Clown Girl - Monica Drake [9]
“Off is good,” I said.
“Or maybe a reading lamp,” and he turned on a third, out of my reach. Soon the whole room was blasting bright, and it was clear who ran the show.
A dietician’s note on the side of the breakfast tray read, “Low fat, low sodium, no caffeine.” I saw between the lines, into their code: Low patience, low humor, no tolerance. Clown.
The man pulled open the blinds with a clatter. My view was an alley. He left me in the glow of every light, my own electric sun.
I stabbed a plastic spork into the sponge of pancake, lifted it, and the heavy dough fell off the stubby tines. I tried again. Halfway to my mouth, pancake dropped to the front of my robe in a sticky smooch. I picked the food up with my fingers, syrup trailing, and licked the empty spork; the grease slick of margarine on the back of the rounded plastic was a non-food I hadn’t tasted in years.
Mid-lick of the spork, a cardiologist ducked into my room. He reached to shake my hand, and blew into the steam on a Styrofoam cup of coffee held in his other hand. I reached back with sticky fingers, breakfast rocking like a raft on the ocean of my lap.
“Well, yes,” the cardiologist said, and drew his hand away. “Nice to meet you.” He searched for a place to set his coffee on the bedside table, then reached for my thin paper napkin and wiped his fingers. Napkin stuck to his fingers in shredded tufts like an old man’s ear hair. He sat on the edge of my bed and puzzled over my chart like it was the Sunday Times.
“Don’t take it personally,” he said, finally. “The long delay yesterday, the difficulty with diagnosis. We go by statistics, judge by likelihood. Thin women, young as you are, generally don’t have heart trouble.” He slid a pen from his front pocket. Made a note.
Thin women. Clown women. Skinny girls like me.
Not heart attacks, no. Skinny women have other problems. They double over, pelvis in knots, and drop stillborn babies in public places—bloody, tiny, and blue. Women have anxiety attacks, not heart attacks; they worry too much, burst into tears, faint. Ta da!
Crazy.
“It seems your mitral valve wasn’t closing properly,” he said, and made a hand gesture like a quacking duck. His thumb snapped against his fingers. His pen, still in hand, pointed up through the duck’s beak like an oversized cigar. “That made your aortal valve work overtime. Maybe a lack of potassium. Do you eat regularly?” The duck flattened, and swirled down to my plate of pancakes.
I shrugged.
He said, “What’d you have for lunch yesterday?”
“I worked through lunch. A gig,” I said. “I had a latex ham sandwich. It makes pig sounds, squeals under pressure.”
He didn’t laugh but only nodded, made a note, then tugged at an invisible beard on the tip of his chin. I said “It’s a prop, right? For the joke: how’s a ham sandwich like a stoolie?”
“What else, what else?” He waved a hand in circles, like a traffic cop asking me to pull forward.
“Exploding bonbons, smoking gum. A self-refilling pitcher of white fake milk. That’s a sight gag that wins every time. I’m trying to cut back on the fake milk, but it’s hard. Audiences love it, Doc. I can’t give it up.”
He made another note. Without looking at me, he said, “What about real food?”
Real food made me want to vomit. For weeks, I had no interest. My pelvis was an empty room, food an unwelcome guest. Instead of answering, I asked, “You think caffeine could’ve brought this on?” It read decaf only all over the dietician’s card on the side of my breakfast tray.
The cardiologist looked up from the notes he was writing. “You know, that’d be an interesting experiment. We could get you all jacked up on caffeine, see what happens. But for now, try to eat a little more. Start with your breakfast.” He tapped my tray. “It’s good stuff.”
He had the sort of personality that would let a body live a long time—inquisitive, delighted, and unconscionable. He was money and science, old skin and thinning hair and rings worn into grooves below his knuckles like metal around wood. He cleared his throat and said, “Your chart shows you were admitted through