by Matt Burgess
She turns to look at the people directly behind her: a white couple in their thirties. The woman, like Isabel, is pregnant. (The other day Alfredo showed her an article in the Post about the boom in babies, nine months after September 11. I guess Osama sets the mood, she’d said.) But unlike Isabel, the woman is probably not here for her prenatal checkup. They’re here, Isabel assumes, for the man, who’s got a bloody towel pressed to the back of his head. They pay Isabel no attention. It is, she thinks, one of the better things about hospital waiting rooms. Invisible, she hears no hey mama, no teeth sucking, no hiss hiss hiss. Waiting rooms are, for her, the next best thing to movie theaters. This one is even set up like a movie theater: long rows of chairs all face the same direction, and the people in them stare straight ahead at the TVs bolted prison style to the top corners of the wall. The television on the right plays national news (priests going to jail, Enron cronies on trial), while the one on the left shows telenovelas (gemelos malos, pelea entre hermanos). No one talks to anyone else. Thank God. Usually she’d be up in the OB-GYN section of the hospital, but a burst water pipe kicked her down here, to the ER waiting room, where Isabel worried there’d be more men, more maniacs, more ogling catcallers, but so far, so good. Everyone adheres to the subway contract. Keep your eyes glassy. Build up your own protective bubble of thoughts.
Isabel leans forward in her chair. She puts her hands behind her back and folds up an inch of her shirt. The skin is hot. With the bottom of her shirt hiked up, she presses the exposed small of her back to the cool metal of her chair. Jesus Cristo! Santa Maria! She angles herself in the chair to feel as much of the metal as possible. All ball busting aside, Isabel’s feet don’t hurt that bad. She expected her calves and ankles to cankle; she expected her feet to swell up and feel as tender as her boobs. But they’ve been all right. (A hereditary thing, maybe. Her mother the puta always had strong legs and feet, and Isabel should know—she’s absorbed many a kick.) So the feet are fine, no problem at all, but her back? Particularly her lower back? Forget about it. There’s some Boy Scouts and sailors in there, tying up knots. Lately, at the Manhattan video store where she’s worked part-time since she was fifteen years old, Isabel has had nightmare days restocking tapes onto the bottom shelves. She’s started stashing them on the top, hiding The Warriors behind The Bad News Bears, Youngblood behind Anaconda. She’d work at the cash register, but she has to pee every ten minutes. Run to the employees-only toilet, squat over the bowl, squeeze out a pathetic trickle. Then go back to work and bend over so some jerk will be able to find Xanadu when he wants to rent it. Fuck the whales, Isabel thinks. Forget about the manatees and the troops in Afghanistan. Save my back! Put me on one of those wooden boards like Hannibal Lecter and wheel my ass around.
But this metal chair cooling her off? Beautiful. Let other people go see doctors. Hear about Tay-Sachs and Huntington’s chorea. Isabel is fine right here. She’s recently decided to build her happiness out of things just like this: buttered popcorn, the click of a movie projector, Alfredo’s mother leaving the house, putting on underwear straight from the dryer, getting into a bathtub surrounded by candles (Isabel’s never actually done this, but she will, as soon as she and Alfredo get their own apartment), the smell of Magic Markers, riding the subway into Manhattan, the monkeys at the Central Park Zoo, the café at the Museum of Natural History, the increasingly rare delight of taking a good and solid shit, and, just now added to the list, cold metal on hot skin.
Alfredo plops down into the seat next to hers. “We’re next,” he says. He wiggles the eyebrows. “I’ve been schmoozing the nurses. Bribing them with Starbursts.” He slips a pink one into her hand. “I told them, ‘Listen. We’ve been here an hour and a half. I work for Channel Seven news, and I’m gonna come in here with a camera crew, expose everyone in this dump of a hospital.’ They didn’t buy it. I get Starbursts from the vending machine. I tell the nurses, ‘Listen. What can you do for us? Here’s some candy.’ I said, ‘But not the pink ones. The pink ones are for mi amor.’ ” He slips another one into her hand. “ ‘They’re her favorites.’ ”
“Are you crazy?” Isabel says. “You think just because you give the nurses some”—In the movie version of her life, it would be at this exact moment that a nurse would lean into a microphone and call out Isabel’s name. “Ms. Guerrero. The doctors can see you now.” Cut to Alfredo grinning. Cut to Isabel with her mouth open. But for maybe the first time ever, she is glad this isn’t the movie version of her life. A nurse doesn’t call out her name. Isabel gets to finish her sentence and stay in the waiting room—“candy, that we’re gonna be next in line or something?”
For another hour she and Alfredo wait in their chairs. Alfredo gets up once to buy more Starbursts. He brings the whole package back to Isabel this time, not only the pinks, but also the reds, yellows, and oranges. He slides the candy into her palm one by one, as if he were bribing a maître d’.
“What do you think he’s gonna say?” Alfredo asks. “When he sees you?”
She doesn’t know if he means Tariq or the doctor. She takes his hands. They’re smooth and uncalloused. With his fingernails bitten down to the quick, raw and sensitive skin is exposed. She kisses a knuckle. More items for the list! Put it down between Magic Markers and candlelit baths: the pleasures of unwrapping a Starburst, the softness of her boyfriend’s hands.
When she was fourteen years old Isabel got her arm broken, and she sat in this waiting room for over three hours. She was more than eager to see a doctor that time. Prior to that she’d been to this hospital only once, to escape from her mother’s womb, and after her arm broke, she didn’t come back until she was pregnant herself and had to pee in a cup and apply for Medicaid and schedule prenatal appointments like the one today. Just once! Her arm got broke, and her mother called a cab and took her to the hospital. Her only visit between ages zero and nineteen. But did she have more than that one opportunity to come to the hospital? Could she have benefited from consistent medical attention? Would it have been helpful to talk to a staff psychologist, or a sympathetic social worker? Oh boy!
She was twelve years old when she lost her virginity. She was pulling back the shower curtain—the one with the map of the world—and she already had one foot out of the tub, when her mother’s boyfriend came into the bathroom. His name was Raul Diaz. With his hand covering his mouth, so that his words came out muffled, he told Isabel she was beautiful. He stepped into the bathtub with her. The room smelled like soap. Water dripped off her body. His belt buckle clattered against the wall of the tub. Afterward, when she saw the blood on the tiles, she wondered if this was her first period, and if the rest of her menstruating would always be this bloody and painful. Raul wouldn’t look at her. He whispered, Lo siento. Lo siento. He helped her clean up the blood. They used paper towels.
Raul was a Cubano. He wore a gold watch too big for his wrist. In the mornings he read El Diario with his feet up on the kitchen table, but he never looked comfortable doing it, probably because his legs were too short. He started coming into her bedroom at night. Isabel? You awake?
One afternoon, with Raul out of the house, Isabel’s mother whipped her with a surge protector. She called Isabel a whore. She held the outlet end of the surge protector, with its empty, unsmiling faces, and she hit Isabel with the cord, attacking from close range. Snake-like welts rose to the surface of her back. They were bulbous-headed, with slithering, three-pronged tongues.
Like a cartographer she drew borders in her bed. A third of the mattress, the part right next to the wall, was hers. This was her safe zone. When Raul snuck into her room, she moved over into the other two-thirds. When Raul left, she moved back. Columbus returning to the New World! She’d press her body against the wall and go back to sleep.
Urinary tract infection: the diagnosis at thirteen. The school nurse told her she was going to have to start peeing right after sex. Isabel imagined this, getting up when Raul got up, following him out of the bedroom. Later that day, the nurse
called Isabel back into her office and gave her a bottle of cranberry juice she’d picked up on her lunch break. Cranberry juice is good for UTIs, she explained. She told Isabel she was also going to have to get herself some antibiotics. And don’t let any of these boys peer-pressure you into being sexually active, she said. She waited for Isabel to nod, and so Isabel nodded. Is everything okay at home? the nurse asked. Isabel scratched the side of her nose. Everything’s fine, she said. Thank you very much for the cranberry juice.
Sometimes, when Raul climbed on top of her, she pretended to be asleep. She became an expert at pretending to be asleep. Sometimes, when Raul climbed on top of her, she got out of bed and watched from across the room. Or she’d watch from the ceiling, see things from up high the way people can do right after they’ve been struck by lightning. She’d watch that man, Raul, rape that girl, Isabel. She’d see his hand jammed into the pillow, next to that poor girl’s face. Sometimes, however, Isabel couldn’t make the leap out of her body. Sometimes, for whatever reason, she’d be stuck in that bed, listening to the tick-tock of his enormous gold watch. He always smelled and tasted like mouthwash.
When she was fourteen years old, Raul moved out. Isabel’s mother slammed a door on her arm. Then she called a cab, took her to the hospital.
Frankie, her mother’s new boyfriend, moved in. He moved out. New guys moved in, moved out, moved in. Isabel slept in her safe zone and waited for these men to tiptoe into her bedroom, but they never did. Not one of these men raped her. But unfortunately no one from the future ever traveled back in time to tell her that, and so she was always afraid. If Frankie didn’t grab her in the kitchen today, he’d get her tomorrow. If one boyfriend moved out without touching her, the next boyfriend would. She could take quicker showers and get dressed in the bathroom and wear two pairs of pants to bed and not clean her privates and try to avoid the apartment on lazy weekend days, but in the end—Raul taught her this—if they wanted to get her, they would. While she waited for it to happen, she took a serrated knife and cut up her arms.
While her mother was between boyfriends, she and Isabel ate tons of spaghetti with butter and parmesan cheese. They played a game where they’d pretend it was pesto gnocchi, baked ziti, fettuccine Alfredo. Her mother would ask what she wanted for dinner, and Isabel would say, Linguine with clam sauce. And her mother would say, Excellent! Just what I planned on making! Sometimes, on her way home, Isabel stopped to look at the menus of Italian restaurants, so that she could bring new, more exotic pasta names into the apartment. Penne puttanesca, rigatoni carbonara. Her mother would ask her to explain what they were. Carbonara: pancetta, scallions, black pepper, and egg. Coming right up, she’d say. And then she’d serve Isabel a steaming bowl of spaghetti with butter and parmesan cheese. Bravo, Mama! Perfecto!
A new boyfriend moved in. Isabel waited. She cut her legs. Blood wriggled into her socks.
Daring escape! At fifteen years old Isabel got a part-time job after school at a video store in Manhattan. She showed up early, left late, covered other people’s shifts. The manager praised her work ethic. Isabel went to school less often. In her free time, with the money she made at work, she hit up the movie theaters. Always alone, always in the back row, where no one could see her. She’d unzip her purse, take out a can of soda, and cough loudly as she popped open the tab. In the movie version of her life she didn’t work at a video store and she didn’t see so many movies, unless the movie version of her life was Clerks or Cinema Paradiso or The Purple Rose of Cairo.
One day at the store she put on Casablanca. It was her first time seeing it. At the end of the movie, when Rick and that lady are hugging at the airport, Isabel stood behind the counter, ringing up a customer, staring at the TV screen, and she actually said out loud, What are you doing, girl? Get on that fucking plane.
———
“That’s us!” Alfredo says. They’re calling Isabel’s name, and Alfredo hurries toward the nurses’ station, moving through people as if this were a deli and he’s got a ticketed number in his fist, his right to roast beef. “That’s us,” he says again. “Excuse me. Perdón, señora. We’re coming! Hold on!”
Up at the front desk, he turns and waves Isabel over. She is not moving fast enough apparently, and so his waving intensifies. She is an airplane, and he is the man on the runway with the orange wands, his hands chopping through the air. Alfredo says something to the nurse. He holds up one finger. He takes a few cautious steps away from the desk before spinning around and dashing over to Isabel.
“You okay?” he says.
An old white man sits in a chair, his hands folded over his cane. Isabel accidentally clips him, bangs his ear with her hip. She steps on a woman’s foot. The floor tilts away from her. The bottoms of her shoes have been replaced by ball bearings. She has the sensation of going down stairs and expecting there to be one more step than there actually is. Again and again, Isabel steps through that phantom step and has to catch herself. She leans against the backrest of an empty chair.
“What’s the matter?” Alfredo says.
A blue-scrubbed nurse pushes an empty wheelchair toward Isabel. Miraculously, in a city-run hospital of God knows how many employees, the nurse is the same one who met with Isabel and Alfredo on their first visit. She helped them fill out the forms, enroll in PCAP and Medicaid. She counseled Isabel on HIV protection and the benefits of a nutritionally balanced prenatal diet. The nurse has, as she did then, a long braid of black hair snaked over her shoulder. It has been six months since Isabel has seen this woman, and her reappearance now feels ominous. As if the hospital already knows about the diseases baby Christian’s been whispering in her ear. As if the hospital can tell just by seeing her bang into chairs that there is something wrong wrong wrong. So they send the O.N.—the Original Nurse—and tell her to bring a wheelchair. The nurse tilts her head toward the chair. Her thin lips smile.
“I can walk,” Isabel says.
“Yeah, but why? If you don’t have to?”
“This is a nice ride,” Alfredo says, running his hand over the armrest. He expertly depresses the wheel brakes and flips open the metal footrests. Holding Isabel’s arm, he eases her into the chair. “Let me at those handlebars,” he tells the nurse.
Two large doors wheeze open, and Isabel is pushed into a new area of the hospital where the lights are brighter and the sounds noisier. Sneakers squeak as nurses and doctors hustle from the ruptured appendix in 104 to the stabbing victim down the hall. The smell of the place—rotting skin and pink antibacterial soap—lingers like a punch in the neck. Worst of all: while Isabel is wheeled around corners and down corridors, through this Elmhurst bazaar, the nurse straggles behind, walking in step with Alfredo. This is not an ideal position for Isabel, who always sits in the back of movie theaters and sleeps pressed against the wall and insists on taking whatever seat faces the door in restaurants. When people loom unseen over her shoulder, when voices float behind her head, Isabel’s scalp tingles and her arms tighten. The nurse offers Alfredo directions: go there, make a left here. Maybe she tilts her chin. Maybe she points. Maybe, when a turn approaches, she touches the small of Alfredo’s back.
“I’m coming from a job interview,” he says. He isn’t talking to Isabel. “I think it went okay. The interview. I felt like I asked some good questions. I was on point, I think. Thing is, I’m hoping to make some professional breakthroughs. But who knows, right?”
He must remember the nurse from that first PCAP visit—which doesn’t surprise Isabel; he misses little—and he is trying, for reasons Isabel only vaguely understands, to atone for something. Six months ago on the Q32 bus coming back from the hospital, Alfredo complained about having to pretend he was unemployed. He had looked down at the clipboard in the nurse’s hand and said he was temporarily between jobs. Spitting the words out like they were curdled milk. As if he expected the Medicaid enrollment form to have an employment status box marked “Drug Dealer.” “Do you know how hard I work?” he asked Isabel. “How I�
��m out there every day? Busting my ass like a dog?” He went on. He complained about how sick he felt, how miserable, how low that hospital experience had dragged him. Until Isabel, in an attempt to put things in perspective, said, “Your hospital experience? I had a hand shoved up my vagina.” On the bus a surprisingly high number of people (three) turned around to look at them. For the rest of the trip home Alfredo said nothing. He stared out the window, watching as Elmhurst gave way to Jackson Heights.
“I forget,” Isabel says. “What kind of job were you interviewing for?”
“Sales,” he says. “Cell phones and pagers. That kind of thing.”
Isabel smiles, not knowing where he gets this shit from. If he anticipates the questions and plans what to say ahead of time, or if he just digs right in and pulls it straight out of his ass.
“Well, I think you’ll probably get that job,” the nurse says. “You seem very personable.” The chair stops in front of an empty examination room. Despite being small and windowless, a considerable draft blows out of the room, prickling Isabel’s legs. The nurse comes around to the front of the chair and bends forward at the waist. “You think maybe you’ll be able to stand up now?”
“I never needed to sit down.”
The nurse smiles in Alfredo’s direction. Isabel has one ally in this world—when Christian Louis is born, she’ll have two—but until then, it is Alfredo, and Alfredo only. Do not, you blue-scrubbed bitch, try to turn him against me. In the movie version of Isabel’s life, she steps to this nurse and scratches her face.
Isabel walks into the examination room. She is greeted by a sink, a blood pressure cuff, a computer monitor, and a box of rubber gloves with five rubber fingers sticking out of the top as if waving hello. The metal scale, the metal cabinets, and the metal footstool all seem to have been waiting for her. The only grouchy holdout is the examination table, with its unwelcoming strip of white paper. And the nurse, of course. She sticks a small cup in Isabel’s hands and asks her to leave.