Skinny (13 page)
Students will be versed in knowledge of appropriate statistical methods to test cause-effect relationships.
I shake the car keys in my mother's sleeping face.
"I need to know who my father was . . . I need to know
now!'
She jolts awake.
"Tell me about him, because I cannot imagine it anymore, it makes me mental. Tell me, or I'm leaving this house right now
and turning you over to Children's Aid. I'll take Holly, marry Sol, and you'll never see us again."
"You are talking nonsense. You know who your father was." Mom's face goes blue in the half-light, but she looks relieved somehow
too.
"No I don't." I hold up the cloth-book.
"Where did you find that?"
"Never mind, I found it."
She tries to grab it but I end up flinging it across the room and all the papers fall out and scatter in the darkness.
Vesla's Story
She sits slightly apart from the after-lunch, summer-house crowd. She looks out at the river. Between her narrow hips, her
small belly is swollen. As she pulls her hand, replete with engagement band, over the thin cotton of her dress she is filled
with the twin impulses of terror and ecstasy. The women grow quiet as boisterous male laughter barrels out onto the veranda,
and when she looks up, the women have all grown silent, watching her through half-closed eyes. And then one of them rises
from her chair.
"Someone's arrived."
The main door cranks closed and announces the newest member of the river party.
"It's Thomas."
She hooks her head back to better hear his movements. The women's eyes are all wide open now and crosswords are dropped, nail-polish
bottles are recapped, the sleepy post-lunch ease broken by a squeaking door and the young doctor's arrival.
"Was he even invited?" the standing woman asks Vesla as they collectively slide their eyes to the interior of the cottage.
Vesla doesn't answer, she is praying that he cannot see her profile. She pulls her mouth into a grimace so that even if he
does see her he may not recognize her for the ugly expression on her face. But Thomas doesn't notice her, he is speaking in
soft tones to the servant who is offering him vodka, coffee, dumplings, and a cold-meat plate perhaps, sir? She hears him
decline, place his doctor's bag on the table, and make his way to the smoky backroom. The laughing stops and everyone listens
as a gust of wind slits through the high branches of the trees surrounding the summer house.
Everyone can hear Thomas ask to speak to Misha, privately. A series of tests, the results of which must be discussed, so sorry
to interrupt but it is important;
surgos,
urgent, Thomas says, using the Hungarian word reserved for emergencies, a word that ignites meaning at the top of the lungs
brought to the front of the mouth like a swift kick to the throat, a word that he knows politicians will respect and defer
to. Misha excuses himself and leads Thomas to a small shed at the side of the house that the men have set up for a poker game
later that night. Inside is one hanging light bulb, a card table, and five chairs.
Vesla wonders what it might feel like to get out of her chair and walk straight into the Danube, to feel the warm water at
the top of her neck and the icy pull below at her feet, to walk to the middle and, after one last breath, submerge her head.
She imagines herself doing it, the shouts from the shore, the wooden doors of the shed banging open, Misha and Thomas united,
at last, by the source of their problems being dragged southward, to the bottom of the Aegean Sea.
The women decide to change into their bathing suits and walk down to the shore, a colourful group of hats, chaises, beach
bags, and brown legs. One of the younger ones offers a hand to Vesla but she shakes her head and remains rooted, her head
pulled towards the shed, which remains quiet.
Twenty minutes later, as the women are almost completely assembled on the thin strip of dusty beach, the rest of the men snap
the elastics over their fat, hairy stomachs and pound out of the house like teenagers, running together into the river. The
women scream and laugh and spit sand out of their mouths.
Amid the chatter at the shore, the shed door opens and slams. She turns to see a white hand fly out of the shed and another
hand slap it away. Misha shoulders up against the door; he hooks on the latch and locks it. He strides up the veranda, his
heavy Slav jaw set in anger, his features suddenly frightening.
He kneels next to her, looking out at the others, taking her hand and clutching it so tight she fears he might break her fingers
against the ring.
"Tell me it's mine, Ves."
"It is, of course it is," she lies, not knowing the answer.
Misha rises, his face arranged now, the shadows falling like old leaves sliding off rocks in a heavy rain. Then he goes into
the house and five minutes later his dark, lean body folds into the river and he swims as far into the middle as he can. She
picks up a cold, greasy drumstick and walks to the shore, pulling her hat over her ears, deaf to the screaming coming from
the locked shed.
Students will learn the ethics of medicine: Knowledge of beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, consent, confidentiality,
disclosure, justice.
—
It's a talent, really, honey, to be able to come up with at least half a
dozen things that depress the hell out of you at any given time.
—Then it is a very great talent that I possess.
Four hours after hearing Mom's story, I'm sitting in a twenty-four-hour barbecued chicken restaurant drinking coffee and waiting
for Sol, trying not to stare at the lump of potatoes on the plates on the table next to mine and not to think about what they
would taste like mixed up with sour cream and butter, thinking, I can't stop feeling as though everything around me is buzzing,
is defiantly real, despite the fact that it seems as if it's a dream, is not true if none of it's true. The only way to keep
my skull from swelling and exploding, to keep myself from falling into this darkness, is to cling to real objects: a spoon,
a chicken carcass, the cigarette shaking in my hand, mashed potatoes, the clock. Because all there is is the empirical; if
everything you've based your life on is not, naught. Not if your father isn't your father at all, not if what you've been
told is a lie, lie, lies.
And I have proof, photo evidence to be filed away. But I haven't looked at Misha's photo yet. It leaped out of the book, fell
face down, on the floor. I've only read the inscription in my mother's handwriting on the back: "Misha Kovacs, 1971." Because
there is a possibility that if I see his eyes, the cut of his face and jaw, I will understand everything.
Sol arrives just as I order us an entire chicken dinner with all the fixin's and a potent Portuguese wine.
—
Why do you love people who never love you back?
"Oh, I thought maybe you were standing me up," I smirk as Sol slides into the booth across from me.
There it goes again, her negativity, the self-saboteur always ready to pipe up and drive people away, but I'm wanting to talk
to Sol. I need him to tell me that he loves me, that I'm not a terrible person, daughter, girlfriend, that I deserve the truth.
I try to block out her voice that loves to attack anyone who gets close to me. I want to fill the space between goodbyes and
hellos with mindless, idle chatter, mundane mashed potatoes, anything. Words may protect me; that was the whole idea of group,
right? Saying it out loud, purging ugly thoughts.
"I asked her, I asked Vesla who my father was."
Sol looks at me carefully and wipes his black, inked hands on the napkin and pours himself a glass of wine. He is silent,
waiting for my explosion of anger or tears but they don't come. Instead, I hold out the photo like a hardened cop on television
enumerating mutilations on a murdered body.
"This is him, this is Misha."
Sol takes the photo and lights a cigarette nervously. He looks at the photo, then back at me, then back at the photo, comparing.
"Vesla told me he died swimming in the Danube after Thomas gave him some bad news about his health, but she swears I'm Thomas's."
"But you don't believe her?"
I shrug and take one of Sol's cigarettes. "She says she saw me and just
knew
I wasn't Misha's."
Sol bites the side of his cheek and pours himself more wine. The waiters begin singing a song in Portuguese, low and timbersome;
their voices fill me with the sadness of crying too long and the sea.
I peer over at the photo.
"Have you looked at this picture yet, G.?"
I shake my head. "Can't. Not yet. Why?"
It seems to me that everything will be made clear by this new piece of evidence, but, judging by Sol's head-scratching and
looks, suddenly I'm not sure at all.
—
There is, of course, the possibility that you are not a bastard child.
And if, for all those years, Thomas hated me because he thought I was not his, what then? His love, precious and accounted
for, could not be squandered on me because of questions neither he nor I could answer. Thomas couldn't ask the question of
science that mattered, simply couldn't ask that of her, directly. Well, if you are roaming in your semi-ghost life tonight,
Thomas, at all curious if your decision to dismiss me was warranted, stay tuned, because this is the moment wre can settle
the matter.
"What is it, Sol?"
Sol bites his lip. "Well, just for the record, 1 have personally always thought that you look like Holly and your mom."
"What're you saying?"
He drops the photo under the table and, climbing for it, his voice rises from under the formica table-top. "Let's just say,
your mother had a type."
For the condition called "high cardiac output failure" the problem is often not the failure of the pumping ability of the
heart but instead the overloading of the organ with too much venous return.
When Sol sleeps, which isn't often, his dreams are a thousand running streams that never find each other. They never form
a lake, or even a puddle. I know he is sometimes afraid to fall asleep, that he stays up and watches me for a long time, like
tonight, when he's worried about something. Lately this something is me.
Tonight I take a sleeping pill and offer Sol one but he refuses: Sol, who'll ingest endless amounts of whisky, ibuprofen,
and coffee, often in combination, despite my doctorly advice against this practice, is oddly purist about sleep: either it
comes or it doesn't. After all the food and excitement, I can't handle being awake anymore, so we have long, slow, lingering
sex, both of us committed to forgetting the events of the night or at least pushing ourselves to the limits of exhaustion
to part with it. Afterwards, we finally fall asleep, or at least I do. I've never really seen him resting peacefully. I always
fall asleep before him and wake up after him. Once or twice I've seen him with his head buried under his arm, but when I looked
into his quiet little arm-place he peered out at me, eyes open, lashes fluttering. Mostly, like tonight, we stay up too late
talking and making love to sleep.
Sol is also superstitious; he thinks of himself as powerful. Take, for example, his idea of streetlights going off when he
walks by them. "Didja see that?" he'll say when a dim orange light pops off as we pass it. And I never have the heart to tell
him that lights flare on and off when I walk down the street, too, that wild, staring animals come up to me bearing gifts
of gnawed bones and other such mythic messages. Maybe his not sleeping does make him powerful, makes him see things, understand
the logic of random power surges and wild animals. Maybe it's what allows him to write about accidents caused by slothful
hands, murders committed in the deep swollen night. But then maybe he's just a teenage insomniac who needs a cup of warm milk.
Once I talked to him about how Holly sees Dad at track meets and stuff but it didn't seem to faze him.
"She sees him out and about in the world. Like he's a normal person?" he'd asked, more like he was confirming something than
being purely concerned.
"Yeah, she says she does, I mean who knows?"
He shrugged and slid his eyes away.
"What, Sol?"
"Nothing... I just don't think you should get your undies in a bunch worrying about it too much. I don't think it's a problem,
that's all. People see stuff."
—
You'll never keep him, he'll leave, just like all the others, he'll.
..
—Shut it, just shut it today, all right?
In the morning, I curl my fingers up under the hot blasts of water in the shower, and then dress, gulp down a cup of instant
that Sol calls coffee, and find that I feel better, all cried out and dried out. At least, I can begin to figure out how to
rid myself of the troublesome hum of her off-key voice, even if everything's just become more confusing than clear. That's
it, I feel like I'm beginning, that I can finally learn to be
——
Happy!? You tear your family apart and you 're happy!?
—Since when have you cared about my family?
This shuts her up. I run outside, pull on my sunglasses through my still-wet hair. Sol's waiting for me in the car. When I
get in, he slips his hand between my crossed legs and drags on a cigarette, filling the already balloon-warm air with smoke,
and adjusts the rearview At the light, he leans over and kisses me. "You look like . . ."
"What? Who do I look like?"
"You look like your sister today."
"Impossible. Could we not talk about her right now?"
"All right, sorry, it's just, I've never seen you in that sweatshirt before."
"This is my goddamn sweatshirt, see." I pull up my shirt, flashing Sol. He laughs, relieved that I'm making a joke of it.
The city is stiff, still rising from a long summer night of heat, emerging from its exhausted air-conditioned gloom. The street
sweepers leave a mist of condensation that we follow.
He parks the car and we walk across the wide field between the parking lot and the hospital. Sol tries to do cartwheels on
the wide lawns, but he's not nearly as good a gymnast as Holly and always ends up on his ass. As we enter the grim, green
geriatric ward hallway through a side door, a fat man, wearing an unbuttoned shirt and heel-worn slippers, shuffles down the
corridor and gives us a crooked, delirious grin. Sol grins back. I think about how strange it is that I am on the inside,
the sane side, of the hospital doors. I've spent my short adult life now on both sides, as med student and patient; a safety
to others but a danger to myself.