Ambulance Girl (15 page)

Bernice is excited about the call. “Maybe they will invite us back for tea next week,” she says.

The call isn’t a terrible medical crisis. Mr. Demeter is having trouble with his legs and his home care aide thinks it best he go to the hospital. As we load him into the ambulance, I admire his patrician profile; this man is still handsome at eighty-three. I also notice that I feel extremely odd, as if I don’t have enough blood in my body, numb and spacey and on the verge of being very dizzy as I climb in the back of the rig. Bernice chats with Mr. Demeter as she takes vitals. I start to copy them down on the notepad, but feel like my body is wooden. About seven minutes into the twenty-minute ride to the hospital I am overcome with a huge wave of nausea and dizziness. I have the urge to lie flat; I feel like I will pass out if I don’t. I try to keep it to myself, but with each curve and bump the ambulance takes I feel worse, as if all the blood is draining from my brain. I fight the feeling as best I can and when I can fight it no more I sort of slump onto the side bench in the ambulance that we use to transport a second patient. I lie in this slumped position, trying to not pass out, praying that we will get to the hospital soon. Bernice gives me a concerned look. She has no idea why I have crumpled into a fetal position.

It’s an odd thing to be sick in the back of the ambulance when you are not the patient. All I want to do is push Mr. Demeter off the stretcher and climb onto the white-sheeted bed. I also want to not be going to the hospital. I know we are heading to a place filled with doctors and nurses but I just want to go home and crawl into my own bed and be left in peace. I am afraid of being sick, of being powerless.

We unload Mr. Demeter at the ER and I run into the washroom. My face is paste-colored, my collar ringed with sweat. I am pissed off at myself. “Now what’s wrong with you, you asshole?” I say into the mirror at my ghostly reflection. I stagger back outside. Bernice is handing the nurse Mr. Demeter’s chart. “I’m not feeling so well,” I mumble. “I think I’ll go outside and get some air.”

The ride back to the firehouse seems endless. Bernice takes my blood pressure, or she attempts to. It has plunged so low that she has trouble finding it at all. “I took a pill,” I say, trailing off weakly, waving my free hand about like a Victorian lady with a case of the vapors.

Back at the firehouse I leave her with the paperwork and run toward my car. By the time I pull into the garage I am ready to crash. What to do, call 911? Take another ride in the ambulance that I just got out of? I think not.

I call Tom Knox’s emergency number. He calls me right back. “You are highly sensitive to beta-blockers,” he says calmly. “You will feel better in the morning.” I crawl into bed. It takes four days before I feel normal. I am now totally phobic about riding in the ambulance again.

I am back at Tom Knox’s office, back at square one. I hold out a shaking hand. “See,” I say, and my hand twitches.

“It’s called benign essential tremor,” Tom says, seconding the opinion of the neurologist.

“I look like a spastic,” I say. “What else can I do beside take beta-blockers?”

“Liquor will stop the tremors, as will Valium.” He smiles. “Of course, don’t use them together, and obviously you can’t drink before going on a call.”

I want to test the theory, so when I leave his office I head to the liquor store, where I buy a bottle of gin, a bottle of bourbon, and a bottle of scotch. I come home and unload my haul in the kitchen.

“What’s that for?” Michael asks. He hasn’t seen me drink since he went on the wagon two years ago. I stopped drinking as a show of support.

“Me,” I answer. “I am going to get drunk so I can be an EMT again.”

“Huh?” Michael says. I ignore him as I pour three shots of Maker’s Mark and some ginger ale into a tall glass, add ice, and stir. I walk to my favorite chair and sit down. I am not much of a drinker. Booze was never a big deal to me; it was easy to put it aside, and I thought Michael would enjoy it if when I went to a restaurant with him I didn’t order my ubiquitous whiskey sour.

I forgot that I like the taste of this drink and swill it down fast.

As a science experiment I hold up my left hand and watch it shake. I watch it carefully to see if when the liquor hits my brain it stops shaking. I sit there for maybe ten minutes. I think I am seeing less of a tremor, but I am also seeing two hands where there was one. I am suddenly startlingly drunk. I get up to go to the bathroom and I lurch, I trip over Clementine, my brindle bullmastiff, who rolls out of the way. I look at her face and begin to laugh. She looks just like the Cookie Puss Carvel Cake: a big flat face with chocolate saucer eyes. I feel better than I did with the beta-blocker; in fact, I feel great in a soused, shit-faced kind of way. But there is no way I could go on an EMT call like this. I hit the speed dial and get Tom Knox’s message on the phone.

“I had a drink,” I half belch. “I’m not so shaky as I was but I’m too drunk to talk.” I hang up.

I sit stupefied in front of the TV watching an infomercial for George Foreman’s grilling machine. I need one, right now. I am going to call the 800 number but am too woozy to get my Visa card and bother with it. I sit there and watch George making steaks and watching the fat drain out. “So healthful,” I think. I am mesmerized by George’s shiny brown head. Eventually I get bored and stagger up to bed and sleep it off.

18

I need something to break the spell of the bad stuff. All I think about is John’s stroke and my own mental problems. I need something that will bring me back in sync with the joy of the firehouse and being an EMT.

I became an EMT because it was a way to get out of my own depressed head, and think about other people’s problems, but it seems I have become immune to the antidote. I am back wallowing in my mental mess.

Things between Michael and me are strained and getting worse. We have been married thirty-three years and are acting like we don’t know each other. In an attempt to heal what appears to be broken we start marriage therapy. We meet once a week with a woman therapist who is thoughtful and kind, yet at the end of each session I want to run screaming into oncoming traffic. Michael and I find fault with each other. We nitpick and criticize. We drag up wrongs and misdeeds from decades past. We finger-point and accuse, we become amnesiac about what we possibly could have seen in each other. It is beyond excruciating to sit in the therapist’s office each week and tell each other how we feel the other one has failed us. We are too angry to stop bitching and too much in love to leave the marriage.

Our therapy sessions are on Wednesdays and I spend all week dreading the pain that I know will be there. It is like root canal of the heart. I love Michael; he says he loves me. But we don’t like each other at all. Our many books written together are like our children; we can’t leave the marriage because of them. We have more books together in us. I can’t write them being just friends with Michael. I have to be in love and be loved for the words to flow.

But the words that are flowing between us are still critical and angry. “You said . . . You did . . . Why did you look at her . . . What did you mean by . . .”

With each business trip we take for
Gourmet
and each column we write together, the tension grows. I cannot get through an hour of driving in the car or pulling into a motel room without tears flowing down my face. Michael drives and I cry. I cry my way through Iowa and Michigan and Texas. I cry every time I see couples our age together, I cry when I see anniversary cakes in the windows of small-town bakeries, I cry when I am in bed at night and look at Michael’s sleeping profile and wonder if this is
fini.

When I am at home I am crying too. I am on the phone with Tom Knox daily. He is guiding me through the couples therapy. He doesn’t know what the outcome will be. I keep pushing him to tell me a “they lived happily ever after” ending, but he won’t. When I come into his office he looks serious and I go through half a box of Kleenex. My best friend, Bunny, calls three times a day to check on me. I am often in bed, sleeping. She recommends books to read and faxes me meditations on relationships. They make me cry more, but I am so glad for her friendship. I have become a pathetic case. I go to Bernice’s house and sit at her dining table and cry as I drink the coffee she makes me, I call another dear friend, Joanne, who is like a mother to me, and weep for hours, until my ear turns red from holding the phone to it.

Michael and I have business commitments to fulfill and a mortgage to pay so we plow on as best we can. One of our commitments is a monthly column for
Connecticut Magazine,
in which we find stores around the state that sell unusual things, and write about them.

We are heading this morning to Bridgeport. We have found a store that sells clerical robes to the clergy and stocks a cleaner that gets sacramental wine stains out of carpets.

The morning has started badly already. We fight as soon as we wake up. I have not a clue what we were fighting about and I suspect Michael doesn’t either. It is just more of the blame and guilt and needs-unmet conundrum that we have unleashed on each other since we began seeing the marriage therapist. It is like a badminton game from hell, each of us walloping the frail bird across the net,
whoop,
as hard as we can.

We are five minutes from the religious store and my face is tearstained. I feel dry heaves coming on. Michael looks stony-faced as he drives. I dry my tears on an old paper towel crumpled in my purse and spray Binaca in my mouth. I take a long, slow breath and try to center myself. We park in front of the store. My head is reeling and I cannot shut my mouth, although I know I should. I keep upping the ante to get Michael to feel the pain I am in. “I just want you to know,” I say, hiccuping with grief, “I called the suicide hotline yesterday.”

Michael glowers at me. “Are you telling me you want to kill yourself?” he asks. His light blue eyes look like bits of an Arctic glacier to me. I have no idea what the answer is. “I do, I don’t, I don’t know . . . I can’t live without you,” I stammer. This has backfired on me. Instead of taking me in his arms, I have alienated Michael even more with my raging codependency. We are back at square one, and I try my best to compose myself as I walk into the religious store.

I am surrounded by icons and portraits of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Not being a Christian, I feel oddly embarrassed to be there; I feel that I am looking at what is for sale with an ironic, slightly kitsch attitude. I wish I were religious, part of an organized faith whose rituals I could cling to as I pass through this hard period with Michael. I envy the rosaries and the statuettes and the holy cards. I do know that if I were a Catholic I would be as big a spanker as I am as an EMT; I would have one of everything, I would have the biggest, shiniest cross in the store and an illuminated Jesus on my dashboard.

Michael and I walk around the store and I start to notice that the small staff of three are huddled around a radio, that our entrance seems to have gone unnoticed. We walk up to them and they scarcely acknowledge our presence. They look gray-faced and frozen in place. One of them tells us, “A plane . . . it just hit the World Trade Tower.” My hand goes to my mouth. I imagine a tiny Piper Cub, off its route, smashing like a mosquito into the unyielding building. Michael and I stop talking and listen to the radio with them. What we hear is frankly unbelievable. It is not a tiny plane but a 767, and now, wait, another jet has hit the second tower and the buildings are falling, collapsing like a crazy wedding cake, tier after tier, into themselves. The religious store staff is too stunned to talk, the voice from the radio pierces the air. Michael and I look at each other. I start to shake with fear. I am too scared to cry. We run to our car parked outside and start the engine. We turn on the radio and listen to the news. “Oh my God,” we both say. I grab Michael’s arm and squeeze it hard. This has got to be a practical joke, like Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” broadcast.

It is now 11 A.M., and we have driven home from Bridgeport to our house at top speed. We run to the TV, the Twin Towers’ collapse remains unreal until we see it. And then we see it, over and over, a hideous loop, the buildings falling and then falling again. People screaming and running, the streets gray with ashes, the sky black with smoke billowing like in the Apocalypse. I look away from the TV and at Michael. I feel like I haven’t seen him in years. I see him without the anger and pain and tears that have come between. He is just Michael and I am just Jane and we live together in a yellow house on a hill, and we love each other. It is all so simple. I bury myself in his arms and we hold each other, waiting together for the world to end.

I hug Michael and he hugs me back. We have no words to say to each other except that what is happening in lower Manhattan has dwarfed everything we have been mad about with each other. We are alive, the end of the world might be coming, and we are together, as we should be.

Michael and I look at each other again and again. We can hear each other’s breath coming in harsh short gasps. “I love you,” I say as if it might be my last words.

After a half hour of watching the TV coverage I look at my wall calendar: 9/11. How ironic: 911. That is me, I remember. I do a strange thing. I run upstairs to my bedroom and pull out my EMT full dress uniform. I have never worn it, so it sits wrapped in tissue paper in a plastic bin at the bottom of the closet. I pull off my jeans and T-shirt and fling them on the floor. Then I get dressed. First the blue uniform shirt with the American flag patch sewed on one sleeve, the Georgetown Fire Department shield on the other. Next come the uniform pants, navy blue with a gold cord up the side. I belt the pants on, and then add the navy blue tie, shiny laced black shoes, and a fireman’s dress hat with a silver badge pinned on it. I place my white dress gloves in the shirt’s epaulets.

I run down to the den where the TV set is. Michael looks at me, and then does a double take. I am dressed to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. I am too freaked out to sit down, so I watch television standing at attention, crying and blowing my nose in a paper towel from the kitchen. Every time I see a flag or a policeman or an EMT on the TV, I salute.

In chaos we each do what we can. I stand in full dress uniform in front of the TV with an ear to my police radio, waiting to be called. I will die like a soldier with my boots on. The Twin Towers have fallen and then we hear about the plane hitting the Pentagon and I wonder if the little oxygen tank, rolls of bandages, and oral airways I have in the back of my car will be of any use if a plane crashes in the middle of Georgetown.

I stand guarding the police radio. Michael reacts in his own odd way. He jumps in the car, drives to the service station and fills it with gas, then goes to the grocery store and buys a dozen steaks, some bottled water, and many cans of dog food. When he comes home the steaks go in the refrigerator and Michael runs upstairs to his office, where he pulls a selection of guns from his closet. He takes out a Kalashnikov assault rifle, an evil-looking weapon, one of the many guns he has collected over the years. He loads bullets into magazines and lays the magazines in a neat line on his desk.

We are each facing the end of the world in our own way. I am going down in uniform. Michael will eat steaks and shoot the enemy and, oh, yes, feed the dog. I would say we are insane, but so is the world at the moment.

Hours pass. I can’t believe I have not been toned out yet. Finally I sit down; I am no longer capable of standing at attention. My feet and knees hurt. I feel very old and very tired. I go upstairs and change clothes.

“Let’s go to Heibeck’s and fill up the other car with gas,” Michael says.

We jump in our blue Dodge SUV and drive the two miles from our house to the gas station. After we pump the gas we walk into the little office where the Heibeck brothers are watching the news on TV. I see the chief standing, looking up at the screen. His face is ashen. I think I see his eyes tearing. The Heibeck brothers and I look at each other, we shake our heads. There is really nothing to say. Michael and I drive home with a tank full of gas, waiting vigilantly.

We sleep deeply and exhaustedly. By the next morning my tone has still not gone off. I have taken off my dress uniform and put on a navy blue jumpsuit with EMS written on the back. I have slept in it. All the steaks are still in the refrigerator, as Michael and I are too nauseous to eat. I have made only one phone call, to Bernice, whom I reach on her cell phone. She is in her car driving to Boston to see her parents. “Please come home,” I say. “I need you to be here for calls.” Fortunately, she has already decided to return to Georgetown.

It seems like half the world is driving into New York City. Fire departments and EMS squads are on their way from all over the country. Georgetown is only an hour and a half away from the city. We wait for the chief to tell us what to do. Other EMS units from our area have been dispatched. We finally get the command: we are not going to Ground Zero; we are to stay in Georgetown to care for the people of the town. I am both disappointed and relieved. Frankly, I am scared to death to go to Ground Zero. I don’t know if I can take it emotionally or physically. I don’t have much time to ponder this decision because suddenly the tones go off, and keep going off. I go to calls all day and all night. It is as if the community had collectively held its breath the day the planes flew into the towers, but now everyone is reacting all at once. We go out on one 911 call after another. People are fainting, having chest pains, panic attacks, symptoms of strokes. Because Georgetown is so close to New York City, many people had family members or friends who were killed in the collapse of the towers. All the churches and the synagogues open their doors to the public. If you drive by with your car windows open you can hear organ music and crying.

We are so near to New York and yet so far. It would take an hour and fifteen minutes to get from the firehouse to the remains of the Twin Towers. But we don’t go. It is a wise and selfless decision; there are more than enough rescue crews there, and we are needed in our small town.

I am exhausted from taking people to the local hospital, but I am now too edgy to go to bed. In my EMT jacket and in my well-labeled EMT car I cruise the town when the sun goes down. Silently, like a bat, like a stealth bomber, I am looking for terrorists, I am looking for victims.

The Monday night after the attacks we have our regular firehouse meeting. I walk upstairs and see everyone watching the news on TV. They look grim.

Bin Laden’s face is on the TV. “Kill him” is murmured in unison. I see the firemen clench their fists. If he were in Georgetown, he wouldn’t stand a chance.

We start to have drills about what to do if terrorism strikes close to home. We are issued big white biohazard suits and learn how to put them on. We learn how to wash people down who have been exposed to anthrax. We learn how to decontaminate ourselves. We go over incident command systems. We view photographs of the municipal buildings around Georgetown, the reservoirs, and other likely terrorist targets.

Suddenly being an EMT is much more than I bargained for. My self-centered fears and small victories are dwarfed by the Twin Towers, on fire and crumbling like the scariest of tarot cards: the Tower. Countless firemen and EMS workers have been killed doing their job. Others work around the clock, digging out, looking for survivors. I feel tiny by comparison to this unspeakable effort. Georgetown feels tiny too. We are one little star in a huge galaxy of rescue workers. I am connected with the people at Ground Zero, yet light-years away. I am but one of many. One of a brotherhood of thousands of rescue workers. It doesn’t matter if my hands shake or my pants are too short, I am still one of them.