Such a Pretty Face

by Ann Angel

  “No, I think it’s riding too close to the guardrail that got you in this situation.”

  I hate that she is funny. I especially hate that she is funnier than me.

  “Are you a redhead?” I say. “God, I would just hate it if you were a redhead. That’s the only thing, if you were a redhead. We can get along fine no matter what other problems you have.”

  My nickname my entire school life was Red Rover. Or, if they had a little extra time, Red Rover, Red Rover. Or, if things were especially slow, Red Rover, Red Rover, Send Ass-Face Right Over. And so on. But I’m not in school anymore. I just graduated.

  “Because. You see, my mother was a redhead. I could kill her. No, she is alive. I could kill her, though. Red. She’s red. And I will never forgive her for that. And even now, when it’s fading and her hair is turning an almost-hair-color-normal-for-humans, what do you suppose she does? She gets some stuff and she starts dyeing it back. After she’s recovered. After she’s been cured, she starts giving herself the disease again. I mean, could you kill her? I could kill her. I love her, but I could kill her. You’re not a redhead, are you, Nursey-Nurse?”

  “I am not Nursey-Nurse, thank you.” You had to hear the perfect note on the second nurse. Banged it like a gong. Hilarious. Very good, very funny, like a pro. I hate it. “You can call me Nurse Knightly, like I told you before.”

  Nurse Knightly is doing stuff behind me, what stuff I have no idea. That is how it is every time because Nurse Knightly only ever shows up in the middle of the night and only after I have been spun over onto my face. We have met several times, but we’ve never actually seen each other. Nurse Knightly is a presence; a pair of busy, efficient, strong-gentle hands; and a voice. A deep, rich, sure voice. Deeper than mine, higher than my mother’s. That is all I know of my midnight nurse, and I keep it this way by keeping my face pressed firmly toward the floor. I could see with mirrors. They said I can have mirrors if I want. I don’t want.

  “Nurse Knightly,” I say in a very nice, obedient, schoolboy voice, “are you a guy or a gal?”

  There’s a snort, a bull snort that shoots in my direction. I may even hear a hoof pawing the floor.

  “I am not a gal.”

  “Hah! I knew I—”

  “I am not a gal, because nobody is a gal in this universe, in this century, you sad little cowboy.”

  I laugh, but mostly on the inside. Laughing on the outside hurts my spine so much that I have to distribute my laughter evenly in a smooth howl-growl dial-tone noise that really cracks up Nurse Knightly, which then gets me going and I wind up killing myself with the hard, choppy guffaws I was trying to avoid in the first place.

  “Shall I rephrase the question, then?” I ask chirpily. This is not the first phrasing of this question between us, actually. And they have all been just this fun for me.

  “You can rephrase it into Serbo-Croatian if you like, but you’ll get the same nothing out of me.”

  I love Nurse Knightly.

  “I love you, Nurse Knightly.” Damn-god-damn I cannot believe I let that out. Fortunately, Nurse Knightly knows me intimately and reorders things.

  “Hmm, you may love me, but I suspect you love morphine just a little bit more.”

  “It is so hot.” I moan almost involuntarily because it hits me now just how stifling they keep a hospital room that should be making the likes of me a little more comfortable.

  “I know,” says Nurse Knightly calmly.

  They wake me up every couple of hours no matter what, to make sure I keep. Healthy. No skin sores and all that, keep my blood moving around my body and all. And keep that stupid spine and all its horrible little splinters locked in place until genius surgeon, who is also very tall and not redheaded and probably has his own airplane, can get in there and stick in the steel rods that will make me more rigid than the wet stick of gum that I am now. I know all the why of why they have to do it. But hell. Hell. I’d have rather just stayed asleep, if anybody asked me. I’d have taken the sores, and the risks, actually, if anybody asked me.

  But nobody asked me.

  Except.

  “What can I do for you to make you feel better?” is what I hear, every night, at about zero in the morning, when I am lying facedown, in the Stryker bed, in some discomfort, and when I can see not one sign of life.

  At first I could not believe this was legitimate. I thought it had to be a gag. A rotten gag.

  “What can you do for me? Are you joking?”

  “No. I’m not joking, actually. Are you feeling all right? That is my purpose, after all, to help you feel better. Call it job satisfaction, I guess. But it does matter to me whether or not you feel better. If you don’t, I’ll go home and feel terrible for the rest of the night. I mean that. That’s the way I am.”

  “Get out of town, because that is not the way you are. That’s not the way anybody is. Nobody is that good. Sorry.”

  “No, don’t be sorry. You’re right, nobody is that good. But for now, would you like me to give you a little alcohol rub, which will help you feel cooler and a lot more comfortable?”

  It is more than fair to say that I’ve had very little experience with fielding an offer like that. But even instincts as miserable as mine say not to go all quivery with excitement.

  “Um, sure, I guess you could do that.”

  “Great. It’s a date.”

  A date. Yikes, a date.

  “Yikes, a date.”

  Nurse Knightly laughs—a barrelly, rugged, kneeslapper laugh.

  “You are so funny. I didn’t think anybody really said ‘yikes.’ But there you go.”

  “There I go. But I didn’t mean to go there. I wasn’t supposed to say the ‘yikes, a date’ thing for you to hear it. Wasn’t even entirely sure I did, until right there when you told me and laughed at me.”

  “Oh gee, I didn’t laugh at you, like that. I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t be sorry. In fact, if you’ll laugh just that way once more, I’ll say it all over again.”

  I don’t even have to say it over again.

  “That’s a great laugh, you know. Makes a guy want to be funny just to hear it.”

  “Well, there you go. Everybody wins.”

  I certainly do. Nurse Knightly proceeds to politely undo the back of my humiliating hospital-boy outfit, then spritzes the finest mist of alcohol across my shoulder blades, carefully out to my sides, moving down but staying safely away from the spine. Then, the spine.

  I could holler with joy, if I could even talk. I could not have guessed this feeling of relief, of coolness, yes, but more of total tingly bliss, as the alcohol touches me all over my back, all over where nothing and nobody has been able to touch me since a June Saturday night or Sunday. Then, with careful fingers, applied just barely heavier than the alcohol mist, Nurse Knightly rubs and feather-strokes my sides, my shoulder blades, my neck, and I don’t know if it is the alcohol or the application of it, but I swear I can feel it seeping under the skin, into my body, cooling my surface and setting fire to my insides.

  I close my eyes. I squeeze them extra-tight because inexplicably, like an imbecile, I am about to cry again. If I do, I swear I will slap myself. There is no pain here, so there is no excuse here. I can cry in another hour, when they flip me over, but not now. I’m going to blow the whole thing, and Nurse Knightly will stop rubbing me and then never show up in my room again, I just know it.

  “How is that, then? Is that all right? You feeling any better?”

  I am not sure if a sound comes out of me. I can only hope it was yes-like.

  So I haven’t blown it anyway. In fact, it gets better. Nurse Knightly leans over a bit closer. I can feel features there, can almost feel nose and lips against my back, at the most dangerous, do-not-touch, shattered area of my middle spine. And then, just then, just so, Nurse Knightly’s breath goes where the fingers cannot, a swinging, slow, side-to-side, then up-and-down motion, as if a team of little wings are aligned for the sole purpose of making me fe
el better.

  And that is just what they do, and just what I feel. Better. Better than before. Better than you. Better than anyone anywhere at this moment. My back may have even healed, I feel so much better. So much better, I suddenly panic, afraid that I am going to embarrass myself. I feel myself breathing faster, in those safe, shallow breaths they taught me so I wouldn’t get any more hurt.

  Nurse Knightly is perfect.

  We have a silence now that I am too aware of. We don’t have silences much once we get going, me and Nurse Knightly, and I don’t like them when we do. They are big, fat blobs in the middle of our fine, clean space, and I don’t like them at all. My back rub has ended, and I need to say something about it. I have to, I should, I want to. I want to say it all, and I will never be able to say enough.

  But sometimes I think, and nothing comes out. I realize it’s more the morphine, but it’s a terror anyway, like I’m in a trap in my own head.

  God, how I do wish that silence would shut up now. It is a fright to me.

  Nurse Knightly must have hit a glitch too, because this should have stopped already. And when finally it does, it’s as if the conversation has skipped backward.

  “ ‘Yikes, a date,’ you say?”

  I am politely rebuttoned. My nurse is up and about the room again doing stuff. Rubbing alcohol is now my favorite scent.

  “Argh,” I say.

  The laugh. Throaty. Meaty. “You also say ‘argh’? Where did you go to school, Marvel Comics?”

  “Listen, pretend I didn’t say ‘yikes, a date.’ It was the morphine talking.”

  “OK, I’ll try and pretend. But don’t get your hopes up.”

  Again the blob of silence descends, and again I hate it. But this time the morphine does its other trick, ending the silence. Go, Morph.

  “Yikes, it was the morphine talking. Want to hear it talk again?”

  God, no. I can almost actually hear this inside, the good region of my mind cringing and begging the other part to stop.

  “OK, here goes.” It’s not listening to anyone now. “I want you to know that that back rub was the finest thing that ever happened to me. The best moment of my life.”

  I think I registered with that one.

  “Whoa!”

  “And hear that? Now I know who it is. Lucille Ball. There was a show, back in the Stone Age, probably the first television show, I Love Lucy. And my mother used to force everybody to watch it whenever it was on. You would have to sit there right in front of the TV like a zombie, like a cult brainwashing indoctrination. My mother always loved her. Lucy was a mad redhead, you see. Even though she was in black and white, she wasn’t fooling anybody. We could tell.”

  I believe I have Nurse Knightly pretty well spellbound by now.

  “I am familiar with Lucy. Is there a reason why we’re talking about her?”

  “Oh. Sorry, it’s the voice. That’s who your voice sounds like. She had a deep, unusual voice. And especially later, when she had another show—in color, unfortunately—and she was older and had smoked millions more cigarettes that made it even deeper . . . that, right there, is the voice.”

  There is a bit of a pause where I find myself weirdly sort of congratulating myself for something here. I don’t know what I thought this Lucy connection would mean. People can be funny sometimes, about being compared.

  “Thanks,” Nurse Knightly says in exactly that voice. Amazing, really.

  “My mother would love you,” I say. “She would really love you, my mother.”

  That one just stays there in the air, uncollected, as I hear Nurse Knightly clanking things and clicking things and doing the nurse job just for me. I think I need to say thank you for that, and it is on my lips when I hear my nurse swoosh out the door.

  To go and do it for somebody else, I suppose. I suppose that’s only fair. I suppose that is the way it has to work, and that I knew that.

  When my nurse returns some time later—minutes probably, but it passed like a whole lonely summer—I am twitching with more pain and discomfort than if it was my morphine running late.

  “I haven’t had very many dates,” I say.

  “ ’Scuse? Were you talking all the time I was out of the room and now I’m off the pace?”

  “No, it’s me. The ‘yikes’ thing. ‘Yikes, a date,’ remember? I thought I would, sort of, explain that now. I have had very few dates.”

  “I find that strange and nearly impossible to believe.”

  “No, you don’t, but thank you. The front of my head is even more a mess than the back. The front has got details.”

  “I won’t listen anymore if it’s going to go like this.”

  “And of those pathetic few dates, almost all of them were with this girl named Cherry, who was right up my alley because she had a face like a shoe and was homeschooled her entire life all the way until she was sixteen and her parents split up spectacularly and there was no home to be schooled in anymore. So Cherry was plopped like a six-foot-tall infant into the middle of our junior year of high school with absolutely nothing for social skills and, as I said, a face like a shoe.

  “And, get ready now, even with all that going for her, the first seven times I asked her out she said no!”

  “Ah, but you stuck with it, and the important thing is you won her over in the end. Lucky number eight.”

  “Lucky nothing, she thought I was somebody else. I eventually wrote her a note, signed it from the second ugliest guy in the school, and she jumped at it like a marlin. I asked her to meet me at this Chinese restaurant near the school, not the greatest Chinese restaurant but just within my budget and quality requirements, because I was going to do it right and pay for everything and encourage her to get more than she wanted and dessert and everything. And thanks only to her E.T.-level of social experience did she not think this was a setup. Cherry actually came to the restaurant expecting a romantic date rather than, say, a bunch of seniors jumping out from behind the hundred-gallon fish tank to pelt her with wontons until she cried and capturing it all on film. I would have expected something like that. I think most normal people who knew some things and had met the world before would have expected something was up. Not Cherry. Only Cherry. Very Cherry.

  “But what she got was me. She may not have considered that a brilliant consolation, but we did get together. She saw me there, looked around hopefully for a better explanation, then figured it out after a few minutes. Then she sighed in a very tired way and spoke those romantic words which will live in my heart forever: ‘I suppose.’

  “I was kind of scared and depressed from that very first minute we got together, and she looked like she felt exactly the same. She looked tired when I felt tired. She looked suicidal when I felt suicidal. It was less like two people and more like one monkey not understanding his reflection in a mirror. Eventually I realized that I had put all this effort into dating . . . myself. And I had hoped to do better than that. We were different enough, but really, we were the same. You could rearrange our features and trade them around like Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, but still, in there, we would see each other. It made me angry when I would see myself in there. Angrier every time.

  “And I felt sorry. For her. ’Cause you know what? I really liked her. And you know what? In those moments when I could stop seeing me where she was supposed to be? Cherry was really pretty. Even though her face was shaped just a little like the sole of a shoe, it didn’t spoil it. It suited her.

  “Until I saw me there again, and not her.

  “By the time we did actually manage to have sex, which we managed exactly two times, it was more like a dare than anything else. A challenge, a joust. A punishment. We probably didn’t do it any worse than most people do the first times. But it was worse, because we were there. And we would not let each other forget that.

  “Want to hear it some more, Nurse Knightly? Ready to hear more from Morph?”

  She blobs me with more silence. She knows what she is doing, but it will not wor
k.

  “Here it is, then. You know how I got through sex with Cherry? Both times? I fantasized of course. What did I fantasize about? I fantasized about masturbating. What do you think, Nurse? As a professional human bodyist, do you think I might have the arrangement a little backwards?”

  “I am not an expert in the field, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, I am, now. I found it very relaxing. Because then I stopped feeling like I had to apologize to anybody else. Worked like a charm.”

  “Are you trying to scare me away now? Do I really sound easy to scare to you? You could just ask me to go, if you wanted me to go.”

  “And now, when I masturbate, want to know what I fantasize about? Go ahead, guess.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “When I masturbate, I fantasize about—ta-da—masturbating. The circle is finally unbroken. Neat little system, huh? Perfection.”

  “My shift is ending.”

  I know when shifts are ending, because I have gotten good at that, a sense of things, of time, of coming and going, that I didn’t used to have. I am thinking about possibly asking Nurse Knightly to hold on just a few minutes for my next rotation so I can finally get a look as he or she leaves and doesn’t ever come back. It is up to me, I know. I don’t know.

  I really did love my airport trip. I loved it a lot, and thought about it all week until the day. Now I can’t even go. And I would be dressed nice, too, in very nice clothes like there was always something special on. Everybody in the airport is so beautiful. Everyone. Isn’t that amazing?

  Well, that time I went, one Saturday night in June, I had no idea I would see Cherry and her mother and father.

  No idea I would ever see them together again anywhere, never mind at the airport. Which is why the sure and bitter taste of unrightness came up on me so fast, right when I saw them. You know when you just know? Especially when you so wish you didn’t?

  Can I say that of a whole airport full of pretty people, Cherry was the prettiest thing? Can I tell you she looked more lovely than the entire place? Lovelier than ten terminals put together. They all did, the reunited family—looked sparkling, as they stood in line getting ready to fly into some fresh, spotless new everything.