|
|
 |
You shake your head and Trumbull apologizes for the inconvenience put to you, a hardworking English girl (he seems to have forgotten that you signed his lease with an American accent some months earlier).  "I'll catch him," Trumbull warns, supposing the culprit to be one of the two men in the house — a Trinidadian and an Algerian. "I'll catch him and give him a wash myself!"
The next morning you take your bath as usual, except halfway through it, there's Trumbull, peeking at you through the crack in the door. He's not pretty, like Teddy, but his blue eyes have sad, heavy lids and you become addicted to the notion that it's you who lends them this quality. You try not to toss so much water out of the tub, but your motor skills aren't what they used to be, and anyway, Trumbull isn't looking at the floor.
It goes like this for a while. Then one day he cracks the door a little wider and actually steps in, seating himself on the john. Not long afterward he moves to the edge of the tub. "Why not let me do that?" he asks, taking the small pot from you as you prepare to rinse your hair. He continues his work even after the shampoo is gone, dousing you back and front, lifting each breast lightly in search of suds that might be trapped underneath. He worries about the possibility of infection without a thorough intimate rinse, and even though you know this is his way of getting a look at you, you can't help but feel his concern.
Trumbull's wife is a heavy sleeper, so he begins slipping out of her bed at night and into yours. You're a heavy sleeper, too. You're addicted to codeine. In the mornings, when you awake, you find grateful notes from him describing all the positions he was able to fold you into, and the degrees to which you seemed to enjoy them. He's meticulous about this, as if you keep some sort of sexual inventory, and he doesn't want to be responsible for you coming up short at the end of the quarter. Though you have no stock to account for, you're fascinated by the idea that you lead a double life. You hope to learn something from your alter ego, who, according to Trumbull, uses a fake American accent and is happiest on her stomach.
On weekends you're drawn to the neighborhood elementary school, where an Indian group practices their music in the evenings. From the back of a sloping auditorium, you notice the man from the corner shop playing sitar. You wave to him and he turns up his amplifier in response, sending out an offensive whistle of feedback. Quickly you press your fingers to your ears, and that's when you feel it, the difference between the right side of your face and the left.
You have a National Health card and you use it. Before examining you, Dr. Plumridge makes a speech about how if he were a visitor in the U.S. (the gravity of the matter seems to call for your American accent), he'd pay thousands of dollars for the care you're about to receive for free. You listen to him closely, respectfully. You offer him money. He says no, that's not the point. You do your English accent for him and he laughs. He tells you you're charming and that he'd very much like to take a CT scan of your head.
The film reveals a tumor in your left salivary gland, located directly in front of your ear. On a subsequent office visit, Plumridge sticks you twice with a needle, trying to get a tissue sample, then lets his freckled otolaryngology fellow take a turn. Blood leaks  down the side of your face as a result of Dr. Harry's inexperience, and a nurse steps in to apply pressure. Though this hurts even more than the punctures, your daily dose of codeine allows you to bear up. "I like the stiff upper lip," Plumridge tells you, winking on his way out the door.
A week later, still high off the notice for your inadvertent display of patriotism, the pathology report comes back benign. "It's got to come out anyway," Plumridge informs you, explaining that this particular type of tumor can grow to be the size of a grapefruit, or, even worse, turn malignant. "No sense mucking about with that," he concludes, scheduling the operation for two weeks.
You're finally going to do something in England. You're going to have surgery. You call your parents to share the good news and they insist that you come home at once. "Just kidding," you say quickly, and they say, "What?" and you say, "British humor," and they say, "Not funny." Teddy grows equally morose, convinced that you'll be killed by a foreign anesthesiologist who earned his medical degree through the post. Trumbull, feeling completely useless, installs a new tub. When you try to thank the Indian man for leading your fingertips to the abnormality, he confesses that he once cursed you and asks for your forgiveness. You can't understand any of them. Why is no one happy for you — you, who are about to become an honorary citizen? It's all well and good to chew at one's exterior, but soon a deep part of you will be expertly removed and buried on British soil. You've begun the process of perishing abroad, the ultimate in assimilation, and no one can stop you now.
D
r. Plumridge, an elegant man in his sixties, can't stop talking paralysis. "The trunk of the facial nerve," he explains before surgery, leaning over your gurney in his scrubs, "is located in the salivary gland. You've got seven nerves extending out from there to various points on that gorgeous face of yours, and my job is to keep away from each and every one of them. Following?"
You nod. You've heard the story before and wish he'd stop talking about losing your blink and your smile and waking up drooling. You need your looks to compensate for your nationality, after all.
The anesthesiologist, who is indeed Korean, shakes his head at the opposite side of the gurney. "Ignore him, miss. He's a genius. He's never paralyzed anyone."
Plumridge turns stern as he addresses his colleague. "Listen to me, Seung: you never can tell with these Americans. They could be completely different from us on the inside. We won't know until we open her up."
You think you're laughing, but it's actually coughing, because the whole thing is over just that quickly and now you're in recovery with a badly dried-out mouth and a bandaged head that feels twice its normal size. You try to say words to the effect of It hurts and a nurse flipping through a magazine injects morphine into your I.V. "Are you nauseous?" she asks, and before you can answer she lifts your bed sheet and gives you a shot in the thigh. "No," you say finally, but the word tumbles out the left side of your mouth like a gutter ball.
It's Plumridge's fellow who has permanently paralyzed you. You know because the next time you wake up, he's there at your bedside, crying. "Dr. Harry?" you mumble.
"Just Harry," he says, wiping his eyes on his shirtsleeves. He wears no medical attire which makes him look like a visiting friend, though as soon as you can get up the energy, you will tell him that he most certainly is not.
"Mirror," you say now, trying to enunciate.
As if he were your husband, he reaches into your purse and pulls out a powder compact, opening it and holding it shakily in front of you. All you can see is the drainage tube sticking out of the base of your wound, so you say, "Higher." His hand shivers upward from your neck to your chin, where you pick up a trail of saliva that leads directly back to the droopy left corner of your mouth. You look like a woman who is partially dismayed and will never make up her mind to become truly furious. From this point forward, no matter what kind of happiness the right side of your face is enjoying, the left will always be there to wreck it.
"That's enough," you slur, and Harry nods somberly, clicking the compact shut. You're ugly, to be sure, but for now it's his remorse that most captures you, a new way of hearing that you're worth something in this world. "Codeine?" you say, and he brings you some pills. You take them and begin to feel yourself again. "Try to smile," he says, leaning over you with pink, wet eyes. You think you're trying, but it feels the same as not trying. He starts crying again and you reach out a hand to touch him. It's startling to you both that the rest of you still works.
|
©2000
Alicia Erian and Nerve.com
|
|
|
|
