“Dalloway, my ducky,” Daddy greets me from the U-shaped kitchen where she stands in a “Moonlight on Purple” Haori jacket. The on-line catalogue describes it as bold royal purple, with shining pine branches of silver and gold, “as if bathing in the moonlight at midnight.” I should know since she’s ordered one for me. She’s enormous in black leggings and heeled slippers with silver pompoms. Like a mountain at a tea ceremony. Daddy still has to wear a wig, her hair isn’t thick enough, and the monk’s bald spot never filled in--a middle-aged man’s cradle cap. But, all in all, she’s a beautiful strawberry blond, the best money can buy. I’m still not able to think of Daddy as Kim, although, I now use the pronoun she. It still hurts.
      “Let me show you my defrosting job.” She holds the refrigerator open; the counter is littered with orange juice bottles and take-out containers. “I cleaned the coffee pot. Next time you use it…follow the maintenance instructions. First rinse. Then fill.” The Krups coffee maker and lifetime gold filter sparkles in the sink, the wiped spice rack, its white and black peppercorns gleam. Then Daddy lifts a new yellow sponge. “I had to throw all the sponges out, Dalloway. Did you hear what I said?”
      “Umm huh.” I hear it vaguely like those announcements at school over the PA when they tell you they’re testing the fire alarms. “Do you know that Taiwan has successfully bred three male fluorescent green pigs?” I shift from leg to leg, scratching my back against the counter. “Even their hearts are green.”
      Daddy answers by picking up a twelve-pack of new sponges. Before his sex change he used to love to talk about horse cloning and genetically engineered fish. Since the divorce three years ago, I’ve wanted to live with Daddy because I missed him so much, but the “him” doesn’t exist anymore. And Mommy has decided to pull her own disappearing act: she and her new husband Brad Boonshaft are honeymooning in Cancun. I don’t look forward to living with any of them. In fact, I saw an old French movie on video over at Hannah’s called Vagabond, a girl drifter roams the countryside, sleeping in her orange and green pup tent, and never washing. I want to do that. Daddy has a room full of camping equipment. I’ve decided on the maroon goosedown sleeping bag.
      “There is nothing more disgusting than an old smelly sponge. And dangerous. Germ metropolises.” Then she grabs me teasingly and waves the stinky sponge around my nose, like Daddy in the old days shaking his sweat on me after he exercised.
      I wiggle free of her arms. “Do you mind if I change?”
      I have on my school uniform, a blue skirt, and white shirt, blue knee-highs. The fibers etch tiny cuts into my skin. They are the garments of servitude. Daddy always suffered from an Irish temper along with his two moods, the morning blue sky and the late afternoon overcast. Mommy usually took the brunt of his overcast. Kim is the same way only she cycles between the two moods faster, starts out with butterfly kisses and twinkling eyes and ends slumped on the couch, fingers digging into a box of croutons.
      “You won’t give me five minutes,” she says, exasperatedly, letting go of his whispery voice that took hundreds of hours of practice and a speech therapist to achieve. It’s Daddy’s voice imprisoned in Kim. “I had to use a screwdriver to unchink the ice that keeps the freezer from closing. And in the crisper from now on vegetables go on the right side and fruits on the left. You’ve been here almost a week, Dalloway, and still don’t get it.”
      “Is that why the cherry tomatoes are in the middle?”
      It’s like he became not only a she, but a PMS-ing one, her lecture on maintaining refrigerator order is like Adam instructing Eve on how to keep the garden tidy. When I complain to Mommy about Daddy being so intense on non-essentials like housekeeping, she shrugs; he was always like that. A hair-trigger temper I was too young to notice. And watch out for cookies, she warned. You must have blocked out what Grandma’s Peanut Butter Cookies do to him.
      “No dirty ice cube trays in the freezer.”
      “Yes, Daddy.” I study my little toe poking through my knee-high.
      “No opened ice cream containers.”
      I don’t answer. “I learned some interesting stuff at school today. That an eagle killed the 3 year old ape-man known as the Taung child, who lived two million years ago.”
      “And I spent a lot of time today thinking about us.” She tore off a sheet of paper towel to wipe a raisin from the cupboard handle.
      “They think early hominids were hunted by predatory birds like the African Gold Eagle. They pierce the top of the skull with a talon.”
      “That a girl, Dalloway, top of the class. I’ll never hurt or leave my little genius.”
      “But you already left Mommy and me.”
      “I didn’t leave you. I am always there,” she snaps. To prove her love she’s bought my favorite blackened voodoo chicken sandwich and a frosted maple cookie. My place is already set in the dining room.
      ”Can I eat now?” All the talk is like slow choking. I can’t stand many more sentences.
      I make it to the table. On a dinner plate Daddy has set a sour dough bun heaped with onions and eggplant. Next to the plate on a piece of waxed paper, a gigantic chunky maple cookie with inch thick frosting smiles at me like the true meaning of the universe has been baked in with the walnut chips. A dollhouse spoon stirs the miniature Dijon mustard. Only one place set.
      “But what about your supper?” I ask.
      “I’m stuffed. I ate a dozen cookies.”
      And then I remember the cherry tomatoes in the vegetable crisper, how perfect the sandwich will taste with a few of them. I go back to the kitchen, reach into the refrigerator crisper. I clutch three, soft, partially liquid cherry tomatoes. Two of them slip out of my hand onto the floor.
      Daddy’s sharp intake of breath rises to the ceiling. It stays there. “Do you see those tomato seeds?” Her face goes pink as raspberry sherbet, the flush melting down her neck. “They’ll draw cockroaches in.”
      I slink back to the table and plop down.
      “Dalloway, you’re just like Grandma Lorna,” Daddy mutters. “She just bulldozes through life. Aren’t you going to come clean your mess?”
      “Can’t I do it after I eat?” The first bite of my voodoo chicken brings shivers. I savor its chewy saltiness; want to eat with my fingers. I wish Daddy would go watch TV, and then I hear glass breaking.
      “Damnit.”
      In my throat the bread congeals into a doughy softball. More glass breaking.
      “I slipped in the tomato. Damnit, there’s a cockroach. I just bought two hundred dollars worth of roach bait.” Cupboards rattle, roach spray aerosols hiss, and Daddy’s slippers with the silver pompoms march back and forth.
      I lose my appetite. I set down my sandwich. “Daddy, I can’t eat if you’re yelling,” I call out.
      “I picked up a piece of glass, Dalloway, and all you can think of is yourself. Just like Grandma Lorna.” Daddy marches to the table, a paper towel around her index finger.
      “No, you’re the one acting like grandma. Ever since you became Kim you don’t care about anyone but yourself.”
      “Dalloway, you’re shaming yourself by saying that. I care for you more than my own life. You’re the only one I do love.”
      “Oh, yeah, you don’t love your lady pal Dr. Bonnie Peeler? ‘Why do gorillas need big fingers? Because they have big nostrils?’ That was the funny joke she told me. What a mind.”
      “I’m going to slap you,” Daddy says with almost a note of surprise in her voice. Her blue eyes flare under lids of copper shadow. Daddy’s chin juts in Kim’s face. I smell her nearness, the clay of her breath, and the hot minerals of her skin. Daddy’s smell when he would lose his temper. If I close my eyes it will be the old days. If I sit still her hand will drop, the shimmery pink fingernails melt away. And then Daddy will be sorry. A flicker warns me, a twitch in her wrist. I lean forward in the chair. Daddy. I feel Kim’s fist in my ribcage. No pain. I don’t cry out. I can’t catch my breath; a bubble of air like a plum is rising inside my windpipe and trying to get out.
      I try to shake off the vision of an eagle swooping down, its piercing eye intelligent, stabbing the back of my skull with a talon, and then the beak cutting a keyhole in the side of my head, and it’s the gray matter they want, ripping out my eyes to get into my brains.
      “I can’t breathe,” I manage to squeak. My wind has been knocked out. How can I get air in with the bubble there? In the shrinking room my head jerks toward Kim for help. Her wig hair sticks out. Her eyes are lovers who wonder if I’m hurt.
      And then tears fill my eyes, running over my face. I don’t look at her anymore; I try to catch my breath. Another bubble is coming up, bubbles like in an aquarium, percolating up from my lower back.
      She falls to her knees next to the seashell chair. “Oh, my God, sweetheart. I didn’t mean that. Dalloway, I’m sorry.”
      “You’re not Daddy anymore. You’re no relation to me.”
      “You egged me on.”
      “Kim. Kim. Kim. I just wanted to eat my stupid sandwich.”
      Then I see what I’ve refused to. Daddy is totally gone. Kim scurries into the bathroom, hurrying back with a wet washrag. Her sherbet face has gone pale. I push the washrag away. What is it going to do with the bubble of air pushing itself up my esophagus?
      “Dalloway, I’m sorry. Little genius of mine, I’m so sorry. Please don’t cry.”
      “I’m not crying. My eyes are just watering.”
      Kim wipes my face. “Here let me cut your chicken up for you. Let me feed you, my little ducky.”
      “I don’t think I can swallow.”
      “Dalloway, I didn’t hit you that hard.”
      My body feels humid. In the second bedroom it‘s easier to breathe lying on the futon next to the air conditioner. My mind goes quiet and cold. No thoughts. I listen to the honking street, garbage trucks grinding, the hotdog and pretzel sellers chattering, strings of words between missing teeth.
      Kim hovers over the bed. “How are you feeling?” she asks. I can’t smell anything I tell her. She feels lousy. I have to promise not to tell Mommy.
      I press my finger over my right nostril; breathe in my left, but when I close my left nostril, no air in my right.
      “I love you, Dalloway. Tomorrow night I’m taking you out for dinner at the Holiday Inn Crown. I’m going to make it up to you I know you like the walnut salad there.”
      I think of the sullen French drifter shouldering her filthy backpack. The winter trees stripped of leaves, the land cold and quiet and furrowed with ditches.
      How will I describe the sleep I fall into, its easiness, dropping effortlessly to it, my breathing guiltless and sweet?

      The next morning it’s hard to shampoo my hair. I run down the stairs into the lobby. When I lift my arm to open the door, my rib cage feels broken. The sun glints as if it had been waiting to glare at me from the bumpers of parked cars. I pass the Seventh Day Adventist Soup Kitchen, the beautiful African-American midget, and her eyes sorrowful as ragtime piano, selling paperbacks on the sidewalk. Today I don’t bother to smile and wave, I’m sick of being nice. I try not to think about breath or air, but the red lights, the taxis I dash out in front of, even the deli peonies and lilies, black dahlias, and the people, all the tiny mouths taking my air. So little left. My side aches; I carry my backpack over my left shoulder. A fire truck clangs, I pass the Flatiron Building. Mariachi music crawls from a boom box. At school, I daydream. I’m angry. I don’t think Kim loves me like Daddy did. Isn’t this proof? When I’m called on to read aloud in Lit class e.e. cummings ‘buffalo bills defunct who used to ride a watersmoothstallion…’ I can’t breathe and get watersmoothstallion out at the same time. It’s not getting any better. It’s better in the air conditioning, worse outside.
      Kim waits for me in the lobby of the Times Square Holiday Inn Crown. She’s dressed tastefully in a blue skirt and jacket and beige-colored stockings. I remember her when she was a him: Ray Bans around his neck, gray slacks and lilac shirt with the collar flipped up, he could be a model for Dolphin Gyms.
      “Hey, trooper, how’s my favorite daughter?”
      “I’m your only daughter,” I say, walking away from her outstretched arms.
      “Was school good to you today?” she asks.
      “Okay, I guess.” I love the escalator and all the mirrors that make me feel like I’m ascending into some ubercool reality, and the hostess escorting us into the wavering candle-lit dim to a window table, and out there all of the canyon of the glittery damned.
      I settle into the deep leather chair that I feel safe in. Daddy orders two walnut salads. I love all the tickly lettuce. “You’re no competition, Dalloway. I take four bites to your one," Kim jokes, dunking a piece of French bread into a glistening pool of olive oil, and then pushing it into her mouth along with one of my endives. She watches me load my fork with blue cheese and vinaigrette-slicked wedges of lettuce. “Am I forgiven?” she asks. But I’m not hungry. I’m worried about my shortness of breath.
      “Today I learned that warmer temperatures keep cloud cover over tropical mountains longer. A fungus that kills frogs is spreading. Whole species of harlequin frogs and golden toads have been wiped out.” I feel like there is cloud cover in my lungs.
      “Dessert, sweetheart?” Kim asks.
      I might as well be talking to the wall.
      The waiter comes with eyes the chicken color of hot rust.
      Afterwards, we stroll. The fleet is in, and sailors promenade in their creased trousers and shirts. Groups of sailors, four, six, laughing, hats in their hands, money in their pockets.
      “Christ, do you smell all that cologne? The sailors must be wearing gallons.”
      “I can’t smell anything.”
      Kim laughs, enjoying the festive feel of the streets. “This is great. Sunday I’ll take you down to the destroyers. We’ll go on a tour”
      I can still breathe only out of my left nostril. But I keep that to myself.
      The sun is different, floating, alien space raw onion ugly, glazing over Sunday. I get up, and leave before Daddy even wakes. I head south toward Chelsea. Ninth Avenue. Rudy's Bar suffers and smells of every cigarette that has been ground out on its floor. On its window burger grease is thick as canning wax. I glimpse the alcoholics at the bar, peering into their afternoons, and think of Mommy’s future of typing numbers, how many years before she chokes on decimal points and double underlines, and answering phones, thousands of callers, fifty thousand transfers to voice mail. Where did all those disembodied business voices go? Eighth Avenue, hotter, since February, summer all year long, the Citibank blinking 102 degrees. Greek Bakery, Victoria, Paradise Grocery, Turkish Cuisine, Holy Cross School. There’s the midget again, her beautiful smeary face, tottering on chubby legs. Maybe in the life before this she rode in carriages and charmed the Italian court dwarfs. Little Milton, seeping from iron grate basement.
      I head toward the subway. Destination, St. Vincent’s Hospital.

      “Could you please fill out this form,” the nurse says, handing me a clipboard and pen. What will I ever be able to say about this Sunday morning in the emergency room waiting room? About the intake window where Triage is written like the underwater language of a brittlestar or a bleemie, and a printed statement saying the staff will take patients in the order in which they arrived? I carry Jesus’ Son, by Denis Johnson, and prepare to wait. I fill out the form. I fell from a kitchen ladder and hit the counter, I scribble, am having funny breathing. I give back the clipboard, but before I can open the book my name is called. The well-fleshed Haitian woman glares when I stand up, her eyes shoot me daggers. A Cuban woman is holding a 16 oz. Coke between her thighs, jeers. “We were here before that puta.”
      “What happened?” the intake nurse asks softly.
      I begin the story of the blackened voodoo chicken sandwich and the cherry tomatoes, and how I climbed on a ladder and fell, the counter jabbing me in the side. I explain that my mother is out of the country on her honeymoon, and that I’m staying temporarily with my biological father.
      “Where is he?”
      “At home but he may be at brunch. He does a lot of brunches on Sunday.”
      “We’ll have to phone him. You’re a minor. If anything needs to be done, he’ll have to give permission.”
      “But I don’t want you to phone him.”
      A few minutes later I quiver like a newborn, standing barefoot in a blue paper gown. The ER doctor walks in. My pulse races. Breathe in, breathe out. Irish features like old Daddy, sandy hair and dimples. He listens to my chest. “We’re going to take some X-rays. You say this happened on Thursday?”
      “Thursday night,” I say. The X-ray plates feel like a glare of field ice against my just beginning breasts, soothingly cold. Afterwards, I wait in a cubicle behind a curtain made of the same delicate blue paper as my gown. A strange gentle look crosses the doctor’s face when he pulls the curtain back. His brows knit together. “We have bad news.”
      My stomach knots.
      “You have a fractured rib.”
      I am relieved. A fractured rib isn’t so bad.
      “And your right lung is collapsed.”
      “What?”
      “You’ve been walking around for three days with one lung. When your rib fractured it must have punctured your lung. We’re calling your father and admitting you the hospital immediately. We have to re-inflate the lung.”
      “How long will that take?”
      “At least a week maybe longer. We’ll be putting in a chest tube.”
      “A chest tube? But I have to go to school.”
      “Not this week.”
      I mount a gurney, and am rolled between worlds. The journey from the vertical to the horizontal takes only seconds. I am like the others--strapped onto gurneys beside me. Emergencies all of us—blood smelling, whimpering animals, a blond man under oxygen, a white arm thrown like plaster over the sheet, a woman, shriveled under a oxygen cup, her eyes moving back and forth. Easy listening music. Every breath you take, every move you make, piped in. They give me an injection. It must be the same blissful shot everyone on the gurneys gets. Police officers, walkie-talkies crackling, stride through the ER like they belong. I wiggle my toes. Lab-coated interns march by; aides rub their latex hands. “They go by like lightning, the rats,” the shriveled woman’s voice calls out. In ER some people lie still in their street clothes, some are just getting undressed.
      “Hi, Dalloway.”
      I look up.
      A black-haired nurse with eyes bright like water smiles at me. “I read the report downstairs. We need to go over what really happened to you. I called your father and asked him to come in. We told him you had a life threatening injury.”
      “But it’s not.”
      “You could have died, Dalloway. A fractured rib really isn’t consistent with the injury you described. Has he hit you before?”
      “What? He didn’t hit me. Where did you get that?”
      Her eyebrows lift in disbelief. “I’m Kendra. Dalloway, I’m your friend. I’d like to report him to Social Services. The Domestic Violence Unit.”
      The blond man moans, the woman shouts, “Rats, bastards.” The ER nurse doesn’t take her eyes away from my face; she seems interested in only that phone call.
      “Promise me you won’t call social services, “ I plead.
      “I won’t call if you tell me the truth.”
      “It was an accident. Daddy didn’t...” Before she promises, a man with brown eyes and olive skin bends over me. He flips through my chart. “Hi, I’m Doctor Cordero. Okay, let’s get this one done.”
      I could be a plastic chair where no one is sitting. He is one of those men who would enjoy giving out F’s. “Did her guardian sign her release?” It’s all in his glance, how far I fall from the Scarlet Johansson type.
      “We got a verbal over the phone.” Kendra holds onto my gurney, as if I am hers now. “You're lucky, Dalloway, you get a full-fledged surgeon for the procedure.” She rolls me under a floodlight. Every sin will emerge under these lamps. Nothing hidden. Stones cover me. I think of the Bible verse.
      Dr. Cordero snaps on rubber gloves. “Are you HIV positive?”
      “No,” I say, feeling dirty. Kim’s fist has made me into ER debris.
      He pulls the top of my paper gown down, takes a brush and dips it in iodine, paints my right side. My chest flares orange as the sunset above the Hudson between Jersey City and the Metropolitan Life Building. “We’ll put it here, between the ribs, close to the armpit. I’m going to numb you up before I make the incision.”
      In the air conditioning of ER I am embarrassed to see my nipples erect.
      A syringe flashes in Dr. Cordero’s hand. The injection goes in, the needle burning like a match then going out. Kendra explains that it isn’t going to be much, other than the doctor pushing a tube between my ribs, popping the lung sac. Oxygen could then be fed directly in. An intern unfurls a blue paper towel over me.
      Dr. Cordero taps the scalpel against his palm. “Did you see that fucking woman?” he asks the intern. It’s the first time I’d heard a doctor say the word fuck. It must come from working in ER. “Her son has just been shot in the lower abdomen and all she cares about is the bullet. What size and then she’ll know the gun it came from. Four bullet holes.”
      The incision is superb, the scalpel quick as a paper cut, blood surprising the paper towel. An intern in green scrubs moves in for a closer look, then another.
      “Listen to what I’m telling you,” Dr. Cordero says, holding the end of a tube. When I’m pushing the tube in, you will hold you arm over your head. You must absolutely not move your body or your arm. Absolutely not. You’re going to feel pressure, a whole lot of pressure. Hold still because I don’t know you.”
      What did he mean by I don’t know you? That he isn’t going to be particularly careful because I’m not a member of his family or his patient?
      He can’t be planning on making that tube go through my ribs. It’s big as a garden hose. “Got that? A lot of pressure,” he repeats. “Ready?”
      “Yes.”
      I hold Kendra’s index finger, not her hand, just that one finger. I will drown if I let go, of her soft furry finger, a warm rabbit's foot dangling from a key chain. She smiles with those particles of light. Does she pity me? The aides gather.
      The hose is coming. I wish my cat Ivan were alive.
      Dr. Cordero pushes steadily; his body weight presses against the tube, forcing it against the plethora, the lung balloon he’s trying to break into. That cavity resists, and the pressure escalates, like trying to move a refrigerator. I squeeze Kendra’s finger. How flimsy we are that we can be assembled and taken apart like toys with instructions. It isn’t in. Dr. Cordero mutters, “Shit.” He keeps pushing. Bigger now, the tube like a gas nozzle. I grip the bunny finger like a clutch of summer grass; I keep staring into her face, at the white clouds moving across blue sky. “You’re doing well, Dalloway. Keep holding still.” Stop, I want to shout. Cry out, roll to the side, burn in the grasshopper flame. Everything is sucked up into the vortex of pressure, the tube being pushed like a battering ram.
      Then it ends. “Relax, Dalloway. I’m in.” Dr. Cordero snaps off his gloves. Like condoms, he tosses the gloves down on the gurney and strides away. The interns follow. They go back to the story of the bullet. The bitch mother. The underclass that use the emergency room as their primary care physicians. "What size is the bullet?” he mimics.
      “That’s all she wanted to know. Some mother.”
      Kendra rolls me back to the other side of the room. “Your bed isn’t ready upstairs yet. When you get there you’ll be hooked up to an oxygen tank.” A man and a woman in skull and cross bone motorcycle jackets sob over the blond man whose face is now immobile like his arms. They are weeping when Kim arrives, in a green pantsuit, and a long straight blond wig. She looks like Grandma Lorna in her beautiful days, but when she bends over my gurney, I see how pale her face is, how frightened her blue eyes. I’ve never seen Daddy scared like that. In her arms, a bouquet of yellow roses. Already open, they glow like scoops of butter, those rosettes you get at fancy hotels, and have to smear on toast anyway. These rosettes begin to melt. “Quack, quack,” she says, pulling out a stuffed mallard duck. There is more to come. Two stuffed bears, one leftover from Valentine’s Day, hold a red sequin heart that says I Love You, the other bear stares at me with four-leaf clover eyes.
      Kendra blinks when she sees Kim. “I thought Dalloway’s father was coming. Are you…”
      “Kim is my father,” I tell her. If she can’t understand his gender’s been reassigned that’s not my problem.
      “Oh,” she says, red spots brightening her cheeks as she extends her hand to shake Kim’s. “Could we talk somewhere privately?”
      Kim and Kendra go behind a curtain. If I turn my head I can still see their feet.

      The hospital food tastes like nightmares: macaroni and cheese with cut up chunks of hot dog, tapioca pudding with a bloody cherry, tea with a piece of saran wrap over the cup in case you want to save it for later, two lemon slices in a bowl, salt and pepper packets in another, spinach and corn and corn bread, soupy corn fritters. Bits of burgundy ham mixed into green beans, spears of gray broccoli, yellow sheet cake. I don’t eat meat, but even the vegetables are polluted with scabs of tormented animals.
      I’m in bed next to the window. A tray table slants over me, a spacious blue chair sits next to the bed. An air conditioning vent and a TV braced up by a hinge completes my side of the room. Daddy has brought me books, the ones I requested. Leaving Las Vegas’ and Jilted. Books about doomed off-kilter people.
      I’m attached by my chest tube to the giant oxygen tank next to the bed. I won’t be able to leave this island until my lung fills up. The hose is long enough for me to sit in the chair and use the tray table to hold my writing tablet and books. How will I go to the bathroom? I had asked. The nurse brought me a bedpan. My roommate Mary is the shriveled worm from ER who kept shouting, ‘Rats! Bastards!’ She’s got emphysema, and so do her husband and her one surviving sister.
      “Bastards, bring me a bagel. You call this slop breakfast?” She yells out at midnight. “You’re starving me. Call security.” She rests for a moment to catch her amputated breath. “My treatment, you rats, bring me my treatment. Where’s my treatment, you bums?”
      I wonder who pays for her treatments. Medicare? When they come with her treatment, they put an oxygen mask over her face, and spray her with a mist filled with steroids. It shuts her up; she can’t talk with the mask on.
      They give me a sleeping pill, and after I take it, Mary finally quiets. When I wake they give me pills for pain although I’m not in pain. I take them because they make the day pass faster. The white pills seem vulnerable at the bottom of the tiny paper cup, but they’re not, they’re codeine. After I take them, the room turns into a melting butter rose.

      “Dalloway, how did you puncture your lung?” the freckled Irish Nurse Eileen asks, after I swallow the white pills.
      It’s evening and Kim is visiting.
      “Hold it, hold it,” Kim calls out. “Eileen, get in the picture with Dalloway.” Kim aims the Canon, clicking shot after shot. I raise my hand to block it. There’s a fog inside me. I don’t recognize anything. Then I remember the photographs I’ve seen of old Daddy’s girlfriends, a gallery of knock-out chicks whose faces over time turned from smiles to sneers to hands thrust out to block the camera.
      “Let me explain how it happened,” Kim turns to Nurse Eileen. “It’s just a small kitchen.”
      Eileen throws the pill cup away and sits down on my bed.
      “There’s only enough room for a stepladder. I should have caught Dalloway. My little ducky gets going so fast. She was cleaning the cupboard over the stove and I was in the refrigerator defrosting. Too much commotion in too small a place.”
      I listen, I can feel Mary listening too, her mask squashed into her nose, her mosquito body crooked under the sheet, but her buzzing eyes lighting on Kim. How instantaneously Kim’s mind is translating the event. Mary’s oxygen tank stands at the head of her bed rather than the side. Her leash must be shorter than mine because she never sits up. She’s spent her whole life playing bridge and smoking cigarettes and cursing and butting into other people’s business.
      “Tomatoes tumbled out of the refrigerator and I backed up and bumped the ladder. Dalloway had only one leg on it and the other on the counter and loses her balance. Down comes the spice rack, the stepladder does a full double somersault and Dalloway spears herself on one of its legs. That’s how she fractured the rib that popped her right lung. But did that stop her?” Kim chuckles. “No, she went around for three days with one lung. She was toughing it out.”
      I look directly at Kim and say softly. “You hit me, Kim.” Her face pales and she places her palms against the window, looking out. Then she turns and strides from the room.
      Nurse Eileen’s cheeks flush and she can’t meet my eyes. “Hang in there, kid,” she says, and leaves.
      In her voice I hear that it’s my fault for Kim’s hitting me, because she wanted to like Kim, and now she couldn’t. Kim wasn’t the courageous male-to-female second mommy bringing roses and stuffed animals, treating her daughter like all men should, Kim still had man inside him, a hater and a hitter.
      I pull the pillow over my head, I don’t want to see anymore.

      Mid-afternoon, the talk shows are on and the teenage girls and their mothers and boyfriends fight over who has to baby-sit the toddler. The mothers wear false eyelashes that remind me of pine needles, and the daughters have hands like fat starfish. That crowded time when the day’s been going on too long. I think of Kim and how I hate most not her hitting me, but the lie. The story of the stepladder, its leg fracturing my rib.
      On the other side of the curtain the Spanish-speaking priest from Panama is visiting Mary.
      “God forgive me,” Mary quivers, “but I can’t stand my husband. Nice to every dog except the one he’s married to.”
      The priest clucks his tongue.
      “You can't be in the room three minutes with my Gene and he’s ordering you around. He’s always smoked more than me. Every chest x-ray he gets is clear. Two sisters I lost this year to emphysema.”
      “Well, they were old,” the priest says, in a tone that shows his attention is elsewhere. “And you’re old.”
      “Yes, I’m old. I’m 67.”
      I almost fall off the bed. She looks like a mosquito, like the shriveled worm at the bottom of the tequila bottle.
      “67!” the priest exclaims, "You look 80."
      I stifle my laughter.

      My roommate Mary snores. The pony-tailed night nurse enters from the darkened hall. Above her left breast, a name tag has been pinned. Her name is Beth.
      “Dalloway, you have to have an enema. There’s no record of your having a bowel movement in seven days.”
      “But I don’t have to go. I’m fine.”
      She nods, leaves and comes back with a orange rubberized bag. “Roll over.”
      “I don’t want to. ” Daddy, Mommy, help me.
      “Dalloway, you’ll be seriously sick if your bowels don’t move.”
      I roll over while she covers the bed with a paper sheet, and then wait for her to fill the orange bag. Oh, no. I whimper at the shock of water trickling and flowing into me, sharp pains zigzagging through my gut, streaking from crotch to chin.
      “Okay, let’s get the bedpan under you.”
      She slips the silver bowl under my buttocks, the cold metal soothing. I settle, the water inside me gurgles like mariachi music.
      Beth’s soft soled shoes squeak to the door. “Ring the bell when you have results.”
      “Please, don’t leave me,” I ask through clenched teeth.
      “Got to go.”
      “But will you come to take the bed pan?”
      “Just push your light.”
      “No, no, you have to promise me. I don’t want it to sit there.”
      “I promise.”
      “Oh, I forgot,” Nurse Beth reaches into her pocket and snaps a latex glove from a pack. “You might need this.”
      What? I must be in hell.
      Later I feel like a bloated caterpillar stuck on a treetop ready to burst and shred. I’m pregnant with shit. A full moon shines in the window, alone, no stars because New York City’s false light kills real starlight. But the moon seems brighter every night I’ve been here. I’m nauseated, and I clutch my gut. Kim has told me Mommy has yet to phone from her Mexican honeymoon. She must be having fun. Moon plucks the latex fingers out of the darkness. Mary keeps dreaming her thin sleep, her paradise of eternal treatments, oxygen masks dangling from clouds. I fit the plastic glove on my hand.
      And then I look to the door to be sure no one stood there. I arch and reach under myself, until I can get a hold of the mud rock inside me. The excrement floods out, terrible jagged bits. I am having a shit baby; the baby coming out in pieces.
      Panting and breathing through my mouth, I manage to edge the bedpan onto the air conditioner vent where I heap it over with Kleenex and napkins. No hiding the stinky hillock from the moon.
      “Beth,” I say aloud, pressing the call button. “Help.”
      No Beth, no anyone. I hear a nurse go by, the footsteps disappearing into the break room. “This is an emergency,” I cry out when the break room door opens. “Please, you said you would come.”
      The hall stays dim.

      The next day I am unhooked, seated in a wheelchair, and rolled downstairs to the x-ray department. They want to see if my lung has inflated. The waiting room chairs are filled with men and women in normal clothes. Then there’s a line of gurneys with patients lying on them waiting like trucks to be unloaded. I hug myself, wishing they had given me a bathrobe to wear over the hospital gown flimsy as a fast food napkin. I cross my legs; there on my feet are the hospital issue slippers like blue sewing baskets. On an end table, stacks of dog-eared People magazines. Michael Jackson holds a child upside down from a hotel balcony.
      I turn to look at the person prone on the gurney next to my wheelchair. A young guy, eighteen or nineteen, oxygen tubes going into his nose, an IV taped to his hand. His dark blue eyes are open, but his lids don’t blink like he’s in the middle of a staring contest with the ceiling. His face is beautiful enough for a perfume ad; his neck floats on an inflatable collar. I listen to the elevators bump and grind. I can’t stop studying him. A male nurse leans over his railing, taps a metal clipboard with a pen. “We’ll get you back upstairs soon.” Handsome boy doesn’t answer, or maybe he does with a jerk of his chin. His hands rest at his sides, not a finger moves. I watch his tongue run over the bottom lip. He keeps growing quieter. The x-ray techs are moving the line. I will him to see me. A bang of black hair has worked itself over his forehead. His sideburns are recently trimmed; the white line of the clippers showing, the rest of him is covered in a tan. I fantasize kissing his blood-dark mouth. The intravenous bag drips. They come and roll him behind the curtain. I pick up People and study the BB sized holes of Michael Jackson’s expensive nose.
      My lung is filling, but not as full as it needs to be. The x-ray techs estimate that it will need three more days. That night I dream I’m a human vase, a pretty girl born without appendages. The texture of my torso is like the pale flesh of mushroom. There are bridges of pancake-like skin where my arms and legs should be. Hands set me on a table; people come to watch me fold clothes with my tongue.
      I know I am learning something but I’m not sure what. For three more days while oxygen fills my lung, I watch talk shows dry-eyed. My piss sits on the air conditioning vent a cold consommé next to Kim’s long-stemmed roses.