Paxil CR: Get back to being you
As I went across the main part of campus, I limped with alternating legs. I switched my limp about every three steps. Both legs were tender. For a while I tried a slow gallop, since that movement felt somewhat comfortable. Then I went back to the limping, discovering I’m way too proud to gallop.
Because it was still early in the morning, there were only a handful of people outside—a photographer taking pictures of a snowgirl, a few joggers, and the kind of kids who head for the library as soon as they wake up. Everyone looked at me as I passed, but I don’t think that anyone thought I was too unusual. In the spring of my freshman year, when I was out of the infirmary for a short while, I noticed that Brown has a large number of students with leg or foot problems. I was only walking around campus for a few months, but during that time I saw people limping, people stuck in wheelchairs, people with amputations, a girl with a clubfoot, some athletes with major sprains, and two lacrosse players with broken legs. I even met a sophomore who told me that he came back from summer vacation missing two toes. One of them was his big toe, and he was sad that he walked differently now.
It took me a long time to get through the main campus that day. It took me at least five minutes getting past the John Carter Library, and when I got to Wilson, the clock on top of it said seven forty-seven. I gave myself a few minutes to pause for breath in front of Sayles, and by the time I got to Salomon, I realized that I was pretty wet from my feet to my calves. The waffles were my northern star, though.
Because the other side of Brown Street has that slight upward curve, that part of the walk took even longer. I’d be embarrassed to put myself up in a race against an eighty-year-old. I used the low brick wall that runs along the sidewalk to steady myself, and I tried to ignore my shitty lungs and the pounding of my heart by looking down the rows and rows of brownstones on the other side of the street. It helped to focus on the vanishing point where the streets dropped off down the hill.
After about twenty more minutes, I think, I finally reached Meeting Street. Once there I decided to take the descending slope with a sideways shuffle, so gravity wouldn’t throw me into an accidental jog. When I got to the bottom, I smiled without even knowing that I was going to smile; I felt somewhat accomplished. A middle-aged woman with a knit turkey sweater reading “Gobble, gobble” in red yarn was going into Emery-Wooley, and she held the door open behind her until I also made it through.
The woman disappeared into the Brown Card Office, but I went farther into the basement. At the soda and candy vending machines I knew I was getting close. Next I came to an open door and stuck my head inside. Because there were wooden tables and plastic chairs and air that smelled like cinnamon, I figured I had done things right.
After stepping into the dining hall, I was stopped by a guy sitting at a folding table.
“Excuse me, I need your card.” He had a gigantic chemistry book open on the table and one knee propped up on an orange chair. His hand was upturned in the air, and his thumb and forefinger twitched for me to place something in between them.
“The card,” I repeated. During the short periods of time before (and between) my illnesses, I had an ID card like everyone else. I’d forgotten that you needed it to let you into buildings and to eat meals. I couldn’t believe how out of touch I’d gotten. I hadn’t seen my card for at least a year and a half.
When I didn’t reach into my pocket, the card swiper looked at me with an “Are you retarded?” expression. “I need to get it from you. So I can swipe it. So you can eat,” he said.
“I don’t have a card on me,” I told him.
“Well, are you on meal plan?”
“Motherfucking meal plan,” I thought. Then I remembered that too—that you signed up for your meals ahead of time. I definitely didn’t have a meal plan. “Yes,” I said. “It includes breakfast.”
“Here’s your alternatives. You can pay for your breakfast, and I’ll take your SIS number if you know it offhand, and then all you have to do is go to Food Services by the end of the week and file for reimbursement. Or else you can just go back to your room and get your card. If you lost it, the card office is over there.” The card swiper pointed out the door.
I looked the opposite way, toward the inside of the dining room. A Hispanic man in a hair net and a chef’s uniform was walking toward a table, carrying a thick waffle on a plate. He took a seat and began to spread strawberries across the top of his waffle. Two women joined him, also Hispanic and also carrying waffles. Their hair nets were even like waffles. Their skin was the color of the edges of the waffles. I wasn’t hungry at all, just determined to get a waffle.
“I don’t have any money on me,” I told the card swiper. “What else?”
The card swiper lowered his hand and returned to flipping through his book while shaking his head. “Look, I’m not the breakfast fairy. If you’re asking me to let you in for free I can’t do it. If you can find someone who will let you use one of their guest credits, then you can do that. Otherwise, you’re out of luck.”
Three girls who looked like they’d just come from hockey practice came into the V-Dub and handed the swiper their cards. They never stopped their conversation.
“Do you want to share a cab to the airport?” one asked.
“What time is your flight? It’s not worth it for me to be sitting there for ten hours,” said another. They all had ponytails and the roots of their hair were stiff from dried sweat.
“Eleven twenty.”
“That’s not bad. I can have breakfast there, I guess, or study. What are you doing, Becca?”
“Train tonight,” the third said.
For only a second I thought about asking the girls not if I could borrow a guest credit—because I didn’t want to be beholden to them—but if any of them knew a girl who used to get bloody noses all the time.
More people were coming into the dining hall, none of them familiar. A delivery guy for the Brown Daily Herald showed up and dropped a pile of papers into the metal rack. You were the headline. I picked up a copy to see if it would tell me something personal about you, but the article was only a fancified police report.
Suddenly, the card swiper switched from glaring at me to flipping out. “You can’t stand there all morning! Do you think if you wear me down or something I’ll let you in?”
“I’m figuring out what I’m going to do,” I told him. I was considering swapping out goals, wondering if my brain would let me do that or if I’d feel disappointed no matter what. Going somewhere else seemed impossible.
“There’s nothing you can do. You don’t have your card, you don’t have money, and it looks like you don’t have friends,” the card swiper said, his face as orange as his chair.
“I know. I know.”
His mouth was open, even in the pauses between his words. “You can’t stand there! You’re making me nervous, standing there.”
To that my left middle finger rose, seemingly on its own. My mom had a hypnotist friend who came over one time and tried to tell me that a big balloon was tied to my finger, and that I should let my finger go where the balloon wanted to take it. My finger had done nothing that day. But in the V-Dub, my finger rose. I stared at the tip of it, wondering why it was so white. The white was startling, especially considering that it was white even against the extreme whiteness of my normal skin.
“Fuck you, I’m just doing my job. This is how I pay for my books,” said the card swiper.
The white resembled the white of a blister. It was iridescent and pulsing like it had pus underneath it. When I opened up the rest of my hand, I saw that my four other fingers looked the same. Then I realized that they all felt the same, too, like I had snow globes inside of each tip. Then I realized that my nose and ears felt the exact same way.
“You flipped me the bird. Great, powerful. Go.” The card swiper was still talking.
I turned my hands so that the undersides faced him, and I asked, “Do you see this?”
“Is that the newest insulting hand gesture all the cool kids are tossing around?” The card swiper’s eyes were wild, locked on mine, and he was ignoring my fingers. “I don’t care! I don’t care, okay?” With both arms he pushed himself away from the table and out of his chair, sending a few pages of his book flipping. “I’m getting someone from administration to deal with this. I need to study.”
Sighing at the trouble of it all, I wandered back out of the V-Dub and into the hallway. A guy with glasses too big for his face was heading for the door, and I stopped him before he reached it. I held up my fingers.
“Excuse me, do you see how these are whiter than they should be?
Guy With Glasses stopped. From the way he looked at me, it seemed like it had been awhile since a girl had stopped him like this. I could tell he wanted to be helpful. He squinted at the fingers before him. “Yes, the tips of your fingers are discolored. I see it.”
I pulled back my hair and leaned forward. “Do my nose and my ears look like that?”
I was breathing lightly in his face and I knew we both were aware of it. “They do, kind of. They’re also exceptionally white.”
I stepped back to give him some space and kneaded my fingers. “The tingling is starting to go away, but I don’t think that’s a very good sign. Now they’re going numb. I can barely feel them.” Then I felt the tip of my nose. “This too. It’s also going numb. What could this be?” I asked Guy With Glasses. It was a rhetorical question. I didn’t really expect an answer from him.
Guy With Glasses didn’t know what to do with his own hands, so he kept making small movements toward me with them. I felt like he wanted to touch me, but he could only do it if he came in at the right angle. “Do you want to sit down? Or maybe you want to eat something?” he asked.
For a split second I forgot my white, tingling problem. I asked him, “Do you have any guest credits left?”
Guy With Glasses shook his head, embarrassed. “My mom and dad insisted on eating at the Ratty when they were here for Parents’ Weekend. They took all of mine. I’m sorry. Did you need one?”
“It’s fine.” I waved the idea away with my right hand, and Guy With Glasses gaped.
“Your fingers are turning blue,” he said.
I flipped over my hand and checked. He was right. They were turning blue. “Is there a pay phone around here?”
Still weirded out, Guy With Glasses pointed over my shoulder to the phone near the bathrooms. “In back of you.”
“Thanks.”
I walked over and dialed 911. While it was ringing, I called out to Guy With Glasses, “My nose, is it blue now, too?”