Barbara the Slut and Other People Read online

  “Okay,” I said. “Anything else?”

  Something something penis, he said.

  “Something is wrong with your penis?” I said.

  Something something penis, he said again, louder. I told him to hold on and went out to the hall. A med student had arrived with Dr. Wagner, and they were talking to the clinicians about what patient to take.

  “I have a really good patient for you,” I said.

  The med student looked excited, like he thought it was going to be a woman with a double vagina or something. He was new to the clinic and he was technically a resident, which allowed him to see patients under Dr. Wagner’s guidance. He was too tall and he walked like it was hard for him to balance on such long legs. I wondered if that was why Dr. Wagner didn’t seem to take him seriously.

  “This guy is sure he’s HIV positive but he had a negative rapid test, and when I told him it was negative, he decided that something was wrong with his penis,” I told them.

  The med student still looked excited but Dr. Wagner rolled her eyes.

  “Why does he think he’s HIV positive?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Don’t you think you should find out?” she said.

  “Um,” I said.

  I went back to the counseling room and told Mike that a doctor would see him, but first I needed to know why he thought he was HIV positive. He just looked at me, rasping now, and I made a mental note to offer him some water later. I sat down and wondered what to ask him and why I hadn’t been trained to do this.

  “Have you ever used needles to take drugs?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Have you ever had sex with another man?”

  “No!”

  I tried to think of the other HIV risk factors.

  “Have you ever exchanged sex for money?”

  Mike Anonymous started to shake. He shook harder and harder and then he started to sob and talk. I had no idea what words he was saying, but at the end I made out the words “my kids.” I didn’t know what to do. I took a box of tissues from the file cabinet and put it on the table.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He looked at me and hiccupped.

  “Did you have sex with a prostitute?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Did you use protection? A condom?”

  “It has broken.”

  He suddenly seemed very calm and I wondered if this was when he was going to pass out. I watched him for a minute. I wondered if he was a researcher at the university or something. I couldn’t think of another explanation for a man with nice shoes and a nice bag and a wife and kids, who could barely speak English, and who either could or could not understand it.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m going to go get the doctor.”

  He nodded.

  “Will you be okay here if I leave for a second?”

  He nodded again.

  I still didn’t want to leave him so I stuck my foot in the door and called down the hall, hoping that Dr. Wagner was down there.

  “What?” she called back.

  “Can you come up here?” I said.

  “What?” she said.

  “Can you please come to counseling room one?”

  When she and the resident got there I looked at Mike and he seemed okay, so I closed the door and told Dr. Wagner about the hooker. She asked what exam room they could use and I told her room two. I gave her his chart.

  “He can’t be anonymous if we’re going to examine him,” she said.

  “You’re going to have to find out his name,” said the resident. I decided he wasn’t speaking to me since he was so tall. I opened the door to the counseling room and Mike Anonymous looked at us.

  “Mike, this is Dr. Wagner,” I said. “She’s going to take care of you.”

  Mike nodded.

  “Hi, I’m Dr. Phillips.” The resident smiled and I wanted to kick his spider legs out from under him.

  I brought Mike a cup of water and moved him to the exam room. They were in there for forty minutes, or the amount of time that it took Judy and Eunice, the other clinicians, to see six patients. When Dr. Wagner came out she ordered a herpes 2 test and a hepatitis C test.

  “What was wrong with his penis?” I said.

  “Nothing,” said Dr. Wagner. “He doesn’t have a single symptom.”

  The resident handed me Mike’s chart and a requisition form for the tests, and then he repeated the names of the tests, like he thought of them himself. He had filled out the requisition form wrong and ordered a herpes culture instead of a herpes blood test, so I pointed that out to him.

  I brought Mike Anonymous back into the lab and drew blood to send out. He wanted me to order a second HIV test from the lab, so I asked Dr. Wagner if I could. She said yes because it was the only way to get him to shut up about how he was HIV positive and the first test couldn’t tell because it couldn’t pick up the antibodies in Asian blood.

  “What?” I said. “That’s crazy.”

  “Is it?” said Dr. Wagner to the resident. “What do you know about that?”

  “I can find out more,” said the resident. “I’ll make a call.”

  “Are you retarded?” said Dr. Wagner. “Did you even go to med school?”

  “I know,” said the resident. “I was just joking.”

  • • •

  Davey called at three to make sure I was getting off of work at four and could help him cut the dog’s nails. He said they were clicking on the floor and if we didn’t cut them at four he wouldn’t be able to get any work done for the whole rest of the day. I swore on the book of skin diseases that if he called me on the private line one more time I was going to break up with him. When I hung up, my coworker Pregnant Patricia asked me if I could stay late for her, because she had to go to an emergency doctor’s appointment that she had been waiting a month to get. I told her I could. I called Davey back and left a message so that he wouldn’t come to the clinic right at four with the dog and the nail clippers. I said the baby inside of Patricia had a life-or-death situation and I had no choice but to stay until eight.

  After Patricia, Boss Donna, and Louisa left at four, Louisa called to tell me that Patricia had lied and was really going to a job interview. Before Pregnant Patricia was Pregnant Patricia she was Fat Patricia, because she was fatter than anyone else, even me. Fat Patricia and the women who had been working at the clinic for four years or six years or eleven years sent out their resumes from the fax machine whenever Boss Donna was out of the office, but no one had gotten a new job in the ten months I had worked there. Even though I was going to leave the job and hopefully the city and the state when my lease was up in two months, I imagined myself doing STD screenings when I was seventy. If I gained five pounds a year eating the donuts that the drug reps brought, I would be enormous by then.

  • • •

  A little before seven, Mike Anonymous came back with a woman. She was tall and black and didn’t look like I would have expected her to look, if I had expected to see her. She had perfect teeth and perfect skin, and she had purplish-blue contacts.

  Mike said he had an appointment. I was starting to understand his accent well enough. I looked at Melissa, who was working the front desk with me.

  “You were already here,” I said to Mike.

  Mike said he wanted to give the woman his appointment, and when I said we canceled it, he said she would wait for a same-day appointment.

  “I ain’t waiting,” the woman said.

  “Hang on,” I said.

  I went to the back and asked Eunice what to do. She looked at the clock. We had to take walk-ins until seven and it was six fifty-four.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  Back at the front, I gave the woman an intake form and an STD questionnaire, and she filled them out with her back to Mike. Melissa entered her into the computer and I put her chart together and brought her in.

  Her name was Marla Jones. Marla Jones looked like sh
e was twenty but the birthday in her chart made her thirty-eight. She wasn’t wearing makeup and she wasn’t wearing a miniskirt. She was wearing jeans and a puffy coat.

  Marla had answered all of the questions in loopy handwriting. I asked her the standard counseling questions, like whether she was ready to get a negative or positive result in fifteen minutes, and what she would do either way. The only question that wasn’t standard was whether she felt like she was being forced to get tested, which we asked when patients were with their moms, and which seemed relevant now.

  “I ain’t being forced,” she said, “I’m getting paid.”

  I started the test and put Marla in a counseling room. I didn’t want to send her back out to wait with Mike Anonymous. When I got back to the lab, Eunice and Melissa were standing over the test. They made room for me and we all waited for the lines to come up. It worked like a pregnancy test: one line was good, two lines were bad.

  The control line came up and then the positive line came up. Two lines.

  I felt like air was rushing through my head. I sat down in the blood-drawing chair.

  “Dear God,” said Eunice.

  “I feel sick,” said Melissa. She left the lab.

  “I need a minute,” said Eunice. She went back out to the clinician’s station and put her head in her hands.

  • • •

  Soon I stopped feeling dizzy and felt empty, like this wasn’t real life, which was a relief. When Eunice was ready I followed her into the counseling room. Marla didn’t look up from her magazine.

  “Marla? Hi, I’m Eunice.”

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.” Eunice sat down. “Are you ready for your results?”

  “Yeah,” said Marla.

  “Your HIV test was positive,” said Eunice.

  “Yeah,” said Marla. She didn’t look up.

  “Okay,” said Eunice. “Did you already know that you might be HIV positive?”

  “Yeah,” said Marla.

  “Are you currently under a physician’s care?” said Eunice.

  “No,” said Marla. She looked up.

  I gave Marla a card for the hospital’s AIDS care program. Eunice asked her how she was going to deal with her results tonight and tomorrow, and asked her about her support network, but Marla kept saying she was fine. Eunice told her that we were going to report the result under our mandated reporting protocol. She wanted to do a confirmation test before Marla left, but Marla said it was already confirmed.

  “Okay,” said Eunice. “Will you call the program?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Marla. “I got to go.”

  “Okay,” said Eunice. “We’ll call you tomorrow to see how you’re doing.”

  I walked Marla to the checkout desk. Mike Anonymous was waiting for her on the other side of the door.

  “He’s paying,” she said. She opened the door to the waiting room and told Mike Anonymous that he needed to pay and that he owed her fifty bucks. He said he needed the results first.

  “Hell no,” she said.

  He said he was paying her so she had to give him the results.

  “No,” said Marla. She walked past him.

  He said that was the agreement.

  “Okay,” said Marla. “Give me the money first.”

  He handed her some cash and she started walking toward the door.

  “Hey!” he said. But instead of following her, Mike Anonymous stormed our window, yelling that he needed the results.

  “I think you should shut that,” I said to Melissa.

  She closed the window, and we watched Mike yelling on the other side. He was yelling that we had to give him the results because he paid for the test and it was his money, so they were his results.

  “We can’t give you the results,” I said through the glass. “It’s against the law.” I didn’t tell him that he hadn’t paid yet.

  He was sweating again and he was crying. He yelled that he knew it was positive. Then he really started screaming, not words but just screaming. He ran into a row of chairs, knocking them over and falling on top of them.

  I picked up the phone and pressed page. “I think we need help up here.”

  By the time Eunice got to the front, Mike Anonymous had taken a couple of pictures off the wall and pulled down a set of track lights.

  “Do you want me to call the police?” I said. We watched him through the window. He looked weaker. He knocked over the pamphlet display in slow motion and then sat down on a chair and put his head between his knees.

  “Call them if I wave at you,” said Eunice. “I’m going to take him outside.”

  She went out to the waiting room and took his elbow and helped him stand up. We watched her escort him outside. She looked older, like his red face set off her gray hair.

  They left the building and walked across the parking lot. The streetlights lit them up and made shadows under their eyes and noses and chins. We could see Mike Anonymous shaking and shouting and then calming down again. Eunice tightened her grip on him and then loosened it. It made me want to cry that this old lady was showing him what was what.

  She led him to a bench and activated the safety light on the side of the building. She had on her calmest face, but she was shivering. I wondered if I should bring her her coat but I didn’t want to interrupt. Mike put his head down again and Eunice talked to him, and I could hear her voice in my head. Her voice was very soothing and she had been the only clinician I wasn’t afraid of when I started working at the clinic.

  Mike didn’t get worked up again, so Melissa and I closed the exam rooms and Melissa did the deposit and I put the pamphlet display back together and left a message for maintenance about the pictures and the track lights. When we were almost ready to go Eunice came back in alone and said that Mike Anonymous would be back in three months for a follow-up test.

  • • •

  When I got home Davey was mad about me working late and he made me help him clip the dog’s nails right away, before I had a chance to pee or open a bottle of wine.

  “How was work?” he said, but it sounded like he meant, I hate you for fucking up my day.

  “It was fine,” I said, hoping it sounded like, I hate you for fucking up my life.

  I made cereal for dinner and Davey played Call of Duty. When I told him I was going to bed he waved at me, and then later he tried to wake me up to have sex with him. I was pretty asleep but I figured if we did it then, we wouldn’t have to do it while I was awake, and he would leave me alone for at least a week.

  When he got on top of me the dog went under the covers. Davey was taking a long time to come and while he was working on it, I decided to tell him.

  “I don’t want to live here anymore,” I said.

  “Fuck,” he said. “That fucking dog is licking my feet. What did you say?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Vivian, what?” he said.

  I pushed him out of me and closed my legs. “We had an HIV positive today.”

  He tried to separate my legs again. “Don’t you have HIV positives all the time?”

  “No. We never have HIV positives.”

  I moved over and put my underwear back on.

  I WILL CRAWL TO RALEIGH IF I HAVE TO

  My mom and I were going to stop to break up with my boyfriend on our way to Emerald Isle, but the muffler fell off of my car right before we got to the exit we needed to take to Raleigh, and my mom said we couldn’t stop anymore. I was driving, and I had been waiting for this exit for three hours, since we left home. I started crying and for a while I was crying so hard I could barely see. The car was so loud that I could barely hear either, and my mom was trying to talk to me but I didn’t care because I was mad at her for not letting us stop. Finally she got in my face and yelled, “PULL! OVER!” so I did and we switched seats. I cried for at least ten more minutes, which was more tears than it sounds like. My mom shouted over the noise that it was okay because we would get the car fixed when we got to Emerald Isle and
I could stop in Raleigh to break up with James on the way back. I yelled that my vacation was ruined.

  We had no choice but to spend the next three hours in silence, or obviously not in silence but not saying anything. My mom drove in the right lane. She put on her sunglasses and tried to ignore all the cars passing us and staring.

  I had insisted on taking my car because I didn’t want it to look like my mom drove me to break up with my boyfriend. My plan had been to drop her off near James’s house and pick her up when I was done, but now all my plans had gone to shit.

  When we finally got to Emerald Isle, my mom’s boyfriend, Mak, was unloading beer from his car, and my brother, Noah, was on a walk with the dog, meaning he was smoking weed somewhere and letting Petey chew on rocks. The three of them had left Virginia at the crack of dawn that morning because Mak was in a big hurry to get to North Carolina to play golf. My mom and I had waited to get our hair and nails done, because my mom wanted to look good for her boyfriend’s brother’s wife, and because I wanted to look good for when I turned single.

  We were renting a house with Mak and Mak’s brother’s family, the Henderchenkos. They were the Henderchenkos because Mak’s brother used to be “Boychenko” and his wife used to be “Henderson,” and by combining they saved themselves six letters and a hyphen.

  The house was smaller and crappier than I had imagined when my mom said we were getting a nice big house for everyone. There were only three bedrooms, and I guessed I was sharing with my brother, which left my mom and Mak in the second bedroom, and the Henderchenkos—Andy, Tina, and their son, Dylan—in the third. Unless Dylan was sharing with me and Noah, but I didn’t think my mom and Mak would do that to us.

  We had been on Emerald Isle at the same time as the Henderchenkos for the past several years, but we had never shared a house. I liked them fine, but they were very serious people. They were always dressed up, even at the beach. Tina wasn’t as pretty as my mom, but she worked much harder at being pretty, and that somehow made my mom want to go get her hair and nails done. Andy was in much better shape than his brother because Tina didn’t let him eat carbs. Andy also had all of his hair, and I wondered if Tina had a hand in that as well.