Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Dr. Dreyfus was a French Jew who had settled in Richmond following the unpleasantries of the forties. On his office door it was proclaimed that he was a plastic surgeon and a specialist in injuries of the hands. Sissy owned some toy automobiles made of plastic — she used them to set up theoretical problems in hitchhiking. Unlike some children, she took excellent care of her playthings. The notion of a plastic surgeon seemed silly to her. The suggestion of injury puzzled her further.

“Do they ever hurt?” asked Dr. Dreyfus.

“No,” replied Sissy. “They feel goo-ood .” How could she explain the tiny tingle of power she had begun to perceive in them?

“Then why do you flinch when I press?” inquired the specialist.

“Just because,” said Sissy. Again the schoolgirl could not elucidate the true emotion, but throughout her life she would refuse to shake hands for fear of damaging those digits that were to be to hitchhiking what Toscanini's baton was to a more traditional field of motion.

Dr. Dreyfus measured the thumbs. Circumference. Length. He gave them eyeshine treatment although their skin was not lacking in shine. He tapped them with tiny hammers, registered (without hint of aesthetic preference) the various tints and shades of their coloration, milked them with syringes, pricked them with pins. He placed them one at a time upon the scales, cautiously, as if he were the Spanish treasurer and they musical hot dogs brought from America by Christopher Columbus to amuse the queen. In a hushed voice he announced that they comprised four percent of the girl's total body weight — or about twice as much as the brain.

The x-rays had a go at them.

“Bone structure, apparent origin and insertion of musculature, and articulation are properly proportioned and normal in every aspect but size,” the doctor noted with a nod. The ghost-thumb in the negative nodded back.

Mr. and Mrs. Hankshaw were summoned from the waiting room where Saturday Evening Post fantasies had clouded their instinctive parental concern the way that Norman Rockwell's sentimental ideas cloud the purity of a blank canvas.

“They are healthy,” Dr. Dreyfus said. “There is nothing I could do that would not cost you a year's salary.”

The doctor was thanked for his consideration of Hankshaw finances. ("But a kike's a kike,” Sissy's daddy told the swing shift the next time he was sober enough to work. “Iffen he thought we had the money he'd a tried to squeeze us dry.") Parents and child rose to leave. Dr. Dreyfus remained seated. His heavy black fountain pen remained on the desk. His diploma from the Sorbonne remained on the wall. And so forth.

“When he was asked by the French government in nineteen thirty-nine how to design parachutists' uniforms for maximum invisibility, the painter Pablo Picasso replied, 'Dress them as harlequins.'”

The physician paused. “I don't suppose that means very much to you.”

Mr. Hankshaw looked from the specialist to his wife to his high-top Red Wing work shoes (in which stolen laces had recently been replaced) to the specialist again. He laughed, half in embarrassment and half in irritation. “Well, shee-ucks, Doc, it sure enough don't.”

“Never mind,” said Dr. Dreyfus. Now he stood. “The girl has, of course, a congenital abnormality. I am sorry but I do not know the cause. Giantism in an extremity is usually the result of a cavernous hemangioma; that is, a vein tumor that draws excessive amounts of blood into the extremity affected. The more nutrients an extremity gets, the larger it grows, naturally, just as if you put chicken, how you say, manure around one rose bush, it will grow larger than the bush that has no manure. You understand? But the girl has no tumor. Besides, the odds of hemangioma in both thumbs is like billions to one. She is, if I may speak frankly, somewhat of a medical oddity. Due to impaired dexterity, her life activities and career potentialities will be reduced. It could be worse. Bring her back to me if there ever is pain. Meanwhile, she will have to learn to live with them.”

“That she will,” agreed Mr. Hankshaw, who, since having been “saved” at the Moore's Field Billy Graham Rally, had begun to look with bitter resignation upon the gnomish blimps moored to his only daughter's hands. “That she will. The Lord made them things big for a purpose. God don't never git tired of testing our kind. It's a punishment of some sort, for what I don't rightly know, but it's a punishment and the girl — and us — got to bear that punishment.”

— Whereupon Mrs. Hankshaw began to whimper, “Oh Doc, if you should git a boy in here, if a young man ever shows up here with, a young man with ugly fingers , you know, something similar, a similar case, Doc, would you please. .”

— Whereupon the plastic surgeon remarked, “Remember the words of the painter Paul Gauguin, dear lady. 'The ugly may be beautiful, the pretty never.' I don't suppose that means very much to you.”

— Whereupon Mr. Hankshaw pronounced, “It's a judgment. She's gotta bear the punishment.”

— Whereupon Sissy, like the Christ in the lurid picture that hung above the TV set at home, beamed serenely, as if to say, “Punishment is its own reward.”

10.

OH YES. She was taken, also, to a specialist of a different discipline.

Commercial practice of the persuasion of palmistry was forbidden by ordinance in the city of Richmond, but in the surrounding counties of Chesterfield and Henrico it was entirely legal. Around the scuzzy edges of the town, where pine groves and truck gardens bumped against roadside honky-tonks and low-bid developments, there were to be found six or seven house trailers and three or four conventional homes within whose confines the testimony of the hands was daily given.

It was simple to recognize the lair of a palm-reader. Outside her trailer or bungalow there would be a sign on which a silhouette of the human hand, wrist to fingertips, palm outward, was painted in red. Always in red. For some reason, and for all the author knows there may be a tradition here whose origins stretch back to the Gypsies of Chaldea, it would have been less surprising to find flesh-colored tights in General Patton's laundry bag than to find a flesh-colored hand on a palmistry sign near Richmond. Every hand was red, and directly below the red wrist joint, where on an actual hand a watch or bracelet might cling, the sign-painter would have rendered the title “Madame” followed by a name: Madame Yvonne, Madame Christina, Madame Divine and others.

Madame Zoe, for example. “Madame Zoe” was the name under the red palm that was passed almost weekly by Sissy's mama when she rode the bus out to the end of Hull Street Road to visit her friend Mabel Coffee, the plumber's wife. Mrs. Hankshaw must have passed that sign two hundred times. She always looked at that sign as if it were a deer in a meadow, it was that real to her and that elusive. But it was not until Mabel Coffee had a cyst removed from her ovary and nearly croaked — the same week of the same autumn that President Eisenhower's heart went kablooey — that Mrs. Hankshaw (moved, perhaps, by the drama of events) impulsively pulled the buzzer cord and got off the bus at Madame Zoe's. An appointment was made for the following Saturday.

When Mr. Hankshaw was informed of the date with the palmist he snorted and cussed and warned his wife that if she wasted five dollars of his hard-earned money on a goddamned fortuneteller she'd find herself moving in with Mabel, her plumber and her one good ovary. During the week, however, Sissy's mama used the vaginal wrench to slowly, gently turn her husband's objections down to a mere trickle. Mabel's plumber, with his full set of tools, could not have done better.