CHAPTER 48 -SQUARED UP ON 'E' WARD
Et tu, Brute? -Shakespeare
The E Ward contained ten beds for poor people. Mine was the first one on the left.
"Hallo!" sang a doughy white girl named Emma in the next bed. Her black bean eyes floated on the ocean of her face. She looked like poverty to me.
"Hi." I pulled the privacy curtain between us just enough to block her sight line.
"Don't have to do that on my account!"
Emma let me know she was a 'great big lesbo.' My womb pain felt worse for a minute.
I had had very little exposure to lesbians. I feared them. Had I seen some propaganda film like Reefer Madness, but about lesbians? Somehow, I had the idea they were duplicitous, forcing 'their ways' on straight women. Sorry, Lesbians.
"I'm Muslim," a black girl named Cerise a few beds down, said. That sounded so exotic to me. Cerise was in prison for bad checks. She had some medical condition the institution couldn't manage.
A frail Russian prostitute across from me 'skin-popped' heroin until her legs were nothing but pink and brown pinpricks. One visitor, her pimp, came by daily, pulled her curtain and, I guess, administered her other meds. She didn't talk much and when she did, it was hard to understand her through the language and drug barrier.
Catty-corner from me was a wild, heavy-set black girl named Jojo. I liked Jojo. I would "kidnap" her guests and bring them over behind my curtain to chat.
"You ain't stealing my husband now!" She joked, as if jealous, but Jojo and I were cool.
One day, Ray visited.
"Did your vagina fall off?"
