“Hummus again?” Alex asked Karen Fitch, his lab tech.
Karen responded with a self-conscious laugh, her habitual reaction to most questions. She pushed strands of scraggly, shoulder-length black hair behind her ear. “Why do you ask?”
Alex, Karen, and Steve Stein, a local student slated to begin Vanderbilt Medical School in ten days, were sitting in the lab having a lunch break.
His turn to laugh. “Seems like hummus and pita bread are all you’ve eaten for lunch these past two weeks. This a new diet?”
Karen, a tall, big-boned free spirit, constantly dove into various special diets reputed to contain undocumented naturopathic benefits. After perhaps a month or so, her focus would shift in a sort of dietary Brownian movement. Last month she ate only sardine sandwiches on whole grain bread, one of which she shared with Alex and Steve. He had to admit it tasted wonderful, but a month of nothing but sardines seemed a bit, well, over the top.
She returned to grinding garbanzo beans with the lab’s mortar and pestle, adding in a splash of extra virgin olive oil and some spices. Her kitchen was the lab’s sheet metal countertop. She routinely bought the beans and other ingredients at a co-op known for predominately organic fare. “Hummus is healthy. You should eat it instead of that greasy fried chicken every day.”
“Already have. You gave me a taste last week. I have to admit, you do a great job with the hummus and bread. Where’d you get the recipe?” He knew she baked breads from a hundred percent organic ingredients.
She perched on a lab stool, her six-foot frame hunched over the counter, knees angled to the right to keep from banging against the shelves. She stopped grinding and plunked her elbows on the countertop, her eyes glazing into a thousand-yard stare. “I was on my ultimate world trip.” Recently everything had become “ultimate”: the ultimate New Year, ultimate birthday, ultimate sardine sandwich. “We’d worked our way through India and were in the Middle East when we stopped at this kibbutz in Israel. Did I tell you about my year at the kibbutz?”
He brought his brown-bag lunch to the counter and took the neighboring stool, with Steve to his right munching a PB&J on white bread—a choice Karen rode him about constantly, yet good-naturedly. “You mentioned it briefly one time but never told me the full story.”
“Well you’re not getting the full story now, or ever. There’s not enough time for the ultimate version.” Another laugh. “Perhaps one of these afternoons when it’s slow. Anyway, this one really amazing Israeli cook taught me the recipe from scratch. I watched her work, and when she finished, she offered me a serving. It was the most delicious food I’d eaten in months. So,” she shrugged, “I tried to remember the exact recipe, but of course, couldn’t. This is close enough. You like it?”
From his brown paper bag, Alex withdrew his daily lunch: two pieces of fried chicken and an orange. “I do. It’s very good.” It wasn’t simply a gratuitous compliment. She was an amazingly good cook.
Steve chimed in. “Sure is healthier than your greasy chicken. How can you eat that? It’s so … unhealthy.” Steve glanced at Karen for support.
Alex couldn’t tell if Steve was joking or not, but laughed anyway. True. Every Sunday he stopped at Safeway for a ten-piece bag of frozen fried chicken and five oranges. Sunday afternoon he baked the chicken, sorted the pieces into five equal portions—each of which he wrapped in aluminum foil—then assembled and stored five sack lunches in the refrigerator. On his way out the door each morning he grabbed a sack, giving Lisa more time to get ready for work.
“I can’t argue with you on that,” he said. “Just seems like so much trouble to go through every day.”
Karen stopped mashing beans to face him, beaming. “Trouble? Not at all. Dishes I make with my own hands,”—she held them up as if mystical instruments—“that I create from raw ingredients taste so much incredibly better than store-bought food. I made the bread too. Did you know that?”
“Yes, that’s why I asked how you do it. You only mentioned the hummus recipe, though. Where did you learn to bake bread like that?”
Another distant stare settled over her eyes. “We trekked as far as Africa—have I told you this part of the story before?”
He raised a just-a-minute finger, then swallowed. “No.”
“About a month after we left India, we were trekking across Africa,” she said as if it had been a leisurely stroll on a picturesque park trail, “when I saw this incredible woman baking bread in an outside oven fueled by wood scraps. She was making the bread her family would eat that day. We stopped and watched her. Ended up staying in the village overnight, and the next day she showed me every step of how to prepare it.”
Alex opened his small carton of milk. “Remind me again; who was the girl you were with?”
“Oh, just a girlfriend,” she said dismissively. “On my eighteenth birthday we decided to walk around the globe, staying close as possible to the equator.” She blushed. “Silly, huh? But it’s what we both wanted to do at the time. The ultimate adventure.”
“Why?” Steve asked.
With a laugh, she brushed some graying hair away from her bright eyes. Most days her unruly strands remained turbaned under whatever silk scarf matched her colorful sarongs. Other days she opted for shapeless mid-ankle dresses in bold batik prints. She always wore sandals, never shaved her legs, and smelled vaguely of musk and patchouli oil.
“It was either do the trek or have to figure out a way to convince Clem I wouldn’t start premed at Stanford so I could graduate with honors and head off to some prestigious medical school—of his choosing—on the East Coast. I chose the easier path.”
Ah, a new wrinkle to the engrossing life story she parceled out in segments, like today. “Your father expected you to attend medical school?”
“You bet. And believe me, if I’d done it, I would’ve had to ascend to the same lofty heights of recognition as he.” She went back to preparing the hummus.
Alex pulled off a hunk of golden-brown chicken skin to eat. “You sure about that?” He popped the piece of skin into his mouth.
“World-famous hematologists have world-famous expectations for their only child to fulfill. I didn’t want to compete with him, because I knew that’s exactly what would’ve happened. He has this bizarre way of bringing out the worst in me when it comes to these things. In case you haven’t realized it, I’m not a competitive person. Besides, I’m perfectly happy with my life as is.”
He believed her.
“But you ended up in medicine anyway,” Steve said. “Maybe not a physician, but as a researcher.”
She paused, pestle in hand. “Purely happenstance is all, not by intent. I ended up broke in Boston, so I took a job as a lab tech.” A quick shrug, as if this explained everything. “Now I’m here. Wasn’t as if I planned it that way. It’s just the way things were destined, I guess.”
“And your father? How does he accept you not being a doctor?” Alex asked.
Pestle still in hand, she scratched the tip of her nose with the back of her wrist. “He’s too busy with his second wife and new family to worry about me. Besides,” she said with a slight flick of her head, “it’s in the past.”
Ah, another one of her wisdoms: what’s past is past. Move on.
Alex swallowed. “You never mentioned how far you got on this trek.”
She banged the pestle against the crucible rim, knocking off excess hummus. “Never finished making it through Africa.”
Another new episode. Her adventures fascinated him, perhaps because her life had been—and undoubtedly would be—so different from his linear, goal-directed career. “Because?”
Karen blushed and glanced at Steve, as if he were an outsider. Although she insulated herself from most awkward situations with nervous laugher, she now displayed frank embarrassment. “I met this boy …”
“Go on.” He popped another tear of fried chicken skin into his mouth. Lisa harped at him for eating the skin, claiming it to be the unhealthiest part of the chicken. She was probably right, but it tasted too damn good to ignore.
Karen returned to work, probably to avoid eye contact as her blush intensified. “Happened in Israel; he was part of the kibbutz I just mentioned. We became very attached to one another.”
Clearly an understatement. “And?”
“Well, Carrie wouldn’t continue trekking without me, and she realized I wasn’t planning on leaving the kibbutz any time soon, so she flew back home and enrolled at Berkeley. That’s it. End of our ultimate journey.”
“And you?”
Karen poured more olive oil into the bean mash. “His family didn’t approve of me for obvious religious reasons—and I wasn’t going to convert to Judaism—so they gave him an ultimatum. There, family is tighter than love, I guess. Or maybe his love wasn’t as strong as I wanted it to be. Anyway, I ended up in Europe and eventually Boston. I got the job in Beneke’s lab, and you know the rest of the story.”
Alex was about ready to pop the other hunk of chicken skin in his mouth when Art Waters came through the open lab door. “Morning, Karen, Steve, Alex.”
Before anyone could answer, Waters addressed Alex. “We’re on our way to lunch. Why don’t you join us?”
Alex pointed to his brown paper sack and the wrinkled aluminum foil holding the remains of his chicken. “Thanks, but I have mine here.”
“I see that. But Alex, you’re faculty now, not a resident. You need to break bread with us, make an effort to become part of the group. It doesn’t do you any good to stay holed up in your lab every day all day.”
“I drop into the conference room on free afternoons.” The surgeons who weren’t tied up in the OR or otherwise engaged habitually congregated for forty-five minutes or so in the conference room to gossip over coffee.
“I know you do, but I really would like you to start joining us for lunch.” Waters seldom threatened or gave orders, but this sounded like more than a simple wish.
Waters said his goodbyes and left.
After a few moments of silence, Karen said, “He’s right, you know.”
“I know.”
“Why don’t you? You can afford it now; it’s not like you’re still on resident salary.”
Alex set down the chicken leg. “It’s not the money. It’s the time. Now that I have to drive across town to the trauma center for afternoon rounds, I can’t afford to spend an hour talking department politics with them.” As it was, he was already returning to the lab two or three nights a week after heading home for dinner.
“I understand.” Karen paused with a knowing smile, making him believe she did understand. “On the other hand, you’re never going to be one of them if you don’t start playing the role. That’s all it is, you know—role playing.” She turned to Steve, raised her eyebrows a moment before laughing. “You’re going to have to start doing the same thing when you enter med school.”
Alex felt trapped. He was already overcommitted, and his NIH grant had once again been denied funding. He was in serious jeopardy of losing the lab to a full-time researcher, someone with the funds to keep it productively staffed and generating publications rather than just limping along with one lab tech and a catch-as-catch-can investigator. Appetite now ruined, Alex balled the remaining chicken in the foil and tossed it into the trash can. “I better get back to work.”