Ambulance Girl

by Jane Stern

  I know this driveway; I have driven it during the day, forward, in my Subaru. It is serpentine and narrow. “You have to be kidding,” I say to him.

  “You can do it,” he says, and I see a flicker in his eyes that explains to me why firemen are a breed apart from the rest of us. He has absolutely no fear. He sees no reason why I, who can’t tell right from left, shouldn’t back up a half-mile-long driveway with ruts on either side in the dark in an immense fire truck. I breathe in his courage. I relax my hands and look at the mirrors on each side of the truck. Everything is backward, everything looks closer or farther than it really is. I slip the gears into reverse and start to hit the gas pedal. I can hardly see the road and the ditches are obscured by shadows. I look at Jimmy, who looks calm and amused. “C’mon,” he says, “it’s easy.”

  I have a choice. I can sit in the cab next to this handsome fireman and tell him the long sad story of my life, all the childhood abuse I have suffered, my recurring depressions, the strength of my Prozac prescription, all my fears and anxieties, or I can just do it. I choose the latter. I clear my mind of its racing thoughts; I exist only in this moment. I have no history at all. It is up to me to stay put or go forward (or in this case backward) and before I can overthink what to do and the hundred reasons why I can’t, I am doing it. Backing up the driveway at a fast clip, spinning the steering wheel, watching how I am able to keep the giant tires out of the ruts on either side of the unfinished driveway.

  “Good job!!!” Jimmy says. I go at a quick pace down the driveway. I know my way back to the firehouse. Jimmy jumps out when we get there and guides me and the truck back into the bay.

  “Thanks,” I say to him, as we close the bay door and head for our cars.

  “That was good,” Jimmy says. I smile at him. I smile my big smile, which shows the crack on my front tooth at the gum line that I am self-conscious about. I smell sweaty, but that’s okay too. I keep smiling all the way home. I dream about the fire truck that night, I dream that I am at the wheel and that Jimmy Mecozzi and I are driving eighty miles an hour through the wheat fields of Nebraska. It is flat as a plate and we are the only vehicle on the road.

  I wake up having never felt so purely happy. When the state instructor shows up a month later to give the 2Q test, Bernice passes. I do not show up for the test. I don’t know why I chose to stay home, but I think I felt that my ability to drive the fire truck that night was like a fairy tale; that in the bright plebeian light of day, the magic would be gone, and I would again not know my right from my left. I do not want to see my fairy coach turn into a pumpkin.

  20

  It has been more than two years since I became an EMT at Georgetown. I have been there long enough to have to recertify, so I must take refresher courses in everything I know, hit the books again, show instructors that I can use the defibrillator correctly, do CPR, insert an oral airway correctly. The recertification class is much more homey than the class I originally took in New Canaan. There are about eight of us, and we are all EMTs already, so we are treated with respect by paramedic Harry Downs, who teaches the class. It is fun. Our chief, Mike Heibeck, and our assistant chief, his brother Marty, are in the class, as is Charlie Pfhal, whom I have come to adore. It is hard for me to remember how scared I was of him when he first showed me the ambulance; now when we see each other we give each other a big hug. Dot is there, too. It feels like old times when she comes in to each class slightly late, throws her backpack down on the desk, and scowls at everyone. I realize how much a part of it all she is.

  In recert class, which runs about four hours a night over the course of eight weeks, we take a break in the middle of the class. Someone runs out for pizzas or a six-foot hero sandwich from the local grocery store. We gobble it down with cans of Pepsi from the soda machine.

  I like being at the firehouse for recert class; I feel truly safe here. I like that things stay the same, that life is logical and predictable. The meetings and drills happen on schedule. The big TV in the great room is still tuned to NASCAR races, notices for parades we can march in are posted on the bulletin board. Even the things that change happen slowly, at a pace I can digest.

  We get a new ambulance. It is a state-of-the art, glorious vehicle. We meet as a committee to choose all the details. The guys choose the chassis and engine and the girls choose the color scheme. It’s a sexist cliché, but that is how we do it. Bernice and I have our hearts set on a soothing blue interior. Bernice wants to add glue-on glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling so the patients will have something nice to look at.

  Some people find the monthly meetings and drills boring. I adore them. It is what my family never did: sit down together and talk about things, even argue safely (the firehouse president bangs his gavel if things get out of hand). Everything from a new dishwasher to painting the stairwell is debated and discussed. People get hot under the collar but it still seems safe. The chief, the president, and the firehouse secretary, who all sit at the big table in the front of the room, are in control. I can relax here.

  I love the meetings. I love standing at attention and saying the Pledge of Allegiance. I love hearing the minutes of the last meeting. I love how the secretary, Greg Zap, reads the correspondence at the end of the meetings, notes and letters from people in Georgetown who thank us for our help. Most people outside the firehouse don’t understand how meaningful these notes are to us.

  After the meeting I follow the crowd back to the TV room, where I join in the ritual of eating hard-boiled eggs, M&M’s, and cookies. I look around and feel a great swell of comfort wash over me. Like Ralph Cramden at his Raccoon Lodge, this is my special place.

  Charlie Pfhal walks toward me. He often comes over to talk after a meeting; sometimes he asks me for a recipe for his wife, to whom he has been married for fifty years. He had been in an officers’ meeting that took place before the general monthly meeting. “Young lady,” he says (this is what he calls me), “we were wondering if you would take over the role of firehouse secretary when Greg Zap’s term is over.”

  I am agog. The role of secretary means that at the monthly meetings I get to sit at the big table with the top three, my name on the list of people in command not far below those of the chief and the president.

  “Yes, absolutely,” I stammer, thinking maybe I have heard him wrong.

  But I haven’t, and over the next month I am shown the file cabinet where the monthly meeting minutes go back decades. The original ones are old and yellowed with age, handwritten and to the point. I plunge my hand in and bring out 1949. I see Eddie’s name, as a member of a “card committee.” Eddie is the man who stopped coming to the meetings last year when he couldn’t smoke his cigar in the firehouse anymore. There is an accounting of $2.81 cents paid to Heibeck’s Garage, a memo that a motion was made and seconded to buy two “books of chances” from the Riverside Fire Department, someone gave a donation of $10.00 to the ambulance, and a motion was made to buy a wheelchair for the firehouse, as well as rent a tank of oxygen at a cost of $1.00 per year.

  There have only been five firehouse secretaries since the firehouse began. Oddly enough, one of them—a retired member who has since moved away—is the man who built and sold the house Michael and I live in now, and Charlie Pfhal did all the interior painting and wall-papering in our house back in the 1950s.

  It is finally time for me to take over as secretary. I am given a special set of keys that opens the chief’s office door (where the secretary’s file cabinet is kept), a special license plate for the front of my car (ahhh, bliss), and an attaché case that, like my front license plate, has a thick sign that says SECRETARY, FIRE DEPT., GEORGETOWN, CT. screwed onto its side. The case is a vintage American Tourister, pebbly black with a red interior, and looks like it is from the early 1960s. Inside the case is a mix of wonderful things, blank greeting cards for “Get Well” or “Sympathy,” meeting minutes, financial reports, and manila envelopes filled with names and phone numbers so I can call or send fruit baskets to
members who are sick.

  Greg Zap walks over to me, and in a heartfelt way hands me the briefcase. We smile at each other because it seems sort of corny but we both know it is an important moment. He is handing me the history of the Georgetown Fire Company from its inception. I will be the first woman secretary. I open the briefcase when I get home. Greg has left me a gift inside. Three inexpensive Evermore cigars, made in Connecticut, in a small white cigar box. These are what he smokes. I never smoke them but I keep the box of cigars in the briefcase forever. I am now “one of the boys.” Along with the cigars comes a gift from Tom Pasiuk, a very quiet man who has been a firehouse member for over twenty-five years. “My friend made this and I thought you would like it,” he says, and hands me a pair of small wooden pinchers. I have absolutely no idea what they do. “I figured a lady like you would need toast tongs,” he says shyly. I imagine myself in his eyes being like Mrs. Toplofty, a character in the old Emily Post etiquette books, who always knew the correct fork to use. The toast tongs go in the briefcase with the cigars.

  The first monthly meeting comes, and there is an empty chair for me at the big table in the front of the room. The chief nods at me, the president bangs his gavel, and we all stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. I place my right hand on my heart and face the flag; “. . . one nation, under God, indivisible...” I say along with the rest. Indivisible. I think of what that word means: united, one of a group of many, not alone. When I was a kid I thought the word was invisible, which is how I felt most of the time. I sit down at the front table and thirty-two people look at me. They see me, I am real, I am here, and I am part of something, at last.

  ambulance girl

  Jane Stern

  Questions for discussion:

  Stern seems to find the experience of anonymity refreshing, even euphoric. Of her first day in a hospital emergency room, she writes, “I am just a spare pair of hands that day. I have no name, no authority…I am hooked.” Similarly, her strategy for getting through the terrifying experience of driving a fire truck for the first time is to tell herself, “I exist only in this moment. I have no history at all.” Why is this displacement of self so attractive to her? Do you see it as a form of denial or as a healthy—perhaps even necessary—release from self-absorption?

  Stern’s encounter with her “first dead guy” drives home the inevitability of unanswerable questions in life. She wants to know why the man’s brother didn’t notice he was blue, why the brother suffers from a grotesque facial deformity, why the brother failed to call 911 earlier in the day. How does she deal with these questions? Do we identify with her reactions?

  Why does Stern call duct tape “the operative semantic symbol of the dividing line between Fairfield County snooty and Fairfield County down-to-earth”? How does the disparity between New Canaan—where Stern takes her EMT training and “where the ambulance cot blankets look like the monogrammed coverings of show horses”—and Georgetown mirror the disparity between Stern’s pre-EMT and post-EMT lives? How do Stern’s friends react to her sudden decision to become an EMT?

  How does Stern’s induction into the EMT world alter her perception of her hometown? Why does she note that “now when I stop at the service station my eyes are cast downward with humility”?

  Stern’s moment of reckoning comes on a grounded airplane, where she is trapped for six hours with no food, no fresh air, and a clogged toilet. Discuss her statement, “I died the thousand deaths of a coward before the plane finally took off.” What allows her to recall in retrospect the one moment on the plane when she “didn’t feel like the whole world was collapsing”? How do you think Stern would react to being trapped for six hours on a grounded plane today?

  The class about head injuries throws Stern completely off balance. What painful family memories does the session dredge up, and why does she remind herself, “It is important to know that there will not be anyone waiting under the window to kill me”? What simple gesture snaps her back to reality? Why?

  As she volunteers at the low-tech, profoundly not scary Georgetown Haunted House on Halloween, Stern contemplates a lifetime of fear. She writes, “Knowledge replaces terror for me, and instead of being afraid I can now safely watch one of the Heibeck brothers’ young sons lying on a table, covered with raw chicken livers, screaming as if he is having live surgery performed on him.” In what way does this sum up the theme of Stern’s memoir?

  When John, a beloved father figure to Stern and her husband, Michael, emerges from a two-week coma, he is brain damaged, partly paralyzed, and has lost all memory of his rich life. Stern is devastated to realize that, in certain circumstances, a successful EMT “save” is perhaps no more than a crass intervention in what might be a timely death. How does this realization affect her? How does it change the EMT work she performs in the following weeks?

  about the author

  JANE STERN has coauthored thirty books about American culture and food with her husband, Michael Stern. Their books have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. She also coauthors a monthly column for Gourmet magazine, which has won several James Beard Awards for writing. Jane Stern lives in Redding, Connecticut, with Michael, two horses, one dog, and one parrot.

  By Jane and Michael Stern

  AMAZING AMERICA

  AMERICAN GOURMET

  CHILI NATION

  DOG EAT DOG

  EAT YOUR WAY ACROSS THE U.S.A.

  THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BAD TASTE

  ELVIS WORLD

  HAPPY TRAILS

  JANE & MICHAEL STERN’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POP CULTURE

  REAL AMERICAN FOOD

  ROADFOOD

  SIXTIES PEOPLE

  SQUARE MEALS

  TRUCKER

  TWO PUPPIES

  WAY OUT WEST

  Some of the names, locations, and details of events in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of persons involved.

  Copyright © 2003 by Jane Stern

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Three Rivers Press, New York, New York.

  Member of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. www.crownpublishing.com

  THREE RIVERS PRESS is a trademark and the Three Rivers Press colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stern, Jane.

  Ambulance girl: how I saved myself by becoming an EMT / by Jane

  Stern.

  p. cm.

  1. Stern, Jane. 2. Emergency medical technicians—Connecticut—

  Biography. I. Title.

  RA645.6.C8 S747 2003

  616.02’5’092—dc21

  2002014762

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-41977-4

  v3.0