Gracie walks back through the kitchen and sees me holding my cup of coffee in the shadows. We give each other a good once-over. I see that she’s still half-asleep. Her face has that mushy look it gets after she’s been laid.
“Please lay off the self-righteous stare, Lila. I don’t need that.”
“I don’t think you can read my expression, Gracie. We’re standing in the dark.”
There is a sharp clack as Gracie flicks the switch and the room explodes in light. I cover my eyes with my free hand.
“I was just trying to feel good,” she says. “I wanted to have a little fun. Just a little. Is that so awful?”
I am so tired the skin on my face hurts. When was the last time I felt good? Or had fun? “Why don’t you run out to the corner,” I say, “I’m sure there’s still a wino or two hanging around that you can bring home and fuck. That would be fun.”
Something in Gracie’s face flattens out and grows hard, like a frozen pond in the dead of winter. She hesitates, but then shoots back. “At least I’m not some kind of half-assed virgin who refuses to even attempt to experience life.”
There’s not much to say on either side after that.
We end this fight like we did when we were little girls, with a staring match. Editor Boy, one of Gracie’s boyfriends who actually hung around for a while, used to say that both Gracie and I were experts in giving silent deadly looks, but that our styles were different. Gracie’s look says that she knows more than you do, but she’ll keep her vast superiority to herself because to do otherwise would be rude. I, on the other hand, specialize in the fuck-off, if-looks-could-kill approach.
My sister and I stare each other down in the bright light of the kitchen. The window over the sink shows a black sky and not another soul awake or a bulb lit anywhere in Ramsey. We are alone in this room, in this house, in this new day. Blue and brown eyes locked.
You don’t know anything about anything.
Fuck you. You don’t know me.
I break first, because I have to leave for work. I have responsibilities. I dump the cold coffee in the sink, grab my bag, and slam out the back door without a word.
I SPEND most of my morning at the hospital looking to regain my rhythm. I go through the motions of being a cool, competent doctor-in-training. I phone in lab requests, swab up blood, hold back pieces of skin and tissue so the attending physician can look inside the patient and determine the extent of the damage. In the middle of the morning my attending has to step away, so he allows me to stitch up a minor arm wound without supervision. The patient, a balding, pudgy man who is on the verge of tears, asks for a local anesthetic.
“An injection of lidocaine will hurt more than the stitches,” I tell him. “Just let me sew the cut up quickly, and you’ll see that you don’t need the shot.”
“I don’t believe you.” This grown man is actually pouting. “I want the shot.”
“Fine. It’s your arm.” I pick up the syringe, making no attempt to keep it low and hidden the way the doctors tell you to. Let this jerk see exactly what he’s getting.
“Shit, you’re not going to just stab that thing into me, are you? Hold on now, maybe I want the real doctor to come back.”
Someone leans in behind me; there is a familiar, breathy voice in my ear. “Let me help, sir.” Pushy, perfect Belinda offers her toothy smile to the patient. “You shouldn’t let yourself get so anxious. There doesn’t need to be any pain.”
I wonder how Belinda’s hair can smell like strawberries during her eighteenth consecutive hour in the hospital. The man smiles back at Belinda. His eyes glaze over. He is apparently wooed by her smell and her dyed blond hair and her one-size-too-small white jacket. “Please,” he says. “I want her to do it. Not you.”
I shake my head and hand over the needle. Belinda has turned this moment into another battle in the long war between us, and I’m in no mood to fight. During the first two years of medical school I was consistently ranked number one in the class, while she was number two. She senses that the title is now up for grabs and moves in for the kill every chance she gets. I have to admire her tenacity.
“How’s your grandmother?” she asks over her shoulder.
“She’s fine,” I say, and leave the room. Of course, it was Belinda who had been sent to find me with the news that Gram was in the ER. I hadn’t believed her at first. I thought she’d taken a left turn toward really twisted and had made up a lie about my grandmother to try to steal away the patient I was working on. When I realized she was telling the truth, that Gram had been in an accident, I’d gotten upset, and I still can’t stand that Belinda saw me that way. I can’t stand to hear her mention Gram out loud now. I want to keep the rivalry between us all business, all about school.
The first two years of medical school took place in the classroom, which meant a lot of straight memorization. I aced every exam. I barely had to study. I went home while everyone else flocked to the library. My teachers held me up in class as an example. I enjoyed my special status to the hilt. I accepted that being number one meant being a loner. I kept the door to my dorm room closed to chatty people walking down the hall. I gave other students smug looks when I walked out of exams twenty minutes early. I lapped up every last bit of my professors’ praise. I consciously enjoyed each moment in the classroom, each semester that I was on top of my game and in my element.
But those days are over. We’re in the second half of medical school now and this part is termed “hands-on” experience. There are no more classes, no more books, and few exams. My days of easy excellence have ended. I am in the middle of my medicine rotation. My classmates walk around the hospital with circles under their eyes, complaining about how tired they are, how overworked they are, how overwhelmed they are. We are on call every third night, which means we have to spend the night at the hospital. The students are supposed to sleep on the rickety bunk beds tucked into various corners of the hospital, but no one ever actually sleeps. We make rounds with our assigned attending doctor, seeing every patient that comes into the hospital who isn’t clearly a surgical or neurological case. As part of a medical team, we assess each patient, take a history, diagnose, and give a prognosis.
This rotation is a lot of hours, but that’s not what bothers me. I don’t mind missing sleep. I like seeing how far I can push my body and mind. After three days of little rest, my personal worries go away, and there is nothing but the work at hand. But what does bother me, and what I do mind, are the people.
The hospital is teeming with them. Everywhere you turn there are doctors, medical students, nurses, nurses’ aides, nurse practitioners, anesthesiologists, specialists. Everyone has their specific job and they get in one another’s way despite the rigid hierarchy that has to be followed. The hospital system is based on education and seniority, so that even if you have the skills and the knowledge, you can’t apply either until you’ve spent a few years following some middle-aged attending around kissing butt. You have to say the right things, and act deferential to the right people. You can’t even find peace with the nurses, who think they know much more than the lowly medical students, and who, when the workload slows, want to chat and bond and talk about their lives and my life until I want to throw myself out of the nearest window.
The patients I can tolerate, because with them at least I can use my mind. I check their symptoms against what I have memorized. I consider the possible illness, the possible treatments, the possible complications. But still, there is no purity in the work because I am not allowed to do much, and because far too often the doctor sends me out of the sickroom to speak to the patient’s family. This is the worst possible assignment, because with few exceptions the families are a mess. It doesn’t matter if they are in the hospital because their ten-year-old is having his tonsils out or because their father is having an emergency triple bypass. The hysteria is always there. I see it in their eyes and hear it in their voices. People know that while they are at the hospital someone in the ro
oms around them is bound to die, and they seem to believe that if they speak loudly and often and shed tears, there will be a better chance of their loved one being spared.
I suppose I always knew on some level that I wasn’t crazy about people. I never had many friends, and I avoided crowded situations like bars and parties. I chose to live in student housing among people who didn’t like me because I was left alone. But still, I never consciously thought about the idea that I might be a misanthrope. It’s not the kind of personality trait one wants to attribute to oneself. And I had never come face-to-face with that possibility until forty hours after my fight with Gracie, when I had spent two straight days in the hospital without ever having one moment alone.
I am on my way to the bathroom, mostly so I can lock the door to the stall and sit down on the toilet and close my eyes. But someone follows me. It is a woman I have just spent twenty minutes calming down, whose son suffered a concussion and broke his leg skateboarding.
“Miss,” the mother says. “He doesn’t recognize me. He’s not talking. Are you sure he’s going to be okay?”
“Your son is asleep,” I say. “He doesn’t recognize you and he’s not talking because he’s asleep. We gave him pain medication and it made him drowsy, as I told you before. Can you understand that?” I speak slowly, because I want her to hear me this time. She seems a little slow.
“He just doesn’t seem right,” she says.
I am at the door to the bathroom. I have to get rid of this woman.
I say, “Your son was drunk when he fell off his skateboard onto his head. He wasn’t wearing a helmet. It was an idiotic thing to do. So you’re correct. He’s not right.”
The woman puts her hand over her mouth. I put my hand on the door to the bathroom, but something stops me from walking in. I glance around and see my attending, Dr. Lewis, on the opposite side of the hall. He is staring at me as if I’ve just admitted to snorting cocaine during my lunch break.
He rushes over, puts his arm around the woman’s shoulders, and leads her away. I go into the bathroom. When I come out, he is waiting. He is a bald man, my height. He has deep lines across his forehead.
He comes right out with it. “You don’t want to be a doctor, do you, Miss Leary?”
“I was tired,” I say. “I had already spent an adequate amount of time with the woman and her son’s injuries aren’t serious. . . .”
“Serious,” he repeats.
I wonder if there is something in the drinking water at the hospital this afternoon that has knocked a few digits off everyone’s IQ. “Yes,” I say, “serious.”
“I wonder if you are serious, Miss Leary.”
I remain silent, because he is clearly going somewhere with this and there’s no point in my getting in his way.
“I’ve been watching you.” He nods for emphasis. “You have plenty of promise, as you obviously know. You have a sharp mind. But there’s no kindness in you, and that’s a problem. You’re doing well enough now because you’ve been able to coast on the reputation you earned during your class work. But it takes more than intelligence to make it from this day forward. You’ll do well to remember that.” He thumps his fist against his chest and then walks away.
DR. LEWIS’S reprimand sticks with me. I play it over and over in my head. Am I the person he described? Do I not want to be a doctor?
He was definitely right about one thing. At the hospital, in my work, I am on very thin ice. Every time I meet a new doctor, he or she is excited to work with me, having heard about my accomplishments, my grades, my memory. But that excitement lasts only so long, as I inevitably lose my patience in front of them. I know Dr. Lewis, for one, has requested not to work with me. There may be others who have done the same. This is a worrying situation that seems to have little chance of improving. Even with my stellar reputation, I am using up any second chances.
When I leave the hospital at the end of the day, I call the Realtor from my cell phone and tell him I will meet him the next morning. I would do almost anything for Gram, but not this. I need to be able to seal myself off more effectively. I need my own bathtub to soak in, my own answering machine to leave on at all times, my own curtains to draw closed.
When I get to Gracie’s house, she is sitting at the kitchen table, Dear Abby letters spread out before her.
The minute I walk in, she says, “Lila, I’m so sorry about the other morning. Please don’t be mad at me.”
I listen to her beg me, for what must be the hundredth time in our lives, to tell her that no matter how questionable her behavior, she’s a good person, and everything will be all right. I lean into the refrigerator pretending to look for something to eat.
I choose an apple and turn back around. “How are the losers doing this week?”
“They’re not losers, Lila.”
When she started this job, Gracie used to make fun of the letters with me. After all, the premise is ridiculous. Scores of people, mostly women, send their heartfelt questions and painful secrets to a complete stranger. They actually want, wait for, and take this stranger’s advice. And what are the stranger’s qualifications to play God? Don’t even get me started. For my sister, it was sleeping with the editor of the newspaper. So now women all across northern New Jersey are leaving their husbands, making up with their teenage children, and signing up for college courses because my sister, the good lay, the pregnant, unmarried twenty-nine-year-old, thought it sounded like the best solution.
“It’s the letters from the young girls that get to me,” Gracie says. “I have seven letters this week alone from girls whose boyfriends are pressuring them to have sex. They don’t know what to do because they don’t feel ready, but they also don’t want to lose their boyfriends. There are also three letters from girls who want help because they’re depressed.”
Gracie spreads her hands over the rows of letters. Like mine, her hands are pale, without creases, but her fingers are slender where mine are stubby. She looks as exhausted as I feel. “Who am I to give them advice?”
I can’t argue with this, so I concentrate on my apple, which is a little mealy. A picture of Gram in the hospital flashes through my mind: old, bandaged, shaken. I wish suddenly that my sister had been there with me to see Gram. I don’t want to be the only grandchild with that image in my head. I wish that my memory was able to let go every once in a while. It has been too noisy in my head lately, too raucous. I miss the silence I used to be able to create locked in my dorm room or in my favorite study carrel at the library.
If I were at the library now, I would reread a chapter in my medicine textbook. Maybe the one on epidemiology, which was always a favorite. I’d review the causes and symptoms for Lyme disease, Chronic Fatigue, Epstein-Barr. I’d read about the suppressed immune system that lets in all germs, infections, and viruses and makes a bad situation worse. I am a fan of these kinds of diseases, which are vague in their symptoms, heavy in fatigue, capable of blurring the edges of the people they strike. These illnesses dull everything—personality, skills, drive, memory. I like to imagine, when I am tired and burnt out, that I have contracted Epstein-Barr, and that I now have the chance to step away from my life, and lose myself.
“Are you going out tonight?” I ask.
Gracie gives a rueful smile. “No. I’m off men for a while.”
“Literally and figuratively?”
“Funny.”
“Well, I’m going for a walk.” I’m surprised to hear this come out of my mouth. I rarely go for walks. I am more a lie-in-front-of-the-television-until-I-fall-asleep kind of girl.
But once I’m outside in the cool night air, I know it was the right decision. I had to get out of that stuffy kitchen, away from my sister, away from the letters full of unanswerable questions and inconsolable grief.
I round the block and approach the Green Trolley with its painted sign of a green train car. I consider going inside. Maybe I need to raise some hell. I haven’t been drunk since college. I haven’t had sex in, well
, a long time.
But my legs take me past the front door of the bar. After all, it is Gracie’s place. I stare straight ahead so I won’t have to make eye contact with half of my high-school class. But out of the corner of my eye I see Joel and his buddy Weber standing beside some overgrown adolescent who is throwing up in the parking lot. Joel freezes at the sight of me, his hand on the vomiting guy’s back. But Weber has no problem talking.
“Hey, Doc,” he yells, “we need some medical attention. Hellooo, I’m right over here. . . . Oh shit, are you ignoring me, Leary? Joel, she’s ignoring me.”
Joel stays frozen. Weber takes two skips in my direction. “I knew your sister had a secret,” he says. “Did she tell you that I knew?”
I have heard about Weber’s so-called psychic gifts. He can’t keep his mouth shut about them. As far as I’m concerned, he’s just a fat fireman, and not much of a friend to Joel either, yelling about his business in the parking lot of the town bar.
“I can tell you’ve got a secret, too,” Weber is saying. “That’s why you’re so goddamned uptight. You need to loosen up! I could help with that—come inside and have a beer with me.”
I turn my head and meet his eyes. I can tell that the contact chills him, as I’d known it would. He stops bouncing in place. Even his crew cut seems to wilt.
I think, I must have ice water running through my veins.
I say, “Stay the fuck away from my sister and me,” and keep walking.
CATHARINE
I won’t tell a soul that it was ghosts that made me stop my car in front of the Municipal Building. Nor does anyone need to know that this kind of thing has been going on for some time now. It would take my children about ten seconds with their heads huddled together to decide that I need one of those fancy new psychological drugs. And there’s no point in telling any of this to Dr. O’Malley, who is my age, and who hates to see any signs that I am growing old.
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