Half the Kingdom

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Authors: Lore Segal
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the mom’s hat with a big, floppy white brim, and he said, ‘On your feet, everybody.’ He didn’t mean me, of course, but I tagged along behind the little boy, Charley. He didn’t want to go and he was crying.”
    The two women listened with horror to what kept bubbling out of their brother’s one-sided mouth. Samson said, “They go down for the day—towels, umbrella, big ball,sandwiches. I’d forgotten my sun lotion. When we were kids, didn’t I always get burned? I knew I should turn over, I kept thinking I was going to turn over onto my stomach …”
    “Is his speech going to come back?” Deborah asked the woman with the—the hijab is what they called it.
    “We’re surprised at the degree of language he has already recovered. Understanding him is a sort of trick, like finding the angle from which you can make out the figures in a holograph.”
    Sammy said, “When we were kids, did everybody squeal when they hit the water? I liked Joey and Stacey. They said ‘Sorry!’ for dripping on me when they came running out. They dripped on Charley purposely and made him cry.”
    “Can you find a vase for these?” Shirley thrust her bunch of multicolored flowers at the hijab, who would not take them from her.
    “Sorry, we can’t do flowers in the ER. I’m sorry.”
    “How do you mean you can’t ‘do’ flowers?”
    “Shirley, godsake,” Deb said, “She’s the doctor !”
    Here’s where Shirley registered the stethoscope around the neck of the white coat, but was not about to admit that she was embarrassed. “So?” she said, “Can’t she just hand them to a nurse?”
    “Since when do you ask doctors to do your flowers?” Deb pressed on. There are times when we go on talking as if certain other persons in the room with us will oblige us by not hearing or not understanding that we’re arguing about them.
    “Whatever,” Shirley had learned from her grandchildren to say.
    Samson said, “When Joey and Stacey went up the beach for ice cream they didn’t wait for Charley and he cried and ran after them. Remember Stewy’s little legs running? I meant to turn my head to watch Charley, but it didn’t turn.”
    The hijab, so unpleasantly associated in Shirley’s mind with her faux pas about the flowers, seemed not to be going to leave. She stood at the foot of Sammy’s gurney. She was writing on his chart. She said, “His vitals are good.”
    “So are you his doctor?” Shirley asked her.
    “I’m his doctor in the ER. We’re finding Mr. Gorewitz a bed in our Senior Center, for rehab.”
    “Rehab? Oh, yes, I see. How long is he going to be in rehab?”
    “Several weeks for sure. His vitals, as I say, are good but he may need to relearn to walk, and some personal skills. He’ll get speech therapy.” To the patient she said, “I’ll be looking in on you. Enjoy your visitors.”
    When she was gone, Shirley said to Deb, “What do you hope to gain by being rude to Samson’s doctors?”
    “Doc tors ? How many doctors have I been rude to?”
    “You would never ask a regular doctor to do your flowers.”
    Samson said, “She’s Jewish,” and they said, “Okay! It’s okay, sweetheart!” and each took a hand and held it.

    “What are you reading?” Phyllis from the second floor asked her granddaughter, who had been dropped off to spend the afternoon.
    “A story,” said the little girl.
    Phyllis told her to take her book and sit at Bethy’s desk. Bethy had gone down to the ER to interview Ida Farkasz. “What’s the story all about?”
    The granddaughter was reading a story about a girl who is so beautiful that the sun, which has seen everything, is amazed every time it shines into her face. The stepmother of the girl in the story is a witch who is mean and cruel to the girl. And where is the girl’s father? He is gone away on business; he is gone hunting; he is, at any rate, away, and the girl runs away. She comes to a great, dark forest. When night falls she curls up in a hollow

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