by Sarah Bird
“So”—Double Dr. Dr. Robin checks the top of the chart for a name—“Juniper, you’ve had a little bump on the head.”
Robin looks up from Juniper’s chart.
Still hiding most of my face beneath the drape, I see an opportunity and decide to seize it. “Uh, actually, the head thing’s all good. Probably just the pelvic today; then I’m good to go. Know what I’m saying? Whatever. No worries. Yo, yo, yo.” I try to sound as much like an early twenties gal as I can. Juniper shoots me a frankly furious glare and makes strangled growling noises until the doctor looks her way, after which she pretends to be engrossed in a poster detailing the bones of the ear.
Robin sits on the rolling stool and zings over to the foot of the examining table. The paper on the table crinkles when she pats the spot at the very end and tells me to “scoot” my “bottom” all the way down. I insinuate my pudenda into the circle of light and warmth cast by the goosenecked examining lamp, and Robin angles it onto my panoramic vista.
Having a great time! Wish you were here!
Then she shoehorns the duck-billed speculum in and ratchets it open for the full spelunk. The instrument is freezing cold. No doubt Lilac Scrubs soaks the thing in ice water for wantons like Juniper.
Having slightly less of a great time.
Robin leafs through my outer foliage like a distracted housewife fingering a head of wilted radicchio. “Hmm, the venereal warts seem to have cleared up.”
I peek at Robin over the edge of my Brawny drape and see my absolute least favorite expression: a brow furrowing into inconvenient questions. One of which pops out. “Did you have the IUD removed?”
“IUD?”
Juniper stabs a finger at her own scenic wonderland.
“IUD. Yes, yes. Removed it myself. It was”—I have no idea what an IUD is capable of and hazard—“itching?”
Not the correct answer. Robin’s brow furrowing and the heat from the examining lamp both intensify as she leans in for the third degree. She checks the chart yet again, then swivels back to the sunken concavity of my belly. “Juniper, you seem to have lost quite a bit of weight.” Another peek. “Quite a bit.”
“Oh, thanks. You, too,” I answer automatically. “What are you doing? South Beach?”
Robin peers over the top of her glasses, then back to Juniper’s chart, then back to what romance novels would call the moist delta of my secret womanhood. From the delta, back to the chart, then back again to the delta. I am really not enjoying the way Robin’s gaze bobs back and forth, checking the chart against the viscera splayed out in front of her. Dr. Robin is counting my rings and discovering that the tree she is examining is significantly older than records indicate.
“Maybe just a quick Pap smear, then I’m out of here?” I suggest helpfully.
“I thought I recognized that voice!” Robin yanks the drape out of my hands. “Blythe? Blythe Young, that is you. Why are you here? Why do you have Juniper Montroy’s chart?” I recall Robin’s niggling affinity for rules, technicalities, laws. “Am I examining the wrong person?” She turns to Juniper, who is pressed against the ear poster trying to assume the shape of a eustachian canal. “You’re Juniper Montroy, aren’t you? Blythe, how did you get in here? Are you attempting to obtain services by fraudulent means?”
“Oh, God, no!” I try to sit up, but the speculum persuades me otherwise. “Whatever is happening, and I’m not saying that anything is happening, Juniper had no part in it whatsoever. I stole her student ID.”
“But she’s here.”
“Yes, but only because I threatened her.”
Robin’s gaze goes from my spindly physique, which has all the intimidating power of a set of wind chimes, to Juniper’s Valkyrian form with its star-halfback-on-a-girl’s-field-hockey-team muscularity. Robin quirks a skeptical brow and I backpedal.
“Threatened to expose her, uh, medical history,” I clarify. “Tell her parents or boyfriend or something.”
Robin can buy this. Governments have been brought down with less incriminating evidence than what is in Juniper’s chart. Seeing my hopes for a Pap smear fade, I grasp at a straw and ask, “I don’t suppose this would be the time to mention my migraines and how well they respond to Vicodin?”
The ill-timed Vicodin request brings my reunion with Dr. Dr. Robin to an abrupt end. “The only reason I’m not calling campus police,” she says by way of farewell, “is because Millie maintains that you two are still friends.”
Seconds later, Juniper and I are on the sidewalk being buffeted by students with mufflers wound around their necks to protect them from temperatures dipping dangerously into the mid-eighties.
“On the bright side,” I say, “although no prescriptions were written, no identity theft charges were filed either.”
Juniper snatches her ID back and stomps away.
The Warm Ocean of Petrodollars
UP TO SOLIDS YET?” Millie asks, holding out a tray of food she diverted from the kitchen. I have been hiding out in our room. Given Juniper’s pique about the health center incident, I think it best to lie low for a while. Millie is unaccountably cheerful as she slides the tray onto my lap and helps me tuck a napkin under my chin.
“Did you know that before you came to and hit your head you were out for three days?”
“Uh, yeah, I heard.” I poke at the dinner offerings: Lentils drearied even further with a greenish sheen of curry. Unpeeled carrots “steamed” to body temperature for a tepid dirt-flavored crunch. Irish soda bread streaked with salty veins of powdery baking soda.
Yum.
“We were so worried about you.”
“We?”
“Well, Sanjeev and I. I had to tell Sanjeev.”
“And he’s the…with the…” I pantomime shower cap.
“Yes. I can’t wait for you two to get to know each other better. I’ve told him so much about you.”
“You have?”
“Of course.”
Of course? “Like what?”
“Oh, just all the fun we used to have together. Like when we planted that herb garden in the back? That was the first time I ever ate pesto. Oh, and I told him about the scavenger party you organized when we all went to ritzy neighborhoods and said we were sorority girls going through rush and we had to get everything on our list: wine, Brie, crackers, smoked oysters, pâté. And we got it all. That was such a fun party.”
“Well, certainly cost-effective.”
“That was when the house first gelled. Blybees, you could get anybody to do anything. Sanjeev will be happy to see you up and about. He was worried when you still hadn’t come around after an entire day. Then even more worried because your sleep was so, so…troubled.”
“Troubled?”
“Well, you yelled a fair amount.”
“Listen, if I said anything, anything that might have mentioned, oh, the IRS or, gosh, I don’t know, Rohypnol—”
“No, you said things like, ‘Leave me the eff alone.’”
“I said ‘eff’?”
“No, you said the F word. Quite a bit actually.”
“Sorry.”
“Please, I’m no prude. I don’t care. Sanjeev was a little startled, however, when you told him to get his mothereffing hands off you.”
“Why were Sanjeev’s hands on me?”
“Well, after all the thrashing, you went completely still, so I put a mirror under your nose. Fortunately, there was condensation, but I was still worried. That’s when I had Sanjeev take a look.”
“Why?” I did not like the image of a strange foreigner in a shower cap examining me. “Is Sanjeev a doctor?”
“Not exactly. But his father is and he grew up helping him in the clinic for indigents that Dr. Chowdhury runs in Calcutta. Oops, did I say ‘Calcutta’? Sanjeev always corrects me about that. It’s Kolkata now. ‘Calcutta’ is the Anglicized version. Sanjeev says Kolkata probably originally meant ‘land of the goddess Kali.’”
Millie notices I am squinting involuntarily in an
attempt to filter out the excess verbiage. “Oops, sorry, I’m wandering. Anyway, Sanjeev was great. He checked your pupillary response with a penlight. Then he sort of rolled you from side to side and said, ‘Good oculocephalic reflex.’ Then, ‘No cluster breathing. No ataxic breathing. No Cheyne-Stokes.’”
Millie repeats Sanjeev’s pronouncements in a fake, deep voice, like Shirley Temple imitating Daddy. “The test you didn’t like was when he ground his knuckles into the bone right under your eye socket.”
“Can’t imagine why I wouldn’t have enjoyed that.”
“Yeah, that’s when you told him to take his mothereffing hands off you. Blythe, do you use drugs?”
“What?”
“Sanjeev went through your purse to make sure you weren’t, you know, on anything. And there were all these empty pill bottles. And lots of them had other people’s names on them.”
Oops, my borrowers.
“Oh those, yeah. I was filling prescriptions for some elderly neighbors of mine. Hip replacements. Hard for the old gals to get out.”
“That’s exactly what I told Sanjeev. I told him that Bamsie and Kippie Lee had to be the names of elderly shut-ins. Or, possibly, the pills were pet medications. But he still wanted to call in EMS.”
“Thank you, God, thank you for that. No EMS, okay? No authorities of any kind.”
“Well, Blybees, I’ve run on long enough, time for you to eat something.”
I am starved, but the thought of eating makes me sick. Even wonderful food, and curried lentils do not qualify as wonderful food. I push a hard chunk of carrot around the plate.
Millie places her hand on top of mine and I know it is time to pay up. I can’t stand to go through the whole charade, so I cut right to the chase. “Would it help if I accepted Jesus?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Buddha? Shiva?”
“Are you all right? Do I need to get the penlight or grind my knuckles into your eye socket?”
“Isn’t that what this is all about? Personal savior and all that?”
“You mean you think I took you in to convert you?”
“Well, maybe. Partially.”
“Blythe, you’re my friend.”
“But I haven’t been a very good one.”
“You were busy. Your life took you elsewhere. Your wedding. Oh my gosh, Princess Di couldn’t hold a candle to you. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned that, should I?”
“No, it’s fine. The parties were the best part of my marriage and that one was a doozy.”
“Blythe, I’m so sorry. When I read that you’d gotten back into catering I knew that you must have been heartbroken and needed to keep yourself busy. I mean, it couldn’t have been for the money, not after being married to Trey Dix the Third.”
“Oh, certainly not for the money.”
“The affairs you hosted at Pemberton Palace sounded like something out of the Gilded Age. I’m certain you raised a fortune for all those causes, the museum, the new library, Reading Is Fundamental, the Ballet Guild.”
I dip my head and appear modest. I’m not. I am biting my tongue so I won’t blurt out that almost the only thing raised by any of my parties was my social standing. After you fly in Donatella Versace or some other name and pay for a room at the Four Seasons, a few dozen replenishments of the minibar, and rotating teams of well-endowed “masseurs,” there is never much left over for the museum or ballet. “So you went to divinity school and became a minister?”
“Well, seminary, actually.”
“What flavor?”
“Episcopalian.”
“What made you…Why did you…Why are you laughing?”
“Nothing. It’s just funny to see you so hesitant and awkward.”
“Well, the priesthood or whatever, it’s—”
“Weird?”
“I wasn’t going to say ‘weird.’”
“Just think it, right?”
Yes. “No, no. Not at all.”
“Back when I was in seminary and people asked why I was going, it usually really meant either, ‘Hmmm, I didn’t know you were a religious nut’ or, ‘I guess this means that you’re the person who has to help me through my existential crisis and tell me why I’m on earth.’”
“That’s not it at all.” That is it exactly. And, P.S., Millie, tell me why I’m on earth.
“Then they would expect me to argue them into believing while they held me responsible for the Inquisition and Jerry Falwell and priests and altar boys and everything else Christianity has ever done.”
“How does this work? Are you affiliated with some church?”
“No, I was never ordained.”
“Is that like going through medical school but not getting your license?”
“Kind of. I can’t practice religion in any of the fifty states.”
“Really?”
“Blybees, can’t you tell when I’m kidding? But it’s sort of the truth.”
“So why weren’t you ordained?”
“Like I said, rhetorical skills lacking. Stage fright. Can’t be a preacher if you can’t preach. Funny, I was just talking to Sanjeev about this—”
Again with the Sanjeev?
“—and he told me something his father taught him. Which is that, essentially, a life of faith is a life of service. Sanjeev says that ordination or no ordination that’s exactly what I’m doing now. Ah well, can you trust a man in a shower cap?” She abruptly switches the subject. “Was the breakup really hard?” Millie winces sympathetically. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
Her concern makes me aware of how long it has been since anyone cared. How long I’ve been on my own, struggling to keep my head above water. Even, actually especially, with Trey; once his mother turned on me, I felt as if I were flailing about in a shark tank with the fins circling closer.
“How did you two meet?”
“At Trey’s youngest brother’s wedding. I was the photographer.”
“Of course! That’s great. You actually used your photography degree.”
“I should have been in pharmacology learning how to sedate hysterical brides or in psychology picking up tips on getting them to accept the reality that just because this is the veryveryvery most special day of their whole entire lives does not mean that they’re going to magically appear twenty pounds lighter in their photographs. Thank God for the diffusion filter.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s God’s special gift to women that makes it appear as if they were photographed in a steam bath. No crow’s-feet, laugh lines, complexion irregularities, mouths, noses, or ethnic identity. For some reason, most of my subjects wanted to look like Casper the Friendly Ghost. Just two heavily outlined and mascaraed black holes in a sheet of white. Of course, that can all be Photoshopped now.”
I had forgotten how great Millie’s laugh was. How wonderful it was to have her listen with such rapt attention. We’d fit together this way from the first moment I walked into the room. I never had any illusions about my need for an audience. A need that Millie filled with unconditional and deeply misguided adoration. I assumed she did it partly because she was cringingly grateful that I hadn’t taken one look at her jumbo bulk and immediately demanded to be assigned another roommate.
“You were always so fearless.”
“Bankruptcy will do that to a person. Besides, wedding photography turned out to have a lot of hidden benefits.” Like providing the perfect introduction to the anthropology of Austin society. From behind the protection of the lens, I learned names, net worth, whom to suck up to, whom to look through. And that is how I knew, when I was hired to help shoot the Withers-Dix union, just how huge a deal it was. Two of the richest, most influential families in not just Texas, but the entire country, coming together. It was a Medici moment. Officially, the bride’s colors were lilac and cream, but the actual hue that every molecule of the event was steeped in was green. The kind of dark, saturated green that
only marinating in oceans of money for several generations can impart. A green so assumed, so taken for granted, that it falls right out of any visible color spectrum and is perceptible only to those who’ve inherited the right rods and cones.
“Benefits like meeting a husband,” Millie says with a look of suppressed delight, as if I’d just gotten off a very good but very naughty one.
“Actually, I only got the gig because my former mother-in-law—”
“Peggy Biggs-Dix,” Millie blurts out like a child anticipating a favorite part of a bedtime story. “Wife of Henry Dix the Second, son of Henry Dix, nicknamed Uno, who was a wildcatter from Oklahoma who went bust, then made a fortune servicing the industry. Pipelines, right? I think I still have that issue of Texas Monthly.”
“Yeah. They started with pipelines and now the family has tentacles in every sheikhdom and caliphate where a dinosaur ever died.”
“Didn’t the article allude to some friction between Uno and his son Junior?”
“Henry ‘Junior’ Dix the Second.” I recall Trey’s quiet, detached father. He had been a giant disappointment to Trey’s grandfather Uno, whose swaggering braggadocio and questionable business practices stood out even in the bare-knuckled, boomtown oil bidness. Peggy, a connoisseur of humiliation, especially her husband’s, loved to tell the story of how Uno would summon his shy, bookish son out to the patio, order Trey’s father to stand in the sun, then yell out, “Well, by damn! The little turd does cast a shadow!”
“Uno and Junior were very different people” is all I tell Millie. No need to go into what a relief it must’ve been to Junior when his father packed him off to boarding school at the age of ten. The next time Uno clapped eyes on his son, Junior had a law degree from Harvard and a hoity-toity wife from a fancy Boston family who rode him like a Shetland pony. Apparently, Peggy Biggs came with tons of class but no cash. She was the one who maneuvered her husband’s rise from, essentially, a clerk in the company’s sleepy legal division into the largest shareholder in the thirteenth largest privately held energy consortium in the country.
“What is Peggy like?”
“Ah, my former mother-in-law.”
