Your Hip Surgery, My Headache, by David Sedaris

It was nice to get away, if only for a few hours. To have someone bring me bowls of nuts and glasses of water. At the table, I mentioned the lady who’d growled at me at CVS. Then Mike told us about a woman who’d spotted Ted Koppel carrying a basketful of avocados at a farm stand in Maryland.

“Making guacamole?” she asked.

“None of your goddam business,” he reportedly answered.

I recapped the evening for Hugh the following morning, saying that there were plenty more parties coming up. “Hopefully, you can come with me to Antonio’s Christmas lunch in two weeks. We had so much fun last year, remember?”

“Two weeks!” Hugh gestured toward his outstretched leg. “Look at me! Are you out of your mind?”

John, who had gone that morning to buy a juicer, set a glass of something that poured like wet cement in front of his brother and raised his voice, which was unlike him. “My God, David. He’s just had major surgery!”

I raised my voice in return. “Well, excuse me! I thought that eventually he might get better!”

By outsourcing Hugh’s care, I had shut myself out of his recovery. Now I wanted back in, but it was too late. After saying, “Whatever you do, don’t give him a bell,” Amy brought Hugh an empty can she’d put a few quarters in.

Clang, clang, clang, I’d hear while sitting at my desk. Clang, clang.

“How can I help?” I’d ask, racing into the bedroom.

“John is downstairs,” Hugh would say. “Go get him and tell him I need to put my socks on.”

I’d roll up my sleeves. “I can do that for you.”

“Just go get John.”

The two were inseparable, and would convene each morning to dissect their dreams. “So I’m back in Port Angeles under a pitch-black sky, frying—get this—pennies in a skillet,” I caught John saying a week after his arrival, as he sat on the edge of the bed, massaging oil into Hugh’s feet. “I might be wrong, but I’m interpreting this to mean I could use more copper and iron in my diet.”

At meals, the brothers would reflect on their childhoods in Africa. “Remember that C.I.A. agent who had a crush on Mom in Djibouti?” “What was the name of that Belgian nun in Ethiopia who we gave our monkey to?”

It made it hard to join the conversation. This as opposed to when Amy would visit. Shortly after Hugh’s operation, she had her elderly rabbit, Tina, put to sleep. A few days later, nose stuffed up and with puffy eyes, she came to dinner.

“Is it a cold?” John asked.

“Actually,” Amy said, “I think I’m allergic to Tina’s ghost.”

Hugh has a sister named Ann, and one morning I walked into the dining room and found him talking with her on speakerphone. “Do you have comfortable enough chairs?” she asked.

The answer would normally be yes, but, on account of his hip, he had to be raised up while sitting. “There are a few that are O.K. if I put a cushion on them,” Hugh told her, gesturing for me to refill his coffee cup. “At my doctor’s office yesterday, I saw one that would be perfect, but there’s no way David would allow it into the apartment. It’s too ugly.”

“Well, screw him,” I heard Ann say. “We’re talking about your health here!”

The next morning, she sent a text that read “Is David any help to you?”

Before Hugh could answer, I picked up his phone and typed, “None at all,” adding an emoji—my first time ever—of a skunk.

I expected her to respond with “You’re kidding,” or “I don’t believe that for one second.”

Instead, she wrote, “That sort of angers me. But then, he’s so self-involved.”

Rather than texting her back, I returned to my office and resumed writing in my diary. Self-involved, indeed, I thought. Hugh hadn’t shown me the chair he was talking to Ann about, but, if it was truly that ugly, I’m sure he wouldn’t have wanted it, either. Why was I the villain here?

Hugh went off his painkillers after the third day. After the eighth, he cast aside his walker and was able to get around using a cane. He made it to the lobby, slowly, then all the way to the corner. Now that he didn’t need quite as much attention, I started taking John to see a bit of the city. One afternoon, on the C train, we came upon a man who had peed on himself—and had likely been doing so for quite a while. The stench of old urine was so intense that it had emptied half the subway car. Neither awake nor asleep, he sat slumped beside a dribbling vodka bottle, muttering.

Check, I thought, since that’s something every visitor to New York needs to see. After looking at this man for a moment or two, John remarked not on the smell or on the ridiculous Santa hat the man wore but on his hands. “Did you notice how beautiful they are?” he asked.

I took him to lunch at a deli in Carnegie Hill. Just as our orders arrived, I heard someone ask, “Can we get a picture?”

Must I? I thought, looking to my right and realizing that the person was talking not to me but to Kevin Spacey.

“Hasn’t he been cancelled?” John asked much more loudly than he needed to.

“It still counts as a star sighting,” I told him, thinking, Check!

We went to the Met and MoMA, then to the most garish of souvenir shops so that John could buy sweatshirts for his grandsons. In Times Square, he stood stock still and took photos of billboards as people who work in that neighborhood cursed the pair of us. I said to Hugh when we got home, “I even took him to see the tree at Rockefeller Center.”

That was huge, as no one in their right mind goes anywhere near Rockefeller Center from Thanksgiving to mid-January or so.

“What do you want, a medal?” Hugh asked.

I tried to remember that he was still in pain, and that, trapped inside for all but thirty minutes a day, he was going a little stir-crazy. It was hard for both of us, but became surprisingly easier when, shortly before Christmas, John returned to Washington State. On that morning, I accompanied Hugh to his surgeon’s office for a follow-up appointment.

“Any questions?” Dr. Reif asked after removing Hugh’s bandage to examine the wound.

“Yes,” I said. “Do you see any reason why he can’t cook Christmas dinner? We have nine guests coming, and he’s threatening to have it catered.”

The doctor replaced the bandage. “Oh, I think he’s up to it. That said, you might want to take a few shortcuts, use Stove Top stuffing rather than homemade, that sort of thing.”

“Stuffing from a box?” I said when we were back on the street. “Stuffing, period? As if we’d have turkey on Christmas Day! That man did not know who he was talking to, did he?”

“No, he did not,” Hugh sniffed, raising his cane to hail a cab. And, with that, he was back. Christmas nearly killed him, but no shortcuts were taken. He made a second entrée for the vegetarians and two desserts. Given a few more days, he might have even churned his own butter.

I left New York in early January to go back on tour, and when I saw Hugh again, six weeks later, he was fully recovered. Walking, swimming, going up and down stairs. “It’s a miracle!” he said.

I once met a young man who’d discovered by accident that one of his kidneys was dead inside him. Doctors removed it, and when I asked what happened to the cavity he said that his other organs had shifted slightly to occupy it. That’s what happened to the space Hugh had filled with his pain. It’s not like we now devote it exclusively to politics or art appreciation, though both subjects grew larger, as did talk of our families, and our friends. As he became his old self again, the pleasantness of our life together just sort of swelled, crowding out everything but half a bottle of OxyContin and a really tall toilet seat now gathering cobwebs beside an aluminum walker in our building’s dank, uninviting basement. ♦