I remember glancing at Anne, a self-described “bitch on wheels.” I knew her in high school, and back then she had struck me as an imperious woman who never faltered. Now she was visibly crumbling, her mouth drooping in disgust. I found her disintegration curious.
“You okay, Anne?”
“Um, no. I’m not okay. You won’t believe this...” She paused and then blurted out sharply, “I fucking know this dead guy. It’s Mr. Reynolds. He was our goddamn high school math teacher. Don’t you recognize him? I must have wished him dead a thousand times. But not like this.”
Now I recognized him: an asshole alive or dead, but a ghastly, stomach-churning mass of flesh at this point.
We were swiftly assigned a new cadaver.
After a few weeks, my classmates and I grew comfortable with putrefying flesh. I guess you can get used to anything. We started wearing workout clothes and sometimes took food breaks right in the lab, stuffing sandwiches into our mouths with a non-dissecting hand.
We were instructed to show the utmost respect for cadavers, but in time we grew bold and irreverent, like raucous kids hanging out on a Saturday night in a mall parking lot. Meanwhile, our older instructors were so inured to the dead that they would demonstrate incisions gloveless.
By midyear, we had all learned to turn dissection into a game, employing wit, hijinks, and competitive pranks. Our cheeky duo was abetted by a third female, a woman with a devil-may-care approach.
Her name was Laura Johnson, a talented and aggressive but free-spirited student. When it came time to dissect the head and neck of a female cadaver, she blithely performed the required decapitation with a buzz saw. Then she placed the severed head squarely between the woman’s legs.
“Finally! Now a woman can think like a man,” she declared. We all laughed, and that was the start of a great friendship. Our male professors were not amused, but Laura didn’t care.
In her ironic fashion, Laura reassured me that medical students were inherently good people, with only a modicum of sociopathic tendencies. She reasoned, “We are performing this barbarian task in order to understand the inner workings of the human body for the greater goal of medical exploration. Humor is our coping mechanism, especially considering men are such boors.”
One day while we were in the middle of our dissection, a tall, dark man walked in with a slim blonde. Just from a quick glance, I could tell that he was otherworldly and she was cute. In a sea of death and darkness, this man was definitely a light. Steeped in preservative and dissected flesh, I needed some affirmation of life.
“Who is that?” I muttered to Laura under my breath.
“I don’t know, but I will definitely get the 411 on that.”
The pair did some dissection on a cadaver reserved for more senior doctors and left after about thirty minutes, the tall man briefly placing his arm around the woman. Buddies? Or more? I couldn’t tell by the gesture.
“Laura,” I continued, “can you find out if he’s single?”
“Um...is my name Laura Johnson? I’ll have all of your recon by tomorrow afternoon,” she replied coyly.
Our crude genitalia-based anatomy jokes had a ring of truth. The fact that the male possessed a second head made him feel superior, the bearer of the sword, free from the pressures placed on women, as the scabbard, to get married, focus on parental duties, stand by your man, and suck his appendage regularly without much reciprocal stimulation.
The senior male doctors who instructed us were not gifted with Laura’s sense of humor. They had a strong sense of entitlement, and female students were considered plankton, the lower life forms to be placed under a scope of greater moral scrutiny than the men.
Our teachers were encouraged by the rules of male privilege to cross the boundary of mentorship into after-hours come-ons at a nearby bar, which were very difficult for us to repel, given the career ramifications.
I was too new to fully grasp these hidden dynamics, and I still believed in a future where I could have it both ways: smell the dandelions with a nose that was partly clogged by formalin. Yet something about those early days of medical school set off warning bells. This was not exactly the fabulous rosy-colored career path my parents had laid out for me.
Drudgery became an obstacle as well. The bulk of the first year was spent lugging around a microscope as heavy as an anvil and studying medical terminology around the clock. There was little time for taking a break to eat, urinate, or sleep, much less experience any intimate personal relationships.
As a well-trained rule-follower, in the feverish first year, I managed to focus on the work at hand, and I maintained a pristine social existence. My body was in a perpetual state of ardent itch for male attention, but given the future spoils represented by the white coat, I would “suck it up” in an appropriate, studious way, accepting a few more years of pain.
So far, however, I felt like the Zombie Queen of the Dead. Instead of my hands dripping in jewels, they were soaked in bodily fluids. For the first time, I could feel my anguish festering from the good-girl syndrome into an inflamed adulthood where anger was replacing humor as the only antidote.
Naturally, I still bought into the fantasy that all I needed to cure my negative symptoms was a boyfriend.
I got home to a text from Laura. “Amir Hadid: surgical intern, may be dating this first-year chick Melissa Carter on and off. And he is every bit as hot as we suspected!” She completed the text with a fire emoji, an eggplant, a donut, and a whale spouting water from its blowhole.
“Amir Hadid,” I thought. I was in trouble.
7. Untying the Knot
He had a very bad penis. A REALLY bad penis.
So why on earth was I down on my hands and knees at 3 a.m. polishing Alex Goldman’s parquet floors with Minwax? I had already straightened out the bed where we’d had sex earlier in the evening.
