Nail scissors. Nail file. Safety razor. Penknife. (The one your father gave you when you were eleven.) Pin. (That pin you got when you graduated from high school, the one with two small pink pearls.) Georgina’s gold stud earrings. (You can’t be serious! It’s the backs, see—the nurse showed her the stubby darts of the backs—they’re sharp, see.) That belt. (My belt? What’s going on here? The buckle was the culprit. You could maybe put your eye out with this part of the buckle, the pointy part.) Knives. Well, you could make a case for knives. But forks and spoons too? Knives, forks, and spoons.
We ate with plastic. It was a perpetual picnic, our hospital.
Cutting old tough beef with a plastic knife, then scooping it onto a plastic fork (the tines wouldn’t stick into the meat, so you had to use the fork like a spoon): Food tastes different eaten with plastic utensils.
One month the plastic-utensil delivery was late and we ate with cardboard knives and forks and spoons. Have you ever eaten with a cardboard fork? Imagine the taste of it, melting clotted cardboard in and out of your mouth, rubbing on your tongue.
Over to the nursing station. “I want to shave my legs.”
“Just a minute.”
“I’m going to take a bath now and I want to shave my legs.”
“Let me check your orders.”
“I’ve got orders to shave my legs. Supervised.”
“Let me check.” Rustle, rattle. “Okay. Just a minute.”
“I’m going now.”
In the tub, swimming-pool-sized, Olympic-swimming-pool-sized, deep and long and claw-footed: Click, swish, “Checks”—
“Hey! Where’s my razor?”
“I’m just the person on checks.”
“I’m supposed to shave my legs now.”
Swish, click.
More hot water: These hydrotherapy tubs are really comfortable.
Click, swish, my shaving supervisor.
“Did you bring my razor?”
She hands it over. She sits on the chair next to the bathtub. I’m eighteen years old. She’s twenty-two. She’s watching me shave my legs.
We had a lot of hairy legs on our ward. Early feminists.