She was cute. She was little. But she hurt me. I saw her a decade or so ago, but I remember asking her if physical therapists had to enjoy inflicting pain. With a charming, or perhaps diabolical, smile she said, “Maybe a little.”
I told this story to Michelle, my present physical therapist, who said, “She was just trying to be funny.” Michelle, however, at our first meeting said in the nicest possible way, that pain would be necessary on the road to recovery for my knee replacement. And then she did what physical therapists always seem to do—she hurt me, bending my joint more than I wanted it to be bent. After the first time, she said, “That was good.” I said, I hope not too bitterly, “If you think I am going to say, ‘That was good for me’ and light up a cigarette, you are sadly mistaken.” She did pronounce that “funny.”
Michelle, however, is a good physical therapist. She has also given me a renewed faith in a version of the American dream. She was born and raised in Brooklyn, but her parents were Jewish refugees from Azerbaijan when it was part of the Soviet Union. Her parents, she said, were secular, but if they had wanted to practice Judaism, they would have to do so in secret. Michelle did get some religious training in the United States, but she said her brother got more. (She was clearly proud of him as she bragged that he had passed all his actuarial exams on the first attempts.) He had been sent to a Brooklyn Yeshiva because her parents did not then understand New York City’s public schools. However, her brother broke his arm badly in the Yeshiva’s hazardous schoolyard. Her parents sued the school, apparently getting a significant award, and the school kicked her brother out. After that, he attended public schools.
Michelle attended Brooklyn public schools from the beginning of her education, got a bachelor’s degree from a state public university, and then got her doctorate in physical therapy from a university in the public City University of New York system, the College of Staten Island. She said somewhat defensively that although she got into what are thought to be more prestigious private universities, she chose the public school for her doctorate so she would not encumber herself with excessive debt. And, of course, she is now a physical therapist in a well-regarded institution forcing me to flex my knee more than I want to.
Michelle has what seems to be a Russian or Slavic family name, but it does not end in an “a” as a Slavic woman’s name might. She said that it was because she was born in the United States. Americans don’t genderize family names, and she is a proud American.
In our first session, Michelle told me that she would see me for the first two weeks of the sessions, but then someone else would step in until she got back. She was going to be married followed by a honeymoon to Bali. I told her that she would not be the first woman who left me after two weeks. She said, “That’s funny.”
She told me that her fiancé grew up in Astoria, Queens, a neighborhood that once was populated overwhelmingly by people of Greek descent. I asked if the fiancé were Greek. She said her husband-to-be is Puerto Rican, and I thought this is quite a New York story—a Jewish-American girl whose parents fled the Soviet Union marries a Puerto Rican boy raised among Greeks. Hey, if I could write tunes I would be working on a musical.
I asked if it was difficult for her fiancé growing up in Astoria. Many white ethnic New York neighborhoods were not welcoming to other ethnic groups, especially if they were people of color. Astoria is now increasingly diverse, but back when the fiancé was born, I assumed that Astorians did not open their arms to Puerto Ricans. Michelle said that his family did have some problems. She told me that her fiancé’s father is very light skinned. She paused and continued, “Lighter than me.” I had not paid attention to her skin tone, but while it might have been darker than most Scandinavians, it was not particularly dusky. Michelle went on to say, however, that the fiancé’s mother is dark—“she is almost Black.” The residents of her Astoria block did not take kindly to the Puerto Ricans. They told the Puerto Rican family that they could not park at certain places on the block because “those are our spots,” even though it was all public street parking. When the mother walked by, neighbors often made racist comments loud enough for her to hear.
Then one day as the mother was about to enter her residence some teenagers held a knife to her and tried to force themselves into her house. A neighbor who previously had not been particularly neighborly saw this and came running over to stop the thugs. He yelled for help and other neighbors came running. Michelle delicately put, “They beat the shit out of them.” This is New York. You are a neighbor. I might not have wanted you for a neighbor, but I want even less someone from outside the neighborhood doing harm to my neighbor. After this day, the fiancé’s family was at least tolerated in Astoria.
She’s on her honeymoon now. I hope that she has had a good time, including the dance at her wedding with her father to the tune he picked, “Sunrise, Sunset.” And perhaps now there will be less discomfort when she gets back, but when she bends my knee again, I will expect pain. That is what physical therapists do including those in a version of an American dream.
