Barbara the Slut and Other People (5 page)

On the way back from the run, Pammy and I went to the bodega to get buttermilk and eggs to make pancakes. Beth was still asleep on the couch. I let Pammy into Kelly’s room and I measured ingredients in the kitchen. When the girls still weren’t up I opened my proposal letter but then played Minesweeper instead.

I heard Beth get up and go into the bathroom. Then she came into my room and said, “What’s cooking, good-looking?”

“I was going to make pancakes,” I said. “Are you hungry?”

“Sure,” she said. “Is Kelly up?”

“No, but she sleeps forever,” I said.

We went into the kitchen. I mixed everything up and heated the griddle.

Beth washed berries. We put them in the pancakes. When Beth was looking through a drawer for a spatula she found a bone-shaped cookie cutter. She put it on the griddle and made a pancake for Pammy.

Kelly got up when the pancakes were ready. She is psychic about food. “Aw,” she said when she saw the bone pancake. “That is so cute. I love that you love my little Muscle-wuscle.”

“I don’t know if I love him,” said Beth. “I just thought it would be funny.”

Kelly looked hurt. I laughed.

They sat down to eat. I made more pancakes. After breakfast Kelly left and Beth helped me do the dishes.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” she said.

“Me too,” I said.

“Are you still mad about the glasses?”

“No. It was just a weird day.”

“I know,” she said.

“It’s not my fault the glasses were dirty. Kelly can’t do dishes to save her life.”

I hadn’t planned on throwing my sister under the bus. I wanted to take it back.

“Okay,” said Beth.

I was ready for the weekend to be over. But I had already asked Beth to take me to the store to get paper towels and toilet paper, so she did. When we got back she parked four feet from the curb. She got out to open her trunk for me.

“Thanks for taking me to get these things,” I said.

“Of course.”

“Have a safe trip home.”

“I will. Let’s do this again soon?” She gave me a hug.

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t think it would be soon.

“All right,” she said. “Back to my crappy fucking life.”

She got into her car and lit a cigarette and peeled into the street. The car turned out of sight at the end of the block.

I went inside. I tried to work on my computer in bed. But it was hard to keep my eyes open. Pammy came in and got under the covers. We slept for a long time.

W
hen Mike Anonymous first called the clinic they made me pick up the phone. I didn’t know what the hell he was saying so I put him on hold. They always made me pick up when someone with an Asian accent called, like I could speak a word of any Asian language, which I couldn’t. This guy was actually Japanese, I could tell that much. I was a quarter Japanese, but my Japanese grandma died when I was five, and I had never been able to understand her either.

Mike Anonymous was the fourth caller on hold, which was the maximum, so at least all the lines were busy and the phones were going to stop ringing. It was my lunch break but I was sitting at the security window, and people kept calling and coming in and needing things. I was looking out the front door straight into the sun. I wished I had sunglasses or ski goggles or something. Every time someone opened the door, cold air rushed through and made me shudder.

Louisa was wearing her coat at the check-in desk, but she kept asking me what was wrong with me, like I shouldn’t be freezing my ass off. Finally I was like, “Fat people get cold too,” and she cracked up.

I picked up line one but the caller was gone, and the phone started ringing again.

“Hello, thank you for calling Gonorrheaville, would you mind holding just a minute?” Louisa pressed the hold button.

“Oh my god,” I laughed. “What if someone from administration calls and you say that?”

“They’d call the private line.”

“What if they didn’t?” I said.

“They definitely wouldn’t call the patient line. They know we don’t pick it up.”

“We try to pick it up.”

I picked up line four and it was still the guy I couldn’t understand.

Something something HIV, he said.

“Do you want to make an appointment?”

Something something HIV, he said again.

“Do you want to be tested for STDs?”

Something something, he said in a high voice.

“Sex-u-ally trans-mit-ted dis-ea-ses?” I said.

“Yes!”

The private line started ringing.

“Okay, hold on,” I said, and picked up the private line.

“Viv?” It was my stupid boyfriend Davey. “What time are you coming home?”

I hung up the phone and wondered if Davey definitely knew it was me who picked up.

I picked up line four. “Okay, what’s your name?”

Something something anonymous, he said.

“You want to be anonymous?” I said. “Fine, but you have to have a first name. What’s your first name?”

“Ano . . . Mike-des,” he said.

“Mike Dess?”

“Mike!”

“Okay, Mike. Do you have any symptoms?”

It sounded like Mike Anonymous didn’t have any symptoms, so I made an appointment for an STD testing with no symptoms at seven the next night. I ate the last bite of my eighth brown rice cake with peanut butter and went back to work.

•   •   •

The next day Louisa had to work the front desk with Boss Donna, so she answered the phones, “Thank you for calling the clinic, this is Louisa, how can I help you?” instead of “Gonorrheaville, please hold,” or her other favorite, “Chlamydialand.”

I was in the dirty lab getting instruments out of the autoclave when Donna paged me. “Vivian to the front, please. Vivian to the front.” Boss Donna loved the intercom.

I walked to the front, stepping on only the pink tiles.

“Your patient is here,” Donna said when I got there. “The one that called yesterday.”

“What?” I said. The waiting room was empty except for a man filling out paperwork in the closest seat to the check-in window. He was sweating and his face was flushed. He looked like he was in his thirties or forties. He wasn’t fat-fat but he had a round face and he filled out his suit.

“That guy?” I said.

“No, one of the other guys,” said Donna. “Yes, that guy.”

I shut the window between the check-in desk and the waiting room.

“He speaks no English,” said Louisa, “not one word.”

“That’s Mike Anonymous?” I said. “He’s not supposed to be here until seven. How come he’s my patient?”

“Because we can’t understand him at all,” said Louisa.

“Neither can I!” I said.

“We’ll let you know when his chart is ready,” said Donna.

His chart was ready quickly because he didn’t answer any of the questions on the questionnaire. I brought him back to the bathroom to pee in a cup and told him to leave the cup in the window and meet me in the lab. But when he came into the lab he was holding his urine cup. He was still sweating. I smiled at him but he didn’t smile back.

He sat in the blood-drawing chair and I asked him all of the questions he hadn’t answered. I rephrased them so that he could answer yes or no. His breathing got heavier and he answered the questions in gasps. When I got to the questions about who he had sex with and how, he said yes to being married. He didn’t answer how he had sex, and I wasn’t about to ask yes-or-no questions about whether he had oral, vaginal, or anal, so I skipped that part. He shook his head like he didn’t understand again when I asked him whether he had had more than one sex partner in the last six months. Two drops of sweat fell onto his shirt. I wondered if it was possible that he understood me perfectly.

“We’ll test your urine for gonorrhea and chlamydia and your blood for HIV,” I said.

He took some gauze from the supply table and dabbed his chin and then his forehead. Now I was pretty sure he actually had no idea what I was saying. I pricked his finger for the rapid HIV test, set the timer, and sent him back out to the waiting room.

•   •   •

I started working at the clinic after I graduated from college. I was supposed to do some other stuff, like med school, but I kind of crashed and burned in the fall semester of my senior year, and now I was trying to figure out what to do about my life.

My childhood dream was to be a girl-scientist. I started conducting chemistry experiments in the kitchen before I could read. My parents gave me a drawer to keep my potions in, and the only rules were that I couldn’t use anything with a green Mr. Yuk sticker on it, and I couldn’t use anything from the garage. In first grade, my half brother Charlie got sick, and I imagined that if one of my potions cured him, I would be such a famous girl-scientist that I would have to wear disguises when I went outside. I made more and more potions, and when Charlie came to visit he tried the ones I picked out for him. He took a tiny sip from each, and once he threw up from smelling one.

Charlie was eighteen years older than I was, and he lived in New York City. I remember thinking that he was the person who knew me best in the world, because he sent me fancy dresses for every holiday except Halloween, when he sent me costumes. Later my mom told me that he bought them at a special store and cut out the tags, but at the time I thought he made them for me. My mom said she told him to stop sending them because she knew he couldn’t afford them, but he didn’t care what he could afford. When my dad sent him money for food and bills, he used it to buy dresses, records, and pieces of china for his Royal Copenhagen collection, which he left to me.

After that, I started thinking I might become a girl-doctor instead of a girl-scientist. I thought that through high school and most of college. And now I was supposed to be applying for something for next year, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t know if I still had it in me to study medicine, or even chemistry. I was thinking I might want to study public health, but I was also thinking I might want to move to the forest and eat berries and mushrooms and hibernate with the bears in the winter.

•   •   •

Mike Anonymous’s test was negative. I called him back in. His shirt around his neck and under his armpits was see-through with sweat. I showed him to the closest counseling room. I could hear him breathing as he went into the room in front of me and sat down, and I told him it was negative before the door even closed, because I thought he was going to pass out if I didn’t. But instead of being glad, Mike Anonymous stood up and slammed his hand on the table and said, “No!” I jumped. Then I think he said the test was wrong, or I did the test wrong. He wanted the traditional test, and he wanted to see a doctor. I was starting to understand him better but I was also starting to get scared of him. I told him he couldn’t see a doctor unless he had symptoms, and he said he did have symptoms.

“You told me on the phone you didn’t have symptoms,” I said.

“No,” he said.

“Okay fine,” I said, “what are your symptoms?”

He showed me a dot on his hand that looked like a freckle but was black.

“Are you sure that’s not ink?” I said.

“What?” he said.

“Ink,” I said, “like pen?”

Mike Anonymous shook his head and waved his hand in my face so that I could get a better look at the symptom.

“Okay,” I said. “Anything else?”

Something something penis, he said.

“Something is wrong with your penis?” I said.

Something something penis, he said again, louder. I told him to hold on and went out to the hall. A med student had arrived with Dr. Wagner, and they were talking to the clinicians about what patient to take.

“I have a really good patient for you,” I said.

The med student looked excited, like he thought it was going to be a woman with a double vagina or something. He was new to the clinic and he was technically a resident, which allowed him to see patients under Dr. Wagner’s guidance. He was too tall and he walked like it was hard for him to balance on such long legs. I wondered if that was why Dr. Wagner didn’t seem to take him seriously.

“This guy is sure he’s HIV positive but he had a negative rapid test, and when I told him it was negative, he decided that something was wrong with his penis,” I told them.

The med student still looked excited but Dr. Wagner rolled her eyes.

“Why does he think he’s HIV positive?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Don’t you think you should find out?” she said.

“Um,” I said.

I went back to the counseling room and told Mike that a doctor would see him, but first I needed to know why he thought he was HIV positive. He just looked at me, rasping now, and I made a mental note to offer him some water later. I sat down and wondered what to ask him and why I hadn’t been trained to do this.

“Have you ever used needles to take drugs?” I said.

“No.”

“Have you ever had sex with another man?”

“No!”

I tried to think of the other HIV risk factors.

“Have you ever exchanged sex for money?”

Mike Anonymous started to shake. He shook harder and harder and then he started to sob and talk. I had no idea what words he was saying, but at the end I made out the words “my kids.” I didn’t know what to do. I took a box of tissues from the file cabinet and put it on the table.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He looked at me and hiccupped.

“Did you have sex with a prostitute?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Did you use protection? A condom?”

“It has broken.”

He suddenly seemed very calm and I wondered if this was when he was going to pass out. I watched him for a minute. I wondered if he was a researcher at the university or something. I couldn’t think of another explanation for a man with nice shoes and a nice bag and a wife and kids, who could barely speak English, and who either could or could not understand it.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to go get the doctor.”

He nodded.

“Will you be okay here if I leave for a second?”

He nodded again.

I still didn’t want to leave him so I stuck my foot in the door and called down the hall, hoping that Dr. Wagner was down there.

“What?” she called back.

“Can you come up here?” I said.

“What?” she said.

“Can you please come to counseling room one?”

When she and the resident got there I looked at Mike and he seemed okay, so I closed the door and told Dr. Wagner about the hooker. She asked what exam room they could use and I told her room two. I gave her his chart.

“He can’t be anonymous if we’re going to examine him,” she said.

“You’re going to have to find out his name,” said the resident. I decided he wasn’t speaking to me since he was so tall. I opened the door to the counseling room and Mike Anonymous looked at us.

“Mike, this is Dr. Wagner,” I said. “She’s going to take care of you.”

Mike nodded.

“Hi, I’m Dr. Phillips.” The resident smiled and I wanted to kick his spider legs out from under him.

I brought Mike a cup of water and moved him to the exam room. They were in there for forty minutes, or the amount of time that it took Judy and Eunice, the other clinicians, to see six patients. When Dr. Wagner came out she ordered a herpes 2 test and a hepatitis C test.

“What was wrong with his penis?” I said.

“Nothing,” said Dr. Wagner. “He doesn’t have a single symptom.”

The resident handed me Mike’s chart and a requisition form for the tests, and then he repeated the names of the tests, like he thought of them himself. He had filled out the requisition form wrong and ordered a herpes culture instead of a herpes blood test, so I pointed that out to him.

I brought Mike Anonymous back into the lab and drew blood to send out. He wanted me to order a second HIV test from the lab, so I asked Dr. Wagner if I could. She said yes because it was the only way to get him to shut up about how he was HIV positive and the first test couldn’t tell because it couldn’t pick up the antibodies in Asian blood.

“What?” I said. “That’s crazy.”

“Is it?” said Dr. Wagner to the resident. “What do you know about that?”

“I can find out more,” said the resident. “I’ll make a call.”

“Are you retarded?” said Dr. Wagner. “Did you even go to med school?”

“I know,” said the resident. “I was just joking.”

•   •   •

Davey called at three to make sure I was getting off of work at four and could help him cut the dog’s nails. He said they were clicking on the floor and if we didn’t cut them at four he wouldn’t be able to get any work done for the whole rest of the day. I swore on the book of skin diseases that if he called me on the private line one more time I was going to break up with him. When I hung up, my coworker Pregnant Patricia asked me if I could stay late for her, because she had to go to an emergency doctor’s appointment that she had been waiting a month to get. I told her I could. I called Davey back and left a message so that he wouldn’t come to the clinic right at four with the dog and the nail clippers. I said the baby inside of Patricia had a life-or-death situation and I had no choice but to stay until eight.