My uncle raised both his eyebrows to display shock. I too was surprised. After all, we didn’t have a cough that made us spit up blood. Would we now have to be quarantined, be sent to the sanatorium?
One of Liline’s cousins, who was named Melina after Granme Melina, had gotten full-blown tuberculosis at sixteen. She had visited Liline now and then, and I’d watched as she’d regularly stop whatever she was doing to double over and cough. She was eventually sent to the sanatorium and died a few weeks after her seventeenth birthday.
Sleeping on the top bunk above Liline and her, those few times she’d spent the night, I’d probably caught the tuberculosis from her and passed it on to my brother. Or maybe Bob had caught it from a kid at school, a kid who didn’t even know he had it, and had passed it on to me.
“Fortunately their tuberculosis is not active,” the doctor said, “but we have to treat them immediately to be sure it stays that way. The treatment will last six months.”
Does that mean I’m not going to die? I wanted to ask.
My uncle’s mouth narrowed into a small
I would think back to this moment when, early in my father’s illness, after a weeklong hospitalization following an emergency room visit for shortness of breath, he was quarantined at Coney Island Hospital because his skin test was positive. The doctors had not yet eliminated the possibility of tuberculosis, and all the hospital workers, along with my father’s visitors, were ordered to wear surgical masks before they approached his bed in an isolated section of the ward. Perhaps recalling the horrors of tuberculosis-it was once as deadly as AIDS during the virus’s early years-the specter of mortality it posed, and the fact that in Bel Air the word “tibekile,” or TB carrier, had often been hurled as an insult, when he was quarantined at Coney Island Hospital, my father asked my brother Karl to tell the doctors that a lot of Haitians test positive on the skin test even though they don’t actually have active tuberculosis.
“I don’t have this disease,” he insisted. “Tell them.”
“We don’t have this disease,” I wanted to scream that day as the doctor gave us-rather, gave my uncle-our directives.
“Even though they’re not infectious, we can’t be too careful,” the doctor said. “They must now use their own utensils. No sharing with others.”
Since we all shared meals and utensils at home, this would be a constant reminder both to us and everyone else that our bodies were hosting a potentially deadly contagion.
“They have to follow the treatment closely,” the doctor continued. “They must take the pills every day or the virus will get stronger and will move to other parts of their bodies. Unless their X-rays read differently in six months, they won’t be able to travel.”
He wrote two prescriptions, which he handed to my uncle.
“Don’t forget,” he told us, looking into our faces at last. “Every morning when you take your pills, you’re closer to New York.”
My uncle stopped by a pharmacy on Grand Rue, where his youngest sister, Tante Zi, had a stationery stand. Surrounded by mounds of pens and notebooks, Tante Zi jumped out of her chair and instantly scooped Bob up in her arms.
Of my father’s sisters, Tante Zi was the most playful. Short and plump, and at her roundest looking and feeling like a feather pillow, she liked to pull Bob and me into her arms whenever she saw us and bury her face in our necks, tickling us with the tip of her nose.
She and Bob were caught in just such an embrace when I blurted out, “You can’t do that anymore.”
“Why not?” She released Bob, handing him a brand-new pen and notebook to scribble in as he sat on the footstool in front of her.
“Because we have TB,” I said.
She seemed stunned, looking up at my uncle for confirmation. My uncle shrugged, then slapped one hand on top of the other as if to say, “What are you going to do?”
As if to answer, Tante Zi motioned for me to come to her, and just as she always had, wrapped her arms around my neck and sweetly buried her nose in my neck.
From that day on, every morning before school, even as other children walked by and stared, my uncle would line Bob, Nick and me up on the front gallery and as Tante Denise held our ceramic cups of water-our own, which we were not allowed to share with anyone else-handed us the aspirin-like pills that were meant to cure us. Nick, it turned out, also “failed” his precautionary X-rays and had to be treated along with us. Liline, however, had tested negative.
Once the pill was in our mouths, my uncle would hand us each a large spoonful of cod-liver oil, which we were to swallow before Tante Denise would surrender the water.
Perhaps fearing that we might gag, Tante Denise would always cry out, “Fe vit, fe vit,” urging us to hurry up and wash the pills down, before she took the cups back.
During our treatment, Bob developed a palm-sized rash on his back that alternately bled and scabbed over. At first the doctor, whom during our monthly checkups I began to think of as Dr. TB, told us that Bob’s rash was unrelated to his medication, but then I developed an even larger lesion on my right buttock, and he was forced to admit some connection. Nick, on the other hand, completely lost his appetite, dropped eight pounds, and constantly complained of cold feet.
Thankfully the rashes, coldness and loss of appetite went away when our treatment ended six months later. After another series of X-rays, Dr. TB gave Bob and me our medical clearance to travel to the United States.
But a new problem emerged. During the six months that we were being treated, my father was laid off from the glass factory where he was working, and because both my parents and Kelly and Karl were now surviving on my mother’s modest income as a textile factory worker, our application was placed on hold until my father could prove that he and my mother had enough income to provide for all of us. Just when my uncle needed them most, my father stopped writing us letters around this time. In his final note, he proposed that we try the now much cheaper call centers run by Teleco, the national telephone company.
As we waited for Papa to find another job, every Sunday afternoon my uncle, Bob and I would walk to a calling center near the fabric shop where my uncle worked, and the three of us would squeeze into a narrow telephone booth with cardboard-thin walls and try to talk with my parents. The conversations were always the same. My uncle would scribble a few notes on the small notepad he kept in his shirt pocket: instant letters that in a few sentences updated our parents on the state of our health, our schoolwork, our grades, the latest on our immigration application. I would carefully repeat my uncle’s scrawled phrases, watching his lips for modifications as I went on. It was hot and cramped with the three of us in there and every once in a while my uncle would have to change places with us on the narrow bench as we passed the phone around. My parents would interrupt me now and then to make a comment or ask a question and I’d have to stop and wait for my uncle to respond before speaking again. The remaining time was for our parents to speak directly to us.
“Now tell me how you are,” my mother would ask me.
“Byen,” I’d answer. Fine.
On another extension, my father asked, “You’re being a good girl, aren’t you?”
“Wi papa,” I’d answer, feeling that I had already spoken to them enough, using my uncle’s words.
“I’ve found a job,” my father announced one Sunday afternoon.
“Bravo!” my uncle wrote.
“Bravo,” I repeated.
I could almost imagine the look on my father’s face, a broad smile that showed how proud he too was of himself.
