Miss Frumkin and Miller arrived at the emergency room of L.I.J.-Hillside at two o’clock. For a time, Miller was afraid she might jump out of the car. Miss Frumkin began to talk fervently to the radio. The radio was playing Paul McCartney’s song “The Lovely Linda,” and he was singing the words “La, la, la, la, la, the lovely Linda.” Unknown to Miller, Miss Frumkin thought that McCartney was singing the lyrics sarcastically, because he had fallen in love with her and was no longer in love with Linda, his wife. She took with her a large tan pocketbook that bulged with notebooks, a bankbook, makeup, and other paraphernalia, and walked downstairs.Īs Miller started the car, turned on the car radio, and began to drive toward the hospital, Miss Frumkin seemed to get excited. In her room, Miss Frumkin put on her underclothes, a pink-and-white print blouse and matching pink-and-white striped skirt, a pair of brown sandals, a Timex watch she had borrowed from her mother after losing her own watch, a pair of glasses with octagonal frames (Miss Frumkin is very nearsighted), and a beige poncho with colorful designs, which her sister had brought her as a gift from a recent trip to Peru. The cut didn’t look bad, and Miss Frumkin appeared calm about it-calmer than Miller thought he would have been if their situations had been reversed-but he knew that any head injury was potentially serious and should be examined by a doctor. Miller looked at the cut, told Miss Frumkin to get dressed, and said he would drive her to the emergency room at Long Island Jewish-Hillside Medical Center, a voluntary hospital in New Hyde Park, a short distance away. She put on an old nightgown and went downstairs to the office of the building to tell the night supervisor, Dwight Miller, who was on duty from midnight until eight-thirty, what had happened. Miss Frumkin’s head burned when the perfume came in contact with the open cut, and the bleeding subsided but didn’t altogether stop. “So many people told me I smelled nice when I wore it. “It was the one perfume I’ve ever had that people complimented me on,” she said. Looking back on the incident six months later, Miss Frumkin was exasperated with herself for having wasted the perfume, which the aunt and uncle had bought in Israel, and which she couldn’t replace. She also thought that she was Mary Magdalene, who had poured ointment on Christ. She poured the contents of the bottle on her cut, partly because she knew that perfume contained alcohol and that alcohol was an antiseptic (in 1972, Miss Frumkin had completed a ten-month course qualifying her as a medical secretary), and partly because she suddenly thought that she was Jesus Christ and that her bleeding cut was the beginning of a crown of thorns. On the dresser was a bottle of expensive perfume that an aunt and uncle had given her in May as a thirtieth-birthday present.

She attempted to stop the bleeding by applying pressure to the cut, then wrapped her head in a large towel and walked back to her bedroom. She slipped on the bathroom floor-it was wet from her bubble-blowing and splashing-and cut the back of her head as she fell. She blew bubbles into the water.Īfter a few minutes of contented frolicking, Miss Frumkin stepped out of the tub. Miss Frumkin felt so cheerful about her new haircut that she suddenly thought she was Lori Lemaris, the mermaid whom Clark Kent had met in college and had fallen in love with in the old “Superman” comics. She imagined that the red mouthwash would somehow be absorbed into her scalp and make her hair red permanently. She had given up wearing her hair red only because she had found coloring it every six weeks too much of a bother.

Some years earlier, she had tinted her hair red and had liked the way it looked. She washed her brown hair with shampoo and also with red mouthwash. A few days earlier, she had had her hair cut and shaped in a bowl style, which she found especially becoming, and her spirits were high. Miss Frumkin, a heavy, ungainly young woman who lived in a two-story yellow brick building in Queens Village, New York, walked from her bedroom on the second floor to the bathroom next door and filled the tub with warm water.

Shortly after midnight on Friday, June 16, 1978, Sylvia Frumkin decided to take a bath.

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