Sad bag

Thanksgiving was long, and spent in the hospital, hooked to an IV, and the next morning long. I’ll tell you right away not to worry. Communist Grandpa has not been poisoning my food. Yet. Instead, it’s something like Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, which is probably a little too pelvic of a disease for me to want to talk about much on the internet.

But I’ll tell you about the hospital. There is not a lot of light there. Long and bare is the hallway, where a woman with gold teeth took hedging, ghostly steps, curling and uncurling fingers. I was cold. The hard tables where they laid me out were cold, and cold instruments on my skin. These nurses kept moving in and out of rooms and talking at me, taking my blood and sticking needles in my ass. But they were kind. I looked at their hands as they tied up my arm for the IV – pale, fleshy, capable.

My family called me as I was hooked up to the IV, and I started weeping and shivering. The doctor told me to calm down and I yelled at him in broken Ukrainian. Nadja put spoonfuls of mashed potatoes in my mouth. It gummed on my dry tongue. Moya malenka, she called me – my little one. And I was at once so grateful to her, not to be alone there, and at once furious at with the nauseous need to which I’d been reduced. Tear-streaked gob of a body, infantile.

I thought about last Thanksgiving, when Christopher and I drove singing around the Chicago suburbs. Wearing Western hats. I imagined all the rooms my friends move through now. But there are rooms a mind can’t move through, and I am scared of forgetting and being forgotten.

I've been confusing the words for "sad" and "bag" lately. And indeed, at that moment, I was a sad bag of bones.

Morning was better, though full of more waiting, IVs and tests. Lace curtains cut in shapes of shells imprinted themselves on the walls. I watched them slide across the room as the morning spun out and grew gray.

Two other women lay on cots in the room. One was slowly waking up when I arrived, curled to her side, face in a wan light. The face was pocked and white and moon-wide, her robe of a chintzy material but its color jewel green. There was something girlish in her black stockinged feet nested under her.

The other woman sprawled heavily in her nightdress, picking at borscht and black bread and reading romance novels. She rose at times to move slowly, to rearrange her matted curls in the mirror or take pills. Nadja chatted to her in the tone she can somehow affect with everyone, friends or strangers, so loud and easy and familiar. I read Bridget Pegeen Kelly poems and thought about apple-eyed deer, in and out of sleep.

And then a couple days later, I was myself again. Ilya and I built a “snow grandmother.” The snow was dirty from the garden, and too soft for packing. Ilya kept apologizing to the snow grandmother – “I’m sorry, snee babusya, that the snow is terrible, I’m sorry.” Then Igor came out, big lug, and threw hunks of our snow babusya at us. WHAT A JERK. So we had a snowball fight. And then it was sunset, at 4 p.m., and I went inside, and there was hot vareneky, and everything was all right for once.