The Care of Strangers

by Ellen Michaelson

  “It’s dangerous,” Mama said, “if the Poles see his little body. I don’t know why we bother. It makes no difference. He’s my son, so that makes him Jewish. Jewish enough.”

  “In the eyes of God it makes a difference,” Papa said.

  “He won’t be Jewish in any other way,” Mama said.

  “Sha!” Papa said. Be quiet. “Hold down your son and stand proud.” Her papa nudged her mama to help Lesk’s wife hold down her brother’s little pink legs.

  “I won’t,” Mama said. “I can’t.” She sat down and started to cry.

  Lesk’s wife nodded and Papa sat, but when he put his arms around his wife, she pushed him away. Lesk’s wife reached for Sima’s hand and pulled her to the table where her brother lay. Legs and penis in the air, tiny tongue out between toothless gums, dark hair in curlicues covering his head.

  “You hold the right leg, Sima,” Lesk’s wife said. “I’ll hold the left one.”

  Lesk’s silver knife hung in the air like a sword. And Lesk was a strong, brave knight. He closed his eyes and said the blessing. “Da-veed,” he announced her brother’s Hebrew name. His face shiny with sweat, he held the knife in one hand, and pulled on the wrinkly foreskin with his other. A drop of sweat landed on the baby’s belly. And then a sliver of skin fell off the newborn penis, and then tiny drops of blood.

  Sima’s brother let out a pisk worse than she had ever heard. His legs kicked, his body squirmed, he wailed. She tried so hard to hold the leg that she started to cry and lost her grip.

  “It’s OK, little one, it’s OK,” Lesk’s wife said. She stroked the baby’s head and let go of the other leg. She dipped her pinkie into the silver goblet on the matching tray where her husband had put down his knife, alongside the sliver of foreskin. She touched the wine on her fingertips to the baby’s wide-open, wailing lips. “It’s ok.”

  She dabbed drops of blood off the smooth, exposed skin and covered the now-Jewish penis with a piece of white gauze. She bundled Sima’s brother in a blanket and rested him in his mama’s arms.

  Her mama was crying and her brother was crying and Sima was crying, along with everyone in the under-the-ground. They were drinking wine and crying.

  * * *

  —

  JJ CUPPED HIS HANDS OVER his crotch and spoke in a serious tone. “What about girl Jews?”

  “If your mother is a Jew, then you’re a Jew,” Sima said.

  “Are you a Jew?” JJ said. He pointed at Sima. “You got the nose.”

  God of the Puerto Ricans talking to the God of the Jews. Hair. Penis. Nose. Sima could feel her face getting hot. She was safe as a Jew in America, with her nose, her hair. But life was more than safety. They needed to keep moving. She drove the wheelchair forward through the steam and the pipes, around the corner, past the cages.

  JJ lifted the sheet and reached a hand into his baggy shorts. “I’m a Jew,” he said.

  “I don’t need to know that.” She kept her eyes on the hallway ahead, pushed harder.

  “Why not?” JJ said.

  And then they were stopped in front of the elevators. There was no place to go. He was crazy, she told herself. Harmless. She wanted to tie the sheet to the armrests of the wheelchair but she was afraid to touch him.

  “Maybe we’re cousins,” JJ said. “Wouldn’t you want to know that? There’s a synagogue in San Juan,” he said. “I seen it. Jews from everywhere.”

  She and her mother could have moved to San Juan instead of New York. And her mother would still only be speaking Polish.

  JJ was shivering again. She fingered the sheet, tugged it free from where it was stuffed on one side of the wheelchair seat and draped it around his shoulders and over his private parts.

  Elevator Lady Miss Lawrence stood by her open door. “What have we got here?”

  JJ sat back. He drew his wayward hand into a polite position and gathered the sheet in close to his chest. “One Jew helping another,” he said.

  “Never seen a Jew with red hair,” Miss Lawrence said. “What do you say, Sima?”

  JJ nodded at Sima. “I knew it.”

  Sima backed the wheelchair into the elevator, away from Miss Lawrence’s gaze. She leaned against the rear wall thinking it was easier for a Jew to look American than it was for a Puerto Rican to look like a Jew. Maybe she should become a singer, memorize the Yiddish songs her mother loved so much, go to Juilliard instead of medical school. She had no talent for music.

  8

  This and That

  Whether the elevator was working or not, Sima took the stairs to the apartment she shared with her mother, the same four flights to the same apartment they’d lived in since 1966. She stopped the way she always did on each floor to see what magazines neighbors had left in the trash by the stoop doors. The walk and the stops gave her time to think about her day, to make her transition from school or the hospital to that fourth-floor apartment she otherwise rarely left. It had been several days since she’d transported JJ. His Puerto Rican yarmulke, his dyed red hair, his nose—she couldn’t get him out of her mind. She took her time more than usual that evening. But she was never in a rush to see her mother after a long day at the County or as many hours as she could fit in at the Brooklyn College library. To sit with her mother at the kitchen table not speaking, the television her mother didn’t understand always on in the background, or the crackly recordings of dead Yiddish singers. Not speaking about so many things.

  In the neighbor’s trash next door, on top of a pile of New York Times, she saw last week’s New York Magazine. Several years before, she’d brought home a discarded copy of the “flashy” publication. Her mother had chased her around the apartment. “Szmira!” she screamed. Her mother would have cheered if she’d come home with an issue of the Forward, world famous voice of immigrants of the Jewish ghetto. Even if it weren’t the Yiddish edition, the only one her mother could barely read. Her mother grabbed the magazine and Sima stormed out of the apartment. Her mother followed her down the hallway into the elevator of their Kings Highway building, waving the slick pages in the air, yelling at the top of her lungs. “You’re a good girl, a Jewish girl! No steal this szmira!”

  When the elevator door opened one floor down, her short, stout mother smiled at Mrs. Puretz, equally short and stout, who stepped in. Her mother stood at the back wall like the survivor she was and switched to a quiet Polish.

  “For this, we didn’t come to America. Your father didn’t die for this.”

  Mrs. Puretz, the only other Polish-speaking widow left in the building, clutched her purse to her ragged woolen coat. Her weekly trips to Canarsie stopped when her grandchildren were grown; her daughter didn’t have much time for her now. She nodded at Sima’s mother.

  “No die for this.” Her proud, broken English. She turned to Sima. “Your mama knows.”

  She’d done it once again. Sima’s very private mother never passed up an opportunity to engage a Polish-speaking Jewish stranger in their arguments about how to behave in America.

  Sima would never forget her roots. But her mother didn’t believe her. And she didn’t understand how much Sima needed to fit in somewhere, anywhere, in New York, New York, center of the universe according to numerous cartoons pinned to the bulletin board in the Brooklyn College library. New Yorkers so proud to be New Yorkers. At least the natives were. She had no point of reference. As she told Dr. Kahn, she had never stepped foot outside of Brooklyn except to Manhattan since she’d arrived off the boat at the age of six. She had never even been to Staten Island.

  This—this reading of a particular American magazine—was the most ambitious way Sima had ever openly defied her mother, defied anyone. She was a lonely outsider—at the County, at college, wherever she went. Maybe she needed to move out. She could ask Dr. Kahn if she needed a roommate. She was not simple, like her mother. She was smart. But she had no idea how she could tell
her lonely, prosta mother she was about to graduate college.

  * * *

  —

  SHE PICKED UP THE DISCARDED New York Magazine and hid it under her coat. She pulled the key of out of her pocket and turned the lock in the apartment door. There were no lights on; her mother was still out shopping. She hung her key on a hook by the door. She was about to stuff the magazine into her backpack, but then she placed it on the center of the dining room table.

  She dropped the backpack on the floor, didn’t bother to take off her coat and hat. She went directly to the dining room cabinet where her mother kept the few family heirlooms they had left: a set of silver spoons that had belonged to her mother’s mother; a candelabra, also silver, etched with a delicate floral pattern; six small silver cups for Passover and one larger one for Elijah; five ivory napkins; her father’s yarmulke, one side hand-knitted by her mother with blue velour backing; one blue glass salt and pepper shaker. Blue was her father’s color. These precious heirloom pieces Sima had studied so many times when her mother was out. She had touched, held, counted every item; she had memorized where each sat in the large drawer in the middle of the cabinet. She knew the story behind each and every single one.

  Sima reached for the handle of the narrow drawer on the left side of the cabinet, the secret drawer she’d been forbidden as a child to touch. And still not invited to share. Where her mother kept the photographs Sima was not allowed to see. Since that first time her mother caught her in the drawer, after the New York Magazine fiasco, she had respected her mother’s wishes. Now she held the handle and pulled back on it very slowly so as not to disturb the contents. She didn’t want to tear anything, especially not a photograph.

  She stood over the open drawer. An ivory napkin was there—it must have been the sixth missing from the set of five in the larger middle drawer. She lifted the napkin and found an envelope. The edges were curled up, yellowed. There were several smaller envelopes, one on top of the other, not placed in any neat, orderly fashion but lounging as if tossed there and forgotten.

  She opened the largest envelope on top. It contained papers with “US Government” written in fancy type. They were immigrant documents. Papers giving Sima and her mother permission to become US citizens. A letter with a seal on it stating that Aunt Miriam was their sponsor. Another letter stating that her mother had been allowed to become a citizen even though she couldn’t speak or read English, and that her daughter, Sima, then nine years old, was thereby granted citizenship too.

  Even more carefully, Sima lifted the next envelope from the drawer. In it was a black and white photograph of her parents, standing like statues in front of their house in Poland, Sima situated in the middle, holding hands with both of them. Sima didn’t know if she remembered what the house looked like or just had memories of it from what little her mother had told her. There was another photograph of her father as a teenager and a boy who looked like his clone, half a head shorter. That must have been Uncle David, who died before Sima was born. In a third envelope were photographs of people smiling with raised glasses in their hands.

  She was about to open a small envelope when she heard a key in the door and the squeak of the knob. She stood like a statue over the drawer, her breath suddenly faster, the beat of her heart in her ears. Then, without daring to look up, she gathered the photos and the envelopes and set them back in the large drawer as quickly and carefully as she could. And turned around to see her mother heading across the room, her eyes aimed at the center of the dining room table.

  Sima reached for the glossy magazine, her fingers sticking to the sleek cover as she leaned over her backpack where it rested against a leg of the table, and stuffed it away, the way she stuffed all her thoughts and dreams and fears and sorrow.

  “What you put in your pack?” her mother said in Polish, in her usual prickly tone.

  “This and that, Mama,” she said. “Just this and that. It’s time for tea. You want tea?”

  “Tea,” her mother said. “Tea before dinner. Always.”

  That morning before her shift, she had splurged on a cheese Danish. She had time to finish her cup of coffee, but half the Danish wrapped in a torn piece of saran wrap was in a brown paper bag at the bottom of her backpack. She hoped it wouldn’t be stale by the next morning.

  9

  Post-Call Positive

  Dr. Kahn was wearing street clothes in the hospital lobby. Dr. Linton, in on-call whites, appeared at her heels. Sima stood alongside them with a patient in a wheelchair under her charge.

  Elevator Lady Miss Lawrence focused her eyes on the patient. “Where you headed with her, Sima?”

  “A71.”

  Sima maneuvered the wheelchair and IV pole to face the front of the operator-controlled transport box where she spent so much time, situated hindmost to make room for others. Dr. Kahn and Dr. Linton faced forward, their backs walling her off. Miss Lawrence’s queenly digit let go of the open button. The door closed them in.

  Dr. Linton stood by Miss Lawrence, his clipboard resting on the ledge of his belt. It was an Indian summer in New York City, and he wore short sleeves and a dark-blue tie Sima liked. He wasn’t wearing his short white intern’s jacket. Stethoscope flung around his neck, tourniquet knotted through a loop on his belt, note cards neatly clipped in his shirt pocket. His arm muscled down to strong fingers curled over the top of the clipboard. Picture-perfect male intern, primed for performance, day and night.

  Miss Lawrence eyed Dr. Linton as he flipped through lab slips attached to his to-do list. “Quite a list you got there,” she said.

  “A good intern knows how to take care of all the patients on the ward.” He tapped his clipboard with his pen, tap, tap, placed the pen behind his ear, and then pulled it out again. Tap, tap, tap. He glanced to his right at Dr. Kahn.

  Dr. Kahn didn’t acknowledge his bearing. She rocked on her heels, the knee-length hem of her black A-line skirt self-consciously showing her slim legs, stocking-less and untanned.

  “Strep faecalis,” Dr. Linton said. He dangled a lab report in front of Dr. Kahn. “One of my patient’s blood cultures came back positive. One out of three.”

  Strep faecalis was one of the contaminants Sima heard the interns talk about. Dr. Kahn had gone through with it. She had taken blood from Miss Osborn’s groin. Sima scrutinized Dr. Kahn’s face perusing the evidence.

  Miss Lawrence reached from her chair and snatched the slip from Dr. Kahn’s hand. “We got a patient in here. No doctor talk.”

  Dr. Linton retrieved the slip and tucked it with his others. All passengers faced the elevator door. No eye contact. The fan at the back blew stuffy air over everyone’s head.

  A few minutes later, Dr. Linton cleared his throat. Without facing his colleague, he said to her, “Did you do a femoral stick two nights ago?”

  “No,” Dr. Kahn said, without hesitation.

  The elevator door opened. Miss Lawrence raised her voice but didn’t shout. “Take your talk out of my elevator.”

  Before Sima could roll her patient out, Dr. Kahn was halfway down the hall. Dr. Linton marched after her. The psych rotator had lied and Sima knew it. She was disappointed to see Dr. Kahn run off like that.

  * * *

  —

  SIMA SITUATED THE PATIENT IN her charge in bed, unlocked the wheelchair, and was about to walk away when the woman asked her to cover her legs. Sima slammed the chair against the bed and complied without a word.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Alma Mae squeaked from the next bed. She patted the blanket on her bed. “Come here, child.”

  Sima wasn’t in the mood for a chat, but Alma Mae reached her bony fingers out, grabbing hold of her arm where she stood between the two beds.

  “So tell me,” Alma Mae said. “I know you’re working on that last course of yours.”

  “I’m not working on anything,” Sima said.

 
“You already told me you were,” Alma Mae said.

  Sima had told Alma Mae she needed to take English composition to graduate but she hadn’t told her she’d decided not to register for the course, never mind drop out altogether.

  Alma Mae coughed. “You can talk to me. I’m not your prying mother, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  Sima couldn’t hide her smile at the thought of the two women fighting over her. Her mother would refuse to talk with a shvartze, a black, even if her mother spoke English, even if the shvartze only weighed eighty pounds and her mother weighed a hundred and eighty. She’d act as if the tiny woman could kill her with her cough. Sima sat down in the wheelchair and stared at the swirly linoleum floor.

  “So?” Alma Mae said, as if she were the Jewish one in the room.

  “Remember the other night with Miss Osborn?” Sima spoke quietly. It wasn’t like her to gossip. And Miss Osborn was still in the hospital. She’d been moved to the Isolation Room until they could figure out the cause of her fever and diarrhea.

  “That pooping fatso—who could forget her?” Alma Mae said.

  “It’s not about her,” Sima said. “It’s about Dr. Kahn.”

  “What can you say about that one?” Alma said. “She’s a wannabe. What’d she do?”

  “She lied,” Sima whispered.

  “So what? Everybody lies.” Alma Mae spoke with authority and forgiveness.

  “I don’t lie.” She shuffled her feet on the floor, moving the wheelchair forward and back.

  “Oh, you’re so proper and good. You don’t ever do nothing wrong. I’m so proud of you.”

  “I’m not perfect,” Sima said.

  “Well, neither is she,” Alma Mae said. “So stop making a fuss about it. What did she lie about you can’t tell me?”