Flavor of the Month

by Olivia Goldsmith

  “I never could afford a vacation, and tar beach didn’t appeal.”

  “Well, that was good luck.” He paused. He took her hand in his and for a moment, she thought he was going to get personal, to give her a kind word. Instead, he pinched the back of her hand, then watched as the little ridge of skin he had made resolved itself back into the relative smoothness of her wrist. “You still have remarkable elasticity for a woman your age. That helps. What’s your diet like?”

  She told him.

  “Fine. But I want you to eat more raw vegetables. A lot more water, too. Hydration is critical for skin. And to keep this somewhat unnatural weight and the benefits of surgery, you can only eat two spare meals a day from now on. You are trying to attain an unnatural ideal, one that is almost impossible for a woman to maintain beyond adolescence. Now that large breasts have been added to the lanky, extremely thin model that’s been in vogue for years, almost no woman naturally has that shape to begin with.”

  “Do you give young, thin models those breasts if they want them?” she asked.

  “I don’t do body work. Only facial surgery. And I don’t know any male surgeon who does a good job on breasts. I recommend a woman doctor: Sylvia Wright. It makes sense that a woman would have a better feel for breasts than a man.” He smiled. “But Wright won’t do implants. Nine years ago, reputable journals were reporting problems with silicone. Anyway, you won’t need implants. Yours would only require a restructuring and lift.”

  She looked down at her drooping chest. Despite the weight loss, or because of it, her breasts looked worse than ever. Well, she told herself, one thing at a time. The important thing was, he would take her case. And that she believed he could work miracles.

  22

  Sharleen pulled the Datsun that Dobe had bought for her and Dean onto the gravel parking lot in front of the aluminum-sided diner there on Ming Avenue and braked to a halt alongside a row of battered cars, pickups, and semis with trailers. She sat in the car, the Bakersfield Times in her hand folded open to the want ads, and thought about what she was going to say.

  Darn, she thought, they all said “experienced.” Eight diners today said “experienced only.” Then each of the disgusting diner owners had made her a proposition, if she really wanted the job. She thought of Dobe, of what he told her about being beautiful. Maybe she could have handled the men, but she didn’t want to get into another situation with Dean.

  Anyhow, how much experience do you need to serve eggs and hash in a truckers’ diner, for heaven’s sake? I’ve eaten in enough of these places to do the job in my sleep, she told herself. But she hadn’t been sleeping. No work, no money equaled no sleep. What could she do? Unless she let these guys touch her, or told a lie, she didn’t know what she’d do. If only she had experience that wasn’t a lie.

  She snapped her fingers. That’s it, she thought. I’ve had experience eating in them for months; maybe that’s enough experience for anyone.

  Sharleen strained to look at her face reflected in the grimy rearview mirror. She pinched her cheeks the way she remembered her mother doing when she couldn’t afford makeup. It brought a bright-pink glow to her face.

  Sharleen squeezed her lips together, bruising them to a cherry red. She felt along the top edge of her white Mexican blouse, and gave a tug to pull it up; it did keep falling off one shoulder.

  “Oh, Lord, help me with this,” she prayed.

  She sprang out of the car, locked the door, and gave her cowgirl belt a cinch to pull it tighter. Sharleen sucked in her breath and encircled her small waist with her hands. Just right, she thought.

  She rubbed the front of her high-heeled sandals against the backs of her tightly blue-jeaned legs and, deciding she was ready, walked resolutely toward the front door. She swung her hips and her straw bag just a little, in case the boss was watching her approach. Might as well walk like she felt good, even if she didn’t.

  Before she could put her hand on the knob, the screen door swung open, and the fattest man she had ever seen stood before her.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” he said. “Or I should say, I’ve been praying for you.” He stepped aside, holding the door open to let Sharleen squeeze past. She paused, then shrugged and walked into the cool, noisy interior. She saw that all the men plus both women customers and the waitress had turned to look at her. So she had been noticed as she came up the walk, she thought.

  “My name’s Jake and this is my place. Jake’s Place. Get it?” he asked as he led her past the few occupied tables to the semiprivacy of a rear booth.

  Sharleen couldn’t keep from smiling. “Sure thing, Jake. And I bet you guessed I’m here about the…”

  “You’re hired. Now, get rid of that newspaper and have a cup of coffee with me and tell me all about yourself.” He walked behind the counter and came back with two white mugs of coffee and a tray of donuts.

  “Wait a minute, Jake. What do you mean, I’m hired? You haven’t asked me if I had any experience yet. Your ad said ‘experienced.’” Maybe she wouldn’t have to lie, or flirt, she thought with relief. A man as fat as Jake wouldn’t be chasin’ her around counters.

  Jake leaned his huge, beefy arms on the table between them and smiled. “Lady, I could see you was experienced the moment you started to walk toward the place. Hell, everybody in here could see it.” Sharleen could feel her face flush. Anyone could see she was embarrassed. But Jake didn’t. He just looked down at his coffee, reached over to pick up a donut, and continued. “And everybody in here said you was hired before you got to the door.”

  He indicated the few businessmen at the tables and booths, and the truckers lined up at the counter. “They’re my regulars, and I like to keep them happy.” He took half the donut into his mouth and mumbled, “So. you’re on. What’s your name?”

  Sharleen sat back and laughed. The Lord sure did work in mysterious ways. She looked around the place.

  There were rows of wire-stemmed white plastic flowers, now gray from dust and grease, along the bottom of the front window. The tables in the middle of the floor had flowered oilcloth covers, with a fake potted plant in the center of each, surrounded by the sugar pourer, salt and pepper shakers, napkin dispenser, and a bottle of barbecue sauce. The booths along the walls were high-backed and deep. The seats were upholstered in orange vinyl, broken in spots, their stuffing pushed back in with silver-gray duct tape. The jutting tables were blue Formica, chipped here and there. Each booth had a miniature juke box with a flip-card selection of records, a mixture of country-and-western and fifties hits, Sharleen was sure.

  Her eyes went to the long blue counter that seemed to join both sides of the room. Big trucker butts hung over the stools, the bodies above them huddled over bottomless coffee cups. The noise level was high; the topics of conversation were baseball, road conditions, and hunting. The two women customers in the place talked only to each other.

  A stocky woman in a pink polyester waitress uniform plodded back and forth to the kitchen, carrying armloads of meat-and-gravy dishes and pie, all the while shouting orders to the Mexican cook dripping sweat in the tiny kitchen. An open slot in the wall held the waiting meals under hot lights.

  Well, Sharleen thought, it’s better than McDonald’s. At least there’ll be tips. Now Jake wiped the donut crumbs off his rubbery mouth with the back of his hand. “What’s your name?” he repeated.

  “Sharleen, Jake. And when do I start?”

  23

  COSMOPOLITAN HOSPITAL

  Patient: Mary Jane Moran Insurance: None

  Age: Thirty-four

  D.O.B. Sept. 22, 1958 Address: 748 East 19th

  New York, NY

  * * *

  Date: July 22, 199-

  Procedure: Abdominoplasty

  Physician: Silverman Cost: $7,425.00

  Date: Oct. 18, 199-

  Procedure: Face lift & submental lipectomy

  Physician: B. Moore Cost: $4,300.00

  Date: Jan. 11, 199-

 
Procedure: Buttock lift, flank resection

  Physician: Silverman Cost: $3,830.00

  Date: April 21, 199-

  Procedure: Blepharoplasty

  Physician: B. Moore Cost: $1,540.00

  Date: Sept. 28, 199-

  Procedure: Lipectomy—batwing arms

  Physician: Silverman Cost: $1,950.00

  Date: Feb. 28, 199-

  Procedure: Mastopexy

  Physician: Wright Cost: $4,300.00

  Date: April 1, 199-

  Procedure: Dermabrasion

  Physician: B. Moore Cost: $1,750.00

  Date: June 3, 199-

  Procedure: Rhinoplasty

  Physician: Moore Cost: $4,100.00

  —From the files of Laura Richie

  After all the preliminary workups had been finished. Brewster Moore set up a schedule for her. He suggested other surgeons for the tummy tuck, the breast lift, and the liposuction. He would supervise their work carefully. Many of them worked with him at the clinic he had founded for indigent children.

  “Isn’t that work depressing?” Mary Jane asked.

  “Less depressing than talking to a socialite begging for her third face lift,” Brewster Moore snapped. “Would you like to see my other work?”

  She felt properly chastised, and accepted his invitation. It was the only time in the weeks since she’d met him that he had offered anything about himself or his interests. She’d grown used to surgeons and their coldness, but he was unlike them—he had the surgeon’s sureness, but beyond that he possessed an odd combination of formality, detachment, and compassion.

  She discovered his secret on the tour. His clinic was his passion. There, from all over the world, were children who had been born with deformities so frightening, so monstrous, that many of them had been abandoned or left for dead. “Well, you can understand it,” Brewster Moore told her matter-of-factly. “We are conditioned to respond to a baby’s smile. Some of these children didn’t have a mouth to smile with. Even educated parents have problems accepting this,” Brewster explained. “Imagine what it was like for a peon in Peru.”

  He introduced her to Winthrop, a Canadian boy whose parents had died in a private-plane crash which he had survived, though he was burned beyond recognition. Now he had a new face, constructed from skin grafted from his back and thighs.

  And Hilda, a blonde three-year-old who had been left at a Bremen church a day after her birth. In the year since she’d arrived, her harelip had been corrected, but she still required a nose.

  And Raoul, a twelve-year-old from Honduras whose bright eyes and clever little drawings were his only means of communication, since he was born without a tongue or a lower jaw.

  The ward and private rooms were cheerful, the equipment up-to-date, and the operating theater the most advanced in the country. “How do you pay for all this?” she asked as she looked around at the facility and the bustling staff.

  Dr. Moore shrugged. “A bit of government funding, lots of private donations, and the rest comes from my fees. I do cosmetic work for some very wealthy and influential people.” He smiled. “They support a lot of this.”

  “It makes me feel even more petty,” Mary Jane said.

  He stopped there in the hall and turned to her. “It shouldn’t,” he told her. “Don’t buy that Puritan idea of predestination, or some outdated morality that says appearance is nothing but vanity. Some things have not changed since the beginning of time. Your face is your fortune. These children could attest to that.”

  She trusted him completely. So it was silly, really, she told herself. After all, she was a nurse and had been in hospitals for years. Still, hospitals made her nervous. And she was more than nervous before the first “procedure,” as Miss Hennessey kept calling it.

  Because, after all, she’d never been a patient before. “Healthy as a horse,” she used to say, and slap her own wide flank.

  The first surgery was a horror. The long ride on the gurney. through the hospital corridors and on the elevator used by visitors, flower-delivery guys, and employees, had been humiliating. The orderly who wheeled her along pushed her as if she were a supermarket basket, and he must have been running for mayor of the hospital—he stopped and talked to everyone he passed. She actually was relieved when she finally got to the operating room.

  Perhaps if it hadn’t been elective surgery, perhaps if it had been life-saving, she wouldn’t have felt the contempt that seemed to roll off the orderlies as they dragged her. one more piece of meat, under the knife. Plastic surgery, they seemed to sneer. Self-indulgent. Neurotic. Selfish.

  She had lost thirty-eight pounds and her stomach had receded, but instead of being flat, it hung in a nasty pouch of stretched skin. That would be neatly stretched in the abdominoplasty. It was a fairly serious operation, but Dr. Moore wanted it first, to give her time to recuperate.

  The abdominal surgery—involving both liposuction and a “tummy tuck”—was a major procedure.

  “You’ve lost about as much weight as you need to,” Brewster Moore told her. “But you’ll have to keep it off.”

  “But I still look awful!” She raised her arms and swung them. Excess flesh waved back and forth.

  “Batwing arms. Typical.”

  “Is that what it’s called?”

  “Yep. Descriptive, huh? Dieting won’t help them. The rest is exercise, liposuction, and surgery. But your stomach muscles need to be tightened. So we’ll actually cut and shorten the muscles and reattach them, slice off excess skin, and stretch the rest down.”

  “What happens to my belly button?”

  “Well, it will be excised. Don’t worry. I’ll supervise everything. And Silverman will make you a very nice new one.”

  “A new one? How is it done?”

  “It’s just a staple from inside. Unless, of course, you want an ‘outie’ instead of an ‘innie.’ But that will cost extra.”

  Her eyes opened wide, until she realized that he was teasing her.

  Despite being considered cosmetic, it was major surgery, with a seven-to-ten-day hospital recuperation, and was scheduled for seven-thirty on a gray Thursday morning. The night before, an aide had come in to—of all things—shave her pudenda. “All skin exposed to incision and its environs must be shaved, to reduce the chance of infection, and to make the removal of surgical tape and staples easier later on,” the bored orderly droned. Her only comfort was that, at least for this one, she’d be unconscious.

  The standard joke is that in a hospital they’ll wake you up to give you a sleeping pill, but on the morning of the abdominal surgery Mary Jane was awoken at five-thirty and given an injection to relax her. The hypo worked, and she felt as if she were floating as she was lifted onto the stretcher for her ride to surgery. Oddly enough, the shot did little to ease her embarrassment at being in the elevator lying down while people in street clothes stood around her, pretending she wasn’t there. No one looked her in the eye, and she had trouble stifling her laughter at how ludicrous the situation was.

  Dr. Moore didn’t do the surgery, though he had selected the doctor who would. Still, he came to visit her the evening before, and she was touched by his gesture. “Bob Silverman is a good man. You’ve got good tissue, and there should be little scarring. But for the mastopexy I’ve lined up Sylvia Wright. She has a feeling for breasts that no man I know has.”

  Mary Jane had giggled at his phraseology. And Dr. Moore actually colored. He was a very formal man, but Mary Jane was getting to know him and see the humor behind his formality. Dr. Moore smiled. He had a very nice smile. “You know what I meant,” he said.

  On the way in to the abdominoplasty, Mary Jane kept her eyes on the ceiling, following the overhead lights as she was wheeled along the halls. She knew she should be nervous, but, with the injection she had received finally kicking in, she at last lost all guilt, all shame, all nerves. She really couldn’t care less. The orderly parked her outside the operating room, in what felt like an alcove, but since she was dis
inclined to turn her head, she couldn’t really tell. Time passed. She had no idea how long. Minutes? Hours? she asked herself. Or is it over? A nurse approached her and said her name, while inserting an IV in her arm. “We’re going in now, Miss Moran,” she said, and pushed the stretcher through swinging doors, into a pale-green room with huge, blinding lights overhead.

  She was aware of a group of people in what looked to be camouflage, which she was able to remind herself was surgical green. They seemed to be standing around a table that wasn’t there; then, suddenly, she was the table, and they were all looking down at her.

  “Hello, Mary Jane,” Dr. Moore’s voice said from somewhere. “Are you comfortable?” She didn’t expect him to be there at all.

  “I’m very relaxed,” she murmured.

  “Count backward,” the masked gas-passer told her. “Start at one hundred.”

  She tried to think of a joke, a wisecrack, but could barely manage the count. “One hundred. Ninety-nine.” And then she couldn’t remember the next number…

  Blessedly, it was over. “You can go to sleep now,” the nurse said. Mary Jane started to say thank you, but never got it out.

  She opened her eyes again later, but couldn’t move. Her mouth was so dry that her tongue felt like sandpaper. The pain was worse than the worst stomach ache she had ever had. It felt as if she’d been stabbed. Mary Jane tried to call out to someone, but no sound came. She started to cry to herself, but the slightest movement increased the pain, so she began to whimper instead. The incision across her entire pelvis felt like a fiery slashed wound, and her whole midsection was knotted, as if she’d been kicked in the gut a million times. Then nothingness again.

  She was aware she had slept. Or had blacked out. She opened her eyes once again, and now knew she was in her hospital bed. The pain was still there, but she knew that someone would do something about that soon, just as soon as she let them know she was awake. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t move a muscle. Not yet.