M.J., I’m thinking of you today.
Leaning forward in my swivel chair at the office, I concave my shoulders and curve over my phone screen, and there you are. A picture of you at a brunch. Some group photo of strangers, and you wear a near-black lipstick like you’re playing goth. Your skin sparkles. (Is that highlighter, or is that just how L.A. is?)
Then I look up. Another patient on the east coast. While you’re supposedly at brunch.
I scratch my neck under my jawbone hinge and listen to Mrs. Carlisle in a green cardigan complain about Dr. Williams running fifteen minutes late. “I have a delivery? For my dog’s meals to my door? And if I’m not there by eleven, it’ll start to go bad?” Every statement pops like a question, like she’s surprised I don’t know this already. Mrs. Carlisle’s hair is bleachy blonde, but grey grows at the roots. I nod, doing the whole “Yes, Mrs. Carlisle” thing when my fingers stop on a neck hair.
I land my fingertips on the strand, assuming it’ll join the longer hairs behind my ears, the ones from my head. But it doesn’t fall away. Just stays there. When I hold on to it, the hair pricks me like a needle connected with my neck and circling its pore’s radius.
Now my face full-on flushes. My skin tingles with too-much blood, and my fingers flatten over this hair like I’m catching my pulse — and I hope that Mrs. Carlisle doesn’t think, from the redness added to my blotchy cheeks, that I’ve caught something from those flu-seized middle-schoolers that wipe snot on the furniture. I see them do it. I practically live in this waiting room, collecting germy checks, and once, a fourteen-year-old boy made eye contact with me while it smeared his nose gook on the cushion and laughed.
Mrs. Carlisle is still pushing forward with “My gastroenterologist needs the notes from this pre-op? Before my colonoscopy tomorrow?”
“Mrs. Carlisle, Dr. Williams is moving as quickly as he can, and he apologizes for the wait,” I start. I want her off my back. “He’s overbooked, and we apologize for the delay.” Mrs. Carlisle looks like she could rub nose gook on my face.
Then I notice where my fingers are, twiddling this neck hair. In aire libre. In a family practice waiting room. With kids around. And an angry dog owner. But I’m running this hair through three fingers, and it’s soft, you know? Like a guy’s armpit hairs. Downy. But it was made by a girl, by me. My body made that one hair, soft like a security blanket.
(M.J., would that make me feminist?)
But then my eyes catch Mrs. Carlisle’s thick eyeliner — it cracks, dries out into that silky area under lower lashes, wrinkles piling into layers of disgust at my mutant body — and I yank the hair. And it comes out of my neck.
It’s longer than two pinky knuckles, Mary Jane. Long and soft like an outgrown pube. I rub the hair between two fingers, and the white pinpoint top, my pore weeded out from my skin, pirouettes as the hair bends and straightens in tight twirls.
I stare down at it dancing between my fingers for too long.
“Um, are you okay?” Mrs. Carlisle asks.
“I think it’s just a neck hair,” I reassure her. “It’s not chronic or anything. It’s my first one.”
“That’s interesting?” Mrs. Carlisle says.
And to make her feel better, I reassure her that it won’t happen again.
* * *
Remember those crazy makeovers on middle-school Fridays, back when we still called them “playdates”? When we didn’t feel guilty for not getting invited somewhere else?
It went like this:
I lie flat on my bed, and you rub soft brushes on my eyelids and cheeks until I fight tickling sensations of sleep, sometimes unsuccessfully.
The forty-eight eyeshadows in the drugstore palette crumble so easily, flicking pink or yellow or purple powder onto my cheekbones and into my nose. It smells artificial like heated plastic.
When I sit up again, stiff like Frankenstein, I notice how you’ve changed me: my eyelids dusted with matte red or gold glitter; my cheeks flaming magenta with blush; my lips smeared with Mom’s brown hand-me-down lipsticks.
You cheer as I looked in the mirror. “Look at those peepers, girl! You look like an adult!” (Remember when adulthood felt like a mission?)
We’re phasing out of our Harry Potter stage, but sometimes you do my makeup with a British accent, pretend to be Hermione and rush through the makeover, saying, “Harry needs the phoenix!”
(Do you remember that, when I played phoenix?)
Then I open my eyes and caw in your face.
And, Mary Jane, back then, you always laughed, and it sounded like Christmas bells — like opening a door with a wreath on it and coming home.
* * *
During lunch, I run to CVS to pick up a microwave pizza. I don’t always get pizza, though if I do, I tell myself I can’t help it. Some weeks, I only buy Lean Cuisines and then on Friday squish a handful of my hips, the handful gritty with cellulite, and convince myself it’s less fleshy than my last squeeze.
I’m sure, with you running around skinny models all day on that fashion competition show, you don’t think too much about what you’re eating. At least, your Instagram makes you look like that.
On slower days, like Fridays in the fall after kids go back to school, I browse the makeup aisle. I bought a periwinkle nail polish last summer. Today isn’t a slow Friday, though. It’s a Monday, which means people are needy from their weekend ailments. I still need to grab charts for the second half of the day, packed with follow-up and same-day appointments.
Wrapping my fingers around each end of a lipstick, I twist. The plastic seal cracks. It smells like vanilla, though the color is plummy. The metal tube sits in my hand, its cold calling to me.
Normally, I avoid mirrors and my swollen eyelids, my dirt-colored hair, my scrubs squeezing my arms like a toothpaste tube, my yellow guinea-pig teeth. I wonder if I could guess my own age if I looked, if I would hit a mid-twenties range. Picture that sort of carnival attraction, a man yelling to strangers to guess my age instead of his offer to sleuth out theirs.
People could try to guess your age too, but they’d lean too young. Your features are clean-cut like your mom’s — sharp cheeks, smooth eyelids, Barbie lips — though you usually worried about your black caterpillar eyebrows. They became trendy in high school, though. Someone might guess you’re eighteen. Like those girls in my junky shows. Normally, I flick the channel to reality TV in the waiting room when the kids leave. And Uncle Tim hears it from his office and comes out and says, “Still with this garbage?” God bless Tim — I swear he shrinks every year under these patients’ weighty needs.
I turn to face the mirror quick, like throwing my head underwater to adjust to the cold. Today it’s not as bad as I maybe thought. Today, you can see how my eyes are blue, not grey.
After three years in the office, I see people leave everyday thinking they have caulked the holes in their health. High school girls with downward eyes and sweaty foreheads from being asked if they are sexually active — pink and pony-tailed and nail-bitten. Grandmothers wheeled in by their grumpy offspring with deep wrinkles like rivers, pink-rimmed eyes shrinking back into their skulls.
I imagine the purple-ish color inside the tube inhales the store’s air conditioning as I pull the top off and swirl the applicator up and out. Like it just woke up from a trance. Like it finally has come to life.
Patients call me Katie, because that was the last desk girl’s name. I don’t bother correcting them, honestly, because they connect her name to my desk placement, but they definitely recognize my face. A toddler’s conditioning, mostly from appointments for shots, will make it squirm in its mom’s arms, impatient, but the kid won’t wail until it spots me. “No doctor, Mommy, no doctor!”
I lean into the small CVS mirror dotted with illegal nail polish swatches, and I spread my lips. I ignore my hungry breath clouding the mirror. When I coax the plummy color toward me, I do it slowly to not scare it. Then I smear it across my mouth, the thick coating nestling into the dehydrated cracks in my lips.
I put the lipstick back on its rack, and I understand why you stay so skinny. Beauty fills that gap in my stomach, and I walk back to the office, purchasing nothing.
When I rub my lips together, M.J., it feels like swimming. So smooth. Gliding. Weightless.
* * *
The August before sixth grade, you take me to your country club, and you show me the dives you’d learned that summer: swan leap, can-opener, backflip. Clean dives, but I have to report on the splash — too much, too little? You improve your toes’ points, your arms’ triangle tucked around your head, your legs’ straightness. Your muscles compete for space under your tanned skin. You don’t even try. You can do anything. You hope to master this. A splash you couldn’t see.
Eventually, your summer friends come over and talk about some weird swim coach who always calls them “chiquititas.” You and your friends have bikinis with pink ruffles or green stripes or cartoon orange slices, but I love my black one-piece with athletic stripes. It covers from shoulders to crotch, pulls me tight into a hug no matter how I flail my arms to tread. I zip my fingers along my spandexed — and back then, tight — stomach. In a one-piece, you can really do anything.
While you ask shocked questions about this weird lifeguard and laugh with these strangers who yap over each other to reach the punchline first, I swim to the diving board and lift my body out of the pool in a firm line. My body is a bullet out of water. I hope that you see.
I climb on the board, give it a few baby bounces, but stay at the board’s edge. The prickly board pokes my uncalloused feet, as if the pointy texture prods me to jump.
Then I go.
Despite the ten-foot depth, my feet touch bottom. Have you been to that bottom of a pool and just wanted to stay there? I try to let my feet plant on the gritty concrete as bubbles leak from my nose. Not in a wild drowning way. In my stillness, my body feels like nothing, like it dissolves into the water, and the sunlight cracks geometric patterns along my thin arms and legs until my eyes burn. I defy water’s reverse gravity, but I imagine you giggle seeing me attached to the bottom, stiff like an abandoned pool toy.
But my body floats up.
I reach for the bottom, as if I could latch to the floor like Velcro, but when I drag my limbs through the water to touch the floor, I float to the top faster.
When I resurface, panting and burning with chlorine, you turn to me and said, “That was barely any splash!”
Did you say that in real life, or just in my memory of you?
And then your friends line up for the diving board, waiting for their turn to impress you.
* * *
When I return from my lunch break, Charisma, my desk mate, looks up at me behind the check-in desk before returning to paperwork. “What patient are you getting fancy for,” she says.
Who Wants to Be A Millionaire blares multiple choice options to “What insect inspired the phrase ‘computer bug’ by shorting out an early supercomputer?”
I rub my lips together for luck. “Just trying it out.” If she overheard my hair adventure with Mrs. Carlisle, Charisma doesn’t mention it. It bores her. These people. Me.
Some patients arrive early for their afternoon appointments and flip through Golf Digest or Mother Magazine or a People magazine older than some of the newborns sleeping in click-out car seats.
The answer to Regis’s question is D, moth.
I notice a green Post-It on my desk from Uncle Tim requesting Brandon Miller’s chart.
Charisma focuses on her computer screen and brushes back her right side-bang, which falls back in her face. She recently cut her long hair — too dry at the ends, she just wanted a trim, she said — but she doesn’t justify her new bangs.
Maybe she wants something that makes her look less tired.
Okay, that’s catty.
Charisma does commute three hours a day and misses her daughter every minute she’s at work. Her daughter’s school picture smiles on her computer monitor. That little girl uses all her gappy baby teeth. Charisma and her daughter have the same heart-shaped mouth tinted light pink with no makeup.
It reminds me of early sunset — you know your first Insta of L.A.? On the Santa Monica boardwalk? That one where you stand silhouetted with arms out, the pale-pink and grey-blue of disappearing day hitting the black-navy of the ocean behind you? That sort of pink.
“Your daughter could be a model,” I say. Charisma looks at her daughter and nods before a patient comes in.
I hunker into my swivel chair and scratch my eyebrows before I look over the to-do list I made this morning:
– print B. Johnson most recent note → Tufts admissions
– sched. f/u w/ Dr. Simon’s office, M. McAndrew’s dev. septum
– confirm tomorrow’s appointments
– fax H. Joaquin’s medical records to new doctor (615) 555-6294
I add “Brandon Miller’s chart.” When I press my lips together, I remember I’m wearing lipstick by the way my lips glide. Like sock feet on a wax floor.
I run to the chart racks towering behind us and pull the crank that slid the six-foot shelves along metal tracks. These beige charts are shoved in tight at all angles like crooked teeth, and a cloud of dust comes out when you retrieve one, making you cough upon other people’s sick skin.
I need the “La-” through “Ru-” section, the third. My body hunches over the crank on that shelf and slowly winds it until it moves. Like a sliding bookshelf of people’s sickness. I can only crank open one aisle at a time. It creaks and groans like an old donkey.
Sometimes I flip through people’s charts to see what they actually have outside of their waiting room neuroses, what they address only in sterilized exam rooms. I kept a short-list of the diagnoses I liked:
– Anal fissure: rip in anus mucus line → blood in poop
– Hypertension: high blood pressure (most people with heart problems also had depression)
– Pelvic prolapse: weakening muscles (uterus, bladder) → vagina falls out
– Alopecia: hair loss, thinning in circles
– Gynecomastia: man boobs
None of these diseases feel real, you know? I was popping these phrases into Google and looking at the generic definitions and then looking at patients going, “Oh, that’s the one with that inside-out vag, that must suck.”
They get over it mostly.
Brandon Miller. Stored next to his wife, Aliana, and his six-year-old twins, Burt and Gus.
I open his chart and skim, hoping for a medical definition for his thick unibrow.
Instead, he has a glaring negative chlamydia test result from nine months ago.
You don’t get an STD test if you’re only sleeping with your wife. And his wife does talk shamelessly about therapy.
I’m filthy, storing people’s secrets in my too-big pores. I’m trying to better understand people from their stories, not their diagnoses. I’m trying to understand why these blobs seem so distraught coming to this office. What is it about this place that makes people want to leave?
People hide secrets in their body. Maybe that’s why they use all that time to perfect them.
So — since I didn’t have to crank any other shelves, just look over and see the Marston family stacked neatly and together — I look through your file.
In my mind, you already told me everything that could possibly be in there, so it wouldn’t violate confidentiality. Like that time in seventh grade when I hugged you without knowing my hand would land on a bee crawling on your shirt, and we spent the rest of recess icing my palm, and you said thank you for saving you from your allergy. Or how you went on that acne medication at fourteen that required blood tests for pregnancy, because the doctors said the medicine would turn a fetus into a conehead.
But unlike the doctors, I know — knew back then — that we knew nothing about sex. I was at that sleepover when Leah explained boners with paper towels, and you screamed, M.J., and woke up Leah’s dog. And the bee allergy makes you hesitate when spring becomes summer, despite how you love the sun, and back then, you declined end-of-year sleepovers because you hated toting your epi-pen.
When I pulled out your thin chart and flipped through it, my ears rang, and my tongue tacked to my mouth roof to see encounter notes from the years before you moved.
Because I see new stuff, Mary Jane.
You always had a pointed, perfect nose, a ski-slope shape with symmetrical nostrils. You never even got sniffles. When did you have a deviated septum surgery? Middle school? It said in the consultation note that you bashed your nose in a recess game, but you didn’t bruise once that eighth-grade spring on the blacktop. I would’ve held the ice pack to your face when your hands numbed from cold.
Do I only remember the transformed nose now? I see your preschool face with that same nose, but it must be a lie. My preschool memories are plastered with your fake nose.
If I had known, maybe I would’ve smashed my nose up. In solidarity, maybe.
My lips are dry. I rub my teeth, and my fingers collect plum specks.
Lipstick doesn’t change whether or not you have an ugly face. It’s still ugly underneath. But now I have a clownish demeanor. Even Rozz from Monsters Inc. wears lipstick, and she’s ninety percent slime tracks.
Your chart’s five-year limit is coming up. Five years since you moved. We shred patients who haven’t been back in five years. Inactive, we call them. We don’t have room for them.
I misplace your chart within the Rodriguez family, pretending I can keep you close.
* * *
What did we get into that really bad fight about in high school? I don’t remember. Was it that time after you won class president or that time at your birthday dinner? I just remember you looked gorgeous while angry — your nose sloped like a water slide, dotted with freckles, and your eyelashes branched up to touch your thick, furrowed brows — and you wore red lipstick, traced slightly outside the lines of your lips like you did. And that infuriated me, that you still looked good. I’d never catch up. Was this the time I called you “a chronic bitch”? Or did I say “shallow slut”? Your honey eyes looked solid like sap, wet but frozen. “Why are you being so mean,” you said. Was it my birthday? No. Yours? Your new friends were there. And I slumped back into my chair in a Mexican restaurant punctuated by fajita tray sizzling. My throat suffocates in a snake grip, and my skin tingles as I think, I could curl under this table, small as a mouse, and no one will come under to comfort me — not your friends, and not you at that point, M.J. People might feel relieved that I left, because they’re tired of forcing themselves to notice me in the first place. I have been hoping that someday I retell that story and you cry and say, “That’s not true, lovie, you’re my best friend, my person, and I’ve forgiven you years ago.” Like a casual Mother Teresa.
But I don’t know if that’s you still.
I tell myself your number’s changed, because if I call and you pick up, after years of silence despite having my middle-school cell phone number — the one that received all those singing or dancing videos you sent for my approval — I’d break.
* * *
It’s three. The slowest hour in the office. Waiting room clears out. Too late for kids and older patients. Usually it’s only a few same-day visits. I wait for Cory Jacobs and his mom to finish up, so I flip the TV channel to another game show. Charisma looks at her phone. I Google “lipo cost” on my phone, shoulders hunched and protective.
Cory and Mrs. Jacobs open the door separating the sterile hallways and the grey waiting room.
My uncle, in Dr. Williams mode, strolls out with them. Uncle Tim leans over my desk to write the name of an orthopedic surgeon for Cody on his prescription pad. He elbows me, pretending to box me out of my own desk space with his arms, and I laugh.
“You look like a different person when you smile, Katie!” Mrs. Jacobs says.
And she smiles with happy eyes like she’s waiting for me to unwrap a present. My uncle tenses. Cody stares at his phone, scrolling with a slow drag of his index finger. Everyone waits on me for a second.
“Thanks,” I say, flatly.
I rub my lips together. Dry, like kissing a wall. She doesn’t comment on the lipstick.
Tim tears the sheet from his notepad, the rip punctuating the interaction of the silent office.
In the background, a contestant bets that his case has one million dollars and finds $100.
* * *
I remember Mrs. V (was that the teacher’s name?) opening a cage of butterflies for the first day of class, and a monarch tangling on the shoulder of my white tee. I almost scoop my finger underneath it, but its feet stick to the cotton fibers. My mom — Mom, fresh and clean as an ad in a baseball hat that day — introduces me to you, because I need my mom, or someone. “This is Mary Jane,” she says. You notice the orange butterfly. “It must like you,” Mom says before you stroke it with the tip of your index fingertip, nail cut clean and close for the first day. Someone had draped your nail in a pearlescent layer of nail polish. We take turns petting the smooth wings.
* * *
Walking back into my house, my childhood house, my mom’s house, I can’t breathe. I take air for granted, I realize, as I can’t pull any oxygen through my sternum, and the tension builds up like traffic at my breastbone.
Mom’s decorated for Halloween with purple string lights and a door ornament of a jack-o’-lantern. “Trick or treat?” it asks. It has a carved grin to make someone assume it’s happy. Doesn’t mean it’s not a trick.
Mom greets me, and I notice for the first time that her hair’s greying. Who are these people that I visit in my memories that aren’t the people I see?
She has two pumpkins on the breakfast table. It’s October 2nd, but Mom loves fall, the change, and every year says, “We can always make more pumpkins,” but every year, the jack-o’-lanterns turn to damp carcasses to greet us at November’s curve, and we never replace the deflated originals. Squirrels tear at them almost immediately.
Mom’s elbow-deep in one’s guts. The pumpkins sit on a tarp of cartoon witches on the breakfast table. She always starts before I get home, because she knows the slick skin and already-rotting smell make me nauseous.
She asks how work was, and I say same old, our nightly routine of boiling down the hours into one generalization. I sort of look forward to when I find a roommate — no offense, M.J. I’ll move out, and we’ll know our co-workers by name through anecdotes: “That’s the Will with the uptight email signature?” But Mom knows I’m in no rush and says so. “No rush.”
“I like your look.” She circles her gutty fist around her mouth to indicate my lipstick. I tell her thank you, it’s something I’m trying out.
I tell her I’m heading upstairs for a quick second, that I’ll be right back.
Even though the walls are grey, a pinch of my childhood lime green shines through to make the room seem it might glow with an toxic layer of slime. I have a bookshelf that showcases the clutter of growing up: young adult romance novels set in time periods or fantasy worlds, half-empty bottles of vanilla lotion, a gimmicky suitcase packed with old makeup. The bookshelf is hefty, white-washed and yard-sale bought with thick wood planks, but nothing in the room matches, really. The periwinkle nail polish I bought last summer sits on my nightstand, full.
Remember how you got me that bathrobe for high school graduation, the waffle knit one? I use it sometimes, like today. I de-loop the cloth belt from the waist, fold it in my hands.
Before I lie down on the ground, I go to my small boom box and play whatever CD is in there. A mix CD made by me. TLC’s “Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls” blares, and I lower myself parallel to the bookshelf.
My stomach feels skippy, jumpy, like this music machine when it hits to track six. Deep breaths. Think of your mom’s hands, steady and scooping pumpkin guts downstairs. And I think of you: That’s someone that goes out and does the damn thing.
As I’m breathing in, I’m wrapping the cotton belt around the top shelf.
As I’m breathing out, I’m back on the floor, the cloth belt in my hand like reins.
TLC amps up, gets louder as if they love their own shit. One of these girls lit a house on fire. Doing the damn thing. The other died in a tragic plane accident. I remember the news clips, though I was little. They played the clip from her music video, where she’s dancing in shiny leather and black lipstick. All of them wore pink or blue eyeshadows to face the world. I think I remember that.
My room smells stale, like my laundry of scrub uniforms might be stinking it up, and I take in a whole whiff from the ground before I pull those reins — remember how I walk pigeon-toed, and one of your high school friends mocked my crooked stride moving behind me, and you told her to focus on herself?
And I bring that bookshelf falling onto my face.
For a second, I feel nothing. I see a glowing, expanding white behind my closed eyes. It morphs to orange-yellow orbs of light, my own sunset.
I taste dirty coins in my mouth as blood coats my throat, and I cough. The shelf hit me in the nose, and I think I heard a crack, and I definitely smell blood. The middle of my face burns like I snorted needles, like I sniffed up some peppermint water. These YA books that we traded, the ones about flappers and vampires, they cover me like a blanket, and the makeup suitcase with that untouched colorful stuff has toppled onto my stomach and exploded powder onto my scrubs.
Then I hear Mom run up the stairs, and I know she won’t see it my way. She loves you, talks out-loud sometimes about “Should we mail this to Midge?” while in the petite section, but she won’t get this. This blood pact I’ve created to interweave us across coasts. A promise of noses. I haven’t shifted, but my brain has a head rush like I’m trying to stand up. She’ll probably call Uncle Tim to come over and examine me. All he’ll find is a broken nose.
And she calls Tim, but she also calls an ambulance, and I wonder if deviated septums are treated in emergency rooms. As she places a hand towel under my nose — and I’m transforming it like my blood is a valuable dye — I think that would be considerate. A quicker turnaround than expected.
I don’t move, don’t hear her wailing to 911. The pain is dizzying, like a high. I can’t smell her perfume, and I’m optimistic that means surgery.
My limbs melt into the hardwood floor, and with my hands at my sides, I subtly squish my fat flesh, my side-thighs, my ballooning stomach pooch. This body feels like me.
I’m not just painting over something with plum or lime green. I’m renovating. Do you like that, M.J.? I like it.
I cough up blood and scare Mom, speckling her face with red drops like the acne she outgrew. Pretty as autumn’s changing trees, my mom, even in her fluid-smattered dismay. You said so when we were little. I don’t think she ever knew it. My face aches, but I think, how selfish.
My brain flits away. Think of neck hairs, think of Mrs. Carlisle, think of September, the coat of plum on my dry lips.
I think of the bottom of the pool’s deep end, standing weightless with my feet attached until I drift off, and when my head pops up above the water, I hope you’ll be there, congratulating me.
I imagine I hear the ambulance and my mom blubbering. Maybe Uncle Tim’s fingers gently tracing the curved of my fractured nose bridge. But now, I’m floating. I’m unflinchingly in my arms and stomach, and I repeat that these are mine.
And I’m tingly, needlepoints all over my face.
I’m gone, swimming into shallower waters, watching a little me — and a little you, Mary Jane — pet butterflies with our fingertips. Clean slates, reverent of change.
