Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso

Author:Sarah Manguso [Manguso, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

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Years earlier, after I’d fallen off my bike, my mother didn’t change the bandage on my infected cut, and I had to swallow a penicillin capsule every six hours for two weeks. Inside the pink capsules the powder was acid green.

After I finished the antibiotics I developed a bumpy rash between my thighs. It came and went. The tiny round welts came to a head, like little blisters, and they itched. My mother gave me some cornstarch to put on it. One summer day, in the backyard, my father saw the rash on my thigh and asked, What’s that?

My pediatrician, who practiced out of his skinny Victorian house, always asked if I got a lot of headaches or tummyaches, and I always said no, hoping to be found perfect.

Then one day, while we were trying on clothes in a discount store’s fitting room, my mother noticed a lump on my hip. It was as if she’d made it grow on me, at that moment, with a silent curse breathed into the mirror in the tiny stall. I’d never seen the lump before.

I fought with my mother about it. She said it had to come off because it looked ugly. It was the size of a big marble. I’d have to have an operation, and then crutches. Off I went to the hospital. I slept over in the hospital the night before the procedure, and in the morning, a nurse gave me some brown liquid soap and told me to wash the area of the bump with it. The bump. It sounded almost cute. I lay down in my bed and then woke up and the lump-bump was gone and a big sticky white vinyl sheet was over my hip, with a lot of cotton gauze between me and it.

Maybe it needed to be removed from my hip and examined before we could know for sure that it wasn’t malignant, but no one ever told me anything like that.

When I went back to school on crutches, my mother told me to tell the other kids that I’d hurt my leg. When Colleen Dooley walked up to me, I could see that she had been selected by a group of the curious to approach and ask. I said, I hurt my leg. Colleen looked at me with her sheep face and waited for me to say something else, but there was nothing else. She looked slightly disappointed, or sorry, or frightened. She backed away a little before turning around. It was in the basement hall, near the classroom where the teacher displayed cows’ eyeballs in old mayonnaise jars. I could smell the formaldehyde seeping out from under the lids. It smelled sweet. Sometimes it got on my hands.

While I was on crutches I couldn’t carry my schoolbag to my mother’s car, so Colleen was enlisted to carry it for me. She worried that she would miss her bus. My mother never drove her home. Or did she? I remember only

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