Patient, Female

My best friend, Cheryl—former shoplifter, co-delinquent friend of my youth—was the one who hooked me up with the professional-patient job. She was a professional female patient (the doctors called us “teaching patients”) at two different hospitals for several years. Then she had a baby and resigned. Too many hands is what she said. She couldn’t stand any more people touching her. Even her husband. Especially her husband, she said. He gets a look in his eye, Lissy, and I swear …

Cheryl used to tell me it was like acting, on a tiny stage. So I try to vary the experience in case the students—standing with their backs against the wall and waiting their turns—are comparing notes. I can be belligerent one minute, slow-witted the next. Sometimes I put the gown on backward: let them decide how to handle it. “You’re the undress rehearsal,” Cheryl used to say.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” I ask him, the next week after work. I have brought him some groceries. I turn on the overhead light in the kitchen, noting that its cake-shaped glass bowl is full of dead moths.

“Wednesday,” he says. He’s got his oxygen on, the portable tank next to him on the rug like a faithful dog. He was supposed to die before my mother, but life is full of little surprises.

I set the groceries down by the sink. We buried my mother nine months ago, but her “to do” list is still taped to the windowsill. “Did you get out for a walk?” I ask.

My father rouses himself—he must have fallen asleep on the couch—and slowly stands up. “The world wasn’t prepared for me today,” he says. “I had too much potential.”

“Wednesday used to be your day for playing cards with Martin.” I open the freezer. “Have you seen him lately?”

“Martin’s dead.”

“Martin’s not dead. He lives at Longview. Why do you have so much ice?” The freezer holds one ancient package of sausage (I look at the date, then throw it out), one bag of peas, and half a dozen plastic containers full of ice. Additional cubes overflow their holding tank in the corner.

“Your mother liked ice,” my father says.

I put the peas on the counter and shut the freezer, remembering my mother dropping ice cubes into her coffee, her orange juice, her milk. “You know you could visit Martin at Longview. Assisted living isn’t contagious.”

“If you want to see him so much you go visit him,” my father says. “I didn’t think you were coming tonight. I thought you said you were going out.”

“Cheryl was busy.” I shrug. “She had to cancel.”

Standing on the threadbare carpet runner in the hall, my father blinks. His scalp is spotted like the skin of a rainbow trout. “You thought you were going out with Cheryl?” He raises his eyebrows. “Cheryl has a baby. She’s going to be busy for 20 years.”

I put two pots of water on to boil.

“You want to know what bothers me?” my father asks.

“No, I don’t.”

“What bothers me,” he says, “is that there’s no such thing as a professional patient. People in hospitals are always amateurs.” His slippers are held together with electrical tape.

“I’m training doctors,” I tell him.

“That’s not why you’re doing it,” he says.

I open a package of spaghetti, then lift the W for Wednesday in the weekly row of my father’s pills. “Are you embarrassed for me?” I ask. “Is that it? Are you embarrassed because I’m not modest?”

“When you embarrass me, I’ll tell you,” my father says.

I watch him attempt to pluck his pills from their narrow compartment, but his hands are shaking and his thumb is too big. I take hold of his hand, turn it over, and dump the pills into his palm, his skin as thick and smooth as polished wood.

“A guy walks into a bar with a duck on his head,” he mutters, concentrating on the pills.

I give him a coffee mug half-full of water.

“The bartender looks at the guy and then at the duck. He says, ‘What can I get you?’”

“You’ve already told me this one,” I say.

“The man says, ‘Nothing for me.’ But then the duck on his head pipes up: ‘Can you get this guy off my ass?’”

I feel as if the air in his apartment has gotten thinner, or as if someone has siphoned most of the oxygen out of my lungs. “I definitely can’t come next week,” I say. “You know, telling jokes isn’t the same as having a conversation.”

My father puts the first pill on his tongue. “Your mother died on a Wednesday,” he says.

“She died on a Friday. At four-fifteen.”

“Well. Same difference,” my father says.

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