Free Ghost Country by Sara Paretsky Page B

straight into the arms of a pimp who started working her over for his own gain. She’s like a lot of people out here, thinks she’s worthless, she wouldn’t ever come see you on her own. Me and Nanette have to see she gets help, otherwise she’ll be dead in six months. And even though she doesn’t say anything to you, those pills you give her really help.”
    Ashley won’t let me give her an injection, and won’t take pills when she’s on her own, so J brings her in every week and watches her swallow a handful
of
Haldol.
    Funny how my eye for street people changed by working with them. Tough lives. In shelter have to follow strict set of rules, yet handle it all without losing dignity.
    Am trying to learn from them how to put up with Hanaper’s petty rules without losing my own dignity. Hanaper vastly entertained after looking over clinic sheets for last three months to see Mrs, Herstein, the compulsive hoarder, has been coming in every week. Daughter still with her. One of these nuclear families created by fission, turning into black hole that sucks in all joy, light.
    “Ah, your black eyes, Dr. Tammuz, I knew Mrs. Herstein would find them Irresistible. Cultivate her—she may be one of these demented women who keeps a fortune stuffed under the bedclothes. Where she apparently would like to reside with you.”
    The dark man in America, even if not from Africa, always has great sexual prowess. Foolish grandfather—thought by fleeing the Aryan nation could leave behind the greasy Jew of perverse sexuality.
    But Hanaper’s so-called banter good for me: makes me feel like vomiting, his image of sex with Mrs. H, and that in turn makes me try to figure out why my reaction so acute.
    Dreamt last night that Jacqui, Nanette, and Madeleine were the three witches from Macbeth, stirring a pot on Underground Wacker. I came along to treat Madeleine’s schizophrenia and the three turned to me—
on
me—and laughed. Madeleine flourished a gigantic wooden spoon and hissed, “Physician, heal thyself!” Then she turned into Mother, and the wooden spoon dissolved into a jar of face cream.
    It frightened him sometimes, how much the homeless women knew about him—part from information gleaned from some informal street network, part from a hypersensitivity honed by life in the open, where they had to decide in an instant whether chancemet folk were friend or foe.
    They knew Hector was unmarried, that he’d grown up out east, that he didn’t get along with his boss.
    “Seems to me you’re running away, Doctor, running away from your family out east, from your boss, from everything you can’t stand to face, so you’ve run to the last place you can find: the streets,” Jacqui observed one morning. “One of these days you’re going to have to stop running from and start running to.”
    If you were an ambitious, superstitious thane you would pay close attention to their words. But in their own eyes they were ordinary women with the usual concerns—for their children (Nanette had a son, in and out of prison on drug charges; Jacqui, two daughters raised by their grandmother, one of them asecretary in a law firm who made enough money to vacation in the Caribbean), or their hair, or even the men in Springfield and Washington who wanted to line their own pockets at the expense of education, of old people, and of the living breathing poor.

8
Rude Awakening
    A GAIN IN HER sleep the double basses menaced her. Again the angry man approached, a chorus of angry men sang that she should be strangled, her voice silenced forever. She thrashed herself awake and blinked once more at a strange room. After years of waking in one city after another, she should be used to strange rooms, but instability mounted with time rather than diminishing. She longed to wake up always in the same place, to know exactly where she was.
    No pictures by the bed to give her a clue, neither Becca as Queen Esther nor her own talisman, a signed photo of Rosa