Free Half the Kingdom by Lore Segal Page A

Social Security office where no one told me and no one told Herbie Dukazs what courses you were meant to take for promotion.”
    “Social worker,” wrote Bethy on the line on the Intake Form for Seniors.
    “In the end, Herbie decided to move back to Budapest. He made me pay him thirty-five dollars for his bed—never mind that it was I had sewed the bedcover for him! I borrowed Poldi’s Miss Margate’s Singer sewing machine. He said that’s what the fabric alone cost him, which maybe it did. One lousy postcard that he sent me from his vacation on Balatonlelle.”
    “Education?” asked the Intake Form.
    “Poldi’s Kari had something on the ball,” said Ida Farkasz. “He got them to New York, illegally, via Canada, whileMiklos and the child and I sat in the Hotel Budapest in Santo Domingo, waiting for our ‘ quota .’ He had a little Hitler mustache, Miklos. Listen,” Ida Farkasz told Bethy Bernstine, “a woman remembers her husband taking her home from her wedding on the bus.”
    Lucy
    Nurse Trotwood brought Lucy a gown and said, “It ties at the back.”
    Lucy said, “I think I’m supposed to wait for Dr. Haddad.”
    Trotwood said, “You’ll put your clothes in this bag.” The bag was large and said PATIENTS PROPERTY in black capitals on the outside, and the missing possessive apostrophe is to be understood to remain a subliminal irritation in Lucy’s mind for the rest of this novel. Lucy remembered that she was meant to act like a regular patient, and followed the nurse.
    Each cubicle had a single wall and three sides formed by a blue curtain attached to a circular rail set into the ceiling. This one looked like—it might be the cubicle in which they had sat and watched Bertie die. There’d been no chair for Benedict to sit on. Benedict had been irritable with her.
    There had to have been a designer, a person, whodesigned the curtain to be blue. Lucy thought this person had meant well, meant blue because it’s a pleasant color, but this blue was stained by pain, the fear of pain, of watching pain.
    Lucy put on the cotton gown, its blue pinstripes leached out by institutional laundering. She folded her own clothes into the bag. The chair was hard, so Lucy climbed onto the gurney and sat there till the nurse came to take her blood pressure. It was the Pleasant Nurse with a nice face and the low voice that people like King Lear thought to be a good thing in a woman. “Your hands are the same temperature as my arm,” Lucy said to her. The Pleasant Nurse was not a chatterer nor a smiler. The patience in her face, Lucy thought, came not of suffering but of natural goodness. Her cheek, at close quarters, was like Lucy’s mother’s cheek, which had received the impression of Lucy’s kiss, returning, when her lips lifted away, to its soft convexity. Were my cheeks soft for Benedict? For Bertie? “Toward the end we had to keep rushing my husband here to Emergency,” Lucy said to the nurse, who was winding the blood-pressure sleeve into an efficient roll. She said, “The doctor will be in to see you,” and went softly away.
    Lucy sat on the gurney. From inside here she could observe nothing. Would Dr. Haddad know where she was? Lucy wanted a book the way a drunk wants his liquor. Lucy proposed to herself to eyeball every object within her view: One chair. Industrial-size garbage can, khaki. Sink with knee handle. Purity Hand Sanitizer. Two gadgets plugged into outlets with black plastic nozzles of different designsfor insertion, was it, into differently shaped orifices? Cartoon chart to identify pain by degrees from smiley face to face with down-turned mouth and falling teardrops. On the white-painted metal cabinet was tacked a paper listing contents. Words to read: Alcohol pads, Culturettes gc/Chlamydia, Probes pink/blue, Hemoccult cards, Developer, Surgilube Towelettes, Chuxs. (!?) Chuxs sterile 2×2’s sterile 4×4’s Gloves 6 size 6½ NS (500cc) with IV. FOLD GOWNS NEATLY .
    Lucy lay down on the