“Ah, sí.” And my mother would pull out this plastic container from a paper bag, which she, waiting outside the bathroom door, had me fill the morning or evening before. I could never bear to look at it and felt anxious and ashamed as hell when my mother handed it over to the nurse, as, aside from my sense of violated privacy, the sample might contain enough microbios to put me back in the hospital.
The doctors were always brisk: They’d examine me all over, and on one of those visits, it was discovered that I suffered from psoriasis, just like my father did. Then I’d get on a scale. I always weighed too much, a mystery since I was supposed to be on a strict diet. The hematology tests were the worst, however — I hated the tube tied around my forearm, the deep pricking that followed, and the sight of my blood filling up the hypodermic, but at least that aversion to needles would one day keep me from becoming a heroin addict like so many of the kids in my neighborhood. Sometimes, a more arcane series of tests, taking up much of the day, required that I go to the nephrology ward. That usually took up another hour or two, and we’d sit around in that room, facing other children, their worried-looking parents beside them, while my mother, hopeful that another Latina might be among them, carefully sized them up. More than once I’d seen her lean forward and, smiling at a “swarthy”-looking Italian or Greek woman, say something to her in Spanish, only to sit back, sucking in air through her lips, in disappointment.
That winter afternoon, my mother had caught wind from a nurse that a nearby room had been occupied by a Latino just recently admitted to the hospital for nephritis, and for some reason, after I had finished with my ordeal and we had gathered our coats, she insisted that we drop in on him to say hello. His wife and two children were in the room beside him. A handsome man with a wonderful smile, he already had an IV line hooked up to his right arm, but, aside from the fact that his face had turned deeply red, as if he had been baking in the sun, he didn’t particularly look sick to me. Once my mother introduced herself—“Soy la Señora Hijuelos, but you can call me Madgalena”—she began peppering him with questions about what he did and where he had come from (second-generation Dominican, a car salesman in Queens by trade, I seem to recall) and pulled me over to his bed saying, “Mira, Ernesto, this is my son. He has nefreetees too,” she said, as if I still had it, and as if that fact, if still true, would hold a special meaning for him. “But he is already getting much better than he was — as I am sure you will too. Los médicos son muy sabios. The doctors are very wise.”
“Gracias, señora, for saying so,” he told her.
A good-natured fellow, with a young and shapely wife, who looked to me both hopeful and on the verge of tears, he wanted to shake my hand, but he did so with difficulty and weakly, for he could barely lift his arm up. Nonetheless, he smiled kindly, and with that, as a nurse appeared by the door, we left the room, but not before my mother told him, “Have faith in God — you will get better!” And to his wife, she said: “They will fix him in no time, I promise you that!” The wife smiled, nodded gratefully, and with that, my mother, feeling as if she had done them some good, took hold of my hand and guided me down the hall. “What a nice man — with such a nice family,” she kept repeating ever so cheerfully in earshot of the room, before falling silent. In the elevator, descending to the main floor, however, my mother began shaking her head and repeating, with a little click of her tongue, “Ay, pero el pobrecito. Oh, but that poor man. Did you see how scared he looks? And how bad he seems? Oh, but I don’t have a good feeling about him at all. Oh, I hope he doesn’t die,” she said, confiding, “but he probably will.”
And that was all. At the doors opening to the main lobby, I almost didn’t mind it when my mother went about the ritual of pulling on my galoshes, buttoning my coat, securing my bufanda snugly around my neck, and tying, as she always did, the hood ever so tightly, because once we left that sterile place and passed through its revolving doors and out onto the sidewalk, as a snowplow pushed slowly along the avenue, through the carbon blueness of upper Manhattan at five thirty or so, with the buildings across the way resembling misted and barely lit palaces, that most lovely and soul-cleansing of things in this world, snow, was falling everywhere around us.
Behind this recollection is another, of sitting in that same ward one day when I was about twelve and noticing, just across that room, an auburn-haired girl who seemed awfully familiar. She also looked at me in the same searching manner: She wore braces and, in pigtails, with brightened cheeks, had greenish eyes that I seemed to have seen before. My mother noticed her as well and, realizing something, told me: “But don’t you recognize that girl? Don’t you remember her? It’s Theresa from that time when you were in the hospital! You used to play together.” She was sitting beside her mother, a somewhat prim and anxious woman, and once my mother had figured things out, she smiled, saying in her best English: “Theresa — this is my son, Oscar, from the hospital,” and with that, Theresa smiled and, standing up, startled me — not only because she too, sitting in that ward, had the same lost air about her but because, though she was quite thin from her waist up, I could see that beneath the hem of her violet dress, her ankles were badly swollen. Of course, she was there to receive a dialysis treatment, and, truthfully, she did not seem too happy about that — how could she have been? Still, I did my best to hold a conversation with her: I think it came down to “How have you been doing?” To which she responded with a shrug; and while I sat beside her for a few minutes and I thought we might become friends, I still felt, at the same time, so awkward — and ashamed — of my year in that hospital that I could barely think of anything else to say.
“But you’re okay?” I finally asked her.
“I guess so,” she answered, shrugging again.
But I knew better, even then: A funny thing, I could almost feel the sickness of her kidneys emanating from her lower back, and from her expression, as if she wanted to cry but couldn’t, I saw that she felt trapped by a physical condition that, in her case, had never really improved — and she knew it. At the same time, however, as much as I vaguely recalled playing with her, I really didn’t feel a thing for Theresa, my emotions about that hospital stay too raw to revisit, muted. It was probably the same from her end, and so we just sat together for a while, until she was called inside. I never even learned where she lived and have no idea now of what happened to her, for I never saw her again.
That image fades into a conversation between my mother and father one night, a few years after I’d started school. Because I was such a nervous sleeper, they’d sometimes let me fall asleep in their bedroom, just off the kitchen. I’d take that opportunity to listen to the television shows that sounded in the courtyard from the windows of our upstairs neighbors: The Jack Benny Show is the one I remember in this instance, a particular episode in which Mr. Benny and his butler, Rochester, discuss what sort of Christmas gifts they should get for Mr. Benny’s friends—“How ’bout a hoss for John Wayne, boss!” Rochester asks in his cheerfully raspy voice; at the same time, my mother and father had started discussing some insurance policy they’d taken out for me. Assuming that I didn’t understand Spanish well enough for them to veil their words, their conversation went as follows:
“Ten dollars a month is a lot of money,” my father said. “He seems healthy enough.”