Anthropology of an American Girl (55 page)

My dorm room was in Brittany Hall on the corner of Tenth Street and Broadway. It was a spacious room on the fourteenth floor with casement windows overlooking the gothic spire of Grace Church. It was bigger than Denny and Peter Reeves’s whole apartment on East Fifth Street. My roommate, Ellen, was big and agreeable like a barmaid from a Dickens novel, though that could not have been accurate since she was Greek and Jewish, and Dickens never wrote about big Greek Jewish barmaids, not memorably anyway. Ellen’s family lived in a just-built mansion in Rye.
Her dad was the chief heart surgeon at Albert Einstein Hospital in the Bronx, which amused my father immensely since he was a sign-painter and Dr. Christopolos was a cardiologist, but their kids wound up in the same goddamned place anyway. I didn’t bother to elucidate the more salient differences—upon graduation I would be forty thousand dollars in debt and Ellen would be loan-free, settled into an investment condo, a guaranteed job, and the white leather seat of a brand-new BMW.

Ellen had the highest standards for personal care of anyone I’d ever met. She was entirely devoted to her own comfort. Thursdays to Mondays she anxiously returned to her parents’ house in Rye weighed down with homework and laundry because it was
just so nice up there
. Besides, it’s common knowledge that dormitory washing machines spread disease.

“Be careful,” she warned the first time I used the laundry room. “My cousin Ruth at Tulane found a used condom stuck to the drum.”

Instead of a stereo or typewriter, Ellen brought spa supplies to college. She had rolling wooden massage devices and fleecy slippers and velour bathrobes and giant plush Egyptian towels. There were vanilla balms for night and peppermint splashes for day and a constant supply of homemade brownies and 3-percent milk in her Permafrost mini-fridge. In the bathroom there were plaque picks and callus shavers and orthopedic shower shoes and super-cushiony toilet paper. Her goose-down quilt added five inches to her bed, and beneath her mattress her brother Stefan had laid three-quarter-inch plywood for added lumbar support.

I never heard her mention boys, not once. She was far too cunning to allow sex to endanger her lavish lifestyle. And since I did not infringe upon her sufficiency, we got along well. She treated me with benevolent indifference, and I found it admirable, actually, that she was so extremely disinclined to be idle, motivated as she was to get out of the city and return to the comforts of home. She went to bed at ten, got up at seven, and was in classes or the library all the hours in between. She wasn’t unsociable; she simply had no time for anything other than an hour or two of television every night,
Dallas
or
Knots Landing
. Invariably she shifted the TV set toward my bed so I could see too.

Ellen was a busy girl; you couldn’t blame her for not noticing.

——

“You okay?” she asked. “You’ve been sitting for, like, three days.”

Ellen poked at the desk lamp near my bed, turning it on, and the yellow light broke the blue of morning, which was a relief. The room had been like a pond with me at the bottom. Ellen took an involuntary step back, an instinctive step, thinking quick, in case I was contagious. On her shoulder was a duffel bag full of laundry. She was on her way home, which meant it was Thursday. I was pretty sure I’d lain down on Tuesday.

“Are you feverish?”

Maybe I had a fever, I wasn’t sure. There were cramps in my abdomen, like mice squinching through narrow tubes.

“It’s food poisoning,” she said definitively. “That cafeteria is shameful. I keep telling you not to eat there.” She thought for a moment, then asked if I wanted her to wake up the RA.

I shook my head. That would just be the beginning of a chain with every next person passing off responsibility, right through to my parents, who’d end up handing all decision-making back to me anyway. “You should go,” I said. “You’ll miss your train.”

Ellen considered my advice, but some fundamental sense of ethics prevented her from taking it. She dropped her bag, opened my closet, and dug through my suitcase for clothes. She helped me slip on a pair of sweatpants and replace my T-shirt. When it came time for feet, she knelt on one knee and sucked back her lips with determination, manipulating the shoes, never once checking her watch, though surely she was thinking she might miss her train.

The transaction was extraordinary, not because we were strangers, but because the business of helping was obviously new to her. If I regretted having to inconvenience her with private problems, I appreciated the changes in her as she condescended to assist me. There was a give to her stiffness, an elongating of her cheeks, a paling of her complexion. She looked smaller when not so confident, and genteel, like a lady from a mannerist portrait. I thought to tell her, but it would not have come out right.

“Okay, let’s get up,” she said, taking my elbow. “One, two, three.”

There was blood on the sheets. I tried to cover it, but my hand
skimmed the blanket ineffectually. She could not have missed it, though she said nothing. Despite my obvious abnormality and her absorbing fear of contagion, she conducted herself graciously, which I decided had to do with good breeding.

There happened to be two available cabs rolling down Tenth Street. Ellen hailed both at once with a superhuman whistle and a mighty wave of a mighty arm. She put me in the first. “You gonna be all right?” she asked.

I managed to say yes. “Sorry about your train.”

“There’s another one in fifteen minutes.” She handed me a twenty-dollar bill. I declined but she insisted. “If anything happens to you, who knows who they’ll stick me with.”

She got into the car behind mine, and the two cabs waited side by side at the red light on the corner. I sat, she sat, each of us awkwardly chauffeured. I imagined what it was to be Ellen Christopolos of the ubiquitous E.S.C. monogram, charging up to Grand Central to catch the 7:55 to Rye, popping into Zaro’s Bread Basket and ordering with a certainty that was enviable and supreme a toasted raisin bagel and a coffee before buying magazines to breeze through on the train as she anticipated the luxuries that awaited her at home—Jacuzzis and tuna salad with fresh dill and a full-time housekeeper. On Friday night, there would be a movie and Chinese food with her grandparents. On Saturday, a few hours at Saks. No one would have guessed at her association with a hemorrhaging girl. I would have liked to make it up to her somehow, find a way to erase the knowledge she’d received prematurely concerning the dizzying and rancid phenomenon of carnal life.

The light changed, and her cab flew east across Tenth, while mine made the right down Broadway. I could see by the ponderous set of her jaw that she’d been making a picture of me as well. She’d been envisioning the squalid uncertainty of modern disease and remedy, the putrid working back to probable cause, the foul business of changing and cleaning bloodstained linen, the dismal occupation of a life without guardians, without ethnic net or religious shield, without refuge or resource. How unnecessarily expanded her mind must have been to review a life as luckless as mine. How relieved she surely was not to be me, poor and parentless, desired but defiled by the opposite sex.

The cab left me at University Place near Health Services, which of course was closed at seven-thirty in the morning, since any respectable student illness occurs during business hours. The walk to the Astor Place subway was macabre, with chained storefronts and cyclones of trash whisking down the Eighth Street corridor. I would have taken a cab, but I thought to save Ellen’s leftover money for later. I must have thought things might get worse later. I recall being cold except for the parts of me that were hot. I recall the sheer slope of subway stairs going from street level down to the train platform. I know the train arrived: there’s an image of the owlish face of the Number 6 implanted in my head. And the train’s crippled dynamics, the labored jerk and groan of the brakes, the spitting inside-out puff of the doors, the garbled declarations by some recently paroled conductor, the porpoise-gray benches, the scattered souls.

Who knows where I was headed. I seemed to have had an East Side hospital in mind. Lenox Hill maybe. I was born at Lenox Hill.

The streets between Fifth and Madison Avenues on the Upper East Side are like halls of windows reflecting infinitely onto themselves, canals of pink-gold boxes repeating across the narrow streets. I sat on the stoop of a brownstone near Mount Sinai waiting for nine to come so I could go and meet Dr. Mitchell. Maybe that’s not right. Maybe time does not come. Maybe you come to time, or through it. Or maybe you are a wheel and it is a wheel and periodically you line up.

July made sense. Hadn’t I felt unwell in August? I’d been nauseous all the time. And then in September there was this tenderness, an ache disentombed like being bruised all over. What I’d felt were messages, weaving and unweaving, a new thing: half me, half Rourke. I would have guessed such a mix would survive, but how could it when those who brought it into being could not find the purpose to carry on? How was a baby to be strong when everyone else was weak? As a child I’d wondered such things too, and often.

There are those who would claim that I’d done nothing wrong, that it had been an accident, that nothing was killed, but rather, something had ceased to live. But the same people who say things such as,
It wasn’t a baby; it was a zygote
, also say,
It’s cruel to wear fur
. Then again, those
who advocate killing animals for sport or fashion are equally hypocritical to speak of the sanctity of life. Maybe a deer has feelings, maybe the origin of a child is in the protoplasm; frankly, it’s impossible to know. And yet, people keep trying to assign logic to sensation and consciousness in beings and entities other than themselves.

No one can say for certain that the grief of failed life does
not
enchase the walls of a woman. God knows you see so much sadness out there. There’s proof enough of peculiar transmissions if you choose to seek it. I’ve heard that cows release adrenaline into their flesh as they’re slaughtered, which in turn can alter you when you eat it, and organ transplant recipients can develop the dead donor’s habits.

I did not have to envision a dead infant to make myself sad; I had only to think of what had happened
in fact
to what
in fact
had been: a minuscule cluster of cells artlessly awaiting the assistance of its life system, its world and its home, seeking sustenance—whether hormonal, electrical, or food-like in nature—but receiving nothing—nothing consistent, nothing adequate. I had only to think of atrophy in me, and my heart broke again, and worse.

The very brevity of the thing’s existence was sacred to me—fine force and gossamer essence. In its economy there was a lesson I needed to learn having to do with windows of opportunity being fantastically small, with powers I had that were hidden. It had never occurred to me that I possessed such aptitude for damage. For several days I cried for Rourke and I cried for me and I cried most especially for the soul that had come and gone like a solitary flicker of the tiniest light. When I thought of the fluttering quills of an angel, consecrated and divine, flapping, flapping, slower and slower to sleep, I cried until the water in me dried; then I did not cry again. For years I did not cry.

“Date of last menstrual period?”

I did not know.

“Form of birth control?”

“The pill.”

The nurse was preparing a needle. She wore a plastic heart pin that leaned to one side. Like a heart blowing. “Did you eat today?”

“She’s not getting general,” another nurse said. “She’s getting Demerol.”

“You’re Dr. Mitchell’s patient?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. Mitchell’s nice.” The nurse drew blood, her head bent. Her hair was dense and coarse, like chocolate wisteria, twining like woody vines into a twist. Her skin was caramel with acne scars that were blackish by comparison. I asked her name. She said Lourdes.

“Are you Puerto Rican?”

“I am,” she answered as she snapped the rubber tourniquet off my arm. Her eyes drooped lazily. “Open your fist for me, baby.”

The syringe filled rib-red and she withdrew the needle, pressing cotton to the prick. I wondered if her life was nice. Maybe there were bridal showers and dowager aunts. A mother with hypertension and a cherished dog. “It’s a hard decision, honey,” she said. “I’ve had to make it myself.”

“I didn’t make the decision,” I confided. “The baby made it for me.”

In the procedure room I lay with my legs strapped in and spread apart, knees over padded stirrups, blue plastic sheeting over knees, green foam slippers imprinted with smiley faces flipping halfway off my feet, and a needle with a tube shooting out of the back of one hand—a far cry from his arms in the dark. There were strangers in scrubs, monitoring, arranging. Faceless nurses tearing plastic corners from sterilized utensil packs, laying instruments on metal rolling trays. Their hands were professional hands, like the hands of casino dealers, making your game their business, making your condition real, making it impossible for you to pretend otherwise. Eyes modestly lowered, eyes that know your truth. You think your story is original—it’s not.

“I’m here to help Dr. Mitchell,” a voice said. “I’m Dr. Burstein, the anesthesiologist.” Dr. Burstein was tall. He seemed to teeter, or perhaps it was me, teetering beneath. “I’m going to give you something to help you relax,” he drawled. He lowered himself onto a stool by my shoulder, then shot a filled needle into the top of the IV bag. I wondered if the feeling in his fingers was the same one you get from pulling the trigger on a pistol—the swift push, the mellow thrust. How omnipotent, to narcotize a body with such a small gesture. My arm went cold, my wrist and
shoulder went cold. I could smell it behind my sinuses, and taste it. Was it possible to smell and taste it? There was a noise, a papery slap, then a growing whoosh like crickets.

Do people call you Eveline?
I opened my eyes. I could not recall having closed them. Dr. Burstein was watching me. It occurred to me to ask how much time had passed. He appeared connected to time and reliable that way.
Or do they call you Eve?