Ambulance Girl

by Jane Stern

  We are five minutes from the religious store and my face is tearstained. I feel dry heaves coming on. Michael looks stony-faced as he drives. I dry my tears on an old paper towel crumpled in my purse and spray Binaca in my mouth. I take a long, slow breath and try to center myself. We park in front of the store. My head is reeling and I cannot shut my mouth, although I know I should. I keep upping the ante to get Michael to feel the pain I am in. “I just want you to know,” I say, hiccuping with grief, “I called the suicide hotline yesterday.”

  Michael glowers at me. “Are you telling me you want to kill yourself?” he asks. His light blue eyes look like bits of an Arctic glacier to me. I have no idea what the answer is. “I do, I don’t, I don’t know . . . I can’t live without you,” I stammer. This has backfired on me. Instead of taking me in his arms, I have alienated Michael even more with my raging codependency. We are back at square one, and I try my best to compose myself as I walk into the religious store.

  I am surrounded by icons and portraits of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Not being a Christian, I feel oddly embarrassed to be there; I feel that I am looking at what is for sale with an ironic, slightly kitsch attitude. I wish I were religious, part of an organized faith whose rituals I could cling to as I pass through this hard period with Michael. I envy the rosaries and the statuettes and the holy cards. I do know that if I were a Catholic I would be as big a spanker as I am as an EMT; I would have one of everything, I would have the biggest, shiniest cross in the store and an illuminated Jesus on my dashboard.

  Michael and I walk around the store and I start to notice that the small staff of three are huddled around a radio, that our entrance seems to have gone unnoticed. We walk up to them and they scarcely acknowledge our presence. They look gray-faced and frozen in place. One of them tells us, “A plane . . . it just hit the World Trade Tower.” My hand goes to my mouth. I imagine a tiny Piper Cub, off its route, smashing like a mosquito into the unyielding building. Michael and I stop talking and listen to the radio with them. What we hear is frankly unbelievable. It is not a tiny plane but a 767, and now, wait, another jet has hit the second tower and the buildings are falling, collapsing like a crazy wedding cake, tier after tier, into themselves. The religious store staff is too stunned to talk, the voice from the radio pierces the air. Michael and I look at each other. I start to shake with fear. I am too scared to cry. We run to our car parked outside and start the engine. We turn on the radio and listen to the news. “Oh my God,” we both say. I grab Michael’s arm and squeeze it hard. This has got to be a practical joke, like Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” broadcast.

  It is now 11 A.M., and we have driven home from Bridgeport to our house at top speed. We run to the TV, the Twin Towers’ collapse remains unreal until we see it. And then we see it, over and over, a hideous loop, the buildings falling and then falling again. People screaming and running, the streets gray with ashes, the sky black with smoke billowing like in the Apocalypse. I look away from the TV and at Michael. I feel like I haven’t seen him in years. I see him without the anger and pain and tears that have come between. He is just Michael and I am just Jane and we live together in a yellow house on a hill, and we love each other. It is all so simple. I bury myself in his arms and we hold each other, waiting together for the world to end.

  I hug Michael and he hugs me back. We have no words to say to each other except that what is happening in lower Manhattan has dwarfed everything we have been mad about with each other. We are alive, the end of the world might be coming, and we are together, as we should be.

  Michael and I look at each other again and again. We can hear each other’s breath coming in harsh short gasps. “I love you,” I say as if it might be my last words.

  After a half hour of watching the TV coverage I look at my wall calendar: 9/11. How ironic: 911. That is me, I remember. I do a strange thing. I run upstairs to my bedroom and pull out my EMT full dress uniform. I have never worn it, so it sits wrapped in tissue paper in a plastic bin at the bottom of the closet. I pull off my jeans and T-shirt and fling them on the floor. Then I get dressed. First the blue uniform shirt with the American flag patch sewed on one sleeve, the Georgetown Fire Department shield on the other. Next come the uniform pants, navy blue with a gold cord up the side. I belt the pants on, and then add the navy blue tie, shiny laced black shoes, and a fireman’s dress hat with a silver badge pinned on it. I place my white dress gloves in the shirt’s epaulets.

  I run down to the den where the TV set is. Michael looks at me, and then does a double take. I am dressed to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. I am too freaked out to sit down, so I watch television standing at attention, crying and blowing my nose in a paper towel from the kitchen. Every time I see a flag or a policeman or an EMT on the TV, I salute.

  In chaos we each do what we can. I stand in full dress uniform in front of the TV with an ear to my police radio, waiting to be called. I will die like a soldier with my boots on. The Twin Towers have fallen and then we hear about the plane hitting the Pentagon and I wonder if the little oxygen tank, rolls of bandages, and oral airways I have in the back of my car will be of any use if a plane crashes in the middle of Georgetown.

  I stand guarding the police radio. Michael reacts in his own odd way. He jumps in the car, drives to the service station and fills it with gas, then goes to the grocery store and buys a dozen steaks, some bottled water, and many cans of dog food. When he comes home the steaks go in the refrigerator and Michael runs upstairs to his office, where he pulls a selection of guns from his closet. He takes out a Kalashnikov assault rifle, an evil-looking weapon, one of the many guns he has collected over the years. He loads bullets into magazines and lays the magazines in a neat line on his desk.

  We are each facing the end of the world in our own way. I am going down in uniform. Michael will eat steaks and shoot the enemy and, oh, yes, feed the dog. I would say we are insane, but so is the world at the moment.

  Hours pass. I can’t believe I have not been toned out yet. Finally I sit down; I am no longer capable of standing at attention. My feet and knees hurt. I feel very old and very tired. I go upstairs and change clothes.

  “Let’s go to Heibeck’s and fill up the other car with gas,” Michael says.

  We jump in our blue Dodge SUV and drive the two miles from our house to the gas station. After we pump the gas we walk into the little office where the Heibeck brothers are watching the news on TV. I see the chief standing, looking up at the screen. His face is ashen. I think I see his eyes tearing. The Heibeck brothers and I look at each other, we shake our heads. There is really nothing to say. Michael and I drive home with a tank full of gas, waiting vigilantly.

  We sleep deeply and exhaustedly. By the next morning my tone has still not gone off. I have taken off my dress uniform and put on a navy blue jumpsuit with EMS written on the back. I have slept in it. All the steaks are still in the refrigerator, as Michael and I are too nauseous to eat. I have made only one phone call, to Bernice, whom I reach on her cell phone. She is in her car driving to Boston to see her parents. “Please come home,” I say. “I need you to be here for calls.” Fortunately, she has already decided to return to Georgetown.

  It seems like half the world is driving into New York City. Fire departments and EMS squads are on their way from all over the country. Georgetown is only an hour and a half away from the city. We wait for the chief to tell us what to do. Other EMS units from our area have been dispatched. We finally get the command: we are not going to Ground Zero; we are to stay in Georgetown to care for the people of the town. I am both disappointed and relieved. Frankly, I am scared to death to go to Ground Zero. I don’t know if I can take it emotionally or physically. I don’t have much time to ponder this decision because suddenly the tones go off, and keep going off. I go to calls all day and all night. It is as if the community had collectively held its breath the day the planes flew into the towers, but now everyone is reacting all at once. We go out on one 911 call afte
r another. People are fainting, having chest pains, panic attacks, symptoms of strokes. Because Georgetown is so close to New York City, many people had family members or friends who were killed in the collapse of the towers. All the churches and the synagogues open their doors to the public. If you drive by with your car windows open you can hear organ music and crying.

  We are so near to New York and yet so far. It would take an hour and fifteen minutes to get from the firehouse to the remains of the Twin Towers. But we don’t go. It is a wise and selfless decision; there are more than enough rescue crews there, and we are needed in our small town.

  I am exhausted from taking people to the local hospital, but I am now too edgy to go to bed. In my EMT jacket and in my well-labeled EMT car I cruise the town when the sun goes down. Silently, like a bat, like a stealth bomber, I am looking for terrorists, I am looking for victims.

  The Monday night after the attacks we have our regular firehouse meeting. I walk upstairs and see everyone watching the news on TV. They look grim.

  Bin Laden’s face is on the TV. “Kill him” is murmured in unison. I see the firemen clench their fists. If he were in Georgetown, he wouldn’t stand a chance.

  We start to have drills about what to do if terrorism strikes close to home. We are issued big white biohazard suits and learn how to put them on. We learn how to wash people down who have been exposed to anthrax. We learn how to decontaminate ourselves. We go over incident command systems. We view photographs of the municipal buildings around Georgetown, the reservoirs, and other likely terrorist targets.

  Suddenly being an EMT is much more than I bargained for. My self-centered fears and small victories are dwarfed by the Twin Towers, on fire and crumbling like the scariest of tarot cards: the Tower. Countless firemen and EMS workers have been killed doing their job. Others work around the clock, digging out, looking for survivors. I feel tiny by comparison to this unspeakable effort. Georgetown feels tiny too. We are one little star in a huge galaxy of rescue workers. I am connected with the people at Ground Zero, yet light-years away. I am but one of many. One of a brotherhood of thousands of rescue workers. It doesn’t matter if my hands shake or my pants are too short, I am still one of them.

  19

  Becoming an EMT has allowed me to do the impossible. I am thinking of how true this is as I am sitting behind the wheel of one of Georgetown’s fire trucks.

  Bernice has decided that she has to get a 2Q driver’s license. This legally allows the operator to drive vehicles over 26,000 pounds, huge vehicles like fire trucks. Jimmy Mecozzi, a professional fireman in Stratford, Connecticut, and a longtime member of the Georgetown Volunteer Fire Department, is the instructor. Bernice has lured me into taking the class. The idea of driving a fire truck seems so silly to me, an ex–New Yorker who didn’t know how to drive a car until I was twenty-three, that I said, “Sure, why not,” in a moment of unbridled lunacy.

  Bernice and I report to the parking lot of the local high school on a Sunday. The lot is empty, except for our few empty parked cars, and Jimmy Mecozzi and the big red fire engine. Bernice steps out of her Lexus and a smile immediately stretches my face. She is wearing shorts, her legs are trim and tanned, and on her head is a large straw hat covered with silk flowers.

  We are not the only people who have signed up for the course. There are a number of young men from the fire department who also want to be trained. We are issued a yellow manual from the Connecticut Fire Academy. I thumb through it and the smile that started with Bernice’s flowered hat has now turned to outright laughter. I might as well have been given a manual for decoding a Martian spaceship. I recognize nothing at all familiar. There are diagrams of push rods and cam rollers, manual draining valves and slack adjusters. I see Jimmy Mecozzi looking at me as I laugh like a loon. His face lights up happily. I suspect he thinks I am digging the heavy-metalness of it all. Everyone at the firehouse loves Jimmy Mecozzi. The Mecozzis have been active members of the firehouse forever. Jimmy used to be a volunteer fireman and now is a professional. He is tall and handsome and has a disarming grin. He tells great stories about fighting fires in Bridgeport and Stratford. He always has a skin-crawling tale about finding a cadaver dead so long, its face fell off when it was moved, or zillions of rats leaping out from behind walls that the firemen chopped down. He brings in his fireman’s hat that has recently melted into a burned wad from a flashback fire. He shows it off to all the young firemen as a cautionary tale.

  I explain to Jimmy why I am taking the 2Q class. It goes something like this: “If there were no firemen left on earth and the truck absolutely had to get to a fire, then I would drive it.”

  “It’s good for everyone to know how to drive the apparatus,” he says. “You’ll do fine.”

  We all stand around dwarfed by the huge shiny truck. It really is a gorgeous thing. I love the gold lettering on the side that says GEORGETOWN. We are going to do a walk-around. I wonder if this is like a walkabout, recalling a Crocodile Dundee movie that had Aborigines doing this on a regular basis in order to go into a mystical trance. I find there is nothing transcendental about walking around the fire truck. It reminds me of what you see people do when they buy a used car. You basically walk around tapping things and peeking at them from below. Jimmy tells us, “You will check the manual slack adjusters on the S cam brakes. Use gloves and pull hard on each slack adjuster that you can get to, check the brake drums and the linings; they must not have cracks longer than one-half the width of the friction area.”

  I have been in 2Q class twenty minutes and I am already totally lost. I walk around the truck banging on things, pulling things, and squatting down under it to pretend to look at stuff. Jimmy finds all sorts of things in need of repair on the truck. He shows them to us, but nothing registers with me. I shake my head yes as if I get it. When I get tense I look at Bernice’s petunia-ridden hat, which cheers me up.

  By the second hour of this first class the students are allowed to climb up into the cab and get the feel of what it is like behind the wheel. We hit the right switches and the ignition goes on. The steering wheel is huge and flat, not in an upright position like a car. Climbing up into the cab has taken effort, I am already breathing hard. Jimmy sits in the passenger seat. I am the driver. He has placed orange cones around the parking lot, and he expects that we will all drive forward slowly, and then around the obstacle course. With the ignition on, I grab the wheel in a death grip. This truck is huge. It weighs 45,000 pounds and is twenty-seven feet long. Jimmy Mecozzi puts his seat belt on, which I think is a mighty good idea. He coaches me to step on the gas pedal and make the truck move forward. My toe taps it so gently that nothing happens. I am exerting so little force I would not break a spiderweb. He keeps encouraging me, and finally I depress the petal enough so the truck moves. I instantly hit the brake, lurching us to a stop. “That’s good,” Jimmy says optimistically. “Now you see that the brakes work. Let’s go forward again.” After half an hour I have summoned up enough nerve to actually drive the truck, albeit very slowly, around the orange cones. I am probably going ten miles an hour but I feel like an unstoppable juggernaut. I am looking in both side mirrors and all I see is endless yards of truck behind me. “Now slow down and stop,” Jimmy says, and when I hit the brakes it feels like nothing is happening. The truck is so much heavier than a car that even going ten miles an hour, it seems to take forever to stop.

  Over the next few weeks Bernice and I take our 2Q lessons together. She is a natural; in her shorts and sandals, with brightly painted toenails, she drives the truck forward, backward, and around the cones, stops smoothly, and climbs out of the cab with ease. I love taking the lessons but it is clear to me from the beginning that I have some sort of spatial dyslexia. When Jimmy says go right, I go left. I run over the orange cones. When I back up I come dangerously close to the brick wall of the high school. Over the roar of the engine I hear people on the ground yelling, “Stop!” Michael comes by the parking lot one Saturday morning with a camera and t
akes pictures of me and Bernice in front of the truck. I have a feeling I will not see the end of the 2Q class, so I want something for posterity.

  Bernice and I arrange a special practice session with Jimmy Mecozzi late one afternoon. We are actually going to drive the fire truck on the road. Bernice goes first. She and Jimmy are gone at least half an hour. She has a triumphant look on her face when they return. The sun has gone down and it is now dark. I am absolutely terrified of driving the truck at night. I can’t see where I am going during the day, and now it is all shadows and darkness.

  “Just relax,” Jimmy says as he sees my white knuckles around the wheel. I’m chewing my gum hard, because I need some saliva. With Jimmy’s encouragement, I slowly pull the truck out of the firehouse bay. I bite my lower lip as I see how close the side mirrors are to the garage door. “Okay now, when we get out on the road we are going to go right and turn right again on Route 57.” I creep slowly along the road, so slowly the speedometer hardly moves. “You can pick up the pace now,” Jimmy says. I gingerly press the gas pedal harder. I feel the truck pick up speed. I make a decent turn and we are going down Route 57, which at this hour is blessedly empty. I get the truck up to about twenty miles an hour, which feels superfast. I can feel a nice breeze blowing in the open windows of the truck. “Faster,” Jimmy says, and again I press the pedal closer to the floor. We are a few miles from the firehouse and I am now going about forty. The blood has rushed back into my hands as I have relaxed my grasp. “Turn here,” Jimmy says. I take my eyes off the road for a moment and look at him. He is really handsome. I can see why when his name is mentioned by the ladies of the firehouse it is followed by a sigh. We head down one road, and then another, I am taking the curves with authority. Cars pull over when I pass them. We reach the big senior citizen housing development in the process of being built in Georgetown. It is still under construction, and no one is around at night. “Park at the bottom of the driveway,” Jimmy instructs, and I manage to get in the right position. “Now,” he says with a big grin, “I want you to drive the truck backward up the driveway.”