Читать книгу Confessions of a Barefaced Woman - Allison Joseph - Страница 9

Pretending for Mother’s sake to be interested in medicine,

I’d go to school Saturdays too, ride the train

from the Bronx to Manhattan’s high-rise hospitals

for special classes for gifted students, bright minority kids,

future doctors. What I remember most aren’t equations

or experiments, brilliant liquids poured from one test tube

to another, into beakers, or the friendly med students

who tried to make a scientist of me, despite stolid resistance.

What I remember most are the bodies, cadavers laid out

on metal slabs, skin cold, clammy after formaldehyde.

During the week, medical students sawed and flayed

these anonymous people, not knowing on weekends

high school students studied their cuts: chest cavities

pried open, ribcages splayed. I was never much good

at telling one organ from another, fascinated instead

by the waxy, sticky buildup of cholesterol in bloodless

arteries. I didn’t quite know what we were looking for—

their legs rigid, skin over them mottled, yellowish-

brown and gray, unsettling sepia—wasn’t sure

how dead bodies could make my future better,

only knowing my mother wanted a doctor

in our family, her own lungs cancer-heavy,

her dream to live to see me graduate. Dutiful,

I’d spend Saturdays examining empty hands,

stiffened fingers, limbs and torsos,

tendons and ligaments stringy, stretched,

muscles drained yet fibrous. I tried

not to stare at faces, at gaping nose holes,

slack but rubbery ears, at mouths

I could push open, then push shut.