Other People's Lives (26 page)

“Naomi, how do you know where you're going? You—who could get lost on your way to the corner to get a loaf of bread. It drove your mother crazy. Remember?” Nearly running—heavy in her mistake dress—the aunt was trying to catch up with Naomi, who would not stop looking as if she had something else on her mind, something that had to be done in a hurry.

“This is the Coffee Shop,” was all she finally said, and, pushing open a door that said
EXIT,
nodded in her colorless, distant way at a Chinese boy in a white suit and a stethoscope.

“I
heard
that they have a lot of foreign doctors working in hospitals.”

“He's not foreign, he's from San Francisco.” Naomi grabbed on to a table that was still loaded down with somebody else's leftover lunch and said, “Decide what you want to eat or we'll be here forever. Don't get the tuna fish.”

“I'm not really that hungry,” the aunt said, still not even sure of the round plastic chair she was trying not to slide out of. “That wasn't my idea of this altogether. Anyway, since when do
you
eat lunch? The only thing you ever liked was French toast, and even that you threw away half of. Remember?”

“BLT on toast and black coffee,” said Naomi to a waitress in a yellow dress who was there suddenly, and before the aunt could even say, “I think I'll have an egg,” a redheaded girl, even younger than Naomi, was standing at the table, saying, “Dr. Dubin, there was a message for you. Dr. Fortgang wants you to prepare Mrs. Grossbard for ECT.”

Naomi looked up at the girl as if she had just put down a newspaper. “Fortgang?” she said, a smile slipping into her voice and even up to her wan, washed-out face. “Was it a phone message, Miss Perry? Or did Fortgang rumple his two-hundred-fifty-dollar suit and actually pass through the building?”

The girl, Miss Perry, not only had red hair, but freckles all over her face, and looked as if she belonged in jeans and a plaid shirt, sitting on a fence with a fishing pole or a lunchbox, waving at an orange schoolbus. Instead, with a nurse's uniform and a slightly buck-toothed, summery smile, she said, “He was here, but it's even funnier. He actually made a note on the chart.”

“That
is
funny,” Naomi said. “He must be getting ready to send out bills,” and there in their uniforms the two of them began laughing as if they were walking down the street together and had just seen something ridiculous in the window of a store.

“Naomi,” the aunt said. “What's ECT?”

“Electro-shock therapy,” she said, and again immediately looked at her watch. “Toby's baby present is upstairs. I'll have to go up again and get it later.”

“I didn't come here to collect presents. I was just thinking of Mrs. Lippman and what happened with her son.”

“What?”

“She was a very fat old woman with fat red cheeks. She lived on the ground floor. You wouldn't remember her.”

“You weren't thinking of her cheeks. What happened?”

“To her? She's been dead for years. She was a very old woman.”

“What happened to her
son?
What's the tragedy you want to tell me?”

“Her son?” the aunt said, remembering suddenly his similar fat cheeks and doughy, rumbling body, terrible for a boy. “Her son? He was perfect till he was seventeen. Not only perfect, but brilliant, very mechanical. All of a sudden, when he was seventeen, he started something new. No school was good enough for him, nothing was right, teachers were staring at him, people were monkeying with his walkie-talkie. Even his mother could see that something was wrong, so she took him to a doctor who put him in a hospital, and instead of getting better, he got worse.”

“How did he get worse?”

“He started getting very violent, so that every time she went up there to visit him and took the special bus, she saw red marks on his face and bruises all over his arms and she never knew whether he did it to himself or else whether he got it from when they had to hold him down.”

Naomi picked up her head, but it was only to wave at a boy in another kind of white suit at a different table, and swallowing some water, she gulped out, “Before phenothiazines. You know—tranquilizers.”

“Before
lots
of things you would hear about, you were never good in science anyway. Also, don't forget—these were people who didn't go to fancy Park Avenue doctors. What was his mother? A simple old Jewish woman. She didn't know anything, but she always read the Yiddish papers very carefully, and one day she found an article about a new kind of brain operation that was a brilliant cure for craziness. Naturally, it gave her hope for her son, so the next time she went to the hospital she quick ran to the doctors, and they said if she would sign the papers, it was fine with them. Why would she hesitate over a signature? Naturally, she signed the papers, the brilliant brain operation was done, and Mrs. Lippman was left with a vegetable.”

“Lobotomies aren't done any more,” Naomi said, “and you'd have a hard time finding anyone to defend them.”

“What about Mrs. Grossbard?” the aunt said, watching Naomi pick up her bacon sandwich that was stuck together with blue and yellow plastic toothpicks as if it were a wedding. “What about Mrs. Grossbard who you're going to give shocks to? Mrs. Grossbard whose life is so funny that you and Suzy Q. Redhead couldn't stop yourselves from having laughing fits about?”

Naomi could have been a girl glancing up now and then for her subway stop. “Mrs. Grossbard has a fancy Park Avenue doctor,” she said. “He's the one who makes the decisions, I'm only the resident. And anyway, you don't have to worry. She won't be a vegetable.”

“But she'll
forget
things. I know what happened to Schreibman's sister-in-law. She woke up in the morning and didn't know what day it was, she went to the bakery and couldn't remember a single salesgirl.”

“Loss of memory is only temporary,” the stone said. “There are conditions in which ECT is indicated. Involutional depression, for instance.”

The Romans built reservoirs, only they called them aqueducts—how was this different? “How do
you
know if that's what she had? You don't even know who I'm talking about.”

“Severe depression associated with menopause. You know what that is—change of life.”

The egg the aunt was putting her fork into was cold. “Whoever expected that you would become a doctor? Your
mother
would never have predicted it.
She
knew you were never good in science. You were good in languages like people on your father's side. Remember that uncle of yours who had a cleaning store downtown? The one who called himself French Cleaner? Some Frenchman!” the aunt said, recalling his squeezed-in, monkey's face: on the way to America, his boat had docked for a few days in Cherbourg. “He could speak any language anyone came in with. You must remember that, Naomi. You used to hang around there so much.” It was probably how she had managed to get through medical school—anyone who could stand the smell of a cleaning store for hours on end would have no trouble wading through four years of ether and bloodstains. “You were very close with his older son, Azriel. Remember? Not that you keep up with anyone.”

Naomi said, “I got a letter from Azriel last week. He's in Japan.”

“What's he doing in Japan?”

“He's studying Japanese. Azriel's very good in languages.”

“He's not still in school! I thought he was married and had a child.”

“He's teaching at Stanford, he's on leave for a semester, his son is four years old.”

“Four? He'll be ready for school soon.”

“He goes to a Japanese school.
He's
very good in languages, too.”

“I don't see what's funny about it, Naomi. It's the one thing you were ever really good in. Remember that French teacher you had, Mrs. Gelfand, who couldn't stop raving about you when you translated those French poems? And that Israeli engineer who was staying across the hall who said he could have sworn you were a
sabra
the few times you bothered to open your mouth?”

She managed to open her mouth now, but all she said was, “Hi, Steve,” to a tall, suntanned boy whose giant circus-clown's tie bobbed out from underneath his white jacket together with his Adam's apple.

“Nao,” said
S. SONNENBORN M.D. PSYCHIATRY.
“You were beautiful this morning. No shit. First presentation I haven't slept through in months.” The tall clown's eyes seemed to follow the glow of his tie the way Naomi's did a windowed distance.

“Thanks,” Naomi said. She was trying to fix an earring and in one minute her long white sleeve would be soaking up coffee. “Naomi, you give more to the floor than you put in your mouth,” her uncle used to say to her. But it was easy for him to have patience, he was not the one who cleaned the floor.

A buzz from S. Sonnenborn's pocket forced him to pull out a walkie-talkie. “I'm on Call,” he said. “Talk to you upstairs.” His smile trickled out to the bottoms of his sideburns, his tie pulled him out to the door, and the aunt said, “Naomi, why did that boy call you Nao? It's not a name, it sounds like a deodorant.”

“For short,” she said. “For a nickname.”

“But no one in your life ever called you
Nao.
Your parents never called you that, your uncle and I never called you that. It isn't even your real name—Naomi—it's only your English name. Your real name, the name that your mother gave you, is Nechama.”

“I know what my name is. Let's go upstairs, I'll get you Toby's baby present.”

“Look how you call it ‘baby present'! You don't even know the names of Toby's children. They wouldn't know you if they saw you on the street and you're practically an aunt to them. And what about your brother? You don't even keep up with him and he always felt so close to you.”

“We were hardly even brought up together. Anyway, I saw him when I was in California, and if he needs money for bail, he knows my phone number.”

“Money for bail?” the aunt said. “Who do you think you are that you can talk that way? What will you have from all this but years of debts?”

“Just like all other medical students. I'll pay it back.”

“But you're
not
like all the other medical students. How could you turn out this way? How could Michael? What could he possibly have in common with all those boys rebelling against their parents' swimming pools? He practically had no parents, let alone swimming pools.”

“Why don't you ask him? He's the one with theories. I was only good in languages.”

“But why did he have to get tear-gassed? What happened to him?”

“You know what happens when people get tear-gassed. You read the papers the same as everyone else.”

“But, Naomi, he's your
brother.
Do you think he resented us?”

“I'm not Michael. How do I know?”

“You're a psychiatrist. That's why I'm asking you.”

“That's right. I'm a psychiatrist and Michael is a dropout, and those are both categories that everyone can understand.”

“I'm not concerned with
everyone.
For you, spilling your coffee and monkeying around with other people's memories are all the same thing, because to you it doesn't matter
what
you forget.”

But already Naomi had gotten up and, in her distant, disappearing way, was floating past the cash register.

“That's a cute hat,” she said to a foreign-looking girl who had just tumbled through the door in a blue raincoat. The girl pulled the hat off her head as if she hadn't known she was wearing it, and in a fuzzy, foreign voice said, “It was knitted for me by my sister. In many colors. I can give you one if you want.”

“Since when are you interested in hats?” the aunt said, but the girl—delicate, fair-skinned, and dazed—continued to look as if she had just been pulled out of an avalanche.

“Na-o-mi,” she said. “You won't believe what I have been through. Do you know what his wife said? ‘That lovely Danish girl in your department—why don't we invite her for dinner?'”

“He told you that?” Naomi said. “What a bastard.”

The girl seemed about to cry. She took off her raincoat and said, “I don't even have many cigarettes.”

“Listen, Inga,” Naomi said, “Let's have dinner tonight. Just come over to my apartment.”

“I can't do it. I'm on First Call. It's better, I think, it's better for me to be working.”

In the corridor, the aunt said, “She's so pretty. Why is
she
a doctor?”

Naomi looked at her watch and, fussing again with her little black notebook, shuffled straight into an elevator where a man in a sheet lay stretched out on a table. His face was the color of worn-out underwear, and tubes and bottles hung down on all sides.

“
This
elevator?”

“You're not at a bus stop,” Naomi said. “This is a hospital,” and seeing her face—thin, distant, and severe—reflected in the glass-covered bulletin board, the aunt could suddenly imagine Naomi with her white smock, round glasses, and plain hair—perhaps in a bun—bending over a microscope: it was not Naomi she was thinking of at all.

“Did your mother ever tell you about your Great-aunt Masha?” she tried whispering past the sick man's feet. “For a Jewish girl in Russia in
her
generation to become a doctor—you can imagine what that was. She was a very unusual person. It was practically unheard of.”

“It couldn't have been that unheard of,” Naomi said in a perfectly conversational tone. “In an Isaac Babel story there's a doctor who's a Jewish girl.”

“I'm not talking about stories, I'm talking about a person. In the middle of a revolution, completely on her own, she went all the way to Moscow. You never even heard about her? Your mother told you nothing?”