Buffalo Gal

by Laura Pedersen

  For one thing, my mother never softened the prognosis by saying something wouldn’t hurt when indeed it would, as the school nurse often did. She told it like it was, and so we trusted her. If Mom said, “This is really going to sting for a minute,” we figured it was going to hurt less than whatever the pediatrician with the hypodermic needles and big clunky hands had up the sleeve of his white lab coat. Also, her neighborhood clinic admitted unaccompanied minors, so my friends didn’t have to report injuries to their parents, who would otherwise force them inside to “rest quietly” or worse, insist on knowing “who did it.”

  As long as we didn’t need a doctor, her don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy afforded a welcome measure of nurse-patient privacy. Kids showed up at the door with black eyes, bloodied elbows, cold sores, and ingrown toenails as if our home was the local emergency room. And my mother welcomed these volunteer patients. Even after friends grew up and moved away, they’d still phone in their symptoms from college dorm rooms across the country, and she’d provide long-distance diagnoses.

  I was thrilled when my mother returned to school. She brought home fun things to play with, like a dissecting kit and a stethoscope through which I could listen to the dog digest her food. However, we all had to serve our turn as laboratory animals. The cat had his abscess cleaned and rebandaged. Dad’s blood pressure was checked. And late one night, I awoke thinking there was a strangler in my room, which was of course my mother with one ice-cold hand around my neck registering the pulse in my carotid artery and the other holding a flashlight trained on her nurse’s watch. After I screamed and leapt from the bed, she dutifully scrawled something in her notebook and said, “I didn’t want to wake you.”

  I complained, “You scared the heck out of me.”

  She said, “Your pulse is normal, and that’s the main thing.”

  Friends thought it odd that, when they came over to play, my mother practiced her craft in the kitchen by giving injections to an orange or studying a sheep’s brain. By the time she was student nursing, our house was like an episode of The Addams Family. If kids stared for any length of time, she’d eventually look up, hungrily eye their healthy young bodies, and ask, “Should we prick your finger and find out your blood type?”

  When my mother began her math classes, I’d already passed algebra and was regularly awoken at one in the morning for assistance. I asked why she didn’t just look up the answers in the back of her book. I mean, that was the whole point of being in college instead of junior high school—they gave you the solutions. Child of the forties that Mom is, she insisted it was cheating. So I’d have a swig of Orange Crush, plug in the solution, work the problem backward, show her how to do it, and then crawl back into bed.

  Mom was completely honest. She wouldn’t bluff in poker because she felt it was too much like lying. She wouldn’t so much as forge a signature, even if the person had given his permission. There was only one law she broke. After she’d lived in our neighborhood twenty years, a traffic light was installed at the end of the street. Mom didn’t obey it because she’d successfully navigated the intersection so long without one that she felt certain it was there for others. Or that she was somehow operating under a grandfather clause, or else had squatter rights, because she ran that light every single day and twice on Sundays.

  Had my mother gotten an earlier start on college she could easily

  have been a doctor. There’s something bold and confident about her demeanor that, no matter what the situation, clearly states: “I’m in charge and you’re not.” Over the years I’ve noticed that in a genuine medical emergency this is the kind of firm leadership most patients are seeking.

  For instance, one Sunday my mother was sitting in church during a naming ceremony when the father just barely managed to hand off the infant to his wife like a football before passing out. The minister asked if there was a doctor in the sanctuary. My mother and a dentist simultaneously accepted the call to the altar. The dentist deferred to her. One could make a case that this is only as it should be since he fills cavities for a living and she was by this time a registered nurse. However, my mother is simply the kind of person that one defers to in a medical emergency. She instructed the dentist to go and call 9-1-1. Then she adroitly went into her routine—airway, breathing, circulation—and determined that no on-site heroics were necessary.

  The paramedics arrived moments later, and she reported her findings as they hustled the man off into the ambulance with a relative. My mother turned to the wife, who was still standing at the altar, slack-jawed and clutching her child. “Did your husband clean the oven this morning?”

  The distraught wife, now wide-eyed at this bit of ESP, said, “Yes, how did you know? We’re having twenty for brunch.”

  My mother just bobbed her head in acknowledgment and suggested, “Next time, open a window.” Another case solved.

  Yet she isn’t always so decisive. Once I arrived home from camp with a painful lump the size of a chestnut on the top of my head. She replied matter-of-factly that it was either a horsefly bite (I’m allergic) or else a brain tumor. I was eleven. I vividly recall being terrified that I was going to die from a brain tumor. In the meantime, she didn’t appear to give more or less weight to either possibility. She simply said that if it went away in a few days then we could be sure it was a bite. It did. It was the same when someone had a stomachache. She’d say it could be something the person ate or else acute appendicitis, in which case, without an emergency appendectomy, they’d die. Even with me, her own child, her only child, Mom has the capacity for a certain detached professionalism—never ruling anything out just because it happens to be the most unpleasant outcome.

  Like an evangelist takes his faith to heart, my mother takes her medicine seriously. And it’s accurate to say that over the years she’s been an aggressive community healthcare provider. Mom has no qualms about sweeping a ballroom, bathroom, courtroom, or any other public space for illegal smokers and summarily escorting them from the premises, not caring a whit if they’re big-shot executives or high-ranking politicians. And they all go meekly and quietly because they mistake her self-assurance to mean that she’s in charge, either operating as an undercover security guard or head of the Red Cross. Or the KGB. Lenin,

  Stalin, Ellen. And though it’s not yet illegal to smoke while driving, Mom is prepared for the day when it is. She can determine when the people in the car in front of her are puffing, because the smoke goes out their window and in through her vent, and she changes lanes as soon as possible.

  Embarrassment would be an understatement for what I’ve occasionally experienced while trailing along in the flotsam and jetsam of her bandages and defibrillators. My mother can spring into nursing action at a moment’s notice, without any warning, because her medical radar is constantly operating. Even when it appears that she’s working as a greeter at church or serving food at a picnic, in actuality she’s surveying everyone’s physical and mental health. After someone passes by she’ll lean over and whisper, “Apparently he forgot to take his lithium this morning” or “That entire family is hearing voices, and she could go into group therapy all by herself.” Before we arrive at a party, Mom will enthusiastically say, “Stay close and I’ll introduce you to an

  undiagnosed borderline personality disorder,” as if we’re embarking on an African safari.

  But that’s nothing compared to her penchant for tackling potential patients. When one elderly parishioner arrived at church with a few bruises on her arms and face, my mother immediately insisted upon knowing what had happened. The woman, who’s been in her seventies as long as anyone can remember, lived on her own and explained that she’d taken a fall but had since recovered. Little did this woman realize that she was playing right into my mother’s blood-pressure cuff—because Mom already had her mental slide rule out and was calculating when each bruise occurred by how it looked, and she had already determined that there’d been more than one fall, possibly three or four. (Don’t try
to tell my mother that you cut yourself on a Saturday when you did it on a Wednesday, because that wound speaks to her the way elephant dung talks to a jungle tracker.)

  Mom abandoned her post in the foyer and hunted the woman down in order to read the elusive patient her medical rights: “As a healthcare professional, I must insist by law on knowing the nature and cause of your injuries.” My mother has a way of wording things to make it sound as if there are law-enforcement officials waiting outside to arrest and bring us to trial if we don’t cooperate. It probably didn’t hurt that they were in a chapel, but the woman quickly confessed: she’d been experiencing frequent dizzy spells, passing out, and falling down. That afternoon my mother made phone calls to make sure she was getting the appropriate assistance and medications. Meantime, I wrote the woman a note of apology and said that she should consider herself lucky since she only had to be inspected by my alleged biological mother on Sundays and was free to do as she pleased during the rest of the week.

  Twenty

  Bus Stop

  On August 16, 1977, the King of Rock and Roll died. Elvis Presley was forty-two years old, about the same age as most of our parents. Though my friends and I were only around eleven, it was obvious that the circumstances surrounding his death were a bit sketchy, especially this business about “cardiac arrhythmia.” At least enough so that we kids could make out that Elvis of the shag-carpeting-on-the-ceiling was poster king for why we shouldn’t do drugs.

  Aside from a few records owned by my parents, I knew nothing about Elvis and had never even seen him perform, live or on TV. But I remember that fateful August day because the radio played his music hour after hour, and weeping listeners phoned in to request their favorites.

  By the time of Elvis’s death, the political momentum of the sixties and early seventies had stagnated. Busing students from one district to another and racial quotas were opposed by the courts, as were rights for homosexuals, and the Equal Rights Amendment for women had also languished. (Usually known as ERA, this was a proposed constitutional amendment that would say, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States on account of sex.”)

  The Cold War was now at the forefront, along with the prospect of the United States losing its economic (and thus political) leadership in the world. Between 1967 and 1977, American manufacturing productivity was being heavily outpaced by West Germany, France, and particularly Japan. Suggested causes were the failure to control the money supply, excessive taxation, and overregulation by government. No matter, these declines hit the industrial cities of the North the hardest, and triggered the start of the migration to the South and West that would continue through the century.

  Our Cold War nemesis, the Communist Soviets, dominated the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), controlled Eastern Europe, and were well established in Cuba. Now they were moving into Ethiopia and also central and east Africa. By the end of the seventies, ten African states were under Soviet “protection” and proclaiming themselves to be Communist. The Berlin Wall would not come down for another twelve years, in November of 1989, after a massive military spending increase under President Ronald Reagan, and the Iron Curtain

  would finally slip from its rod.

  In the fall of 1977, I started junior high school in another Sweet Home school-district building. This one was a rectangular brick fortification that looked so much like a prison we used to check behind the room-number signs to see if they covered cell-block numbers. On the first day of seventh grade, I fully expected a warden to be waiting inside the metal doors to toss me a striped jumpsuit and a pile of license plates and bark, “Start painting!” There was a banner high up on the wall that said “I am responsible for my day.” I’m pretty sure it was created in conjunction with the local parole board.

  Despite the correctional-facility feel, the guards, I mean teachers, were mostly pleasant. This was just before the era of school lawsuits, and so educators were much more willing to take the inmates on field trips and even invite the entire class to their homes for a picnic. It was just after the era of corporal punishment (our parents’ generation), so our teachers weren’t supposed to hit us. The one exception was the home economics teacher, Mrs. Tweed (aka Boss Tweed), who wasn’t beyond commanding a girl’s full attention by yanking on a chunk of her hair, which came to be known as the Tweed Twist.

  Many teachers went out of their way to make learning fun, not because they were being prodded with incentives or put through all sorts of courses on new learning theories, but simply because they were kind and devoted. For instance, a social studies teacher claimed to have the only recorded copy of the Gettysburg Address. At the age of twelve, most of us weren’t sure if tape recorders had been around for thirty years or a hundred and thirty. So he’d play the “only recording,” and kids would listen to the scratchy presentation with rapt attention. He also managed to have in his possession the bullet used to assassinate President Kennedy, and this was two decades before eBay.

  Mr. Krawczyk (another Mr. K.) played tic-tac-toe against his detention charges. If he won, they wrote an essay; if they won, he gave them a pass to escape for a half hour. A black belt in pencil-and-paper games, Mr. K. was a formidable opponent, and otherwise lackadaisical students ended up writing more in one day than they otherwise would have in an entire school year.

  The only truly scary player was the school nurse. She had the emptiest clinic in the history of healthcare, sort of the Maytag repairman of the junior high, the loneliest nurse in town. Commissar might be more accurate. She took “I’m okay, you’re okay” to a whole new level. Basically, we would vomit in the classroom, on the playing field, anywhere, before going to the nurse. If a girl went down to the clinic saying she had a stomachache, our nurse would be sure to ask if she was having her period, in a stentorian voice that was easily overheard by the captain of the football team who was wrapping a knee injury nearby. A student who had just lost her father was informed that she’d essentially killed him with all of her shenanigans. There was no doubt in any student’s mind that this was exactly the kind of god that the writers of the Old Testament had in mind—plenty of rules, power over life and death, and no mercy.

  Finally, she retired, or else was called back to the Kremlin, and the benevolent Nurse Sherry arrived as her replacement. Nurse Sherry was sweet and all smiles, and soon the place was packed with kids experiencing all sorts of ailments and needing passes to get out of classes, skip tests, and leave early. These needy patients would grow up to cost the government millions in healthcare while the stoics from the previous regime went for decades without so much as an aspirin.

  One of Nurse Sherry’s duties was dealing with blue-jean injuries. Designer denims reached the Buffalo suburbs by way of a 1980 television commercial featuring a teenaged Brooke Shields insisting that nothing came between her and her Calvins. And suddenly girls were lying across benches in the locker room sucking in their breath and pulling on their jeans, sometimes with assists and rebounds from friends.

  The formal dress code for public schools had gone by the wayside about ten years earlier, so we were allowed to wear jeans, overalls, T-shirts, sweatshirts, and sneakers. However, it’s doubtful when the uniforms were dropped that administrators had in mind as their replacements skintight Jordache, Sassoon, Sergio Valente, and Gloria Vanderbilt jeans worn with lacy camisoles and cherry-blossom pink, high-heeled Candie’s molded plastic slides.

  Even gum chewing was allowed. Though we still couldn’t chew gum in chorus and had to stick that big wad of Bubblicious to the top of a Smurf-themed notebook until the period was over.

  It was around this time that the movie Saturday Night Fever delivered disco fever to our doorsteps. John Travolta played a working-class Italian guy who lived to shine on the dance floor. Growing up in an ethnically diverse industrial town that had just run out of opportunity, we identified with such escapist fantasies. Suddenly women were clothed in spandex unitards and wraparound skirts. In
the school gym and converted basements, we jumped around to the Bee Gees, Commodores, and James Brown. Equally popular were Patti LaBelle’s “New Attitude,” “Born to Be Alive” by Patrick Hernandez, and Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”

  Up until then, the fashionable dances had been the Mashed Potato, the Monkey, the Twist, and the Watusi. They were quickly abandoned for the Bus Stop, the Bump, the Time Warp, and the Electric Slide. For hours we line danced, all facing forward in a military phalanx, to Van McCoy’s “The Hustle,” “A Fifth of Beethoven” by Walter Murphy, anything fast by disco diva Donna Summer, and then we performed groundbreaking calisthenics to the Village People’s “YMCA.”

  This was about the extent of our rowdiness. It wasn’t as if the radical sixties had been erased by the time the late seventies rolled around, but the economy was still abysmal, especially in Buffalo. Despite the decline of heavy industry, it remained a blue-collar city populated largely by first- and second-generation Americans. Most of us knew from life at home and stories around the dinner table that times were tough, and we were concerned about the survival of our families, so many kids had after-school or weekend jobs.

  In my neighborhood, most parents worked in factories, schools, local businesses, or government jobs. There were plenty of teachers and civil servants, along with a few doctors and lawyers and a dozen or so nurses, the main job available to women back then if they didn’t become teachers or secretaries. Yet, our mothers thought they were doing pretty well, because when they graduated from high school in the Nifty Fifties, classified ads divided men’s work and women’s work, a practice that ended in the early sixties. Also phased out was the policy of firing airline stewardesses on their thirty-second birthday.

  Many people, like my parents, had moved a few miles away from the city because the suburban schools were thought to be better and, after the unrest of the sixties, were considered safer. Most of us kids were expected to do slightly or substantially better than our parents. If they’d left high school early, then we were at least supposed to finish high school, and perhaps go on to college. If they labored with their hands and their backs, then we were expected to work with our minds.