Queen for a Day

by Maxine Rosaler

The clinic was just twenty blocks away from Jack’s 99 Cent Store. Talk about addiction: that’s what Jack’s, with its profusion of useful and useless things, was for me; so in happy anticipation of the unknown bargains that lay in store for me, I went to fetch my broken cart from the hall closet, where it had sat, among many other broken things, for three years now, waiting to be put out of its misery.

  When I got to the clinic, I signed in with the receptionist and she handed me a form and I handed her the envelope containing the letter Jake and I had worked on, which I asked her to give to the head nurse. I sat down in a chair by the window and started filling out the form, cramming the margins with complaints about Dr. Ruttman, but when I was finished with my scribblings and looked at the paper, I thought they resembled the ravings of a drug addict, so I tore up the piece of paper and asked the surly receptionist for another form.

  “I just gave you one,” she told me.

  “Well—yes, I’m sorry, but I made a mistake, could you give me another?”

  We hated each other. The week before I had sat there waiting for over two hours, and every time I went up to ask her when I would be seen, she looked at me through the slits of her eyes and said that I would have to wait my turn like everybody else. “You’re not the only patient, you know.” Those were the same words the head doctor uttered to me forty-five minutes later when I tried to present her with my various theories about why my urine might have tested negative for Percocet.

  “No more Percocet for you!” she had said with a smile. She had a name that no one could manage to pronounce and so everyone called her Dr. B.

  I told Dr. B. that, according to the results of my last screening, I had tested positive for Percocet.

  “That’s strange,” I said. “I wonder why I tested positive this time, and negative the time before.”

  “That’s because you were taking the Percocet!” Dr. B. exclaimed as she clicked her way out of the room. She was a short, fat woman with a bad complexion who dressed in ill-fitting frilly dresses and stiletto-heeled shoes. She had administered a nerve block to me a month before, a painful procedure that involved sticking an enormous needle into my lower back. I think I insulted her professional pride when I told her that the procedure hadn’t worked, that I still felt as though I were being eaten alive from the inside by thousands of tiny bugs, and now she was punishing me for it.

  Shortly after my return to my seat, the receptionist called me over and informed me that my health insurance had expired. This seemed to make her happy, and it in turn made me happy to know that her happiness was destined to expire shortly, because I knew with wonderful certainty that my insurance was still active, having just received a notice of recertification in the mail that morning. It felt so good, being without doubt for a change. I dialed the tiny numbers printed on the back of my insurance card, and after explaining the situation to the woman on the other end, I handed the receptionist my cell phone. I could tell from her smug expression that she was giving the insurance lady a hard time and that felt good, too, knowing that I wasn’t the only person in the world she treated with contempt.

  After a few minutes she beckoned me over with one of her overmanicured claws and I waited on my cell phone with the insurance lady—who turned out to be a great person—until the fax confirming that my insurance was up-to-date came through. We found a common bond in our mutual dislike of the receptionist.

  “You could tell, just from that brief conversation with her?” I asked.

  “You get to be very quick at picking up signals like that in my business.”

  “Well, it’s a tribute to you that you’ve managed to stay so nice.”

  “I try my best,” she told me. “We’re all in this together. That’s what I tell myself every day.”

  “Me, too!” I said. What a nice woman, I thought as I planted myself back down on my chair and looked around the waiting room. Everyone was white. There was an elderly woman with beauty parlor hair in pearls and two men in business suits and the boy next to me was reading a book about semiotics. There wasn’t a single drug addict in the bunch: There was no woman nodding off mumbling into her chest that the doctor refused to renew her presciption for Vicodin because she had tested positive for cocaine; no man in his twenties who looked to be least fifty, his hair in a greasy ponytail, dark circles under his eyes; no skinny woman, reeking of cigarette smoke, with her front teeth missing, dressed in a miniskirt that exposed legs that were covered in black and blue marks—none of my usual crew of fellow patients, in other words.

  Then I remembered. This wasn’t the poor people insurance day. Monday had been a holiday, and since they were rationing out the painkillers to me one week at a time, I couldn’t be scheduled to come in on my regular day, so the clinic had no choice but to put me in with the private health insurance crowd.

  I sat in my chair rereading my letter, and in the middle of the third reading, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I made my way through the door to the back, where I planted myself outside the office of Ellen, the nurse who had been so nice to me during my previous visit. I had been sitting in Dr. Ruttman’s office in tears, terrified at the thought of my symptoms being left untreated because I was now a person under suspicion. I had demanded that another doctor be summoned, and had been presented with Ellen instead. She wasn’t a doctor, but she was the head nurse and such a comfort to me that I was happy Dr. Ruttman hadn’t been able to find a doctor to sit in with us. She had held my hand and looked into my eyes and told me that they were going to help me.

  “Don’t worry, honey,” she had reassured me. “We’re going to find something that will work for you.” What a nice woman, I thought to myself. So unlike everyone else who works here. But now she was saying, “Who does she think she is? Barging in here like she owns the place!” (She was talking about me the way I spoke to my mice—although I spoke much more respectfully to them.)

  “What did you expect me to do? Wait all day?” I called out to her. “I have an autistic son and I have to be home for him when he gets back from school!” Lately I had gotten into the habit of using Danny as an excuse for everything.

  I have an autistic son, I would write as my excuse when I was called for jury duty; there was a crisis with my autistic son, I would tell my editor when I missed a deadline; and I used Danny as an excuse once when I went to argue a parking ticket as well.

  I had always made it a policy to fight my parking tickets, regardless of whether or not I was in the right. It was a game I liked to play with the hearing officers, who never believed my stories about missing street signs or the car not starting or being stuck in the elevator on my way out of my apartment building to move my car. Most of my excuses were things I would make up on the spot, and I would usually take my losses in stride. But since Danny’s diagnosis, every ticket had taken on the weight of my monumental grief. Why do they insist on hurting me? I would ask myself. Haven’t I been hurt enough already?

  There was only one judge, the last one, who ruled in my favor. One of the reasons I prevailed, I think, was because the story I told him happened to be true.

  I told him that I had been rushing down the street with my son to get to my car in time to move it, but then he saw the big piece of black tape covering the sign for the W subway line.

  “He’s very upset that the W line was canceled,” I said. “He loves the subway system. He kept on trying to tear off the black tape. And I kept on trying to stop him. My son is autistic, you see, and he wants everything to be the same.”

  Then forgetting that the reason I was telling the judge this story was to beat the ticket, I went on.

  “My son—my son—my son … He wouldn’t stop trying to pull off the tape. I let go of his hand for a second—I forget why—and he went running to the subway station. I’d never seen him so upset!

  “This wasn’t the first time he did this,” I continued. I was on the verge of tea
rs. “Two months ago he was at the same subway station and he kept on jumping up to try to tear off the tape. Later, when we got home, my husband and I tried to make Danny understand how dangerous what he was doing was.

  “We told him he could be arrested. We told him about prison. We told him he could get beaten up in prison. But he kept on insisting that he would refuse to be arrested. He said he would get a get-out-of-jail card. Or he would break out of jail. We kept on telling him that that was fantasy. We kept on telling him stories about what jail was really like. We wanted to frighten him and we didn’t stop until we made Danny cry. Danny never cries.”

  I told the judge that Danny still keeps on trying to rip off the black tape. It’s always a battle of wills with us, I told him. I had long ago forgotten who this man was and why I was telling him all this. Then, remembering the ticket, I added that by the time I got back to my car, there was the dreaded flash of orange flapping arrogantly in the breeze.

  I could barely talk, my throat ached so much. “That’s why I was late. I couldn’t get him to budge. He’s getting so big—”

  The words stuck in my throat. I could tell by the look on the judge’s face that I had won him over: The moment of victory I had been waiting for had finally arrived. Here, at last, was a person who understood. I could see my heartbreak reflected in his kind eyes. This made me very uncomfortable.

  Holding up his hand, the judge told me to forget about the stupid ticket. I had more important things to worry about. I suppose I must have looked confused, because I was confused. He looked me in the eye and told me that mothers like me were heroines as far as he was concerned. “It’s important for you to take care of yourself. Think of your son. You have to stay healthy for him.”

  I decided right then and there that that would be the last time I would use Danny as an excuse for anything and I was sorry now that my resolve had weakened, because Nurse Ellen was stomping out of her office and commanding me to go into the waiting room and sit there, like everyone else. There was such a mean look on her face that I wondered where all the compassion she had shown me last week could have gone. Had it all been just an act? How frightening, I thought to myself; cruelty masked as kindness is cruelty in its most lethal form.

  I went back into the waiting room and waited for the time to pass. Finally an hour later. Nurse Ellen came out and beckoned me over to her with a steely nod of her head, her lips pressed together so tightly that all the blood had drained out of them. She handed me a prescription for a week’s supply of the new drug, at the same dose.

  “Didn’t you read my letter?” I asked her.

  “It’s eight pages long. I don’t have time to read an eight-page letter.”

  “This new drug isn’t helping me at all!” I told her, brandishing the prescription form she had just handed me.

  “Don’t get hysterical. If you get hysterical, I’ll call the guards. You’ll have to wait until a doctor is available to see you to have the medication adjusted. That’s the policy. You can’t expect the policy to be changed just to suit you.”

  The next appointment wasn’t for another month and I ran out of the clinic, but not until I told the receptionist what I thought of her.

  “The people who come here are in pain and you sit here with that sneer on your face and you’re rude. You have a real attitude problem. You should be a token booth clerk or a prison guard, instead of a receptionist in a doctor’s office.”

  “Thank you,” she said, looking at me with those standard-issue eyes of hers.

  “Don’t thank me,” I told her. “I’m telling you that there’s something wrong with the way you treat people. That you’re a morally deficient human being. You shouldn’t thank me.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Fuck you, bitch,” I told her as I made my way out the door and down the brightly lit corridors of glass-enclosed rooms containing continents of human suffering and human need.

  I regretted uttering the words as soon as they left my mouth, for I had been trying to train myself not to overreact to situations like this for quite some time now. Jake and I both had problems dealing with the rudeness of strangers, and one day we had sat at the kitchen table developing a list of rejoinders. For example, in response to people who angrily bark “You’re welcome!” when someone fails to thank them for keeping a door open, we would simply say, “You’re welcome, too.” For the person who orders another person to cover his mouth when he coughs, I wanted to say, “I’m sorry but I have lung cancer, which isn’t contagious,” but Jake insisted that a flat “I’m sorry” would suffice. We were still working on an effective response for people who don’t know—or if they do, they don’t care—that it’s impudent to order other people to lower their voices in public places (this was a case that really just applied to me, because I was the one with the big loud voice). I agreed with Jake when he told me that “Fuck you” was not the devastating rhetorical device we thought it was when we were teenagers, but the fact of the matter was it was still my favorite phrase in the English language.

  My plan now was to walk to Jack’s and I was wheeling my one-wheeled cart up Sixth Avenue thinking about man’s inhumanity to man when a wall-eyed black woman with a big belly and a big smile approached me. She was wearing a tight red dress that exposed a deflated, stretch-marked cleavage, and she had a friendliness about her that alternately repelled and attracted me. I took her to be the sort of person who has everything figured out because of God or some other spiritual dimension. Still, my experience at the pain clinic had left me feeling hungry for human kindness, so I decided to accept her friendliness at face value.

  “I like your cart,” she told me. “I’ve been looking all over for a red cart. I hate the color black. It’s so sad and my cart makes me feel sad,” she said, pointing to the perfectly lovely, able-bodied black cart she was wheeling. “Red is a happy color and I am a happy person. Do you mind telling me where you got your cart?” she asked, and I proceeded to tell her the story of my cart—how it was supposedly covered by a warranty, but that the company had charged ten dollars and ninety-five cents for shipping a new set of wheels to me and that when the wheels arrived I discovered that it would take an entire factory to attach them to my cart, but I had been holding on to the wheels and the broken cart for five years now—because I had trouble dealing with injustice and defeat. This was one of my issues, I told her. I used the word “issue” because I was sticking with my initial impression that she was a person with a philosophy and I know that people with philosophies are always in the process of dealing with their issues.

  “So what I’m trying to tell you is that I don’t think this is such a great cart. I wouldn’t recommend it,” I said.

  “It would do just fine for me,” she told me. “Yours broke because you carry around too much heavy stuff. You shouldn’t do that to yourself. You are one of God’s precious children,” she added.

  “Thank you,” I told her sincerely, because at the moment the idea of having some benevolent omnipotent being watching over me appealed to me very much.

  “All I care about is the color,” she told me. “I don’t carry around heavy stuff. I just need it for my business,” which she informed me was selling scarves on the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. She lived in Rego Park, Queens, a good solid white middle-class part of the borough where the median income was sixty thousand dollars a year—that’s where her fiancé, a retired lawyer, was from, but Harlem was still in her blood, and she liked doing business there.

  “They’re still my people. They’ll always be my people,” she said, concluding her digression. Then she went back to asking me about my cart.

  “Okay,” I told her, “maybe it will work for you. Anyway, I got it at Jack’s. Do you know Jack’s?”

  “I heard of it, but I’ve never been there.”

  “Well, you’re in for a real treat. I’m going there now and I’ll show you where I
got my defective cart.”

  “Great. And then I’ll give you mine. You shouldn’t be wheeling around a cart with only one wheel.”

  “That’s awfully nice of you,” I told her. “But you don’t have to do that,” I added, hoping with all my heart that she would give me her cart.

  “I want to,” she said.

  Then we proceeded to introduce ourselves to each other and to tell each other our life stories, starting with our ages and our weights.

  I told Renee I was fifty and she told me she thought I looked like I was thirty and she asked me how much I thought she weighed and I told her about one forty, thinking she was at least one sixty, and then she told me about her two sons and their two fathers.

  The oldest was nineteen and lived with his father, an African-American who never gave her any money. The kid was a mess, and every now and then she would try to set him straight about life, but besides that, she didn’t have much to do with him anymore. Her other son was only five, and was living with her fiancé, the lawyer, a white man who had already set up a college fund for the kid, even though he wasn’t his child. Her older son’s father, “the black man,” she said, hadn’t put aside a cent for her nineteen-year-old, but her five-year-old already had fifteen thousand dollars in his name. And then she tried to engage me in a conversation about the superiority of the white race, a line of conversation I had no interest in pursuing.

  I didn’t tell her about Danny, but I told her that my husband hated me and I told her all about the pain clinic and about my bladder and she told me that she had never found a man who was good for anything, except this last one, but that was only because he had money, and that she had bladder problems, too, that sometimes she peed as often as every half hour, and I told her that sometimes I peed as often as every five minutes and that was why my experience at the pain clinic had left me feeling so devastated.

  “It must have been something in your past life,” Renee told me, and I told her that this was one thing I hadn’t looked into yet.