Hazel then tried pulling at her still-stuck arm and was reminded of an unusual fishing practice she’d heard about called “noodling.” The fisherman would stick his bare arm into underwater holes to lure catfish, and the fish would bite down on his arm and could then be wrenched from the water. But if the catfish was large enough, it sometimes could drag the person under for long enough to drown them, or it could retreat into an alcove where the person’s limb would get stuck and they couldn’t surface for air.
And that reminded Hazel of being a kid and getting caught with her hand and arm literally inside the cookie jar, because if her mother saw her she’d yell, “FREEZE!” and Hazel would have to turn into a guilt-statue of her crime and stand there feeling the cookies on the tips of her fingers, even perhaps picking one up then dropping it then picking another up and dropping it as her mother lectured on. “Hazel!” she’d scream. “Why are you hell-bent on hitchhiking the malnutrition highway? Do you know what broccoli is like to your body? It is like a hundred-dollar bill. When you eat it, you are paying yourself with health. Do you know what a cookie is like? It is Monopoly money! You’re giving your body fraudulent currency. Your teeth are going to try to go down to the vitamin and mineral store to buy some calcium, and you know what the checkout clerk is going to have to say? ‘I’m sorry, Hazel’s body, but you don’t have sufficient funds to pay for this because Hazel is a blockhead sugar addict who disobeys her brilliant parents.’ And your body is going to start crying and maybe even begging. ‘Please take pity on us,’ it will say. ‘If we don’t get calcium right now, our teeth will fall out and then everyone at school will make fun of us and we will never have a boyfriend or get a job or be loved.’ And the clerk will just have to shrug and say, ‘I have no idea why a young lady would behave so stupidly as to eat cookies before a nourishing dinner, thereby ruining her appetite and forfeiting all the nutrients she so desperately needs to grow into a respectable adult instead of a toothless mutant, but if that was her decision then she deserves whatever comes to her.’” And the whole time her mother spoke, Hazel would be scraping as many chocolate and cookie particles under her fingernails as possible so that when the sermon finally ended and she was sent to her room until dinner, she could eat the sugary crumbs and feel like the mission hadn’t been a complete wash.
The water had almost reached a good soaking height. She decided to pretend that Diane’s head wasn’t actually underwater; instead Diane was a civilian who’d gotten trapped inside a storm drain and everything except her head was under, and she was very scared and it was Hazel’s job to reassure her and help her be patient while they tried to get her out. Hazel reached down and patted Diane’s head, then grimaced: the doll’s hair was liquifying into a slimy paste. Should she have taken Diane’s wig off before bringing her into the water? Hazel gave Diane’s limbs a quick feel then cleared her throat. “You know, Diane? Things change but things also stay the same.” By which she meant that even if Diane’s hair didn’t make it, the rest of her body seemed to be holding up just fine.
Applied to herself, the saying had a different sort of meaning. Here she was, back in her parents’ house, her hand sort of caught in a cookie jar. “But luckily,” Hazel said, “your throat is large enough that it’s not like a little kid could get his hand stuck inside. Not unless he was a really big little kid. I only had a problem because I’m an adult. I don’t see you as being a hazard to children, Diane. That’s another thing you’ve got going for you.”
It was just then, just as Hazel was reaching out her free arm to turn off the water, that the super-white-flash fireworks started up in her brain. Hazel couldn’t see a thing except a series of glowing sparks shooting off behind her eyes.
She leaned forward in the bathtub and vomited, then vomited again. But that didn’t stop the sparks from coming.
MINUTES LATER WHEN HAZEL REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS, THE BATHTUB was overflowing and the water had started to turn cold. She realized later that she should’ve shut the faucet off at this point—that would’ve stopped the noise and the gushing and probably given her more time to think, but her first thought was SAVE DIANE.
Hazel had a burst of adrenaline. She’d heard about this—how in times of crisis, petite mothers in sweater sets get the ability to lift a station wagon off a child’s pinned leg. But she’d never experienced it personally until now. Hazel cried out Diane’s name and pulled upward so forcefully that Diane was launched from the bathtub. But when the doll hit the ground, it pulled Hazel’s arm with her in an unplanned way. Then all Hazel felt was pain.
Emotional pain Hazel was a true soldier at. She was the equivalent of a wounded Civil War cadet who whistled folk tunes during a battlefield amputation while the bone saw did its thing. Physical pain Hazel had far less experience with. The shoulder dislocation really hurt.
At this point, the running bathtub water in the background no longer even registered. Hazel lay down on the floor next to Di and they sat there together, shipwrecked. Diane’s face was completely occluded by her gummy wig, which had a matted golden retriever texture now, and Hazel felt the shame of this too because if Diane’s face looked like the backside of a giant dog, it meant Hazel’s arm appeared to be coming out of said dog’s backside.
What had just happened to her, before the tub filled up and her shoulder got ripped out? It made little sense. In recall, the incident felt a little bit like being in a movie theater, watching a screen.
The movie theater Hazel frequented in college played a concession-stand commercial that made her panicked instead of hungry. Its premise was a roller-coaster ride in outer space on a track made out of filmstrips. Giant snacks hovered in the air as the virtual ride zipped forward: it passed an enormous box of popcorn, massive hot dogs, a soda whose straw rotated in a whirlpool motion.