The Blue Cotton Gown (24 page)

“I look to see if anyone’s watching.” He swivels his head back and forth, acting it out. “Which one should I take? An elderly woman in a polka-dot dress comes out of the ladies’ room and nods. I take a deep breath and go in with the sharks.”

Kaz, the man, rubs the side of his face, feeling his two-day-old beard. “Yeah, it was a milestone.” He grins.

I stand and give his arm an affectionate squeeze. “Hey, you’re getting muscles! That’s one of the side effects of the testosterone.” “Yeah, I’m taking some supplements and working out with

weights too.”

“That’s great.” I listen to his heart and lungs with my stethoscope. “The beard looks good. How ’bout everything else? You doing okay? Your labs are fine.” I hand over the copy of the patient’s results for cholesterol, testosterone, CBC, and liver enzymes.

Kaz grimaces. He stares at the sheet of paper without reading it, then hands it back. “I guess I’m okay, but not really. I’ve had some problems at home.”

“You mean Jerry?”

“Yeah. She’s having trouble adjusting to me being a guy. We were always a
lesbian couple,
see? We hung out with other gay women. Now what are we? A heterosexual couple? I don’t think so. So who do we hang out with? Jerry misses her old
girlfriend,
Kasmar, but I want to be her
husband,
Kaz.”

“Well, you’re still with her, right? You’re still working it out. You may have changed outside, but you are still
you
inside.”

“Yes and no. I’m more confident now, more aggressive. I don’t put up with bullshit as much, expect more respect from people I meet. And women are starting to come on to me.” He grins sug-gestively. His straight teeth are even and white.

“Women? Really. Like what? When?”

“Oh, like at the agricultural conference I just went to in Syra-cuse. I had quite an entourage of female graduate students following me around.” The smile fades. “But Jerry, she’s still the love of my life. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost her.”

“Have you tried counseling? Maybe you’re just in an adjustment phase. You have to admit, the situation is weird. I mean, to be in love with a woman who’s turned into a guy.”

Kaz snorts and rubs his beard again. “Yeah, we’ll be okay. We have an appointment with our therapist next week. I’ll tell you how it goes when I come back next time.”

He stands up to leave. “We’ll be okay,” he says again, convincing himself.

I head for the lab. Did I do the right thing by helping Kasmar the woman become a man? I look back down the hall. As if sensing my thoughts, Kaz smiles and raises his hand in salute.

Mutiny

It’s 4:35, the last patient’s gone, and the staff is finishing up for the day. The receptionists file the labs, pushing the heavy sliding metal chart racks back and forth. I sit at my desk, staring bitterly at my last chart, running my fingers over its shiny yellow surface.

Our monthly meeting this noon had not gone well. The secretaries, nurses and practitioners, aware that we owe the Feds another fifteen thousand dollars, have voiced their concerns about the pre-carious future of the practice.

*

“If you’re going to have to close, you ought to tell us. Don’t drag it out. We’ll have to find new jobs. We have families,” says Celeste. Her brown eyes single me out. I keep my face still but tighten my

jaw. If I bite any harder I might crack a filling. Celeste doesn’t look away. “You should have realized a long time ago that Gorham was worthless.”

She’s right, but Tom made decisions too, and yet somehow he’s always
exempt
from such criticism. A few heads nod, agreeing with Celeste, all eyes on me. I study the women in their blue checkered uniforms, which we provide for them, a different color for every day of the week. We pay the best wages around. Granted, we are struggling, but where is the gratitude? Where’s the support?

On the other hand, I reflect, they all have families. They depend on their incomes to make mortgage payments and keep food on the table. They have a lot at stake here too. They need these jobs. Celeste is just the only one with the guts to say it.

“If I were running this business, I’d hire an experienced office manager. Someone who knows what she’s doing,” Celeste goes on. I listen to her without expression, thinking that hiring an administrator would cost another forty-five thousand a year. Like we have that money!

*

Though I resent being locked in the stocks before the whole village, I realize that there is frequently truth in hearing what you don’t want to hear. I have my bachelor’s degree in health-care administration, but I’m not an experienced CEO.

What hurts most is that while I was being publicly lashed, no one came to my defense. No one, not even Tom. What was he
thinking?
If my husband were the victim of this kind of flogging, I’d have backed him up. I was being blamed for all the practice’s problems, while he sat picking his nails.

I should quit! What the hell . . . I brood for a moment then open the chart on the desk in front of me. When I think of the stories my patients tell me, my troubles always seem small. Like Rosa’s story.

I push back my desk chair and stand, stretching my back. It’s time to go home. Downstairs in the parking lot, most of the cars are gone, and the street lamps glow yellow. It gets dark so fast in the winter. I see Trish plowing steadily across the parking lot, her long blue coat blowing open, and I tap on the window, but it’s four stories down. I know she won’t hear me.

It’s 5:15, and through my closed office door, I hear the staff jok-ing as they clock out. Linda is clowning around. Apparently they have no idea how they hurt me. To hell with them all!

When their voices fade, I throw on my coat and scarf. Outside the wind has come up and it’s raining hard. The roads will be icy, and the storm will be worse before I get home.

rosa

Rosa’s annual exam and wellness visit is going smoothly until, after reviewing her medications, I inquire, “You’re taking both Xanax and Prozac? Is there a reason?”

“Is there a reason you need to know?” Rosa asks. Her dark brown eyes flash defensively. The fifty-year-old Hispanic woman I recognize as the secretary for the VP at the university hospital. Her smooth, unlined brown face belies her age.

“I guess, I just wondered because both medications will work for anxiety, but Xanax is quite addicting.”

The woman takes a deep breath, looks down at her blue cotton gown, and then back up at me. “I might as well tell you. My son is in prison. He’s in prison and every day when I think of him, I cry. He’ll be there for ten years. No parole. I don’t usually like to get into this.”

“I’m sorry. It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.”

“No, it’s all right.” The patient softens her low voice. “It’s just that, how do I explain . . . He was an ordinary kid, a good kid. We’re

not this kind of family. Do you have children?” I nod. “Well, eight years ago, my husband had an affair with a woman in Delmont. To tell you the truth, it wasn’t the first, just the most blatant. I got a divorce. I couldn’t trust him again. I could never forgive him. I tried, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

She clears her throat. “It was bad timing. Darren had just turned fifteen and began hanging out with the tough kids. He was living with me. One night he was beat up. I don’t know who started it or what the fight was about. Some racial slur, maybe; he was sensitive like that. While he was in the ER they did a drug test. Turns out it was positive for marijuana and cocaine.

“They can’t arrest you for testing positive. You know that. But it was a wake-up call. We tried counseling, and for a while Dee seemed to fly straight. We call him Dee, did I say that?” Rosa tells me all this as she stares at the wall directly behind me. I glance back, imagining a small TV screen with the marquee announcing the afternoon-movie feature:
A Mother’s Nightmare.
“He was put on probation for the fight; they called it assault and battery, something like that, and he cleaned up his act. He had to be drug tested every week, but in less than a year he was picked up downtown, this time with marijuana
on
him. Somehow we got him out of that scrape. It was only a small amount of grass. They lengthened his probation, but gave him another chance.

“Then, a few years after he’d started college at State, it came out he was gay.”

I swivel on my exam stool, close Rosa’s chart, and lay it on the sink counter. I hadn’t expected this turn in Rosa’s story. “Gay?” I ask. Rosa continues, “Yeah, but I was relieved about that. Everything made more sense. He’s very good-looking, but his girls never lasted.

Somehow, when he told us, I loved him more, but his father couldn’t get over it.” She takes a deep breath.

“And then Dee shot someone . . . He shot him, and the boy died. You probably read about that. Headline news in the
Torrington Tribune.
This was over a year ago now.”

The story has twisted again in a direction I wasn’t expecting. I rarely have time to read the
Tribune
and get most of my local news from Linda, who reads the paper each night.

“Dee was on cocaine,” the patient tells me. “We know now that he’d been dealing drugs for some time. That’s why he had so much money and so many new clothes. This other boy was in the process of breaking into his apartment to steal drugs when it happened. Darren was high and got scared. He pulled a pistol from under his pillow and shot the young man right in the chest. I don’t think he’d ever fired a gun before, but what do we really know about our kids?”

I flash on the gun Tom found hidden in Orion’s bedroom five years ago, a sawed-off shotgun. Tom was so pissed he ran down to the lake and threw it as far as he could. Orion denied it was his. Said he was just keeping it for a friend. What the hell were our boys doing with guns? We’re pacifists, for God’s sake! They’d been on peace marches before they could read! Rosa goes on with her story. “At first Darren was freaked and hid out with friends, but in three days he turned himself in. We got a good criminal lawyer, Rock Durban. You know him?” I nod. I remember Mr. Durban. I know personally how good he is. He was our youngest son’s lawyer when he was caught in the high school parking lot with ten little baggies

of grass.

“Because of the breakin, the shooting was considered man-slaughter and Dee was put on probation again. A lot of people in town were bitter about that, felt he should have been tried for murder.”

“So if he got off, why is he in prison now? Did he violate his probation?”

“I guess you could say so. He got caught robbing a bank in Delmont with a rifle a month later.” Rosa pauses. “He was high on meth this time. You see why I don’t talk about this?” Our eyes finally meet. “It feels like someone else’s life I’m describing. This can’t be me. This can’t be my boy. Anyway,” she says, taking a deep

breath, “there’s no possibility of probation or parole. Armed rob-bery is a mandatory ten years in West Virginia.”

For the first time there are tears in the woman’s eyes. She wipes them at the corners with an actual hankie. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s okay.” I reach for her hand. It’s cool and brown, white on

the inside. “So, do you see him often?” I whisper.

“No. It makes me too sick. After I visit him in the prison I can’t sleep; I cry all night. That’s when I take the Xanax. I can’t face him there, you know? I write him every week, but that’s all I can do.

“He’s just a beautiful kid . . .
man,
I should say. And so smart. He

has his dad’s height, but my coloring. He’s clean now. No drugs in prison. But he’s too beautiful. You know what I mean? He sold dope and had a gun, but I know him, he’s not a tough guy. He’ll be used. He’ll be knifed or come out with HIV. If he learns to survive, he’ll have to become member of a gang, a thug himself. Either way he’s gone . . .”

We sit in silence. Rosa is thinking of her son. I think of my sons. Finally I stand and silently begin her examination. When I listen to her heart it is ticking away.
Lub-dub. Lub-dub.
I count the beats, eighty per minute. I would like to take her heart into my hands and hold it against my cheek. Not the real heart, you understand, the soul of the heart. The mother soul . . .

nila

“Good, I
caught
you!” Abby whispers as she hurries down the hall to-ward me. “I’ve got to talk to you before you go in there.” She indicates the exam room with a nod of her head and pulls me back into the lab. “Nila is back with irregular periods, and she’s got a black eye, but don’t say anything. You’re not supposed to notice.”

“What do you mean,
not notice the black eye?
” I counter. “Does Nila have makeup over it? How did she get it?”

“All she would say is, ‘Just tell Patsy I don’t want to talk about it.’ That’s all she said.”

I close my eyes. I’m not good at ignoring something and keeping my mouth shut.

Nila was supposed to return in three months for a birth control check. It hasn’t been that long. Hesitating for a moment, I knock my gentle greeting, tying to be casual. “Hi, Nila,” I say as I enter.

The woman sits on the end of the exam table with her back to the door. “So, how are you doing?” I’m trying to be upbeat. “What brings you in today?” Nila’s sandy brown hair, which she usually ties up in a ponytail, hangs down around her face. It’s not just her eye. Her whole left cheek is mottled and purple. I make a quick assess-ment, then look away.

“The birth control patch wasn’t working,” the patient says flatly. “I spotted heavily for the first two weeks, so I took it off. Now I’m really messed up.”

I glance again at the eye; messed up in more ways than one. “How much are you bleeding? Like a period?”

“No, I finally stopped, but it was real heavy for a while. I think I’m anemic.”

“What makes you say that?”

Nila still hasn’t made eye contact. “I’m just so tired. I can barely get out of bed. I figure I’m low blood, and the bleeding has caused it, first the miscarriage and then a period that lasted forever.” She hunches at the end of the exam table, a deflated balloon.