An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [35]
What I’m saying is I was already not Nurse Batshit’s favorite student.
“Well,” I stuttered, “I mean, I don’t know, it’s not, it’s just, I don’t think — listen, you don’t need to convince me anyhow: I’m married to a European.”
“I have a European parent,” she said, in a voice that suggested that I meant European to be a euphemism for nudist: she understood, but this really wasn’t the place to discuss it.
I’m glad I wasn’t being graded.
4. An infant CPR class. This took place in the basement of the public library and was the most oversubscribed class of all, as well as the most motley: there were two other heavily pregnant women, a bunch of day care workers, a few other couples, and some EMTs brushing up on their skills. The teacher was a pepper pot of a woman with six kids. She’d brought two of them with her, a pair of mismatched nine-year-old fraternal twin boys.
The rescue mannequins were the usual beige objects that looked as though they’d died of heroin overdoses, even the two infant dummies. There weren’t enough to go around, so to make up for the lack, the teacher had brought a variety of dolls. For instance, Elmo. And Kermit the Frog. And the green Teletubby, the Cat in the Hat, a Rugrat, a character I’d never heard of called Doug, Raggedy Ann, and a Cabbage Patch doll. The history of beloved commercial dolls. She gave us pieces of plastic to lay over the mouths — or muzzles, or whatever you call the thing through which a Teletubby takes its nourishment — dental dams, essentially, to make safe the practice of artificial respiration on toys. The man next to us had the green Teletubby. He was the only person there who was learning for a specific, already earthbound person: his son, he said happily in a Chinese accent as thick as his crew cut, was five days old. You would have easily picked him out as the new father, he was so tender with the Teletubby, so cautious as he supported its head and adjusted the bit of plastic wrap.
The twins stood in when we learned about older children.
“Here’s where you press,” the instructor said, indicating the spot on the littler twin. He had blond ringlets and a potbelly.
“And then they throw up!” he said.
“Yes, sometimes,” she said.
“And then they eat it!”
“That doesn’t happen,” his mother said, frowning.
“Who wants to save me?” the taller twin asked the students politely, but we were all a little shy about rescuing a perfectly safe boy, right in sight of his mother.
I made sure I got my hands on one of the actual dummies, the kind with a balloon down its throat, whose chest rose when you blew into the mouth: I needed the physical reassurance. I put my hand across its torso. As long as I breathed, the dying plastic baby breathed. When I stopped, it stopped.
“Listen,” the woman announced suddenly, in the voice I recognized from fourth grade, a room full of kids working on projects, a teacher with a point: listen up, people. “Listen, children don’t die. They rarely die.”
She said this to calm us. If you think that children rarely die, then it’s easier to save them. I dandled the plastic baby on my knee and bit my lip.
My notes from that class say:
WORRY IN THIS ORDER
A ir
B reathing
C irculation
And that of course is why we were taking all those courses: We wanted to be told, Worry in this order. We were delighted to know the damage a single loose almond in the cab of a car could do in the event of an accident, because then we could remove that almond and be vigilant about future dropped almonds. We wanted to hear all the details of a caesarean just in case; we wanted to know ahead of time how common vacuum-assisted births were. Once, we had belonged to the school of Cross That Bridge When We Come to It. Now we wanted all bridges mapped, the safety of their struts, their likelihood of washing out, their vulnerability to blackguards,