Telegraph Avenue (9 page)

“Don’t fall asleep, Mommy,” Arcadia said. “Here comes Daddy with the towels.”

G
wen hurried along the corridor, bleeding from a fresh cut on her left cheek, trussing her belly with one arm, trying to keep up with Aviva, who was trying to keep up with the single-masted gurney on which Lydia Frankenthaler was being sailed toward one of the emergency-room ORs by a crew of two nurses and the EMT who had accidentally slammed the ambulance door on Gwen’s face. The EMT hit the doors ass-first and banged on through, and the nurse who was not steering the IV pole turned and faced down the midwives as the doors swung shut behind her. She was about Gwen’s age, mid-thirties, a skinny ash-eyed blonde with her hair in a rubber-band ponytail, wearing scrubs patterned with the logo of the Oakland A’s. “I’m really sorry,” she said. She looked very faintly sorry. “You’ll have to wait out here.”

This was a sentence being passed on them, a condemnation and a banishment, but at first Aviva seemed not to catch on, or rather, she pretended not to catch on. As the Alice Waters of Midwives, she had been contending successfully and in frustration with hospitals for a long time, and though, by nature, she was one of the most candid and forthright people Gwen had ever known, if you sent her into battle with another nurse, an intake clerk, or most of all an OB, she revealed herself to be skilled in every manner of wheedlings and wiles. It was a skill that was called upon to one degree or another almost every time they went up against hospitals and insurance companies, and Gwen relied upon and was grateful to Aviva for shouldering the politics of the job so ably. She envied the way it seemed to cost Aviva nothing to eat shit, kiss up, make nice. Catching babies was the only thing Aviva cared about, and she would surrender anything except her spotless record for catching them safe and sound. She had, Gwen felt, that luxury.

“No, no, of course, we’ll wait,” Aviva said in a chipper voice. She made a great show of gazing down at herself, at her white shirt with its chart of blood islands, at the chipped polish on her big toenail. With the same partly feigned air of disapproval, she surveyed Gwen’s cheek, her played-out saggy-kneed CP Shades. Then Aviva nodded, granting with a smile the whole vibe of dirt and disorder that the partners were giving off. “But after we clean up and scrub in, right? then it’s no problem, right”—leaning in to read the nurse’s badge—“Kirsten? If you want to check with Dr. Bernstein, I’m sure . . .”

Gwen could see the nurse trying to determine whose responsibility it was in this situation to be the Asshole, which was of course the purpose of Aviva’s gambit. Sometimes that awful responsibility turned out to be endlessly deferrable, and other times you got lucky and ended up in the hands of someone too tired or busy to give a damn.

“Bernstein’s stuck in traffic,” Kirsten said. “The attending’s Dr. Lazar. I’ll check with him. In the meantime, why don’t you two ladies go ahead and have a seat.” She told Gwen, “You’re going to want to have a seat.”

You have a seat, bitch. That’s my patient maybe bleeding to death in there.

“No, thank you,” Gwen said. “I prefer to stand.”

Her relations toward authority, toward its wielders and tools, were—had to be—more complicated than her partner’s. She could not as blithely subordinate her pride and self-respect to the dictates of hospital politics, distill her practice of midwifery, the way Aviva did, to the fundamental business of the Catch. But Gwen knew, the way a violinist knew tonewood, how to work it. She had grown up in a family of doctors, lawyers, teachers, cops. For many 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 drop of rain. Then they fell on each other and hung on tight, Gwen half stupid with relief, drunk on it, clinging to Aviva as if to keep the room from spinning.

Dr. Lazar studied the celebration with his flounder eyes and a mean smile like a card cheat with a winning hand. “Do you think,” he said after an interval not quite long enough to pass for decent, “uh, I don’t know, do either of you ladies think maybe you could explain to me how you managed to screw up this birth quite so badly?”

“Excuse me?” Gwen said, letting go of Aviva as the dizziness abruptly passed.

“Ten more minutes of sage-burning or whatever voodoo you were working, and that mom—”

“Voodoo?”
Gwen said.

Instead of wincing at this clear instance of having said something he was bound to regret, Dr. Lazar turned gelid, immobile. But he flushed to the tips of his ears. “You know what?” he said. “Whatever.”

He turned and walked out of the room, and Gwen noticed a purple Skittle adhering to the seat of his surgical scrub trousers. For some reason, the sight of the smashed piece of candy stuck on the doctor’s ass inspired a minute compassion for the fish-eyed and weary young man with his burden of alopecia, and this, in turn, sent her over the edge.

“Gwen!” Aviva said, but it was too late, and anyway, the hell with her.

A
n hour ago, when they had blown in on a gust of urgency from the ambulance bay, EMT yelling instructions, calling for a stretcher, Garth looking modestly wild-eyed, dancing like a man who had to pee, holding the baby who needed to be fed, Aviva breaking out a bottle of Enfamil from her backpack and cracking it with a sigh and that formula smell of vitamins and cheese, the wonderful avid baby needing every ounce of it—Gwen had failed to remark just how busy it was tonight at the emergency room of Chimes General Hospital.

Every room seemed to be occupied. Her pursuit of Dr. Lazar was haunted at its edges by glimpses of a pale hairy shin slashed with red. A forlorn teenager in a volleyball uniform clutching her arm at a surrealist angle. A young man with baby dreadlocks gripping either side of a sink as if about to vomit. The whole scene scored with a discordant soundtrack of televisions and woe, the nattering of SpongeBob, an old man’s ursine expectorations, a pretty Asian woman cursing like a sailor as something nasty was extracted from the meat of her hand, the horrific shrieking of a toddler being held down by its father while a phlebotomist probed its arm for a vein. Outside the last examination room before the waiting area, a young Hispanic man lolled in a chair, holding a bloody ice pack to his face, while from inside the room, a doctor yelled cheerfully in English at his bleeding companion as if the man were deaf and retarded.