I knew there were, but I didn’t want to hear about them.
Dr. Beverly took me right in when we got there, and it was a good thing, because I threw up in his wastebasket.
“Oh!” he said, and rang for the nurse, who wiped my face and left with the wastebasket. Then I promptly threw up on the floor.
I figured the nurse would come in this time with a mop. She did, but she also gave me a basin to hold on my lap, and just staring down into it, knowing what it was for, made me upchuck again.
Dr. Beverly wanted to know which came first, the pain or the nausea. The fever or the tenderness in the abdomen. This time when I was being examined, I shrank away when he got even close to the place where it hurt. He took my temperature again, and this time it had gone up half a degree.
“Appendicitis,” he told Dad. He made a few calls, then told Dad to take me over to Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, that the surgeon on call said he could take me within the hour.
By now the pain was relentless, and I didn’t think about the operation much, I just wanted the pain to stop. Dad got me admitted to Suburban and waited outside my room while the attendant helped me get my clothes off and put on a hideous white cotton robe that tied in the back. Then she rolled me over onto a stretcher. Dad sat with me while I waited to go to the operating room. He held my hand and patted my shoulder till they wheeled me in.
I hated the strangeness of the operating room. The big metal mirror and the instruments and lights. The surgeon came in and had to poke me again just to make sure I’d yell, I guess. I started crying.
“What if I d-don’t wake up?” I mewed.
Dr. Salinas smiled. “Well, I’ve only done about a hundred and sixty of these, and I’ve never failed to have one wake up yet,” he said. He bent over me.
“Wait!” I gasped. “What if I wake up too soon while you’re still operating?”
“Won’t happen,” he said. “I guarantee it.”
A nurse moved in. “Wait!” I cried. “What if … what if you leave something in me before you sew me up?” I thought of all the cartoons I’d seen of doctors leaving sponges and things in patients. “What if you leave a pair of scissors?”
“That won’t happen, either,” he said, his eyes smiling above his mask. “We need every pair of scissors we can get.”
Why hadn’t they put my robe on with the opening in front? I wondered. Now they would have to roll me over and untie the robe and roll me back again.
“Wait!” I cried as the nurse put something in my arm. I wanted to explain about the fading tattoo on my bottom but then I felt myself beginning to sink deliciously into sleep, the noises around me grew fainter, and I felt my arms relax.
I couldn’t tell how long I had been out. My first thought was that I must have fainted again, and as my eyelids fluttered, I saw that I was in a bed with metal sides.
“Al?” came Dad’s voice. “You’re doing fine, honey.”
I think I drifted off again. Then Lester’s voice: “We could always fill a bedpan and dump it on her.”
I opened my eyes and saw him standing over me.
“Don’t … you … dare,” I managed to say.
He grinned. “She’s awake.”
“How do you feel, sweetheart?” asked Dad, and I realized he was standing on the other side of me.
I felt my tummy. There was a bandage. “Is it over?” I asked, surprised.
“All done. You came through with flying colors.”
The nurse walked in. “Well, look who’s awake,” she said, and adjusted something in my arm, then cranked the head of my bed up a little.
I realized I was feeling quite good, actually. Sort of foggy and fuzzy. My belly was sore, but the throbbing pain was gone.
When the nurse had checked on me and taken Dad out in the hall to direct him to a rest room, Lester handed me something wrapped in tinfoil and tied with string. “A little present,” he said.
I slowly untied the ribbon. Everything about me seemed to function in slow motion. My fingers felt all thumbs. Inside the foil wrap was a small jar, and inside the jar … I couldn’t figure out what it was.
“Appendix,” said Lester. “The surgeon thought you’d want to keep it.”
“Oh, gross!” I said, looking at it curiously. About the size of a pinkie, it was thin and white and shriveled, sort of lumpy at one end. “What am I supposed to do with this, Les?”
He shrugged. “Wear it on a chain around your neck, give it to an admirer, feed it to a pet … I don’t know.”
I went home the next day. Dad took off work to take care of me until he was sure I could manage on my own. I was still a little wobbly, and had to keep the bandage dry, but by the day after that I was perfectly able to be by myself, and the doctor said I could go back to school the following Monday, but couldn’t take gym for a while. Dad sort of let me take over the living room and gave me all kinds of little projects to do to keep me occupied and to help us get ready for Sylvia—a box of unmatched socks to sort through; the same with a box of shoelaces; pictures to put in albums; clothes to be mended …
Pamela and Elizabeth came to see me, of course; Karen dropped by with Gwen, and a lot of people called.
“Oh, my gosh, was it awful?” Pamela asked. “Alice, you’re the first one of us who ever had an operation.”
“You don’t feel a thing,” I told her.
“Do you have to be completely naked?” Elizabeth wondered.
“I have no idea. I was unconscious, you know.”
“If I ever have an operation, I’ll have a local anesthetic,” Elizabeth declared. “I want to know absolutely everything that’s going on.
It was when I was checking my E-mail later that I found a note from Eric.
Hey, what happened? Someone said you
were sick.
CAY
I E-mailed back:
Just a little appendicitis, is all. I’ll be
back in school on Monday.
It was time, I decided, that Eric meet the rest of my friends. So when I got a second message from him, Can I come over? Sunday afternoon, maybe? I E-mailed back, Sure, and invited Pamela and Elizabeth and Mark and Brian and whoever else wanted to come, too. I said we’d have a nachos party, and I put on my soulful, sick-little-girl look for Lester. It actually worked. He went out and brought home a large order of nachos and some sodas, which was a good thing because Karen and Jill and Justin showed up, too, and later, Patrick. I was wearing my best sweats and just socks on my feet, and felt perfectly comfortable.
Eric was surprised to find a room full of people when he came to the door, but I grasped his arm and pulled him inside. “Eric, you probably know most of these people,” I said. “Eric Fielding, everybody.”
Patrick had been telling a story of something that had happened on the last band trip out of town, and we were all listening to that, so it gave Eric a chance to settle down in a corner with a plate of nachos, and he’s most relaxed when he’s not the center of attention.
“So three guys sneaked out to bring back some beer, and the rest of us locked the door on them,” Patrick said.
“Where were you, a motel?” asked Mark.
“No, a dorm, in Towson. They’d really been a pain, spouting off the whole trip about how, when we got to Towson, they were going to do this and they were going to do that, but we had a big competition coming up the next morning. So after they left we locked our room door, and evidently the custodian locked the front door, too. When they got back with four six-packs, they couldn’t get in, and they didn’t know what room we were in, what window was ours.”
We all started to laugh.
Patrick was laughing, too. “So they decided to hide the beer first, then figure out how to wake us up, then come back and get the booze. They made two mistakes: They threw gravel at a window and it happened to be the band director’s, and later, when they went down to get the beer, after he’d let them in, the unlocked car they’d put it in had driven away.”
We hooted.
“Eric, are you in the band?” asked Mark.
Everyone turned to Eric.
“N-N-No,” Eric said, his face coloring a little.
Brian grinned. “I take it that’s a n-n-no?”
All faces turned from Eric to Brian. I couldn’t believe he’d said something so insensitive.
“Brian!” Elizabeth murmured disapprovingly.
But Eric, strangely, smiled, too. “Y-Y-Yes,” he said, smiling, and this time it seemed he was stuttering on purpose. “That was a n-n-no.”
We all laughed then, and I thought how well he’d handled it.
“Eric’s on the track team with me,” Patrick explained.
“We t-teamed up in the rrr-relays,” said Eric.
“Came in second, too!” said Patrick.
The gang stayed for a couple of hours. Of course, we had to pass around the jar with my appendix in it.
“Oh, get it out of here!” said Karen.
“It looks like a finger,” said Jill.
“A uvula,” said Gwen.
“A what?”
“That little thing that hangs down the back of your throat between your tonsils,” she said.
Mark studied the jar. “Looks more like a part of the private anatomy of a male monkey,” he said, and we all laughed. I had to be careful of my stitches when I laughed.
Patrick, however, held the jar in his hands, turning it this way and that, and finally he said, “You know what this is, Alice? A piece of white asparagus.”
“What?” I said.
He unscrewed the lid and sniffed. “Preserved in vinegar,” he told us.
“What?” I shrieked again. Then, “Lester!” as I caught sight of him out in the hall.
He poked his head in the doorway. “You called?”
“That’s not my appendix, it’s asparagus,” I said.
“Is that a fact?” He grinned. “Well, you can’t blame me for trying. I was in the Safeway and wondered what I could pick up for you. Balloons and flowers cost too much, but the produce man let me have a stalk of white asparagus for nothing, slightly wilted at the ends. But with a little imagination you can see it’s a decaying remnant of the large intestine, a little gangrenous there in the middle with… . Say. Anyone got an appetite for more nachos?”
When everyone left about four, Eric stayed a while longer. He looked around at all my half-finished projects for Dad and picked up the box of assorted shoelaces. “Starting a c-cottage industry?” he joked.
“Dad’s put me to work cleaning out drawers and stuff, getting ready for his wedding this summer,” I said, and told him the story of Miss Summers and how they’d met at the Messiah Sing-along.
All the while I was talking, I noticed that Eric was playing around with the shoelaces, and then I realized he wasn’t exactly playing, he was idly tying intricate knots. “What are you, a sailor?” I asked, and he grinned.
“N-Not exactly. I was a SSSS-Scout once, and had to learn a zillion knots,” he said.
I went over and sat beside him, and he showed me how to tie a figure eight, a fisherman’s knot, a stopper knot …
“Congratulations,” he said. “Remind me to send you my camping badge when I get home.”
The phone rang. It was Pamela.
“I’ll call you later,” I said. “Eric’s here.”
“He’s still there? Oh, definitely! Call me back!” she said.
Eric and I talked about movies and favorite vacations and sharks and what food we would miss most if we were stranded on a desert island. Eric said what he would really miss was his CD player, and then we talked about our favorite songs and I told him how much I liked the music from Fiddler on the Roof.
“I liked those articles you wrote for The Edge,” he said. “Especially the one about how you felt watching the others s-sing, and you can’t carry a t-tune.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It always looks so easy for them. How do they know they’re singing the right notes? I’ve always wondered, and Dad says they can just hear it. Well, I can ‘hear’ myself, of course, but I can’t tell if I’m on the right note or not. It seems so magical to me, that others just know.”
Eric smiled ruefully. “That’s how I feel,” he said. “T-Talking always looks so easy for everyone else.”
“Just to open your mouth and say the words?” I asked.
“Yeah. Instead of all this sss-stopping and ssss-starting.”
“And practice doesn’t help?”
He laughed. “I can ssss-stand up on a stage in an empty auditorium and recite the P-Pledge of Allegiance without a hitch, b-but let one p-person come in, and I ssss-start ssss-stuttering again. I discovered that from experience.”
“Then it doesn’t sound like something you were b-born with,” I said, and suddenly stared at him. “I just stuttered!”
He laughed. “So it’s catching!” Then he put two fingers under my chin, turned my head toward him, and kissed me.
I liked being surprised that way; I didn’t have to worry about it in advance. I blinked and just looked up at him when he let me go. And then he kissed me again.
We both smiled at each other afterward. So I laughed and said, “What was the second kiss for?”
“For k-keeping your mouth shut after the first one,” he said.
I leaned back against his arm. “Well, if you don’t practice not stuttering, what does your therapist have you do?” I asked.
“More s-stuttering.”
“What?”
“He says the more I c-can do it openly and easily, the m-more I’ll relax. And when I don’t try so hard to fight it, I won’t k-keep my tongue or my jaw or throat muscles so tense. And everyone else will feel more comfortable, too.”
I sighed. “I wish it was the same for singing. No matter how relaxed I am, nobody wants to listen. I was practically banned from singing ‘Happy Birthday’ at parties when I was little.”
Eric laughed out loud.
“In fact, when I was in grade school, and all the other kids were singing, the teacher gave me the triangle to play instead.”
We both laughed that time. Eric kissed me again. “I like you b-better with your mouth closed,” he said.
“See?” I told him. “Even you think so!”
When I called Pamela later, she asked, “How long did he stay?”
“I don’t know. Another hour, anyway.”
“He really is crazy about you, Alice!”
“Well, that’s nice to know,” I said.
“So, what are you going to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he likes you, but he’s a stutterer!”
“No, he’s a guy who happens to stutter, along with a whole lot of other stuff he does very well, Pamela.”
“Like what?”
“Like kissing,” I told her, and we laughed.
11
The Color Purple
Lester was in love.
Again.
Well, he didn’t use the word “love,” and he said it was an intense, intellectual relationship, but I know Lester, and he was more nuts over this woman than he’d been over someone in a long time. I figured any woman was better than his last girlfriend, Eva, a walking clothes hanger, who criticized everything he did. Several nights a week at the dinner table, Les told us about his conversations with Lauren that he said were helping to sharpen his mind.
“So what did we learn at school today?” I asked him brightly over the chili.
“Actually,” said Lester, spearing a piece of broccoli, “we’re comparing John Stuart Mills’s distinction between higher and lower pleasures with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.”
I was sorry I’d asked; what I really wanted to know was what Lauren had said to him before or after class and what he’d said to Lauren. “What about lunch?” I asked. “Did you eat with her again?”
“Usually she eats in the faculty dining room, but sometimes I can persuade her to eat with me out on the grass, i
f the weather’s nice. That’s where we have our best discussions. Mills’s approach, see, is that some pleasures are different and superior to others, and he chooses the higher pleasures, those of the mind versus those of the body.”
“And you’re for the pleasures of the body, of course,” I said.
“Well, that’s what we’re discussing. Mills says that anyone who says the lower pleasures are better isn’t qualified to judge, that you need to be trained and educated to appreciate the higher things. And while there may be some truth to that, I say that maybe the intellectual has lost the capacity to enjoy some of the lower pleasures.”
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy?” I said helpfully, trying to condense the argument.
“You might say that, yes!” Lester said, and looked at me appreciatively as though I had actually said something important.
“And Lauren’s view?” asked Dad.
“Well, right now we’re discussing the fact that not all intellectuals have lost the capacity to enjoy the lower pleasures.”
“You, for one,” I said.
“Darned right.” Lester sprinkled cheese over his chili and took another bite.
“These discussions over lunch,” said Dad. “I assume that anyone can join in? Anyone passing by you out on the grass?”
Lester shrugged and thought about it a minute. “I suppose. We don’t exactly put out a welcome sign, but if anyone came along and wanted to join in, we wouldn’t stop them. We’re just so intent on the conversation, we don’t like to be disturbed.”
Dad didn’t say anything more. If anybody was disturbed, I’d say it was Dad.
Les and Lauren may have been intellectual buddies, but the fact that he wanted to bring her by the house to meet us obviously meant something, so I put on my best jeans and a clean shirt to look halfway decent.
My scar had almost healed—it hardly showed—and I was able to take gym again. I was so happy to be back in the World of Well that I felt I was ready for anything. Operations don’t sound like much when they happen to someone else, but when they happen to you, when it’s your mind that’s going to sleep, and your body that’s going to be cut open, it’s not so casual anymore.
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