Memoir: Small-Talking With Imaginary Ghosts, Gynecologists, and Children by Alexis Justman
“I was in a doctor’s chair, the lady doctor’s, naked and wrapped in white paper”
Fiction by Alexis Justman
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On a Monday I am in my car, which is an appropriate setting for both the beginning and the end of most tragedies in Los Angeles. You are at-once confined to a Nissan Sentra, and surrounded and swarmed by more confined strangers with their own separate universes and sets of crises in this collective mess of traffic, smog, and turn signals. Yet in this place, every single one of these individual universes wishes you did not exist, and of course, you take this so personally, subsequently becoming more alone here than any other place you have ever known.
I was sweating at the stoplight on Sunset and Alvarado when I came to this realization. And I sighed. I sighed the sighs of a hundred people before me, whose clothes hung in my closet and clung to my body. That’s the thing about sweating in second-hand clothes -- you are, at the very least, swapping DNA with dead people.
Then I had to walk around with this image in my head all day. My movements took on this responsibility of careful reverence, since I was carrying this shell, touching skin with a girl who would have to be, like, a hundred years old by now. I imagined I was meeting her for coffee. I would be late, incidentally.
"I’m sorry I’m late," I would say. "Traffic." And I would shrug like it was nothing. Like I didn’t feel like I was being hurled towards my mortality at the speed of sound.
"That’s alright. I like your hat."
"Thank you, I like your dress. I have one just like it."
It would go something like that. I would practice with her the conversation I was going to have with a man whom I have come to admire.
"Be coy, and alluring," she would advise. "But, you know. Still a little…"
She pauses to let the word roll around in her mouth, and materialize in the back of her throat. That’s the difference between me and her, I am not graceful with these pauses. That’s because back in the olden days, they knew how to fill a pause without it being -- wait, what were we talking about? This art of small-talk was as effortless and as fluid as my violent resistance to awkward silence was not. The stammering, the squirming, the darting glances, and rapid, jerky hand gestures trying to coerce the words out of thin air.
"Yes," I would say.
"Gamine."
"I have no idea what you are talking about."
"Try to be interesting, but not as interested."
And then I would go to work.
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I work with children, who are the most fascinating creatures I’ve ever come to detest. As soon as I walk through the door, at least three or four of them will come barreling from their writing desks toward me, throwing themselves at my lower body. They clamor at my skirt, fighting for attention.
Miss Alexis, did you remember to bring my M&Ms?
Miss Alexis, did you know my little cousin lost his tooth last night?
Miss Alexis, does your cat do anything silly?
Miss Alexis, my favorite color used to be pink but I changed it to orange today!
It doesn’t help anything that just before to coming to work, I was in a doctor’s chair, the lady doctor’s, naked and wrapped in white paper. Her name was Doctor Diego, but the signage on the medical building was all in Chinese, or if it wasn’t Chinese, it was an Asian language I could not read or identify. It smelled like a pet store with vicious fluorescent lighting. There was only one window, as big as a shoebox and protected with iron bars. Otherwise, it looked exactly like a Chinese restaurant without the tables.
But Doctor Diego could not be Chinese, unless she was married to a Mexican man. When I met Doctor Diego moments later, I deduced that she was actually Pacific Islander, but nothing like that really matters when you are spread open on a table. She put her hand inside me and felt around my organs, and told me I was “as fertile as the San Joaquin Valley.”
"You can tell that just by feeling my guts?" I asked her.
"I can."
I didn’t know why I was sweating so much that afternoon. Maybe it was nerves. Or perhaps it was the children. It didn’t feel right having their tiny Dorito-stained hands clutching at my dress, not after being probed by a Filipino woman in latex gloves. I didn’t want to talk about it. I shook the kids off my legs like fleas, and moved toward my desk like I was treading water. No, like I was treading wet cement.
When he arrived to pick up his eight-year old daughter and her five-year old brother, I saw him now differently today than I had all the days before. I saw him glowing with the purity and wisdom of a child, while carrying the weight of so many years on his shoulders and in his face.
I pretended to be busy highlighting signatures on a Parent Sign-in sheet. I was actually white-knuckling the clipboard. It has been said there is no such thing as the velocity with which you are being sent towards your death. Rather, we are all born with it inside of us, where it remains dormant our whole life, until one day -- when it doesn’t.
This man is neither interested nor interesting. In my mind I have already won and lost him, and just, whatever. But his children love me, so there’s that. That, and their tiny dusty fingerprints all over the hem of my skirt from my hundred-year-old ghost friend. He asks how I am, and how can I tell him? I am gamine. I am freaked the fuck out. I am as fertile as the Valley, but inside me I feel my own death unraveling wildly from its spool. I pretend my hesitation is just my careful deliberation of the perfect answer, but really it’s just that I forgot what the question was.
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[Photo Via: Monticello Antiques]
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Alexis Justman is a writer -- on the Internet, and also in real life. She works in an office with a big window and a yard, but isn't sure what she does for a living yet. She is a wearer of many hats, and hangs them all in Silver Lake, Los Angeles.