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  Also, the town has an uneasy relationship with this place. Most of the staff is local, so the hospital puts money into their pockets, and thus taxes into the municipal coffers, and patients and their visitors buy stuff—at least one gift shop in town owes its existence to visitor-guilt. Half the older houses in town have sleeping porches built on, from back in the thirties and forties when released patients, frail and still dependent on the Alex for check-ups and medications, would stay in town for a year or more, renting rooms from the locals. Some of them never left. But, still, the town doesn’t want to see us in the streets, and it counts on Grass and MacConnell to keep us quiet, docile, and confined to our wards.

  It takes three tries before I manage to slide, unobserved, into the stairwell. Patrick and Denise are sharing a jam jar just off the third floor. She must have said something snarky about Elaine and Bernard because he is lecturing her on the shallowness of physical attraction.

  “You’re like the little ones who grab at the toffees in gold paper and ignore the plain ones. Underneath, it’s all of it candy—sweet and sticky on the tongue, warm and lovely in the belly.”

  He expands the lecture to include me, beckoning me forward with nicotine-blackened fingers. “You don’t want to waste your time grabbing at the shiny wrappers when you’re looking for love. Underneath it’s all the same, all the same. Sweet and succulent. The pretty wrappers get thrown away, or time steals them and turns them dull and grey with age.”

  Denise is bored and skeptical.

  He’s absolutely right, of course, but are we to dismiss Mark merely because the curve of his lower lip is the most beautiful thing on the planet? Because his fingers are slender and agile like those of a pianist? It is not merely the fact that his jawline disturbs the flow of liquid in my belly or that the slow slide of his grin and the warmth of his hand lightly pressed to the small of my back draw me helplessly to him. It is that he thought to send one daffodil on a rainy day. Patrick, however, is not interested in a discussion of the merits of one admittedly physically attractive guy; he merely wants an audience for his blather. After he’s finished I take over the speaker’s chair (step) and make them listen to my most recent research on cures. Turnabout is fair play.

  “Physicians and the upper classes in the eighteenth century believed that horseback riding—for days on end if you could hang on that long—was a sure cure for consumption. All that fresh air and being jounced about and—doubtless—the bracing aroma of the stable were bound to improve your condition. The underclasses, who couldn’t afford horses of their own, were encouraged to seek employment as coachmen.”

  “I won five hundred bucks at the track, my last leave,” said Patrick.

  “We know,” said Denise, “and then you drank it.”

  “Pay attention,” I said. “Globetrotting: nineteenth-century medical advice promoted travel in general instead of merely leaping over the brooks, hedgerows and cowering farm labourers of one’s own estate. Patients were urged to undertake voyages to the South Pacific, trips to the Swiss Alps, expeditions to the Egyptian pyramids, sojourns by the Mediterranean—anywhere, so long as it wasn’t home. Mountaintop or seacoast, desert or ocean, just so you pack your bags and get out of town.”

  “Sounds lovely,” said Patrick. “Loan me bus fare?”

  Denise snorts.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I’m broke. This is the best bit and I have saved it for last because it is lovely and it is still true:

  ‘Sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. Who complains of want, of wounds, of cares, of great men’s oppressions, of captivity, while he sleepth? Beggars in their beds take as much pleasure as kings. Can we therefore surfeit on this delicate ambrosia? Can we drink too much of that whereof to taste too little tumbles us into a churchyard, and to use it but indifferently throws us into Bedlam?’ Thomas Dekker, 1609.”

  Patrick has nodded off, and Denise is yawning.

  SIMPLE RULES TO PREVENT TUBERCULOSIS (CIRCA 1920)

  1. Do not put pencils in your mouth.

  2. Do not hold money in your mouth.

  3. Do not put pins in your mouth.

  4. Do not put anything in your mouth except food and drink.

  5. Do not kiss anyone on the mouth or allow anybody to do so to you. It should be unnecessary to state that kissing should be avoided by the consumptive.

  CHAPTER 41

  We are hanging around the sunroom, Denise and Evvie and Christine and I. We’re waiting for it to be suppertime, so we can wander down to the dining room and amuse ourselves with utensils and mystery meat and Jell-O cubes for an hour. To stave off our hunger pangs, and our boredom, Christine has brought in a half-ton bag of Cheesies and we are all a dusty orange colour around the mouth and fingers. We have been trying to teach Evvie to toss them up in the air and catch them with her open mouth, but she is completely lacking in talent and has very many orange blotches down the front of her chenille bathrobe.

  When Mrs. Oikle was released, bacilli-free, Evvie inherited her abandoned stacks of True Love Conquers, so we have taken to reading the juicy bits to each other. They go well with Cheesies. We score each story for technical merit and artistic impression: one to six purple points. The young women in the stories—they are always young, usually underage, and hopelessly naïve—appear to suffer a kind of delirium and loss of common sense whenever some guy with a sculpted body, a tangled mop of greasy curls, and a surly lower lip gets his hands under their shirt and his tongue in their mouth. This usually leads to some confused steamy sex (quite often the dumb clucks aren’t altogether sure “it” has occurred—you wouldn’t notice?), quickly followed by abandonment by the surly cad, then a maudlin reconciliation when he discovers he really, truly does love her and can’t live without her and is willing to give up his evil, selfish ways for her, or—if he doesn’t reform—rescue and reclamation by the really good guy she ignored at the beginning of the story who is not quite as built but turns out to have better hair and a job and to be better in bed than the cad and who, moreover, is willing to adopt the cad’s illegitimate child because, of course, she got pregnant, being too dumb to use birth control. The whole thing ends with a wedding and more steamy sex, this time morally sanctioned, and she gets to wear a negligee in a honeymoon hotel and have it slowly, legally, peeled off instead of having her skirt yoinked up in the cab of a rusty pickup.

  It’s a lot to swallow.

  Purple point number six is for originality and, since we started this game, over two weeks ago, it has yet to be awarded. We live in hope.

  “My heart was beatin’ so fast I thought I would faint.” It’s Evvie’s turn to read. “His hands tenderly car-essed my breasts, and my breath was comin’ in ragged gasps. I wanted… somethin’…”

  Except Evvie reads the dots. “I wanted dot dot dot somethin’ dot dot dot.”

  “I’d like a little dot dot dot, myself,” Christine sighs and stuffs her face with Cheesies in an attempt to sublimate.

  “How about you, Gwenniekins?” Denise is always needling me these days. She’s miffed that I turned down her entire A list of select dates from the men’s ward. “Getting any good dot dot dot from lover-boy lately?”

  “Certainly not,” I take umbrage, with a handful of Cheesies. “I’m a good girl. I only go as far as dot dot. Maybe dot dot and a half. I have morals. I have scruples. I’m saving the final dot for my wedding night.”

  “Sure you are,” says Denise.

  “His hands reached under my cheer leader’s red and white silk skirt. ‘No,’ I moaned, but he didn’t hear me and I was help less to re-sist. I wanted him, so bad. I’d dreamed of him for weeks, holdin’ me and dot dot dot.” Evvie ploughed on, skipping over the longest words, breaking the compound ones into manageable bits, slightly ripping the pages in her enthusiasm.

  “No wonder Mrs. Oikle had such a red face all the time,” says Denise. “She was feverish with terminal dot dot dottiness.”

  “Four points,” says Evvie, a l
ittle breathless.

  “Two,” is all I am willing to offer.

  “One and a half,” sniffs Christine. “Not an original word in the whole piece of crap.”

  “Two for technical merit and two point five for artistic impression,” says Denise. “I’m being generous, only because they spared us another stupid description of French kissing.”

  “I really don’t get this French kissing stuff,” I grumble. I really don’t get it. If it’s supposed to represent, hint, imply, mime the actual dirty deed, I’m heading for a huge disappointment on my wedding night (or sordid approximation thereof).

  “What’s to get?” says Christine. “He puts his tongue in your mouth, you put yours in his. Everybody gets a little worked up.”

  “Having a wet sloppy tongue jammed down your throat is supposed to get you worked up? It’s like having a live toad thumping around in your mouth.”

  “Honey, if that’s what it feels like, Mark is badly in need of some instruction.”

  “You volunteering to teach him?” asks Denise. “A little hands-on training for lover-boy?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Denise. Gwen, French kissing can lay you out in lavender, but he’s got to know how to do it right.”

  “I thought that meant dead. Laying in lavender. Lying in lavender.”

  “Not where I come from.”

  “There are six ways to screw up French kissing, and most guys know five,” says Denise.

  Evvie is agog. Literally agog. I can see Cheesie stain clear to her tonsils. I’m guessing Nelson knows a couple.

  “First,” says Christine, “there’s the guy who jumps down your throat and tries to excavate your tonsils.”

  “As if you don’t have a tongue and it don’t matter anyway. He just dives in and cuts off your breathing,” confirms Denise. “Then there’s the woodpecker.”

  “Jams his tongue in and out and in and out,” says Christine, “with no juice whatsoever.”

  “Then there’s the guy who holds your head in place with both hands so you can’t escape. This guy’s a control freak and a potential wife-beater. You want to stay away from a guy like that.”

  “There’s the one who slops around and unloads a mouthful of spit.”

  “And the one who can’t control his teeth and ends up cutting your lip.”

  “Or chips your teeth with his.”

  “Did we get them all?”

  “That’s five. What’s the sixth?”

  “Bad breath,” say Christine and Denise together. “The guy who doesn’t brush and floss his teeth before every date.”

  “Mouthwash,” says Denise. “Mouthwash is crucial.”

  “Mark always brushes his teeth,” I insist. “But…he’s sort of a cross between tonsil excavation and that spit thing.”

  “Too much enthusiasm,” my mentors concur. “Not enough experience.”

  “Tell him to halve everything,” says Denise. “Half the push, half the wiggling, half the spit. If that doesn’t feel good, tell him to halve it again.”

  “How can I do that?” I am indignant. “His feelings will be hurt if I tell him he’s doing it wrong.”

  “You want to baby his ego, or you want good kissing?”

  “Toad in the throat, or dot dot dot?”

  I have to think about this. I mull it over all through supper. Mark is giving me the three-fingered wiggle from across the room, which means I’m supposed to meet him after supper in the fourth floor janitor’s closet—to which he has stolen a key. The janitor goes home at five and I have come to associate the smell of Lysol with the exploratory meandering of Mark’s fingers. Mopping Aunt Edith’s floors is never again going to be quite the chore it was.

  Denise is staring at me through her water glass. She knows what’s on my mind. She’s seen Mark wiggling his fingers at me; she figured that one out a while ago.

  “If he gets all wounded and pissed off,” she says, “remember, we’ve still got the A list.”

  “You go on and tell him, Gwen,” says Evvie, “so’s you can tell me how to do it.” She blushes fiercely.

  “So what’s Nelson’s problem, Evvie?”

  “Nothin’. Nelson don’t have no problems. He’s real good at dot dot dot, Lord he’d go all night if I’d let him, it’d just be nice, you know, if he could sorta slow down. You know, that woodpecker thing. Don’t you never tell no one. Don’t you never say nothin’ to Nelson, he’d kill me for sure. He’d just die, he’d be so embarrassed. He’d run to the woods and never, never come back. Promise me on your mama’s grave you won’t never say nothin’. “

  “Scout’s honour, Evvie, not a word.”

  Evvie is shocked at herself for having said anything to us. We all swear solemnly never, ever to open our mouths on the subject of Nelson and tongues and woodpeckers. She looks a little dubious, and we have to swear all over again on the heads of our unborn children to never, ever say nothin’ to nobody.

  For Evvie’s sake, I decide, I will do this. I will tell Mark his kissing sucks. For the sake of Evvie’s marriage. For women everywhere.

  We finish supper and head back to our rooms to swallow the pile of pills the head nurse is passing around. Half a dozen at breakfast, half a dozen at lunch, eight more at suppertime. Horse pills, we call them, because the PAS are big enough to choke a horse. The Ionizaid, of which there are only two per meal, are tiny. From time to time the pile is joined by others: vitamin pills to build you up if they think you look peaked; iron pills if your blood is too pale; cold medication if you’ve been hanging around the nurses and have caught something. It’s nothing to swallow two dozen pills in the course of a day. Every mouthful is one mouthful closer to being discharged.

  I brush my teeth, twice, and floss, and brush my hair, and put on some blusher. I think about mascara, but decide against it—it’s amazing how that stuff smears. Even the so-called waterproof kind will rub off and leave you with raccoon eyes. I’m nervous. Am I in love with Mark? No. But I like him a lot, and he’s funny and makes me laugh, and the way he smells and the feel of his skin make me shiver. I’m trying to be in love with him. If he gets mad I’ll be really pissed off at Denise and Christine. I haven’t the slightest interest in Denise’s A list of losers, I just want Mark. I want him to kiss better. If he kissed better I could really fall in love with him.

  He’s waiting in the closet and he’s impatient because I took so long. He pulls me in and locks the door behind me.

  “Mark,” I say, as he starts in. “This is too fast for me. Can you go softer with your tongue?”

  “Sure,” he says, matter-of-factly. “How’s this?”

  “Slower,” I say, and he slows down, down, down, soft and gentle and sensuous. Our tongues are waltzing, sweet and silky, and I am definitely starting to feel both delirious and juicy. So is he, the Lysoled air is positively vibrating with our ragged breathing. Holy Hannah, I’m thinking. Then we have to stop, we really do have to stop, because I’m halfway down his throat, our two sloppy toads are having hysterics together and I’m about to explode. I finally get it, I finally, really get this French kissing stuff, and I have to tell you it’s wicked dangerous, it’s gorgeous, it’s definitely going to lead to all kinds of dot dot dot fun and trouble. I can smell the lavender.

  CHAPTER 42

  Miz-etc. showed up with a big stack of textbooks for me. Now that they’re not going to rearrange my insides and now that I’ll be home for good by March (knock on every available piece of wood), they’re concerned about my lapsed education. I didn’t finish my last year, obviously, and I didn’t do anything much all fall to try to catch up, though at one point Miz-etc. did try to suggest academic distraction might take my mind off “things.”

  Time to buckle down, she says, although I think January’s better buckling weather. I’m not going to get through the last half of last year and all of this year by next June, no matter how bright they think I am. I’m not going back to high school in March, either. I can study at home, at Elizabeth and George’s
, and write the exams in June. I’ll still have one more year after that, but maybe by next September I’ll feel like getting on a school bus each morning and sitting in classes with kids a year behind me. Maybe. I’ll figure something out. This may just be one of those things where I’m going to have to grit my teeth and endure. I wish now I’d finished last year at the San, but I don’t see how I could have. Couldn’t hold up a book the first two months I was there, I was such a mess.

  So, today I’m starting with history. World History. According to this text, World History seems to begin and end with Europe, with a passing nod to the ancient Egyptians, and a bit on Africa, India, and China as they pertain to the British Army, the acquisition of foreign loot, and the building of canals and trade routes to get more and better loot. Obviously, if I’m going to learn any of the rest of the world’s history, it’ll have to be after I get out of high school. I’ve got to pass an exam on this book, which means a lot of memorizing of dates and causes. The War of Blah Blah Blah was fought in eighteen-something-and-something between England and fill-in-the-blank, most likely France. The causes were greed, and national pride, and greed. It ended with the signing of the Treaty of Let’s Swap Colonies. Allemande left, all join hands, then do-si-do.

  Take a deep breath, Gwen, you’re stuck with this. Gird your ravishing loins and buckle down, just as soon as you put the final touches on the newly designed Poetic License Application Form.

  W. T. B. A P.? (WANT TO BE A POET?)—FORM 7A

  Please check the following where appropriate and provide corroborating documentation. See subsection 21C for a complete list of acceptable documentation. Successful applicants must score a minimum of twelve out of a possible twenty points.

  1. Body fat percentage of less than fifteen percent.

  __

  2. Full head of wild, unruly hair.

  __

  3. Personal tragedy, categories 1 through 3.*

  __