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12 God’s Arms Are Very Long
- University of Wisconsin Press
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149 12 God’s Arms Are Very Long There is a bed available for me in the Western Infirmary, Glasgow, a place filled with people who say “wee,” as in “Will you have a wee tea, then?” and “You mean this wee tiny lump here?” It’s so drab that I am already deciding how I will describe it to my friends in the States: as a hospital out of the Gulag perhaps? Or something left over from the Great War? Already I’m planning on telling them: “Even if I survive the cancer, I might have to commit suicide just to get out of this place.” The acoustic ceiling tiles are stained and falling in. The linoleum is peeling. The walls are covered with ancient pea-green paint, cracked and streaked with water stains. The molded plastic chairs date from the early sixties and come in colors that shouldn’t exist: avocado, aqua, pumpkin-orange. The one pay phone is in the dayroom, itself decorated with unmatching chairs in various stages of decomposition. The windows are filthy, which is a shame, because the views of Glasgow from the tenth-floor ward (breast cancer and general surgery) are magnificent: to the south, the River Clyde and the sprawl of what was once the might of industrial, dirty Glasgow; to the north the sandstone tenements of the West End climbing up the hills and glowing in the sun as if on fire. As if having cancer isn’t enough, I have roommates: three, to be exact. Fiona, in the next bed, is a trim blond with a worried face and a breathless, whispery way of speaking. She’s always hot. At night, when I’m huddling under the blankets, hugging myself for warmth, Fiona is resting under a single bedsheet, while an oscillating fan, placed above her bed, makes whirring sounds like rain falling. Perhaps she is going through menopause, but I am unable to confirm this one way or another. Fiona is fifty-three: a fairly standard age for menopause. I, however, am only forty-three, the baby of the group. Fiona’s husband died more than twenty years ago, of cancer, in this very same hospital. Fiona recognizes some of the oncology nurses from then. “So I guess you figure that you’ve had enough shit dropped on you for one lifetime?” I ask her on the third day of our being neighbors in the two beds on the west side of the room. “Something like that,” Fiona says. Jean is in the bed opposite my own. She’s in her early sixties, a retired nurse. Five years ago it was the left breast that came off. This time it’s the right one. But as she repeatedly says: “At least I’m even.” She also tells anyone within hearing distance that now that she has no chest at all she can see how big her tummy is. She has three grown sons—the children of her husband—and many grandchildren, who make her get-well cards. She tells us of their exploits. They are good children. Just before she is wheeled off for surgery, she looks up from her pillow and says: “Don’t forget to put my dentures back in before you take me upstairs.” She has a pile of trashy magazines by her bed: British tabloids, gossip magazines with photographs of Princess Diana’s butler’s house, Cherie Blair, and various movie stars and singers. She also reads the junky, slightly right-wing Daily Mail, whereas I read the New York Times and the Baton Rouge Advocate on the web, and now also read either the Herald or the Guardian, depending on what Stuart picks up on his way home from the university where he is ensconced this year—this much looked-forward-to sabbatical year—in an office overlooking the ancient university chapel, with its stained-glass windows and soaring spire. The Guardian is a better paper, but it sometimes lapses into such politically correct posturing that in recent weeks I have done nothing but write letters to the editor, protesting its stand on everything from the Middle East to the Midwest. None of my letters to the Guardian have been published. Liz is the same age as Jean, but because her short, boyish hair is whitewhite , without a trace of underlying blond or gray, her eyebrows are similarly white, and bushy, and her long, slender body is somewhat shapeless; because...