Gesche

Laurie
Gesche
Starbucks, June, 2007

On a train to Germany, I met a doctor, Gesche. She was beautiful in a worn out way from late nights working, and she was stylish, with long legs and dark hair piled high with extension braids. Her skin was tanned and looked very dark against her gleaming white shirt and gold necklace. It was a long journey, and at first I sat with my eyes closed. When I rose to stretch, she began a conversation. I was attracted to her as soon as she boarded the train.

She was a neurosurgeon who had switched to pediatric oncology, having wearied of male colleagues who looked down their noses at women surgeons. She’d grown tired, too, of the anonymity of her patients, most of whom arrived with head traumas due to car accidents. She would operate, change their dressing the next day, and never see the person again. She went to Canada, entered oncology, and began treating children and their families. Some patients remained in her care for years. She described living in a cloud of grief, elation, and fatigue, and she recalled a visit to the grave of one young girl and weeping with the child’s mother, who was pregnant again. Gesche had been certain the girl would live, but after years of chemo, her system gave out.

In Canada, she fell in love with a cell biologist who was studying aging. She talked about the erotics of cells, how all they want—healthy cells, tumor cells—is more. She described the sex she had with this man, as if I were not a stranger, and I felt I wasn’t, that we were in a band of women who find each other as we drift toward the bodies of men.

One morning in Berlin, we met for breakfast. She had been awake since six the night before, working in a neonatal intensive care unit. The babies, kept alive on tubes and machines, were allowed a chance at life after only twenty-five weeks in the womb. Two were being sustained after only twenty-four weeks, each weighing twenty-five grams. She held out her hand as if weighing a pound of butter, to show how small that was. Everything on their bodies needed to be assisted. Their brain cells, still fetal, didn’t know how to regulate swallowing or breathing. The babies were intubated. She had to take blood from veins too tiny to see. She said it was thrilling. She felt skillful. She was wearing a blue t-shirt, a long sweater, and skinny black pants. Her eyebrows were fuzzy and dark, her dimples deep.

She ordered eggs, a baguette, and coffee, and we sat under an umbrella as yellow jackets buzzed the jam. She was directed outward, not involved with herself, although she admitted to a tendency to evade intimacy and escape into effort. At thirty-six, life billowed out before her. She was considering having a child with the cell biologist although, she said, they didn’t share a language. She didn’t mean German or English. She meant that what was big to her was little to him, and vice versa. What was central to her was women’s lives. “Don’t take what men say seriously,” she said, as much to herself as to me. “Men are not their words.” There was hope in her tired eyes as well as doubt, and I tried to see through them. How did I look, a woman past her prime who didn’t know what to make of men’s words? What kind of love would allow you to see past someone else’s contradictory understanding? Was it love? A bee got its feet caught in honey. It extracted one foot, thinking it was free, and then another got stuck. It was like that with me and words.