Last night I had a hallucinating pregnant teenager come into the ER. She was convinced she was going to—in this order—have the baby, die, come back as a bird, and then shit on me. That’s what she said. “When I come back as a bird, I’m going to shit all over your ugly face.”
She wouldn’t tell us what drugs she took. (They never do.) She wasn’t even close to having the baby. Or dying. Or coming back to shit on my head. She was younger than Sarah. Just turned fourteen. She had a stuffed animal with her—a furry horse that used to be white but looked like it had taken a mud bath. When one of the techs tried to take it from her she fought him hard and then kneed him in the groin. We had to put her in restraints. That’s never fun. Not with a drunk regular or a psych case or, in this case, a pregnant teenager. If she hadn’t been pregnant or hallucinating, we could have done chemical restraints, but this time we had to go with old-style straps. Rules are rules. If you hit my staff, you go in restraints until you make a deal that you’ll behave. If only those rules applied in the outside world.
? ? ?
Bruce told me once when he was in high school that if Chet and I didn’t stop arguing that Sarah would be one of these damaged girls who gets pregnant at thirteen or gets addicted to heroin or something. I blew him off at the time, but he put it in my head and I couldn’t stop thinking about my own parents and Chet’s father and how fighting adults were normal for us both.
Not like Chet ever put a knife to my throat or abandoned me like his father did.
But we wrecked Bruce. I didn’t want to wreck Sarah, too.
I called a truce. Chet shrugged. It’s what he does best. Shrugging. Even when he’s not shrugging, I see him shrugging. It’s like a mirage for me now. He’s got to have the most-toned trapezius of any man in Philadelphia. And I have the most-toned middle finger, which is saying a lot for Philly.
Every time he shrugs I just flip him off. A lifelong game of charades. Chet is always a person who doesn’t know what to do and I am always a person who is flipping off people who don’t know what to do.
I flip Chet off all the time and he doesn’t know it. Under the table, through walls, in my pocket, behind the curtain next to the couch. I grew up in a house where cursing wasn’t allowed and I wonder what my parents would think of me now, flipping Chet off all the time. I think they’d be fine with it.
My parents adopted me when they were quite old. Probably too old to be adopting a baby, but they loved me. They fought a lot as I got older because they’d just retired and were sick of seeing each other all the time. They weren’t mean.
Sometimes I think of my father’s stories about working on the big skyscrapers in Philadelphia—walking the iron girders fifty stories high and welding joists and climbing scaffolding—and I can’t figure out how I married a man who works in a cubicle all day processing paperwork and making deals. On one hand, it’s less dangerous and brings in more money. On the other hand, it causes a lifetime of shrugging.
Which has caused me a lifetime of flipping him off.
When we were still sleeping in the same bed back before Sarah was born, I used to sleep with one hand pointed at the back of his head, finger up. A truce is one thing. But I can’t live a lie.
Except I am living a lie.
It’s complicated.
Alleged Earl
Alleged Earl leaves the drawing on the grocery store wall unfinished. I get up and ten-year-old Sarah walks back up 15th Street. She says, “See you later!” She has her hair in braided pigtails. It was my favorite look. Maybe my mission should be to bring braided pigtails back into fashion. Maybe I can paint some pop art dots of braided pigtails and one day it will sell for forty-five million dollars. Not original, but at least it will be mine.
Alleged Earl puts his box of art supplies under his arm and it’s devoured by his coats and blankets. He shuffles when he walks. He’s not that old—maybe in his forties—so I wonder what’s wrong with him that he walks this slowly. I think about the stories Mom brings home about ulcerated feet and stuff like that. It makes me want to help him carry something, but then he yells out, “I don’t have to do what you tell me!” and I just walk a few yards behind him and stay in his shadow.
With Alleged Earl as my pace car, it might take me a half hour to round the corner and walk one block of Spruce Street. I wonder where he’s headed next. I wonder if he’s hungry, because I am.