Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon Page A

the waiting room. Throwing up his hands, shaking his head: all the bad acting people tended to engage in when they were most sincere. Gwen stayed right with him. Everyone in the waiting room raised their head, face blank and attentive, prepared if not hoping for further entertainment.
    “Don’t you bait me,” Gwen said, feeling an internal string, years in the winding, snap with a delicious and terrible twang. “Don’t you ever try to bait me, you baldheaded, Pee-wee Herman–looking, C-sectioning, PPO hatchet man.”
    Ho! Uh- uh ! Go, Mommy!
    Gwen was right up against him, her body, her belly, the pert cupola of her protruding navel flirting through the fabric of her blouse with actual physical contact. He backed off, betraying the faintest hint of fear.
    Garth stood up, holding the baby stiffly, forlornly, as if it were a rare musical instrument, some kind of obscure assemblage of reeds and bladders that he would now be called upon to play. His blue eyes looked frightened, bewildered, and when she saw him, Gwen felt ashamed. Arcadia, curled in on herself in a plastic armchair, woke up and started to cry.
    “Mr. Frankenthaler?” the doctor said.
    “Garth, she’s fine,” Aviva said. She hurried over to Garth, rubbed his shoulder. “She’s fine, she’s going to be fine.”
    “Why don’t you come with me, Mr. Frankenthaler? I’ll take you to see your wife,” Lazar said.
    “She isn’t my wife,” Garth said, dazed. “My last name is Newgrange.”
    Lazar crouched down in front of Arcadia and spoke, in a tender voice, words that only she could hear. She nodded and sniffled, and he moved a thick coil of her dark hair, damp at the end with tears, out of her eyes, painting a shining trail across her cheek. Suddenly, the man was the kindest doctor in the universe. He stood up, and Arcadia took hold of the hem of her father’s windbreaker, and they followed Lazar back into the ER. Two seconds later, Lazar reappeared and pointed his finger at Gwen in a parody, perhaps unconscious, of Aviva’s recent performance.
    “I’m writing this up,” he told Gwen, who stood there, shoulders heaving, all the righteousness emptied out of her, the last bright tankful burned off in that final heavenward blast. “Count on that.”
    “Did you hear the way he spoke to me?” she said to Aviva, to the room, a note of uncertainty in the question as if seeking confirmation that she had not in fact imagined it. “ ‘Voodoo.’ ‘It’s not like having your hair conked.’ Did you hear? I know everybody in this room heard the man.”
    Aviva was back to the hushed voice, gently taking hold of Gwen’s elbow. “I heard,” she said, “I know.”
    “You know ? I don’t think you do.”
    “Oh, come on,” Aviva said with an unfortunate echo of Lazar in her tone. “For God’s sake, Gwen. I’m on your side.”
    “No, Aviva, I’m on my side. I didn’t hear him say one damn word to you .”
    Gwen pulled her arm free of Aviva’s grasp and trudged out of the waiting room, through the covered entranceway to the ER, and out to the driveway, where Hekate the Volvo still sat, her hazard lights faithfully blinking. The late-summer-afternoon breeze carried a smell of the ocean. Gwen shivered, a spasm that started in her arms and shoulders but soon convulsed everything. She had barely eaten all day, which was horrible, reprehensible, two months from delivery and already a Bad Mother. Now she felt like she was starving and at the same time like she might throw up. The stitches burned in her cheek. There was a reek of butts and ashes, out here beyond the doors, and a live thread of fresh smoke. She turned to see a pair of women whom she recognized from the waiting room, young and wide-eyed with matching taffy curls, cousins or possibly sisters, one of them even more hugely pregnant than Gwen, sharing a Kool with an air of exuberant impatience as if, when they finished it, something good was going to happen to one or both of