Love and Modern Medicine : Stories

by Klass, Perri

• ISBN13: 9780618109609
• ISBN10: 0618109609
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-05-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

The New York Times has described Perri Klass's short stories as "subtly astonishing and very funny. Klass writes stories that sound true. She's a medical school graduate, a passionate traveler, a mother, a writer. Her preoccupations come forth in her stories. She has plenty to say about love in a science-drunk world, how the brain works, and the heart. And how the sparks fly when the two collide." Sparks fly again in her new collection, LOVE AND MODERN MEDICINE, a literary tapesty of the beauties and terrors of contemporary domesticity. Instantly recognizable, the appealing characters in these stories are the able sort who can cope with any crisis at work but are often undone by the complexities of life at home. They are parents, doctors, patients, friends, and lovers, who encounter one another in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, in a world in which professional expertise -- even the finest medical expertise -- cannot always ward off threats to everyday happiness. In "Freedom Fighter," a pregnant obstetrician steals a getaway weekend with an old friend among the outlet malls of northern New England. A fruit-fly geneticist in "The Trouble with Sophie" struggles to contend with her daughter's jargon-spouting kindergarten teacher. In "Intimacy," a high school biology teacher, exhausted by new motherhood, listens bleary-eyed to the details of her coworker's "intimacy counseling" with her latest boyfriend. And in "Necessary Risks," an anesthesiologist balks at spending two weeks alone with her energetic and precocious four-year-old. Including three O. Henry Award -- winning stories, LOVE AND MODERN MEDICINE is full of small wonders and large satisfactions.

Author Biography

PERRI KLASS is the award-winning author of both fiction and nonfiction works. Most recently, she wrote Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor. She is a practicing pediatrician and the medical director of the national literacy program Reach Out and Read, dedicated to promoting literacy as part of pediatric primary care.

Table of Contents

For Women Everywhere	1	(16)
Rainbow Mama	16	(14)
Necessary Risks	30	(22)
Intimacy	52	(16)
City Sidewalks	68	(17)
Exact Change	85	(11)
Freedom Fighter	96	(24)
Dedication	120	(18)
The Trouble with Sophie	138	(21)
The Province of the Bearded Fathers	159	(12)
Love and Modern Medicine	171

Excerpts

For Women EverywhereAlison, in her ninth month, finds she can no longer turn over in bed at night without waking up. The hydraulics of shifting her belly are just too complex, and to get from her left side to her right, she has to maneuver herself delicately, tucking her elbow under and using it as a lever, swinging her abdomen over the top. Turning over the other way, belly down, is not possible; if she could, she imagines, she would look like a circus seal balancing on a huge ball. When her best friend from high school arrives to keep her company and wait for the birth, Alison hopes to be distracted; lately, she thinks of nothing but the advent of labor. When will this baby come out, when will the pains start that will be unmistakably something new, something she has never felt before? Her obstetrician suggested that they might feel like bad menstrual cramps, which Alison has never had. And she is now accustomed to the small tightenings inside her belly that occur every now and then; Braxton-Hicks contraction, she tells her friend Doris, who thereafter asks her, if she should happen to clutch herself, "Another Brixie-Hixie?" It is very nice to have Doris around. For one thing, unpregnant, Doris is easily as big as Alison in her ninth month. Doris was big in high school and shes bigger now. She buys her clothes in special stores that sell silk and velvet and linen for the fat working woman, and all her lingerie is peach. She smells of a perfume named after a designer, familiar to Alison because of little scented cardboard samples in a million magazines - open this flap to enjoy the magic - opposite honey-toned photos of naked bodies arranged like fruit in a basket. Doriss possessions fit surprisingly well into what she calls the tawdry jungle glamour of Alisons apartment. Among the overgrown plants with Christmas lights strung through them and the life-size stuffed animals and the bongo collection, Doris reclines in her jumpsuits, taking her ease as if waiting for her palanquin. When Doris and Alison walk down the street together on their way to get hamburgers and onion rings, Alison feels like they are a phalanx. Finally she has the nerve to wear a big straw hat with fuchsia flowers out in public, stealing it off her stuffed giraffe. Hey, big mamas, she imagines someone shouting (not that anyone ever does). Together, she and Doris take up their share of the street and of the hamburger restaurant, where the waitress greets them by saying, The usual, right? Alison is by now pretty well used to the rude and stupid and none-of- their-business things that people say to her. But good old Doris walked into her apartment, put down her two suitcases and her handbag and her camera case, and informed Alison, looking narrowly at her ballooned abdomen, "Alison, you are doing this For Women Everywhere." Then she gave a Bronx cheer. "Right," said Alison with relief, wondering how Doris knew. The world is full of well-meaning people who fe

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Excerpted from Love and Modern Medicine: Stories by Perri Klass
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