Patient, Female

A few weeks later I get to the clinic early and am put to work restocking the linen closet with drapes and gowns. I’m wheeling a metal cart full of clean linen toward the elevator when I turn a corner and nearly pin a white coat to the wall. Surprise: it’s Jerry Tomo. He tries to work his way around me, but I wedge the cart across his path. Better to get this moment over with, I think. My nose almost touches his ID badge.

“I didn’t remember you were so tall,” says the talking crotch.

“I had a growth spurt,” says Gerald Tomo, M.D. “While I was in college.”

“So you remember me. I thought you might.”

“I wasn’t sure at first. Then I thought … ” He shrugs, a handsome gesture.

I understand what he was going to say. There are people on this floor who are turning on spits in mechanical beds. There are people whose every orifice is occupied by a whirring machine. Embarrassment and awkwardness are low priorities.

I ask him what kind of doctor he’s planning to be.

“A neurologist. But I haven’t started neurology yet.”

I tell him I’m thinking of becoming a nurse, but I’ll need a few more years of college. I watch his face while he accounts for the past decade and a half of my life, a period during which he was probably spending his summers in Europe.

“My mother died in this hospital,” I explain, as if we’d been talking about our parents. “And now my father has emphysema.”

“Emphysema is treatable,” Jerry says. “I’m sorry about your mother.”

I stare at his ID badge. I want to pluck it from his coat and plunge it, voodoo-style, into his chest.

“I think it’s great that you’re willing to serve as a patient,” Jerry says. “Most women probably wouldn’t do it. But we need the training.”

“Especially in neurology,” I say.

Jerry makes his way around my cart and pushes the button for the elevator. I wait beside him while the doors open. He is headed for a lifetime of stressful days and long hours, softened by weekend golf and a second home perched on a glittering body of water. He steps into the elevator and nods.

“You’re welcome,” I say.

A few hours later I’m back at the door to my father’s apartment. Holding a grease-stained bag of Chinese food in one hand, I jiggle the key in the lock, which always sticks, as if forcing me to pause and collect my thoughts before I go in. When the door finally opens, I catch a glimpse of my father on the couch. He is watching TV, the screen casting its lurid blue light across his face. Even before I kick off my shoes and walk toward him, I understand that, against my will, I will miss him terribly, that my grief will make the sadness I felt when my mother died seem trivial and small.

Her death was the practice run, I think, a preparation for his. The injustice of it makes me press my forehead, hard, against the door.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” my father says.

I notice how bony his shoulders look despite the double layer of flannel shirts. “Wednesday,” I tell him. “I brought you some takeout. Are you hungry?”

He doesn’t answer. On the screen in front of him, a woman in high-heeled black boots clicks up a driveway toward a darkened house while glancing fearfully over her shoulder.

“That looks kind of sleazy.” I head for the kitchen, but I can still see the TV. “Is it a movie or what?”

Tethered to his oxygen, he shrugs. “A little sex, a little violence. It’s a mixed grill.”

I put our take-out food on two plates and set the plates on the coffee table in front of the couch, which is cluttered with badly embroidered pillows—my mother’s final, misguided hobby.

“Did you take your meds?” I ask, sitting down.

He barely nods.

Still wearing her heels, the TV actress tac-tacs noisily through a series of rooms and ends up trying to hide in a bathroom—probably the only place in the house without a window or a working phone.

“Idiot,” I say, my mouth full of rice. “She left the front door open.” The camera lingers on the woman’s breasts. I point toward the TV with my chopsticks. “She’s standing there waiting to be strangled.”

“It might not be strangling,” my father says.

The music swells as the woman, cleavage glistening, steps into the tub and draws the curtain. Despite the movie’s predictability, fear rises in me like a wave of nausea. Is there nowhere to go but toward the future? I find myself clutching my father’s sleeve.

Two minutes later the woman is dead. The station cuts to a commercial.

“You aren’t eating, Dad,” I say. I’m still holding his sleeve. When my father and I screamed at each other and fought—I used to wish he would drop dead—my mother invariably would tell me that he loved me. I swore that I hated him, that he didn’t love me at all; she said his feelings were complicated.

“She should have, locked the door,” my father says, nodding toward the TV. He speaks in small phrases, catching his breath. “Next time she goes out, she’ll know better.”

Next time, I think, is what I am waiting and practicing for. Next time my mother and I will be sitting here on the couch and she will be embroidering another unfortunate pillow, and because my mother has always loved me—and because her love is uncomplicated—I will let my father sit on the couch with us as well. In this alternate life, in this improved version, I make the decision for the three of us: I let him live.

I’m late to work the next Wednesday because the hospital parking lot is occupied by religious protesters. I park on the street a few blocks away, then elbow my way through the fervent throng, whose members chant and sway and gnash their teeth in prayer. One woman grabs my arm and insists that I save my baby.

“I’m not having a baby,” I tell her. George, the security guard, arrives and detaches the woman’s fingers from my arm.

In the locker room I pull off my clothes and take a one-minute shower. The water is cold, and by the time I reach the exam room I’m out of breath. The first three med students are ornery because they have been waiting for 11 minutes. I climb up on the table and apologize.

I try to gather my thoughts, to compose myself, but one of the students is already opening my gown. He is short and good-looking and scores particularly high on the arrogance scale, perhaps not wanting to take instruction from a living pelvis.

I’m not feeling well. My arm is sore where the protester grabbed me, and my heart is beating out a frantic rhythm in my chest.

Everything is moving too fast. The next doctor-in-training has hands like a butcher’s, short muscular fingers and spatulate thumbs. I want to pull him down by his white lapels and shout in his face: Radiology! Hematology! Geriatrics! But I can tell by the look in his eyes when he grazes my pubic bone with his wristwatch: this is it. He has some warped idea about the mystique.

I imagine I can hear the protesters chanting, pressing toward us with their ragged anger and despair. “Please,” I say. “Wait.”

The students look stunned when I stagger up and away from the table, cinching my gown closed with a fist. Are we not pretending anymore?

One of them suggests that I should sit down but I have nowhere to sit except the table.

“I’m not ready,” I say.

In their matching white coats they appear as blank and unconcerned as three sheets of paper. They are younger than I am and know almost nothing about what is bearable and what isn’t, about the evanescent line between simple mortification and an unendurable, impossible joke.

We wait for what seems like forever, for the sounds of the people coming to save us.

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