The Pursuit of Alice Thrift (11 page)

13.
Ms. Bravado

DR. KENNICK PUT ME ON PROBATION. I COULD CONTINUE MY
surgical pursuits if—as he so crudely phrased it—I pulled no more Alice Thrifts.

He had me beeped at home. Leo heard the summons, slipped out of bed, carefully closing the door behind him, and intercepted me in the kitchen for a pep talk: Falling asleep on the job was yesterday's news; today the headline was
HASTINGS ON THE HOT SEAT
, right? I was to throw around the words
intimidation, discrimination, harassment,
and
debilitated by exhaustion.
Got it?

I outlined my worst fears: Kennick must have seen the letter of resignation despite our caper. He must have gotten a late-night phone call and an earful from Hastings. We must have triggered a silent alarm, prompting security to study its surveillance tape.

Sitting opposite Kennick in a tweed armchair, I soon learned that there
had
been a late-night rant of a phone call, and it had been, indeed, an earful. Probation won by a hair's breadth over separation because he, Dr. Kennick—red-faced as he alluded to “a colleague's attack that erupted into something unbridled and, frankly, uncalled for”—was still quarterbacking this department.

I asked if this was tantamount to giving me two months' notice.

“It's up to you: If there are no more serious mistakes, we'll most likely lift the probation. If we see measurable improvement, you'll earn more responsibility. If we see no improvement, we'll be forced to sit down and assess the danger you pose to the patients.”

I said I was bound to improve. If only he could have a little confidence, I might get some, too. Didn't that make sense? Trial by fire wasn't my best working milieu.

“You knew what you were getting into,” he snapped. “We all did it, and now you have to do it. This is what separates surgeons from the rest of doctordom. Exhaustion never excuses a mistake.” Sports analogies flowed: one more strike and I was out; fumble again and I'd be sidelined; let anyone down, be he playmaker or water boy, and I was off the team.

Leo would be crushed. He had pictured me walking away with an apology from Kennick and the promise of one from a humbled and chastened Charles G. Hastings. Instead, I accepted what now sounded eminently fair: two months to shape up; two months to show my stuff; two months to make the starting lineup.

I remembered to state for the record that I'd been bullied, harassed, humiliated, discriminated against, screamed at. In front of witnesses.

“Which I don't dispute—”

“—by a loudmouth asshole,” I heard myself say.

“That loudmouth asshole is the next president of the American College of Surgeons,” Kennick stated, adding a notation to my file.

MS. BRAVADO KEPT
her head erect for the walk out of his office, past Yolanda, who was trying to look as if she wasn't enjoying every slippery inch of my career descent, down the hallway to the ladies' room, to the farthest toilet, into which I vomited. I didn't mean to linger, didn't have time for dramatics like these, but some combustion of adrenaline and fatigue had rendered me light-headed. I sat on the floor and invented a conversation, whereby a sympathetic soul would inquire from the row of sinks, “Are you all right in there, miss?”

“Just nerves,” I'd answer. “I'm on probation—a first for my department. No one's ever been this bad.”

Next the phantom stranger would ask, “Is your nausea, by any chance, morning sickness?”

“Yes,” the other, chatty me would offer. “I just found out. I haven't told anyone yet.”

Where was this tableau and conversation coming from? No one had impregnated me. No one had even tried. No pair of legs was visible outside my stall. I fluttered my hand in front of the optic sensor to induce another flush, then checked my pulse. I was alive. I recognized my surroundings: gray tile, white grout, white porcelain. These were my Keds, my white jacket, my plaid skirt, my brown tights, my ID. How odd—using my imagination, writing a playlet starring an alter ego of mine, an Alice who had a life and missed a period. I wiped my mouth with toilet paper, then went out to the sinks. I didn't want to look in the mirror but I did: My eyes were red and my skin was pale; my hair, in what remained of yesterday's single braid, was unkempt. An expression of my father's came to mind:
Sad Sack.
I was sick of that face; sick of myself. I needed to do something immoderate, big, drastic. But what? The possibilities were hardly endless: I could walk away and never come back. I could switch to a specialty that wouldn't kill me. I could sue Dr. Hastings. Murder Dr. Hastings. Cut off my braid. Take vitamins. Take amphetamines. Call Ray and tell him to leave me alone. Call Ray and tell him I'd like to have sex.

Sex.
I rinsed my mouth with cold water and dried my hands. Intercourse in my own bed, I reasoned, would take less time and energy than dinner or a movie. And I could be asleep within minutes following the act. Ray would be pleasantly surprised. “You mean it?” he would ask, his eyes grateful, his voice cracking with repressed emotion and pent-up testosterone.

Maybe it would put color in my cheeks. Maybe I would like it.

Your place or mine? I could say. I looked into the mirror, blotted my upper lip with a brown paper towel, and whispered as libidinously as I could, “Your place or mine?”

I CARVED ONE
minute out of my duties to call the housing office. My timing, pronounced the young man on the other end, was awesome. A tenant had most unfortunately lost his life and had
just,
like, this morning, been discovered! The police would be finished with their investigation by the end of the week, tops. It was a studio apartment with a small terrace and a Murphy bed, available as soon as the carpet was industrially cleaned and fumigated.

I asked if I could wait until the police report was in and whether the tenant had died of anthrax, Legionnaires' disease, or foul play that might implicate a neighbor.

The young man lowered his voice. “Off the record?”

I said yes, please.

“Sleeping pills. Not to worry.”

“Was he a surgical resident?”

“Anesthesiology. But it was personal—a bad breakup. He left a note.”

I said I was sorry. I'd take it. I gave him my name, my beeper number, and my solemn promise that I'd have a check on his desk by five o'clock.

I WENT LOOKING
for Leo in the cafeteria during the half hour he favored for lunch. There was a woman eating with him—wearing the professionally serene expression and natural fibers of a midwife. Around her neck, under her long brown hair, were both a stethoscope and a strand of beads that looked like shellacked seeds. Older, I thought. Thirty-five, forty. That would be fine with Leo the open-minded, the lover of all humanity.

“How's it going?” he asked enthusiastically. “I can't believe I didn't get debriefed. You talked to Kennick, right? Everything okay?”

“Well, I'm still here.” I offered my hand to Meredith. “I'm Alice. The roommate.”

She said, “Leo told me about your trials and tribulations. I hope you don't mind his sharing that with me.”

I said, “
Trial
is right. I'm on probation. Two months during which I'll be under the microscope.” I held up my hand to ward off Leo's reply, sure to be another call to action. “I do have good news,” I announced.

Ever the optimist, Leo grinned. “Hastings's busted?”

“No, nothing about that—”

“Thankfully, Hastings does no OB or GYN procedures, so we never overlap,” Meredith informed me.

I nodded once and turned back to Leo. “You knew I was on the waiting list for hospital housing?”

He said huh, no, he didn't know that.

“Well, amazingly enough, a studio opened up today, which is practically required now that I'm on probation. I'll be a tunnel away from the hospital.”

“But you're only across the street now,” he said.

Standing behind Meredith, I could easily convey with a minimal thrust of my chin: Now you'll have your privacy.

“Is it definite?” he asked. “Have you signed anything?”

I said I had.

“Which building?” asked Meredith. “North or south?”

“North,” I guessed.

“I've heard they're nice,” she said.

Leo said, “No, they're not! They're overrun with married couples and babies and plagued by fire drills.”

“You love babies, hon,” Meredith murmured.

I said I was supposed to be getting labs for my chief resident, stat.

“This seems kind of sudden,” said Leo.

“That's the nature of a waiting list,” I said. “An apartment comes up, you make an instant decision, or you kiss it good-bye.”

“You'll still see each other here,” said Meredith. “Probably as often as you did when you were roommates.”

“Not so fast with the past tense,” said Leo. “We're still roommates.”

Meredith smiled, got to her feet, touched Leo's shoulder in a farewell love tap. “I'm a champion mover,” she said to me. “I'm famous for helping friends pack and relocate and unpack. Just say the word.”

“I only have my clothes and books and a toaster oven,” I said. “But thanks just the same.”

She put out her hand. “Really nice meeting you. I know I've been something of a ghost roommate, but now we don't have to be strangers. I'd love to have lunch another day when you have more time.”

“I'm the ghost,” I said. “And as far as lunch is concerned, I never have more time.”

Meredith's bright smile faltered. Leo said, “No time and no manners.”

As soon as she walked away I said, “You won't miss me. I was never there. I just took up a bedroom and wrote a check, but I wasn't a real roommate.”

Leo said, “I tried to help. I tried to be your friend. I didn't know I wasn't allowed to have a girlfriend.”

“That's what you think? I'm moving out because of her? She's irrelevant. Today's headline is,
MY NUMBER CAME UP FOR HOSPITAL HOUSING
.”

“If you say so,” said Leo, wadding his sandwich wrapper and denting his soda can.

I stood by the table before finally asking how long he was going to stay mad at me—he, Leo, the eternal optimist; he whose glass was not only half-full but vitamin-enriched.

He made a sour face, which turned slightly indulgent after a few stubborn seconds.

I said, “I'll continue to pay my share of the rent. I mean, what else do I spend money on? I can swing both for a while. The new place is subsidized.”

He said, “I might be okay rent-wise. We've talked about it as a possibility.”

“We?”

“Her commute is ridiculous,” he answered. “Would you believe Winchester? For a midwife?”

I said I had to run. I couldn't let the team down. The team was waiting to hear if Mrs. Jacobs was acidotic.

“What about the other parts of your life?” he asked. “Are you going to make friends in the new building? In the laundry room? Because I felt we were making some progress in that arena.”

“Which arena?”

“Human relations. Good times. Fun.”

I said, “I'll socialize. I'll definitely meet new people. And I think you're forgetting Ray. I haven't given him much of a chance. Maybe, when I have my own place, I'll get to know him better.”

“Ray?”
he repeated, now on his feet. “
Ray?
Are you saying this to get my goat? I mean, is
boyfriend
such a textbook concept that you'd let a slimeball fit the bill just because he won't take no for an answer? I find that so goddamn depressing that I don't know what else to say.”

People were watching. Leo Frawley rarely frowned and never glowered; never raised his voice except to hail a friend or cheer a patient.

I said I appreciated everything, every kind act, every morsel of food from his side of the refrigerator, but I hadn't known he was such a snob. And what nerve to insinuate that I was asocial and eremitic. I'd learned at his knee—the most popular guy in the world—hadn't I? Wasn't it logical that I'd take a turn for the sociable under his tutelage?

“Overnight?”

I said his timing was appalling. It had been a very rough twenty-four hours, if he recalled. With my voice choked, I added, “I felt nauseated and diaphoretic after talking to Kennick. And I've just pulled myself together to carry out my first lowly gofer errand. So I'd appreciate no more so-called advice about Ray Russo or anyone else.”

“I can't believe we're arguing,” said Leo. “I don't know how we came to this. I can't believe you'd get so weird over a woman staying over—”

“I'm on call tonight,” I said coldly, backing away. “And tomorrow night I may or may not be home after work.”

“Alice—” he tried. He reached for my wrist, but I yanked it free and strode away.

14.
I'm a Normal Person

WITH PROFESSIONAL AND RESIDENTIAL UPHEAVALS LOOMING
, I didn't undertake anything socially drastic. I purchased a greeting card, a black-and-white photograph of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and wrote inside,
Hi! I'm moving to my own place on Feb. 1, an
exceptionally clean studio in hospital housing. Will call when I get a
phone. Or you can page me. Sincerely, Doc.
I mailed it to First-Prize Fudge and wrote
Personal
on the envelope. I hadn't heard from Ray since I'd beeped my getaway from the bar near Fenway Park, but even I knew, in my uninsightful way, that between the lines of my cheerful tidings lay a bold invitation.

He didn't answer. I tried to remember what I'd written; I also tried to remember what traits he possessed, other than his willingness to abide my company, that made me want to resuscitate the friendship. He wasn't intelligent or attractive. He wasn't interesting, except perhaps as someone I might have interviewed—after venturing into a bad neighborhood with a tape recorder and a whistle—for an undergraduate sociology course. In his plus column I could write
entertaining
and
outgoing
and
shares food.
If I were prone to oversimplification and romance, I might say,
Opposites attract,
but that very notion seemed so unscientific, so puerile, that I dismissed it out of hand.

AS MY MOTHER
folded each of my undergarments into thirds and arranged them in my suitcase, she asked nonchalantly, “Have you ever heard, in your medical travels, of Asperger's Syndrome?”

“It's neurological. A form of autism, I think.”

“Nicknamed the Little Professor Syndrome.” She frowned at the compromised elastic in a dingy pair of cotton underpants and lobbed them into my wastebasket. “Sufferers have very high IQs—sky-high—but their social skills are nonexistent,” she continued. “Your father read the piece, too, and we can't stop talking about it. He's been doing some research online and found a study at Yale.” She walked to the closet door and asked me to face her. She put her hands on my shoulders, signaling, Pay attention. Head up. Make eye contact. “How are you today, Alice?” she enunciated in Beginning Conversational English.

I shrugged. “Tired. Depressed.”

“Good,” she said. “That makes me feel better.” She went to her shaggy woven book bag and took out an underexposed Xerox, its pages stapled and highlighted in pink. “It was the cover story in last Sunday's magazine section . . . and now I'm quoting directly: ‘When you ask them at first, “How do you do?” they will say something like, “Why do you want to know?” They simply don't understand social games.' ”

I said, “Are you talking about me? You think I'm autistic?”

She held up an index finger. “Wait, I underlined it. . . . Here it is: ‘Asperger's kids cannot decipher basic visual social signals. This leads people to see them as emotionally disturbed. Or brilliant.' ”

I took the pages from her and skimmed the opening paragraphs.

“Ring any bells?” she asked at my elbow.

I read silently until I came to “. . . a neurological disorder that disproportionately affects males,” pointed that out as if it settled the matter, then asked, “Don't you think that if I were autistic, someone would have diagnosed it by now?”

“Not this kind! It was only made an official syndrome in 1994.”

“And do you think a lot of autistic kids graduate from college
summa
and go to Harvard Medical School?”

She frowned. “I wondered about that, too. But you could have something less than a full-blown case. You could be compensating because Daddy and I are such extroverts that you learned coping strategies.”

Had
I learned to cope and compensate? I walked over to my bed, which was stripped to the mattress ticking, and lay down on my side, facing the wall.

“There are a lot worse neurological problems a person could have,” my mother coaxed. “You could have been born with cerebral palsy or epilepsy or Tourette's. Asperger's is a walk in the park compared to—”

“I don't have Asperger's! And you're not qualified to diagnose anyone, either. First of all, mostly boys get it. Second of all, I'm a normal person who might be challenged in the personality department, but that's all. And how do you think it makes me feel to hear that my mother thinks I'm autistic?”

“
Feel?
Feelings are exactly what I'm looking for,” she said. “There aren't enough in this family since Nana died. I want you and me to have what Nana and I enjoyed for sixty-two years, which is to say an exquisite friendship.”

She picked up the pages again and flipped to another highlighted passage. “ ‘Consider Glenn Gould,' ” she read. “ ‘The eccentric Canadian pianist, who died in 1982 and who retired from the concert circuit at thirty-one, was notorious for his bizarre behavior: He had a phobia about shaking hands, ate nothing but scrambled eggs and Arrowroot biscuits, and rocked incessantly at the keyboard.' ” She tossed the pages onto my night table. “I'm finding this very reassuring, because I know you don't have a phobia about touching people. You not only have to touch them but you have to cut into them and probe their organs and glands. Correct?”

“Correct.”

“But let me ask you this—is the reverse true?”

“The reverse of what?”

“The reverse of a handshaking phobia. In other words, do you like to be touched?”

Did
I? While I tried to remember, she jumped in. “Stop me if I'm getting too personal, but I've had a lot of free time lately to imagine what goes on inside the head of Alice Thrift. I mean, is physicality something you think about? Yearn for? Jump into with both feet when the opportunity presents itself?”

I said, “That's three different questions.”

“And look how long it's taken me to ask you even one! Nana knew more about what was going on inside my head than I did. Even when I'd moved away from home, she knew where I was going, with whom, when I was menstruating, and what I was making for dinner. I could tell her anything, and she never recoiled, never shrank from any personal details. Her EQ was off the charts.”

With her daughter maybe, inside their two-person cocoon. I didn't point out that Nana's so-called EQ dwindled in the company of her grandchildren. Julie and I were dropped off at her apartment when my parents couldn't find a babysitter, and it was understood that we would bring our own food, and then get tutored in contract bridge by displaying our hands solitaire-style on her card table.

I said, “I don't think a mother and a daughter should talk about personal concerns, because sooner or later the daughter is going to have to hear something she'd rather not know.”

She smiled coyly and sat down on the edge of the bed. “When your father and I first met—”

I put my hands over my ears. She pried them away and snapped, “Don't act so autistic.”

I said, “If you insist, I'll listen. But remember that I'm not Nana.”

“I don't insist,” she said, then plunged ahead: “Your father and I despised each other at first sight. I thought he was brash, rude, egocentric. He was getting his MBA, while I always fell for the boys who wrote for the literary magazine.” She smiled a private smile. “Poets, of course. When along comes this guy—micro, macro, macho. All business, and I mean that literally.”

“I've heard this story,” I said.

“No. You've heard the sanitized version. What might be instructive is the truth: that I slept with him not too long after we met, just for the fun of it. Just to get it over with, just to be with someone who wasn't sensitive and artistic—without the slightest intention of falling in love. But that's where it happened: in bed. Well, there weren't any etiquette books that tell you where to go from there. You jump into bed because you want to be like those girls who hung around the Village, who had sex without looking back, and what happens? You wake up, happily twisted in the bedclothes, wanting to be Mrs. Bertram Thrift.”

I blinked. “And your point is?”

“My point is that I could confide every word of this to my mother. My girlfriends were too conventional—go steady, get pinned, get engaged, buy your trousseau, get married, lose your virginity on your wedding night in the Plaza. I knew that I could tell my mother everything, and she wouldn't call me a slut or, worse, dissolve into tears.”

“How did you know she wouldn't?”

“Because of how she raised me. She wasn't ashamed of her body or her bodily functions, and that kind of thing sets a tone in a house. If one takes a bath and voids with the door open and if one's daughters can perch on the edge of the tub and have a conversation with their naked mother, some threshold is set.” She lowered her voice to confide, “Once, right after her divorce, we spent a week at a nudists' colony in upstate New York, one that accepted children. Her friends didn't know. She wasn't a committed nudist, but she was curious. We didn't go back because she didn't particularly like the people, and I think, between you and me, she was looking for some male companionship at that stage. Ironically, it proved to be an unbelievably dull vacation. Everyone talked politics, everyone was married, nobody flirted, and everyone sagged.” She smoothed her dark hair back toward its French twist. “I tried very consciously to continue that tradition and hold court in the bathtub, but you and Julie and God knows your father would close the bathroom door when you walked by. Maybe I should have tried harder.”

“Why?”

“Because! I might have broken down some resistance. I might have made you more open, more physical, more . . . unconstrained. And Julie! I should have tied her down and made her bathe with me in order to demystify the female body so she wouldn't grow up to see it as a sexual object!”

I said, “I don't think it works that way.”

“The point being—one of several points I wanted to make—that it's not too late. I'm here for you now. God closed the door that was Nana and opened the one marked ‘Alice.' ” She nudged me with her hips until I moved closer to the wall, then lay down next to me.

“Doesn't this feel good?” she asked. “Doesn't it make you want to talk late into the night?”

I said, “Not really.”

“Go ahead,” she said. “Tell me something. Anything. Big, small, as long as it comes from here.” She rapped her fist against her left breast.

“Like what?”

She waved her arms above both of us. “The sky's the limit. Your dreams and aspirations. Your fantasies. A handsome internist you spotted across a crowded room.”

I could conjure only round-shouldered, myopic internal-medicine residents, married nonetheless. I said, “Well, you know it's always been my dream to do reconstructive surgery on patients in the Third World.”

“I know,” she said. “But why?”

“Why? Because in many cultures the disfigured are shunned. Imagine having the power to return someone to society and to rescue him or her from loneliness, if not total isolation or even death—”

“And this is important to you—rescuing primitive people from loneliness? Are you sure you'd be good at that?”

“I'd learn. I have ten more years of training before I'd be eligible to even—”

“I didn't mean surgically. I mean psychiatrically. Do you think that you have the interpersonal skills to be a humanitarian?”

I said, “You asked me about my dreams and I told you. Is that so hard to understand—someone who's born with a cleft lip makes her way to my clinic and leaves with a perfectly aligned vermilion border?”

“You're right, absolutely.” She smiled. “What else do you want to confide in me? Anything more immediate? More Alice-centered?”

I closed my eyes and said, “No, thank you.”

“I'm sorry. I apologize. I know that if it can be learned in a textbook, you'll study till you get it right, so what am I worried about?”

I said, “Well, here's something you can worry about: I almost killed a patient during a gallbladder operation this week. How's that for a good juicy secret?” I abridged the rest: the exhaustion, the retractor, the nicked hepatic artery, the hostilities, the sentence.

“Terrible,” she murmured. “You must have been scared to death. But thank goodness no one died . . . and now, how humiliating to be watched like a hawk.” She waited a beat, tapped my forearm to signal a new topic. “What about your love life? That's more along the lines of what I was trying to elicit.”

I said, “You know I'm working a hundred and twenty hours a week—”

“What
I
know is that it takes a special man to understand and to accept that. Probably another doctor, don't you think? Which is why I like the ring of
hospital housing.
”

I said, “I work with doctors day and night. I don't have to go to a dance in the common room to meet any.”

“Dances? Really? They hold dances in your new building?”

“No. And if they did, do you think I'd go?”

Her right arm crossed over her face and covered her eyes.

After a minute I tried, “Mom? . . . Joyce?”

She answered with a sniffle and plucked a tissue from my bedside box. After another interval I nudged her and said, “Okay. Here's an inside scoop: Once I'm settled in, I'm going to invite Ray over for what I'm labeling a housewarming.”

“Ray?”

“Ray Russo. The man who drove me to Nana's funeral?”

“Not the candy vendor?”

I said as a matter of fact, yes.

“Have you been seeing him?”

I said no, hardly, but he'd taken the day off from work to attend a total stranger's funeral, and this was my way of saying thank you.

She rolled onto her side, propped herself on her elbow, and peered at me. “You're beet-red. What kind of thank-you did you have in mind?”