Have You No Shame? And Other Regrettable Stories

The Anorexic's Cookbook: Part 3

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            It wasn’t long before I was on a first name basis with most third floor staff at University Health Center: Desmond, the Jamaican security guard, Santos the friendly maintenance guy, and the ray of sunshine that was Danita, the part-time receptionist, a stickler for rules who felt little compunction about openly displaying her contempt for the over-privileged college kids that thronged her lobby, seeking to correct the mistakes of an ill-considered weekend. 

            “Where your I.D. at?” she would bellow at an unfortunate student.

            “Um…I don’t have it.”

            “Well, go get it and come back.”

            “I can’t.  I think I lost it.”

            “You ain’t got no I.D.?”

            “No.”

            “Well, I need your I.D. card to enter you in the system.  How I’m supposed to enter you in the system if you ain’t got no I.D. number?”

            “I can tell you my I.D. number, I just don’t have the card.”

            Danita raked the girl up and down with disdainful eyes.  “What you here for?”

            “I need the morning after pill.”

            “The Morning…After…Pill.”  Danita repeated the phrase as though it was a concept so foreign each word required its own separate thought.  “The Morning After Pill,” she said again, this time loudly enough that the rest of us waiting in the lobby could look up from our eight-month-old copies of Time and turn our gaze to the wanton that dared brazenly to stand among us. This treatment was not just reserved for females—I once had the pleasure of witnessing her dealing with a boy who had come to the clinic for treatment of an intimate nature: “you have a what on your personal area?”

            “A wart,” the boy said furtively.

            “That’s what I’m asking you,” pressed Danita.  “A what?”

            It’s not every receptionist that can make an Abbot and Costello routine out of a teenager’s first outbreak of genital herpes, and those with the talent and motivation should be properly commended.  But it wasn’t all comedy with Danita.  She could be caring and sympathetic when the occasion called for it. For example, as I waited in the lobby one day she said to me: “You too skinny.  What’s wrong with you?  You got cancer or something?”

            “No,” I said.  “I have been diagnosed with anorexia nervosa.”

            “Anorex-a…that be that thing where you can’t eat?”

            “That’s right.”

            “So why you don’t just get some McDonald’s?  Just go get you a Big Mac or something.”

            “I can’t,” I said.  “It’s a very serious psychological problem.”

            Danita threw her head back and laughed.  “Problem?  Girl, you come back when you got five kids and they go and shut the power off, then we talk problems.  ‘Til then, baby, you ain’t got no motherfucking problems.”