Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,27
cut very short the week her summer rotation began, his newly shorn head alarming her for days. The curls had suited him, and their removal had struck her as too aggressive, as if instead he had cut off an ear or a finger. More than once she has pictured the clipped curls being swept from a salon floor and dumped without ceremony into a trashcan, his hair forced to commingle with strangers’ clippings, this anonymous intimacy oddly troubling to Anna. There is silver visible on his head now, these strands spikier than the dark brown ones. Many times she has wondered what he would do if she reached up to touch one of these bristling hairs. She thinks that he likes her too, not necessarily in the same way that she likes him, but he seems to keep his gaze on her longer than on any of her classmates. And every morning when she presents herself to him, his face changes a little, as if someone has opened the blinds in a room dark with night.
But he isn’t free. He has a wife and two sons, both of them teenagers, one a soccer player, the other a talented pianist. He rarely talks about his personal life, but with all the time she and the other students in her rotation spend with him, they do sometimes speak about their lives outside of the hospital. He has only mentioned his wife once, to say that she had asked him to pick up a dozen quail’s eggs for a dinner party, and did anyone know where he might find a store that sold them? Jim Lewin knew, because, in part, he knew everything. Anna did not know where to buy quail’s eggs and couldn’t imagine what Dr. Glass’s wife planned to do with them. She went home that night and looked them up on the web and found two stores that sold them, both within an eight-mile drive of the medical center. She sent an e-mail to Dr. Glass with the store names and addresses, but he didn’t respond, not even to thank her, until an entire week had passed. In the days preceding his belated thank-you, she hadn’t dared to ask if he had received her message.
The quail eggs had come up in the spring of Anna’s fourth year during a six-week internal medicine rotation—six whole weeks with Dr. Glass Monday through Thursday and Dr. Fitch on Friday and Saturday. Dr. Kaczmerski hadn’t yet been assigned to her group. After this rotation, she spent four weeks in ob-gyn, her attending Dr. Hlvacek, who was from Bratislava, but at twenty-one had moved to Boston to study medicine at Tufts—fiercely homesick and barely proficient in English, she had confided to Anna with a sheepish smile. Her English was now nearly flawless, and she was also beautiful, but not, it seemed, overly preoccupied with the power this beauty imparted her. Anna often caught herself wondering if Dr. Glass had a crush on Dr. Hlvacek, as most of the male doctors whose paths they crossed seemed to. When they discussed Anna’s performance on the last day of her obstetrics rotation, Dr. Hlvacek had startled her by saying, “What is the expression? A double threat, brains and beauty? Whatever it is, you will be just fine, Dr. Ivins. I am sure of this.” For days afterward, Anna had replayed Dr. Hlvacek’s words in her head, not certain if she was more happy to be called pretty than intelligent, though she knew which one she should value more.
Her family and friends are impressed that Anna is studying to become a doctor, but on the phone, when her father called her after the Cannes festival, where Bourbon at Dusk had done well but the Palme d’Or had gone to Ten Pretty Girls, an Israeli film about a child prostitution ring, he asked if she was sure that she wanted to make a career out of giving people bad news. She couldn’t tell if he was kidding, knowing that he has bragged many times to his friends and acquaintances about her chosen career.
“Most of the bad news is given by specialists,” she told him. “Potentially serious problems get farmed out.”
“But won’t you get tired of doing immunizations and physicals?”
“I don’t think so. They’ll be a relief because I’ll have to do other things like lancing boils and stitching split lips.” She laughed. “No, seriously, what I want is to have real relationships with my patients, like a lot of doctors