My Dark Vanessa(75)
We end up going out to eat at Olive Garden for my birthday, a brick of lasagna followed by a brick of tiramisu pierced with a candle. My present is an eight-week driver’s education course, a gesture that shows Browick is even further behind us.
“And maybe, once you pass,” Dad says, “we’ll find you a car.”
Mom’s eyebrows shoot up.
“Eventually,” he clarifies.
I thank them and try not to act too excited by the thought of the places a car can take me.
*
That summer, Dad helps me get a filing clerk job at the hospital in town—eight bucks an hour, three days a week. I’m assigned to the urology archives, a long windowless room of floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with medical charts that are shipped in from all over the state. Every morning when I arrive, a pile of charts waits to be filed, along with a list of patients whose charts I need to pull, either because they have upcoming appointments or because they died so long ago the chart can now be destroyed.
The hospital is understaffed, so entire days pass without the lead clerk checking on me. Even though I’m not supposed to, I spend most of my time reading charts. There are so many—even if I worked at the hospital for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t be able to get through them all. Finding an interesting one is a guessing game of running my fingers along their color-coded stickers, tugging out a random one and hoping for a good story. You really can’t predict which ones are going to be good. Thick charts can read like novels, with years of symptoms, operations, and complications in blue carbon copy and faded ink. Sometimes the thin ones are the most devastating, a tragedy compacted into a handful of appointments and a red stamp on the front cover: deceased.
Almost all the urology patients are men, most middle-aged or older. They’re men who pee blood or aren’t peeing at all, men who pass stones and grow tumors. The charts have grainy X-rays of kidneys and bladders lit up with dye, diagrams of penises and testicles annotated with the doctor’s scrawl. In one chart, I find a photograph of bladder stones in a gloved palm like three spiky grains of sand. The transcript shows the doctor’s question, How long has there been blood in your urine? and the patient’s answer, Six days.
At lunch, I eat in the cafeteria armed with a book so I have an excuse not to sit with Dad. It feels better with some breathing room between us, because in some ways, he’s a different person at the hospital. His accent becomes thicker, and I hear him laugh at gross jokes that he’d be offended by if Mom were around. Plus, he has a ton of friends. People’s faces light up at the sight of him. I had no idea he was so popular.
On my first day, when he went around introducing me to what seemed like every single person, I asked him, “How does everyone know you?” He just laughed and said, “Helps if you’ve got your name on your shirt,” pointing to the phil embroidered above his breast pocket, but it’s more than that—even doctors smile when they see Dad coming, and they never smile, and some people already knew stuff about me, how old I am, that I like to write. They still think I go to Browick, which makes sense. I assume he told everyone when I was accepted, and he wouldn’t have gone around announcing it when I was kicked out.
Dad and I really don’t have much to say to each other, which is ok. In the truck, he keeps the radio turned up so it’s too loud to talk, and once we’re at home, he settles into his chair and turns on the TV. In the afternoons he likes to watch shows from when he was a kid, The Andy Griffith Show and Bonanza, while I go for long walks with Babe around the lakeshore and up the bluff to the cave where the abandoned cot still sits rotting. I try to stay out of the house until Mom gets home. Not that being with her is any easier, but when they’re together, they forget about me, and I can slip up into my bedroom and shut the door.
Dad tells me I should start saving now for college textbooks. Instead, I blow my first two paychecks on a digital camera and, on my days off, take self-portraits in the woods, wearing floral dresses and knee socks. In the photos, ferns brush my thighs and sunlight streams through my hair, making me look like a wood nymph, like Persephone wandering her meadow, waiting for Hades to come. I draft an email to Strane with a dozen JPEGs attached and hover the mouse over “send,” but when I imagine the ruin that could come to him, I can’t do it.
Midsummer, he appears in the form of a chart waiting to be filed, included in an archive shipment from western Maine. strane, jacob. born november 10, 1957. Inside are the records of the vasectomy he had in 1991, notes from the initial consultation appointment, written in the doctor’s handwriting: 33 y.o. patient is unmarried but insistent in not wanting children. There are notes from the actual surgery, from the follow-up appointment: Patient was instructed to apply ice to the scrotum once a day and to wear scrotal support for two weeks. At “scrotal support,” I slap the chart shut, mortified at the phrase even if I’m unsure exactly what it means.
I open it again, read it all the way through—his vitals, his stats, six foot four, 280 pounds. His signature in three different places. I pull apart two pages stuck together by a decade-old ink blot and imagine the pen leaking onto his hands. I can see his fingers, his calluses and flat, bitten-down nails. How they looked resting on my thigh the first time he touched me.
The story of his chart is undramatic but still surreal, his recovery described as him holding a bag of ice to his groin. I try to picture it—he had the surgery in July, so the ice must have been melting and there would’ve been wet spots on his shorts, a sweating glass of a cold drink beside him, an orange bottle of painkillers that clicked as he tapped them out into his palm. At the time, I was how old? I count in my head: six, a first grader, barely a person and nine years away from being in bed with him, squirming under his hands as he told me to calm down, that I couldn’t get pregnant, he’d had a vasectomy.