Highs in the Low Fifties

by Marion Winik

  It’s never simple, is it.

  the fixer-upper

  One thing the Brainiac had going for him was his unblinking acceptance of my health situation. Our first date was essentially a sickbed visit with a cup of tea. I’ve learned that people have different reactions to scary viruses and serious illness. Some fade into the distance, sending vague e-mails of support, while others step into the breach, hauling your groceries. One friend believed that being exposed to me would pose a slight but fatal risk to her newborn baby. Though this fear had no basis in medical fact, even letters from my doctor could not convince her otherwise. The fatal risk was actually to our friendship.

  The relationship that endured the biggest transformation was the one between me and Jane, who underwent a rapid if somewhat forced transition from little girl to independent young woman at the age of eleven. When I first started to be so tired all the time, she was not sympathetic. It was hard for her to accept that I was sick, especially since I had never been sick before. She had been watching me bounce around the house like a silver marble in a pinball machine all her life, and at first she reacted to my slow roll to the drain by being very cranky and critical. Why did I lie on the couch all day and night? Why didn’t I cook anymore? Various neighbors had to drive her to and from school, or she walked. In the evenings, we ate take-out lo mein and watched television.

  Disturbingly, after the cellulitis episode and the five-day hospitalization were over, I kept going downhill. I was so low-energy I felt like my body was sliding off my bones—like my bones themselves were coming unglued, and I would soon be a formless glob on the couch. One morning after Jane left the house, I broke down and lost it completely. “I can’t take it anymore!” I wailed. The dog looked around anxiously, then brought me a tennis ball, hoping a game of fetch might help. Then the phone rang and it was my young doctor. He told me that a follow-up MRI of my arm had shown I might have a life-threatening abscess. I should leave for the hospital immediately.

  I literally howled at this news, but he was firm. Soon I had canceled the next day’s classes, Crispin was on his way to take care of Jane, and I was back on the eighth floor of Hopkins, this time revealed not to be a spa at all. I could have nothing to eat or drink the whole time, just in case I ended up in surgery. The nurses were preoccupied with crises elsewhere on the ward. My loud, assertive roommate talked on her cell phone all day, shouting over the gospel DVD she had going on the television.

  “Are you one of those people who sleep with the TV on?” she asked me in a break between calls.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Sorry in advance, then,” she said. “I can’t sleep without it.”

  That night, she left the thing tuned to the Patients’ Rights Network, which endlessly repeated a ten-minute program advising you what to do with your valuables when you got to the hospital. At about 3:00 a.m., I decided to get up and turn it off. She’d been conked out for hours, and as far as I could see, she didn’t even actually wake up, just clicked the remote and turned it back on in her sleep.

  The life-threatening abscess was a false alarm, but it was a good thing I’d gone into the hospital, because there was a different, not much less serious problem. My red blood count was about as low as it can go. This is why I felt so horrible. I received two units of blood and was released the next day.

  Whoa. The feeling of rejuvenation was incredible. I went running around for at least seventy-two hours, telling everyone I was Keith Richards and blood was the new coke. I walked to Jane’s school to pick her up for the first time in a year. I combed my hair and brushed my teeth. I read the whole Hunger Games trilogy in a day and a half.

  Then it wore off.

  Fortunately, around this time, the first three months of treatment came to an end. I got to stop taking Telaprevir and was also put on some shots to boost my red count. Both of these measures improved my well-being considerably, and my arm was slowly returning to normal. Unfortunately, the dryness and itchiness that had started the whole damn thing persisted, and now my eyes, mouth, and nose were all glued together. One day, I got a nosebleed that just wouldn’t stop. To explain the stupid way I handled this situation, a little backstory is required.

  From the outset, my parents saw me as a fixer-upper, and engaged many contractors to rehab my lazy eye, crooked teeth, pigeon toes, persistent chubbiness, and so on. The prow of the whole pontoon was my nose. It was big, humped at the bridge, and fleshy at the tip. A slightly more refined version of it looks excellent on my twenty-three-year-old son, but my parents were not wrong in thinking that it didn’t suit a thirteen-year-old girl. They may have been a little wrong in taking me in for a nose job as a birthday present.

  I looked through the book of noses the doctor showed me and knew two things: One, if I did this, I would end up with a miniature pig snout like certain unfortunates in my Hebrew school class; and two, my parents did not love me.

  My nose remained proudly untouched for nearly a decade. During this period, I went to college and got a boyfriend named Jan. He was a filmmaker, an ice-hockey player, and an aspiring expatriate. Chameleon girlfriend that I was, I embraced all of these interests. Having had little success in the cinema and as an expat, I tried ice hockey, joining a previously all-male league at the ice rink in Austin, Texas. The entire league was made up of Canadians who had been transferred to Texas by IBM. I didn’t even know how to skate when I started, but soon developed my own version of a move called the “submarine check,” which basically involved trying to get other players to trip over me.

  I was an audience draw, I believe, but it all came screeching to a halt the day I took a slap shot in the face.

  This career-ending injury resulted in a whole new conformation for my nose. Now I looked like the bastard child of Barbra Streisand and Wayne Gretzky.

  Ever stalwart, I did not seek medical attention until several years later. Ironically enough, I was trying to demonstrate my submarine-check maneuver to a new beau on a sidewalk outside a bar. Caught up in my demonstration, I pretend-skated right into a fire hydrant and mangled my knee.

  At the emergency room I was treated by an ex-army doc named Davis. Davis’s specialty in the service had been trauma / plastic surgery, and he asked if he might examine my odd-looking nose. The gist of his report was that it was all messed up inside from the accident, and I would have problems in later years—to the point that a rhinoplasty might even be paid for by insurance.

  Well, that did it. Up in New Jersey, my mother was horrified that I was having my nose done by a battlefield medic, but to me it was reassuring. She completely embarrassed me by vetting all his licenses and credentials, then flew down for the operation and its aftermath, ready to pass on the wraparound sunglasses she had worn after her eye lift.

  When it was over, I had the nose of my dreams—small and cute, but not too small and cute, somehow conveying a pleasant memory of whatever had been okay about the original. For thirty years, the finely proportioned nose Dr. Davis gave me has been the cornerstone of my self-esteem.

  More recently, however, I have come to feel there might still be something a little weird about the inside of my beautiful nose. Annoying dryness and stuffiness culminated last spring—way before I started hep treatment, like around the time I was first starting to feel weird—in a distressing twenty-four-hour nosebleed. This landed me in the emergency room yet again, where a brutal doctor named Cooramaswamy shoved my head between her giant breasts to muffle my shrieks as she inserted an apparatus through my nostrils into the center of my brain. Various tampon-like appendages and tubes hung down in front to my chin. She told me to go home and come back and see her Monday to have it removed.

  I couldn’t believe she expected me to walk around all weekend like that, and then, to voluntarily return.

  I got home to find the members of a prearranged dinner party waiting for me, so I disguised the lower ha
lf of my face with a bandanna and proceeded to serve the boeuf bourguignon as the Frito Bandito on Percodan. Later that evening, alone in my bed, I steeled myself to perform the delicate yet unflinching removal of the unsightly item I have since learned to call a Rapid Rhino 351 Epistaxis Device.

  Dr. Cooramaswamy had been unimpressed when I tried to tell her about Dr. Davis’s long-ago concerns for my future nose health, and the ENT specialist she referred me to was even less interested in my backstory. From the moment he walked into the room, his ruddy complexion and sculpted hairdo saying “televangelist,” I felt uneasy. He took one look up my nose and said disgustedly, “Do you do coke?”

  “Well,” I said, taken aback, “not for quite a while. Decades, really.”

  “I can’t help you,” he told me. “You have a hole in your septum the size of a Buffalo nickel, and your only hope is reconstructive plastic surgery. There’s just one man who can do it.” He scribbled the name of this superhero on a prescription pad, handed it to me, and left without another word.

  I was so humiliated by these incidents, not to mention so weary of dealing with the medical establishment, that when I had a similar nosebleed a few months after my cellulitis episode, I decided to treat it at home no matter what. A week after I’d successfully stopped the nosebleed with my own homemade version of the Rapid Rhino 351 Epistaxis Device, I began to smell something very foul with every breath. Somehow a small wad of Kleenex remained floating around deep in my sinuses, rotting away, and damned if it didn’t take a trip to the emergency room—perhaps the most humiliating of all—to have it removed with nasal forceps. I apologized to the doctor for the grossness of the whole procedure. She said, “Yes, but I find it sort of satisfying.”

  I don’t think I did that much coke, really, and even my sister, who tends to have a sharper take on such matters, agrees with me. Nonetheless, the wages of sin and narcissism just keep rolling in. As a greeting card I tacked on my bulletin board years ago says, “If you can’t be a good example, you’ll just have to serve as a horrible warning.”

  I really cannot explain why I am so much happier than I was three years ago. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve had no success on the dating front, I’ve been sick as a dog, and I haven’t even lost weight because of it. My twenty-four-year-old son earns more than twice as much as I do. His younger brother makes me look like a wimp in almost every way. My twelve-year-old daughter is prettier and more level-headed. (Come to think of it, perhaps these things are causes of, and not detriments to, my happiness.) In any case, most of my body parts no longer bear any scrutiny whatsoever, which is less critical than it would be if I could actually see them.

  The hottest experience I’ve had in a while was introducing Jane to the DVD of Shakespeare in Love. Jane was dubious at first, what with the Elizabethan outfits and the English accents, but once Will and Lady Violet began to gaze into each other’s eyes, she couldn’t look away.

  There are things that happen in life you cannot laugh at. They are few and hopefully far between. These were between years for me, and I’ll take as many more of them as I can get.

  afterword: where are they now

  Most of the names in this book have been changed and certain other details adjusted to protect the identities of the gentlemen involved. While a few are now off my radar, like Wheelchair Mike and Brown Lips, I’ve kept tabs on most of the others, and quite a few have read and approved their sections of this narrative, as awkward as that may sound. (I knew that despite my attempts at disguise, each would recognize himself if he ran into the book, and other people might, too. So I asked them to read what I had written and see if they agreed that this was what happened. In most cases, I made any changes they suggested.)

  Here’s a rundown.

  Humberto: About six months after our rendezvous, the crew was working at another house in my neighborhood. Humberto started coming over at lunchtime, eating at my kitchen table. I didn’t mind; in fact, it seemed sort of sweet to me that he felt we were friends after what went down. We talked about his brother, who had ended up back home in Salvador for now.

  After about a week, though, somebody ratted him out, and his boss, who is a friend of mine, came over to find out what was going on. I blanched when I realized how angry he was and how much trouble Humberto might be in. I tried my best to minimize the situation, saying that we were actually friends and he did nothing wrong, and please, please don’t fire him. Anything that was out of line was my fault.

  The boss gave me a look. Okay, he said, but he has to learn how to behave with clients. You’re not helping him if you encourage him to be unprofessional.

  About a year later, I wrote down the story, changing some identifying details to confuse the INS in case I published it. Since Humberto couldn’t read or speak English, I couldn’t get his comments. I doubted he would ever even be aware of its existence, but his boss definitely would. So I had my friend over one day and said I wanted to show him something, but he had to promise he wouldn’t take any action based on what he learned by reading it.

  I’m not sure he would have stuck to his agreement, but he didn’t have to—it turned out he had already let Humberto go for inappropriate behavior with another lady whose house the crew had been working at. Apparently this woman had received his advances less enthusiastically than I had. And she was not the only one. Meanwhile, in addition to the family I had heard about in his home country, there were apparently also some little Humbertos living in Atlanta.

  Oh, well. I guess we already knew I was an idiot.

  The Underwear Model Biologist: When reached by e-mail, he agreed to review his chapter. He was basically flattered at his portrayal but suggested I make a couple small changes to further conceal his identity. The most amusing one was changing the long, inscrutable technical title of his cancer research paper to a different long, inscrutable technical title.

  Uncle Norm: As of season eleven, he still shows up for an occasional American Idol with his take-out Chinese food and his clever little dog, whom we took care of one time when Norm was out of town. He is still dating the yoga teacher he met on Match.com.

  Bmoreguy: Remember, he wasn’t interested in me “carnally.” Sadly, this guy had a second chance to reject me when I relapsed on OkCupid and Plentyoffish about a year after meeting him through Match. He favorited my profile the second I put it up. I couldn’t believe it. But when I wrote and reminded him who I was, it turned out that he hadn’t recognized (or remembered) me. Sorry, my mistake, he wrote. In reply, I told him I was writing about my experiences and that there was a mention of him—would he like to see it? He demurred. He said he wasn’t worried about being “outed,” but would prefer not to be in my book, as he “has always been repulsed by authors who manage to profit by telling stories about others’ personal lives, or by portraying real people in a less-than-positive light, no matter how disguised they may be; the author still knows their real identity, and it seems like thievery somehow. I think we might have even covered this peccadillo of mine when I mentioned that I had disdain for The Wire and for David Simon, for this reason.”

  Let the repulsion and disdain continue.

  Arnie: While a touch concerned about his portrayal in the book, he was most unhappy about the pseudonym Arnie. However, he had no other ideas, and did agree that it was better than using his real name. As former Greenfields campers, Arnie and I have remained friends, and hope to plan another reunion sometime. He called the other day and filled me in on his last few relationships, which turned from potential soul-mate situations to frustrating and confusing disasters. One girl had a brain injury where she couldn’t retain visual memories, so she couldn’t recognize Arnie, say, when he came out of the bathroom, or from one date to the next. It definitely made for trouble. Another one, with whom he was sure he had a very intense connection, called the cops when a bouquet of flowers he had sent to her arrived on her doorstep. He is a romantic
soul, and still very much looking for love. Too bad we didn’t click, but in retrospect, we really didn’t.

  Brett: Still has ridiculous power over me—conceptually, I mean. I haven’t seen him again since the Ravens game with the purple coleslaw, but revising the chapter about the kisses was almost as dangerous as experiencing them. His response to reading it was, “Jesus. What a doucher. This guy is a total loser, great kisser or not. I am sorry. Being the private person I am, if you decide to publish this, I would ask that you change enough things to make me unidentifiable. Not only do I value my relative personal anonymity, but I’d also be embarrassed for anyone who knows me to see what an ass I can be.” So actually, Joe Fiennes is not the movie star he looks most like. Anyway, I need to stop writing this paragraph before I get sucked into the vortex yet again.

  J.J. Johnson: This guy is a prince among men and was very nice about his chapter in the book. He complimented my memory, corrected tiny details of his backstory, and asked if I still had a cute butt.

  The Walrus: Jane and I still go see him in his parade every year, and he is always sweet and welcoming. He said it was a very strange experience to read about himself in my manuscript. He had no corrections and said he was mostly flattered, though he did not think it suitable for family and friends.

  Zach Silverman: I had to take a deep breath before I showed it to him, because I felt particularly stupid about this incident. Like Brett, he was appalled by his own behavior. He was glad I had explained how drunk he was.

  The Pheromone King: We are still in close contact, though every time I talk to him he seems to suggest that he is on his way out of this life very soon. He has been an invaluable source of support and information during this whole hepatitis thing. I hope he gets a liver transplant and outlives us all.