And Now You Can Go (14 page)

From behind, a mother reaches around my torso and digs into the bag. I turn around and from the other side of me a girl reaches for my personal favorite, a polar bear. I try to take it back from her and she yanks it and runs. A boy with long fingernails grabs a dog with floppy ears. I try to offer him another, bigger one. But a taller boy wearing a sand dollar around his neck pulls it out of my hands. Soon my bag is empty. "I want them," more children and parents yell. Their words almost become a chant. I hold the bag upside down to demonstrate the supplies have run out. I shake it vigorously.

I go back into the dorm room and take out a box of almost one hundred sunglasses my mother packed. They're all wrapped in an old blue satin sheet. I know this sheet. When it was on my parents' bed, and my parents were out for the night, Freddie and I would crawl

into its cool smoothness and watch TV:
The Dukes ofHazzard, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island
. The glasses and the stuffed animals were supposed to last the whole week, but the thought of keeping them here for later distribution makes me feel like a coward, or like I'm withholding something for no reason except that I have the power to do so. Hundreds of lenses stare up at me as I carry the sheet-lined box outside.

I push my way through men and women and children who think I have more toys, and set the box in the middle of the crowd. I turn away so I won't witness the commotion around the sunglasses. A minute later, when I turn back around, even the sheet and the box are gone.

Inside the hospital, there's shade but it's still hot. An inch above my breastbone, my shirt is wet. I never knew it was possible to sweat there.

I help organize the medications. I write each letter of the alphabet on a card and prop the cards up on three long tables. A nurse named Viola, in her early thirties and the youngest in our group aside from me, helps me unload all the medicines from the boxes. We put the Advil behind the "A" card and the Vioxx behind the "V."

"Are you single?" Viola asks. She has black hair, dyed blue at the ends. "Yeah," I say.

"So am I," Viola says. "At least now I am."

Viola tells me that just before the trip she asked her husband to move out. "He'll be gone by the time I get back," she says.

I debate asking her whether or not she's going to change the locks. Before I can decide, the doctor who my mother calls "the Hawk" calls me over to her. The Hawk has a hookish nose and wears a brooch with three monkeys on it. They're the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys.

She asks me to make my way through the crowd by the door and examine the shoes and chests of those in line. I'm supposed to make sure the people seeking free help are truly in need. Bras and leather shoes are the telltale signs of money. I see one woman, in a red shirt, who's obviously wearing a bra and point her out to the Hawk. I feel like a narc.

"Can't she still see a doctor?" I say.

"For every person who receives treatment, there's someone who doesn't," the Hawk explains. "We have to make sure there's no way they'd be able to pay a doctor."

I help out at the makeshift pharmacy. When Dr. Silang calls out the prescription, I find it. Advil is popular for headaches, most of which are caused by bad teeth. Many people are missing mouthfuls. One couple is given Prozac. A lot of the patients have colds. Almost all the children are given antibiotics for one illness or another. One woman brings in her son who has what the nurses call "water head." His forehead is at least six inches high and his eyes are half-closed. For him, nothing can be done. "He'll die before he's twelve," Viola tells me.

That evening the sunset is brighter than the sunrise. Some women from the village set fires in cinnamon-colored garbage cans and cook fish for dinner. I eat rice and fruit.

On Sunday morning no one is outside the hospital. They've gone to mass. My mother and I walk over to the church and pay an old woman with no teeth fifty pesos for a fan. The pews are packed; seven hundred fans ward off heat. We find two seats toward the back.

The priest my mother mistakenly hugged is giving the sermon. I understand nothing. At some point, the woman in the pew in front of us turns to say something to me, but her eyes look to the left of me, and then the right. I smile and shake my head to signal that I don't understand. It's only when she turns back around, mistakenly thinking there's no one behind her, that I realize she's blind.

The woman is in her late twenties, with beautiful long hair. Buttons run down the back of her short-sleeved flowered sundress. Her skin looks perfectly and evenly moist, the way they spray fruit to look in magazines. Her three daughters sit on either side.

But then the third one, the one sitting furthest from her, gets up and leaves. The mother looks alarmed, her head moves in each direction, like a lighthouse beam. She can't see a thing. She says something to the daughters who are still sitting; they try not to giggle.

When she reaches over to where the now departed girl was sitting, one of the girls slides over so that the mother touches hair. The mother feels the barrette, knows the difference, understands she's being tricked, and gets upset all over again.

My mother and I watch the whole interaction. The woman's eyes turn in my direction; they're intensely vacant. She doesn't have a fan, but looks hot, so I hand her mine. "
Maráming salá-mat
," she says. She doesn't see that my mother and I are the only foreigners in the church. She fans herself so hard, I can hear nothing but the sound of her rapid movements—the frazzled, flapping wings of a wounded bird.

I turn around and see the escaped daughter standing under the arched entrance to the church. She's five and wearing a dress that's too long for her, and white Mary Janes that are scuffed and too large. I nudge my mother and she spots the girl. She excuses herself from the pew and approaches the girl. My mother's light shawl slips off her shoulders as she bends down and I know she's complimenting the girl's shoes. That's something she always

does: compliments kids' shoes. She once told me shoes are one thing kids are always proud of.

The girl smiles and looks at her shoes. She touches them, and then my mother's hair, which is the only blond hair I've seen here—my hair is still dyed dark. My mother takes the girl's hand and leads her back to her pew. The blind mother yells at the girl for a minute, and then holds her tight. Then she lets her play with the fan.

After church, everyone hurries back to the hospital. They run past my mother and me, dirt and dust rising. A pedicab stops to offer us a ride. We decline. We walk past shacks with men holding roosters up by the scruffs of their necks, trying to strengthen their limbs for the rooster fights.

On Monday the surgeries begin.

The group I belong to is doing cataracts. I'm going to be working with Dr. Cruz, my mother, and Viola. I put on a blue scrub suit and tighten the white shoestring belt around my waist. The string on my mothers scrub suit is dark blue, on Viola's it's white, and on Dr. Cruz's scrub suit the drawstring is green. I wonder if this means anything. The color of belts on scrub suits could be like the colors of belts in karate. I tell my mother my theory.

"Different colored belts for the different sizes. Medium, large, and extra-large," she says, and shakes her head.

Over breakfast (rice, mangoes, dried fish, colored eggs), Dr. Cruz explained the cataract operation to me. He said the lens capsule is like a Ziploc bag and the cataract is the jelly inside. "What you want to do is get out the jelly," he said. "If the cataract is really bad, it's more like a rock than jelly."

Next, he taught me how to eat one of the blue eggs. I cracked open the top and slurped the liquid. I rinsed it down with coffee and tried not to make a face.

The patients who have been chosen to be operated on today are sitting high on hospital beds in the hallways, their families gathered around them like fallen petals around a vase. It's my job to take off the patients' shoes, if they have any, and put blue shoe covers over their feet.

I'm wearing shoe covers over my sneakers. On my head I wear a light blue cap and over my mouth I wear a mask. It ties twice in the back, and reminds me of a backless shirt Sarah owns.

The first patient is a woman in her sixties. Her English is passable; her Philippine dialect obscure. I help her thin, heavy-skinned arms into a surgical gown. My mother comes out to the hall. "We're ready to operate," she says.

Viola and I wheel the patient into the operating room, and the doctors move her onto the operating table.

"For the first operation," Dr. Cruz says to me, "why don't you just observe."

Two other doctors are performing cataract operations on two other operating tables in the same room; there are two other doctors performing two other cataracts in the room across the hall. I try to concentrate on our patient.

Dr. Cruz narrates to me what he's doing; he uses a needle to inject 5 ccs of 2 percent Xylocaine beneath the woman's right eyeball.

"This might sting," my mother says to our patient. "It's just to numb your eyes a bit." It's unclear how much the woman understands.

Viola applies a topical anesthetic to the woman's eye area with a cotton ball. The anesthetic is mud-colored.

"Both eyes open," Dr. Cruz says. "Look at the light." He uses the foot pedals, like he's playing piano, to raise and lower and adjust the microscope.

"Your eye is wiggling," he says. "Look at the light without any motion. I need your help. Both eyes open. Your eyes are dancing around. I need your help, I can't do this without you."

Through an eyedropper, my mother squeezes saline solution into the woman's eyes every minute to keep them moist. With her hair up in the cap, and without makeup, my mother looks very old. I try not to look in her direction. When I do, I don't think of her as my mother.

The woman is lying flat under different-colored sheets. Over her body is a dark blue sheet, over her torso, a lighter blue one, and from her chest to her neck is a light green one. She looks like a present about to be wrapped in tissue paper.

Viola unboxes a lens. The box is labled "SA40N 20.5 Allergan intraocular lens." She places the sticker from the box on the woman's medical record.

"You're almost finished. You're doing well," Dr. Cruz says. The woman laughs, relieved.

The lens is foldable and clear, like a contact. With sterile, gloved fingers, my mother pinches it in half and eases it inside an inserter. "The lens is folded like a burrito to go through a tiny incision and then it opens up," Dr. Cruz says as he squeezes the lens into the

old woman's eye. My mother sprays water on the eye and Dr. Cruz uses a utensil called a lens hook to adjust the lens to its proper place. A tube dilates the eye and he sews a stitch on the eyeball to stop it from bleeding. My mother squeezes drops into the woman's eyes. With her index and middle fingers, she rubs cortisone above and beneath the woman's lids.

My mother's fingers! They're large and manly. She grew up on a farm in Italy, milking cows and having slumber parties in the hay in the barn. When I was younger, I slept in that same barn with my cousins and woke up with scratches all over my body. When I was seventeen my mothers fingers reached up inside of me. I had tried to have sex for the first time with a guy who had four toes and was in Model UN, representing Denmark. I had used a Today sponge and afterward couldn't get it out. I called the hot-line number on the box, got the voice of a male munching on what sounded like potato chips, and hung up.

I went crying to my mother. "Please don't be mad about what I'm going to tell you." "Well, what are you going to tell me?" she said.

"First, promise you won't be mad."

She promised and she wasn't. Her fingers reached up inside of me and pulled out the sponge.

Dr. Cruz pushes the foot pedal on the left and then the one on the right. Underneath his shoe covers I see his Nikes. What kind of shoes did I expect a doctor to wear?

"Brand new," Dr. Cruz says to the woman. "Remember not to rub your eyes." "Do I get a lollipop?" the patient asks.

We all laugh. How does she know this word in English? One of the other operations in our room is already finished, another is still going on.

I wheel her past the other beds and out to the hallway where hundreds of patients in surgical gowns and their families are waiting. There's no recovery room in this hospital. I look around at all the faces staring at me with confused hope. "Next!" I say, louder than I expected to.

By night, the five ophthalmologists have performed almost twenty-eight operations in the two rooms. I've assisted on seven cases. Three of the cataracts, the ones about to burst, took almost two hours each. When I go to bed, I'm so tired from standing in the heat I don't notice the doctor's snore, or the dissonant breathing of everyone in the room. I fall asleep, my body so heavy I feel I've crashed straight through the cot and onto the floor.

The Hawk has brought binoculars. "Of course she has them," my mother says. My mother tries to make hawk noises, but she sounds more like a pigeon.

I borrow the binoculars and walk up to the third floor of the hospital, where there's a balcony with a railing painted bright green. Above the many palm trees, I look through the lenses and out into the ocean. There are seven thousand islands that make up the Philippines. Dr. Cruz told me that there's one island he's heard about where seven families live, that these people have never been off the island, and they have no communication with anyone else. "All they do is fish and farm and eat."

I hold up the binoculars and adjust them and stare out at the South China Sea.

To shower I fill an orange bucket with water from the tap and locate a plastic scoop that could be intended for sand castles or for cooking. I lug the bucket into a shower stall that has small brown hexagonal tiles and a showerhead that doesn't work. I look around for soap. There's none and now I'm naked and it's too late to go out and find some.

I stop and examine my stomach. I wonder if my daughter— the one I'll never meet—will have this pudge her whole life too.