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Authors: Jane Stern
Tags: Fiction
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theater on East Eighty-sixth Street he clicked his tongue and hummed and cracked his knuckles and made weird ticlike facial movements. I could see the unevenness of his skull illuminated by the movie screen; his forehead caved in slightly and then came sharply out, where the plate must have been. For years I dreamed about Frankenstein’s monster chasing me. I especially hated the big ragged stitches on his head. I always went to my mother for comfort after a bad dream, never my father.
My father could be charming but was unable to hold a job. His unpredictable rages would sever ties as soon as he blasted his boss wherever he was working. For a few years he stayed home, painted flowers and sailboats on canvas as a hobby, and waxed and rewaxed the family car. My mother supported the family selling handbags at a posh shop on Madison Avenue and then became a dental hygienist. When I was eight my mother packed some suitcases and ran away with me when my father was out walking our dog. We moved into a brownstone apartment thirty blocks uptown from where we had lived as a family. That summer my mother left me with our housekeeper and took a Greyhound bus to Juárez, Mexico, and got a divorce against my father’s wishes. My father never forgave her, and as revenge he threatened to kill us both.
This is when my phobias started. I was afraid to leave the house—with good reason, I realize now. My father never actually attempted the murder, but he sat for hours at a time under the window of the brownstone where my mother and I lived. I could see him peering up at the window with binoculars. I kept waiting for the sound of heavy monsterlike footsteps on the stairs. Through the walls I could hear his hard breath.
I am finding myself growing more and more anxious as Frank lectures to us and shows us pictures of what a skull looks like after it has been whacked with a baseball bat and a steel pipe. Frank calls the brain the Big Cheese, his version of Harry’s Big Kahuna nervous system. We are told not to be impressed by the massive bleeding that comes from skull lacerations, but to pay attention to assessing any visible bone fragments of the skull.
Frank teaches us how to use the Glasgow Coma Scale to gauge a person’s level of awareness. He does not explain why it is called the Glasgow scale. I imagine unconscious Scottish people lying motionless on the cobblestone streets.
Frank is showing a picture of someone with dark circles under the eyes—the distinctive raccoon eyes of a neurological injury. The picture looks like me when I wake up in the morning after forgetting to take off my eye makeup. “The patient will present with the possibility of blurred vision, double vision, tunnel vision, ringing in ears, dizziness, loss of equilibrium, nausea, feeling that their hands are burning.” I feel a menopausal hot flash starting, I am burning up. Dot is busy taking notes. I suddenly feel very cold and lonely.
I think about my father. He was born in New York City in 1899, when ambulances were still horse drawn. I imagine a crowd of people pulling him out from beneath the trolley and throwing him in the back of a wooden-framed coach. I wonder what hospital they went to and who the surgeon was. Was it a miracle that he lived? They didn’t have EMTs back then, they had undertakers who would take you to the hospital. If you didn’t survive the trip, your body went back with them to the funeral parlor.
I sneak a Valium out of my purse and swallow it dry. I make a note on the margin of my notebook to talk to Tom Knox about my father’s head injury. I watch Dot take her left-handed notes. I reach out and touch the end of her jacket, which snaps me back to reality at the feel of it. Remembering that I am no longer a child is soothing, as is the reality that I have a husband like Michael to go home to. It is important to know that there will not be anyone waiting under the window to kill me.
6
May 13. That is the date of the national
My father could be charming but was unable to hold a job. His unpredictable rages would sever ties as soon as he blasted his boss wherever he was working. For a few years he stayed home, painted flowers and sailboats on canvas as a hobby, and waxed and rewaxed the family car. My mother supported the family selling handbags at a posh shop on Madison Avenue and then became a dental hygienist. When I was eight my mother packed some suitcases and ran away with me when my father was out walking our dog. We moved into a brownstone apartment thirty blocks uptown from where we had lived as a family. That summer my mother left me with our housekeeper and took a Greyhound bus to Juárez, Mexico, and got a divorce against my father’s wishes. My father never forgave her, and as revenge he threatened to kill us both.
This is when my phobias started. I was afraid to leave the house—with good reason, I realize now. My father never actually attempted the murder, but he sat for hours at a time under the window of the brownstone where my mother and I lived. I could see him peering up at the window with binoculars. I kept waiting for the sound of heavy monsterlike footsteps on the stairs. Through the walls I could hear his hard breath.
I am finding myself growing more and more anxious as Frank lectures to us and shows us pictures of what a skull looks like after it has been whacked with a baseball bat and a steel pipe. Frank calls the brain the Big Cheese, his version of Harry’s Big Kahuna nervous system. We are told not to be impressed by the massive bleeding that comes from skull lacerations, but to pay attention to assessing any visible bone fragments of the skull.
Frank teaches us how to use the Glasgow Coma Scale to gauge a person’s level of awareness. He does not explain why it is called the Glasgow scale. I imagine unconscious Scottish people lying motionless on the cobblestone streets.
Frank is showing a picture of someone with dark circles under the eyes—the distinctive raccoon eyes of a neurological injury. The picture looks like me when I wake up in the morning after forgetting to take off my eye makeup. “The patient will present with the possibility of blurred vision, double vision, tunnel vision, ringing in ears, dizziness, loss of equilibrium, nausea, feeling that their hands are burning.” I feel a menopausal hot flash starting, I am burning up. Dot is busy taking notes. I suddenly feel very cold and lonely.
I think about my father. He was born in New York City in 1899, when ambulances were still horse drawn. I imagine a crowd of people pulling him out from beneath the trolley and throwing him in the back of a wooden-framed coach. I wonder what hospital they went to and who the surgeon was. Was it a miracle that he lived? They didn’t have EMTs back then, they had undertakers who would take you to the hospital. If you didn’t survive the trip, your body went back with them to the funeral parlor.
I sneak a Valium out of my purse and swallow it dry. I make a note on the margin of my notebook to talk to Tom Knox about my father’s head injury. I watch Dot take her left-handed notes. I reach out and touch the end of her jacket, which snaps me back to reality at the feel of it. Remembering that I am no longer a child is soothing, as is the reality that I have a husband like Michael to go home to. It is important to know that there will not be anyone waiting under the window to kill me.
6
May 13. That is the date of the national
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