We tried several bracelets on the young woman’s lovely wrist but kept coming back to the nicest one. Robin’s ingratitude and insults, her slights about my earnings, her sexual inattention, were beside the point. Or maybe they weren’t. I’d show her. It happened quickly. I thought it said $300; $300 would’ve been a stupid waste of money, but then I noticed the third zero. I’m still not sure why, but when my credit card was declined, I pulled out our debit card in a state of almost total disbelief, and wiped out our checking account.
Back out on the street, I passed two women with matching silvery-blond crew cuts, rollerblading by with clomping strides. I read the receipt. No returns allowed except for store credit. I took in long, damp sheets of breath, to keep from blacking out. That made it worse. It erased my salary for the conference and then some. After our house and car and first child’s emergency cesarean birth, this was more money than I’d blown on anything in my life. I passed an immensely tall, fabulous-looking drag queen, and a little skinny gum-chewing drag queen, flyering the crowd in the hours before their shows. I attempted to interpret my irrational action. Had I ever done this kind of thing before? No. A life in the arts requires vigilance and restraint. Was my behavior out of character? Yes, technically, and also terrifyingly, although it was possible that this was merely the culmination of a period of interior deadness and anger, that something had been building for months, or years, that the recent and ongoing stresses had pushed me over the edge. I tried to figure it out. Robin would be stunned into something beyond hatred, more like fear. She’d think I lost my mind. This was the kind of thing borderlines did before they burned down the house.
Pedicabs and kids on bikes fought for space on Main Street with muscle boys in packs and day-trippers and families with small children hauling beach stuff, imported Bulgarian teenagers rushing to work for an hourly wage, women who looked like librarians, wrapped in each other’s embrace. They were happy, proud, and in love. I’d just spent the amount we’d saved to send our daughter to pre-K in the fall on a piece of waxed leather strung with stuff made by a mollusk. Whatever other cash we had coming was already set aside for regular expenses, to be disbursed during a weekly, unpleasant, nauseating triage of deciding what got paid first. A small blue velvet bag had been placed inside a white paper bag, and I held it tightly in my grip and continued my stroll down Main. I needed to gather myself and return the bracelet. If I had to murder everyone in that store, they would refund my money.
Health-food store, bait and tackle, taffy store, war monuments along the town green, motels, bars, benches full of gawkers, sipping espresso in little paper cups, big rusty anchor mounted on cement. Across the street, beside a sandwich board advertising tonight’s cabaret, a big, blond frightening drag queen in a full-length white sheath joked with tourists, hawking her wares. A massive white clapboard building with black shutters and a witchy-looking clock tower, the town hall, cast a cool shadow across the green. There were police cars lined up along the wide front steps, a familiar-looking ambulance parked there, too—like an ice cream truck, clean and white with red and yellow—and beside it, a small brown building with partly tattered shingles, with a brown wooden sign that read, OUTER BEACHES MEDICAL CLINIC.
I crossed the street. I’d gone in there once for a band-aid and they had shellacked swordfish hanging on the walls. The real hospital was an hour away. She’d think I was harassing her. But wasn’t I also her friend? Who would turn their back on a friend at a time like this? I went up the wooden stairs.
Inside, the waiting room was windowless but bright, fluorescent lights pulsing overhead. I passed a woman in a bathing suit jiggling a baby, and an old man with his arms folded across his chest. At the nurses’ station, three people in scrubs were quietly typing and filing papers. I walked down the hall, past examination rooms with the doors ajar, some ogre coughing to death in the first one, a kid screaming in the next one, and at the end of the hall found a curtain; it was white and looked disposable, with a foot of mesh at the top. I stood on my toes and peered through the mesh.
Amy lay on a gurney, wide-eyed, head to the side, jaw hanging open like a drunk’s. I felt sad and achy and sorry this thing had happened to her, and at the same time a little fascinated and unmoved and almost unable to believe it was real. A man in scrubs stood over her, medium build, angry complexion, receding curls.
“Every break is different,” he told her. “Some people come in sobbing and begging for morphine. Others, like you, hold it together.”
She licked her lips and said, “I gave birth to three kids without drugs.”
“Well,” he said, and sat on a stool and turned his back to her and began very nerdily measuring strips of white stuff, cutting and laying the strips on the table. I thought he was talking to himself, then realized he was telling the nurse how he planned to manipulate the break back into place.
“Because what you usually get in some Podunk town on a Saturday,” he said, turning back to Amy, “is a medical assistant who’s never done one of these before, so you have to wait for the surgeon to get off his boat and get in here.” Then he gave a nod to the nurse. He mentioned a Something splint to deal with the swelling, then ice and elevation, and a new compression splint ten days from now, depending.
Another nurse pushed past me and threw back the curtain. I followed her in. Burt Feeney, the provost of the college, sat in the corner. He got the call if anything happened on campus—public urination, fire alarm, underage conference participant naked in the lacrosse dorm at three A.M. Behind him hung a poster of Diseases of the Digestive System. The doctor moved past Burt to check the X-rays on a light box on the wall. Burt called the doctor Henry. Amy turned to me as though she knew I’d come, and I thought, Don’t do anything, don’t scare her. I looked at her as though I’d known her all my life. Her T-shirt had ridden up against her armpits, against her boobs, and her plaid shorts were twisted and her face hung to the side. Her T-shirt looked soft. When I looked at her, it softened me. I stood there, staring like a creep. She was mine. She had been all along. There was dirt on her socks from the base path, and an IV in her good arm, but the puffy orange thing they’d put around her other arm on the field was gone, the arm lay there on a silver tray, bare and still, deformed.
“Does it hurt?” I loved her and wanted to tell her.
She shook her head and seemed to go away. She seemed a bit high on goofballs. Her eyes closed and her eyebrows went up like some bored waitress’s. When she came back she said, “I have a distal radial fracture with displacement.”