Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind (4 page)

It was hard to tell if the girl was intelligent. She would have to penetrate the shell and see. Anna would resist. Her therapist would pursue without seeming to pursue. Her therapist would have to be patient, patient but stealthy.

Dr. H. and Dr. Z. were waiting downstairs for Dr. Berman. They were taking her to a dinner party for a visiting psychoanalyst from Zurich, one who had published original work on infant development. She was late. He asked the doorman to call upstairs. She was coming, the doorman said, soon.

Dr. H. asked Dr. Z., Are you afraid of losing your mind?

Dr. Z. said, Of course, isn't everyone?

Dr. H. said, Not those who have already lost their minds.

Lucky at last, said Dr. Z.

Fritz was in his office, idling at his computer, an email to a colleague about a seminar at Texas A&M the following December, an appeal for an urgent contribution from the Democratic Party, a reminder from his editor of a luncheon with booksellers still some months away. He put his hand on his stomach. He rolled it over the excess flesh. He should lose weight. He should take his bike out into the park. He should sleep better. He could feel the ache behind his eyes, a mark of his predawn tossing in sheets. He had tried to wake his wife but she resisted, so far into her own Ambien sleep she had left him stranded in the bed they shared. The radiator in the apartment was turned up too high. The room was hot. It was too cold to open a window. The heat was controlled in the basement. It was like a sauna in that bedroom.

All he had ever wanted was that his children should be happy. Fritz was an honest man: that was not all. He had also expected a certain giftedness, an extraordinary ability in something, music, art, mathematics, scholarship. He had not wanted ordinary children. But then no one wants ordinary children. Fritz understood: if some children were to be extraordinary then most had to be ordinary. For now, all he wanted was Anna talking on the phone to a friend, her lilting voice filled with the sound of light rainfall on the moving river.

Later he listed certain disappointments: Anna gave up the piano and the flute. Anna was not a reader, a real reader, like he had been, like he still was, although she was an A student, he knew she worked hard but learning wasn't as easy or natural for her as it had been for him. Anna was not a chess player. He had tried. Anna was not a dancer. He knew it after the first recital. Anna was not an athlete. She tried out for teams but didn't make them. Anna was dear to him, but not extraordinary. At least she had not yet discovered her gift.

And what if she had no gift? It mattered to him. It didn't matter to him. It shouldn't matter to him, on that point he was clear.

Anna received an email from her roommate. When are you coming back? Never, she wrote in return. She thought about never.
Never
was a beautiful word. There was Peter Pan in Never Never Land. There was a way that never was just like forever. It was a verdict, an end to so many questions. It was better than next, or soon, or eventually. It was firm, solid, definite. Never, she was never going back.

Anna wore a shirt she had taken from her father's drawer. It was a blue shirt, soft with tiny white buttons. She rolled up the sleeves just over her wrists and opened the shirt so that her breasts just peeked out, a shy promise, a diversionary tactic. There were small white scars on her arms. There were newer dark lines. There were thin cuts that still leaked red blood onto the bandages she had tenderly placed there. At night she listened to the music that intruded into her ears through the wires attached to her laptop. She didn't think about the future. She didn't think about her old friends. She didn't consider her old ice skates resting on the closet floor. She floated in the sound as if she were a fall leaf torn from its branch in all the unremarkable ways of leaves and wind and seasons.

Beth was at lunch with an older colleague: her colleague's daughter was pregnant. This would be the first grandchild. It makes me feel old, said the colleague, but the way she said it, the smile that flickered across her face, sent another message. It was like the lighthouse bell ringing off the shore, all is well, all is well. The rocks may be dangerous, the passage to the port uncertain, the winds strong, but no crash has occurred tonight, the moon is out, the waves are calm, calm now, if not tomorrow. A pressure formed in Beth's head. Anna, she wanted to say, was home. She didn't say it. Anna is stranded, she wanted to say, but she didn't. If she said it out loud it would be true. If she didn't say it out loud it would still be true. Also the Vita Sackville-West memoir she was reading had suddenly lost its luster. It seemed manipulative, false. That she could talk about and did.

Fritz considered. Had he been overly seductive with his daughter, had he tried to keep her for himself, such things are possible. He had to ask himself hard questions and answer them bravely. Was his own fear of failure, the one that had been with him ever since he had learned that people fell off high wires and crashed into the dirt and that the best of safety nets ripped and that there was no time of night or day when the smell of blood wasn't in the waters—
Deutschland
ü
ber alles
? Had his daughter absorbed his fear and made it her own?

Beth, back at her desk in her office, a photo of her two children in a silver frame sitting to the left of her computer, wondered if she should have stayed home, could the Neanderthals who carped at mothers who hired help, mocked those who didn't work at the school fair, who had no time for tea parties in the afternoon, were they right after all? Had she neglected the most important work of her life, for this desk, for this title, for her own selfish needs? Yes, and yes, and yes, she accused herself. But there was a defense: she made the defense. She picked up the phone to make an appointment with Dr. Berman to talk about the situation. Dr. Berman returned her call some hours later and said she couldn't see her. It didn't matter who was paying the bill. She was Anna's doctor. She could recommend someone for Beth. Beth was not interested. Beth was not the kind of woman to let tears fall, certainly not in the office, not with students apt to knock at her door, not at home either, not in front of Fritz who ought to be crying too but probably wasn't. She put the book she was teaching and a batch of student papers in her black bag and left the office early. She would talk to Anna herself.

When she got home she found Anna was out. Anna was siting in the park.

She was smoking. Passersby glared at her as if she didn't know that smoking was dangerous. So what, thought Anna, so, so what?

That evening at dinner Fritz said to his daughter, What is it you want to do? Anna did not look at him. She was stabbing her fork into her peas. Stop that, said Fritz. Anna said nothing. What is the matter with you? he shouted. You have food and clothes, a nice room, parents who love you. The Nazis aren't chasing you. The slave hunters aren't trying to return you to your master. You don't have cancer, or multiple sclerosis. You're not blind or deaf. You have all your limbs. You don't owe vast sums of money. You have not been arrested for any wrongdoing I know about. For God's sake grow up.

Fritz was afraid to look his wife in the eye. She would be appalled at his outburst. But in his chest he could feel relief like a sailor sighting shore. There, he had said it and he was right. He hadn't said she was spoiled and selfish and peculiar. He had edited out those thoughts. He had said enough. Anna took another stab at her peas. The sleeve of her shirt, her father's shirt, slipped into the curry sauce on the shrimps delivered from the Indian restaurant on Columbus Avenue.

Anna jumped up and ran into her room. She took off the shirt and threw it into the hamper in her bathroom and turned around to see her mother entering the door. Her mother saw the cuts on her arm, a lineup of cuts, a few bandages wrapped all the way around the forearm where the cuts had been particularly deep. Her mother quickly closed the door. What she had seen made no sense. Who had hurt Anna?

Once when Anna was in third grade her best friend told her she wasn't her best friend anymore. Anna had refused to eat for two days. But then she made a new friend. Once at camp Anna had called and asked her parents to pick her up. It had something to do with a boy from across the lake who had said her eyes were crossed. They weren't. They told her to call again if she still wanted to come home at the end of the week. She didn't. When at the end of the summer they went to the bus stop in White Plains Anna cried in her counselor's arms because camp was over.

Beth was angry at Fritz. If it was her fault it was his fault. Fritz decided to go to work at his desk. He didn't want to hear his wife breathe. She almost smelled of confusion and disappointment. He couldn't bear the weight of her soul. It was too heavy. It smothered him.

Beth considered: drugs, drugs were the destroyers of children's minds, their sense of purpose, their relationship to their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. Drugs were the seducers promising immediate pleasure and guaranteeing loss, loss of clarity, loss of a future. Oh Mr. Tambourine Man, what have you done with my child? But Anna didn't seem to be on drugs. Beth had searched her room, rummaged through old papers, found a list of clothes she had wanted for college.

Had someone rejected her? Who? Was it sexual? Was she struggling with gender identity? Beth would not be shocked. It was a new world. Anna could love anyone she liked as long as she loved. Fritz would agree. Was she afraid she wouldn't do well? She had always done well.

Beth was suddenly afraid to talk to Anna. She didn't want to say the wrong thing. She wanted to help but anything she said might make matters worse. The thought seared her brain: Anna might hate her, must hate her, wouldn't really look at her. Had she delivered a stillborn child who happened to be eighteen years old?

Fritz said, I want to talk to Dr. Berman. Beth said, She doesn't want to talk to us. We pay her, said Fritz. She has to talk to us. Insist, he said. Beth insisted.

Dr. Berman had referred the Fishbeins to Dr. Z. He noticed the half-completed gesture of Fritz who had wanted to hold his wife's hand and then changed his mind. He offered no thoughts speculative or otherwise about Anna. He listened. His phone rang. He ignored it. He asked if the parents were planning a divorce. They weren't. He asked if Meyer was having trouble with friends or schoolwork. He wasn't. He asked if Anna had had an abortion that they knew of. They didn't think so. He assured the parents that many children found their first year away from home difficult. He did not think the problem was unusual. Let's see how it goes, he said. She's in good hands with Dr. Berman. He hoped that was true. Beth wanted to mention the blood on Anna's arms but she thought that might be a betrayal of her daughter. Maybe it was nothing, nothing worth mentioning.

Afterward, as they waited for the elevator and put on their coats, Fritz pinched Beth in the spot above her second rib which was his signal to her, come lie down with me, leave the TV, leave the dishes, leave the children, lie near me, naked, now. Beth pulled away. She did not look at him. In the street as Beth waved down a taxi to take her to the university, Fritz said, Cold fish. Beth sighed. Was he talking about her or Dr. Z.? It would not be so bad, she thought, to be a cold fish, a cold fish with a slice of lemon for an eye.

In the cab she considered, was there a circle in hell for failed mothers? She would have liked to have wept or to have howled, instead she closed her eyes and thought of herself on a beach blanket near the ocean's edge listening to the pounding waves, the hissing of spray, the way the meditation counselor had taught her when she'd had a cluster of migraines after Meyer's birth.

Beth was not sleeping. Fritz was not sleeping. He felt a vague fluttering of unsatisfied desire and turned to his wife. She was lying there stiff, her limbs close to her body, all on her side of the bed. He could sleep if she would come to him. But she didn't want to. She didn't want sex, she wanted happiness and that she could not have. Fritz got up from the bed, put on his robe, and fixed himself a pastrami sandwich with a pickle. He walked to Anna's room and listened for sounds of music or talk. He might go in, he might ask her what is wrong. He might rumple her hair as he did when she was six. He might tell her a story or play his Rolling Stones tapes for her. The light was on, he could see it, pale but inviting, slipping under the crack of the closed door. He knocked. It's me, he said, Can I come in? Go away, she said in the voice of a child. He stood there, uncertain. Go away, she said again. He did. He went to the kitchen and ate his sandwich in the dark. He spilled pickle juice on the table and left it there.

Meyer had a nightmare. In it an alien was oozing through the slats of the air conditioner. He was watching it push through, translucent flesh, claws like icicles and bulbous eyes that fixed on Meyer sitting up in his bed. He woke breathing hard and his hand reached down to his organ. All right. Just a dream. Dreams had meaning, his father had explained. Something to do with forbidden wishes. He did not wish to be eaten by an alien. He rose to go to the window and heard the water running in the bathroom. His sister must be there. He decided to go tell her his dream. He went to the door and would have knocked but it was open a crack already. Anna was sitting on the edge of the bathtub. There was blood. In her hand was a razor. Meyer jumped away from the door. He was still dreaming. He rushed back to his bed and tried to wake up. After a little while he did.

Before she sat down in Dr. Berman's office Anna took off her sweatshirt. She was wearing a tight T-shirt and at first Dr. Berman saw only her small breasts and an outline of the nipples, and then she saw the scars and the fresh cuts and the scabs. She did not immediately remark on the elephant that was now clearly in the room. Ah, one of those, she thought. This would not be a short treatment. This girl before her might be just at the beginning of a long slide down, a slow journey into invalidism, hospital corridors, curiosity in the eyes of her old friends. On the other hand maybe not. Dr. Berman suddenly was tired. Did she have the strength for this? Did she really want to ride this ride into the tunnel with this child? She intended to have her hair done this afternoon after her last appointment. Her red hair held firm like a helmet, but the dull gray roots like repressed memories kept reappearing.