Other People's Lives: Stories by Johanna Kaplan

Author:Johanna Kaplan [Kaplan, Johanna]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781480414747
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Sickness

IN BOOKS, RADIATORS HUM and sing; in my house, the radiator howls and yelps as if a baby were locked up in it, an angry baby who, though he cries and cries, still does not bring his mother running. Not that she isn’t longing to. But there is an older neighbor around or an aunt maybe, and her philosophy is: He’s crying? So he’ll cry! And the baby in the radiator—how can he know all this? So he sends up a last, raging yowl and I am woken up.

Here, in the brief, early whitish light, the march of neighbors has already begun. For even though it is barely morning of my first day home from school, the news of a sick child has shuttled through the building like steam through the pipes, and my mother’s voice rises from the kitchen in bitterness.

“What’s a doctor? He sits and sits studying long enough so that finally in one place his bathrobe wears out.”

It is not a question now of tissues and aspirins, of swollen glands or a throat that won’t swallow. This time it is serious: Lichtblau, the limping Golem with MD on his license plate, has made a housecall. Dragging one heavy foot behind the other, he has announced measles and a high fever, and in a stingy mumble as dull as the one that sends black years to the Irish kids on his new Buick in the street, he has even mentioned the possibility of hospital. But this doesn’t worry me because what’s a hospital? One, nurses: quick-stepping, white-clad girls whose heads are all blond and faces shiksa-silly. And two, doctors: bald, heavy men, sad-eyed and Jewish, who walk slowly on dragging legs, their bodies wrapped up in old maroon bathrobes, shamefully all worn away in one spot.

What would I do in a place like that? Where would I keep my glass of sweet, lukewarm tea that sits, whenever I am sick, like lightened liquid honey on a folding chair by my bed? Where would I put all my books? Where would I get my neighbor stories? As I lie back against the pillow, my room flies up before me like an airy, pastel balloon. From the window, slats of sunlight sift in, off-spinning ballerina twins to the clumsy elephant slats of the fire escape: the sun is playing a game of potsy on the linoleum. Hopping each time to a different cone of color, the sun has zoned my floor so that it’s a country counter of homemade, fruit-flavored ice creams, or else great clean pails of paint from which I can choose new, sweet, custardy colors and order the painter to paint my room.

Outside, other children’s feet thump off to school. Some are shouting: they just got to the corner, shoelaces dragging, and now, for spite, the light is changing. And some are crying: people with bad work habits, maybe they forgot their consent slips or their gym suits, and because it’s too late now to go back,

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