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Every episode seems to take a day, but I can't tell if they're sequential because Jackie's constantly scheming for drugs in new ambitious ways, but then why make a big deal about how every one of them is a day? Maybe it'll be clearer later. I like the idea that her life is just this interesting, not to mention the idea of not missing a second of Zoey's antics.
Kevin's worried about Grace, the older daughter, and her perseveration on apocalypses, pandemics and the like. Jackie tells him not to worry about it, but she's scared too. Over sushi, Eleanor says -- I'm paraphrasing -- at least if something happens to Jackie, Grace will have something to worry about: Eleanor being her new mommy. (Presuming, then, that she really is the girls' godmother, because the Peytons are like these huge Catholics, so I don't think she was just saying it.)
Hospital gossip: Mo-Mo's crushing on Coop, Coop thinks he's discovered Jackie's "crush" on Eddie, and Eleanor steals Zoey's brand-new stethoscope and spends the day watching her freak out about asking for it back. They're looking at replacing Big Pharma Eddie with an automated dispensary robot, which of course causes junkie Jackie to freak out, but it's unclear whether Coop is interested or even able to help her vote it down.
An adorable Ohio couple vacationing for their anniversary come in with a possible pregnancy, but all is not what it seems: the wife has accidentally gotten herself addicted to Vicodin, and subsequently sent herself into withdrawal. The irony of telling the girl how dumb this is isn't lost on Nurse Jackie, who jury-rigs an eye pencil/chewed-gum device to rescue her own last pill.
Zoey attempts abortively to bond with a man whose relationship with his cat is scrotum-scratchingly unhealthy, and in another bed, Stefania from Damages spends her husband's last days feeding him Jewish penicillin, fending off Mrs. Akalitus, and not letting on that she knows how close to death he really is. Jackie's moved enough by their story to try some chicken soup magic of her own on Grace, but it doesn't really seem to help. week: other people start to notice Grace's impending breakdown, Jackie juggles her complexifying personal life, and Zoey loses her first.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Kevin and the girls are on the bed in the morning, still in their pajamas, even though it's a Thursday. The world outside the bathroom, in the master bedroom, is very different from the world inside. "Ah, morning. So quiet," Jackie says. "So peaceful. I can breathe it in, I can almost feel it inside... " She's short, reaching for the last pill on the medicine cabinet, far above her head where nobody knows about it but her. Outside, Fiona and Kevin are ignoring the television; Grace watches with rapt attention. "Almost there..." It's something medical:
Jackie retrieves the pill and then drops it in the sink, and for a second she is ugly. She grabs a piece of gum and an eye pencil, and reaches down into the hole. It's pretty gross. Kevin surprises her and she jumps, guilty, and tries to get out of there. He cracks the door behind him, and shows her Grace, staring up at the TV. Their younger daughter lies back on the bed, bored to tears. "I asked her what she wanted to watch," he says, and she chose a documentary over cartoons: Viral Armageddon: Death Knell For Mankind." Grace knows better than most about the things that come into your house, that tear you apart. "So she's interested in science," Jackie says easily, but he says there's more to it. He's right:
Jackie points out that Grace is heading full-bore into teenagerhood, where mood swings are the order of the day, and reassures him this stuff is normal. But documents about world war, and global warming? "She seems so nervous," he says, honestly afraid. "She's ten, what's she got to be nervous about?" How about this:
Kevin Peyton kisses his wife and asks to visit her at work, take her to lunch like Eleanor always does, but she takes a rain check. It's Thursday, it's going to be nuts. What she means is that her back hurts; what she means is that she doesn't wear her wedding ring past the revolving doors; what she means is that she fucks Eddie every day at noon. "Been raining a lot lately," Kevin says, already giving in, and she distracts him: "April showers bring May flowers. And if you're really good, maybe a blowjob." Humor plus sex and he's forgotten what they were talking about. Kevin laughs, and leaves to take the kids to school. Jackie stares back at the sink.
Then it's later, coming out of the subway and calling Eddie: "I really want to see you this morning," she says. What she means is that she needs some drugs. "Call me, that would be great, okay," she says. Sounding desperate. Then it's later and this old guy is saying he knows about medicine, he's aware of how this works, he knows all about it, he was in the Army. She's more distracted than usual, filling the space with empty encouragement. Zoey enters grinning, showing off her new stethoscope -- "Ta-da!" -- but Jackie's more distracted than usual:
"Okay, first give me those leads. Second, don't ever say ta-da. The only people that say ta-da are magicians and idiots." Zoey smiles and nods, as usual blissfully uninterested in anything but accentuating the positive: "Cool, isn't it," she gloats proudly. "My mom gave it to me." Jackie doesn't even look at her. "Leads." Before Zoey can force her to acknowledge her existence, or that of the stethoscope, Dr. Eleanor O'Hara comes breezing in: "Swear to God, Jacks, the salespeople at Bergdorf are so foul they almost make me regret spending twelve hundred dollars on a scarf."
Eleanor easily snags Zoey's brand-new stethoscope with barely a verbal acknowledgement that she's doing so, and listens to the old man's chest. He had a quadruple bypass, he tells her, the same year the Rangers won the Stanley Cup. Eleanor looks at, or toward, Jackie, knowing she'll fill in the blanks, and Jackie does: 1994. She's still dreaming about a particular player, whom the old man loves as well. Eleanor tells him he needs a cardio consult, probably angioplasty -- Zoey reaching for the stethoscope, pulling back suddenly -- if not another bypass. She calls Jackie out into the hall, and Zoey follows: "I'm thinking sushi or Indian for lunch. Text me and I'll get a rezzie." Zoey can barely breathe, much less ask for her stethoscope back, and Eleanor breezes out as easily as she came in.
Alone with the nurses, Mr. Zimberg tells Jackie it's not happening. No more cardio consults, no more angio, no more bypasses, no more bupkas. He apologizes for his irritation, but alludes to a saying his friend used to hand him: "Well, that's life in the Balkans." He didn't know what he was talking about, this friend, until lately.
(Zimberg's played by Eli Wallach, who quotes this phrase more than once in his own autobiography, attributing it to his first stage agent, and presumably brought it to this episode.) But in this context, what Zimberg now understands is what his friend meant: life is still life until it's not life anymore; that we take what we take, and give what we can, and in the end we're all handed the same amount of life, just in different shapes. The usual dreary existentialism that keeps people alive in brutal climes and amid unjust, unearned punishments. But what the old know and the young fear learning is that the scathing sharpness of this dreary existential humor is really just the price: the thing you're buying is another minute of life, and the right to fill it up with love. C'est la guerre. You have to laugh, because if you don't, you lose the war. In the Balkans, everything is in short supply.
Zimberg doesn't want his wife to lose "one minute of sleep" over this, his new dying. He honestly thinks she doesn't know. He can feel her: "Here she comes! My childhood sweetheart." Mrs. Zimberg runs to the bed, smiling deeply. "I looked and looked!" she shouts joyfully, and he grins. "And now you found."
Jackie introduces herself, and Zimberg explains to his wife how he was just saying, no more doctors and no more medicine. His wife completes his sentences; she knows he's ready too. They are entering the Balkans, over rocks and barren fields, after decades, with his hand in hers. "All he needs is in this bag," she says, and he nods; Jackie's eyes go humorously wide: "Must be some bag!" They laugh. It is. She leaves them to each other, bouncing for a second to talk to Eddie.
"You rang?" Eddie says, revved up and ready; she tells him her back is killing her and he promises to take care of it -- they'll meet in twenty minutes; he grins wolfishly and leaves. Then it's later, and a young lady is coming in on a gurney, cold and sweating, no fever yet. Her cute, bedimpled husband is sick with worry. He doesn't know what her allergies are, yet. They're too young to know those things; they're too happy to know how to hold hands like that yet. "Penicillin," she gasps out, in pain, and they transfer her to the bed. Allergic to penicillin.
The young wife wasn't feeling great last night, but started cramping up this morning. Jackie can tell they're Midwestern, not native New Yorkers, because "You're in pain and you're apologizing." They apologize; it is their anniversary. Her vitals are okay, Jackie wants to do a pregnancy test, they are overjoyed. She leaves them beaming.
Then it's later, and Zoey's dancing weirdly toward Jackie, calling out, "Hi!" Jackie tells her to stop saying hi, that once a week is plenty, that five days consecutively will earn her a Metro card. Zoey reports on her doings and Jackie notices her stethoscope is gone; Zoey tries to explain that Eleanor took it but Jackie doesn't care. The excuses are for the outside world, she's trying to teach her every day: you don't apologize for mistakes, you just stop making them. And then you laugh, because that's life in the Balkans; because if you don't stay on your toes and remember to breathe, if you don't do both of those, all the time, people die.
"Dr. O'Hara is..." Zoey shivers, wondering for the word, the precise chilly, intimidating, scary, word. "A doctor." Jackie nods. "Okay, here's a tip. Doctors take shit. Sandwiches, stethoscopes. Credit. They can't help themselves. Figure it out, Zoey."
Then it's later, and Eddie's closing the Harmacy shades while she grimaces at him in pain, trying to smile. She gazes lovingly at the rows of bottles and jars of pills, and he starts doing some kind of fucking massage on her. She's pained by it, but also charmed. "Yep," she finally says, "That's it. Right there, you got it." He's so proud, she's not interested. He keeps going. There's something else:
"Eddie? Your hands feel sad." He grins; "You're killing me," he says. She asks again why his hands feel sad: they're replacing him, perhaps, probably, with a Pyxis machine. She jumps up, horrified. "Over my dead body!" She asks, desperately, if it means he'll be transferred to another floor, and he shakes his head. The whole point is getting rid of him altogether with the "bullshit pill machine," but she shouldn't worry about him, he can just go work at CVS or whatever. Not really the point. She calls it a robot and he corrects her and then realizes that technically it is a robot. Still not the point:
"I don't fucking believe this. We're gonna need ID numbers now so they can keep track of every fucking aspirin we take out? Like we need more oversight! Why don't ya staple a fucking camera to my forehead? It's gonna take us like twenty minutes to punch a number into a keyboard to get a fucking Motrin. I swear to God I could puke." What she means is: where will her drugs come from now? "Yeah, I'm gonna miss you too," Eddie says, none too happy with the sudden transparency of their arrangement right now. She looks at him and sighs because what, this is serious:
It's serious enough that Jackie calls Dr. Fitch Cooper "Coop" for the first time, which sends him into circus poodle backflips, and before she can even speak he's showing her an x-ray of a man's hand, shattered into a million pieces. "Grim, right?" She gets to the point, bringing up the Pyxis, and he starts in with the backflips again. "Even the name sounds cool! Pyxis! I love that!" No, Jackie explains slowly, like he's a slow child, which come on: It's the opposite of cool, Coop. "Vote NO on the Pyxis," she says like a mesmerist, hoping it'll sink in. "Captain, we are powerless against the crushing force of the Pyxis," he yells into his stethoscope in some insurmountable accent. "Pew pew pew!" She waits a bit, then asks if he's done, but she should be more specific:
"Jackie, we're talking about the seamless integration of man and machine! Step! Into the Future!" She explains to him that the Pyxis is not only an insult to nurses, but is also squeezing Eddie out of a job. Suddenly, Coop realizes that she's there on her own behalf, and not like as his Jiminy Cricket or whatever; that she's not urging him to give his own two cents to the board, but hers. Which has been obvious since she walked in and told him that, but whatever. His feelings aren't even really hurt. "How about time you need a favor just ask, huh?" Ugh, if that's the price, these mental noogies... She takes off, but he decides it's worth trying again, this time humiliating her with questions about the "little crush on Eddie" he's somehow uncovered by reading between the lines of their conversation. He's a regular Nancy Drew, old Coop:
"Yeah. That's it, 'Coop,' I have a huge crush on Eddie. In fact, we fuck every day at noon. You're a moron."
12:01 and guess what's up. "How are we on time," Eddie gasps out, and with her forehead against his, sitting in his lap in his pneumatic chair, she answers. "We're good. Just don't get fancy."
Then it's later and Mrs. Zimberg is feeding him chicken soup. That was what was in the bag. She makes Jackie smell it, and it's amazing. Zimberg swears that it's kept him alive two years longer than predicted; it's all he needs. Jackie tries to underscore that Eleanor is a very good doctor, and that her evaluation can be trusted: Zimberg needs a consult and therapy. They both protest, and Mrs. Z levels: "He's had enough. Trust us."
"They don't call chicken soup Jewish Penicillin for nothing," Zimberg says. "It's all about faith." About faith, about love, about life in the Balkans. "It's a cure-all," Mrs. Z says. "Back in ancient times, a Jewish mystic blessed the first pot, and to this day there's a little magic in every pot. True or not, it's a nice story." Jackie smiles. "We'll go with true." She wants to believe.
"Attagirl!" Zimberg shouts, and Jackie laughs. "So, let's be clear. You are refusing medical treatment, and choosing to eat soup, instead." It's not really something she needs to clarify, unless Akalitus comes running, because she loves them and they deserve to enjoy some soup. His ass is dying, and all three of them know it. But life in the Balkans is like this: You're old enough, or wise enough, to look it in the face. Or you get that way PDQ. Whatever it is, you look at it -- death, sadness, horrors, cold, mistakes, pain, suffering unimaginable -- and you don't blink. You blink, people die. You weep, people die. You say anything but the truth, shining like a harsh winter sun, it doesn't make it better, it makes it worse. And for this strength, this cruel firmness, you are rewarded with something more valuable than any comfort: you have the truth. That's what Jackie gives, and all she's doing now is confirming that all three of them are strong enough to look.
They promise to leave after this last meal, the chicken soup, the penicillin. "If I can be of any help," she asks them, "Let me know." Zimberg smiles and promises to take her up on that, at least. She leaves his bed, pulling the curtain closed, and walks past Mrs. Akalitus without drawing her attention; Akalitus doesn't mind, because the last time she saw them she was all fucked up on drugs. But they're a little closer than they were.
31 year old male, in the stirrups again, brought in unconscious, still out of it. Serious lacerations on the testicles, and a lump on his head. He comes to, and freaks out about the stirrups, which are freaky. "Goddamnit, Roy..." he mumbles, calming down, and Coop gets right up in there. "Boyfriend trouble?" he starts offering the guy options, but he says no, he's not pressing charges against Roy, because Roy is his cat. Their jaws drop, but Zoey gets a closer look. "Oh, yeah. A cat did that." He was cleaning the bathtub, nude, and leaned over, and Roy dove for his scrotum -- dove, he says, for the scrotum -- and he knocked himself out. Coop grins, between his legs.
"I married my cat when I was six. Made him a little tuxedo and everything." Zoey pats the man on his leg, unbelievably adorable/flesh-crawlingly creepy as usual, and grins down at him. "Aren't cats great?" Jackie barks her name, and yells again about the stethoscope. "I know! Shut up! Go get it!" Zoey vanishes in a whirlwind of yelling.
Then it's later, and Mo-Mo allows as how it could happen. Naked cleaning, a certain amount of movement, that is to say a certain swinging action: what cat could resist. He compares the scrotum to "a little pink mouse, swinging from a vine," which is a titch too far for Jackie, but you know, and she notices the Ohio husband flipping through magazines. He's in over his head, and he doesn't even know it yet:
"Well, this one is for forty-year-olds... And this one's for teens... This one's in Spanish." His dimples are ... On fire. She picks out better magazines and he thanks her profusely, swearing the stories about New Yorkers aren't true. "Mmm," she grins: yes they are. Heading back to Mo-Mo, she's treated to the freaky sight of watching his eyes climb the entire delectable, embarrassing, heady mess that is Dr. Fitch Cooper, and screams like a little pink mouse just jumped off a vine at her face.
He jumps, guiltily; his eyes were cheating on Randy. He jumps like she jumped in the bathroom, when she was diving after the thing she loves more than her husband, or her children, and was surprised by it. He jumps like that. "You were cruising Dr. Cooper!" she dry-heaves, and he protests. "You were licking your lips like a cartoon wolf!" she shouts. "That's the second time today I felt like I was going to puke!" But really it was the third, wasn't it. "Sometimes the people who disgust you are the hottest fucks," Mo-Mo tries to explain, but she shakes her head. "Sometimes the people who disgust you just disgust you."
Mrs. Akalitus interrupts the Zimbergs in their bed, still with the soup already, and Zimberg calls her "dear." She brusquely asks who his doctor is, and Mrs. Zimberg explains: "He doesn't have a doctor. He's eating soup." You can't really blame Akalitus for being weirded out by that. Jackie appears out of thin air and tells her that they're just waiting on test results. "They can wait in the waiting room!" she shouts, and Jackie pulls her out of there firmly. "That's not a happy woman," Zimberg suggests. He has no idea:
"Gloria, can you be a nurse again for one second, and stick your head in there? Tell me what you see?" She does, stands there with hands on hips, and stares at them. After a moment of consideration, she returns to Jackie, closing the curtain behind her again. "He's dying," she says. That's life in the Balkans, right there. "All right, he can have until the end of your shift." Jackie rolls her eyes, but that's good enough.
Zoey stalks Eleanor through the hospital, never quite snagging her moment. She asks Thor to help her get the stethoscope back, and he immediately gives her a cute, singsong no. She stares at O'Hara a few yards away, smiling insanely and carrying on a vivid conversation with nobody. I saved two lives today. Doctors are just people. Hi, Mrs. O'Hara, can I... Hi, DOCTOR O'Hara, my stethoscope that you borrowed from me this morning, can I... She pounds a fist into her palm and heads over, still monologuing, still subvocal.
Dr. O'Hara, it's come to my attention that you have my stethoscope... Eleanor looks up, not at her words but her approach: "Oh, hello Angela!" she smiles brightly, and looks back at her work. "Oh um it's not An... It. Um." Zoey curtseys at this point -- low enough that her undies bite her ass, causing her to jump in the air like a YouTube video of your pet doing something hilarious -- and then she bounces away like a rubber ball in a department store, squealing as she runs.
"Jews are so funny," Eleanor says at sushi, about the soup. "Is that racist?" Jackie asks, because yes it is, but Eleanor shrugs. "I think it's a compliment." She swears he better have a DNR ready to go: "He's absolutely a knob if he doesn't. I mean, trying to bring them back to life is such a bloody mess!" Patients, basically, are appalling. She goes on at length, until Jackie points out that she's sitting there eating her "spicy money roll" and getting hypothetical. But if she had the chance to spend like one day with somebody she really loved, the story would be different. Eleanor smiles a secret smile. "That's assuming an awful lot."
Eleanor changes the subject to Jackie's husband Kevin, and her boyfriend Eddie. Matter and antimatter, chicken soup and Vicodin. Kevin, the God particle that keeps her family afloat, that chicken soup glue that keeps everybody alive another whole day. There's Kevin, okay, Kevin who couldn't locate the Balkans on a map and has no idea he lives ther
e, how he labors under a false cold sun. That thing that Grace feels slipping away, and the world going with it. And then there's Eddie, who supplies the other thing. For whom she takes off her ring, and who in turn feeds her body with pleasure and oblivion. Eddie who couldn't locate the Balkans on a map, but at least knows that they exist.
"Eddie and your husband decide to become friends. And they become friends, and the Titanic is sinking, and only one of them survives." That's the story Grace is telling, all the time, and nobody can decipher it. Kevin doesn't know what it means, and Jackie's not strong enough to hear it yet, because she is the Titanic.
"You are really a very mean-spirited woman," Jackie says, and then changes the subject. Or thinks she's changing the subject, when really she's just riding that train to its stop. "I think Grace is starting to unravel a little bit," she admits. Unto admitting that it's starting to scare the shit out of her. The things, the bright Balkan things, she has to protect Kevin from. "If you need anything -- and I mean anything -- you better bloody tell me," Eleanor says, uncharacteristically clear-eyed, "Or I will kill you." Yes:
When we were talking about Kevin, about the chicken soup, the pancakes, that he brings them every second, she was picking at her fingernails, her nail beds, her cuticles, her thumbs and fingers, worn and dry from the constant OCD sanitation that keeps us alive. Now her hands flutter to her face, as though she is being attacked, and linger at her earrings:
"And then, she'll be motherless." (This with a gorgeous and evocative intonation somewhere along the semiotic lines of, Which will give her something to fucking cry about.) "And then I'll have to take her." Jackie shivers at that thought, from the bottoms of her feet to the top of her lovely head. She won't leave the earrings alone, can't do it, like sneakers that will never be quite tight enough. She forces her hands to her lap and changes the subject again: "You know you took my precept's stethoscope this morning, right?" Meaning, was this something you did knowingly, to be my friend the bitch, or is this something you did because you're a doctor. Eleanor giggles that she's been having "the most marvelous time" watching her muster the courage to ask for it back, and they laugh, and the fear goes away again.
(I think -- and it pains me to say this -- I think I would like to see Eleanor really screw Jackie somehow. Or if not betray her, at least show us the limits of this friendship. Because they're so kind and accepting and impressed with each other all the time that it's really comforting? But also kind of scary, because part of the point of Eleanor is that she's this Absolutely Fabulous Weapon of Mass Consumption -- prodigal to a cartoonish degree, exquisitely blasé, debauched in no specific way -- which, you'd do well generally to remember, can and will always go either way. Real folks who eat off other people's plates will eventually reach for yours, and you better love them enough to share before that happens, or they will cut you with their steely knives. We love our selfish friends because they make us feel less selfish but that doesn't change the fact that we're both selfish. So the idea of the abyss, although we have not seen it yet and maybe never will, makes me nervous, because at some point we're going to require a sense of where her honor is located for her to remain interesting, and I do so love her.)
Mo-Mo brings the labs for the Ohio couple -- "Wife ain't preggers" -- he says, but there's more to it. Jackie goes to the wife, alone, and explains the situation. Not pregnant, sadly: withdrawing from opiates. The girl protests when she asks for details, and she cuts to the chase: "If you bullshit me I can't help you." Welcome to New York. She asks how Jackie knew, and she fairly counts off on her fingers: "Cramps, sweating. And you know, it's my job."
Ohio Wife got her wisdom teeth out six months ago, and was given Vicodin, and she loved it. Incredibly easy to get ahold of, online. It was the most amazing feeling she'd ever had, like chicken soup: the most perfect day of your entire life. Which, she explains, is not an easy feeling to attain in Toledo. So what, Jackie asks, she ran out on their trip? Not at all: it's their anniversary. The real perfect day, the perfect trip. Why would she need it? Because you've found your way into the Balkans, where things have consequences; because you must now find your way back out again. Because this job is wading through a shitstorm of people who come into this place on the very worst day of their lives.
You can't just stop taking opioids just like that; you have to taper off. "You're on a slippery slope," Jackie says, and she recoils. It's not like she's addicted, after all. Jackie doesn't even bother, because they both know the truth. And incidentally, trying to get pregnant while you're taking painkillers recreationally is "not a great plan," to understate the problem somewhat. She shivers; the husband has an alcoholic dad and a pill-popping wife will kill him. She jumps, I mean to say, like Jackie in the morning.
Jackie heads out to get her a phone number, and when she reaches into her pocket for a pen to write down the number, she pulls out the eyeliner and gum, and the Vicodin stuck to the end of it. Pops the pill; why not? There's no time for irony.
Jackie and Mrs. Zimberg listen to the dry flatline whistle, looking down at him as the lights go out. Jackie sends the team away, so that it's just the two of them with him, and eventually turns off the machine. "I'm so sorry," she says finally, swearing that the chicken soup must have eased his suffering. "That's all I ever wanted," Mrs. Z smiles. "I knew he was dying, even though he didn't want me to know. Married a hundred years, how could I not know he was dying?" That's life in the Balkans, harsh and uncaring:
Mrs. Akalitus arrives, right on time, distastefully efficient, and gives Mrs. Zimberg an ugly apology. The curtain squeals, screeches, as she pulls it back. Mrs. Zimberg speaks quietly, says something in Yiddish, and Akalitus leaves again. She's not a happy woman. What did it mean? "Go shit in the ocean," Mrs. Zimberg grins, and Jackie smiles warmly. "Very nice."
Eleanor sits on a pew in the chapel hall, giant sunglasses on her face, looking at nothing. Zoey creeps up to her, like a cat, speaking in that strangely reverent, weird way. "Hi, it's me, Zo... Angela?" She sits, to no response. "I was wondering if I could get the stetho..." Nothing. She stares, considering this woman. This doctor. She waves her hand in front of Eleanor's face. Nothing. Finally, on fire with her own daring, every nerve alive with transgression and fear, she slips it off Eleanor's neck. A big moment, Goonies-esque in its adventurous import. As it comes free, she gets into it, grinning toothily, and then it's free. She runs.
"Well done, Angela," Eleanor grins to herself, and reclines on the pew, resting on her elbows. If it were Jackie, Zoey would have pulled back a bloody stump. She would have held onto those things with a death grip until Zoey pulled it together enough to look her in the eye, squinting, and demanded them. Threatened to beat the shit out of her, maybe, or just grabbed it, like Grasshopper. Not referring to authority, not threatening to tattle, just looked her in the eye and said "Give me back my fucking stethoscope."
But this is Eleanor, and this is also training Zoey needs: You don't look a doctor in the eye and you don't threaten them with harm. Not unless it's somebody like Coop, or you're somebody like Jackie. A different kind of training: How to survive in a world where people punch you out of nowhere, or blame you for their own misdeeds, or use the hierarchy of power to fuck with you. You don't demand, you just take. Silently, and without disturbing the balance. You sneak, without leaving a ripple or a footprint, so that nothing changes. She did well. She learned a thing today.
Jackie hits a corner store on the way home for some chicken soup. Some Jewish penicillin. The irony didn't escape her: stare a woman in the eye and tell her that her addiction is killing the family she's only barely started. The woman from Ohio was allergic to penicillin, but had no problem shoving opiates into herself, just to forget ever having seen the Balkans. Jackie hits a corner store on the way home for some chicken soup, because back in ancient times, a Jewish mystic blessed the first pot, and to this day there's a little magic in every pot. Because she wants to believe.
Fiona and Kevin are asleep on the bed; Grace is on the floor, worrying at the screen with all her might. Grace carries her parents on her back, across the rocky cold landscape, and it's killing her. Crippling her, slowly. But she doesn't need Vicodin for this pain. She needs something better. It's about faith.
"Hey, sweetie," Jackie says, sitting on the floor with her, backs against the bed. Grace asks first whether the bubonic plague could ever happen again. No, Jackie explains: we have medicine, and sanitation, that they didn't have. But Gracie knows there's something wrong, something coming. An iceberg in the water; she writes it in her doomsday book. You have no idea how hard it is to watch your child falling, and you can't do anything to stop it.
But what about the flu, then? Is it the flu she feels coming for them? "Could a flu epidemic wipe out forty million people, like it did in 1918?" Jackie's exasperated: "Honey, these are not important..." Grace demands. "Could it!" No, Jackie says. No. She shakes her head, holding a bowl of the soup she brought all the way into this territory, to bring it back to life. Grace looks away.
"You want some soup?" Not really. "It's really good for you, Monkey. Chicken soup. Just a little bit?" Grace doesn't even look at her mother, eyes trained on horrors. Jackie blows on a spoonful and holds it across the cold space between them, and Grace opens her mouth without looking. Jackie watches her like a hawk. "That's good. Right?" Grace nods, and Jackie touches her hair. She doesn't take her eyes off the screen, staring at the Balkans, wondering how to save them all. If it's even possible.
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