By Anonymous
When I graduated from college in western New York, I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. So I did what any well-educated dilettante would — I moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and began bartending at a local Applebee’s. It was like being on permanent spring break.
I ate so well in the neighborhood that I gained 25 pounds. And thanks to South Carolina’s mini bottle law — which prohibited bars from stocking full-sized bottles of liquor and mandated that customers pay for each tiny bottle that a bartender cracked open to make their cocktail — I never learned to make any drinks that contained more than one type of booze.
After a year of holding court on Mudslide ’n’ Margarita Row, I’d had it. I was a grown-up, damn it, and grown-ups didn’t wear corporate-issue polo shirts and sling paper-lined wire baskets of fried onion segments. Grown-ups worked in offices. I needed to do that.
But how?
I didn’t have any real work experience—at least not any that would be applicable in Myrtle Beach, where the main industries were tourism and retirement and strip clubs with names like “Nuttin’ Butt Horseplay.” My only college internships had been at film-production companies, and my only summer job had been waiting tables at a mediocre Italian restaurant that overlooked the Erie Canal.
As it turned out, the only grown-up job I was qualified for was a position as an outpatient registrar at a hospital an hour and a half south of where I lived.
Her voice was the throaty bullfrog croak of a retired Marlboro Man, her wardrobe a rained-out parade of boxy rayon separates.
It was there that I met the Dragon.
The Dragon was a silver-haired woman of indeterminate age. Her voice was the throaty bullfrog croak of a retired Marlboro Man, her wardrobe a rained-out parade of boxy rayon separates. She was the head of the hospital’s registration department, a position she’d held since before Hippocrates coined his own oath.
The woman was a stickler for rules. Lunch lasted precisely half an hour, and afternoon break lasted not a second longer than 15 minutes. Employees were required to dress in black or navy-blue suits with button-down shirts of very particular shades of yellow, blue, pink or green. The Dragon kept cloth swatches in her office, her own prehistoric Pinterest board of sorts, and she’d come around in the morning to make sure that the hue of your blouse was acceptable. If you wore a skirt, the Dragon would make you kneel beside your desk to prove that your hem hit the floor.
My shift began at 7:30 a.m., and I once arrived at 7:32 to find the Dragon sitting in my chair.
“You. Are. Late,” she snarled, each word catching on her soft palate like autumn leaves on a chain-link fence. Then she shredded me apart in front of everyone within earshot about the perils of being a disobedient little girl.
After that I began leaving my house at 5:30 each morning, just so she’d never yell at me again. The morning after St. Patrick’s Day, I was still woozy and buzzed, but it didn’t stop me from hitting the road before the sun came up. That’s how much the Dragon scared me.
She scared everyone, ruling that hospital with a well-seasoned cast-iron fist. She made everyone cry: men, women, nurses, doctors, EMTs, volunteers. She once chased me into the bathroom to scream about how I’d used the wrong-colored highlighter on a report.
I wanted so badly to quit, but I couldn’t bear the thought of giving my notice. What if she got mad? What if she fired me? Just being alone in the same room with her was enough to make my palms sweat.
So I behaved like a desperate and terrified 21-year-old professional rookie. I marched into the Dragon’s office one morning and told her that I was “sick.” And that my doctor had done some testing and that, well, it didn’t look good. I would have to quit and find a job closer to home, if I could even work at all. Cough, cough, etc.
Just a tiny white lie, I thought. What does the Dragon care? We’re strangers. She hates me. She hates everyone.
To my horror, the Dragon didn’t bristle but softened. Her tightly puckered dill pickle of a mouth twisted into what I presume was the closest she could get to a smile. A sympathetic one.
“Is it cancer?” she asked softly. “You poor child. I hope it’s not cancer.”
And here’s where I become the villain of the story, because I didn’t say, “No.” I just screwed up my face and said, “They don’t know yet,” casting my eyes to the floor.
The Dragon embraced me. She smelled like cigarettes and lunch. She held me tightly while I pretended that my inability to fake-cry was actually a show of stoicism.
I didn’t know how to take it back, this deplorable suggestion that I was terminally or even vaguely ill. I didn’t speak of it again, but I didn’t have to; during my final days at the hospital, the Dragon was unspeakably kind to me. Another registrar told me that my monster of a boss had lost her daughter to breast cancer. Hearing that made me feel small and jagged and cold.
I left that job, and I left Myrtle Beach not long after. It took me over a decade to appreciate the callous gravity of that lie. It is among the things I am most ashamed of. I can’t undo it. All I can do is hope that the Dragon has found peace.
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Illustration by Yina Kim; design by Isla Bell Murray.
