We Are Gathered

by Jamie Weisman

  I graduated from the University of Georgia with honors and was accepted to seven of the ten medical schools I applied to. I was going to be a heart surgeon. My dad’s just an internist, and he always said that if he had it to do all over again he would be a surgeon. They make a shitload more money, and everyone thinks they’re amazing, and no one asks them to do heart surgery on them in the middle of a bar mitzvah party, unlike the poor internist, who has to dole out advice on hypertension and impotence over the bagels and lox. That summer, I went home to relax. Med school was going to be hard, and my parents let me do whatever I wanted to do, which was nothing. I was like that guy in the movie The Graduate, lolling around the country club pool, ogling the teenage lifeguards who had the good sense or the innocence to be unimpressed with my imminent attendance at the Emory University School of Medicine.

  My sister had an internship with our congressman in Washington, D.C. Debbie is a lawyer now, though the JD is the new MRS degree, and once she’s married, she’ll stop pretending she gives a shit about corporate law and take her place at the country club and the gym, which is her destiny, and she, wisely, and to preserve her sanity, is embracing it with no opposition. I went to D.C. to visit her that summer, and I think now the first sign that something was wrong was that I found that all I wanted to do was ride the Metro from one end of the city to the other. It was cool on the Metro, even in the blistering summer heat of our nation’s capital, which we all know was built on a swamp, and I loved the feeling of being carried down those long escalators into its subterranean world, where soft lights throbbed on the ground to indicate the arrival of the next train quietly whooshing into the station. There was almost always a seat on the Metro, since I rarely took it during rush hour, and I would lean my head back and ride it all the way to the last point in Virginia, then Maryland, feeling a huge amount of accomplishment at having visited two states and the District of Columbia without even standing up. The train made a comforting thump-thump sound over the rails, jostling me gently as if I were a baby in a crib, and sometimes I slept and woke up to a person looking at me curiously, an older woman with kind eyes or a homeless guy or someone in a suit sneering at me, aware before I was of my uselessness. When Debbie was done with her day, we would go out to dinner at nice cafés in Dupont Circle (I paid; I had Mom and Dad’s credit card), and I would lie about my day, which I found stunningly easy to do, particularly because my sister is not that smart and I think she still believes what I told her about there being two Mona Lisas, one of which is in a secret room of the Smithsonian.

  I stayed there a week, and then I went home, and Mom and Dad bought me a condo since they thought that would be a good investment, and I started med school. The first course was embryology. They thought they’d ease us into the proc-ess with something easy; what idiot thinks that embryology is easy? Granted, the professor was a nice guy who graded on a curve, and if you went up to him after class with questions, he would basically tell you what was going to be on the test, but still it’s horrifying, seeing how the morula turns into a blastocyst and then into this little shrimp thing with a giant fish eye and a tail. To tell you the truth, it’s disgusting, but I put my head down and got through it and got my A because cardiothoracic surgeons don’t have to know any of that shit, but we do have to get As so we can get into a good surgical residency program and then into one of the coveted CT surgery fellowships. I met Serena in embryology, so I guess you could say that the beginning of life, of all human life, was also the end of mine, because I fell in love with Serena: the would-be heart surgeon took out his bloody red heart and handed it to the beautiful dark-haired girl from California, and she looked at it curiously for a moment, and then squeezed, really hard, so that it oozed and spurted through her fingers, and then she ground her foot on what was left of it as the blood soaked into the ground. I used that image on Dr. Gruber once, and she said she thought that really captured what I felt at the time, but did I really think Serena did that on purpose? Did I really think Serena was a monster? Fuck yeah, she was (is) a monster, a monster who lives and breathes hot breath out of every pore of her body, in Los Angeles, California, where she, of all things, delivers babies.

  Serena Goldstein, half Jew, half Mexican. Her dad is a Jewish tax attorney in Beverly Hills, and her mom is a Mexican American princess, a MAP, daughter of a drug lord or a corrupt government thug or both, because who else gets filthy rich in Mexico? Maybe I should have listened to my parents. She wasn’t a real Jew since her mom never converted, and though I think my parents would have been cool with her as long as she didn’t have a Christmas tree or celebrate Easter or stage a pogrom, the Orthodox rabbis in Israel would have spat on our kids. Given what she put me through, maybe those rabbis are onto something.

  Serena was raised Catholic, but had a Bev Hills bat mitzvah, with Cyndi Lauper singing “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and the average gift a check in four digits minimum or something from Tiffany’s with a diamond in it. When I met her, she said she was thoroughly confused and thinking about being a Buddhist or something, some religion as different from Catholicism and Judaism as you can get, with a God who doesn’t give a shit if you have cheese on your hamburger or if you’ve said “I do” before you get laid or what you do with the unwanted pregnancy she tearfully confessed to me she had sucked out of her uterus her senior year of college when the condom on the giant cock of her last boyfriend broke and he spilled his seed into her. Because of the abortion, she had developed some kind of fuckaphobia, so I didn’t screw the girl for a whole year, though we did everything but.

  At first, I was amazed by Serena. I think I spent three months just staring at her, slack-jawed, probably drooling. She had thought about so many things. I know I sound like I’m making fun of her theological angst, but she actually had reasoned through it, studied the Judeo-Christian traditions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism; she was a religious studies major and a classics minor who threw in her science courses on the side while, it sounded to me, she managed to break the hearts of half the guys at Stanford before getting a full scholarship to Emory, where she honored us with her presence not because of the money (her parents had mucho dinero—I about died when I saw their house in Beverly Hills) but because she was curious about the South, with its history not only of racism but also of heroes and genius, Martin Luther King, William Faulkner, Jackie Robinson, B. B. King, Elvis. I hadn’t thought about any of that crap, and I think she was pretty disappointed in Atlanta because it doesn’t feel southern at all. Half the kids at Emory are from New York, rejects from the Ivies who spend their four undergrad years telling themselves they chose this place. She dragged me to the Martin Luther King museum (I didn’t even know there was one and had never been there in my twenty-three years living in Atlanta), and it was pretty pitiful, especially compared to the flashing lights and glass escalators of the Coca-Cola museum, where a magical machine spat out different soda flavors from around the world into small paper cups that we lapped up like puppies being drugged.

  When she came back to start our second year of medical school, she said she had missed me over the summer while she was stuck in the cultural wasteland of Beverly Hills and then cloistered like a princess in her grandparents’ mansion outside Mexico City, where she was guarded by two big and lustful thugs who were needed to prevent kidnapping but who, she said, undressed her with their eyes and stared at her ass when she swam laps in the pool. She finally spread her legs for me, though I had the sense, based on some kind of warmth and softness, that her pussy was broken in and that she had spread these legs for someone else over the summer, so she felt that I, her loyal servant who had accompanied her to museums and on a weekend pilgrimage to Milledgeville, a small city famous for its horrible insane asylum and the fact that this weird writer named Flannery O’Connor had lived there a long time ago; I, who had attempted to read books by that writer, and by William Faulkner, both of whom clearly needed some serious psychiatric help but who, I think, lived before the development of
Thorazine or maybe, for all I know, tried it, like me, and found it to be no help at all; I deserved a fuck at last. It was good, and I was hooked.

  Jennifer Abrams is walking toward me and smiling. All the girls are wearing these floaty yellow dresses, and I can see her legs almost all the way up. She’s still gorgeous, and Debbie reminded me this morning that she’s not married. I told Debbie I was sure I was just what Jennifer Abrams was looking for, a fat, unemployed, internet-porn-addicted thirty-one-year-old who lives with his parents. Debbie made a face, and said, You don’t have to be that. You did finish medical school. As far as Jennifer knows, you just took some time off. Maybe you wanted to give your professional golfing career a shot. Tell her you’ve been in Australia for the last four years. It would be peachy to think that Jennifer Abrams doesn’t know what happened to me, but the whole goddamned Jewish community of Atlanta, and probably Savannah and Charleston too, knows what happened to me. She’s talking to that dog Carla Lefkowitz with the fucked-up face, er, port-wine stain; she has some syndrome where the leg’s too big and something’s wrong with the brain or the optic nerve or the auditory nerve, I can’t remember the name. That stuff used to roll off my tongue. Jennifer and Carla appraised me and softened their eyes like they’re looking at a three-legged dog.

  I ran into Carla at the grocery store, like, two years ago. In high school, Carla was a total loser. How could she not be with her limp and her purple face and her straight As? I was supposed to be nice to her because her dad and my dad were partners, but I never claimed to be Mother Teresa, and she was disgusting. My parents let me throw this huge high school graduation party, even gave me enough cash for a few kegs, and conveniently took off for our beach house right after the ceremony. I invited everyone from tenth grade on up except for Carla Lefkowitz and about ten other losers. She knew about it too. How could she not? Everyone was talking about it. Her mom called my mom up and complained to her. She said, How could you raise someone so heartless? My mom asked me if it was true, and I told her that, yeah, Carla was gross and that I didn’t care whose daughter she was and that I didn’t want her anywhere near my house, wouldn’t even want her to touch our mailbox, and my mom just said, Oh, and walked away, didn’t tell me it was okay or that I should make my own decisions or tell me I was a shithead. (Dr. Gruber, I’m sure, thinks I am a shithead; Serena would have hated me for it, but I’ll bet there were girls like Carla even at Beverly Hills High, and I am sure she didn’t give them the time of day either.)

  Anyway, there I am pushing a grocery cart full of all the shit I like to eat now that I don’t care what I look like anymore and because the meds make me constantly hungry, like there is a pocket in my stomach that if I could just find and fill it would make everything okay, and here comes Carla, skinny and wearing a suit but still ugly. I’m sure some plastic surgeon should be able to fix her face—or she could put on some makeup. She’s not even trying. She says, Steven? Steven Shapiro? And I say, Yeah. I am not going to let on that I recognize her. Carla was a nobody. I shouldn’t remember her. She looks me up and down, and says, How the mighty have fallen, and then just pushes right on past me. I think she wants to run over my foot with her cart because she angles it a funny way, but she misses me. Bitch. She turns back to look at me, and I think she is trying to decide what to say, whether to pity me or enjoy the spectacle. Finally, she says, There is a God. I watch her walk away. She has a run in her stockings, and she is trying to look all grown-up and important in some high heels, but they are too big, and her feet keep slipping out of them, so she makes a lot of noise with those shoes slapping the ground, and I actually feel kind of sorry for her. (Progress, Dr. Gruber would say. Empathy helps us survive even our greatest sorrows. She says feeling the pain of others thins out our own, like when you spread out a thin layer of paint so it dries quickly. I said, Well, but once it dries, there’s no changing or erasing it. All you can do is paint over it. Hmm, she said. I hate it when she says hmm. It means she wants me to think about it some more, but thinking makes my head hurt. It makes me want to climb up to the top of a snowy mountain and sit there until every bit of me is frozen solid.)

  Jennifer says, Hi, Steven. The wedding is starting. You want me to help you find a seat? God, she is gorgeous. I’ll bet her nipples are perfect. Kevin Holderman, the high school quarterback, supposedly went all the way with her, but I think that was just a rumor. She was too good for him. She’s a grown woman, so no doubt someone’s tapped that by now. Lucky shit. Carla’s just squinting at me, and I know she’s laughing at me, but she won’t do it out loud.

  I say, No, that’s okay. I can find a seat.

  We both look at the pictures of Elizabeth when she was a little girl. I realize now I have been standing by them for a long time, so she probably thinks I’m a pervert or something. Wasn’t she cute? Jennifer says. This is not something guys do, look at baby pictures and comment, so I just shrug. Jennifer points to the rows of chairs on the right. That’s the bride’s side, she says. She looks at me. Unless you know the groom. Do you know Hank? I tell her that I do not know Hank. I see my parents sitting at the end of a row. There is a seat in between them, but I don’t know if it’s for me or Debbie. I can’t remember how the bridesmaid thing works. Do they do their thing with the dress and the bouquet and sit down, or do they have to stand up there or what? My mom is looking around. When she sees me, she smiles and pats the chair between her and Dad. I feel such a sudden rush of gratitude for her that I almost start to cry. I have failed her so many times, have called her names, wrecked her car, drunk her booze—even some crazy expensive champagne they bought to celebrate their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary—and still she saved me a seat. I sit down next to her. There’s such a thick cloud of perfume around her, I’m surprised she’s not covered in bees. My dad is sitting with his thick hands on his thick thighs. He has some kind of program thing rolled up like he is going to swat a dog. He doesn’t look at me. He says to no one in particular, Debbie’s wedding is going to be indoors. It’s hot as hell out here.

  The chairs are wedged in tight. My mom is talking to the lady in front of us, and a few rows up are some pretty girls, but mostly I’m surrounded by middle-aged and old people. The lady sitting behind me is murmuring to herself in a foreign language. German or Polish or Russian or something. Time was when I’d think she was a spy or an assassin, but I’ve made some progress, and while I am still pretty sure she’s talking about me, I don’t think she wants to kill me. Just to be sure, I turn around and look at her hard for a minute, so she knows I’m onto her. She isn’t even looking at me. She is staring at her lap and kneading her hands together like there’s some tiny bug trapped in her palms that she urgently needs to destroy.

  The music starts. Everyone turns to look. First there’s a little girl throwing flowers and some little boy in a suit and a clip-on tie that’s coming off, then the bridesmaids, most of them gorgeous, and somehow, with the music and the sunshine, even Carla Lefkowitz doesn’t look bad. I rub my eyes to make sure I’m seeing right. She kind of has a nice smile, and I think maybe I could do her after all. She catches sight of me and narrows her eyes. I am pretty sure I can hear her hiss, and I start to hiss back at her until my dad slaps my knee. Debbie comes along and does a little low wave at me and my parents. When Elizabeth comes down the aisle in her long white dress, she looks so beautiful and perfect it’s ridiculous, and I feel an urge to shout out, That girl’s got some fucked-up tits, but at the same time, I feel a wave of shame, who am I and half of AEPi to have seen the tits of that beautiful girl, someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, maybe soon someone’s mother. Probably all these girls have crazy tits. I start to see them all, green tits, tits with eyes where the nipples should be, tits with mouths, talking tits. Elizabeth gets to the front, and I hear the rabbi say something in Hebrew that I know means the devil is coming; he’ll be here any minute. He’s going to make this whole place go up in flames. Everyone smiles and murmurs amen.

  I have to get up. I have to
get up. I stand up fast and edge past my mother, stepping on her feet. My chair falls backward into the lap of the old lady who says something in her foreign language—probably calls me a shithead—and she drops her hands and lets whatever she was holding fall to the ground. She stares down into the grass, scanning for whatever I just caused her to lose. I bolt out of there, going as fast as I can until I find myself in the shade of the woods behind the garage, where the florist has discarded the wilted flowers and unwanted stems of the bouquets and centerpieces. In the garage, the caterers are setting out glasses of champagne. There’s water in the vases and a big punch bowl we could use to put out a fire if it started. It seems safer here. I don’t remember any of the Hebrew from my bar mitzvah. I don’t know the Hebrew word for the devil. I lean up against a tree to catch my breath.

  I was on my way to having it all. I was top of my med school class, some of the attendings may not have liked me all that much, but they had to admit I was good. Our third year of med school, we finally got unleashed on patients. On my surgical rotation, the first surgery I scrubbed on was a basic appendectomy with the head of the surgery residency, Dr. Bill Jenkins. Lucky for me, there was a guy from AEPi in the class ahead of me, and he gave me these notes. He said that if you scrub with Dr. Jenkins he’s going to quiz you on all this shit, but they’re always the same questions. I wasn’t too worried. I had it down. Anatomy made sense to me in a way that biochem and microbiology didn’t. Once we got past embryology, it was like I had built the body myself; I knew where everything went, what connected to this and that, what was vital and what could be destroyed. There are blood vessels and nerves that basically go nowhere, so you can cut them out and no one’s the worse for it, but then, for some reason that only God knows, each finger only gets one nerve. Cut it and you’re fucked. You’d think He’d give us a spare, especially for the thumb. We’re not much better than dumb animals without a thumb, but one nerve, one big blood vessel, that’s it. Cut them, and at best, you’ve got a useless thumb; at worst, the whole damn thing turns rotten and you have to chop it off. The surgeon, Dr. Jenkins, kept quizzing me—how long is the small bowel, where besides the right upper quadrant can you find an appendix? (Certain people who look otherwise normal are freaks on the inside, the appendix wedged next to the rectum, the heart on the right side, only one kidney, and you may not know it until you open them up. It’s called situs inversus. There’s a metaphor for you, Dr. Gruber.)