The Two Kinds of Decay

Tabitha

Tabitha called nail polish nail enamel. Her daughter was ten or fifteen years older than I was. The daughter had lived out of her car for a long time.

Rock and roll, I said after Tabitha told me that. Living out of your car was cool. It wasn’t even her car. It was her boyfriend’s car.

Tabitha never scolded me for saying stupid things. She told me her daughter had a skin-picking problem. Lesions on her face.

Lesions?

Just acne. Small inflammations. Tabitha liked using the proper medical terms for things. She told me the story of her first day of nursing school. She’d already read the text for the week ahead, and when the professor asked what p.o. meant in a clinical context, Tabitha said she raised her hand and said per os, by mouth, as if it were nothing at all. Rock and roll.

Tabitha manipulated the hell out of that apheresis machine. I hardly shook.

When my line stopped delivering blood to or from my heart, and the machine’s alarm rang, Tabitha twiddled with the pump until my blood flowed again. The other apheresis nurses moved my body around, unwrapped me from my cocoon of heated blankets, and twisted the tubes around like secretaries playing with telephone cords.

The worst nurses injected heparin, which was the fastest solution of all — nothing makes blood flow like a shot of blood thinner.

But Tabitha knew that even when you’re sick, when you no longer mind things that once horrified you, avoiding even one unnecessary subcutaneous injection can put you in a better mood.

Tabitha knew that machine, and she knew my heart — she could infuse anything into it, and I’d scarcely notice. And she brought those wintergreen candies with her as if it were part of my prescription.

Besides her daughter she only ever mentioned a deadbeat exhusband who’d abandoned her.