The Best American Short Stories® 2011

by Geraldine Brooks

  My feet are freezing. She speaks to the window, to no one in particular. The puddles on Second Avenue are fifteen feet across. I always mean to buy a new pair of boots and never get around to it.

  I can get you a pair of hospital slippers if you want.

  Her laugh is high and piping and uncharacteristically girlish.

  Thanks. I'm not that desperate.

  Some indefinite tension lingers in the air. As if it's a joke and he guessed the punch line by accident too soon. So it is with me, he thinks, never one for chitchat.

  I've been meaning to ask you something, she says. And I want you to give me a frank answer. I should have her at home, shouldn't I? I mean, medically speaking, there's nothing keeping her here, right? It's not as if I don't have the space. The girls can bunk up again. You just have to say the word—

  You'd have to pay me almost double. Plus a night nurse. Rentals too. Home dialysis equipment, a hospital bed, a wheelchair, plus all the supplies. It would mean turning your house into a miniature clinic. Plus trips back here when she gets an infection or has to have a stent changed.

  All that's required? I mean, like, by law or something?

  At moments like these her face drains of expression, a strange placidity, the opposite, he thinks, of real calm, of actual relaxation. Without looking back she reaches behind her and touches the old woman's foot, the tender ankle with its close webwork of veins.

  It's the standard of care.

  Her village in Korea didn't get electricity till the eighties, she says. Her father dug the family well by hand. She grew up eating meat once a week if she was lucky.

  Then she's one of the fortunate ones.

  I don't know if that's what she'd call it.

  Good thing there's no choice in the matter.

  These are the kind that just go, a resident said to him once, in a low voice, when they were alone in the room. You could turn around and the hematode simplex is dividing and you'd never know. A hundred things depend on her saying right and left. Fucking Alz-heimer's. You might as well be back with the dogfish in Gross Anatomy. She's a regular time bomb, this one. But I don't have to tell you that.

  He fixed the resident with a look. Why, he said. Why don't you have to tell me that.

  You went to med school. I can tell. Your notes are too detailed.

  I guess that's a compliment.

  Well, then, you should have gone to med school.

  He muttered under his breath. Quae vero inter curandum, aut Etinam Medicinam, minime faciens, in communi hominum vita, vel videro, vel audiero, quae minime in vulgus esseri oportear, ca arcana esse ratus, filebo.

  What's that?

  What I may see or hear in the course of the treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself, holding such things shameful to be spoken about.

  Damn.

  My sergeant was kind of a sadist. Made us memorize it before we could run an IV.

  Seriously, though. Was it the money?

  He's a healthy, six-foot-two Indian kid with long, tapering fingers, trying to make himself older with thin gold wire-loop glasses and a rep tie. From one of those leafy midwestern suburbs, Shaker Heights or Grosse Pointe. A certain guilelessness, the product of a vigorous, uncynical, public-school upbringing. Doctor and Doctor Sharma with the matching Mercedes. Work as a nurse in New York long enough, he thinks, and you'll meet everyone: the upwardly mobile, the failing fast, and the stick-it-outs, the in-betweens, too perverse or lazy to be counted.

  Yeah. Somehow my fairy godmother never came along.

  Well, you never know, right? There's loans. You're still young.

  Listen, he says, I like nursing. Want to know why? Because it's women's work.

  Dr. Sharma draws in his shoulders, protectively, and blinks.

  Seriously, he says. Look at her. Nothing to be done, right? Tacrine, donepezil—they ran through that years ago. Vitamin E supplements? And then a whole slew of antidepressants. She was diagnosed as ALZ-likely twenty years ago and ever since it's been a comedy of fucking errors. One doctor coming in after another and trying to fix it. That's not how it works, man. Pay attention to the basic science! Until they find every single one of those triggers in the DNA and figure out how to turn them off, all anyone's going to be able to do is be there day by day, trying to keep those synapses exercised. For nurses, man, that's life. That's medicine.

  Look, Sharma says. I get it. It's not just changing bedpans. I just can't see living in New York on a nurse's salary.

  You just have to travel light. No kids, no encumbrances. I'm not looking for a condo on the Bowery.

  I was thinking more like a three-bedroom in Flushing.

  What, he wants to ask, is it Sympathy for Doctors Day? You mean I'm not the only martyr in the building? Well, he says, it's a sad world when a young MD can't make a mortgage payment.

  Yeah. Businesslike now, his pride wounded, he knocks Mrs. Kang's chart with two knuckles and lets it clatter back into its holder at the foot of the bed. I should get back to my rounds.

  It's not about the body, he's thinking, and not not about the body. Her clothes are loose, squared-off, raw silk, unbleached cotton, cashmere. Drapery. They generalize her figure. Only when she squats or reaches or bends low does he become aware of the generosity of her hips, the smooth unfreckled cleft of her breasts. She never arouses him, not in person, not in daydreams. Nothing as obvious as that. Her smoldering frustration. Like her scent, not perfume, not soap, but there in the room nonetheless, slightly sweet and damp.

  So unlike the clatter and innuendo outside in the corridor. Men can't resist a woman in scrubs, even the ugliest mismatched laundry-room rejects; he certainly never could. That was the one benefit of switching to paramedic in the days after Renée, or, to be honest, during and after: the whole parade of them, doe-eyed, fresh RNs, lacy bras and thongs underneath, in spare rooms, in supply closets, in his bed at four A.M. after a shift and an hour slamming beers. It's the oldest feeling in the world, or the second oldest, after just plain lust: survivor's guilt. Like all the stockbrokers shacking up after the towers fell. Terror sex, they called it, but it had nothing to do with terror. You look at pain, you gape at it, and then tear yourself away and eat Froot Loops. Pure instinct. A shift of heart attacks and gunshot wounds and eight-year-old girls with fingers burned off and what else could you possibly want? A candy bar, a shot of Jameson, a bacon double cheeseburger, and your face buried in Nicole Scangarello's pussy in the back seat of her Altima pulled over at a rest stop on the way out to Huntington Beach.

  He was never particular in those days. You took what came. Hospitals, again: a great equalizer. Sponsor of thousands of mongrel births. He never understood the guys who swore by Bronx Dominicans or Flatbush Chinese or Staten Island Italfans. And the girls: were they aroused by his blackness? Not likely. Not that he ever knew. His body was never so remarkable as to engender much comment. It was a body, it was available, it was alive; that was the coin of the realm. He doesn't miss the sex so much, the messiness of all that grappling, all those unfamiliar shapes beneath the fingers, the odd discoveries, pounding away to get the nut no matter if the sweetness is gone, but he misses the reassurance. And misses being awake so often in the hour of necessity, the hot glare of the streetlights just before dawn.

  Hyunjee has his home number. Not just his cell, his business number, which he turns to silent on weekends and the evenings—a substitute for his old answering service—but the old black rotary phone that just rings: no answering machine, no caller ID, no volume control, not even a plug to unhook from the wall. He gave it to her the first day her mother was admitted; it was something about the hapless way she fell into the chair in the waiting room and curled her legs to one side. New Yorkers don't act that way when engaging a service, signing a contract. It unnerved him when he showed her the payment schedule and she barely glanced it over. He flipped over his card and scrawled the number across
the back. I'll always be at one of these, he said. Don't worry.

  Now he checks his cell messages on a Sunday morning, no less. In case she's too shy to bother him at home. Sweaty, after running, peeling off his shirt and nylon jacket, draping a towel around his shoulders. The way she molds the dirt into little mounds with her fingertips. Her deftness with the metal chopsticks that never click against the side of the bowl. I could use a little pruning. A stupid way to put it. A woman's face creased with quiet anxiety. Care, he thinks, I could use someone else's care. I've grown too good at it myself.

  Watch yourself, now. As if the world needed a whole new dimension of tired and pathetic. You'd have to wait till after the old woman died, and then what? A phone call two weeks after the funeral? I thought we might have dinner?

  You can't afford it, he thinks, there comes a point in life when every investment is a loss, every additional effort is a mistake. Do yourself a favor. Do yourself a service. The luxury of not waiting out another six months of heartache. He steps into the plastic stall with its long skid mark of rust running from the faucet to the drain, thinking, Do something about that, if you want to do something. And leaves the water on cold for a moment longer than usual, till his teeth are chattering.

  When he walked into the classroom on the first day of Korean 110 the teacher covered her mouth, to cover a laugh, or a grimace of horror, perhaps some new fusion of the two she'd never imagined. He wedged himself into a chair between Katrina Lee and Jenny Park and tried his best to follow her explanation of hangul, a jumble of little circles and boxes and stick-figure men.

  It's a very difficult language, she said to him afterward. Even for them—she indicated the young Korean American women vanishing through the door, zipping backpacks, flipping open their mobile phones. They grow up hearing it and still it takes them years. What makes you interested in learning it?

  I have a Korean girlfriend.

  He'd been flipping through the course catalog on the toilet—it came in the mail, unbidden, three times a year—meditating on the question of other possible lives. Introduction to Reiki. Advanced Flavors of the Mediterranean. Systems Analysis and the Diversified Portfolio. The listing for the introductory language classes said, No previous experience necessary, for the absolute beginner. He liked that phrase, its wishful absurdity. As if there was any such thing as an absolute beginner.

  Then she can teach you, yes?

  She's shy. Anyway, she doesn't have enough time. I want to learn it properly, from the ground up. Her parents don't speak English.

  She crossed her arms and gave a broad, worldly laugh. That's very well-intentioned of you, she said. But the problem might not be the language barrier.

  Am I making you uncomfortable? he was tempted to say. She didn't even bother to disguise the way she moved behind the desk when he came near. Uninhibited fear and discomfort. You could almost respect her for it.

  Well, it's my money, he said.

  It amazes him now, three months gone, the term nearly finished. Every word he speaks out loud sending ripples of wincing distaste through the room. Teacher Cho has perfected the art of derision by example. Bol, she says, flapping her tongue at him to demonstrate the way it should be placed: curled behind the teeth, a little coiled snake. Not bowl. Bol. Long after he's gotten it right. That's you, Renée used to say, stubborn as a rock when you've made up your mind. Meant not entirely as praise. But mostly.

  Mul jum kajigo wara, Mrs. Kang says.

  I want some water.

  Mul jum kajigo wara.

  A sentence flowing at him out of a dream. He stands by the window, scrubbing iodine off the toe of his sneaker. He wipes his fingers on a paper towel and inches his neck around until his head rotates half the distance between them.

  Cham gam manyo, mul kajoda deureul kayo? he asks.

  Mul kajoda.

  Her eyes shift in his direction: wet drops of onyx, bright as always, brighter than seeing eyes can ever be. Who does she think is speaking? he wonders. She stretches out a palsied finger, pointing at the bathroom door. A tap. A pump. A well. Eventually the disease squeezes out every memory, he knows that, even the earliest: the bottle, the mother's breast. But right now, who am I to her? Son, father, uncle, nurse, servant?

  Mul. He catches himself saying it. The tip of the tongue placed exactly in the middle of the palate. Mul. Mul.

  And here you thought it would never happen, he thinks. You thought it would never click. All that wasted time.

  Kevin—

  Hyunjee in the doorway, looking from one face to another.

  He's forgotten the daughters: their names, their ages, the particular blur of each face. The taller of the two full-grown, shoulder-high on him, the other some indeterminate late-childhood shape, all bright wholesome fabrics and plastic beads. They're uptown for the weekend with their father, but he's thinking, as they walk up Second Avenue from the Thai restaurant back toward her apartment, that he should have something to say on the general subject of children, why he and Renée never had any, the difficulties of being a single mother—being a child of one—the hardships of the New York City schools. A certain widening of the circle of the conversation. He needs to bring things up to date, to gesture toward the immediate past, the impending future. Amy, Elizabeth, Lisa, Allison? Nondescript, easy names, names indicative of compromise, of shying away from the fashionable, not making things more difficult than they would already be.

  Though one could hardly say she's given him much of an opening. Come get a bite with me tomorrow, was all she said. Stanley's got the girls for the weekend. I could use some adult conversation. This whole you-studying-Korean thing—she waved her hand, as if to say, I don't get it, I don't have to get it. I mean, she said, it's strange, isn't it, spending so much time together, never actually getting to know each other. Maybe to you it's not. But you don't have to come if you don't want to. Strictly optional.

  And now he's lightheaded, pathetic dateless creature, swinging along the sidewalk as if he owns Manhattan, free-associating through the past, a tour of sedimented longings he hasn't unearthed in years.

  There's something I meant to ask you about, she says, after they've walked a block in silence. Next week's her birthday. I was wondering if it would be appropriate to celebrate. In the room, I mean.

  He wonders if he should be annoyed; business on a date, isn't that one of those basic rules? Instead he opts for generosity, a light laugh. Of course, you should do anything you want. She's not in a coma, you know. Anything she recognizes helps.

  It's also her wedding anniversary.

  All the better. A tape recording of your father, maybe? Or a piece of his clothing.

  And a bottle of soju. She used to drink herself silly and talk to his picture, every year. Stories from her village. I should have used a tape recorder. Is there some rule against getting the patients drunk?

  He laughs so loudly passersby look up from their conversations, startled. She doesn't need it, he says. That's the good side of Alz-heimer's. You're permanently blotto.

  She opens the door, drops her keys in a glass bowl in the hallway, opens the refrigerator, and carries a bottle and two glasses across the living room to the sliding door of the balcony, without looking at him, without asking permission. Shucking her mules absent-mindedly halfway across the carpet. A chrome-and-glass coffee table, a pair of black leather couches, an Eames chair, enormous plastic-looking ferns. His furniture. Everything you can't afford to replace in a divorce, and the kids want it anyway, no matter how horrible, it's what they've grown into, and the continuity matters.

  I'm curious about something, she declares, and I want to be honest about it. No pussyfooting around. I want to know what it was like over there.

  It wasn't even a real war. Not like the one they're in now.

  That's a poor excuse for an answer.

  I'll tell you this much, he says. Sand gets into everything. I had this expensive camera, a Nikon, and it was trashed by the time I left. Sand driven throu
gh the seal into the lens. It sticks to your skin. The slightest bit of moisture makes it stick. You get so that it sticks to your dick and keeps you from jerking off.

  The wine has a cloying floral bouquet, like sweet perfume; he licks his lips trying to get rid of it. Half my high school signed up, he says. Four tables right outside the main doors starting in April. Like shooting fish in a barrel. They took the kids who graduated two or three years ahead of us, the ones we looked up to, and sent them back as recruiters. It was a goddamned reunion out there every day. Gave them nice watches, good insurance policies, anything they could show off.

  So you were manipulated into it.

  I was looking for another father. A certain perverted kind of unconditional love. And instead what you get is Daddy slapping you across the face every other minute.

  I understand that.

  No you don't, he wants to say, quickly, a splash of cold water across the eyes. But says, instead, It wasn't for me. Some really get into the camaraderie aspect, the brotherhood. It feels good to be needed when you're that age. And, you know, it teaches you to get your shit together. Get up and take a shower in the morning, no complaining. It's a job. They say it's the best and worst training for the rest of your life.

  He chuckles. As long as we're on unpleasant topics—

  He's a lawyer. You might have heard his name. Stanley Pollack. Civil rights stuff, mainly, First Amendment issues. Whistleblower cases. Pretty high profile. He's a commentator on WNYC.