I listened for the sounds in the hallway: someone wheeling a metal laundry cart, a nurse scolding a patient, a woman crying out in pain. I imagined that this was the woman I would be tomorrow, after they had opened me up, attached my brother’s kidney to the wiring inside me, and sewn me back again. I would be the one waking up and screaming, holding my hand over my side.
A sharp pull in my hair, and I opened my eyes to see my mother pulling through the knots the way she sometimes pulled loose threads from the hem of a skirt.
“Mom!” I yelled, but she didn’t stop.
The old loud hospital phone rang, shaking the movable table on which it sat. “Channel 3. Siamese twins who’ve never been detached, ” my brother said. They had put my brother in another room and on a different floor, something about separating us to keep our names straight so they didn’t have to switch the medications, and since our check-in, he had been calling me every time he saw something funny on TV. This time, it was a gross sight, really. On the wall-mounted television, there was one normal-sized woman, and attached to her at the hip (literally) was her sister, her smaller version. A side effect of sorts, clinging to her as they moved and talked. My brother had always been obsessed with the gross and absurd. Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Planet of the Apes.
“How do they get dressed in the morning?” he said.
“Or go to the bathroom?” I asked him.
The things that made me retch were the things that enthralled him. Once, when we lived in Queens, he collected dead flies stuck in our bedroom window, and then took a needle and thread out of my mother’s sewing box and made a fly necklace.
“Ow!” I yelled.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Mom is pulling my hair out in large chunks.”
“I’m not!” she yelled into phone.
“Tell her to lay off you.”
“Lay off me!” I told her.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” she said to me, the line between her eyebrows deepening. She grabbed the phone from my ear and said the same thing to my brother, only, when he responded with something I couldn’t hear, she laughed with him. He always won her over, though she didn’t like to admit it.
A memory: I stood on a chair in our living room. A crickety wooden one that sounded like it was going to pop under my feet. My brother’s back was against the white-painted wall and his arms were perpendicular to his body. I was on the chair beside him.
He turned to me and said, “Now, you pretend you are a Roman soldier and nail spikes into my hands.”
I looked down around the room “What nails?” I asked.
“Just pretend,” he said. “Pretend like you’re hammering nails into my hands.”
“Oh, I can’t do that,” I said.
“Just pretend!” I could tell by the volume of his voice that he was getting annoyed with my ignorance, with my lack of imagination. “You’re a Roman soldier, okay? I’m Jesus, okay? When they crucified him, they nailed his hands and feet to a wooden cross and let him hang there to die.” By age ten, my brother was well versed in the New Testament. In religion classes, he paid close attention to parables and stories. At six, all I knew was that today was Holy Saturday and I was too sick to play outside. We were in our pajamas. My nose was running, and my head was hot, but he promised the crucifix game would be fun. The day before, he and my mother had watched the movie Jesus of Nazareth, staying up late while I fell asleep. He seemed to know what he was doing, so I followed him as he rescued me from boredom.
From my chair, I pretended to hammer a big spiky nail into his hand. He grimaced, and grunted painfully. “Oh,” I said, easing up with my pretend hammer and pulling out a pretend nail.
“I’m just pretending,” he whispered. “Keep going.” He winked and nodded. “Now, you say, ”Jesus, King of the Jews, you shall die!” ” He continued to feed me the lines. “Pretend to laugh as you do it. You know, ”Ha! Ha! Ha!” ” He threw his head back with hearty laughter.
“Ha! Ha! Ha!” I repeated, throwing my head back, too.
He looked up at the ceiling and looked as if he could cry. “Forgive them, Father,” he pled, “they know not what they do.”
I was confused, not quite sure why I was laughing, or why I was nailing spikes into his hands. I looked up to see whom he was talking to, but all I could see was the bright yellow ceiling light. It shone over him, casting the shadow of his entire crucified body on the white wall.
A week later, back in religion class at school, Sister Mary Victor’s long navy blue habit was swinging low and heavy behind her. “Now, does anyone know who died last week?” She had one palm in the other as she paced back and forth. “I’ll give you a clue,” she said. “He is the King of the Jews. He suffered for our sins, and they nailed him to a cross. He died, came back to us, and then went up to Heaven. Does anyone know who this is?”
“Jesus!” someone behind me shouted out.
“That’s right!” Sister Mary Victor cried.
It came to me like a puzzle. All the pieces started to make sense. “My brother!” I said aloud.
“Excuse me?” Sister Mary Victor snapped, her big eyes bulging and coming closer to me.
“Jesus Christ—is my brother! When I crucified him, he asked our father to forgive me!”
Sister Mary Victor gave me a long, cold stare through the thick lenses of her glasses, one that pierced straight through me and shrank me back into my seat.
“Well, I think he is . . .” I mumbled before I dropped my eyes toward the floor.
When I got my first pimple at thirteen, my mother told me that when a girl gets a pimple, it means that she is secretly in love. Of course, I was—with some boyish face I can no longer recall. But her prophecy made me embarrassed, and I blushed. The stress of everyone finding out my secret made me worry even more until I broke out in full acne.
“Don’t tell them that!” my father would say to my mother when she told my brother and me these things, but she never listened. While my father was a quiet Catholic who prayed privately, my mother was the one who believed that you got punished for your sins.
Throughout high school, there were times when I struggled with insomnia. I turned over and over again in my bed, paced the floor, and sometimes went downstairs to watch TV for hours before finally dozing off on the couch. I even tried praying. When I told my mother about it, she said that a deep-rooted guilt could keep someone awake for days.
“Something is on your conscience, isn’t it?” she asked me, squinting her eyes and trying to find the answer in my face. I flinched, and then I turned away. “You cannot sleep because you feel guilty. Am I right? Maybe you should go to confession,” she whispered, her cold stare like that of a witch casting a spell.
I believed her. I told the priest everything I’d done. Everything: my secret crushes, my secret wish that the ceiling fan at church would fall down into the pews in the middle of Mass (just to make things interesting). I told him how, once, a friend dared me to steal purple mascara from the local mall. During the week, I kept a running tab of my offenses so I could confess them by week’s end. I prayed every night; I listened to the gospels during Mass. My brother and I both did.
Every Sunday in church, I sat next to my brother, who sat next to my mother, who sat next my father, who sat by the aisle. Every Sunday, we stood, we knelt, we sang, and we prayed. Every Sunday since my First Communion, we all got up, stood in line, and took the Eucharist.
But one time it was different. I remember the loud dramatic sounds coming from the organ. They made our pews vibrate and made my bones shake. My brother was a high school senior, and between the weekly sermons, all he talked about was where he was going to college. I looked at his outfit. He had started wearing jeans to church, sweatshirts instead of button-down shirts. Lately, he had stopped singing the hymns, and he had started slouching in his pew while the priest was talking. My mother nudged him with her elbow and he shook her off.
When it came time for communion,
everyone stood up and got in line. My brother, who didn’t stand, held up this usually orderly process. He remained seated, leaving me stuck on the inside of the pew.
“Go!” I whispered.
“I’m not going,” he said. He shook his head, put his feet up on the kneeler. I must have stood there with my mouth open, frozen by his protest. “No, I don’t think I’m into it this week. You go.” He moved his feet to allow me to pass.
I kept my eyes on him as I moved up the communion line. He slouched and looked around. He was confident in his decision. I was unsure of what was going on. I watched the other parishioners kneeling and praying. I wanted to yell at my brother right there from the communion line, “What are you doing? He’s watching, you know!” But his body language was deliberately hostile, clearly stubborn. I took the Eucharist in my mouth, and prayed for my brother’s salvation.
The morning of our surgery, I woke up early to find my mother yet again hunched over my bed. This time it was comforting to have her there. As the nurse wheeled me out of my room on a gurney and toward the O.R., my mother walked alongside, her hand trying to keep in constant contact with my arm, or my shoulder, anything.
“You pray!” my mother commanded, pulling a blanket over me before she left me with the nurse. I had been praying for weeks before the transplant. I asked God to make it work, to let me finally be okay, be done with the dialysis treatments, and get back to my life at school. Sometimes I sank to the ground on my knees and begged that the transplant would work.
Back in the room, balloons had filled the ceiling, and cards from well-wishers were stuck to every available surface of the wall. “Your courage is an inspiration,” said one card with a cartoon lion drawn on it. Fraud, fraud, fraud, I thought to myself. Give me a choice, and I’ll show you how “brave” I am. Give me the chance to open the door and run away from this whole disease, never have to deal with it again, and I’ll show you I’m made of nothing but fast feet. I’m on automatic pilot. I’m reading the lines off the script and making the appropriate facial expressions.
But my brother? I didn’t know what was keeping him there. He could have left any time he wanted and told everyone that he just couldn’t do it, and no one would have hated him for it. They would’ve thanked him for trying.
Once, when I was in kindergarten, I rode the bus with my brother and his classmates, but he forbade me from talking to him. The girls in my grade sat in the back while he and his friends sat in the front. Only once do I remember him talking to any of us. There was one Korean girl, Jae-Bok, who had taken my finger puppet right off my pinky.
“Too slow!” she said and stuck out her tongue before stuffing the puppet into her jeans.
“Not fair!” I said. “Give it to me!” I must have said it loudly enough for my brother to hear because—bam! —just like that, an imaginary cape hovering behind his shoulders, he turned around in his green vinyl bus seat and said, “What happened?”
“Jae-Bok took my Piggy Puppet!”
“So!” she said, playing tough with my brother.
I wanted him to hit her, smack her in her place. But, foreshadowing the wit and insult comedy he will master in later years, my brother said, “Jae-Bok, you’re a thief! You’re a stealer! You’re a Pittsburgh Stealer!” At the time, I hadn’t caught how clever this was, how my brother linked up Jae-Bok’s crime to a football team’s mascot, especially since we weren’t yet living in Pittsburgh.
But everyone else on the bus got it and hummed “ooooh,” shaming Jae-Bok into returning the Piggy Puppet to me.
An orderly and my father came down into the white room with Joel in a gurney between them. My dad came over to kiss me on the forehead and quickly made an exit. “Don’t be scared,” he said.
Our stretchers were lined up along each side of the stark white hallway. Between us, nurses and orderlies shuffled by, flinging open the operating room door as they moved in and out. My brother, too, was clothed in white and had an IV running from his hand. I could tell by the flutter of his eyelids that the anesthesia was just starting to work.
I held my hand over the side of my waist where they would put in the new kidney, where they would transplant his organ into my body. There was an emptiness there now, like skin stretched over bone with a hollow space underneath. I tapped on it impatiently. I watched a nurse stand beside me, turning the pages in my chart. My eyes followed an orderly who came down the hall and repositioned my gurney so I was closer to the wall and out of the way of traffic. He tugged on my blanket to cover my exposed foot.
The double doors swung open one more time, and inside the room ahead, trays with equipment were rolled from this side to that. One nurse called out directions and another one adjusted the tube of my IV. I looked at my brother on his narrow gurney. He was dozing in and out of sleep. I felt my pulse, the tremble of my skin. The lights from the other side of the double doors seemed brighter and stronger than they were minutes ago. They seemed to come right over my brother, over his long white figure, his outstretched arms, his long legs. They illuminated his entire body.
Three weeks after the transplant, everyone was finally able to rest. My daily blood tests read that my brother’s kidney was working, that my body wasn’t rejecting it. I thought about how, before long, I would have to go back to Baltimore for school.
Friends and family called to ask how I felt. I didn’t know how to tell them without jumping out of my seat. I felt the blood pumping in my veins and the breath in my lungs. I thought, today I could run a hundred miles without stopping. The scar over my abdomen was healing, and I wanted to eat all my favorite, salty foods that I was forced to avoid when my kidneys didn’t work. I was someone else now. Someone better.
People came to see my brother and me and told us that even our parents were looking better, how the wrinkles on their brows had finally smoothed out. They were laughing again and the secretary in my dad’s office confessed to me that she had finally seen my dad’s big smile for the first time that summer. Not only was the transplant successful, but we had been living under the same roof for the past few weeks, and that made it easier for my parents to watch over us.
It just kept getting better after that. Three weeks after the transplant, I was restless and eager to use my energy. I needed a project. I didn’t want to just sit around. The owners of the house before us had covered the entire second floor with cheap, ugly carpet. Underneath lay shiny, flawless parquet. My mother had been saying for years how she wanted to rip up that carpet, but she never did it. One day they came home, and I had rolled up half the carpet so that a big lump sat in the middle of the room.
“What do you think you’re doing?!” they yelled.
“I was bored. It’s not as hard as it looked. It wasn’t bolted in there or anything.” I had ignored my surgeon’s orders to rest, and my father made me check my incision to make sure nothing had popped. I had the energy of a horse. That was what the new kidney did for me.
In the room across the hall, things were quiet. My brother was back in his childhood bed. His boxes from moving out of his place in Boston were piled up around him. Sometimes he came down to watch TV, whizzing through the channels impatiently. He was cranky because of the pain of his incision, a cut that extended from the front of his torso, around the side of his body, and all the way to the middle of his back. The surgeons warned us that the surgery would be more difficult for him, and I don’t know if he ever believed that. If he didn’t before, he did now.
“Do you want to go to the mall?” I asked him.
He stared back at me for a few minutes before I remembered that I wasn’t allowed to drive for two months, he for three. We were stuck in that house until our parents got home.
I hadn’t heard his laughter in a long time, despite how much I tried to egg it on. “Look,” I pointed to the TV, “botched-up plastic surgery stories on channel 4.” But instead of paying attention, he put on his earphones and tuned out.
He had lost touch with his friends in Boston and dec
ided he would not return after he got better.
“Why not?” I asked. All I could think about was moving into my dorm in a few weeks and being surrounded by friends.
He responded with just a shrug and then went upstairs again to hide in his room. When my parents came home, I called him down for dinner, but he didn’t respond and stayed up there for the rest of the night.
In the weeks before school, I should have been exhausted from my days of jumping around the house energetically and my newfound hobby as a carpet remover, from packing my boxes and planning my schedule. And while I was a little tired, I had trouble sleeping. After the transplant, I lay in bed trying to close my eyes and doze off, but I couldn’t. I stayed up all night rolling from one side of the bed to the other, sitting up in the dark, and pacing the floor, trying to make out the millions of thoughts clouding my head, but the only words that came through were forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.
Chapter Four
Direct from San Francisco: Two Dancers Balance One-Footed on the Moving Earth
I tell Charlie I was a real drag before he came along, I and he says to me, “Nah, Moonface. You just needed someone to find that spark in you.” He says he was intent on lighting that spark from the first moment he laid his baby blues on me.
But I was skeptical. After spending the summer watching my brother slowly heal, I went back to school trying to pick up where I left off. I drank at the bars with my friends, but stopped after they were all too drunk to realize that I was nursing my drink and being more conscious about what I was taking in. I was keenly aware now that something had changed, that things did not go my way. Even when Charlie came along, I didn’t believe him. The last thing I needed was to deal with a guy who thought he was the incarnation of Elvis. I was even reluctant about making a big move to San Francisco, but before I knew it, I was there, and I was waiting to meet Charlie.
I stood in that lobby in San Francisco waiting. Any minute now, Charlie would come walking out of that elevator. Then what? Shallow hug? Fidgety handshake? The flowers in the hotel lobby were fake and gray with dust. A bellman wearing gold tassels on his shoulders stood by the door and seemed embarrassed. Any minute now.
Moonface Page 3