Other People's Lives

by Johanna Kaplan

  Naomi looked up at the girl as if she had just put down a newspaper. “Fortgang?” she said, a smile slipping into her voice and even up to her wan, washed-out face. “Was it a phone message, Miss Perry? Or did Fortgang rumple his two-hundred-fifty-dollar suit and actually pass through the building?”

  The girl, Miss Perry, not only had red hair, but freckles all over her face, and looked as if she belonged in jeans and a plaid shirt, sitting on a fence with a fishing pole or a lunchbox, waving at an orange schoolbus. Instead, with a nurse’s uniform and a slightly buck-toothed, summery smile, she said, “He was here, but it’s even funnier. He actually made a note on the chart.”

  “That is funny,” Naomi said. “He must be getting ready to send out bills,” and there in their uniforms the two of them began laughing as if they were walking down the street together and had just seen something ridiculous in the window of a store.

  “Naomi,” the aunt said. “What’s ECT?”

  “Electro-shock therapy,” she said, and again immediately looked at her watch. “Toby’s baby present is upstairs. I’ll have to go up again and get it later.”

  “I didn’t come here to collect presents. I was just thinking of Mrs. Lippman and what happened with her son.”

  “What?”

  “She was a very fat old woman with fat red cheeks. She lived on the ground floor. You wouldn’t remember her.”

  “You weren’t thinking of her cheeks. What happened?”

  “To her? She’s been dead for years. She was a very old woman.”

  “What happened to her son? What’s the tragedy you want to tell me?”

  “Her son?” the aunt said, remembering suddenly his similar fat cheeks and doughy, rumbling body, terrible for a boy. “Her son? He was perfect till he was seventeen. Not only perfect, but brilliant, very mechanical. All of a sudden, when he was seventeen, he started something new. No school was good enough for him, nothing was right, teachers were staring at him, people were monkeying with his walkie-talkie. Even his mother could see that something was wrong, so she took him to a doctor who put him in a hospital, and instead of getting better, he got worse.”

  “How did he get worse?”

  “He started getting very violent, so that every time she went up there to visit him and took the special bus, she saw red marks on his face and bruises all over his arms and she never knew whether he did it to himself or else whether he got it from when they had to hold him down.”

  Naomi picked up her head, but it was only to wave at a boy in another kind of white suit at a different table, and swallowing some water, she gulped out, “Before phenothiazines. You know—tranquilizers.”

  “Before lots of things you would hear about, you were never good in science anyway. Also, don’t forget—these were people who didn’t go to fancy Park Avenue doctors. What was his mother? A simple old Jewish woman. She didn’t know anything, but she always read the Yiddish papers very carefully, and one day she found an article about a new kind of brain operation that was a brilliant cure for craziness. Naturally, it gave her hope for her son, so the next time she went to the hospital she quick ran to the doctors, and they said if she would sign the papers, it was fine with them. Why would she hesitate over a signature? Naturally, she signed the papers, the brilliant brain operation was done, and Mrs. Lippman was left with a vegetable.”

  “Lobotomies aren’t done any more,” Naomi said, “and you’d have a hard time finding anyone to defend them.”

  “What about Mrs. Grossbard?” the aunt said, watching Naomi pick up her bacon sandwich that was stuck together with blue and yellow plastic toothpicks as if it were a wedding. “What about Mrs. Grossbard who you’re going to give shocks to? Mrs. Grossbard whose life is so funny that you and Suzy Q. Redhead couldn’t stop yourselves from having laughing fits about?”

  Naomi could have been a girl glancing up now and then for her subway stop. “Mrs. Grossbard has a fancy Park Avenue doctor,” she said. “He’s the one who makes the decisions, I’m only the resident. And anyway, you don’t have to worry. She won’t be a vegetable.”

  “But she’ll forget things. I know what happened to Schreibman’s sister-in-law. She woke up in the morning and didn’t know what day it was, she went to the bakery and couldn’t remember a single salesgirl.”

  “Loss of memory is only temporary,” the stone said. “There are conditions in which ECT is indicated. Involutional depression, for instance.”

  The Romans built reservoirs, only they called them aqueducts—how was this different? “How do you know if that’s what she had? You don’t even know who I’m talking about.”

  “Severe depression associated with menopause. You know what that is—change of life.”

  The egg the aunt was putting her fork into was cold. “Whoever expected that you would become a doctor? Your mother would never have predicted it. She knew you were never good in science. You were good in languages like people on your father’s side. Remember that uncle of yours who had a cleaning store downtown? The one who called himself French Cleaner? Some Frenchman!” the aunt said, recalling his squeezed-in, monkey’s face: on the way to America, his boat had docked for a few days in Cherbourg. “He could speak any language anyone came in with. You must remember that, Naomi. You used to hang around there so much.” It was probably how she had managed to get through medical school—anyone who could stand the smell of a cleaning store for hours on end would have no trouble wading through four years of ether and bloodstains. “You were very close with his older son, Azriel. Remember? Not that you keep up with anyone.”

  Naomi said, “I got a letter from Azriel last week. He’s in Japan.”

  “What’s he doing in Japan?”

  “He’s studying Japanese. Azriel’s very good in languages.”

  “He’s not still in school! I thought he was married and had a child.”

  “He’s teaching at Stanford, he’s on leave for a semester, his son is four years old.”

  “Four? He’ll be ready for school soon.”

  “He goes to a Japanese school. He’s very good in languages, too.”

  “I don’t see what’s funny about it, Naomi. It’s the one thing you were ever really good in. Remember that French teacher you had, Mrs. Gelfand, who couldn’t stop raving about you when you translated those French poems? And that Israeli engineer who was staying across the hall who said he could have sworn you were a sabra the few times you bothered to open your mouth?”

  She managed to open her mouth now, but all she said was, “Hi, Steve,” to a tall, suntanned boy whose giant circus-clown’s tie bobbed out from underneath his white jacket together with his Adam’s apple.

  “Nao,” said S. SONNENBORN M.D. PSYCHIATRY. “You were beautiful this morning. No shit. First presentation I haven’t slept through in months.” The tall clown’s eyes seemed to follow the glow of his tie the way Naomi’s did a windowed distance.

  “Thanks,” Naomi said. She was trying to fix an earring and in one minute her long white sleeve would be soaking up coffee. “Naomi, you give more to the floor than you put in your mouth,” her uncle used to say to her. But it was easy for him to have patience, he was not the one who cleaned the floor.

  A buzz from S. Sonnenborn’s pocket forced him to pull out a walkie-talkie. “I’m on Call,” he said. “Talk to you upstairs.” His smile trickled out to the bottoms of his sideburns, his tie pulled him out to the door, and the aunt said, “Naomi, why did that boy call you Nao? It’s not a name, it sounds like a deodorant.”

  “For short,” she said. “For a nickname.”

  “But no one in your life ever called you Nao. Your parents never called you that, your uncle and I never called you that. It isn’t even your real name—Naomi—it’s only your English name. Your real name, the name that your mother gave you, is Nechama.”

  “I know what my name is. Let’s go upstairs, I’ll get you Toby’s baby present.”

  “Look how you call it ‘baby present’! You don’t even
know the names of Toby’s children. They wouldn’t know you if they saw you on the street and you’re practically an aunt to them. And what about your brother? You don’t even keep up with him and he always felt so close to you.”

  “We were hardly even brought up together. Anyway, I saw him when I was in California, and if he needs money for bail, he knows my phone number.”

  “Money for bail?” the aunt said. “Who do you think you are that you can talk that way? What will you have from all this but years of debts?”

  “Just like all other medical students. I’ll pay it back.”

  “But you’re not like all the other medical students. How could you turn out this way? How could Michael? What could he possibly have in common with all those boys rebelling against their parents’ swimming pools? He practically had no parents, let alone swimming pools.”

  “Why don’t you ask him? He’s the one with theories. I was only good in languages.”

  “But why did he have to get tear-gassed? What happened to him?”

  “You know what happens when people get tear-gassed. You read the papers the same as everyone else.”

  “But, Naomi, he’s your brother. Do you think he resented us?”

  “I’m not Michael. How do I know?”

  “You’re a psychiatrist. That’s why I’m asking you.”

  “That’s right. I’m a psychiatrist and Michael is a dropout, and those are both categories that everyone can understand.”

  “I’m not concerned with everyone. For you, spilling your coffee and monkeying around with other people’s memories are all the same thing, because to you it doesn’t matter what you forget.”

  But already Naomi had gotten up and, in her distant, disappearing way, was floating past the cash register.

  “That’s a cute hat,” she said to a foreign-looking girl who had just tumbled through the door in a blue raincoat. The girl pulled the hat off her head as if she hadn’t known she was wearing it, and in a fuzzy, foreign voice said, “It was knitted for me by my sister. In many colors. I can give you one if you want.”

  “Since when are you interested in hats?” the aunt said, but the girl—delicate, fair-skinned, and dazed—continued to look as if she had just been pulled out of an avalanche.

  “Na-o-mi,” she said. “You won’t believe what I have been through. Do you know what his wife said? ‘That lovely Danish girl in your department—why don’t we invite her for dinner?’”

  “He told you that?” Naomi said. “What a bastard.”

  The girl seemed about to cry. She took off her raincoat and said, “I don’t even have many cigarettes.”

  “Listen, Inga,” Naomi said, “Let’s have dinner tonight. Just come over to my apartment.”

  “I can’t do it. I’m on First Call. It’s better, I think, it’s better for me to be working.”

  In the corridor, the aunt said, “She’s so pretty. Why is she a doctor?”

  Naomi looked at her watch and, fussing again with her little black notebook, shuffled straight into an elevator where a man in a sheet lay stretched out on a table. His face was the color of worn-out underwear, and tubes and bottles hung down on all sides.

  “This elevator?”

  “You’re not at a bus stop,” Naomi said. “This is a hospital,” and seeing her face—thin, distant, and severe—reflected in the glass-covered bulletin board, the aunt could suddenly imagine Naomi with her white smock, round glasses, and plain hair—perhaps in a bun—bending over a microscope: it was not Naomi she was thinking of at all.

  “Did your mother ever tell you about your Great-aunt Masha?” she tried whispering past the sick man’s feet. “For a Jewish girl in Russia in her generation to become a doctor—you can imagine what that was. She was a very unusual person. It was practically unheard of.”

  “It couldn’t have been that unheard of,” Naomi said in a perfectly conversational tone. “In an Isaac Babel story there’s a doctor who’s a Jewish girl.”

  “I’m not talking about stories, I’m talking about a person. In the middle of a revolution, completely on her own, she went all the way to Moscow. You never even heard about her? Your mother told you nothing?”

  “She told me about her.”

  “In Palestine she lived in swamps and in deserts and if she ever earned a penny, she immediately gave it away. What did your mother tell you?”

  “That she was stubborn,” said Naomi, and wheeled out the door to a silent, blank hallway.

  “Stubborn?” The aunt had to squeeze with her purse past the man on the stretcher. “What she was was not stubborn. Masha was a nut. She never got married, she worked day and night, she lived for her profession and died all alone.”

  “Maybe she was good in languages,” Naomi said. “Let me get you Toby’s present.”

  “Naomi, why can’t you bring it to her yourself? She isn’t used to living out of town yet. Every time I talk to her I can tell that she’s crying.” It was what she could see on the phone: Toby, in whose face people had always seen so much sweetness—cheyn—sitting on a beige sofa in Connecticut, her face dark and red, simply from crying.

  “As long as she doesn’t get her medical advice from newspapers,” the stone said, and disappeared with her braid so that there was no point in following her.

  Not that there was anywhere to go: the hall was filled up with closed doors and blank spaces. Finally, at the far end of the corridor there was some sunlight which opened itself out from a room marked LOUNGE. Here, plants were on the window sill, newspapers lay on the chairs, and a television with nobody anywhere near it just kept on going. People, mostly in bathrobes, sat around doing nothing. A woman in a black nightgown was putting polish on her fingernails, a man who hadn’t shaved yet was shuffling a deck of cards, and next to the long window, bobbing back and forth in the sun with their bathrobes, two boys were playing Ping-Pong. The aunt looked around for Mrs. Grossbard, a woman who didn’t know yet that her life would mean waking up one morning to say, “Oh my God, I don’t even know what day this is,” and found instead that she couldn’t stop herself from staring at a very young girl who looked as if she had just stepped out of a cemetery. That she was wearing a pink quilted bathrobe made no difference—it could not substitute for flesh which she simply did not have. Bones and sockets stood out in her so far that when she stood or walked, her arms and legs looked like marionette strings, and when she began to open her mouth, it did not seem possible that her voice—which was shrill—had anyplace to come from.

  “I gained one pound and I found out what my doctor’s first name is,” she said to a boy in bedroom slippers whose hair fell into his guitar. “It says N on her thing, but I asked her and she said it’s Naomi.”

  “They have to tell you if you ask them,” said the boy, who did not either raise his beard or play his guitar.

  “If I gain five pounds, she said that she’ll take me to the Coffee Shop, and if I gain ten pounds I’ll be able to go off the Sustogen.”

  “The Coffee Shop sucks,” the boy said, and began to look out through the room with the small, sour eyes of a definite maniac.

  “What would you do if you got stuck in a plane right next to a maniac?” the aunt ran out to ask Naomi, who, it turned out, was sitting inside a glass cage labeled NURSES’ STATION. On one side of her was S. Sonnenborn of the glowing tie, on the other, a fat, red-faced boy who was eating a Danish. In their white coats, they sat perched on a desk like children at a soda fountain. Naomi’s legs dangled, they could not reach the floor.

  The aunt knocked on the glass and Naomi came out carrying a large package beautifully wrapped in blue-and-purple paper, perfectly tied with a dark purple bow. Obviously, she had not done it herself: it was Toby who wrapped things with fine, perfect fingers, Toby who once painted tiny birds on her old bedroom wall, Toby who even now could weave rugs that people offered money for.

  “Naomi, do you remember when Toby made you that scrapbook for a present? She got the leather from her Arts and Craf
ts Club, and she pasted in for you all the old pictures of your family that you didn’t even remember?”

  Naomi looked as if she were about to say something, but it was only to smile at the unfortunate skeleton-girl, who had crept down the hall in her pink quilted robe.

  “Do you sign death certificates?” it suddenly occurred to the aunt.

  “On Psychiatry? What do you think I do here?”

  “I don’t mean here, I just mean if somebody happened to die, and you were the one who was there—”

  “And it happened to be in the middle of the Belt Parkway, and there happened to be an off-duty cab—that's what you’re trying to say to me. That’s the only reason you’re here.”

  “Naomi!” the aunt said, and felt her face swelling out in a thousand directions, but hanging over the vague and cloudy-eyed stone whom Bluma had named Nechama—comfort, solace—and who was not so vague about languages that she did not know what it meant.

  About the Author

  Johanna Kaplan was born in New York City and studied at New York University and Columbia University. Her collection of stories, Other People’s Lives, was nominated for a National Book Award and the Hemingway/PEN Award, and won the National Jewish Book Award in 1976. Her novel O My America!, also nominated for a National Book Award, won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award in 1981. Kaplan’s stories have appeared in Commentary and Harper’s. She has received grants for her writing from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.