Handy Hannah Deluxe
March 30, 2009
Deborah was in the bathroom the first time I got sick. "Just a minute," she said when I knocked on the door, but a minute was too long to wait. I stumbled through the side door of Aide's house and puked next to the heating oil tank. The sun was just coming up, birds were chirping, a squirrel was swinging on the bird feeder that hung from a big tree across the lawn. Steam rose from the small patch of wine-red vomit.
"What do you think it was?" Adie asked when I started to feel better after spending the day in bed while she and Deborah were out enoying the beautiful weather and fresh upstate air. "I don't think t was food poisoning," she added a little defensively. "Deborah and I ate the same things you did, and we're okay."
"No, I don't think it was food poisoning," I said. "I think it was a couple things, all coming together in a bad way — the perfect storm."
For one thing, I suffer from vertigo — sporadic bouts of the spins caused by who knows what. Small ear canals? I've been told by various doctors, including an ear and throat specialist, that my ears don't drain properly which makes me prone to ear infections and probably contributes to my vertigo spells. The vertigo usually just forces me to stay in bed for a few hours feeling as though I just stepped off a small fishing boat. Saturday morning, however, was exceptional. Every turn of my head sent the entire universe spinning. Instead of a small fishing boat, I was barely clinging to a shard of wood.
Deborah and I drove to Aide's house on Friday night. After a long day at work motionless in front of a computer screen, I rushed home to meet Deborah, we shared a sandwich, threw a few things in a bag and blew out of Brooklyn as fast as we could. (Which to be honest, on a Friday night during rush hour isn't all that fast.) We arrived at Aide's house about 10 PM, sat at her kitchen counter eating cheese and sausage and drinking a bottle of wine. Although I didn't drink that much, the few glasses I had went straight to my head and I wouldn't have been surprised by a mild hangover the following day. But combined with the vertigo it was a disaster.
And, of course, my Type 1 diabetes, I'm not sure how it played into the scene, but I'm sure it did somehow. It always does.
In any case, what was intended to be a overnight sojourn of clean country living, turned into something else entirely. For me, that is. Deborah and Adie managed just fine without me, walking in the woods, driving through the countryside — Deborah fantasizing about an idealized bucolic life with each rustic farmhouse they passed, Adie looking forward to the one she's already begun struggling to make for herself.
When they returned, Deborah told me she bought something at a second hand knickknack shop in a neighboring town. She pulled it from her bag — a vintage vibrator called the Universal Handy Hannah Vitalator De-Luxe. "Faster relief and quicker treatment." We read the box together, laughed at the various warnings and guarantees.
"Understand this thoroughly — the delicious tingle that sweeps through you is produced only by the rapid movement of your own fingers upon your body. It is not electricity."
"Do you want a massage?" Deborah asked.
"God no," I said, "that's the last thing I need."
When I said previously that I'd been lying in bed all day, what I meant was that I'd been lying on a fold-out couch — a sinister contraption full of inconvenient springs and support bars that, under other circumstances would've had me begging for a massage — but the blender in my head was only just beginning to wind down. One touch from the Vitalator would've amped the speed to "puree."
"A nice idea, though, thanks. Save it for yourself next time you’re hit with a bout of women’s hysteria ."
