The accident happened at sunset, so that is when I felt this way the most. I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. He opened his shirt and showed me where an acupuncture person had dabbed at his chest with cola syrup, sunk four needles, and told him that the real cure was charitable works.Īs soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn’t know it. The doctor said he’d give it to me till I couldn’t button my blouse -“ a figure of speech to someone in a cotton gown. One of the medications was making my fingers stiffen. I spent fifteen minutes before going to bed squeezing rubber grips. She would say, “Why watch that trash? Why not just ask me how my day went?” The hour would end, and a floor nurse would wheel me back to my room. I prayed for men who were not discriminating.Īren’t we all, I thought, somebody’s harvest? The boy’s mother prayed for drunk drivers. He was next on the transplant list, as soon as -“ the word they used was harvest -“ as soon as a kidney was harvested. His lashes were thick and dark from blood-pressure medication. There was sometimes, on the other side of me, a twelve-year-old boy. You would ask them how he felt, he would say, “924-3130.” Or he would say, “757-1366.” We guessed what these numbers might be, but nobody spent the dime. On one side of me was a man who spoke only in phone numbers. Wednesday nights we watched a show where women in expensive clothes appeared on lavish sets and promised to ruin one another. They had wide-screen color TV, better than they had in Rehab. They didn’t mind when a lounger was free. She said, “This is what my son used to look like.” In the solarium, a woman showed me a snapshot. What a comfort -“ his family, people said -“ until his wife took the kids and moved out. He carries a briefcase to the college campus. The rest of him is neatly dressed in dark suits and shined shoes. In my neighborhood there is a fellow who was a chemistry teacher until an explosion took his face and left what was left behind. “Do you think looks are important?” I asked the man before he left. The man of a week was already gone, the accident driving him back to his wife. I said, “First, don’t we talk about dateability?” The tendency was to say marriage-a- what? although I knew what he meant the first time I heard it. “We have to talk here about marriageability.” That I had never considered becoming one was immaterial, he said, legally. He had already covered loss of earnings, that I could not now become an airline stewardess. He said that his friends had given him handsomely embossed business cards, but where these lovely cards were supposed to say Attorney-at-Law, his cards said Attorney-at-Last. He told me he had taken the bar three times before he had passed. I could tell that the lawyer liked to say court of law. What he meant by looks was how much my loss of them was worth in a court of law. He sat in an aqua vinyl chair drawn up to my bed. Crucial is what I had said.īut this guy was a lawyer. We were having the looks discussion -“ how important are they. But I won’t get around to that until a couple of paragraphs. The lawyer was the one who used the word. The five days they didn’t know if they could save my leg or not I stretched to ten. What happened to one of my legs required four hundred stitches, which, when I told it, became five hundred stitches, because nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be. In the hospital, after injections, I knew there was pain in the room -“ I just didn’t know whose pain it was. He said, “You’ll be okay, but this sweater is ruined.” My blood was on the front of this man’s clothes. I remember knowing that I shouldn’t look, and knowing that I would look if it wasn’t that I couldn’t. The man I had known for one week held me in the street in a way that meant I couldn’t see my legs. The man was not hurt when the other car hit ours. The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.
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