“You know,” she was saying, “I’m sick and tired of turning someone over and thinking that this is not going to affect me! ‘Tag ’em and wrap’em. Have you tagged them and wrapped them yet? Tag ’em and wrap ’em up.’ ‘No, because the family hasn’t come yet. Get the fuckin’ family here so we can tag ’em and wrap ’em, and get the hell out of here!’ I OD’d on death, Mr. Roth. Because,” and again she could not speak, so felled was she by these memories “… because there was too much death. It was too much dying, you know? And I just couldn’t handle myself. I turned on the Jews. The Jewish doctors. Their wives. Their kids. And they were good doctors. Excellent doctors, excellent surgeons. But I’d see the photographs framed on their desks, the kids with tennis rackets, the wives by the pool, I’d hear them on the phone, making dates for the evening like nobody on the floor was dying — planning for their tennis, their vacations, their trips to London and Paris, ‘We’re staying at the Ritz, we’re eating at the Schmitz, we’re going to back up a truck and empty out Gucci’s,’ and I’d freak out, man, I’d go off on a real anti-Semitic binge. I worked on the gastric floor — stomach-liver-pancreatic floor. Two other nurses about the same age, and it was like an infection that went from me to them. At our nursing station, which was great, we had the greatest music, a lot of rock ’n’ roll, and we gave each other a tremendous amount of support, but we were all, like, calling in sick a lot, and I was yakking and yakking about the Jews more and more. We were all young there, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five — five days a week, and you worked overtime and every night you stayed late. You stayed late because these people were so sick, and I’d think about those Jewish doctors home with their wives and their kids — even when I was away from the floor, it wouldn’t leave me. I was on fire with it. The Jews, the Jews. When we’d work evenings, all three of us together, we’d get home, smoke a joint, definitely smoke a joint — couldn’t wait to roll it. We made piña coladas. Anything. All night. If we didn’t drink at home we’d get dressed up or throw our makeup on and go out, Near North, Rush Street, the scene. Go to all the bars. Sometimes you met people and you went on dates and you fucked — okay? — but not really as an outlet. The outlet for the dying was pot. The outlet for the dying was the Jews. With me anti-Semitism was in the family. Is it hereditary, environmental, or strictly a moral flaw? A topic of discussion at A-S.A. meetings. The answer? We don’t care why we have it, we are here to admit that we have it and help each other get rid of it. But in me I think I had it for all the reasons you can. My father hated them, to begin with. A boiler engineer in Ohio. I heard it growing up but it was like wallpaper, it never meant a thing before I was a cancer nurse. But once I started — okay? — I couldn’t stop. Their money. Their wives. Those women, those faces of theirs — those hideous Jewish faces. Their kids. Their clothes. Their voices. You name it. But mostly the look, the Jewish look. It didn’t stop. I didn’t stop. It got to the point that the resident, this one doctor, Kaplan, he didn’t like to look you in the eyes that much — he would say something about a patient and all I saw were those Jewish lips. He was a young guy but already he had the underslung jaw like the old Jews get, and the long ears, and those real liver lips — the whole bit that I couldn’t stand. That’s how I went berserk. That’s when I hit bottom. He was scared because he was not used to giving so much pain medication. He was scared the patient would suffer respiratory arrest and die. But she was a woman my age — so young, so young. She had cancer that went everywhere. And she was just in so much pain. She was in so much pain. Mr. Roth, a terrific amount of pain.” And the tears were streaming onto her face, the mascara running, and the impulse I now suppressed was not to palpate her large, warm breast or to measure the warlike strength of the heart beneath but to take her two hands from the tabletop and enclose them in mine, those transgressive, tabooless nurse’s hands, so deceptively clean and innocent-seeming, that had nonetheless been everywhere, swathing, spraying, washing, wiping, freely touching everywhere, handling everything, open wounds, drainage bags, every running orifice, as naturally as a cat pawing a mouse. “I had to get out of cancer. I didn’t want to be a cancer nurse. I just wanted to be a nurse, anything. I was screaming at him, at Kaplan, at those fucking Jew lips, ‘You better fucking give us the pain medication we need! Or we are going to get the attending and he’s going to be pissed off at you for waking him up! Get it! Get it now!’ You know,” she said, surprisingly childishly. “You know? You know?”
You know, like, okay? — and still there was enough persuasiveness there to make you know.
“She was young,” she told me, “strong. Their will is very, very strong. It’ll keep them going forever, despite as much pain as they can endure. Even more pain than they can endure and they endure. It’s horrible. So you give them more medication because their heart is so strong and their will is so strong. They’re in pain, Mr. Roth — you have to give them something! You know? You know?”
“I do now, yes.”
“They need an almost elephant dose of morphine, the people that are so young.” And she made none of the effort she had the moment before to hide her weeping in her shoulder or to pause and steady herself. “They’re young — it’s doubly bad! I shouted at Dr. Kaplan, ‘I will not allow someone to be cruel to someone who is dying!’ So he got it for me. And I gave it to her.” Momentarily she seemed to see herself in the scene, to see herself giving it to her, to that woman her own age, “so young, so young.” She was there again. Maybe, I thought, she’s always there and that’s why she’s with him.
“What happened?” I asked her.
Weakly — and this was no weakling — but very weakly she finally answered, all the while looking down at the hands that I persisted in envisioning everywhere, hands that she once must have washed two hundred times a day. “She died,” she said.