the major cities in the U.S. and many elsewhere too. For a while I was jealous of all that his father could offer him and Anna—such remarkable experiences that I would never have been able to produce for them, let alone participate in. I have assumed since they were very small children that their lives would both be better, more momentous, than my own. I don’t know if all parents want this for their children. Many seem to. I’m not sure if I’m one of them, though. I want my own life to be as momentous as theirs, maybe even more so. I don’t think this is wrong—I am simply being honest. If we work hard enough, we should all be able to achieve lasting contentment. Billy’s bitterness and lingering inertia in the face of his astounding good fortune aren’t really surprising. But they are disappointing. Even when he acts graceless and unkind, however, I don’t wish him ill. What kind of mother would wish that on her child?
Chapter 4
The Finest Medical Attention
Anna has two close friends, Celestine and Jill, women she has known since childhood, the three of them from families with live-in housekeepers and feuding parents and assorted, neglected pets. They have gone through periods of intense closeness as well as bouts of jealous competition, which, in one case, resulted in Jill not speaking to Celestine for almost a year because Celestine began dating Jill’s ex-boyfriend two days after he had broken up with her.
It is Celestine’s and Jill’s lives that often have the air of a siege, not Anna’s, at least as she perceives their confessions and self-mocking admissions. Both of her friends are prone to spending too much money on clothes they might wear only once, to dating more than one man at a time, and to having sex with their bosses, or even, in one case, a boss’s wife. They confide in Anna often, despite how busy she has been with medical school over the past four years, how tired but often exhilarated she feels when she’s at the hospital, following around the attending physicians she and the other fourth-year students have been assigned to. Dr. Glass, one of the attendings for her internal medicine rotations, is her favorite. She guesses that he is in his mid-forties, though he looks younger, his face turning especially boyish when he smiles. His credentials make it clear, however, that he has been out of medical school for close to twenty years.
She began working with him in the spring of her third year, when clinical rotations began, and now, a year later, with her coursework finally finished and a full-time summer residency under way, she is with him for nine or ten hours at a time, five days a week, unless he alternates with the other attendings she has been assigned to for the internal medicine rotation, Dr. Fitch and Dr. Kaczmerski, who are older and often humorless. Dr. Fitch also has a wandering eye and on some days, bad breath; Dr. Kaczmerski snaps when he is impatient and favors the male interns.
“The hospital is full of the busiest, most important people in the world,” Anna has joked to Jill and Celestine. “Nowhere else on the planet is anyone’s work as important.”
“If you start acting like your bosses,” Jill said, “we’ll have to kill you.”
Anna laughed. “You can’t kill me. I’m too important. You’d have to call it an assassination.”
But Dr. Glass is not, as Anna has told her friends, a stuffed shirt. He is thoughtful and handsome, and his temper doesn’t fray easily. “I have a long temper,” he said soon after they started working together. “But that doesn’t mean I never get mad. I just prefer to handle problems without a flare-up. My expectations are that you will also be on your best behavior and do the most rigorous work you have done so far in medical science.”
Two weeks into her summer rotation, Anna realizes that she thinks about him more often than anyone else in or outside of the hospital, and twice she has had dreams about him, both leaving her with a sexual ache that lasted for an entire day. When she is choosing a carton of strawberries at Von’s or deciding which blouse to wear or else lying restless in bed despite how exhausted her body is, she finds that her mind is running a series of impressions and images that all feature Dr. Glass. She sees his curly black hair, which he had