The week I had pink eye was one of the best weeks of my life. I was in 6th grade and president of my class, not because of my leadership qualities but because I could spell antidisestablishmentarianism. No one even knew what it meant, not even me, until the day I decided to look it up: “Opposition to the removal of state support or recognition from an established church, especially the Anglican Church in 19th Century England.” The words looked angry, peremptory, like a reprimand from a teacher. Threatening us in some way.
One morning, being class president, I was given the honor of going down to the principal’s office to deliver a note from my teacher. After reading the note, the principal looked me in the eyes and said, “Wait right there young man. You’re not going anywhere.”
My stomach sank. Was she talking about my life in general, or was it something in my teacher’s note? “You stay right where you are,” she said. “You have pink eye.” The principal saw it right away. After all, she was trained to look you right in the eyes.
Later, after my mother brought me home, I looked it up: “Pink Eye: Inflammation of the Conjunctiva.” Then I memorized how to spell “Conjunctiva” in case I might need it to get re-elected.
The thing was, I felt great and I got to stay home for a whole week and did not have to lie in bed with some fever, worrying about the doctor coming over to give me a shot. The other thing was, I got to spend a few days with my father at his podiatry office in Middle Village Queens.
I loved going to Middle Village. I also liked my father’s office, though I didn’t like the outside of it much. It used to be a shoe store, so as soon as you got there you saw a store window, but instead of shoes on display, people were sitting on sickly green kitchen chairs like we had at home. I wondered if their feet were the same color as the chairs. Mostly, they read magazines or just sat there waiting, staring out the big picture window, looking at people walking on the street and cars moving slowly down Metropolitan Ave, the big avenue where all the stores and restaurants were, especially the Arion movie theater where I saw many of the great horror and sci-fi movies of my childhood: Godzilla, Rodan, Godzilla Meets Rodan, The Spider Woman, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, The Spider Woman Meets the Fifty Foot Woman, The Incredible Shrinking Man, movies that stimulated my imagination forever.
The first day I spent mostly in my father’s waiting room, pretending I was a patient. Listening to the distant whirring of the whirlpool in the treatment room where my father washed everyone’s feet, young or old, smooth or wrinkled, flat or swollen. I liked seeing my father walk around occasionally in his white lab coat and call in the next patient. He never called them by name but just kept saying “Next,” which seemed good enough to keep things moving.
There was no receptionist. My father thought having a receptionist was a waste of money. My mother said not having one lacked “professionalism,” yet despite this, there still seemed something great about my father at those moments; maybe it was the white lab coat, the ketchup stains on it reminiscent of blood, an actual doctor, that made him seem in control, that if people were called “out of turn,” there was some greater purpose to it, a feeling they were safe from the outside world, a world full of battered and swollen feet dragging themselves, endlessly, pointlessly, just outside the office door.
One morning, I saw some teenage kid, who looked like Vic Morrow in the Blackboard Jungle, open the outside door and just stand there, his body still in the street, his head poking inside the office, looking us up and down like he was wondering who we were, why we were there, especially if there were no longer any shoes to try on. There was no receptionist to ask what he wanted, to remind him there were boundaries, that he was not free to look us up and down or even worse to rob or kill us. My father was way in the back, in the treatment room. What if he came in and asked who was next? Maybe the kid would say, “I am,” and then what? Who would argue with him? Even my father would be helpless against him, especially if he had a knife. This is what I didn’t like about the waiting room. It was too close to the street. Anyone could just come in. But the kid never did. The whole time, which seemed like hours but couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds, he looked up and down, and then slammed the door shut. But the damage had been done. Just opening the door, letting in the sounds of the street, the horns honking, the sirens blaring, people shouting, was enough to terrify me, to make me realize how dangerous waiting rooms could be, especially without a receptionist.
For the rest of the time at my father’s office, I no longer sat in the waiting room, but in my father’s consultation room. It was cozy, and seemed safer, further away from the street. Even if that was just an illusion, that was fine with me. I was still very much in my illusion stage. I much preferred it to reality. All week I read my Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt comic books. If a patient screamed next door in my father’s treatment room from the pain of an ingrown toenail, I would imagine they had just opened the mummy’s tomb or were being tortured by zombies.
The word consultation sounded important. I looked it up in my father’s big old Merriam-Webster dictionary I found on his bookshelf: “The act of consulting. A meeting for discussion deliberation or decision.” I wondered what my father and I might consult about here other than where I wanted to go for lunch. Otherwise, I couldn’t think of any other reason for my father to call it a consultation room.
It was more like a study with dark brown furniture and bookshelves filled with reference, medical, and history books. On one shelf was a bottle that contained what my father said was a pig’s embryo, but I believed it was human, maybe a brother or sister who never came to fruition. Each morning that week, I would begin the day by holding the bottle in my hands convincing myself that the embryo had gotten larger and would burst out one day and strangle me while I wasn’t looking. I tried to write a story about it. I called it “The Embryo,” but I never got past the opening scene where the embryo bursts out of the jar and kills me, his brother, for throwing our mother down the stairs so he’d never be born. I was never able to think of anything past that point. But I figured if I drew a picture of it and wrote that line under it, it would be good enough. Nevertheless, the idea of a dark secret in my family excited me. The only secret I knew, and that was only because it was such a badly kept one, was that my father worked in the post office all night. Did we need more money that badly? Was he having an affair? I couldn’t imagine my father being with any woman besides my mother but maybe there was someone he liked to imagine he was having an affair with or just liked looking at every night. Or maybe it was the stamps. I knew he liked stamps, but mostly single ones he hinged into stamp albums, but here there would be great sheets of them, everywhere, or maybe, he loved the mystery of them and of the letters they were stuck on, especially on those letters that people mailed in the middle of the night with no return address.
Still the job exhausted him and by eight p.m. he was already asleep in his big armchair in front of the TV. I remember how all of us, my mother, my brother and myself would have to wake him up, pull him out of that chair, get him into his bed so he could sleep for another two hours before we’d have to wake him again, and pull him out of bed so he could get to the post office on time, and how just moments later I would watch his car slowly pull out of the parking lot, hum quietly down the block and then disappear into the darkness.
On my last day in Middle Village, my father took me to his favorite luncheonette. The only thing I ever ate at luncheonettes were cream cheese and jelly sandwiches and this day was no exception. On the way there, my father pointed out Abe’s Jewish Deli way up the next block which I wrote a poem about years later called “Abe’s Deli” in which I described it looking like a “round golden-brown knish glittering in the sunlight.”
“We’ll go there next time,” my father said as if he were promising to take me to Shangri-La or even Disneyland. “That Abe is some character,” he said. “He has the worst feet in Middle Village, corns, calluses, bunions, metatarsalgia, you name it he’s got it and yet makes the best brisket in the world and don’t tell your mother know I said that.”
That evening when we came home, my mother looked me straight in the eyes, like I was hiding something, but when I looked down, it was too late. She knew. She knew I was happy, too happy to be out of school.
“My god!” She said. Look at those eyes!”
“What eyes?” I asked.
“Yours!” she said. “They’re as clear as day. And yes, in case you were wondering, you are quite ready to go back to school the hell tomorrow.” My stomach sank. I looked at my father, but he just shrugged his shoulders like “what do you want me to do about it?”
But what about Abe’s Deli? I thought. What about The Incredible Shrinking Man Meets the 50 Foot Woman coming to the Arion theater next week? What about my brother, or sister, the embryo floating in that jar on my father’s shelf? Won’t he suspect something happened to me?
And that’s when I thought of the disease Abe had, metatarsal something which must hurt but probably wasn’t contagious and how, if I could catch something like that next time, I might be able to stay in my father’s office even longer and get to put my feet into his whirlpool and then, if I could learn that whole word, how to spell it and what it meant exactly, I could definitely be re-elected class president.
Mitch Levenberg has published essays and short fiction in such journals as Fiction, The Common Review, The New Delta Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Fine Madness, The Same, The Assisi Journal of Art and Fiction, Hanging Loose Press, and others. His collection of short stories, Principles of Uncertainty, was published in 2006, and his collection of autobiographical fiction entitled Write Something was published in 2014. He teaches Writing and Literature at St. Francis College.
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