Chloe Doe (4 page)
I tell him I’m penniless.
“I can’t pay your bill.”
“The city’s picking up the tab.” He says not to worry. “Why don’t we start with how old you are.”
Not a question. Phrased to make me feel more like talking. He paid attention in class.
“Eighteen.”
“In three or four years?”
“I was born the day Bush became president.” The first Bush.
He takes a minute to think it out. “Seventeen.”
“Congratulations,” I say. “Your degree is a real one.”
He thinks this is funny. The lines around his eyes and nose deepen. “You’re not the first to question it,” he says.
I can read his face as easily as a traffic light.
“What do you want to tell me today?” he asks.
Green.
“Who cuts your hair?”
“My wife,” he says. “She does a good job of it, don’t you think?”
I tell him it’s a mistake. “When your job is getting people to trust you, you shouldn’t look like The Joker.”
He smiles, wide enough that I can count his teeth.
He is quicker than the others who have tried to split me open and look at my insides. Who have diagnosed me as a “product of an abusive home” or “mani[a]cally depressed” or “criminal element.”
“Is it my hair or my good mood that disturbs you most?” he wants to know.
“Why don’t we get down to business,” I say. “What will it take to get out of here?”
I slide off the chair and am kneeling at his feet. I’m so fast, I’m there a full five seconds before he reacts, but then his face rises above me like a red moon. It says STOP without him even having to speak.
“Get back in your seat,” he says.
His voice is tight but not angry. His lips are an even line, and I think about why this bothers me. The best I can come up with is that his frown weighs more than his smile.
I stand up so I can look down on him. I’m losing my edge, what keeps me alive on the street. Not caring. Pretending to not care. It’s an art and I’m da Vinci. I ease back into my happy-to-be-here face.
“Your hair,” I tell him. “It bothers me more than your good mood.” In fact, I say, a haircut would dramatically improve our doctor–patient relationship. “After that, we can work on your attitude.”
I stole his line and I like my cleverness so much that I smile at him and take my seat.
“OK,” he says, “now we have some real work to do. You don’t list a living relative.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Your mother’s not alive?”
I tell him I doubt it. “Some people die when they lose a loved one.” I believe this with my whole body.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
I’ve lost track of days and mark time now by the hour.
“Guess,” he says.
But I don’t need to. I remember the exact moment. I could give him month, day, and year. I could tell him the sky was the darkest I’d ever seen it. Even the lights in the homes of the people I knew seemed farther away than the stars.
“When was the last time you saw your mother, Doc?”
“Christmas. She stayed for two weeks.”
“A little hard on the wife and kids?”
“Harder on the son. When?”
“You think working out how I feel about my mother will cure me, Doc? You think she’s the key to my happiness?”
“You know how you feel about her. You’re mad. And that’s good. It means you know you deserve better than you got.”
I have one of those moments when you know someone’s standing on your shadow. He’s so fast, I didn’t see him coming. I look him in the eye, see he knows it himself. He’s got that look athletes get when they win the gold. He’s pleased with himself and the whole world.
“I’m not mad,” I tell him.
“Yes, you are.”
He’s so sure of it, my body gets hot and tight. I’m on my way to thinking I want to rip his head off and use it for an ashtray before I realize the psychology he’s using on me.
“You’re pretty good,” I tell him. “But I’m not mad.”
Before he lets me go, he tells me what life looks like. “There’s the walk into battle. The battle itself. And the walk away.” It’s a cycle we repeat. Every day. Sometimes it’s over small stuff. Sometimes it’s life and death.
“Our goal is the peace that follows victory. I want you to spend the next week thinking about what that peace would look like to you.”
I want to tell him I don’t remember winning anything in my life, but my throat is dry and swallowing doesn’t help.
“I want you to think about what you have to give up to get it.”
I
n each room there are two beds, one long dresser, half to each, and a beveled mirror, the shatterproof kind, so we won’t kill ourselves or our neighbor.
They say, No fighting. No taking your
prójimo,
your roommate, your friend and putting her head through the wall, or the door or the window. We will behave like
cuates,
best buddies.
We have our own bathroom, with a toilet and a shower cubicle, a sink and a plastic tree for hanging our toothbrushes. Towels are distributed each morning and checked off a balance sheet when we hand them back: There will be no hanging, no strangulation, no desperate escape attempts out a second-story window.
The bathroom is small. You can’t stand inside it and take a deep breath. It’s like my old apartment on the Amtrak: a coffin.
The doors to our rooms remain open. There’s no exception to this rule. We dress at seven a.m., when we can expect a certain amount of privacy; male staff workers don’t check the halls, don’t stick their heads through an arch for a Hurry-up, until 7:20.
We eat breakfast at 7:30 and then have an hour of free time, to read the newspaper, watch
Good Morning America,
or talk to staff.
We can make special requests: for a TV show that evening, for some time in the hospital’s library, for a hairbrush, for apple juice instead of milk at lunch. They count your points.
Yes, you can watch
Charmed
tonight. Or
No, you’ve earned only enough for a diary or a turn with the hot rollers. You want that instead?
You want neither. You want your TV show.
Lo siento,
they say. Come back when you decide.
Your points are only good for a week, and then you start over. There’s no saving up for something you really want. Like a bar of rose-scented soap.
There’s a list of fifteen items you can purchase with a week’s worth of earnings:
1. the pick of Friday’s rented movie — 18 points
2. use of the unit’s Walkman and the new Beyoncé CD — 18 points
3. your choice for weekly chore — 15 points
4. an extra hour before lights out — 15 points
5. an hour of your favorite TV show — 15 points
6. choice of dessert — 15 points
7. writing journal — 12 points
8. hospital library use — 12 points
9. hot rollers — 12 points
10. hairbrush — 12 points
11. toothbrush — 8 points
12. shampoo — 6 points
13. toothpaste — 6 points
14. bar soap — 6 points
15. visitors — 2 points
The morning is for private therapy — there are seventeen girls to be heard and only five days in the workweek. We meet with our self-help groups and our social workers. With visitors from the outside.
The afternoon is lunch, group, chores, and a little free time to think about where we are and where we’d like to be.
We are assigned one day a week to wash our laundry, unless there are emergencies.
We set out plates, cups, and plastic forks and knives for dinner. They don’t miss a chance to protect us from ourselves. We, who are unlucky in love, who might use the prongs of a fork to pierce our hearts.
We watch the evening news with Brian Williams.
We bargain for the right to a vegetarian diet when we see it’s meat loaf.
More TV.
We thumb through
Cosmopolitan
and
Us
magazine. We sew buttons onto our shirts.
Write letters to friends who have forgotten us.
We talk among ourselves about what we miss the most: the clean, fresh air of our lives on the outside.
We read:
Salem’s Lot, The Hanson Brothers: A Biography, The Secret of Creating Your Future, Love’s Savage Embrace, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
We count how many days, and has it grown into months, that we’ve been here.
On Fridays we have occupational therapy: we use the computers to build a résumé; learn how to sit for an interview (legs crossed, hands folded, smile, even if it takes all you’ve got); we learn how to dress, no flashy colors and nothing above the knee on show; they teach us a proper handshake; we role-play the perfect scenario.
Business leaders from the community come and tell us what they like to see in an applicant: nicely groomed, smile, know your stuff, be polite. They’ll be trusting us with their livelihood — their customers. We’ll be the front people, representing the business. We can’t chase away their only source of income.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays we have recreational therapy. Physical exercise is important for a full recovery. The endorphins are a natural high. You can’t be unhappy when you’re running three miles around the gym floor. You’ll feel better physically and you’ll feel better about yourself. You’ll like who you are. Exercise is the key to changing your future. It’s control.
We play basketball and learn the importance of a team spirit. Of cooperation. People depend on you. You don’t want to let them down.
Do something wrong and you lose. You’ve let down your team. You feel shame, if you’re any kind of team player.
This kind of lesson works in your everyday life, they say. Teamwork will help you get along with others. You’ll love your neighbor. You’ll stop at the scene of a car accident and give first aid. You’ll develop a world conscience — you’ll want to recycle, you’ll stop using plastic, and you’ll shut off the light when you leave a room.
On Wednesdays we have art therapy. The first week we made greeting cards. They went to all the
carrozas
in the nursing home down the street. We learn to crochet or knit. We sew holiday crafts: wreaths that went to the local churches and ornaments that went to hospitals. We paint with watercolors. We mold clay into ashtrays or hot plates. Some of our things are sold at the hospital auxiliary.
They tell us we do the art to vent our frustrations. To provide a welcome hello to forgotten people. To let someone who’s suffering know there’s someone who knows. We do it as an outlet for bottled pain and violations.
Lights-out is ten p.m. We lay in our beds and wish we could fall asleep without remembering other times we lay in bed and wished we could just fall asleep. Or play dead. In our homes, where we had maybe a mother who was blind and deaf and a father who stole our secrets.
T
oday is my first time in group and all the other
chicas
with their long nails tap-tap-tapping against the arms of their chairs are waiting for my story.
“I’m one of the best,” I say. I can nickel-and-dime them down to the lint in their pockets.
“That’s why I do what I do, Doc. I’m a natural.” I was born into my trade.
“I have
talento.
”
A real gift.
You get them really hot. You get them so all they’re thinking about is getting off, they’re begging for it,
Baby, baby, now!
And I say, That’s going to cost you a little more. We’ve already run through the sixty-dollar happy hour.
By then they’re willing to pay.
That’s one of the benefits of the job. Any extra is yours. Manny Marquez never knows. And what he doesn’t know is good for me.
Dr. Dear leans forward in his chair. “Tell us more,” he says. Tell us a typical day in the life of Chloestreetwalker, he says. “What is it like? What concerns you the most?”
Today he’s playing dress-up in a white coat like the other doctors. I like him better when he shows a little of himself. When he looks less like he’s practicing and I’m the mouse in the spin wheel.
Here it is, I say, my autobiography.
There are some troubles in my line of work. Sure. Things that make you wonder if you’re ever going to get ahead.
AIDS. You worry about that all the time. Even while you’re suiting up. Even when you have him all wrapped up in a gold-seal Trojan, you worry if this is the one that’s got the hole. Is this the one that’s going to break? Is he poison? Is this one seventy-five-dollar trick going to have it in for me?