Sister Katherine would be there to check my vital signs every six hours. To check my pulse against the sweep second hand on her man’s wristwatch, thick and silver. To wrap the blood pressure cuff around my arm. To check my temperature, she’d push some kind of electric gun in my ear.
Sister Katherine was the kind of nun who wears a wedding ring.
And married people always think love is the answer.
Jump back to the day of my big accident, when everybody was so considerate. The people, the folks who let me go ahead of them in the emergency room. What the police insisted. I mean, they gave me this hospital sheet with Property of La Paloma Memorial Hospital printed along the edge in indelible blue. First they gave me morphine, intravenously. Then they propped me up on a gurney.
I don’t remember much of this, but the day nurse told me about the police photos.
In the pictures, these big eight-by-ten glossies as nice as anything in my portfolio. Black-and-white, the nurse said. But in these eight-by-tens I’m sitting up on a gurney with my back against the emergency room wall. The attending nurse spent ten minutes cutting my dress off with those tiny operating-room manicure scissors. The cutting, I remember. It was my cotton crepe sundress from Espre. I remember that when I ordered this dress from the catalogue I almost ordered two, they’re so comfortable, loose with the breeze trying to get inside the armholes and lift the hem up around your waist. Then you’d sweat if there wasn’t a breeze, and the cotton crepe stuck on you like eleven herbs and spices, only on you the dress was almost transparent. You’d walk onto a patio, it was a great feeling, a million spotlights picking you out of the crowd, or walk into a restaurant when outside it was ninety degrees, and everyone would turn and look as if you’d just been awarded some major distinguished award for a major lifetime achievement.
That’s how it felt. I can remember this kind of attention. It always felt ninety degrees hot.
And I remember my underwear.
Sorry, Mom, sorry, God, but I was wearing just this little patch up front with an elastic string waist and just one string running down the crack and back around to the bottom of the patch up front. Flesh-tone. That one string, the one down the crack, butt floss is what everybody calls that string. I wore the patch underwear because of when the cotton crepe sundress goes almost transparent. You just don’t plan on ending up in the emergency room with your dress cut off and detectives taking your picture, propped up on a gurney with a morphine drip in one arm and a Franciscan nun screaming in one ear. “Take your pictures! Take your pictures, now! She’s still losing blood!”
No, really, it was funnier than it sounds.
It got funny when there I was sprawled on this gurney, this anatomically correct rag doll with nothing but this little patch on and my face was the way it is now.
The police, they had the nun hold this sheet up over my breasts. It’s so they can take pictures of my face, but the detectives are so embarrassed for me, being sprawled there topless.
Jump to when they refuse to show me the pictures, one of the detectives says that if the bullet had been two inches higher, I’d be dead.
I couldn’t see their point.
Two inches lower, and I’d be deep-fried in my spicy cotton crepe sundress, trying to get the insurance guy to waive the deductible and replace my car window. Then I’d be by a swimming pool, wearing sunblock and telling a couple cute guys how I was driving on the freeway in my Stingray when a rock or I don’t know what, but my driver’s-side window just burst.
And the cute guys would say, “Whoa.”
Jump to another detective, the one who’d searched my car for the slug and bone fragments, that stuff, the detective saw how I’d been driving with the window half open. A car window, this guy tells me over the eight-by-ten glossies of me wearing a white sheet, a car window should always be all the way open or shut. He couldn’t remember how many motorists he’d seen decapitated by windows in car accidents.
How could I not laugh?
That was his word: Motorists.
The way my mouth was, the only sound left I could do was laugh. I couldn’t not laugh.
Jump to after there were the pictures, when people stopped looking at me.
My boyfriend, Manus, came in that evening, after the emergency room, after I’d been wheeled off on my gurney to surgery, after the bleeding had stopped and I was in a private room. Then Manus showed up. Manus Kelley, who was my fiancé until he saw what was left. Manus sat looking at the black-and-white glossies of my new face, shuffling and reshuffling them, turning them upside down and right-side up the way you would one of those mystery pictures where one minute you have a beautiful woman, but when you look again you have a hag.
Manus says, “Oh, God.”
Then says, “Oh, sweet, sweet Jesus.”
Then says, “Christ.”
The first date I ever had with Manus, I was still living with my folks. Manus showed me a badge in his wallet. At home, he had a gun. He was a police detective, and he was really successful in vice. This was a May and December thing. Manus was twenty-five and I was eighteen, but we went out. This is the world we live in. We went sailing one time, and he wore a Speedo, and any smart woman should know that means bisexual at least.
My best friend, Evie Cottrell, she’s a model. Evie says that beautiful people should never date each other. Together, they just don’t generate enough attention. Evie says there’s a whole shift in the beauty standard when they’re together. You can feel this, Evie says. When both of you are beautiful, neither of you is beautiful. Together, as a couple, you’re less than the sum of your parts.
Nobody really gets noticed, not anymore.
Still, there I was one time, taping this infomercial, one of those long-long commercials you think will end at any moment because after all it’s just a commercial, but it’s actually thirty minutes long. Me and Evie, we’re hired to be walking sex furniture to wear tight evening dresses all afternoon and entice the television audience into buying the Num Num Snack Factory. Manus comes to sit in the studio audience, and after the shoot he goes, “Let’s go sailing,” and I go, “Sure!”
So we went sailing, and I forgot my sunglasses, so Manus buys me a pair on the dock. My new sunglasses are the exact same as Manus’s Vuarnets, except mine are made in Korea not Switzerland and cost two dollars.
Three miles out, I’m walking into deck things. I’m falling down. Manus throws me a rope, and I miss it. Manus throws me a beer and I miss the beer. A headache, I get the kind of headache God would smote you with in the Old Testament. What I don’t know is that one of my sunglass lenses is darker than the other, almost opaque. I’m blind in one eye because of this lens, and I have no depth perception.
Back then I don’t know this, that my perception is so fucked up. It’s the sun, I tell myself, so I just keep wearing the sunglasses and stumbling around blind and in pain.
Jump to the second time Manus visits me in the hospital, he tells the eight-by-ten glossies of me in my sheet, Property of La Paloma Memorial Hospital, that I should think about getting back into my life. I should start making plans. You know, he says, take some classes. Finish my degree.
He sits next to my bed and holds the photos between us so I can’t see either them or him. On my pad, with my pencil I ask Manus in writing to show me.
“When I was little, we raised Doberman puppies,” he says from behind the photos. “And when a puppy is about six months old you get its ears and tail cropped. It’s the style for those dogs. You go to a motel where a man travels from state to state cutting the ears and tails off thousands of Doberman puppies or boxers or bull terriers.”
On my pad with my pencil, I write:
your point being?
And I wave this in his direction.
“The point is whoever cuts your ears off is the one you’ll hate for the rest of your life,” he says. “You don’t want your regular veterinarian to do the job so you pay a stranger.”