Telegraph Avenue

years her father was an assistant district attorney for the city of Washington, D.C., and then a lawyer for the Justice Department. Both of her mother’s sisters were nurses. Her uncle Louis had been a D.C. patrolman and plainclothesman and was now the chief of security for Howard University, and her brother, Ernest, ran a lab at George Mason. To the extent that Gwen had been hassled in her life by representatives of the white establishment, she had been trained to get the better of the situation without compromising herself, sometimes by dropping a name, sometimes by showing a respect that she genuinely felt or could at least remember how to simulate. Mostly by letting the doc or the officer feel that she understood how it was to be on the job.

“But truly, thank you, Kirsten,” Gwen added, reaching for chipper like a note that was just beyond her range. “We really appreciate your taking the time. We know how busy you are.” She smiled. “And maybe I will sit down a minute, at that.”

As though doing Kirsten a favor, Gwen lowered herself into one of the plastic chairs bolted to a nearby wall.

“Definitely want to have somebody look at that cheek,” the nurse said, her brittle tone expressing solicitude for the cheek less, Gwen thought, than for her own worn-out, urban-population-serving self.

“Oh, thank you so much for your concern,” Gwen said. Struggling a little harder, knowing from the way Aviva was looking at her, that she was starting, in Aviva’s phrase, to leak. “Now, please, honey, go ask the doc when we can see our patient.”

It must have been the “honey.”

Kirsten said, “She’s not your patient anymore.”

This was not technically true. As a result of years of hard work, steady and sound practice, slowly evolving cultural attitudes in the medical profession, and long, unrelenting effort begun by its founder and senior practitioner, by the summer of 2004, Berkeley Birth Partners enjoyed full privileges at Chimes General Hospital, with every right to assist in and attend to the care of Lydia Frankenthaler, who would remain a patient until such time as Lydia herself decided otherwise. But Aviva and Gwen had come this evening in an ambulance, giving off a whiff of trouble, with an unnecessary police escort they had managed to acquire along the way. Like a pair of shit-caked work boots, they were being left outside on the porch.

“We’ll wait here.” Aviva stepped in with the perfect mixture of unctuous sweetness and professional concern, spiking it lightly, like a furtive elbow to the ribs, with a warning to Gwen to seal all leaks or else shut the hell up. “As soon as you talk to the attending, you come find us, okay, Kirsten?”

Gwen followed Aviva into the bathroom, fighting the urge to apologize, wanting to point out that if you were white, eating shit was a choice you could make if you wanted; for a black woman, the only valid choice was not to.

In silence at separate sinks, they washed their hands and faces and rued the ruination of their shirts. The reverberation of water against porcelain intensified the silence. In the mirror, Gwen saw her partner staring at the bloodstains with an emotion between horror and hollowness, looking every one of her forty-seven years. Then their eyes met in the reflection, and the defeated look was gone in an instant, smuggled off, hooded and manacled, to the internal detention facility where Aviva Roth-Jaffe sent such feelings to die.

“I know,” Gwen said. “I was leaking.”

“Literally,” Aviva said, coming in to get a look at the damage the ambulance door had done to Gwen’s cheek. It had stopped bleeding, but when Aviva touched it, a fresh droplet formed a bead on the cut’s lower lip. The cut was about the size of a grain of pomegranate, pink and ugly. It would leave a scar, and Gwen was prone to keloids, and so forever after, she thought, she would have something special to remind her of this wonderful day. In her mind, she replayed her stumble, the optic flash as her face struck the steel corner.

“You need a stitch,” Aviva said. She leaned in to look at Gwen’s cut. “Maybe two.”

They went out to the ER and, after a few minutes of further genial self-abasement by Aviva, found themselves shown into an examination room with needle, suturing thread, and a hemostat. When it came time for novocaine, Gwen sat on her hands and told Aviva to go ahead and sew it up. “One stitch I can handle straight,” she said.

“Better call it two.”

“Two, then.”

“Aren’t you fucking macho.”

“I’m liable to start crying anyways, might as well give me a reason.” Gwen gasped as the needle bit. “Ow, Aviva, ouch.”

Aviva tugged the thread with a severe gentleness, breath whistling in her nostrils. Gwen focused her attention on the pendant that hung from a leather thong around Aviva’s throat. It had been made by Julie Jaffe in a flame-work class at the Crucible, lovely and enigmatic, a small glass planet, a teardrop of blue alien seas and green continents and polar caps tinted ice blue. For as long as Gwen had known him, Julie had been a mapper of worlds, on newsprint and graph paper and in the phosphor of a computer screen. Gwen recalled having asked him where he found the inspiration for the tiny glass world he had presented her as a Christmas present last year, and she tried to take comfort or at least find shelter from the pain of the suture needle in the memory of his reply: By living there. Then Aviva sank the barb a second time, and that was when Gwen started to cry, no big show or anything, they were both a couple of cool customers, your Berkeley Birth Partners. No sobbing. No whoops of grief. Just tears welling up and spilling over, stinging in the fresh seam of the wound. To be honest, it felt pretty good.

She permitted the tears to flow only as long as it took Aviva to snip the thread from the second stitch, lay down the hemostat, peel off her gloves, and hand Gwen a tissue. Gwen dabbed her eyes and then used the tissue to blow her nose, a nice big honking blast.

“They aren’t going to let us in,” Gwen said bitterly.

“I guess not.”

“Where’s Bernstein?”

“He was in the city. He’s coming.”

“We need to be in there. They’re going to want to do a hysterectomy, I know it. When all they need to do is just wait a little. Lazar. Who’s Lazar?”

“Don’t know him.”

“Tell me she’s going to be all right.”

“She will be all right.”

“I should have noticed it sooner.”

“There was nothing to notice until you noticed it. You noticed it right away.”

Gwen nodded, ducking her head, balling the tissue in her fist. She stood up and paced the room, stopped, hugged herself, notching her arms into the groove over the swell of her abdomen. She sat down, stood up, blew her nose again, and paced the room some more. She knew perfectly well there was nothing anyone could have done, but somehow that only made it feel more imperative to blame herself. It implied no kind of self-exoneration if she felt compelled to blame some other people, too.

“I can’t believe they aren’t letting us in there!”

“Take it easy,” Aviva said in a hushed voice that was meant, Gwen knew, to communicate the fact that she was talking too loudly. But Gwen could tell that she was rattling Aviva, and for some reason, it pleased her to see it. For the second time that day, she had a sense of trespassing on some internal quarantine, crossing a forbidden zone into the pon farr; amok time. It would not be right for Aviva to make her go there alone.

“I’ve had enough of this,” Gwen said. “Aviva, no, seriously. Listen to me.”

“I can hear you loud and clear, Gwen.”

“Come on. You have worked too hard. We have both earned the right to be treated better than this.”

There was the squeak of a sneaker on tiled floor. The partners turned, startled, to the door of the examining room, where a young pink-faced doctor appeared, his head shaved almost to the scalp, leaving only a ghostly chevron of pattern baldness. Dead-eyed, already tired of listening to them before they ever opened their mouths.

“I’m Dr. Lazar,” he said. “I was able to do a manual removal of the placenta. Mrs. Frankenthaler is stable, uterine tonicity looks good. We stopped the bleeding. She’ll be fine.”

The partners stood, perfectly still, tasting the news like thirsty people trying to decide if they had just felt a