The Narcissus, Bahamas.
Maybe it was because Teeny had booked all six of us, but it appeared that we were first in line for everything. Room service was amazing. To die for. We were still savoring our fabulous diet-legal desserts that first afternoon when the nutritionist came, bearing a cart full of yummy food samples. While she spent hours working out our menu plans with each of us, we took turns having massages or sunning on the balcony—with a strict caution to use their custom-blended sun blocker and not overdo.
We’d get our vitamin regimens after the blood tests.
I chose a modified Atkins plan with all the lobster, crab, shrimp, steak, lamb chops, grouper, fresh mushrooms, artichokes, asparagus, fresh spinach, salad stuff, low-carb desserts, and berries I wanted.
Pru liked my choices, so she did the same plan. Diane opted for chicken and fish. Linda went for the clinic’s custom weight-loss plan with yummy protein shakes. Teeny needed boosters to get her weight up. (World’s smallest violin playing “Hearts and Flowers.”) And SuSu went with their Cleansing Regimen, specially designed to help people quit smoking.
Sunday and Monday, we cruised at a leisurely pace to the company’s private tropical island, a sheltered mooring whose turquoise waters, white sands, and swaying palms looked just like a travel poster. Meanwhile, a stream of attractive nurses (mostly male, and not a one of them swishy) with top-notch credentials and experience came to introduce themselves and do our pre-op testing. We played bridge and backgammon, read, and watched movies from the satellite between visits from our surgeon and all the other people who would be taking care of us.
The six of us had three nurses on each shift, just for our group. Linda’s and mine looked like a Viking prince, and his name was Hans. If anything should go wrong, the ship’s life-flight helicopter could get us to a top-notch Miami hospital in less than an hour.
I liked everybody we met, but especially our surgeon (of whom there were two dozen aboard). Norwegian, she was beautiful even without makeup and looked forty-something. We were all shocked when she showed us her passport, and the birth date was 1941.
“No way are you sixty-three,” SuSu told her.
“Who did you?” Linda challenged. “That’s who I want.”
The doctor laughed, then opened her huge album of befores and afters she’d brought. It impressed my socks off, as did her surgical statistics for the thousands of procedures she’d done (up to date and neatly printed out by procedure for each of us). We settled on our final selections with confidence.
So, with complete confidence in the staff, we fasted after midnight on Monday, scrubbed down well with Betadine at the crack of dawn, then hugged each other good-bye as we went to the operating rooms.
The Narcissus, Basa Cay. Tuesday, March 2, 2004.
Pru went first, at 7:00 A.M., maybe because she was having so much done. She didn’t bat an eyelash at the prospect of going through all that surgery with only her regular dose of methadone and acupuncture. Boggled the mind. And she wasn’t even afraid.
I went next. It felt weird just walking with the attendant to the pre-op area which, along with the OR, was pink, too. As I lay on the table engulfed by the hollow operating room sound that roared below soft, classical music, I managed to get in one last prayer before they put the anesthetic into my IV. God, I know this whole setup is vain, but I’m counting on You to look after me, for Your sake as much as mine. I mean, everybody knows I’m trusting You to take care of us all. So please make sure everything goes smoothly, and all the equipment works properly. Put angels to minister safety and protection over each of us while we’re asleep. And please give the doctor supernatural wisdom and skill. In the name of Christ, amen.
SuSu calls prayers like that spiritual blackmail, that God—if there was one, which she denied—wouldn’t like. But the Bible says God wants to give us the desires of our hearts as long as we’re in His will. So since there wasn’t anything in the Good Book that said, “Thou shalt not have plastic surgery” (especially if it’s free), I figured I was on pretty solid ground.
I woke up back in my stateroom to find the angel Gabriel hovering over me in a halo of afternoon sun, and the wind blowing through the cloud I was lying on. (It turned out to be a positive air-flow therapeutic mattress.)
“Hello, there,” he said in a soothing tone. “Everything went well, and you did beautifully.”
I didn’t know Gabriel was German.
I drifted into a blessed fog, then back out again. I didn’t hurt. Everybody had said it would really hurt at first, but it didn’t.
The ship swayed almost imperceptibly, like a wonderful hammock.
Thirsty. I asked for some water and heard a rude, guttural “Unngghh” from somewhere close.
“Here you go.” My angel placed a straw between my lips, and I greedily sucked down the cold water.
“Annnggh.”
Where was that noise coming from? And why couldn’t I talk?
Not that I cared…No wonder people got addicted to drugs.
I thought of Oliver. “Please, sir. I want some more,” but nothing came out.
“You’ll notice that you have on a pressure garment,” he said. “We use these to discourage thrombosis, help the tissues reattach, and minimize swelling.”
Thrombosis. Blood clots. Gotcha.
My stomach growled.
“May I bring you something to eat?” Hans the nurse asked. “Perhaps a fresh raspberry sorbet freeze?”
I nodded. “Ummm.”
The next thing I knew, there was a straw in my mouth. I drew in the smooth, gloriously sweet raspberry slush.
Thank God for Splenda.
When I asked for the bedpan, Hans made me get up and go to the bathroom, and the party ended, then and there. I felt vaguely like I’d been run over by a Mercedes—several times, like that Houston orthodontist whose wife caught him with another woman.
My rearranged hips, sides, inner thighs, underarms, stomach, and belly button were all encased in a crotchless, gut-sucker body leotard that went from my wrists to my toes, as if they thought I’d fly to pieces without it.
Maybe I would.
On a scale of one to ten, I was rocking along at a six. Until I moved, then Katie bar the door.
“Der more you can walk, der better,” Hans said. “Ve need to get that circulation going in der legs.”
Ever dutiful, I tried to sit up.
“Dat’s it. Nice and easy.”
Easy? Nothing worked right, and I looked like Frankenstein meets the mummy!
Hans steadied me as I swung my legs over the side and stood in slow motion. “Take your time.”
I looked at him and noticed a faint resemblance to Franz of Hans und Franz of Saturday Night Live, permanently branding him as Hans-und-Franz in my mind.
Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t stand straighter than forty-five degrees from the waist. After Hans-und-Franz straightened my tubes, he gave me a pillow to hold against my stomach, which helped a little.
With my free hand, I clutched the IV pole for dear life. “Pain medicine?” I asked.
“Not quite yet.” Which was nurse talk for at least two more hours.
Pain medication. Pru couldn’t have any pain medication.
“My friend, Pru?” I asked. “The one who went first.”
“Ah. She iss doing quite well. Quite well, indeed. Do you vish to go see her?”
“Tomorrow.” Maybe.
I’d be lucky to make it to the bathroom today. It looked a city block away, but I made it.
Since my fanny was the only place on my torso they hadn’t messed with, I sat without setting off too many pain alarms. Hans-und-Franz discreetly arranged my pink hospital gown to spare my modesty, then left me to take care of the necessaries.
Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to have so much done at once.
In my condition, nothing was easy, including tearing off a length of johnny paper. A bone-deep moan escaped me when I did, summoning Hans-und-Franz in serious professional mode. “Are you all right, ma’am?”
“Fine. Fine,” I lied. “I just tried to move my arm.” I seriously considered drip-dry, but only for a second.
“May I assist you?” he volunteered.
“No! Thank you, no.” I know it was silly, but I’d never had a male nurse before, and lipo didn’t qualify as dire enough to suffer such bathroom indignities. “Just give me some time. I can do it.”
“I’ll be right outside.” He resumed standing with his back to the open door.
Every movement set loose legions of nasty little demons.
“Serves you right,” Chicken Little said. “That’s what you get for being so frivolous and risky, and not accepting yourself the way you were.”
“Oh, shut up.”
Hans pivoted. “I beg your pardon?
“Nothing. I was just talking to myself.”
He turned away again, his posture relaxing. “All der best people do, madam.”
I laughed.
Big mistake. “Oh. Ouch. Oh. No. No laughing.”
When I was finally finished and was ready to get up, I struggled to my feet, discovering a whole new set of pain neurons. “Okay. Help.”
Hans took my elbow and assisted me back to bed, which was looking awfully good, even if it did make a lot of noise for a bed. I had just sat down when I heard Linda’s voice coming through the monitor on Hans’s belt. She was rattling on in Yiddish. I hadn’t heard her say more than a sentence or two in Yiddish since her Bubbie had died when we were nineteen.
Hans carefully swung my legs onto the bed and covered me. “Madam’s friend iss vaking up. If madam will pardon.”
“Her name is Linda. Tell her Georgia said to feel better soon.”
“I shall.” He left me to sink into the wheezy mattress.
I slept most of the rest of the day, waking to hear a few faint sounds of distress from the other rooms, but nothing alarming. I woke the next morning to a statuesque black woman putting a blood-pressure cuff on my arm.
“Good mornin’, missie,” she said in a gentle Caribbean lilt. “My name is Shonna. I’ll be your nurse today.” The cuff inflated automatically, then eased. “Very good.” She opened the Velcro. “One hundred over seventy-two. Light a candle to your ancestors.”
I started to stretch, but immediately thought better of it. “Ow!”
“It’ll be a few more days before you’ll be wantin’ to do that, darlin’.”
“How many?” I don’t know why I bothered to ask. I’d be better when I was better, and not before. “I’d like to have a date to look forward to,” I justified aloud.
“Very fine idea.” She stuck an electronic thermometer under my tongue. “If all goes as usual, by day four, you will feel quite human again. Sore,” she qualified, “the way you would be after a strenuous workout when you haven’t been to the gym for a few months.”
Gym? Gym and Georgia weren’t in the same dimension.
At least, until now. The physical therapy would start a week after surgery, something I wasn’t looking forward to.
“Ninety-seven point seven,” she read without alarm. “Do you usually run a bit low in the mornings?”
I nodded.
“Very good. Now.” She put the instruments away. “Would you be wantin’ to have your shower or your breakfast first?”
“Shower? I thought you couldn’t get wet after surgery.”
“It’s not a good idea to get incisions wet, no, but we use surgical glue that seals those off very nicely. And we’ve found that a warm shower is quite therapeutic, both for de circulation and de morale.”
I felt my hair, which was matted and bizarre. “It would feel good to wash my hair.”
“Before breakfast?”
Oddly, I wasn’t hungry. “Sure.”
I was fine till she untied my gown, the warm shower ready and running. I looked in the long mirror on the back of the door and burst into tears. “I’m fat! Fatter than before.”
Even with a girdle from head to toe, I looked like somebody had stuck a bicycle pump into my toe and added twenty pounds of pressure. My shape had lost all definition.
I did have an innie, but besides that, I looked awful.
“Ah, missie, donya cry now,” she half-chuckled in sympathy. “Dat’s just de swellin’ from de fluids and de trauma. My word on it, darlin’, you gonna come out lookin’ like a bride.”
The adrenaline of that wretched moment subsided, and I mopped my tears with a washcloth. “I’m gonna hold you to that. And my lady doctor.”
“Trust, me, darlin’, I know what I’m sayin’. I been doin’ this for many years.”
I stood there staring at my reflection with all my privates and incisions showing through the body girdle. “How do I get this thing off?”
Shonna laughed. “Honey, you don’t. Dis de Bahamas. We do tings de easy way.” She grinned and motioned me into the shower “as is.” Then she got a lovely nylon scrubber and soaped up everything I couldn’t reach, with just enough pressure to feel good, but not hurt.
I never would have believed it, but thirty minutes later when she was blowing dry my hair, I felt a thousand times better, even in a damp body girdle. I ate my breakfast of fresh blueberries, low-carb muffins, and broiled pork tenderloin while Shonna got Linda up. I heard the shower next door and smiled over my peach tea.
It was nine before I heard signs of life in the living room.
I was actually pretty comfortable in my bed, but when the others congregate, anytime, anywhere, I’m seized by the irresistible urge to be where they are.
John calls it herd mentality and claims men don’t have it.
So I bit the bullet and put on a clean gown (one of mine), and braved the passage down the hallway, clinging to my IV pole and bent over with my girdle showing beyond my sleeves and hem. Linda’s and Diane’s rooms were vacant as I passed.
When I rounded the corner, I wasn’t prepared for the carnage that awaited. Linda was sprawled on a chaise, her neck and head girded with a tube of the same stuff my getup was made out of. It left her face and the front of her hair corralled into an odd oval shape.
When she saw me, her eyes went wide and brimming.
I pointed to the tuft of silver hair that stuck straight up from her forehead. “You’ve got baby bird hair.” I couldn’t even see the small lipo incisions below her cheekbones and jawline.
“This brain corselet is drivin’ me nuts,” she said. “My ears are about to burn up. But the chin barely hurts.” She tugged at the “brain corselet.” “I’ve gotta get Shonna to cut holes for my ears.” Unable to hide her reaction to the way I looked, she peered at me as if my head was threatening to fall off any second.
I turned to SuSu.
“Ohmygod!” Gingerly stretched out on a sofa to humor her lipo’d fanny, she stared at me in alarm, but I was staring back at her swollen face and two huge shiners with surgical markings and lines of stitches around her eyes. Not to mention the exposed stitches just inside her hairline and down into her ears. Her thick hair was wild as an Aborigine’s. Either they hadn’t let her wash it, or she’d turned down the offer of a shower. She had a body girdle, but it was sleeveless. “Georgia, honey, how can you stand it?” she asked me with a wince that had to hurt.
I would have asked her the same question, but I didn’t want to give her any ideas. She was enough of a whiner already.
“Actually, I feel pretty fair, considering all they did,” I lied. (It’s that martyr thing.) “But I don’t think I’m gonna be able to stay up long.” I subsided slowly into an upholstered Parsons chair.
Diane shuffled by, her lower half encased in elastic from her thigh-suck and tummy tuck, and her face swollen and distorted from the lift she’d had.
“Hey, sweetie.” I air-kissed in her direction. “How’s your self?”
Diane had an enormously high pain threshold. “Better than you, from the looks of it.”
There was a knock at the door, which Teeny’s nurse answered.
Mumble, mumble. Then, “One moment. I’ll ask.” The nurse came in and came over to me. “Mrs. Baker, there are flowers outside for you. Do you wish to accept them?”
“John. How sweet,” I said to the others. “Please, bring them in.” As she headed back to the door, I said, “Must have cost him a fortune.”
Quite unlike John. He adored me, but was no romantic.
I knew something was up when the nurse opened both doors.
In came a huge exotic arrangement with enough giant tiger lilies in it to give me a headache for a week.
“Whoa.” All of the others sat upright in amazement.
“What?” Linda asked. “Did you win the Kentucky Derby?”
The nurse brought over the card. “Madam.”
I opened it. “Oh, for heaven’s sakes.”
I handed it to Teeny, who read, “So sorry to drag you into my little troubles. Feel better soon, then we’ll talk. Celeste Heinz-Bitterman.”
I might have known. The woman from the dogfight over the limo. She’d impressed me as the kind of person whose world ended at her skin.
Diane bristled. “Of all the nerve.”
“They take up half the room,” Teeny noted in dismay.
I motioned to the nurse. “Nurse, could you please have him take these away? They’re lovely, but I’m allergic to lilies.” I had an inspiration. “Is there a chapel onboard?”
“Yes, madam.”
“Why don’t we put them in there, then?”
She hesitated.
It wasn’t hard to figure out why she had. “If they’ll fit.”
She nodded. “Perhaps with a little judicious rearranging.”
The steward lugged them back out.
“Remind me not to get within a mile of the dining room,” I said. “I am in no mood to talk to Celeste Heinz-Bitterman. Or Arthur.”
With great care, I swiveled to scan the room. “Where’s Teeny? And Pru?”
“Coming.” Teeny’s voice came down the hall. It was several minutes before she appeared, bent over a walker with wheels on the front.
“Booty call! The booty woman is here.” She inched toward us. “And the bazoom babe, but you’ll have to take my word for that. It hurts too much to stand up straight and show off my new boobs, but they’re there. And they’re even.”
“I want to see,” Diane prodded.
Teeny shook her head. “Not till they’re well. But I promise, I’ll let you see them before we dock.” She took a whiff. “Whew. Something smells really cloying in here.”
“That woman from the limo sent George a honkin’ huge flower arrangement,” SuSu told her, “tryin’ to get her to testify.”
“Lilies,” Linda said. They all knew I was allergic.
Teeny bristled. “People have no sense of propriety anymore.”
Pru’s voice came from the hallway. “Ready or not, here I come. Brace yourselves.” She moved easily, since she’d had little bodywork done, but her head looked twice as bad as SuSu’s, not just because of the extensive work she’d had done, but mainly because of the jillion acupuncture needles sticking out of her head and neck.
“I know,” she said through the mask that was her face. “I look like Pinhead in Hellraiser after a barroom brawl.”
SuSu laughed. “Ow, ow, ow,” she said between spates.
I was happy to see them communicating. If Pru was going to be one of us again, we had to treat her like one of us, not some wounded victim you had to handle with kid gloves.
“You are gruesome. No two ways about it,” I said evenly. “But ain’t we all? I decided I was ‘Frankenstein Meets the Mummy.’”
Linda motioned to her brain corselet. “Yeah, well, what’s this, then?”
“Big bird,” Diane and Teeny said in unison, then laughed, which sent them both into a wave of complaints.
“The damnedest thing is,” Pru said, “the acupuncture works. I am not kiddin’ y’all. I’ve been really comfortable.”
“Well, send the guy to me,” I said.
“Ditto,” from SuSu. “God, I need a cigarette,” she whined. “And a drink!”
We all froze. Except Pru.
“You don’t need a drink, honey,” she said in a flat-footed, practical tone. “Or a cigarette. You just want one. Big difference.”
Uh-oh.
SuSu bristled.
“It’s okay,” Pru went on. “I want one, too. The difference is, I know that all it takes is just that one to screw up my life. And another thing I know is, wanting something isn’t the worst thing that can happen.” She said it with such poise and calm.
SuSu’s defenses went up, her tone harsh. “Will it ever go away?” she asked. “The wanting?”
“God, I hope so.” A smile escaped Pru, which made her moan in discomfort.
The pain bug must have gotten loose just then, because we all shifted positions and made it a whine-in.
Stooped, I started the long shuffle toward my room. “I gotta lie back down. Teens, my darling, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
She did her best to smile, but it came out as a semiwince. “Talk to me in three weeks. I think you’ll be very happy.”
“Are we gonna show each other the final results?” Pru asked.
SuSu waggled her hand. “I want to see the lipo and the boob jobs.”
“Of course, I’m only a chin,” Linda qualified, “but I’ve got to admit, I really would like to see the final results.”
“What?” I couldn’t believe it. Linda, of all people. She was even more modest than I was. “Just to satisfy your curiosity, y’all want me and Diane and Teeny to get nekkid?” I left out SuSu, because she’d long since lost her inhibitions about her body.
Linda spread her hands in a soothing gesture. “That’s an awful blunt way to put it.”
“Yeah, well, nekkid’s nekkid,” I said. (That’s Southern for naked and up to no good.)
SuSu snorted. “Big deal. We used to take group showers getting ready for our dates at Pru’s.”
“Yeah, but we were all seventeen. And we were all nekkid,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t feel comfortable baring all while Pru and Linda sit by with their clothes on.”
Pru perked up. “Then we’ll all get nekkid, like we did back then. That’s simple enough, isn’t it?”
I wasn’t too keen on that, either. “What? Just strip off in our rooms and come out like nudists or something?”
Clearly, that didn’t go down with Linda or Diane, either.
Pru lifted her chin. “It could be my initiation into the Red Hats.”
“Honey, we had that when we gave you the hat,” Linda said.
“I know,” Teeny piped up. “We’ll order some great room service, then lock the suite and play Strip Bridge.”
That made us all laugh, then go all ouchy.
SuSu jumped in and lobbied hard for that option, chiding us for how inhibited we’d all gotten. Eventually, she won me over.
“Oh, what the hell. Why not? It’s hardly prurient,” I admitted. We were just curious, not perverted.
“But I don’t know how to play bridge,” Pru confessed.
“Now that you’re a Red Hat, you need to know how to play bridge,” Teeny said. “We’ve got three and a half weeks. We can teach you.”
“All in favor of Strip Bridge and a floor show?” SuSu said. “Raise your hands.”
Everybody but Linda and Diane voted yes.
“Hah,” SuSu said through her mask of a face. “You’re outvoted. Strip Bridge, it is.”
“When?” Diane asked.
“Last day at sea?” Linda suggested, putting it off as long as possible.
We all scanned each other, finding no objection.
“Last day, it is,” Teeny ruled. “We can stock up on food and start about four.”
“Y’all are seriously crazy,” I had to say.
Pru laughed. “Ow. That’s what I’ve always loved best about y’all. That, and your good hearts.”
Diane went over in slow motion and hugged her, careful not to disturb her needles. “Ditto, sweetie. Welcome back.”
“Strip Bridge it is,” SuSu exulted.
Maybe we really were crazy.
Oh, Lordy. That meant I’d have to work really hard to get in shape, darn it.