Calypso(27)

Its own blood supply! I thought of those people you read about sometimes with terrible potato-size twins inside of them, complete with hair and teeth.

Recounting this story over the next few weeks, I was surprised by the general reaction it got. “She what? You didn’t take her up on it, did you?”

“Well, sure.”

“And how did you know that she was a real doctor?”

These were the same overly cautious people who threw out their children’s Halloween candy and showed up at airports with masks on. “How do I know she was a doctor? She told me she was.”

The only real exception was my father, who once took antibiotics prescribed for his dog, saying, “Aw, who cares? They’re the same damn thing.” When I told him that a strange woman performed surgery on me in the middle of the night, his response was the same as mine would have been: “Sounds like you saved yourself some real money!”

The doctor—I’ll call her Ada—returned to the theater after I’d finished signing books, at around one a.m. With her were the son and daughter of her girlfriend, both of whom were in their early thirties and looked more like soap-opera actors than real people. While their attractiveness was preternatural—almost outlandish—the way they related to each other as brother and sister felt familiar to me, especially their little insults, blanks, for the most part, more funny than mean. The four of us drove on deserted roads across the state line to a dark clinic located in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. The late hour, the secrecy—it felt furtive and dangerous, like having an abortion in 1950.



My procedure began with a local anesthetic, and though I didn’t notice when Ada cut into me, I could feel slight tugs as she hacked at the tumor. It was like having my pocket picked by a trainee. My fatty pocket. The shreds were placed in a metal pan and resembled slivers of raw chicken breast.

“Are my intestines hanging out?” I asked at one point.

“God, no,” Ada said. “Your lipoma is in a sort of pouch, so there’s nothing at all protruding from the incision. If you want, you can look for yourself. I can get you a mirror.”

“That’s OK,” I said.

While she worked, I talked to the son and daughter of her girlfriend, hyperconscious of how good they looked and, by contrast, how awful I did, half sitting up, my hairy stomach showing. “How do you say ‘tumor’ in espa?ol?” I asked.

“Tumor,” the woman said.

I took Spanish in high school and am always delighted when I find another word I can toss into my vocabulary basket. It was like learning that shortcake is pronounced “shorto cakey” in Japanese, and beige “beige” in German.

After I was stitched back up, we drove to Ada’s house, the only one with lights burning on its quiet suburban street. There I met her girlfriend, Anna, who wore a floor-length white nightgown. Her hair was white as well and fell to the middle of her back. “So nice of you to drop by,” she said, opening a bottle of codeine tablets. “Will you take some for the road? For the pain?”

The house felt familiar, if not exactly like the one I grew up in, then at least close. “Artsy,” my mom would have called it, meaning there were paintings on the walls but they weren’t all pretty. The backyard was flooded with moonlight, and while looking out at the sleeping city below us, Anna’s daughter told me about her youngest child, a girl of five. “She’s going through a phase where she wants to be a dog, insists she’s a dog. The barking and walking on all fours is something I’m willing to put up with, but then she shit on the ground over by that shrub, and I said, ‘That’s it. Now you’ve gone too far.’”



At four a.m. Ada and her girlfriend’s children returned me to my hotel, and three hours later I got up to go to the airport. All told, it was an exceptional evening: a chance to meet interesting new people and have at least one of them reach inside of me with her tiny hands. After I left El Paso, Ada shipped my tumor on ice to my sister’s house in Winston-Salem. Lisa put it in the freezer and promised to bring it with her to the beach when we gathered for Thanksgiving at the end of my tour.

Meanwhile I continued on. In Houston I had an emergency root canal, which didn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it would. A few days later, perhaps because hanging out with doctors was something I’d gotten into the habit of, I saw a podiatrist in Dallas. “What seems to be the problem?” he asked.

“My left foot hurts,” I told him.

He took some X-rays, but nothing showed up, perhaps because my foot only hurt a little.

“This has to stop,” said my lecture agent, who’d been making all the appointments for me and was clearly tired of it.

My last show was in Tallahassee, Florida, and the following morning I flew to Raleigh. My sister Gretchen picked me up at the airport, and by sunset we were with Hugh and my entire family at the house on Emerald Isle. I like having a place that theoretically belongs to everyone but technically belongs to me. It’s neutral ground but not quite, meaning that if someone hangs a picture I don’t care for, I get to take it down, saying, “Let’s rethink this.” I, on the other hand, can hang whatever I like. “Why would anyone frame a piece of plywood?” my father asked the night before Thanksgiving.

He was frowning at the artwork Janet had given me during my visit to Omaha. “It’s a one-eyed raccoon looking in a mirror,” I told him.