Thanks for Choosing Us
by Maitreyi Rajaram
My fingers clasp the string of a red balloon. I descend from the backseat of the Toyota with a grocery bag, dragging the balloon in tow after me like a pet on a leash. My mother calls for me from inside while I bounce on the front lawn, my hair collapsing from its bun into a cloud of curls. I pretend to not hear her for just half a minute, and watch my balloon being lifted by the wind.
Overhead, I see faint beads of stars, the haze from a mountain fire in the distance, twinkling lights of planes. The friendly cashier told me that today Pluto was declared a dwarf planet before tying the string to my finger. I imagine astronauts in funny suits with measuring tape, hunched over desks in a control center in Houston, clucking their tongues in disapproval as they recall the next hunk of planet. Ms. Miranda would have to redo the paper solar system model, I think. I stumble across the stairs as my mother’s calls turn increasingly impatient, letting go of the string to open the door and shriek in horror as my balloon is enveloped by the night sky. That night, between muffled sobs against my pillow, I pray it lands on Pluto.
It’s Friday evening, proclaimed as game day by the kids on the block. I grab a soccer ball from behind the door and wait for my mother to catch up to me. She hums a Simon and Garfunkel song as she slowly descends the stairs to the pavement. The bachelor in the next apartment watches from his window, the shades haphazardly pulled up to reveal a cluttered kitchen countertop. A woman’s panties hang from a clothesline opposite the sink. My eyes follow it to the broken glass bottle, the ripped sheer fabric across a kitchen chair, a pair of bare legs in red heels strewn over a futon arm. There’s a word for that – Lisa calls our social studies teacher it whenever she comes to class in floral patterned pantyhose and miniskirts – slut. I never knew what the word meant and I got the feeling that Lisa didn’t either but sometimes we use words we don’t really understand. It always reminds me of slit, I am much more familiar with slit: the slits of my mother’s hospital gown as she is wheeled away, just enough to reveal the plastic tubes peeking out of her veins. Or the slits the surgeons carved into her skin, goose bumps rising around them.
Sometimes, I watch her untie the bloodied surgical gauze sticking to her skin. I carry microwaveable lasagnas up to her bedroom, and set up the TV channels, nervously glancing at the bathroom lights dancing across the linoleum floor. Through the crack in the door, I see stitches, blood, wondering where her old heart was and where her new one began.
New York University Department of Cardiology, Call 911 in case of sudden cardiac arrest.
I touch my own chest and run my hands across my t-shirt.
Children’s Place. Holiday discount. Extra Small.
At the children’s hospital where my mom is treated, I like to sit in the bean bag chairs and watch the flurry of movement around me. The nurses sneak me a Klondike icecream from the cafeteria downstairs and talk about petting zoos and the place on Christopher Street with rainbow cotton candy. They never know I’m not the patient and I can’t seem to find the right place in a conversation to tell them so I let them unleash their years of medical training on me: sympathetic eyes, arched brows as if keenly interested in my favorite kind of chocolate, gentle hand poised on the top of my shoulder. While they talk, I trace the ugly cartoon wallpaper around the room and watch a five year old balance a Mother Goose book against her Holter monitor. They forget that it is probably my tenth time in this waiting room, and like them, this process becomes all too mechanical.
It is my third visit to the hospital when I meet Dr. Stadler. His nurses walk my father and me to a conference room and let me sit in the swivel chair. A sliver of pale wall peeks out from under a barrage of medical certifications and diplomas. The nurse points at one: Harvard Medical School, assuring my father “this guy is good”. He strides in behind her, a six-foot tower of blue scrubs. His limbs move before him as if with a purpose of their own as he speaks to the room. “It is bizarre that we did not catch this earlier, you know this surgery is typically done on infants”. The back wall is filled with large textbooks organized alphabetically. The number of diseases in the ‘A’ section alone is staggering. He follows my eyes to the bookcase and snags a title from the shelf. ‘Aortic Aneurysm’. He is now speaking directly to me. He draws frantically on the whiteboard beside him. “We’ll insert this metal with the string attached. Then we’ll inflate it once we’re inside. It’s just like a balloon”. I gaze at the illustrations on the board. It is a carnival of red Expo marker lines against the outline of a human body. As adults continue shuffling around the room, I float away.
As we are walking towards the soccer field, I hear children’s yells, red colored pinnies flapping between goals. My mother holds my hand as she limps beside me. I can tell she’s embarrassed as we pass by a row of onlookers from their balconies – old housewives whispering over cups of tea and passing time waiting for gossip to fly through their deliberately ajar screen doors. Their eyes curiously look at her limp, search her body for any wounds, visibly confused. My mother nervously looks at the ground so I loudly talk about how she ran three miles last month and how we’ll run another next week. She smiles gratefully and I think about how silly an adult’s pride can be.
We stop along the way at Lisa’s house and I scream her name waiting for her to come bounding across the yard to join us. She is wearing new cleats, red nail polish and a ribbon in her hair, gracefully emerging from the embankments of her elementary tomboy phase. It is still all so foreign to me: smearing my face with stolen lipstick in a bathroom stall before class pictures, naming blonde Barbies after husbands with plastic houses and model cars, taking turns wearing her mother’s stilettos before being knocked down in a stride. Lately it seems like she is in such a hurry to grow up. I wish I could tell her that adulthood is just lots of empty corridors, coffee cups and the harrowing shadows of whiteboard drawings under tube lights.
Years later, I will be told that I was independent and brave. In the hospital room, I only know that I am supposed to feel scared and intimated as the surgeon revolves around the room preaching his sermon of legal clauses poorly disguised in faux sentiment. I only know that and my father pacing next to me who hasn’t called me by my nickname in months. The discussion that follows dissipates to a buzz around me. Giant hand gestures and medical brochures followed by questions like how long the operation is and what time they will begin, how many nights in recovery, how to take her home, how long after the surgery until she can walk, how to contact insurance companies, what am I signing dissolve into a chaos of receptionists and papers. I know that I am guilty of not feeling fear or grief so I hide downstairs in the gift shop and watch the owner inflate another heart shaped balloon.
On my first day back at class, my friends gather around my desk and ask where I was for the past week. A petting zoo with rainbow cotton candy colored balloons. “You won’t believe what you missed, David brought his lizard into class and Lisa and Mark French-kissed in the closet during recess” “what’s that” “a kiss, stupid” “gross”. We spend the rest of the day cutting circles from sheets of construction paper and deciding what we want to be when we grow up. Ms. Miranda pretends she knew she was destined to teach. Some girls say they want to be a teacher too and practice licking their fingers before turning pages in a book. It’s afternoon so I think about square cut pizzas in the cafeteria and the bus driver with the loud Latin music. She calls on the class to share and someone proudly pipes up.
“I want to be a doctor so I can help people”
I snort with laughter.
“There’s so much litter around here, isn’t there?” my mom shakes her head in disgust. We are on our evening walk to the soccer field, this time we can hurry through the street past the wandering eyes in balcony doors. My mother walks without holding my hand now and I watch her make long strides up a hill.
I follow her gaze to the lawns littered with cans and glass bottles and see the string from a balloon knotted up in the branches of a tree. The deflated plastic flaps in the wind. Almost indiscernible, I nudge the edge of the plastic and it exhales a last breath of helium. Thanks for choosing us it reads. A grocery price tag is still stuck on its side. As if by some astronomical fate, the string is intact, my mother is walking next to me. The balloon didn’t go far.