The Exciting Day

1. The Phancy Phlebotomist

I had a blood test today on Ye Olde Cancer Floor at Fancy Hospital. The phlebotomists have always been nice and personal and usually talkative. There was one who'd had surgery for a repetitive motion disorder like carpal tunnel from gripping the test tubes. She said when she saw the hand surgeon in the hallway, her hand started hurting. There was another who always noticed my earrings when I went in for chemo. We were getting started today when another phlebotomist came by eating a shortbread cookie. The two of them talked about how tempting they were, and then my phlebotomist said she didn't mean to eat cookies and such but as soon as she sees them, she eats them. We commiserated about all the tempting foods out and about at this time of year and she told me she had to stop eating so much because she didn't want her New Year's Eve dress to be so tight on her that she looked like a whore, pardon my French. She told me she'd bought a dress on sale Marshall Field's in October or November five years ago, for $85, and it had sequins and ruffles on top and two tiers of material below her knees. It was going to be her New Year's Eve dress. But when the time came to put it on, it was too tight: Girl, she said, it looked like I had four titties and six booties.

So she didn't wear the dress that night. She's never worn it. It's still in the closet with the tags on. But she plans to. One day.


2. Whole Foods

The lady ahead of me in line told the cashier to put the food from the hot bar in a bag, and to give her the cookie. The cookie, she said, was for herself. The hot food was turkey tetrazini that she was going to give to a homeless man. He'd asked for spaghetti and meatballs and this was the closest she could find.

We say homeless and what does it mean? My undergraduates at Downtown University would use the word bum in their writing and I told them not to and I couldn't convince them I was right. They thought it was descriptive, not pejorative. I told them to describe the person instead. That way, the reader would have an image in her head. They could write homeless, but how could they know that was accurate unless they asked the person if s/he lived in a shelter? I suppose you can assume correctly that a person who is selling the StreetWise newspaper is homeless, or had to be when s/he first started hawking it. The point of selling it is to not be homeless forever, to use the selling job to get on your feet. Though at 75 cents take-home per sale, it might be a very long climb to self-sufficiency. Still, I say it: There was a homeless man...
I talked to a guy I know a couple of days ago in the Little Cafe Down the Street. I knew him from Cafe Avanti on Southport. He used to come in when he was tired or cold from selling the paper in front of the Jewel and do arcane astrology figuring. He sells StreetWise now in Evanston. He goes to the same church now as the owner of Avanti. When he saw me he told me Happy Hanukah. He said someone had stolen his books and he was trying hard to forgive them. We talked about Kabbalah and the colors of chakras. Is he still homeless? I don't know. I don't know where he lives. It sounded like his stuff had been stolen in a shelter, but he didn't come out and say that. Maybe he lives in an SRO. I didn't ask.


3. Yoga Party

Tonight my new yoga class had a party in an apartment two blocks from here. I'd been going to yoga three times a week at S Park (indoors), but when our beloved teacher J retired in August, the classes ended. Allegedly the park staff is still looking for her successor. How long does it take to find a yoga teacher in a big city? Apparently more than four months, if the people conducting the search work in the laziest, most patronage-heavy sector of local government. So I've been going on Wednesday nights to yoga at G Park, which is even a little closer to my house. The flyers about the party were handed out last week, our last class of 2007. I'd been skeptical about the party--I'd rather do yoga than have a party, but that wasn't the choice. I made a side dish, as assigned, and went. We told meeting-your-spouse/fiance stories. The yoga teacher works as a physical therapist who visits her clients at home. She was helping a man with cancer whose caretaker was a young Polish man who didn't know much English. The Pole was captivated by our teacher, by the way she was so focused on the patient she was working with, and so caring. And also that she was so beautiful. He suggested they get together. The premise was that he would teach her Polish, so she could speak to her Polish clients, and she would teach him English. The second time they went out he proposed they move in together. She assumed that he'd meant to say something else. But he hadn't. She said no. After a month he took her to her favorite restaurant and he gave her flowers and a small box. She opened the box and saw a diamond ring. She put it behind her back. She didn't want to see it. She told him it was too soon. He took her home. He kneeled and proposed to her in Polish, because he couldn't say what he wanted to in English. She said no and kept the ring for about a year. And then they decided it was time. That was this fall. They flew to Poland to see his family. She's from Taiwan. They'll visit her family next.

Story 2: When D was in high school, his family hosted a student from South America through the American Field Service. They stayed good friends. When D was divorced, he called his friend, now a doctor in his home country. His friend invited him to visit for three weeks. He did. He met the best friend of the friend's teenage daughter. That girl went home and told her mother (newly divorced) that she should meet this nice, handsome man from the United States. She did. She offered to show him around town. She gave him her card. The next morning she called his hotel room and said, Why haven't you called me yet? And she showed him around. They married about a year later and she moved here. At the party tonight, D passed around the business card she had given him when they met, eight years ago. He laminated it to preserve it. D is in the jewelry business and told our teacher he had never heard before of a woman keeping an engagement ring for a year without officially accepting it.

This yoga group is very tight. They went to Ravinia together last year. They met at a restaurant once. A few weeks ago we had people over here for Hanukah and M was saying that she thinks it's nice to have people you do an activity with but don't become friends with. She said, for example, she's glad just to see her yoga practitioners only at yoga. I had agreed at the time. At least I thought I'd agreed. Maybe I hadn't. In my old yoga class, there seemed to have been a group of Insiders who would hug J and ask about her daughter. These same people would talk before and after class with one another in a friendly, intimate manner. I wondered if they were friends before yoga. I think they were. After a few years J learned my name, and when I found out about my cancer and told her, I became one of the Insiders. At least I became Special. She sent me a get well card. My friend R (who I knew from Cafe Avanti) joined the class a couple of years after I did. I know he became friendly with a couple who came on Fridays, and he'd been to their house. I know this sounds like high school or grade school. But for a long while I was stymied by the already-set friendships in the class. It was like there was a clique I could never join.

There was one tall slim blonde in the Advanced class who one of my fellow Beginner classmates used to refer to the yoga goddess. The goddess worked as a chiropractor. And then she got cancer and it went to her brain and she died.

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Cancer Bitch Turns a Corner & Runs Into a Wall

Tonight I looked in the mirror and thought to myself, You are cute. I think I have just passed the awkward Sluggo stage and am now a boyish woman in a shorter-than-crew cut. I even have most of my eyebrows back. I am surprised that in all this time, no one's thought I was male. I did have girly-feminine designs atop my scalp and I usually wear two earrings, not the lone little hoop that often signifies Cool Male Who Dares to Pierce One Ear. But approached from the left, I am flat-chested. Then again, I do have a female voice. Today at Whole Foods, for example, I stopped at the Customer Service desk to ask about organic whey protein and the woman at the counter referred to me as a woman. Which I am, of course. But if she could tell, how come other people couldn't tell I was female a few times when I was in my full-tressed glory? My head could have also signified a different identity; last month I met a young person who asked me if anyone thought I was gay because of my short/non-existent hair. I told this young person that only at the Whole Foods I might have been eyed a few times by women, but probably because it's right next to a new LGBT community center.

I choose my words carefully here. I met this young person and I was dying to know this person's gender-- I, who was all prepared to have people ask me whether I was male or female, and to respond tartly: Why does it matter? Yes, I wanted to know whether this short, slight person-- with about 1/8-inch-long hair under a cap, body swallowed by a baggy long-sleeved white shirt tucked into loose pants--was male or female. Why? Why is it so disconcerting not to know? Why couldn't I just have a conversation with a Person? Years ago, a friend and his then-wife returned from seven months in Provincetown. I remember the erstwhile-wife saying she'd been taken aback by all the gay men in P-town. This is what she said bothered her: She was used to speaking to men in a certain way (flirtily, I guess?), and being noticed by men in a certain way, and these men (in stores, for example) were responding differently (or maybe she said not responding). This surprised me. I didn't think I expected as much as she did from men in casual encounters. But I'm not very flirty. Sometimes, though, I feel my eyes widen when I'm speaking to a man who's in possession of stereotypically male expertise--mostly having to do with appliances and automobiles. I guess I sink into the O, what do I know? housewifey mode. I am stereotypically female when it comes to home repairs and hardware, and I'm not proud of this dumbness. But I come by it honestly. My mother didn't change ceiling light bulbs, and as for my father--changing light bulbs was the extent of household expertise. That and killing cockroaches. L changes the difficult high light bulbs because when I use the extender thing I break the bulbs. I kill silverfish and roaches myself. I let spiders out. The other day at the dentist's I noticed a spider, and he caught it in a cup and I let it out on a planter on Michigan Avenue.

But I am moving away from the uncomfortable subject of the young person of uncertain gender.
I introduced myself by name just so s/he would be forced to do the same. Wilily, this young person answered with a name that was neither male nor female. In fact, it wasn't a regular name. Later in conversation I found out that the person was a pre-op tranny, born a girl, identifying as male. And only 18. OK, that explained everything, I was no longer uneasy. I solved the mystery. But there's still the mystery of why I was uneasy in the first place, why I needed the answer to the question: What are you?

And I know that we classify people, and that we want to know the gender of the baby in the passing stroller, and even the dog walking by on the leash. And I know that I want to ask, Where are you from? each time I hear an accent. But why? Because we have certain ideas about what constitutes male and female, and male and female characteristics, and what it means if the person speaking to us is from Poland or Germany (Ossie or Wessie?) and I know I bring certain assumptions if I know my interlocutor is Jewish.

I won't answer this now because I can't. I will only say that in the summer of 1992 I was in Krakow and I was looking for the building where a Jewish girls' boarding school had been housed before the war. It was now a school for the deaf. There was a caretaker couple that was not hearing-impaired, but they didn't speak English and I don't speak Polish. We made do in pidgin German, and using gestures and drawings. I managed to understand that the granddaughter of a former student had visited, and that the couple was going to let me in and look around. School was out for the summer. They asked me, Was sind Sie? What are you? American, I answered disingenuously. I knew that wasn't what they were asking. But I wouldn't tell them I was Jewish. Why? Because I didn't want them to know. Or to know for certain.

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