Joan Is Okay(16)

I asked if he was talking to me about baseball.

Baseball? he said and kept tucking brown locks behind his ear. They didn’t look bad there nor did they undercut anything he’d just said. Brown with streaks of chestnut, thick and slightly wavy, no frizz. By a certain age I was told to stop playing with my hair in public and especially while I spoke. You don’t want to grow up into one of those, do you? a teacher or other adult would ask. A woman who twirls her hair while speaking is a woman never to be taken seriously.

What other sport is worth watching and discussing? he continued in a deeper, more somber voice. Football is too militant. The gridiron, the idea of gaining yardage and gaining ground. Baseball is in every way more perfect; there are no flaws in the game, hence why it’s America’s sport and pastime. Just consider how pastoral baseball is. It’s all about going home.

Huh, I said, because I’d never thought about baseball like that nor had anything profound to say about sports. Did a person then need to watch baseball to have America be her home? Neither of my parents had watched any and neither considered this country home.

That I didn’t have a television also surprised him.

You don’t have a TV? But how do you watch…He listed out the things I was supposed to have watched from both past and present. I was missing out on the ubiquity of NY1 news, game shows like Jeopardy!, famous movies set in this city (where to even start? he said), and famous sitcoms (only one place to start). The show about nothing. Jerry and Kramer, two neighbors who live across the hall from each other, like he and I, long-term pals who get into all sorts of shenanigans. And George, he ends up working for the Yankees.

When I asked if the show was actually called About Nothing, Mark fell into what resembled a catatonic state of shock. Then he looked down, for a long time, at my doormat. During the period of his shock, I thought about doormats and how mine was made from a fibrous weave and, if I was remembering the back label correctly, from the furry husks of coconuts. So, did my doormat also have hair, since it shed continuously like a human head? Those poor sacrificial coconuts, cut off from their trees to make wiping mats for feet. The long silence continued. I touched my neck and felt the flush of anxiety, felt my new cultured neighbor was about to tell me that I perceived the world all wrong.

The show is called Seinfeld, Mark said, still counting the coconut hairs of my doormat. As in Jerry Seinfeld, and it’s set in the Upper West Side.



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I WAS SUPPOSED TO work only two weeks in November, but when an attending called out sick last minute, I volunteered to step in. Then Reese asked if I could take his Thanksgiving shift in exchange for one of my December ones. The day of turkey basting and feasting was his mother’s favorite—because it was just one day, as he explained, centered around family and not like Christmas, which for the entire month of December became a part-time job.

He said he’s never missed a Thanksgiving.

Not even one? I asked.

Thirty-three years and counting, he had no plans to start now.

I’d forgotten that Reese was a year younger than Madeline, though his reproductive window was much longer. Did it make sense to call it a window, if after puberty it was flung open for the rest of his life? Reese was our youngest ICU attending but by his first year had already made it onto the brochures, from his good relations with HR. For whatever reason, our HR department employed only late-middle-aged women, the same age as probably Reese’s mother. He would open doors for them, wave to them in the halls, or swing by their offices for a quick chat. The HR reception counter always had a filled M&M dispenser, and I’d seen Reese stand there, chatting and pulling the handle as if it were a slot machine, cha-ching, cha-ching.

But a doctor who has never missed Thanksgiving was an anomaly and I asked Reese how he had managed to do that.

He shrugged. Always able to find coverage, he guessed, someone was usually willing.

I almost rescinded my offer but wanted his hours more. I wanted everybody’s hours, so didn’t offer him any of my shifts.

A rite of passage almost, to miss all the important holidays, to be on weekend call and never there for your family or friends. A badge of honor to have missed your sister’s wedding or the major crisis of a close friend, to slowly become the person whom no one reached out to first and then the person who heard about personal news last. My brother’s engagement to Tami I didn’t know about until a week after it had occurred. But I texted and called you, he said, and indeed he had. He had even left a voice message that I’d meant to listen to, forgot, and while I was angry at myself for forgetting, I was also slightly proud. Because how else could you be providing great service to strangers if you didn’t take that time away from people who were not?



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ON THE SECOND FRIDAY of the month, I was summoned by the director’s secretary to his corner office on the twentieth floor. The office faced northwest and had an uninterrupted view of the Hudson from bank to bank. Opposite this wall with the window was the wall of his degrees, five and counting, hung up in different types of brown frames. The latest degree was an MBA that he had finished online. The last time I was here, the degree was printed but unframed. Now it was in a frame more ornate than the one for his MD and MPH. He had a DPhil too. Prior to med school, he had studied linguistics at Oxford, a story he liked to tell new recruits during meet and greets, over drinks.