* * *
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TATER TOTS DAY IN the hospital cafeteria, and I had just scooped a full plate and gone out to find a seat. Reese was at a table eating a sad deli sandwich alone, no tater tots. When I went to sit down next to him, pushing the tray of fried goodness into the table middle for both of us to share, he didn’t greet me like usual but started talking as if I’d been sitting there all along.
Yesterday, he had an epiphany, he said.
About? I asked.
About recognizing some hard truths with respect to his situation. The first being that he didn’t belong at this hospital anymore, or any hospital; the second, more severe—he asked if I was ready for it and I said I would brace myself—the second being that he’s never belonged in medicine to begin with. In hindsight, what was he really doing with his life? All these years trying to fit himself into a mold when maybe he was never meant to fit a mold, but the reverse.
I asked what was the reverse.
That the mold was meant to fit him. That he was the mold.
You’re the mold, I said. Which, when said aloud, didn’t sound quite right and only reminded me of fungi.
I asked if this had anything to do with my raise.
No way, he said. Haven’t thought about that in ages. The deli meat in his sandwich drooped, the lettuce was already soggy.
I said he would get his own raise soon; I could see it coming around the corner.
But from here on out, they’ll give them all to you, he replied. That’s how it works. Once they identify someone, that person reaps all the rewards. When it comes down to it, Joan, you truly belong in this profession, whereas I’m not so sure I ever did. Compared with you, I’ll never be good enough. A terrible feeling, being average or below. I’m sure you’ve never experienced it, so you have no idea what I’m going through, but it’s a gutted feeling right here.
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.
* * *
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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.