Small Great Things (5 page)

“Whipped cream and a cherry,” Brit adds, breaking my reverie. “If they've got it.”

Reluctantly I slip into the hallway, past the nurses' station, down an elevator. The cafeteria is open, staffed by a woman in a hairnet who is doing a word-search puzzle. “Do you sell milkshakes?” I ask.

She glances up. “Nope.”

“How about ice cream?”

“Yeah, but we're out. Delivery truck comes in the morning.”

She doesn't seem inclined to help me, and focuses her attention on her puzzle again. “I just had a baby,” I blurt out.

“Wow,” she says flatly. “A medical miracle, in my very own checkout line.”

“Well, my
wife
had a baby,” I correct. “And she wants a milkshake.”

“I want a winning lottery ticket and Benedict Cumberbatch's undying love, but I had to settle for this glamorous life instead.” She looks at me as if I'm wasting her time, as if there are a hundred people waiting in line behind me. “You want my advice? Get her candy. Everyone likes chocolate.” She reaches blindly behind her and pulls down a box of Ghirardelli squares. I flip it over, scanning the label.

“Is that all you have?”

“The Ghirardelli's on sale.”

I flip it over and see the OU symbol—the mark that proves it's kosher, that you're paying the Jewish mafia a tax. I put it back on the shelf and set a pack of Skittles down on the counter instead, with two bucks. “You can keep the change,” I tell her.

J
UST AFTER SEVEN,
the door opens, and just like that I'm on full alert.

Since Davis arrived, Lucille's been in twice—to check on Brit and the baby, and to see how he was nursing. But this—this isn't Lucille.

“I'm Ruth,” she announces. “I'm going to be your nurse today.”

All I can think is:
Over my dead body.

It takes every ounce of willpower for me to not shove her away from my wife, my son. But security is only a buzzer away, and if they throw me out of the hospital, what good does that do us? If I can't be here to protect my family, then I've already lost.

So instead, I perch on the edge of the chair, every muscle in my body poised to react.

Brit grabs Davis so tightly I think he's going to start screaming. “Isn't he a sweetie!” the black nurse says. “What's his name?”

My wife looks at me, a question in her eyes. She doesn't want to have a conversation with this nurse any more than she'd have a conversation with a goat or any other animal. But like me, she's aware that Whites have become the minority in this country and that we're always under attack; we have to blend in.

I jerk my chin once, so infinitesimally I wonder if Brit will even see it. “His name is Davis,” she says tightly.

The nurse moves closer to us, saying something about examining Davis, and Brit recoils. “You don't have to let go of him,” she concedes.

Her hands start moving over my son, like some kind of crazy witch doctor. She presses the stethoscope against his back and then in the space between him and Brit. She says something about Davis's heart, and I can barely even hear it, because of the blood rushing in my own ears.

Then she picks him up.

Brit and I are so shocked that she just took our baby away—just over to the warmer for a bath, but still—that for a beat neither of us can speak.

I take a step toward her, where she's bent over my boy, but Brit grabs the tail of my shirt.
Don't make a scene.

Am I supposed to just stand here?

Do you want her to know you're pissed off and take it out on him?

I want Lucille back. What happened to Lucille?

I don't know. Maybe she left.

How can she do that, when her patient is still here?

I have no idea, Turk, I don't run this hospital.

I watch the black nurse like a hawk while she wipes Davis down and washes his hair and wraps him up in a blanket again. She puts a little electronic bracelet on his ankle—like the ones you sometimes see on prisoners who've been released on probation. As if he's already being punished by the system.

I am staring so hard at the black nurse that I wouldn't be surprised if she goes up in flames. She smiles at me, but it doesn't quite reach her eyes. “Clean as a whistle,” she announces. “Now, let's see if we can get him to nurse.”

She goes to pull aside the neck of Brit's hospital johnny, and I'm done. “Get away from her,” I say, my voice low and true as an arrow. “I want to talk to your boss.”

A
YEAR AFTER
I went to Invisible Empire camp, Raine asked me if I'd like to be part of the North American Death Squad. It was not enough to just believe what Raine believed in, about Whites being a master race. It was not enough to have read
Mein
Kampf
three times. To be one of them, truly, I had to prove myself, and Raine promised me I'd know where and when the right moment came to pass.

One night when I was staying at my dad's, I woke up to hear banging on my bedroom window. I wasn't really worried about them waking up the household; my father was out at a business dinner in Boston, not due back till after midnight. As soon as I threw up the sash, Raine and two of the guys spilled inside, dressed in ninja black. Raine immediately tackled me onto the floor, forearm against my throat. “Rule number one,” he said, “don't open the door if you don't know who's going to come inside.” He waited until I was seeing stars and then let me go. “Rule number two: take no prisoners.”

“I don't understand,” I said.

“Tonight, Turk,” he told me, “we are custodians. We are going to clean Vermont of its filth.”

I found a pair of black sweats and a screen-printed sweatshirt I wore inside out, so that it was black, too. Since I didn't have a black knit cap, Raine let me wear his, and he pulled his hair back in a ponytail. We drove in Raine's car, passing a bottle of Jägermeister back and forth and blasting punk through the speakers, to Dummerston.

I hadn't heard of the Rainbow Cattle Company, but as soon as we got there, I understood what kind of place this was. There were men holding hands as they walked from the parking lot into the bar, and every time the door opened there was a flash of a brightly lit stage and a drag queen lip-synching. “Whatever you do, don't bend down,” Raine told me and snickered.

“What are we doing here?” I asked, not sure why he'd dragged me to a gay bar.

Just then two men walked out, their arms slung around each other. “This,” Raine said, and he jumped on one of the guys, slamming his head against the ground. His date started to run in the other direction but was tackled by one of Raine's friends.

The door opened again, and another pair of men stumbled out into the night. Their heads were pressed together as they laughed at some private joke. One reached into his pocket for a set of keys, and as he turned toward the parking lot, his face was lit by the glow of a passing car.

I should have put the pieces together earlier—the electric razor in the medicine cabinet, when my dad always used a blade; the detour my father made to stop for coffee every day to and from work at Greg's store; the way he had left my mother all those years ago without explanation; the fact that my grandfather had never liked him. I tugged my black cap down lower and yanked up the fleece neck warmer Raine had given me, so that I wouldn't be recognized.

Panting, Raine delivered another kick to his victim and then let the guy scurry into the night. He straightened, smiled at me, and cocked his head, waiting for me to take the lead. Which is how I realized that even if I'd been totally clueless, Raine had known about my father all along.

When I was six, the boiler in our house exploded at a time that no one was home. I remember asking the insurance adjuster who came to assess the damage what went wrong. He said something about safety valves and corrosion, and then he rocked back on his heels and said that when there's too much steam, and a structure is not strong enough to hold it, something like this is bound to happen. For sixteen years, I'd been building up steam, because I wasn't my dead brother and never would be; because I couldn't keep my parents together; because I wasn't the grandson my grandfather had wanted; because I was too stupid or angry or weird. When I think back on that moment, it's white hot: grabbing my father by the throat and smacking his forehead against the pavement; wrenching his arm up behind his back and kicking him in the back till he spit out blood. Flipping his limp body over, and calling him a faggot, as I drove my fist into his face again and again. Struggling against Raine as he dragged me to safety when the sirens grew louder and blue and red lights flooded the parking lot.

The story spread, the way stories do, and as it did, it swelled and morphed: the newest member of the North American Death Squad—namely,
me
—had jumped six guys at once. I had a lead pipe in one hand and a knife in the other. I ripped off a guy's ear with my teeth and swallowed the lobe.

None of that, of course, was true. But this was: I had beaten my own father up so badly that he was hospitalized, and had to be fed through a straw for months.

And for that, I became mythic.

“
W
E WANT THE
other nurse back,” I tell Mary or Marie, whatever the charge nurse's name is. “The one who was here last night.”

She asks the black nurse to leave, so that it's just us. I've pushed down my sleeves again, but her eyes still flicker to my forearm.

“I can assure you that Ruth has more than twenty years of experience here,” she says.

“I think you and I both know I'm not objecting to her experience,” I reply.

“We can't remove a provider from care because of race. It's discriminatory.”

“If I asked for a female OB instead of a male one, would that be discriminatory?” Brit asks. “Or a doctor instead of a medical student? You make those allowances all the time.”

“That's different,” the nurse says.

“How, exactly?” I ask. “From what I can tell, you're in a customer service business, and I'm the customer. And you do what makes the customer feel comfortable.” I stand up and take a deep breath, towering over her, intimidating by design. “I can't imagine how upsetting it would be to all those other moms and dads here if, you know, things got out of control. If instead of this nice, calm conversation we're having, our voices were raised. If the other patients started to think that maybe
their
rights would be ignored too.”

The nurse presses her lips together. “Are you threatening me, Mr. Bauer?”

“I don't think that's necessary,” I answer. “Do you?”

There is a hierarchy to hate, and it's different for everyone. Personally, I hate spics more than I hate Asians, I hate Jews more than
that,
and at the very top of the chart, I despise blacks. But even more than any of these groups, the people you always hate the most are antiracist White folks. Because they are turncoats.

For a moment, I wait to see whether Marie is one of them.

A muscle jumps in her throat. “I'm sure we can find a mutually agreeable solution,” she murmurs. “I will put a note on Davis's file, stating your…wishes.”

“I think that's a good plan,” I reply.

When she huffs out of the room, Brit starts to laugh. “Baby, you are something when you're fierce. But you know this means they're going to spit in my Jell-O before they serve it to me.”

I reach into the bassinet and lift Davis into my embrace. He is so small he barely stretches the length of my forearm. “I'll bring you waffles from home instead,” I tell Brit. Then I lower my lips to my son's brow, and whisper against his skin, a secret for just us. “And you,” I promise. “You, I'll protect for the rest of my life.”

A
COUPLE OF
years after I became involved in the White Power Movement, when I was running NADS in Connecticut, my mother's liver finally quit on her. I went back home to settle the estate and sell my grandfather's house. As I was sorting through her belongings, I found the transcripts of my brother's trial. Why she had them, I don't know; she must have gone out of her way to get them at some point. But I sat on the wooden floor of the living room, surrounded by boxes that would go to Goodwill and into the trash dumpster, and I read them—every page.

Much of the testimony was new to me, as if I hadn't lived through every minute of it. I couldn't tell you if I was too young to remember, or if I'd intentionally forgotten, but the evidence focused on the median line of the road and toxicology screens. Not the defendant's—but my brother's. It was
Tanner's
car that had drifted into oncoming traffic, because he was high. It was in all the diagrams of the tire skids: the proof of how a man on trial for negligent homicide had done his best to avoid a car that had veered into his lane. How the jury could not say, without a doubt, that the car accident was solely the defendant's fault.

I sat for a long time with the transcript in my lap. Reading. Rereading.

But this is how I see it: if that nigger hadn't been driving that night, my brother wouldn't be dead.

I
N TWENTY YEARS,
I
'VE BEEN
fired once by a patient, and it was for two hours. She screamed bloody murder and threw a vase of flowers at my head while in the throes of labor. But she hired me back when I brought her drugs.

After Marie asks me to step outside, I stand in the hall for a moment, shaking my head. “What was that about?” Corinne asks, looking up from a chart at the nurses' station.

“Just a real winner of a dad,” I deadpan.

Corinne winces. “Worse than Vasectomy Guy?”

Once, I had a patient in labor whose husband had gotten a vasectomy two days before. Every time my patient complained about pain, he complained, too. At one point, he called me into the bathroom and pulled down his pants to show me his inflamed scrotum, as my patient huffed and puffed.
I told him he should call the doctor,
she said.

But Turk Bauer is not silly and selfish; based on the way he brandished that Confederate flag tattoo, I'm guessing he is not too fond of people of color. “Worse than that.”

“Well.” Corinne shrugs. “Marie's good at talking people off the ledge. I'm sure she can fix whatever the problem is.”

Not unless she can make me white,
I think. “I'm going to run to the cafeteria for five minutes. Cover for me?”

“If you bring me Twizzlers,” Corinne says.

In the cafeteria I stand for several minutes in front of the coffee bar, thinking about the tattoo on Turk Bauer's arm. I don't have a problem with white people. I live in a white community; I have white friends; I send my son to a predominantly white school. I treat them the way I want to be treated—based on their individual merits as human beings, not on their skin tone.

But then again, the white people I work with and eat lunch with and who teach my son are not overtly prejudiced.

I grab Twizzlers for Corinne and a cup of coffee for myself. I carry my cup to the condiment island, where there's milk, sugar, Splenda. There's an elderly woman fussing with the top of the cream pitcher, trying to get it open. Her purse sits on the counter, but as I approach, she picks up the handbag and anchors it to her side, crossing her arm over the strap.

“Oh, that pitcher can be tricky,” I say. “Can I help?”

She thanks me and smiles when I hand her back the cream.

I'm sure she doesn't even realize she moved her purse when I got closer.

But
I
did.

Shake it off, Ruth,
I tell myself. I'm not the kind of person who sees the bad in everyone; that's my sister, Adisa. I get on the elevator and head back to my floor. When I arrive, I toss Corinne her Twizzlers and walk toward Brittany Bauer's door. Her chart and little Davis's chart sit outside; I grab the baby's to make sure that the pediatrician will be flagged about the potential heart murmur. But when I open the folder, there's a hot-pink Post-it on the paperwork.

NO AFRICAN AMERICAN PERSONNEL

TO CARE FOR THIS PATIENT.

My face floods with heat. Marie is not at the charge nurse's desk; I start to methodically search through the ward until I find her talking to one of the pediatricians in the nursery. “Marie,” I say, pasting a smile on my face. “Do you have a minute?”

She follows me back toward the nurses' station, but I really don't want to have this conversation in public. Instead, I duck into the break room. “Are you kidding me?”

She doesn't pretend to misunderstand. “Ruth, it's nothing. Think of it the way you'd think of a family's religious preferences dictating patient care.”

“You can't possibly be equating this with a religious preference.”

“It's just a formality. The father is a hothead; this just seemed the smoothest way to get him to calm down before he did something extreme.”

“
This
isn't extreme?” I ask.

“Look,” Marie says. “If anything, I'm doing you a favor. So you don't have to deal with that guy anymore. Honestly, this isn't about
you,
Ruth.”

“Really,” I say flatly. “How many other African American personnel are on this ward?”

We both know the answer to that. A big, fat zero.

I look her square in the eye. “You don't want me to touch that baby?” I say. “Fine. Done.”

Then I slam the door behind me so hard that it rattles.

O
NCE, RELIGION GOT
tangled up in my care of a newborn. A Muslim couple came into the hospital to have their baby, and the father explained that he had to be the first person to speak to the newborn. When he told me this, I explained that I would do everything I could to honor his request, but that if there were any complications with the birth, my first priority was to make sure that the baby was saved—which required communication, and meant that silence in the delivery room was not likely or possible.

I gave the couple some privacy while they discussed this, and finally the father summoned me back. “If there are complications,” he told me, “I hope Allah would understand.”

As it turned out, his wife had a textbook delivery. Just before the baby was born, I reminded the pediatrician of the patient request, and the doctor stopped calling the arrival of the head, right shoulder, left, like a football play-by-play. The only sound in the room was the baby's cry. I took the newborn, slippery as a minnow, and placed him in a blanket in his father's arms. The man bent close to the tiny head of his son, and whispered to him in Arabic. Then he placed the baby into his wife's arms, and the room exploded with noise again.

Sometime later that day, when I came in to check on my two patients, I found them asleep. The father stood over the bassinet, staring at his child as if he didn't quite understand how this had happened. It was a look I saw often on the faces of fathers, for whom pregnancy wasn't real until this very moment. A mother has nine months to get used to sharing the space where her heart is; for a father it comes on sudden, like a storm that changes the landscape forever. “What a beautiful boy you have,” I said, and he swallowed. There are just some feelings, I've learned, for which we never invented the right words. I hesitated, then asked what had been on my mind since the delivery. “If it's not rude of me to ask, would you tell me what you whispered to your son?”

“The adhan,” the father explained.
“God is great; there is no God but Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”
He looked up at me and smiled. “In Islam, we want the first words a child hears to be a prayer.”

It seemed absolutely fitting, given the miracle that every baby is.

The difference between the Muslim father's request and the request made by Turk Bauer was like the difference between day and night.

Between love and hate.

I
T'S A BUSY
afternoon, so I don't have time to talk to Corinne about the new patient she's inherited until we are both pulling on our coats and walking to the elevator. “What was that all about?” Corinne asks.

“Marie took me off the case because I'm Black,” I tell her.

Corinne wrinkles her nose. “That doesn't sound like Marie.”

I turn to her, my hands stilling on the lapels of my coat. “So I'm a liar?”

Corinne puts her hand on my arm. “Of course not. I'm just sure there's something else going on.”

It's wrong to take out my frustration on Corinne, who has to deal with that awful family now. It's wrong for me to be angry at her, when I'm really angry at Marie. Corinne, she's always been my partner in crime, not my adversary. But I feel like I could talk till I'm blue in the face and she wouldn't really understand what this feels like.

Maybe I should talk till I'm blue in the face. Maybe then I'd be acceptable to the Bauers.

“Whatever,” I say. “That baby means nothing to me.”

Corinne tilts her head. “You want to grab a glass of wine before we head home?”

I let my shoulders relax. “I can't. Edison's waiting.”

The elevator dings, and the doors open. It's packed, because it's end of shift. Staring back at me is a sea of blank white faces.

Normally I don't even think about that. But suddenly, it's all I can see.

I'm tired of being the only Black nurse on the birthing pavilion.

I'm tired of pretending that doesn't matter.

I'm tired.

“You know what,” I say to Corinne. “I think I'm going to just take the stairs.”

W
HEN
I
WAS
five, I couldn't blend. Although I'd been reading since age three—the result of my mother's diligent schooling each night when she came home from work—if I came across the word
tree
I pronounced it “ree.” Even my last name, Brooks, became “rooks.” Mama went to a bookstore and got a book on consonant blends and tutored me for a year. Then she had me tested for a gifted program, and instead of going to school in Harlem—where we lived—my sister and I rode the bus with her for an hour and a half every morning to a public school on the Upper West Side with a mostly Jewish student population. She'd drop me off at my classroom door, and then she'd take the subway to work at the Hallowells'.

My sister, Rachel, was not the student I was, though, and the bus trip was draining for all of us. So for second grade, we moved back to our old school in Harlem. I spent a year being dulled at all my bright edges, which devastated Mama. When she told her boss, Ms. Mina got me an interview at Dalton. It was the private school her daughter, Christina, attended, and they were looking for diversity. I received a full scholarship, stayed at the top of my class, received prizes at every assembly, and worked like mad to reward my mama's faith in me. While Rachel made friends with kids in our neighborhood, I knew no one. I didn't really fit in at Dalton, and I definitely didn't fit in in Harlem. As it turned out, I was a straight-A student who still couldn't blend.

There were a few students who invited me to their houses—girls who said things like “You don't talk like you're Black!” or “I don't think of you that way!” Of course, none of those girls ever came to visit me in Harlem. There was always a conflicting dance class, a family commitment, too much homework. Sometimes I imagined them, with their silky blond hair and braces, walking past the check casher on the corner of the street where I lived. It was like picturing a polar bear in the tropics, and I never let myself think on it long enough to wonder if that was how they saw me, at Dalton.

When I got into Cornell, and many others from my school didn't, I couldn't help but hear the whispers.
It's because she's Black.
Never mind that I had a 3.87 average, that I'd done well on my SATs. Never mind that I could not afford to go to Cornell, and would instead be taking the full ride offered me by SUNY Plattsburgh. “Baby,” my mama said, “it's not easy for a Black girl to want. You have to show them you're not a Black girl. You're Ruth Brooks.” She would squeeze my hand. “You are going to get everything good that's coming to you—not because you beg for it, and not because of what color you are. Because you deserve it.”

I know I wouldn't have become a nurse if my mama hadn't worked so hard to put me smack in the middle of the path of a good education. I also know that I decided long ago to try to circumvent some of the problems I had, when it came to my own child. So when Edison was two, my husband and I made the choice to move to a white neighborhood with better schools, even though that meant we would be one of the only families of color in the area. We left our apartment near the railroad tracks in New Haven, and after having multiple listings “disappear” when the realtor found out what we looked like, we finally found a tiny place in the more affluent community of East End. I enrolled Edison in a preschool there, so that he started at the same time as all the other kids, and no one could see him as an outsider. He was one of them, from the start. When he wanted to have his friends over for a sleepover, no parent could say it was too dangerous an area for their kid to visit. It was, after all, their neighborhood, too.