Grey's Journal:
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When I tried to remember what Jen was studying in New York, the words `library archaeology' came to mind. I imagined her as a female Indiana Jones wearing a cool hat and fighting Nazis in the underwater archives of Atlantis. Sadly, this was not the case, and she corrected me saying that her actual course of study was library science and art history, though she understood how one could easily confuse the two. I knew Jen from college where she lived a few doors down the hall from me in my junior year. I forced her to become a sort-of sister to me because she was a good person to talk to and is entertainingly dry and sarcastic. When talking to her, it's less work to simply assume that she is always sarcastic and to listen for the times when she isn't. We sat together in Bryant Park for much of the day. It is one of her favored spots in the city as it amuses her that the New Yorkers go there to look at grass, marveling in the greenness of it all. Over the course of eating, Jen spotted my left hand which I had been trying to conceal. ``Oh! What happened to your thumb?'' A large, unpleasant-looking dent crossed the nail horizontally. ``It's much better now,'' I said. ``You should have seen it two months ago.'' ``What happened?'' About a month ago I was talking to Zornitsa in the doorway of our flat and had my hand on the frame, near the joint. When Zornitsa let her door swing closed behind her the edge caught my thumb. I slapped the door back open with my free arm, but not quickly enough. The first thing Zornitsa said to me was not a concerned `Are you OK?' but the more harsh `Who puts their hand there!? Even children know not to put their hand there!' (Incidently, several months later, when she accidently slammed my bedroom door closed on my head hard enough to bend my glasses, once again her compassion shown through: ``Grey! Why did you put your head in the way of the door?'') After getting my thumb out of the door joint, I clenched it in the center of my fist and sucked air in through my teeth the way people do when they get a bad paper cut. Zornitsa made a well-aren't-you-dramatic huffing noise. ``OK, Grey, let me see your hand.'' ``No-no-no,'' I said quickly. ``It's fine, it's fine. I'm just going into my room for a moment. It's OK. It's OK.'' I get repetitive when I lie. Before Zornitsa could argue, I went into my room and sat on the bed rather stiffly, with my thumb still clenched in my fist. I could feel that something was unusually wrong, but decided that it would all be OK, so long as I didn't look. This was the quantum mechanics of injury. Until I looked, the harm to my thumb was in an undetermined state of severeness, thus there was a small chance that it wasn't as bad as it felt. Eventually though, I couldn't ignore the throbbing and had to look. The fingers on my left hand disagreed with the idea and wouldn't open, so I used my right hand to pry them off. I wasn't sure what I saw at first. There was the indentation across my thumb from where the door hit, that much was clear, but the nail itself looked longer, but longer in the wrong direction -- back toward the joint. ``Oh no.'' I realized that the door had popped the un-grown part of my nail out from under my skin. At this point in the storytelling, Jen made a horrified squeal and curled up in the chair. ``I knew what I had to do,'' I said dramatically. ``See a doctor?'' ``A doctor?'' I replied as though the idea was preposterous. ``Pshaw! No need.'' I tried to play it off as though I had considered getting medical attention, but disregarded the idea. In actuality it never crossed my mind and I found myself seriously doubting my own judgment when I told the next part of the story. ``I went to Google.'' ``You went to Google!? The nail comes out of your finger and Google, dot, com is the first thing that crosses your mind?'' ``Well,'' I said, trying to defend what in retrospect seemed a tenuous decision. ``I needed more information: like how do nails grow?'' After a little searching, I confirmed what I was afraid of: the part of my nail that was now out was the part that grew new nail. If I wanted to have a thumbnail in the future, I needed to push that part under the skin. As gingerly as possible, I pulled back the skin with my right hand and tired to push the nail back in. But I wasn't dextrous to do it with one hand, so I -- ``Called a doctor?'' Jen interrupted hopefully. -- I pulled back the skin again and, before I let myself think it through, I hit my thumb on the corner of my deck. I heard a satisfying little click! as my nail slid back into place and had just enough time to think, `Hey, that wasn't so bad' before the message `maximum perceivable pain' was received and I collapsed on my bed, curled up in a fetal position around my hand. ``Anyway, it's OK now,'' I concluded with another big grin. Jen uncurled herself from her chair and said, after a moments pause, ``I was going to tell you a story about what happened to my toe but I can't possible top that.'' A recent injury of hers made her realize that she owned none of the things that parents have that kids take for granted, things like bandages, antiseptic, hydrogen peroxide. As she listed the items, I could see where each lay in my parents' house. ``Now that I think about it, I don't have any of those things in my flat.'' ``Here's another thing I bet you never thought of,'' she said. ``A plunger.'' ``Hmmm...'' ``It's not something you want to buy, I mean, who wants to admit that their bowels are capable of clogging modern plumbing, but you're going to need it sooner or later.'' I frowned, this was another unexpected entanglement of independent life. Responsibility means buying a plunger. ``It's a ticking time bomb if you don't,'' Jen continued. ``I figure I'll get one the next time I have a lot of things to buy from the home-improvement store. No one will notice if I bury it in a pile of other home essentials, right?'' Upon returning to London, I broached the idea with Zornitsa. Her terse response was: ``Grey, I have never needed a plunger and I will not have you bring one of those primitive things into our flat.'' So, in our little flat in South East London, a time bomb still ticks. |
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Copyright © 2004 Wellington Grey  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
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