“Cruel human child!” the dolphin said, but she rose up on her tail, swimming away backward and clapping her fins together in dismay before she turned and hurried away from the hospital.
“I’m not mean!” Kidney called out to her glistening back. “I just want to go home!”
44
Every morning Jemma crawled out of bed and put on the same thing: an extra-large pair of scrubs, a yellow gown, and her clogs. She looked not just plain compared to everyone else, but decidedly old-fashioned. How strange, people said to her, that you of all people should cling to the old mode, and certain nurses asked her, “Don’t you know that those scrubs make you look fat? Don’t you know you can tell the angel, Give me something to make my ass look smaller and, it’s all as good as done? Look at this. Do you think that my ass is really this small or this firm?” Then they would offer their asses for inspection, or even a flesh-testing slap, and Jemma always wanted to say, It’s my baby that makes me look fat. But instead she’d say that she felt very comfortable in scrubs.
At seventeen weeks she didn’t show in them, but was fairly obvious in everything else she tried. Every time she looked in the mirror she expected to see a monster, a creature with ten-gallon boobs, elephant feet, and a tiny little head, because that was how she perceived her body to be changing when she wasn’t actually looking at it. The actual change was more subtle: the moderate swelling in her belly; the foreign nipples, large and dark; and the map of blue veins spreading over her abdomen and her chest. She nearly passed out every time she stood up, and her back was starting to hurt. When she complained to Vivian she got a lecture on her posture instead of permission to drug up. “Imagine a string,” Vivian told her, and marched her around the dissolving ER space like a single-string marionette.
She wasn’t ready for everyone to know, and wasn’t ready for maternity clothes. A week before, she’d tried on a dress that Vivian had made for her — a black felt jumper with a high collar and iron buttons. “It says, I am pregnant and I am powerful,” Vivian declared at the fitting.
“It says, I am pregnant and I am Joseph Stalin,” Jemma said, and took it off, and never put it on again. She put back on her scrubs, and soon they became unique to her, as every last person in hospital, with the exception of Ethel Puffer, developed a distinctive wardrobe in consultation with the angel. Ethel stuck with her hospital gown, a baggy nightie printed with frolicking safari animals, adding only a sturdy pair of sandals. She painted her head as faithfully as before, though she stopped blackening her mouth and tongue. But everyone else put on new clothes, and some confided to each other and to Jemma that they felt as if they were putting on a new spirit, and in fact the new Council of Friends passed a bill in support of the new wardrobes, endorsing them as an outward expression of the personal and universal new beginning.
Dr. Snood put away his old gray suit and the fraying school tie he’d been wearing day after day. Before, he’d gone to the replicator only for fresh underwear, and had told Jemma (while she broadcasted what she thought were rather obvious indicators that she didn’t want to know, and why was he telling her this, and wouldn’t he just go away?) that even these were quite plain, simple linen form-fitted boxers which he’d modeled after the secret, holy underwear of the Mormon roommate he’d had in medical school. Every third day he had stuffed his suit into the replicator for cleaning, and watched it emerge minutes later, the empty legs stepping out carefully from the fog, and the empty jacket doing a careful sort of limbo to clear the top edge of the replicator window without wrinkling. He was never sure if it was his actual suit coming back to him, or something new and false, a perfect lying image. So he held his tie back, though it became frayed around the edges, and was stained with Pickie’s melanotic shit. He said he would have felt naked without it on any usual day, but then there came a morning when he looked at it, and at the old gray suit, and decided it was time for him to put these things away, and put on new clothes. Now he wore trousers with a subtle flare at the ankle, and jackets with Nehru collars, and collarless shirts all in electric pastel colors, and a pair of shining ankle-high boots. Vivian said he looked like a twenty-third-century pimp.
Others modified what previously had passed for a uniform. Dr. Tiller put away her long skirts, frowsy blouses, and long white coat for tapered skirts that still fell to her ankle but were split in the back to well above her knees, and satin pirate blouses, and sweeping silk dusters in rich dark blues and greens, and boots with pointed toes and dark jewels running subtly up the sides — they blended with the color of the leather, so you had to squint to be sure they were actually there. Of course she kept her ritual headdress, but in place of the ordinary blue, black, or gray cotton she wore chenille or cashmere or suede or even leather, and the size of the thing grew to greatly more than head size, as if there were a secret volumizing appliance underneath the fabric, or her secret, not-seen-in-thirty-years hair had been tonicked to ankle length by the angel, or she had grown another face, kinder or crueler than the original, on the back of her head. Everyone agreed that she now had the biggest head in the hospital, though there were many women and a few men who had begun to wear chapeaux in various degrees of size and fantasticness. “Gay Muslim cowboy” was how Vivian described the look, but Jemma thought that the new clothes had only made Dr. Tiller look more intensely like herself, and made her more imposing than ever.
Some people tried unexpectedly to glam up. Dr. Sundae, who previously had only worn scrubs in a shade of burgundy very unflattering to her complexion, suddenly appeared every day in a different fancy dress. They were rather severe, as dresses go, still very dark, and bearing nowhere the smallest scrap of ribbon or lace. Some were made of heavy castle-curtain material, never with prints, but never plain — they were all embossed with stern roses or fleurs-de-lis in colors only a little darker or lighter than the base. Some were sequined, though not flashily. The sequins seemed to catch and hold the light, rather than reflect it — and because the dresses were all so heavy, and so broad shouldered, they looked more than a little like suits of armor. There were square-toed flats with surprising little additions, like a crystal flower at the heel, or a detail from Titian printed on the sole. And she might wear a soft scarf or a little beret, but these little contrasts seemed to heighten rather than relieve the overall impression of severity. “Fancy-ball hair shirt,” Vivian said.
Vivian herself was unpredictable, and advanced beyond the rest of the populace. She’d been making clothes since the time when, on her initial encounter with the replicators, she’d ordered the angel, in jest, to make her a pair of hot pants with an edible crotch. When the pink pants had appeared from out of the fog, and Vivian had unfolded them and run her finger along the wide band of fruit roll-up between the legs, she had looked, just briefly, as happy as Jemma had ever seen her. People tried in vain to imitate her. She wore something starkly different every day, and sometimes the outfits changed from morning to night, or even from breakfast to dinner. A few times while Jemma was with her someone came to ask if they could borrow something they’d seen her wearing, but Vivian always said the same thing to them: “That thing? Oh, it’s already been destroyed.”
She tried hardest of anyone to get Jemma out of her scrubs. “You have got an image to maintain,” she said, and Jemma thought she might agree, but she thought that the image of hardworking frumpiness might be just in line with the office of Universal Friend. It said you were plain and usual and approachable and ready at any time to take on a task. She still did not understand her duties or prerogatives terribly well, and knew no one else did either, but felt at least that she was coming to understand how people perceived her, and what their minimum expectations were. And her belly was an issue — she didn’t want to make any announcements until it was absolutely necessary.