If Marty were as resilient as she says, she would have bounced off the brick. If she were as coordinated as she wants, she wouldn’t have lost her footing. If she were as responsible as she thinks, the path wouldn’t have been slippery enough to fell her.

But Marty is full of shit. Actually, that’s precisely inaccurate: Marty’s inner ass is currently so inflamed that it won’t tolerate the presence of shit at all. The minute any waste accumulates she feels it – she’s defecating half a dozen times a day lately, and thinks (sarcastically) she might as well take advantage of the emptiness and have that overdue colonoscopy now.

Marty thinks sarcastically even though she knows it’s the cheapest form of wit. It’s better than grumpiness, and that seems to be her alternative. She feels whiney a lot lately, cantankerous often, curmudgeonly late at night. The bottom of her spine aches when she sits, pulls when she stands. Like rocks in her hubcaps. Stutters in her steps.

She remembers ski patrol three decades ago. Back when she was blonde. Everyone they pulled off the toboggan hill had a broken coccyx. She watched it hurt then and never wondered how long it would take to heal. Now she’ll know.

She hasn’t been to a doctor. She doesn’t much respect them. Marty was subjected to a barbaric tonsillectomy when she was five: a trial-by-ether that made her choose between autism and willfulness, but that’s an injury for another story. The fact is, she’s never had a meaningful medical diagnosis, though she has received stupidity, arrogance, magical thinking, malpractice.

Dentists may be worse. Marty has chronic periodontal disease, so she knew to see her dentist immediately about last week’s sudden swelling in her mouth. Dr. Simmons tsked and prodded and directed her to the endodontist for a root canal. There a quick test found a live nerve and sent her back. The dentist shot an X-ray (the lead shield covers the neck now, because dental science finally discovered that those benign, preventative, wise, can’t-hurt-you yearly X-rays in fact do hurt people, in their thyroid glands, which causes havoc in their endocrine systems, and which was an obvious consequence to any patient who ever reclined there and submitted to having her or his head radiated by a technician who had to leave the room for the procedure). Then he tsked some more. “If it’s not the nerve it must be periodontal,” he concluded reluctantly, and finally he wrote her the referral she needed in the first place.

No, Marty called her friend Phil about her butt. He used to be an MD but got out of it because medical business drove him nuts. Phil told her she didn’t need a picture unless she were one of the unlucky 5% to have a consequence: a sharp bit of bone biting into the colon. She had no symptom of that. So it didn’t matter whether she broke or bruised; the important thing was all the muscles that attached right there – they got smashed and would take months to heal. Marty used to freedive for abalone with her father. She remembered pounding the flesh with the tenderizing mallet before flash-cooking it thirty seconds on a side. She imagined her muscles after that bright silver mallet. She cranked up the heating pad.

The doorbell rang. Marty began to consider answering it. She’d almost swung her legs off the couch, almost pulled her sacrum away from the heating pad, when she heard the familiar three raps and then the key in the knob. She sat back with relief, awaiting Jane.

If Marty could have chosen a goddaughter she would have picked Jane. But nobody ever gave her the chance. She’d never been close to anyone at that tender time of reproduction. Jane was the oldest child of Marty’s ex-neighbors. She was twenty-seven and on her own in San Leandro, but she’d lived next door to Marty from age two to seventeen, modeled hula skirts and cowgirl outfits for Marty when she was three, baked holiday cookies with Marty every year since she was five, had special overnights with Marty (buttered popcorn and movies) once she was six, and walked, ran, strutted, stomped over to Marty’s regularly during adolescence, for relief from her mother’s breast cancer, her father’s unemployment, her brothers’ tortures.

(continued on Wednesday)