Speculative Portrait

A Community Writing Collaboration

Tumbleweed Found’s antique portraits come to life from the depths of imagination and out into the written word by Professor Micah Perks and three writers from her Spring Advanced Fiction Class, UCSC; Emily Pineda, Hailey Phipps and Melissa Low.

This first writing is by Micah Perks, Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, UCSC. This is an excerpt from “Hygiene Wars” originally published in Chicago Quarterly Review.

Micah Perks is the author of a short story collection, a memoir and two novels. Her novel, What Becomes Us, won an Independent Publisher’s Gold Medal and was named one of the Top Ten Books about the Apocalypse by The Guardian. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Epoch, Zyzzyva, Tin House, Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, and Ploughshares, amongst many journals and anthologies. She has won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the New Guard Machigonne Fiction Prize and multiple residencies at the Blue Mountain Center and MacDowell. Micah is a Professor of Literature and Creative Writing and Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs in the Humanities Division at UCSC. More info at micahperks.com

How good it is to be fat in 1907! How good to be a member of the corpulent class, how good to tuck into just baked rolls and fried blood sausages on Park Avenue far from the whip thin hoards confined to lower Manhattan where the stench of raw sewage is always in the nose.

Except, they aren’t confined down there. Who do you think is doubling all those Park Avenue chins? Each brownstone has an alien busy at its center. Sleeves rolled up on meaty foreign arms, foreign palms pressed into the family dough. You see that house there, the one with the gay yellow curtains fluttering at the kitchen window? Little does that gloriously tubby family know that along with the rich smells of breakfast, there’s typhoid smeared on the curtains, typhoid glazing those yeasty rolls. Never fear, the porcine peace will be restored. Into this monied hush chugs and wahoogahs a new twentieth century ambulance automobile. Three police officers clatter behind on horse-back in their long blue coats and soufflé-shaped helmets. They pull up to the curb in front of the Park Avenue brownstone with the yellow curtains. Out of the ambulance pops Doctor S. Josephine Baker.

Doctor Jo! A new woman! Fashionably plump herself, dressed in a white sailor shirt with a jaunty bow tie and a fitted dark skirt. She is the first woman doctor in the new Hygiene Bureau!

The possibly infected Irish cook in question has already refused to be tested for typhus, but this time Doctor Jo is determined to get a hold of a bit of her urine and blood, come hell or high water. The glass jar and the syringe jostle at the ready in her black leather doctor’s bag. The five, white coated, mustachioed interns, all in black pants creased and cuffed, wait by the ambulance, arms crossed, black boots scuffling and stamping, chatting in low voices amongst themselves. Doctor Jo posts one of the police officers at the front door, one at the back. Then, with the burliest officer by her side, she raps smartly, one-two-three, on the servants’ entrance at the side of the house. They wait, Jo tapping her own black-booted foot impatiently. It annoys her that the police officer, who is stippled with small pox scars on his forehead and cheeks, hums cheerfully under his breath, as if this isn’t an errand of grave importance. She goes to knock again.

The door jolts open with such force it bangs against the side of the house. Doctor Jo jumps back a step. The cook leaps out on the landing, her cheeks aflame, brandishing a long cooking fork. Doctor Jo glances to the officer for help, but he’s lost his chin in his effort to lean away. “Don’t be foolish,” Doctor Jo says to the cook. “We only want—

“The cook stabs at Doctor Jo with the fork. Doctor Jo and the policeman rear backwards, toppling togetherin a heavy tangle on the stone walkway below. The cook slams the door shut.

“Sorry, Doc.” The police officer removes his leg from her chest. “But, say, ain’t that a woman!”

Doctor Jo refuses his offer of help, wrestles herself to her feet. She can feel her own face boiling now. “Onward!” she shouts. They rush in after the cook. Breakfast is still on the stove—white fish in furious boil, stewed apricots and cereal and sausages starting to burn. The police officer stops to remove the pots. “That’s all potential poison,” Doctor Jo says. “Knuckle down, now.”

The lady of the house and her two daughters weep in the parlor. One of the girls is already complaining of a headache from hunger. “What shall we eat?” the girl whimpers. The other servants make their faces as featureless as rising dough, claim to have no idea where the cook is. No use to explain germ theory to them here and now. All they can see is the heavy, dark hair piled high on the back of Cook’s head, her well-fed form, her food rich with butter and lard. They cannot imagine what stews inside Mary Mallon.

“Let’s get methodical,” Doctor Jo says. They start at the top of the house, the tidy, nearly empty fourth floor attic where Mary sleeps, and move room by room, floor by floor. But it seems she has disappeared.

Back at the kitchen, the police officer says, “Well, that’s that then,” and looks longingly at the food cooling in the kitchen.

Doctor Jo heaves up the pots and upends them one by one into the garbage bin that sits in the back hallway of the kitchen. She says, “This is a matter of life and death. What are we over-looking?”

And just then, at the end of that hallway, behind several piled-up ash cans, Doctor Jo spies a small wedge of blue calico wagging from a closet door. Doctor Jo and the officer drag away the ash cans, evidence of class solidarity, and turn the black doorknob.

Out bursts Mary, hands clawed. “This is illegal,” she yells. “I got rights!” The police officer grabs her from behind. She twists about and rakes at his eyes.

“Assistance!” Doctor Jo shouts out the front door, and the interns in their stiff white coats and the two other police officers in their long blue coats and ridiculous high round hats come running down the hallway. It takes all these official men to carry Mary to the ambulance.

Doctor Jo sits on Mary’s chest for the journey to Willard Parker Hospital on 14th street near the stinking East River. She sits sideways, her arm braced against the wall of the vibrating automobile. The sleeve of Mary’s blue dress is ripped, her thick dark hair a tangled mess. “This is all got up against the law,” Mary croaks up at her. “I’m a free woman. I’ll get myself a lawyer, I will.”

Doctor Jo shouts to her that the Public Health authorities were granted wide-ranging authority during a cholera epidemic in 1850, almost sixty years earlier. Jo shouts to be heard over the engine, not because she is angry. In fact, she feels jubilant. She has saved untold numbers of innocents from typhus. “In the name of public health we can over-ride personal and property—“

“You’re setting me up because I’m Irish,” Mary interrupts. “But I ain’t Irish! I never been in that blasted land. I’m from New Jersey. I never been sick a day, just look at me why don’t you?”

Doctor Jo starts to explain to Mary that she may be a typhus carrier. “It’s a new discovery from Europe. There are those who pass on—“

Mary begins to struggle again. “Get your fat arse off me you twat!”

The interns hide their giggles by pretending to cough.

“There are individuals that carry typhus without showing symptoms,” Doctor Jo continues. “But they can infect others. We wont know unless we study some samples of your fluids.”

“Just look at me,” Mary says again.