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Show 152 "What do you think?" he says. "I think you put it in the right place," I said. "Made it up myself." I'm about to tell him what he can do now, where he can go, when out of the corner of my eye I notice the two old spotted ladies on the bench. They've forgotten all about their bus and they're staring goggle-eyed at Owen's bare ass and I know what's going to happen now. They're going to scream. I wait for the nurses. Nurses. They're all the same. They start out in the profession with their dumb little-girl ideas of helping mankind, and after a year on the floor end up with the much more convenient notion of just helping themselves to a man. Doctors, patients, visitors: I've watched them reach for every kind of guy that makes his way down these not-so-antiseptic halls. When I was thirteen I discovered one of them in the linen closet with the boy who delivered clean sheets. Last year it was the head nurse and the hospital administrator in the instrument room. Jesus. In nineteen years I haven't met a nurse I had any respect for. But it's not so much the way they act around men that I hate; it's the way they act around me. Bouncing into my room every morning with one of those sweet idiotic smiles on their faces and saying, "Well, Jenny, how's our skin today." Our skin. Jesus. When I was younger I sincerely wished that eczema was contagious. |