“She apparently had psychological problems brought on by writer’s block. She thought her work was being plagiarized, or that someone was coming in and taking things when she was away from home. She made quite a fuss about it, and she apparently started carrying her manuscripts around tied up in a scarf.”
Mama was not a particularly successful writer. About five or six years after the divorce, I happened to see a short piece in the newspaper saying that she had won a new writer’s prize. I bought the book and read it. It was a strange story about an old lady who owns an apartment building and grows carrots in the courtyard. She digs up one in the shape of a human hand, with five perfect fingers. In the end, they discover her husband’s body buried in the garden, minus the hands. That was the general idea.
She had several books published after she won the prize, but no one took much notice. I would find them in the remainders bin; when I brought them home, I had to hide them from my father.
“Well then…” said the man, clearing his throat. The children stood up and formed two lines in the aisle, their legs apart and their hands behind their backs. The passengers sat watching them; the woman next to me closed her magazine and the college girls fell silent.
“‘The Little Dustman’ by Johannes Brahms,” the man announced, holding up a pen for a conductor’s baton.
The voices of the children reverberated above our heads, voices almost too beautiful to be human, rippling the surface of memory. I prayed for Mama as the snow continued to fall.
Later, someone sent me a small box of things she had left behind. A few trinkets, some clothing, fragments of manuscripts—and a faded picture clipped from a newspaper that had been tucked into the box. In the picture, an emaciated old woman in a headscarf stood smiling in the courtyard of an apartment building. She was holding a carrot in the shape of a hand. Mama was standing next to her, holding a carrot, too, and looking terribly uncomfortable. It had been a beautiful day and Mama was squinting in the sunlight.
I have no idea why Mama left us. Toward the end, she talked to herself more and more, and she no longer bothered to stop even when she realized I was in the room. She muttered almost constantly, like a broken record. At some point I realized the pendant had disappeared from around her neck.
On her last day with us, she held my cheeks in her hands. “You’ve been a good boy,” she said. “I wish that I was so good.” Her hands were as cold as they had been on that snowy day at the zoo.
LAB COATS
“Nephrology, one short. Endocrinology, one long. Emergency Room, one short.”
I take a lab coat from the mountain of dirty ones on the floor and I check the pockets. I read out the size and the name of the department written in magic marker on the back of the collar and then toss it in the cart. She sits next to me, writing down each coat in the register, so that next week, when they come back from the laundry, we can check them against the list to be sure nothing’s missing. Of all the jobs we secretaries at the hospital have to do, this is the one we hate the most. Partly because it’s nasty and boring, but also because the laundry room is next to the morgue.
She and I take an old freight elevator to the basement—just a cold, rattling box, really—and then walk down this long hall that’s so tight I don’t see how they roll the gurneys through. The walls are scuffed up, and the fluorescent light flickers creepily. The floor of the hall slopes down from the elevator, so the laundry cart rolls forward on its own, as though pulled by an invisible hand. Like it’s going to race down the hall and crash through the door of the morgue. That’s creepy, too.
To be honest, the morgue doesn’t scare me much. I don’t really understand why the other girls are so afraid of it. They see people dying all over the hospital, while they type their reports or eat cream puffs in the lounge. The job is even kind of nice, especially when she’s next to me. She’s as beautiful underground as she is in the office, her face all white and pale.
“Dermatology, two short. Cardiology, one long. Oral Surgery, one short…” No matter how long we work, the mountain never seems to get any smaller.
“He should be in the endo lab this afternoon,” she says, without looking up. Endoscopy.
“Right,” I agree, “it’s Monday.” I know the whole schedule by heart. “I can manage here if you want to go.”
“No,” she says, running her finger down the list to Oral Surgery. “No need.”
Her boyfriend is a resident in Respiratory Medicine, and right about now he’s probably putting an endoscope down someone’s throat.
I pick up the next coat, turn it inside out, and shake it. Something falls out of the pocket and rolls across the floor: a dried-up plum. Looks like a testicle.
I’ve given up trying to figure out how this stuff gets in their pockets. And this isn’t even the weirdest thing; I’ve seen flower bulbs, bras, corks, a Bible, a little eggplant, condoms—you name it.
“He was supposed to come see me last night, but he never showed up,” she says.
“Maybe one of his patients took a turn for the worse,” I say, tossing the plum in the trash.
“He went to see his in-laws to tell them about the divorce; he said he’d come and tell me how it went.” The doctor’s wife went home to her family last month to give birth to their third child—first girl. I knew all the details. “He was full of excuses again. Something about the train getting stuck in snow. He claimed he never even got there, that he sat on the train the whole time and had to come back without seeing them. Can you believe the nerve? He expects me to believe a story like that with the cherry trees already in bloom.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “He could be telling the truth. Freak snowstorms happen. You should check the weather report. If he was going to lie to you, he would have said it was a patient.” She doesn’t seem to be listening.
Since the day I started my job at the hospital, I’ve always enjoyed working with her. She’s a hard worker and she doesn’t take grief from the doctors or anyone else. And she’s beautiful. I never get tired of looking at her. It must be nice being that pretty.
I especially like to watch her work—the way her eyes light up in front of the computer screen, that cute little ear that sticks out from under her hair when she answers the phone. But best of all is her tongue when she’s licking those blue airmail envelopes. It flicks out, all moist and red, and runs over the gluey edge.
“I wouldn’t mind having a peek down one of those scopes,” I say, just to make conversation. She nods, but she’s still not listening.
The next coat has bloodstains. I wonder whether the patient suffered much—before I toss it in the cart.
“They used one on me when I was a kid,” I add. “A peanut went down the wrong tube and I couldn’t breathe. Nearly suffocated. It’s weird that one peanut could kill you.”
She doesn’t answer, so I go back to reading labels. The room smells like death and disinfectant.
The two of them have been doing it all over the hospital—in the wards, the labs, the broom closet. Maybe he’s even put the endoscope down her throat. Bet she looks as good inside as out—warm, red, inviting, all those little wrinkles tempting you deeper and deeper …
She knows exactly how she wants a job to be done. Twenty pages or fewer gets a paper clip; more than twenty, a binder clip. Sugar packets are for staff meetings; sugar cubes for guests. The surgery schedule is expected to be blown up 150 percent, and copies posted on the bulletin board (upper left-hand corner), on the side of the equipment locker, and on the door to the lounge. If a patient gives you cookies or other food, it goes on the middle shelf in the cupboard.
Not long after I started working here, some bigwig in Neurology asked us to help with a presentation he was going to give at a conference. It had all these graphs and charts, and he wanted it back in just two days. She split the work with me and we typed up labels for the slides.
“Use the number 508 stickers for the slides,” she told me. “They’re for conferences.” No. 508 was a dull gray.
