Miss Armstrong widened her eyes at Dr. Kahn but spoke to the others. “Seems the intern on-call forgot to tell us a thing or two about one of our new patients here.”
* * *
—
THE DOCTORS’ CHARTING ROOM WAS a mess of white-coated bodies. Brandy’s X-ray was up on the view box. The bones of her skull showed in silhouette against the light, and all eyes in the room were staring at those bones.
Sima leaned against the door, trying to hide behind Miss Armstrong while she listened in. Dr. Kahn hid behind the rest of the team. Her wire rims were crooked on her face, her post-call hairdo not much better than Sima’s.
Miss Armstrong pushed her way to the middle of the group. “So why didn’t we know our Brandy is not who she says she is, Dr. Kahn?” She turned to the psych-rotator extraordinaire. “You didn’t think it would be a good idea to tell us the old girl had another tool for her trade?”
Dr. Steinberg switched off the view box. “You just put it all down in your incident report, Miss Armstrong.” He had a big smirk on his face. “We’ll take care of the rest.”
“Incident report!” Miss Armstrong folded her arms atop her white polyester bosom. Nobody messed with Miss Armstrong the way nobody messed with Miss Lawrence. “What we got here is more than an Incident Report,” she said. “Dr. Kahn is just lucky the County’s not one of them swanky white people’s hospitals, or you’d have lawyers all over the place.”
Dr. Steinberg flipped the switch of the view box again, on, then off, then on.
Dr. Linton stepped in front of him. “Will you stop that?”
Sima poked her nose in from behind Miss Armstrong. “Does Mrs. Sampson need an X-ray? I can take her,” she said. She wanted to get a jump start before Miss Armstrong could attack Dr. Kahn another time. Sima surprised herself, trying again to protect this floundering wannabe who could pass for her sister when they were both cleaned up. Dr. Kahn might be on the verge of messing up her career and some part of Sima wanted to be her friend, no matter what.
11
Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel
It was the week after Thanksgiving. An early-season snow had closed the schools and stranded staff in the hospital. Two in the morning and Sima walked into the Doctors’ Charting Room. Steam from the clunky radiator under the window hissed into the air the way it did in every old New York City building she had ever been in. She saw Dr. Kahn sitting at the counter. Her hair, attacked by the steam, was frizzed out even in the dead of this early winter predawn. Her white jacket was draped over the back of her chair, and as much skin was exposed as her on-call outfit would allow. Sleeves of a black turtleneck under her scrubs shirt were pushed up to her elbows; the legs of her scrubs pants were rolled above her knees. She was leaning forward almost off the seat of a chair. Her left hand rested on the telephone receiver, her right in the middle of an open chart. She stared at the wall in front of her.
“You can turn off the radiator in here, you know,” Sima said.
Dr. Kahn lowered her eyes to the chart pages and sat back in the chair.
Sima started toward the radiator, and then she heard the scrape of chair legs behind her.
“My father’s wife just called,” Dr. Kahn said.
“Your father’s wife?” Sima said.
“My parents are divorced,” she said. “My father lives in Manhattan. He’s remarried.”
“It’s two o’clock in the morning.”
“She said he hasn’t moved his car in three days.”
“Lots of cars haven’t moved in all this snow,” Sima said.
“They’re separated and she walks by their building every day.” Dr. Kahn passed a hand across her sweaty forehead and then wiped it on the leg of her scrub pants. “There are parking tickets all over the windshield. He never leaves parking tickets on his car.”
“She can see them with all this snow?”
Dr. Kahn didn’t answer.
Sima hardly knew anyone who drove beside the doctors at the County, but everyone knew about alternate-side-of-the-street parking and how easy it was to get parking tickets. Monday/Wednesday/Friday or Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday, 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. or 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. She’d seen people sitting in their cars reading the paper, waiting until it was time to move to the other side. One New York City ritual those without a car didn’t envy.
“Maybe he’s out of town.” Sima didn’t know what to say.
“He never goes out of town.” Dr. Kahn pulled the black sleeves down to her wrists and stood up. She lifted her white jacket off the back of the chair and began to put it on. With one sleeve partly on, she suddenly sat down again, and the rest of the jacket drooped onto the floor.
Sima stepped over to rescue the jacket. “This floor is gross,” she said. The soles of her running shoes stuck to the linoleum. The jacket slipped into Sima’s hand without any resistance from Dr. Kahn. Sima sat down nearby, draped the jacket over her lap, trying to keep anything from falling out of the pockets. “What’s wrong?”
“She wants me to go to his apartment to check on him.”
“Why doesn’t she go?”
“She called, she rang the bell—he doesn’t answer,” Dr. Kahn said.
The steam from the radiator hissed and spat. Sima sat quietly alongside Dr. Kahn.
The intern stared down at her salt-stained running shoes. In a tiny voice, as if she were a child afraid to go to the bathroom in the dark, she said to Sima, “Will you go with me?”
Sima had never been with Dr. Kahn anywhere outside the hospital. Two in the morning in the middle of a snowstorm.
“OK,” she said.
* * *
—
EVERY CAR IN THE COUNTY parking lot was covered with snow. Dr. Kahn pulled a brush from the trunk of her car to clean the driver’s side windshield. She handed the brush to Sima to get the passenger’s side. Then she leaned into the car and stretched her arm to clear the roof in one big sweep, the back window in another. Sima could see Dr. Kahn had experience with snow. There was a trail of it down the front of her heavy winter coat.
The car was so close to a drift on the passenger’s side that Sima couldn’t open the door. She had to get in on the driver’s side. She squeezed under the steering wheel and inched her way across the front seat. She’d only ridden in a taxicab a few times in New York and a truck once or twice as a child in Poland; no one she knew there had a car. She watched the large flakes land on the windshield under the glow of the streetlight.
“Is it safe to drive?” Sima said.
Dr. Kahn turned the key in the ignition. “I’ve got snow tires.”
In the dark, the heaps of snow looked like photographs of the North Pole Sima had seen in National Geographic. Except for the bits of red-brick buildings, the roofs of cars, telephone poles, streetlights. Her toes were getting cold. She had been caught by the snowstorm without winter boots, same as Dr. Kahn. She rubbed her gloved hands together.
“The heater takes a while to get going. This old Rambler Rebel is almost as old as we are—my first and only car,” Dr. Kahn said. “I bought it from a little old lady in Massachusetts.” Medical student loans. That was all she could afford.
The car moved slowly down side streets. Sima held tightly to the armrest; she didn’t ask any questions. She didn’t want to distract Dr. Kahn.
“Flatbush Avenue should be OK,” Dr. Kahn said. She turned right, skidding slightly onto the wider street.
In the quiet of the Rebel, they headed down the long avenue that crossed the borough on a diagonal toward the Brooklyn Bridge, past closed-up storefronts: a coffee shop on almost every corner, several newsstands, a shoe repair, a CVS Pharmacy, a branch of Citibank, a Safeway, a hardware store. The usual Brooklyn litter—bits of tossed paper, soda cans and abandoned bottles, a solitary glove—was buried by snow; the streets looked clean. White, unblemished. Sima loved the look of new
snow even in the dark, in a storm. Snowflakes falling under the streetlights. It reminded her of winters in Poland and building snowmen with her father before he got sick.
A snowplow blocked the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. A sign posted a detour to the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel.
“Damn,” Dr. Kahn said. The car skidded again as she turned around and headed toward the tunnel several blocks away. Sima held on, her first ride in a private car.
They were getting out of Brooklyn—the same way as to get out of any of the boroughs that wasn’t Manhattan, or out of New Jersey, through a tunnel or over a bridge or on a subway train. Bridge and tunnel people—what New Yorkers called those like Sima who had the bad luck to live so far from the center of the universe. It was like that New Yorker magazine cover she had seen on the bulletin board at Brooklyn College, with Manhattan at the center and the rest of America on the other side of the Hudson.
The Rebel nosed up alongside the tollbooth. A sliding window opened and ash flicked out. Tollbooth Guy: surprising in the snowstorm to see his cheeks puff out, a cloud of gray exhaled into the winter white. When she was five, Sima had loved to watch her father’s smoke rings come out of his mouth and disappear into the sky. He taught her to count them.
“You young ladies shouldn’t be driving in a storm at this hour.”
Dr. Kahn put her hand out with three dollar bills for the $2.50 toll. She pressed the money into his hand and rolled up her window.
“Hey?” Tollbooth Guy knocked on the car roof.
The signal light flashed green and Dr. Kahn drove fast into the tunnel.
“You didn’t get your change,” Sima said.
Dr. Kahn kept her foot on the gas.
In the middle of the night, only one leg of the tunnel was open. It was two-way single file. Bright lights shone every thirty feet or so, six feet up on both walls. In between the lights, there were dark shadows and the headlights of the Rebel. The driver’s side tire hugged the center line, on the yellow brick road into Mayor Koch’s Big Apple. A car in the opposite lane flashed its brights and for a few seconds blinded them. Sima closed her eyes and then rubbed them open.
“I hate this drive,” Dr. Kahn said. “My father never drives in tunnels. The bad air gives him chest pain.” She gripped the steering wheel harder, leaned forward on the seat, as if that could make the car move faster.
A bulb on the tunnel wall was out, and there were places under the lights where water dripped down, as if the river were leaking through. Sima had to stop herself from thinking about all that river water. The tunnel was all around them. Overhead, the Staten Island Ferry, only twenty-five cents one way, and the boat to Ellis Island where Aunt Miriam had cleared immigration twenty-five years ago, not at all like the way Sima and her mother had come, through JFK. And just a few blocks up the West Side Highway, on the other end of the tunnel, Wall Street and bankers’ fancy apartment buildings.
* * *
—
THEY TURNED OFF AT THE Seventy-Ninth Street Boat Basin and slowed down by a fenced-in area.
“I played tennis here with my father a few weeks ago,” Dr. Kahn said. “It was still warm. The City hadn’t taken down the nets yet.”
“He can’t drive through tunnels, but he can play tennis?” Sima asked.
“It’s all about oxygen,” she said. “Not enough of it in tunnel air. He can play guys in their thirties—he makes them run for balls.”
At West Seventy-First Street, there was a red light and only one other car on the road, a Checker cab in front of them with its right turn signal on. Dr. Kahn hit the horn. “Turn, you asshole!”
Sima had never heard Dr. Kahn talk like that.
“It’s 3:00 a.m., and we’re going to my father’s apartment,” she shouted. “My father’s wife has never called me. Why would she call me in the middle of a damn snowstorm?”
“Did she say your father was sick?”
“Nothing. She said nothing.”
Sima thought Dr. Kahn might say, “It doesn’t look good,” what she often heard doctors say to a family member when their loved one had taken a turn for the worse, or had already died. She figured that was why Dr. Kahn was so jumpy. Neither of them was going to say it out loud.
Dr. Kahn pulled up alongside a car with parking tickets sticking out of the snow. She put her warning signals on and got out of the car, double parked. She brushed the snow off the driver’s side, cupped her hands to the windows; Sima was at her elbow and saw on the passenger seat the Times movie pages and a half-eaten pastrami on rye, dried mustard on the outside edges.
“Tunnels and pastrami,” Dr. Kahn said. “He said they’d kill him.”
* * *
—
DR. KAHN STOOD IN FRONT OF the door to her father’s apartment, bits of snow falling off her coat onto the floor. Sima could see the intern’s glasses had fogged up. She pulled a tissue from her coat pocket and handed it to her. Dr. Kahn didn’t remove her glasses, snuck the tissue in behind each lens and swiped it. She didn’t push the doorbell or knock. She raised the hand with the tissue to the peephole in the door and wiped the peephole too.
“My father paneled all the walls in his apartment and put up wooden blinds. He’s a cave dweller who grows roses in his backyard, if you can call it that.”
Gardens bloom in the dark. Three-by-five rectangles of city soil, dug up and watered and seeded and pruned. Standing gardens hiding in between the backs of five-story walk-ups, stretching their stems and thorns and leaves and petals up to reach the light as it reaches down and passes over back-to-back rectangles behind the side-by-side brick boxes that Manhattanites call home. Nothing grew at the back of Sima’s ten-story Brooklyn building; there was nothing there but cement and a few broken window screens lying on the ground.
Sima stood alongside Dr. Kahn and ran a gloved finger down the doorpost. “There’s no mezuzah,” she said. The small box that held a scroll of the Jewish prayer, the Shema. Every Jew hung one on the front door. “Jews were afraid to put up mezuzahs in Poland after the war.”
“Something happened to my father during the war,” Dr. Kahn said. “And then in the ’50s, McCarthyism. He got stuck there—he thinks everyone’s either a Commie pinko or a Jew hater.”
“My father wanted to join the army. But they wouldn’t take Jews,” Sima said. “Papa said, ‘Jews don’t go to war. That’s Jewish history, back to the days of the Babylonians. Wherever they are, the war comes to the Jews.’ ” Sima didn’t remember her father saying this but her mother had repeated her father’s statement so many times.
“The first time my mother let me spend the High Holidays with my father here,” Dr. Kahn said, “I wanted to go to the synagogue. I’d never missed Yom Kippur services. My father said it was good for me not to go once, so I’d know the world wouldn’t come to an end.”
“My aunt keeps pushing me to go to services to meet a Jewish man, a doctor,” Sima said. “But I don’t want to marry a doctor, I want to be one.” Sima had never said this out loud before to anyone other than Alma Mae. She hoped Dr. Kahn had been too distracted to hear it.
Dr. Kahn didn’t budge. She fingered the peephole again. “My father has a blue sofa and a blue shag rug. Remember those ugly things from the ’60s?”
Sima shrugged. “I was in Poland until 1966.”
Dr. Kahn stepped back from the door, and when Sima turned around, she was sitting down on the stairs to the second floor. She removed her gloves, then took off her wire rims and made another effort to wipe them. Then she set the gloves and glasses down on the step.
“I don’t want to go in there,” she said.
Middle of the night. No screeching bus wheels. No car horns or alarms. Just quiet.
Dr. Kahn unwound her scarf and unbuttoned her coat. Sima sat down alongside her.
“He has a blue bathrobe and three blue velour shirts. Blue is my mother’
s favorite color.” Dr. Kahn cleared her throat. “They’ve been divorced now longer than they were married.”
Blue like the family heirloom glass Sima’s father held on to, passed down from his great grandmother. Her mother sold it right after he died so they could go to America.
Sima pulled off her hat and gloves and held them in her lap. There was a snowy line of footprints from the door of the building to the door of the apartment, and now to the steps where she sat with Dr. Kahn.
“This year I’ve seen my father every two weeks,” Dr. Kahn said, “since the start of internship. We go out for Chinese food and a movie. It’s all I can do without falling asleep.”
Dr. Kahn put her glasses on. She stood up. She rang the buzzer by the apartment door.
A short woman opened the door, the top of her head even with Dr. Kahn’s nose. To Sima, she looked like the blonde on Aunt Miriam’s Clairol box. She had the kind of hair fingers got stuck in, the look of chubby women from Brooklyn or Queens trying to be Manhattan chic. Middle of the night and the woman’s hair was poofy, her eyelashes long, thick, black, American movie-star lashes. Aunt Miriam sent her mother posters of American movies. Her mother wanted to go to America but she hated those posters as much as her father did.
“You’re here,” was all the blond woman said. She turned away from them. As she walked, her backside jiggled through black slinky pants.
To the left inside the door was a wall of books, ceiling to floor—paperbacks and hardcovers, some not quite straight on the shelves. There on one of the shelves, a black-and-white photograph of a couple. He had dark hair, dark glasses, a suit and tie, his hand was over hers and they were holding a knife, about to cut a cake. The woman was the blonde with the poofy hair and black lashes. They were both smiling.
The Care of Strangers Page 6