She lifted her name tag up on her shirt pocket: Orderly Sima. Orderlies didn’t rate last names. She wondered what would happen if she lost her ID. Ridiculous thought, she hardly had to prove she was an outsider.
“Closer,” the guard said, his words breathy through the microphone.
“I was here last week.” She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She unclipped her badge and held it up against the window.
The guard buzzed her in.
She pushed her stretcher down the hallway, wheels squeaky on the scratched linoleum, past more guards with holsters and billy clubs, posted every ten feet. The ward was at the far end, behind a wall of windows ceiling to floor. A guard stood by the locked door. The Nurses’ Station was its own windowed cage, with a separate secure entrance.
“Peabody.” Sima heard a woman’s voice announce from a microphone. Nurse Bingham. Nurses rated no first name. “Three beds down on the right.” She nodded to the guard by the entry to the ward to let Sima in.
“You know the drill,” the guard said.
Inside the open ward was filled with dark, moody men doing time at Rikers, street-sick from drugs, from gunshots and stabbings and deeper wounds, the kind nobody could see. She was drawn to these strangers in a way she didn’t fully comprehend. She was drawn to County patients wherever they were from, whatever they had lived through.
A husky guard inside the ward stepped beside her, smelling of mustard.
“Stay alert,” he said, then stationed himself against the windowed wall, where the move of every prisoner was watched by the guards on the other side.
“We got ourselves another pretty little whitey here!” a grumbly voice shouted. “Why don’t these nice lady doctors wear skirts? Show a lonesome man a little leg.”
He shot up out of bed and suddenly was up close to Sima. “Hey, hey!” he said.
“Watch it,” the guard said, his words out in the air like a cartoon bubble.
The grumbly voice laughed again, and others joined in. Fluorescent lights buzzed from the ceiling.
Sima leaned into her stretcher and moved away, down the aisle between two long rows of beds. The smrod was worse than in the women’s ward, dirty socks and siki. She breathed through her mouth. She stopped where an intern stood over the prisoner she’d come to transport.
She had seen this intern on A71 the day she delivered Miss Osborn. Up close now, Sima thought she could be seeing herself: a young woman with curly, dark hair, narrow shoulders, long arms and fingers. Except for the glasses and the white jacket. The young doctor’s pockets bulged: test tubes with red tops, purple tops, and blue ones, 4 x 4 wrapped gauze pads, syringes small and large, rubber gloves. Her chest pocket was over-stuffed with note cards, her pager on the verge of falling off the waistband of her white on-call pants. Mindy Kahn, MD: her ID didn’t say she was a psych rotator spending a year on Medicine. Sima had heard the other interns talk. This doctor wasn’t anyone she wanted to be mistaken for.
The prisoner sat up against his pillow, his hospital johnny laundered pale, its neckline crooked. He yanked his arm out of the intern’s grip.
“Shit, man,” the prisoner said. “How many times you going to poke me?”
“It would be nice if you had some veins, Mr. Peabody.” Dr. Kahn’s demure smile seemed forced. She had one hand on the prisoner’s forearm, the other on a tourniquet cinched around his bicep.
“Mr. Peabody,” he smirked. He tugged at the tourniquet and it dropped onto the bed sheet. “Mars Peabody’s got veins. You just got to know how to find them.” He turned to Sima. “What you looking at?”
Sores the size of quarters covered the man’s arms. He sat on top of the sheets, hospital bottoms rolled up to his knees. Red wounds ran up one leg and down the other, more than Sima had seen on most addicts at the County. The A71 interns joked that the psych rotator wasn’t any good at procedures, she wasn’t expected to be, but getting blood out of this addict was going to be a challenge for even the best medical intern.
“What’s the matter, doc?” he said to Sima. “Mars Peabody’s veins too tough for you?” Then his raspy laugh turned into a cough and a wheeze.
“Give him another pillow,” the grumbly voice three beds away spoke up again.
“The doctor needs to listen to his lungs,” another prisoner taunted.
“Sit up,” Sima said to Mars Peabody. She stepped in close to the bed, reached behind his back with one arm, tilted him forward, and held him upright. “Take a deep breath,” she said.
Dr. Kahn stood by Sima’s side. “I need to listen to his lungs.”
“Doctor! Doctor! Doctor!” A chorus chimed in.
“Pillow! Pillow! Pillow!”
Another guard Sima hadn’t noticed was walking down the line of beds. “This ain’t no joke,” he said. “Peabody can’t breathe. Shut up and let the doctor do her job.”
Dr. Kahn stood there, arms hanging by her sides the way her stethoscope hung from her neck. She seemed paralyzed by the voices in the room.
Sima kept her hands on Mars Peabody’s shoulders. The laying on of hands—what she’d read a doctor was supposed to do. What Dr. Kahn needed to do now. Dr. Kahn didn’t have one of the extra-long stethoscopes the medical interns used to keep a distance from the patients. She could move in and really hear with this one. Chief Danielson had taught Sima to listen to breath sounds. She wished she had her own stethoscope.
“Sit forward,” Sima heard herself say. “Take a deep breath.” She could feel his ribs move, the vibration of his wheezing.
Dr. Kahn placed her stethoscope onto the patient’s chest. “Deep breath.” Mars coughed and wheezed. “Breathe slowly.” She listened carefully at several places on his chest. “Smaller breaths,” she said, listening from the front and the back. “Slower.”
Mars Peabody’s breathing eased. Sima couldn’t hear his wheezing anymore, she could feel his shoulders relax. And then she felt him squirm forward from her touch.
He closed his hand around the tubing of the stethoscope and stared up at Dr. Kahn.
“My lungs are working just fine now,” he said.
They eyed each other, Mars Peabody and Mindy Kahn, MD.
“Time to get that blood you want so badly, don’t you think?” he said.
“I don’t think so.” Dr. Kahn broke the stare and removed his hand from her stethoscope.
“You just got to know how to feel for it,” Mars Peabody said. He grabbed the tourniquet from the bedsheets again. “I can teach you a few things.”
He wrapped the tourniquet around his arm, anchoring one end and leaving the other loose. He took the loose end between his teeth and tugged.
“Syringe,” he said through the yellow rubber in his mouth. “Come on.” He snapped the fingers of his free hand. “You got all them needles on that table. Hook up a big one for me.”
“I don’t think so,” Dr. Kahn repeated.
Sima was impressed with how Dr. Kahn managed to steady her voice. She watched as Dr. Kahn reached for the anchored end of the tourniquet and yanked it, as if she’d been doing this her whole life. The yellow tubing snapped against Mars’s skin as it fell off his arm, the other end still held by his teeth.
A strip of skin reddened by the tourniquet stood out from the many sores on his arm.
Mars winced. He fingered the bruised spot. Then he pressed deeper, and deeper again, almost frantically. He shivered and buried his hands under his armpits and rocked.
The tourniquet lay abandoned on the bed sheet.
“Time to get you onto the stretcher, Mr. Peabody,” Sima said.
“Mr. Peabody,” Mars said. “Mars Peabody.” He pulled the bedsheets tightly around him.
4
Hair
A few weeks later, Sima found Dr. Kahn leaning against the counter at the A71 Nurses’ Station, writing in a chart. Since the Prison Ward, Dr.
Kahn had clearly learned to fill her pockets more carefully: three-by-five patient note cards were now neatly clipped together in her chest pocket with a penlight, a small notebook stood unruffled in one side pocket, new packaged 4 x 4 gauze pads reached over the top of the other. A clean tourniquet looped through a buttonhole in her short white jacket, fresh from the laundry.
Dr. Kahn’s hair was much darker than Sima’s, curlier and frizzy. So unlike the billboard blondes hovering over the heads of America she saw everywhere when she first arrived as a child. On their first Sunday in Brooklyn, in their basement apartment, her Aunt Miriam flipped open a shiny magazine to page after page of slinky women with silky blond hair, placed an even shinier box in her mother’s lap, and told her mother that the shampoo in the box would make her a real American. Her mother’s baby sister, Miriam, who married the first man in their village who agreed to take her to the United States, untied the scarf on her head, her hair now a soft blond, and twirled around the room.
In Poland, everybody was blond, shikse blond, her mother said, and she would have none of it. She shoved the shiny box onto the floor, told Miriam to cover her shame, and warned her to keep her hands off Sima. In junior high school, with the help of a girl she barely knew, Sima tried to iron her tresses. She wouldn’t be a blonde but she could have long, straight hair like Cher. Sima was relieved that now, in the ’80s, women, in New York had perms—they all wanted curly hair. But not frizzy and disheveled the way Dr. Kahn’s was.
“New York summers are good for curly hair,” Sima said.
Dr. Kahn contorted her neck, attempting to tame unruly strands behind one shoulder.
“I stopped using a hair dryer,” Sima said. “You should just let it go.”
Dr. Kahn flipped a page in the chart and kept writing.
“I’m told my curly hair is softer than an Amsterdam hippy.” Amsterdam hippy. She had no clue where this idea came from. She paced behind Dr. Kahn. “Jewish hair is not as frizzy as Italian. You’re Jewish, right?”
Dr. Kahn didn’t raise her eyes. “They asked me that in Massachusetts.” She closed one chart, set it aside, and opened another one. “Nobody asks me in New York.”
“I’m writing a paper on ethnic hair.”
Dr. Kahn turned to face Sima. “Once when I was in high school, waiting at bus stop, a man asked me if I was Italian or Greek or Moroccan or Brazilian. When he ran out of countries, he asked me if I was Jewish. He said ‘Jewish’ almost in a whisper, as if he’d uncovered my big secret.”
Dr. Kahn tapped her pen on the chart. “So what are you writing this paper for?”
“English composition.” Sima had put off taking the course, afraid she’d fail. But it was now or never. It was the last course she needed to graduate—she hadn’t told anyone. She hadn’t told anyone she wanted to drop out. “I’ve had an interest in hair since I was six, when I first moved here from Poland.”
“My grandfather was born in Poland,” Dr. Kahn said. “Every time I see him, he says, ‘So when are you going to get a haircut?’ ”
“Isn’t that what mothers say to sons these days?”
“Not in my family. Only daughters, and I’m the firstborn. My parents were going to name me David.”
“My parents wanted me to be David, too,” Sima said. After her brother David died, her father sometimes called her David, Dave, Davey. “Your hair is frizzy for Jewish hair.”
Dr. Kahn’s pen rolled off the counter onto the floor. “Well, damn,” she said. “Who cares?”
“In Poland they cared.” Sima looked straight at Dr. Kahn. “They didn’t ask me politely what country I was from. They called me a kike. A Christ killer. I was only six.”
Dr. Kahn bent to the floor to retrieve her pen. When she stood, her cheeks were flushed, as much as Sima’s. She focused on her chart and started to write again. Without making eye contact she said softly, “In New York everybody’s hair is dark and curly, but in Boston it’s brown or blond, and straight.”
Sima stared at the toe of her running shoe where it hit the wall of the Nurses’ Station and left a mark. “I’ve never been to Boston,” she said.
“You’ve got to get out of New York,” Dr. Kahn said.
Sima had barely been across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan. She’d never stepped foot on Staten Island or in the Bronx. She went to Queens by mistake once when she got on the wrong subway line. She had to take a bus and it took her an extra hour to get home. She’d hardly ever taken a bus since she was a child, since her first years in America.
5
Tea for Two
When Sima was seven, she and her mother boarded the B82 bus to Canarsie. It was 1967 and they’d been in New York a year when Mrs. Puretz, the other Polish-speaking Jewish widow in their building, told her mother about Canarsie, where her daughter lived in a stand-alone house with her przystojny maz and two piekny dziatki. Good-looking husband and beautiful children. And a long-haired Dachshund, just like the one Mrs. Puretz had given her daughter on her tenth birthday in Poland that was viciously run over by the Ukrainian man next door. Canarsie was wporsazdku. Safe. Three times a week the widow Puretz walked five blocks to catch the bus on Avenue K. It was a fifteen-minute ride. Cudowny. Marvelous. Sima’s mother had managed to negotiate a good price for her dead husband’s collection of blue glass and silver to purchase two one-way tickets to America on a huge boat across the Atlantic on her own with her little daughter tightly in tow. But a year later, Sima had to be by her side if her mother ventured out of their Kings Highway neighborhood. Her mother demanded Sima check the signs at the bus stop three times to be sure they boarded in the correct direction.
They got off the B82 near Avenue L and walked the bustling street. Her mother clutched her purse to her chest in one hand, Sima’s arm in the other. She refused to go inside any of the stores. And then she stopped in front of a thrift shop. Her legs were tired, she said. She stood staring in the window. She pointed to a pair of glass tea cups with silver holders. Just like ones she’d sold for passage to America, a set of six that she and her friends drank tea from every afternoon in their village in Poland.
“Jak duzo? Jak duzo?” She tapped on the window until Sima read the price tag.
Her mother opened her purse. Without her usual hesitation, she counted out the necessary cash into her seven-year-old daughter’s hand. She waited outside while Sima made the purchase. When they returned home from Canarsie, her mother headed to the kitchen. Still in her coat, she washed the vintage Russian glass cups, dried them with the lime-green linen towel reserved for the few special items she’d secreted from Poland. The handles and the holders on the thrift shop acquisitions were only silver plated, her mother pointed out, not the real Podstakanniki, and so they wouldn’t get as hot.
Her mother set the two sparkling pieces of glass on the table. She scooped a large spoonful of tea leaves into one cup and drowned the leaves with boiling water. Sima stared at the steam swirling above the surface of the cup, waiting and waiting for the tea to steep. Finally her mother dipped a finger in. She declared it was cool enough to drink, and presented Sima with a few sips from the large spoon. Sima would have to wait until she was older to drink from the glass cup herself. When she was eight, her mother said she wasn’t quite old enough. At ten, her mother told she had to wait until she was twelve. On her twelfth birthday, her mother told her thirteen was the proper age to start drinking tea.
From the time Sima was tall enough to stand over the stove, she hovered over the unpainted kettle every afternoon, steam from the spout threatening to frizz her hair, until the whistle blew. Their daily ritual. But by thirteen, Sima had lost interest in tea, in her mother’s silver-handled glassware. She never poured for herself, she never sat.
“Turn off the pisk!”
“Yes, Mama.”
Sima liked the Polish word for “shriek” even though her mother shouted it from the kitchen
table a foot away.
“Usiac, Sima.” Sit.
Sima set the steaming glass cup alongside the lace napkin in front of her mother.
“Not today, Mama.” Sima spoke in English at tea-time. Sima dressed in scrubs at teatime now, about to leave for her next double shift. What she loved was to get to the hospital early when she worked days, to stand in line with the doctors and nurses at the Greek diner truck outside the ER. For a dollar she could buy a warm raisin bagel in a brown paper bag and coffee in a paper cup with the blue Greek diner design. Once in a while, she’d splurge on a cheese Danish, an American pastry her mother refused to eat.
6
Fever Workup
Double shifts and on-call shifts, like Jewish holidays, start at night. But the beginning of a Jewish holiday is calm: table set for a family dinner, white candles in silver holders passed down one generation to the next, ready to be lit. The start of a night at the County was more like Sima’s childhood in Poland: chaotic—pagers beeping, swallows of dinner abandoned, feet scurrying in their call to action.
Sima made her way through the cafeteria line, her plate piled with eggplant parmesan, one of the few County meals she liked, free with hospital ID. She stopped by Dr. Kahn, alone at a table. She had seen Dr. Kahn’s name posted on the A71 on-call schedule and asked to work the same night. She was pleased when the curly-haired psych intern nodded for Sima to join her. But almost immediately, Dr. Kahn’s pager went off. She closed the Styrofoam carryout container she’d filled with eggplant in anticipation of this moment, shoved it into a plastic bag with fork and napkin, and without a word, headed for the door. Sima sat by herself for not more than five minutes before she too was paged to the ER.
Screams blared in the hallway outside the Female Room. They came through the open door from a bony sixteen-year-old girl squirming on a gurney. The smooth-skinned teenager was sweaty and tender to the touch everywhere the nurses laid a finger. It was the sickle cell anemia pisk of painful bones. A human shriek. The sound of squashed red blood cells, oxygen-deprived, stuck in tiny capillaries throughout the body. The girl’s eyes bulged. Her arms wrapped around the side rails of the bed, skinny but strong as a wrestler’s, yanking so hard the gurney shook. Sima figured the nurses hadn’t given her Demerol yet. Or not enough.
The Care of Strangers Page 2