It took only a minute. The old Armenian, crouching, lizard-backed, ran his yellowed fingers over my parts. It was no surprise that Dr. Philobosian had never noticed anything. Even now, alerted to the possibility, he didn’t seem to want to know.
“You can get dressed now,” was all he said. He turned and walked very carefully to the sink. He turned on the water and thrust his hands into the stream. They seemed to be trembling more than ever. Liberally he squirted out the antibacterial soap. “Say hello to your dad,” he said before I left the room.
Dr. Phil referred me to an endocrinologist at Henry Ford Hospital. The endocrinologist tapped a vein in my arm, filling an alarming number of vials with my blood. Why all this blood was needed he didn’t say. I was too frightened to ask. That night, however, I put my ear to my bedroom wall in hopes of finding out what was going on. “So what did the doctor say?” Milton was asking. “He said Dr. Phil should have noticed when Callie was born,” Tessie answered. “This whole thing could have been fixed back then.” And then Milton again: “I can’t believe he’d miss something like that.” (“Like what?” I silently asked the wall, but it didn’t specify.)
Three days later we arrived in New York.
Milton had booked us into a hotel called the Lochmoor in the East Thirties. He had stayed there twenty-three years earlier as a navy ensign. Always a thrifty traveler, Milton was also encouraged by the room rates. Our stay in New York was open-ended. The doctor Milton had spoken to—the specialist—refused to discuss details before he’d had a chance to examine me. “You’ll like it,” Milton assured us. “It’s pretty swank, as I remember.”
It was not. We arrived from La Guardia in a taxi to find the Lochmoor fallen from its former glory. The desk clerk and cashier worked behind bulletproof glass. The Viennese carpeting was wet beneath the dripping radiators and the mirrors had been removed, leaving ghostly rectangles of plaster and ornamental screws. The elevator was prewar, with gilded, curving bars like a birdcage. Once upon a time, there had been an operator; no longer. We crammed our suitcases into the small space and I slid the gate closed. It kept coming off its track. I had to do it three times before the electrical current would flow. Finally the contraption rose and through the spray-painted bars we watched the floors pass by, each dim and identical except for the variation of a maid in uniform, or a room service tray outside a door, or a pair of shoes. Still, there was a feeling of ascension in that old box, of rising up out of a pit, and it was a letdown to get to our floor, number eight, and find it just as drab as the lobby.
Our room had been carved out of a once-bigger suite. Now the angles of the walls were skewed. Even Tessie, pint-sized, felt constricted. For some reason the bathroom was nearly as large as the bedroom. The toilet stood stranded on loose tiles and ran continuously. The tub had a skid mark where the water drained out.
There was a queen-size bed for my parents and, in the corner, a cot set up for me. I hauled my suitcase up onto it. My suitcase was a bone of contention between Tessie and me. She had picked it out for me before our trip to Turkey. It had a floral pattern of turquoise and green blossoms which I found hideous. Since going off to private school—and hanging around the Object—my tastes had been changing, becoming refined, I thought. Poor Tessie no longer knew what to buy me. Anything she chose was greeted by wails of horror. I was adamantly opposed to anything synthetic or with visible stitching. My parents found my new urge for purity amusing. Often my father would rub my shirt between his thumb and fingers and ask, “Is this preppy?”
With the suitcase Tessie had had no time to consult me, and so there it was, bearing a design like a place mat’s. Unzipping the suitcase and flipping it open, I felt better. Inside were all the clothes I’d chosen myself: the crew neck sweaters in primary colors, the Lacoste shirts, the wide-wale corduroys. My coat was from Papagallo, lime green with horn-shaped buttons made from bone.
“Do we have to unpack or can we leave everything in our suitcases?” I asked.
“We better unpack and put our suitcases in the closet,” Milton answered. “Give us a little more room in here.”
I put my sweaters neatly in the dresser drawers, my socks and underpants, too, and hung my pants up. I took my toiletry case into the bathroom and put it on the shelf. I had brought lip gloss and perfume with me. I wasn’t certain that they were obsolete.
I closed the bathroom door, locked it, and bent close to the mirror to examine my face. Two dark hairs, still short, were visible above my upper lip. I got tweezers out of my case and plucked them. This made my eyes water. My clothes felt tight. The sleeves of my sweater were too short. I combed my hair and, optimistically, desperately, smiled at myself.
I knew that my situation, whatever it was, was a crisis of some kind. I could tell that from my parents’ false, cheery behavior and from our speedy exit from home. Still, no one had said a word to me yet. Milton and Tessie were treating me exactly as they always had—as their daughter, in other words. They acted as though my problem was medical and therefore fixable. So I began to hope so, too. Like a person with a terminal illness, I was eager to ignore the immediate symptoms, hoping for a last-minute cure. I veered back and forth between hope and its opposite, a growing certainty that something terrible was wrong with me. But nothing made me more desperate than looking in the mirror.
I opened the door and stepped back into the room. “I hate this hotel,” I said. “It’s gross.”
“It’s not too nice,” Tessie agreed.
“It used to be nicer,” said Milton. “I don’t understand what happened.”
“The carpet smells.”
“Let’s open a window.”
“Maybe we won’t have to be here that long,” Tessie said, hopefully, wearily.
In the evening we ventured outside, looking for something to eat, and then returned to the room to watch TV. Later, after we switched off the lights, I asked from my cot, “What are we doing tomorrow?”
“We have to go the doctor’s in the morning,” said Tessie.
“After that we have to see about some Broadway tickets,” said Milton. “What do you want to see, Cal?”
“I don’t care,” I said gloomily.
“I think we should see a musical,” said Tessie.
“I saw Ethel Merman in Mame once,” Milton recalled. “She came down this big, long staircase, singing. When she finished, the place went wild. She stopped the show. So she just went right back up the staircase and sang the song over again.”
“Would you like to see a musical, Callie?”
“Whatever.”
“Damnedest thing I ever saw,” said Milton. “That Ethel Merman can really belt it out.”
No one spoke after that. We lay in the dark, in our strange beds, until we fell asleep.
The next morning after breakfast we set off to see the specialist. My parents tried to seem excited as we left the hotel, pointing out sights from the taxi window. Milton exuded the boisterousness he reserved for all difficult situations. “This is some place,” he said as we drove up to New York Hospital. “River view! I might just check myself in.”
Like any teenager, I was largely oblivious to the clumsy figure I cut. My stork movements, my flapping arms, my long legs kicking out my undersized feet in their fawn-colored Wallabees—all that machinery clanked beneath the observation tower of my head, and I was too close to see it. My parents did. It pained them to watch me advance across the sidewalk toward the hospital entrance. It was terrifying to see your child in the grip of unknown forces. For a year now they had been denying how I was changing, putting it down to the awkward age. “She’ll grow out of it,” Milton was always telling my mother. But now they were seized with a fear that I was growing out of control.