A few voices (mine included): “206!”
“Good. Some of you have been reading ahead in your textbooks. However, some consider the sternum to be three bones, which, scholars”—gesturing at the class—”would make a total of how many?
A chorus of “209!”
From the back of the room a bold dissenting voice: “208!”
“Exactly!” says the prof. “Stand up!” The student stands up. “A true scholar! A for the day! A+! The rest of you…”(sarcastically) “scholars: Do the math! Class dismissed!”
Two weeks later, in a lab session on the circulatory system, we are instructed to team up with the person to our right and take each other’s pulse. I’m in seat three of six in the row and to my right in seat four — Thank you, Jesus! — is a girl who could be Suzette L.’s better-looking cousin. She takes hold of my wrist in a practiced way (sending a chill down my spine), looks at her watch, and releases my wrist after only fifteen seconds. “Twenty-two. You have a piano pulse,” she says.
“Wait! You only took if for fifteen seconds. And what’s a ‘piano pulse’?”
“Do the math. I’m studying to be a nurse. Fifteen seconds is all I need. Is your pulse always that rapid?”
“Only when you take it,” I say, amazed at my own glibness. I take hold of her wrist, placing my thumb underneath and my middle finger on what I have recently learned is her radial artery. She flexes her wrist slightly as I grasp it.
“Is that your scaphoid I feel with my thumb?”
“I don’t know. You aren’t counting.”
“I used to know all eight bones of the human wrist. Now all I know is the mnemonic.”
I whisper it in her ear. She colors, snatches her hand back, and turns away from me.
“What’s going on there?” the lab instructor, a grad student, says.
“I goofed. I didn’t get her pulse.”
“Did she get yours?”
“Yes!” she says. “Eighty-eight too many!”
Puzzled, the instructor cocks his head. “Well, never mind. Let’s move along. Get together with your lab groups. We’re going to look at some blood.”
“Take some of his,” she says. “I think he’s got too much.”
Later, after my English class, which is devoted to an attempt to define poetry, I linger in the hall with the prof. I tell him about the mnemonic for the wrist bones and my gaucherie with the girl in biology lab.