had both made the stipended top 500 cutoff, my grandfather asked me why I had decided to become a doctor. He had already bragged about it at the doctors’ luncheon, told a number of his patients about it, and I didn’t know what he wanted me to say, so I said, “Because it’s the right thing to do.”
This was true—I had been inspired largely by guilt that was manifesting itself among members of my generation as a desire to help the people we kept hearing about on the news, people whose suffering we had used to explain our struggles, frame our debates, and justify our small rebellions.
For years, we had fought to show nonchalance in the face of war, and now that it was suddenly over, over without having touched us in the City, indignation was surfacing. Everything was a cause, a dignified labor. We fought through biology and organic chemistry and clinical pathology; fought to adopt the University’s rituals, from the pre-exam binges to the gypsy woman who took advantage of superstitious exam-takers in the courtyard, threatening them with bad luck if they didn’t give her money. We fought, above all, to show that we deserved to be there, to defeat emerging newspaper projections that declared the City’s postwar generation destined for failure. We were seventeen, furious at everything because we didn’t know what else to do with the fact that the war was over. Years of fighting, and, before that, a lifetime on the cusp of it. Conflict we didn’t necessarily understand— conflict we had raged over, regurgitated opinions on, seized as the reason for why we couldn’t go anywhere, do anything, be anyone—had been at the center of everything. It had forced us to make choices based on circumstances that were now no longer a part of our daily lives, and we kept it close, a heavy birthright for which we were only too eager to pay.
For a while, I thought I wanted to help women—rape victims, women who were giving birth in basements while their husbands were walking through minefields, women who had been beaten, disfigured, maimed in the war, usually by men from their own side. It was impossible to accept, however, that those particular women would no longer need my help by the time I was qualified to give it. At seventeen, things like that make you self-righteous. You don’t know anything about the aftershocks of war. Slightly younger, we had been unable to ration our enthusiasm for living under the yoke of war; now, we couldn’t regulate our inability to part with it. Major decisions trended toward the assumption that the war and its immediate effects would always be around. Aspiring to orthopedic surgery was considered under-achieving—you wanted, instead, to be an orthopedic surgeon specializing in amputation recovery. Plastic surgery was unthinkable—unless you wanted to deal with facial reconstruction.
One late afternoon, a week before midsemester exams, my grandfather asked me if I had given any thought to my own specialization, as if it were just around the corner. I had an answer for him: “Pediatric surgery.”
I was sitting cross-legged at the dining room table, my secondhand cellular biology textbook lying on a kitchen towel to spare our white lace tablecloth. My grandfather was eating sunflower seeds directly from the small tin tray he usually toasted them on. Like all of his rituals, this was a process. He would remove the tray from the toaster oven and set it down on two cork coasters, and lay out a napkin for the disposal of shells. He would sift through the seeds before he started eating them; no one, not even my grandma, knew why he did this, what he was looking for. While he was sifting, he would wrinkle his nose to raise his glasses, which were enormous and square, to a position through which he could comfortably focus. It gave him the appearance of a diamond expert, and also made him look slightly suspicious.
“You’ll be leaving God out of it, then,” he said.
“What does that mean?” I said. I couldn’t remember when he had last mentioned God.
But he was back to the business of sifting through the seeds. Every so often, he would pick one out and chew on it, mostly with his front teeth; he would invariably end up eating them all, rendering the sifting exercise pointless. It took him a long time to ask, “Been around children much?”
He wasn’t looking at me, so he didn’t see me shrug. After a while, I shrugged again, tapped my book with a pencil. Eventually, I asked: “Why?”
He sat up, pushed his chair away from the table and rubbed his knees. “When men die, they die in fear,” he said. “They take everything they need from you, and as a doctor it is your job to give it, to comfort them, to hold their hand. But children die how they have been living—in hope. They don’t know what’s happening, so they expect nothing, they don’t ask you to hold their hand—but you end up needing them to hold yours. With children, you’re on your own. Do you understand?”
Of everything we fought for that year, we fought hardest for notoriety, for the specific word-of-mouth reputation needed to earn respect, recognition, and above all the favor of an obese technical assistant named Mica the Cleaver, the man who prepared cadavers, and who, like an unmet husband or your passport representative at City Hall, was a figure we were expected to factor into our plans long before we ever actually laid eyes on him.
It was a daunting but critical endeavor. Mica’s attention had to be attracted well in advance. His gruff admiration was the prize for having attached some impressive anecdote, some reputable deed, to your name. Earning this attention before second-year anatomy was crucial. The point was to elicit some spark of awareness in his tar-clotted voice during the first roll call in the laboratory basement, so that when he read your name, he would raise an eyebrow at you and say,
Without a weekly cadaver, a corpse to practice on, you were predictably fucked for the remainder of your career in medical school. It was a special privilege to be in those well-scrubbed rooms with the prepared cadavers that looked like damp schnitzel. You wanted to get a head start on your colleagues by entering that mental space where you were used to a dead body, where you could look at a corpse without cringing or throwing up or collapsing. In order to succeed, you needed to move beyond the notion of respect for an autopsy victim, to resist the urge to pass out if the assistant referred to the corpse by its living name. You had to be the kind of person who could rise above the coping mechanism of painting the corpse’s eyelashes with green mascara. For this, you needed a weekly corpse. You needed Mica the Cleaver’s acknowledgment. You needed it so you could take that first step toward nonchalance in the face of death.
“What the hell do you have to be worried about?” Zora said to me when some older male colleagues, in an effort to ingratiate themselves to us, revealed that we would be dedicating our first year to this effort. “Haven’t you inherited that anecdote about the Marshall’s guts?”
We learned very quickly that nepotism was one of the many ways you did not want to be known to Mica the Cleaver. You did not want to be the perpetrator of some medical disaster, some self-defeating spectacle or slip of the tongue that made you look like an idiot rather than a respectable person for whom a steady influx of cadavers would pave a path to miracles. You did not want to be known for the kind of insolence to your predecessors that Zora carried around our first semester. In a cavalier bid to secure future connections, Zora had beaten eight hundred applicants to win a much-lauded internship with the Department of Genetics. To say that the position was lowly would be an understatement; her duties included mopping the floors. Her fifth morning on the job, carrying a box of files from the storage room, she ran into a rickety old man who was shuffling down the hall toward her, and who stopped her to suggest that she should put her excellent hips in a skirt, because pants indicated that she was too forward. Zora, towering over the old man with a file box she probably considered dropping on his head, responded with: “Don’t be so fucking provincial.” Of course, the old man was the Chair of Genetics, and she spent
