Joan Is Okay(28)
He put a hand on his chest. I lost my appetite for tots.
What else would you do? I asked.
He said he had asked himself the same question, which precipitated another more horrifying epiphany about his lack of a legacy, should he continue down his current path of mediocrity. A man needs a career legacy, he emphasized, whereas a woman doesn’t always have to worry about that, a woman doesn’t have the same pressures.
I said I cared about career legacy; I had the same pressures as he did in that realm and wanted to be more than just somebody’s wife.
He seemed caught off guard to hear me say that. He explained he was using “woman” in the abstract, he didn’t mean me specifically.
Oh, I said, and he continued to talk about this abstract woman as if I had no skin in the game.
A woman biologically is able to reproduce, he said, and should she choose to, her legacy would be secure, without concerns for what else she can offer the world since she has already given it a human being. But a man can’t get pregnant on his own. A man must forge his own legacies and create something out of nothing.
I tried to act surprised by his statements, to lift my eyebrows a little and show that I hadn’t realized this before, that Reese, being a male, didn’t have ovaries that released one egg each month to be fertilized, and if this egg isn’t fertilized by one sperm out of an onslaught, the sixteen-millimeter-thick uterine lining that had readied itself to support the fertilized egg, the zygote, would shred, each month, bit by bit, and come out the uterus like a vine of ripe tomatoes put through the blender.
I said while I didn’t know this abstract woman personally, I imagined that once she met her abstract man, she would probably tell him to fuck right off.
Fuck right off? he asked.
Yeah, like that.
Perplexed but not necessarily offended, he said it seemed too early in the day for swear words and he didn’t quite know what I meant.
* * *
—
DEATHS SOAR THE LAST week of December, and New Year’s Day is consistently the deadliest day of the year. Weather, influenza, car accidents, substance abuse around the holidays, stress of family, of eating, and of constantly having to be jolly, but no verifiable cause has been found.
It was a resident’s first Christmas working and a few hours in, she had reached her most sad. Every batch of them went through cycles of sadness, and should you come across one at peak sadness, they would pull you aside to emote that no one told them what it was like. Being a doctor, that is. Kind of dull actually, much more busy work than expected, checking numbers then rechecking them, grueling but dull, the same routine each day.
Nurses, on the other hand, very rarely fell into a slump or seemed to have existential crises. They didn’t carry themselves with gravitas, and if they needed a break from the drama, they simply took five minutes outside, then came back recharged. Nurses brought in pans of homemade lasagna and plates of sugar cookies to be shared. They decorated the residents’ lounge with snowmen wearing telemetry boxes, each snowman bearing a resident’s name. The nurses in our unit comforted the resident for missing her first Christmas by congratulating her on the first badge of honor, and here, have a cookie, two scoops of lasagna, fresh out of the microwave.
You don’t have to care about people to be a doctor, but you do to be a nurse.
You don’t need a sense of humor as a doctor, but it helps as a nurse.
The days between Christmas and New Year are called the “perineum,” an older nurse told a younger one at the bay. You know what that means, don’t you?
From anatomy. The perineum: in males the pyramidal surface region between anus and scrotum; in females, between anus and vulva.
* * *
—
DURING THE WEEK OF perineum, I found at my apartment door a Samsung television on a stand. I knocked on Mark’s door and told him through the wood that his stuff was again blocking my path and preventing me from going inside.
My TV? he said, coming out. Your TV. Surprise. The best holiday gifts are those we least expect! Or don’t think to ask for.
The Samsung had served him well until he recently bought himself a new one. Nothing was wrong with the old set, and he didn’t want to be one of those people who threw out electronics every year. It seemed wasteful to him when people upgraded phones whenever possible and he himself had an iPhone model so old it wasn’t even available anymore, the software inside no longer supported. He showed me his phone, which had a long crack down the screen and was very small. He looked incredibly proud, and I thought of my cousin who, when showing me her big-screen phone encased in plastic rhinestones and gold, looked equally proud. My father believed quite strongly that East and West would never get along, never see eye to eye. But maybe they could, I now thought, since Mark and my cousin would never fight over the same phone.
Long story short, he said, please take it.
The phone? I asked.
No, the TV. A TV could also help me unwind, and after that last visit, and sitting in that horrible little chair, he found my apartment too vacant. Had he not known I lived there, he would’ve assumed no one did. Then he started talking about voids and how no one should have to live in them or ever see that word in print. Void should be avoided, he said and because I was too tired to say otherwise, we moved my new-old television set inside during this speech. He told me to call the cable company tomorrow, he texted me a number. If I wasn’t home during any of their slots, he offered to oversee the installation process for me, for a small fee.