White___ Black___ Hispanic___
Angry___ Weeping___ Laughing___ Agitated___ Calm___
Slow talker___ Fast talker___ Stutter___ Lisp___
Other speech impediment (please specify):__________
Foreign or regional accent (please specify):________
* * *
The Suspicious Caller Report was unpopular with the staff. When the former Green Beret introduced it during Threat Response Training, he was severely interrogated by one of the volunteers, Marisol Leon.
Sir, I have a question. Do I sound Black or Hispanic?
He smiled uneasily. Ma’am, that’s not for me to say.
Well, this form is asking us to make a judgment. “How did the caller sound?” I’m merely asking you that same question. Do I sound Black or Hispanic?
The Green Beret blushed a shade not found in nature. The Suspicious Caller Report was designed, he explained, to give law enforcement as much actionable intel as possible. There was no other agenda.
Marisol repeated her question.
Ma’am, he said, I’m not going to engage with you on this.
THE DELI WAS PACKED AT MIDDAY, HUNGRY PEOPLE LURKING IN the vestibule. The overflow crowd spilled onto the sidewalk: elderly couples, women pushing strollers, loud-talking men in suits. All day long the place smelled of breakfast, bacon and coffee and fried potatoes. Every few months, Phil dragged Claudia there for lunch. As far as she could recall, he was the only person who’d ever cared what she ate. When they were married, it drove her crazy. After their divorce, it was the thing she missed the most. He’d been her college boyfriend, first lover, starter husband. His mother got her the job at Damsel. They married the summer after graduation and lasted two years.
She was a divorced person. It was her natural state—preferable, she felt, to either alternative. Marriage didn’t appeal to her in any way, and yet she was glad to have tried it. If she were forty-three and never married, she might attach undue importance to the fact. Her never-marriedness would seem the root of all sorrow, the cause of every small dissatisfaction in her fortunate and mostly happy life.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said as they waited for a table. “The phone rang just as I was leaving. It got complicated.” She explained about the Suspicious Caller Report, the angry husband. My wife has been calling this numbah.
“I don’t like the sound of this,” Phil said. “Be careful.”
“What would careful look like?”
It was an honest question. At the clinic they took every precaution imaginable. She felt incapable of greater care.
“I’m serious, Claudia. What are you going to do if he shows up there?”
“He won’t. People say things on the phone that they’d never say to your face. Honestly, it was nothing.”
“You said that last time.”
“Last time was also nothing.”
“If I were you,” Phil said, “I’d get myself a gun.”
“Seriously?” Claudia was gobsmacked. “Can you seriously imagine me pulling a gun on someone?”
“You’d do what you had to do,” said Phil.
“I would lose my shit.” They’d known each other twenty-five years; how could he not know this? It suggested that he hadn’t been paying attention, that he had no idea who she really was.
They slid into a booth and glanced at the menu, which Phil knew by heart but studied for pleasure. Early in his career he’d reviewed restaurants for the Globe and had single-handedly put several out of business—fake, overpriced dim sum; a gastropub in Somerville that served an appetizer of flavored steam. But the deli never disappointed. The dumplings and brisket and homely kugels were, to him, the pinnacle of human culinary achievement. Claudia could remember when these foods seemed exotic to her. In rural Maine, pre-internet, even bagels were unheard of. It wasn’t like that anymore; no place was. It was hard to believe, now, how little they’d known of the world, how isolated they’d been.
“I drove past the clinic the other day,” said Phil. “There must have been fifty people out there.”
“Thirty-six,” she said. “It’s Lent. They’ll be out there until Easter.” She reached for her phone to show him a photo. “See? No more buffer zone. Now they come right up to the door.”
For years, protestors had to stay fifty feet away from the clinic’s entrance—a Massachusetts law recently overturned by the courts. Now they could crowd around the door, praying and singing to their hearts’ content, cursing and screaming and speaking in tongues. Their insults and obscenities were protected under the First Amendment. Unless they laid hands on a patient, or threatened to, or physically barred her from entering, the law was on their side. It was up to the patient—whatever her physical or emotional condition—to muscle her way through.
When Claudia explained this to Phil, he looked incredulous.
“You’re kidding. That’s legal?” The son and grandson of attorneys, he believed—reflexively, unconsciously—in the overarching wisdom of the law. That the law could be shortsighted or capricious, or simply wrong, was an impossible thought.
“It is now,” said Claudia. “Do I like whitefish?”
“That’s outrageous. Someone’s going to get killed.” He had an eye for calamity, an actuarial sense of all that could go wrong in life: identity theft, radon leak, Bell’s palsy. Tsunami, heatstroke, spinal meningitis. It seemed like a complicated way to live.
“Enough on that subject,” she said. “Joy is good? The girls are good?”
Joy was Phil’s second wife, a woman she had never met. Claudia wasn’t invited to their wedding, a lavish affair at a golf club in suburban Ohio, with a six-piece swing band for dancing after the surf and turf. Her own long-ago wedding to Phil, at city hall, took ten minutes.
“Isabelle has a boyfriend. Logan,” Phil said with wry distaste. “I am unprepared.”
“How is that possible? You’ve been worrying about this since she was in diapers.” Back then he’d played it for laughs: his reflexive mistrust of male children, an entire generation of infants with designs on his daughter’s virtue. Joking, but not really. It was a quirk of male psychology Claudia would never understand, a weird oedipal protectiveness she found slightly creepy. But what did she know? She’d never had a father.
“He’s two years older,” Phil said. “I find that ominous.”
“You don’t like Logan?”
“Haven’t met him. No one has. Logan is a mythical whatever. A Sasquatch.”
“Loch Ness monster,” said Claudia. “Jersey devil.”
“Funny you should say. He does go to Princeton.”
“That doesn’t sound ominous.”
“That’s what Joy says. I’m lucky: the girls tell her everything. I’m happier that way. The less I know.” He took a pair of reading glasses from his pocket.
“Oh ho! When did this happen?”