Small Great Things Page 5

  I sat for a long time with the transcript in my lap. Reading. Rereading.

  But this is how I see it: if that nigger hadn't been driving that night, my brother wouldn't be dead.

  IN TWENTY YEARS, I'VE BEEN fired once by a patient, and it was for two hours. She screamed bloody murder and threw a vase of flowers at my head while in the throes of labor. But she hired me back when I brought her drugs.

  After Marie asks me to step outside, I stand in the hall for a moment, shaking my head. "What was that about?" Corinne asks, looking up from a chart at the nurses' station.

  "Just a real winner of a dad," I deadpan.

  Corinne winces. "Worse than Vasectomy Guy?"

  Once, I had a patient in labor whose husband had gotten a vasectomy two days before. Every time my patient complained about pain, he complained, too. At one point, he called me into the bathroom and pulled down his pants to show me his inflamed scrotum, as my patient huffed and puffed. I told him he should call the doctor, she said.

  But Turk Bauer is not silly and selfish; based on the way he brandished that Confederate flag tattoo, I'm guessing he is not too fond of people of color. "Worse than that."

  "Well." Corinne shrugs. "Marie's good at talking people off the ledge. I'm sure she can fix whatever the problem is."

  Not unless she can make me white, I think. "I'm going to run to the cafeteria for five minutes. Cover for me?"

  "If you bring me Twizzlers," Corinne says.

  In the cafeteria I stand for several minutes in front of the coffee bar, thinking about the tattoo on Turk Bauer's arm. I don't have a problem with white people. I live in a white community; I have white friends; I send my son to a predominantly white school. I treat them the way I want to be treated--based on their individual merits as human beings, not on their skin tone.

  But then again, the white people I work with and eat lunch with and who teach my son are not overtly prejudiced.

  I grab Twizzlers for Corinne and a cup of coffee for myself. I carry my cup to the condiment island, where there's milk, sugar, Splenda. There's an elderly woman fussing with the top of the cream pitcher, trying to get it open. Her purse sits on the counter, but as I approach, she picks up the handbag and anchors it to her side, crossing her arm over the strap.

  "Oh, that pitcher can be tricky," I say. "Can I help?"

  She thanks me and smiles when I hand her back the cream.

  I'm sure she doesn't even realize she moved her purse when I got closer.

  But I did.

  Shake it off, Ruth, I tell myself. I'm not the kind of person who sees the bad in everyone; that's my sister, Adisa. I get on the elevator and head back to my floor. When I arrive, I toss Corinne her Twizzlers and walk toward Brittany Bauer's door. Her chart and little Davis's chart sit outside; I grab the baby's to make sure that the pediatrician will be flagged about the potential heart murmur. But when I open the folder, there's a hot-pink Post-it on the paperwork.

  NO AFRICAN AMERICAN PERSONNEL

  TO CARE FOR THIS PATIENT.

  My face floods with heat. Marie is not at the charge nurse's desk; I start to methodically search through the ward until I find her talking to one of the pediatricians in the nursery. "Marie," I say, pasting a smile on my face. "Do you have a minute?"

  She follows me back toward the nurses' station, but I really don't want to have this conversation in public. Instead, I duck into the break room. "Are you kidding me?"

  She doesn't pretend to misunderstand. "Ruth, it's nothing. Think of it the way you'd think of a family's religious preferences dictating patient care."

  "You can't possibly be equating this with a religious preference."

  "It's just a formality. The father is a hothead; this just seemed the smoothest way to get him to calm down before he did something extreme."

  "This isn't extreme?" I ask.

  "Look," Marie says. "If anything, I'm doing you a favor. So you don't have to deal with that guy anymore. Honestly, this isn't about you, Ruth."

  "Really," I say flatly. "How many other African American personnel are on this ward?"

  We both know the answer to that. A big, fat zero.

  I look her square in the eye. "You don't want me to touch that baby?" I say. "Fine. Done."

  Then I slam the door behind me so hard that it rattles.

  --

  ONCE, RELIGION GOT tangled up in my care of a newborn. A Muslim couple came into the hospital to have their baby, and the father explained that he had to be the first person to speak to the newborn. When he told me this, I explained that I would do everything I could to honor his request, but that if there were any complications with the birth, my first priority was to make sure that the baby was saved--which required communication, and meant that silence in the delivery room was not likely or possible.

  I gave the couple some privacy while they discussed this, and finally the father summoned me back. "If there are complications," he told me, "I hope Allah would understand."

  As it turned out, his wife had a textbook delivery. Just before the baby was born, I reminded the pediatrician of the patient request, and the doctor stopped calling the arrival of the head, right shoulder, left, like a football play-by-play. The only sound in the room was the baby's cry. I took the newborn, slippery as a minnow, and placed him in a blanket in his father's arms. The man bent close to the tiny head of his son, and whispered to him in Arabic. Then he placed the baby into his wife's arms, and the room exploded with noise again.

  Sometime later that day, when I came in to check on my two patients, I found them asleep. The father stood over the bassinet, staring at his child as if he didn't quite understand how this had happened. It was a look I saw often on the faces of fathers, for whom pregnancy wasn't real until this very moment. A mother has nine months to get used to sharing the space where her heart is; for a father it comes on sudden, like a storm that changes the landscape forever. "What a beautiful boy you have," I said, and he swallowed. There are just some feelings, I've learned, for which we never invented the right words. I hesitated, then asked what had been on my mind since the delivery. "If it's not rude of me to ask, would you tell me what you whispered to your son?"

  "The adhan," the father explained. "God is great; there is no God but Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah." He looked up at me and smiled. "In Islam, we want the first words a child hears to be a prayer."

  It seemed absolutely fitting, given the miracle that every baby is.

  The difference between the Muslim father's request and the request made by Turk Bauer was like the difference between day and night.

  Between love and hate.

  --

  IT'S A BUSY afternoon, so I don't have time to talk to Corinne about the new patient she's inherited until we are both pulling on our coats and walking to the elevator. "What was that all about?" Corinne asks.

  "Marie took me off the case because I'm Black," I tell her.

  Corinne wrinkles her nose. "That doesn't sound like Marie."

  I turn to her, my hands stilling on the lapels of my coat. "So I'm a liar?"

  Corinne puts her hand on my arm. "Of course not. I'm just sure there's something else going on."

  It's wrong to take out my frustration on Corinne, who has to deal with that awful family now. It's wrong for me to be angry at her, when I'm really angry at Marie. Corinne, she's always been my partner in crime, not my adversary. But I feel like I could talk till I'm blue in the face and she wouldn't really understand what this feels like.

  Maybe I should talk till I'm blue in the face. Maybe then I'd be acceptable to the Bauers.

  "Whatever," I say. "That baby means nothing to me."

  Corinne tilts her head. "You want to grab a glass of wine before we head home?"

  I let my shoulders relax. "I can't. Edison's waiting."

  The elevator dings, and the doors open. It's packed, because it's end of shift. Staring back at me is a sea of blank white faces.

  Normally I don't even thin
k about that. But suddenly, it's all I can see.

  I'm tired of being the only Black nurse on the birthing pavilion.

  I'm tired of pretending that doesn't matter.

  I'm tired.

  "You know what," I say to Corinne. "I think I'm going to just take the stairs."

  --

  WHEN I WAS five, I couldn't blend. Although I'd been reading since age three--the result of my mother's diligent schooling each night when she came home from work--if I came across the word tree I pronounced it "ree." Even my last name, Brooks, became "rooks." Mama went to a bookstore and got a book on consonant blends and tutored me for a year. Then she had me tested for a gifted program, and instead of going to school in Harlem--where we lived--my sister and I rode the bus with her for an hour and a half every morning to a public school on the Upper West Side with a mostly Jewish student population. She'd drop me off at my classroom door, and then she'd take the subway to work at the Hallowells'.

  My sister, Rachel, was not the student I was, though, and the bus trip was draining for all of us. So for second grade, we moved back to our old school in Harlem. I spent a year being dulled at all my bright edges, which devastated Mama. When she told her boss, Ms. Mina got me an interview at Dalton. It was the private school her daughter, Christina, attended, and they were looking for diversity. I received a full scholarship, stayed at the top of my class, received prizes at every assembly, and worked like mad to reward my mama's faith in me. While Rachel made friends with kids in our neighborhood, I knew no one. I didn't really fit in at Dalton, and I definitely didn't fit in in Harlem. As it turned out, I was a straight-A student who still couldn't blend.

  There were a few students who invited me to their houses--girls who said things like "You don't talk like you're Black!" or "I don't think of you that way!" Of course, none of those girls ever came to visit me in Harlem. There was always a conflicting dance class, a family commitment, too much homework. Sometimes I imagined them, with their silky blond hair and braces, walking past the check casher on the corner of the street where I lived. It was like picturing a polar bear in the tropics, and I never let myself think on it long enough to wonder if that was how they saw me, at Dalton.

  When I got into Cornell, and many others from my school didn't, I couldn't help but hear the whispers. It's because she's Black. Never mind that I had a 3.87 average, that I'd done well on my SATs. Never mind that I could not afford to go to Cornell, and would instead be taking the full ride offered me by SUNY Plattsburgh. "Baby," my mama said, "it's not easy for a Black girl to want. You have to show them you're not a Black girl. You're Ruth Brooks." She would squeeze my hand. "You are going to get everything good that's coming to you--not because you beg for it, and not because of what color you are. Because you deserve it."

  I know I wouldn't have become a nurse if my mama hadn't worked so hard to put me smack in the middle of the path of a good education. I also know that I decided long ago to try to circumvent some of the problems I had, when it came to my own child. So when Edison was two, my husband and I made the choice to move to a white neighborhood with better schools, even though that meant we would be one of the only families of color in the area. We left our apartment near the railroad tracks in New Haven, and after having multiple listings "disappear" when the realtor found out what we looked like, we finally found a tiny place in the more affluent community of East End. I enrolled Edison in a preschool there, so that he started at the same time as all the other kids, and no one could see him as an outsider. He was one of them, from the start. When he wanted to have his friends over for a sleepover, no parent could say it was too dangerous an area for their kid to visit. It was, after all, their neighborhood, too.

  And it worked. My, how it worked. It took me advocating for him at first--making sure that he had teachers who noticed his intelligence as well as his skin color--but as a result, Edison is in the top three of his class. He's a National Merit Scholar. He is going to college and he will be anything he wants to be.

  I've spent my life making sure of it.

  When I get home from work, Edison is doing his homework at the kitchen table. "Hey, baby," I say, leaning down to kiss the top of his head. I can only do that now when he's seated. I still remember the moment I realized he was taller than me; how strange it felt to reach my arms up instead of down, to know that someone I'd been supporting his whole life was in a position to support me.

  He doesn't glance up. "How was work?"

  I paste a smile on my face. "You know. Same old."

  I shrug off my coat, pick up Edison's jacket from where it's been slung on the back of the couch, and hang them both in the closet. "I'm not running a cleaning service here--"

  "Then leave it where it was!" Edison explodes. "Why does everything have to be my fault?" He shoves away from the table so fast that he nearly knocks over his chair. Leaving his computer and his open notebook behind, he storms out of the kitchen. I hear the door of his bedroom slam.

  This is not my boy. My boy is the one who carries groceries up three flights of stairs for old Mrs. Laska, without her even having to ask. My boy is the one who always holds open the door for a lady, who says please and thank you, who still keeps in his nightstand every birthday card I've ever written him.

  Sometimes a new mother turns to me, a shrieking infant in her arms, and asks me how she's supposed to know what her baby needs. In a lot of ways, having a teenager isn't all that different from having a newborn. You learn to read the reactions, because they're incapable of saying exactly what it is that's causing pain.

  So although all I want to do is go into Edison's room and gather him up close and rock him back and forth the way I used to when he was little and hurting, I take a deep breath and go into the kitchen instead. Edison has left me dinner, a plate covered with foil. He can make exactly three dishes: macaroni and cheese, fried eggs, and Sloppy Joes. The rest of the week he heats up casseroles I make on my days off. Tonight's is an enchilada pie, but Edison's also cooked up some peas, because I taught him years ago a plate's not a meal unless there's more than one color on it.

  I pour myself some wine from a bottle I got from Marie last Christmas. It tastes sour, but I force myself to sip it until I can feel the knots in my shoulders relax, until I can close my eyes and not see Turk Bauer's face.

  After ten minutes pass, I knock softly on the door of Edison's room. It's been his since he was thirteen; I sleep on the pullout couch in the living room. I turn the knob and find him lying on his bed, his arms behind his head. With his T-shirt stretched over his shoulders and his chin tilted up, I see so much of his daddy in him that for a moment, I feel like I've fallen through time.

  I sit down beside him on the mattress. "Are we gonna talk about it, or are we gonna pretend nothing's wrong?" I ask.

  Edison's mouth twists. "Do I really get a choice?"

  "No," I say, smiling a little. "Is this about the calculus test?"

  He frowns. "The calc test? That was no big deal; I got a ninety-six. It's just that I got into it with Bryce today."

  Bryce has been Edison's closest friend since fifth grade. His mother is a family court judge and his father is a Yale classics professor. In their living room is a glass case, like the kind you'd find at a museum, housing a bona fide Grecian urn. They've taken Edison on vacation to Gstaad and Santorini.

  It feels good to have Edison hand me this burden, to wallow in someone else's difficulties for a while. This is what's so upsetting to me about the incident at the hospital: I'm known as the fixer, the one who figures out a solution. I'm not the problem. I'm never the problem.

  "I'm sure it'll blow over," I tell Edison, patting his arm. "You two are like brothers."

  He rolls onto his side and pulls the pillow over his head.

  "Hey," I say. "Hey." I tug at the pillow and realize that there's one single streak, left by a tear, darkening the skin of his temple. "Baby," I murmur. "What happened?"

  "I told him I was going to ask Whitney to homecomin
g."

  "Whitney..." I repeat, trying to place the girl from the tangle of Edison's friends.

  "Bryce's sister," he says.

  I have a brief flash of a girl with strawberry-blond braids I met years ago when picking Edison up from a playdate. "The chubby one with braces?"

  "Yeah. She doesn't have braces anymore. And she's definitely not chubby. She's got..." Edison's eyes soften, and I imagine what my son is seeing.

  "You don't have to finish that sentence," I say quickly.

  "Well, she's amazing. She's a sophomore now. I mean, I've known her forever, but lately when I look at her it's not just as Bryce's little sister, you know? I had this whole thing planned, where one of my buddies would be waiting outside her classroom after each period, holding a note. The first note was going to say WILL. The second was going to say YOU. Then GO, TO, HOMECOMING, and WITH. And then at the end of school, I'd be waiting with the ME sign, so she'd finally know who was asking."

  "This is a thing now?" I interrupt. "You don't just ask a girl to the homecoming dance...you have to produce a whole Broadway event to make it happen?"

  "What? Mama, that's not the point. The point is that I asked Bryce to be the one who brought her the HOMECOMING note and he freaked out."

  I draw in my breath. "Well," I say, carefully picking through my words, "it's sometimes hard for a guy to see his little sister as anyone's potential girlfriend, no matter how close he is to the person who wants to date her."

  Edison rolls his eyes. "That's not it."

  "Bryce may just need time to get used to the idea. Maybe he was surprised that you'd think of his sister, you know, that way. Because you are like family."

  "The problem is...I'm not." My son sits up, his long legs dangling over the edge of the bed. "Bryce laughed. He said, 'Dude. It's one thing for us to hang out. But you and Whit? My parents would shit a brick.' " His gaze slides away. "Sorry about the language."

  "That's okay, baby," I said. "Go on."

  "So I asked him why. It didn't make any sense to me. I mean, I've been to Greece with his family. And he said, 'No offense, but my parents would not be cool with my sister dating a Black guy.' Like it's okay to have a Black friend who comes on family vacations but it's not okay for that friend to get involved with your daughter."