Dirty Secret by Jessie Sholl

Author:Jessie Sholl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

MY MOM DOESN’T call me the next day, and when I try to call her the afternoon of her surgery, I can’t get through. The phone in her room is busy. I’m pretty sure she’s taken it off the hook. She always makes herself unavailable when I most need to reach her. Every Mother’s Day, Christmas, birthday, her phone is off the hook. She clearly doesn’t want to be disappointed if no one calls, but by making herself unavailable for disappointment, she also negates any chance of being pleasantly surprised. I’ve told her this a million times but it makes no difference. I always end up waiting for her to call me.

And she finally does, the day after her surgery.

“I feel fine,” she says when I ask. “Totally fine. Now I just have to wait for the doctors to tell me the results from the tissue samples. That’s when I’ll find out about the chemo.”

“So you’re not in any pain at all?”

“No, none.”

It’s one of my mother’s many paradoxes: She can talk for hours about the emotional traumas she’s suffered at the hands of her father, her siblings, bosses, ex-friends, even bank tellers, but her threshold for physical pain is off-the-charts high. My dad told me that after she broke her back in the car accident she never once complained about the pain. And she had to have an emergency appendectomy not long ago—emergency because she waited so long to go to the hospital, thinking the odd feeling in her lower back would pass.

I’m the opposite. I’m constantly gauging how I feel, touching the glands on my neck to see if they’re swollen, looking at my tongue as I’ve seen acupuncturists do (though I have no idea what I’m looking for), asking my husband if he’ll feel my forehead and tell me if I seem feverish. My dad is the same way and I think I got it from him.

My mom starts talking about how one of the nurses there has a dog the same size as Abraham Lincoln and my mother plans to knit it a sweater.

“Mom?” I say, interrupting her. “I need to ask you about these . . . lice.”

“Oh, no. I didn’t mention it because I was hoping they were gone.”

“They’re not.”

“The nurse is here,” she says abruptly, and then I hear her speaking in the high voice she usually reserves for children and pets, “I’ll take more of that pudding, please. The butterscotch—it was just delicious!” Then she’s back to me, her voice low and muffled, as if she’s covering her mouth and the phone’s receiver. “Jessie, what’s going on with the lice?”

“It seems to be getting worse. The rash that started on my ankle has moved to my arms.”

“I told you to get that RID!”

“I did. In fact I did it two nights in a row just to be safe. And I’ve washed everything.”

“You didn’t get Dave to do the RID, and now he’s reinfecting you.”

“No, he’s done it twice, too. And he doesn’t have any of the bites that I have anyway.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.