Brooklyn Zoo Read Free Page B

still technically students, I knew we’d never be returning to campus again. I was thirty-four years old, and certainly it was time, but I’d loved almost everything about graduate school and could think of little benefit to its end. I enjoyed dividing my time between reading and seeing patients, and discussing the readings and the patients with people who were just as interested in it all as I was. I was living on student loans, which, supplemented by the occasional writing assignment, provided for the basics. And then there was the security inherent in the student position, the absence of any pressure to be the final word.
    “Was George excited this morning?” she asked.
    Yes, I nodded, he was. As Jen and I traveled farther out into Brooklyn, George, whom I would marry in the spring, was on his way into Manhattan to begin his own internship at Columbia-Presbyterian, the most coveted of placements—a private hospital affiliated with an Ivy League university—and one that hadn’t even seen fit to grant me a second interview last winter when the whole matching process was in bloody swing. George had been a social worker in the navy before he’d gone back to school, and he’d struggled over whether to rank Columbia over one of the three local VA hospitals, but in the end he couldn’t resist the siren call of the world-class medical institution. Geographically, Columbia was about asfar as you could get from Kings County within the borders of New York City. It seemed like an apt metaphor.
    The train rumbled down the tracks. Speaking over its clatter, Jen told me she was already wishing the year away. Like many of her classmates, she’d worked at Beth Israel for three years during grad school (we called these placements externships), and she’d had enough of hospitals. Most of my own classmates had also done hospital externships during school, but I’d purposely avoided that, choosing to train at a psychoanalytic institute instead, with healthier patients and different objectives. I’d been halfheartedly cautioned against this by my school’s externship adviser—he spoke vaguely about the value of having hospital experience pre-internship—but all of my professors were psychoanalysts in private practice, grooming us for much of the same. I wanted to get right into it. This other work seemed like a lesser option, a booby prize. During my master’s program I had briefly volunteered on an inpatient psychiatric unit in order to build my CV, and I believed I’d learned nothing. I’d helped the handlebar-mustachioed recreation therapist run groups, which meant sitting with him and the patients as we put together a unit newsletter (he eventually left me alone to run that group, thanks—but no thanks—to my magazine background) or played hangman, cautiously renamed Wheel of Fortune by the staff. In my semester there I never once encountered a psychologist. Now, some years of training later, I still had no idea what therapists like me, schooled in long-term recovery with higher-functioning patients, were supposed to do in places aimed at short-term stabilization of the chronically and acutely mentally ill. I felt too embarrassed to ask, half-certain that after six years in school I should know that already and half-afraid that the answer would simply validate the fear that I was superfluous.
    The alarm bells of the subway station’s emergency exit gate blared as Jen and I disembarked at the front of the train. I’d exited subway stations throughout the sprawling city over many years but never to the sound of sirens. I assumed they were meant to summon the police, but nobody came. There didn’t seem to be an emergency anyway. Jen and I climbed the stairs into a sunny July morning. We walked straight toward the BP station, left as the road dead-ended at the hospital’s A Building, and right down Winthrop Street a good long way.

    In 1831, the population of Flatbush hovered around a thousand, and Brooklyn was a city