Call Me Zelda (5 page)

We all sat in various states of unrest waiting for her to continue.

“I could have climbed down from the roof at any time,” she said. “I enjoyed having them at my disposal.”

The skin rose on my arms, and for the first time since she’d arrived I felt suspicious of Zelda, and my allegiance slipped back to its proper alignment.

Zelda stood, scraping her chair against the floor and knocking her knee against the heavy wood of Meyer’s desk.

“I must get back to work,” she said.

“What work is that?” asked Dr. Meyer.

“My novel.”

“A writer,” said Dr. Squires. “Like your husband.”

“No. He’s more like me than I’m like him.”

I smiled at her confidence.

“It’s wonderful to have two talents in the family,” said Dr. Squires.

“Yes,” said Zelda. “But I don’t know how Scott will write with me locked up.”

“Why is that?” asked Dr. Meyer.

She spun toward him, piercing him with her glare, at once
fierce, vulnerable, proud, and angry. Her emotions were like a jewel whose facets caught the light in succession.

“I am his words.”

As if to punctuate her declaration, the clock struck the hour and she stormed out of the room.

H
er pen did not leave the page for two hours after her therapy session. Every time I checked in on her she was scribbling, the stack of papers accumulating like winter snow on top of her bedside table. After my morning rounds I was able to sit with her while she wrote, trying to pick up some of her mumblings, but none of it made any sense to me. She told me, however, that I was a comfort to her, so I was glad to sit with her and catch the intermittent smiles and offhand comments she’d throw me. In truth, her attention felt like the sun coming out from behind the clouds, for it revealed in brief flashes the woman she was before all of the hurt and pain and illness blotted her out.

Lunchtime was approaching, and I wanted to warn her to give her some time to transition from the state she was in. I cleared my throat and reminded her of the schedule, anticipating that she would ignore me as she had during the last hour whenever I asked whether she needed anything. I was surprised when she dropped her pen and stretched her hands.

“A good stopping place,” she said.

Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes glassy, as if her writing had induced a creative fever.

“You look well,” I said. “Your memories become you.”

Her smile was luminous.

“That night at the Champs-Élysées theater,” she said, “Josephine Baker arrived onstage wearing nothing but a skirt, breasts bare like ripe, caramel-covered apples, and we all were mesmerized by the beautiful grotesquerie of it.”

“I’m afraid it would’ve caused me to blush,” I said, feeling heat in my cheeks at the mere thought of it.

“We were too tight from the champagne cocktails to feel the burn of the blush,” she said. “That time in Paris in the twenties was the edge of when it all turned.”

I felt suddenly alert. She was beginning her remembrances. I didn’t want to lead her at all, so I remained quiet and attempted to mute my expression. Perhaps if I could just blend into the walls she’d speak as if she were alone.

“Those were the days we ran with the Murphys, the Hemingways, Dos Passos, Duff Twysden. That damnable Stein, who always banished the wives to tea with her
wife
while the artists and writers got high on each other’s bold ideas.” Her voice became brittle.

“There were too many parties, too many salons, too many nights watching half-naked Negroes, half-sober painters, half-mad homosexuals….” Her voice trailed off for a moment. “Waking up mornings was the worst part. It was like the sickly, bitter flavor on the tongue after drinking coffee. It was so good going down, but the aftertaste made you damn near hate it.”

My eyes moved over the pages and it occurred to me that her writing allowed her to open up. I considered this for a moment, then made my thoughts known.

“How would you feel about writing to Dr. Meyer instead of talking to him?” I asked.

Her gaze met mine straight on and I understood that being direct was the only way to get through to her. She was no fool. Tricks would not get her to reveal anything.

“About what?” she said.

“Your illness. Your past. What you think precipitated your collapses,” I said. “It’s all he wants, you know. It’s all any of us want: to help you reach in and determine the source of the
problem to help you avoid it in the future. To heal. To prepare you for living outside of a clinic.”

She did not recoil from my words as I anticipated she would. After a few moments, she nodded her head.

“I’ll do it,” she said. “What shall I write?”

“Start at the beginning, wherever that is to you.”

“Can it be like a story?” she asked.

“It can be anything you want. Whatever feels natural.”

“Could I only write for you?”

This presented a problem. Anything my patient shared I was obligated to tell the entire team caring for her. I didn’t want to lie to her, but I also didn’t want to betray her. I decided to put her at ease for now, and later decide what to do if she wrote anything.

“Yes, you may write just for me,” I said.

“And you promise not to show Scott.”

“Of course I won’t show him,” I said.

“He thinks expression ruins me,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because he thinks he should be enough for me. He needs me to orbit him. He wishes to pluck me from orbit when he needs me and then send me back once he’s used me up.”

Herein lies the problem
, I thought. But it was a common enough problem in marriages. Didn’t we all want devotion? Undivided attention? Why did it break the Fitzgeralds so badly?

“You clearly crave creative expression,” I said. “I know about your dancing. Do you play an instrument? Paint? I feel that more outlets would nurture your physical and mental health.”

“I do love to paint. I studied with the best in France. I love to make things with my hands, too. You should have seen the dollhouse I made for Scottie at our home in Delaware.”

Her words fell flat and her face contorted. A sob rose in her throat and she collapsed on the bed. It had been too much. I
needed to back off, but I wanted to calm her. I approached her carefully and reached to touch her back. She flinched but did not push me off. I sat next to her and rubbed her back in wide, slow circles. She turned her body and wrapped her arms around me, crying until she fell asleep.

FOUR

The taxi stopped at the entrance to the pebbled drive, and Lincoln, the driver, opened my door and helped me out like he did once a month. He treated me as if I were the most important and elegant woman who’d ever ridden in his backseat.

“You sure you don’t want me to take you all the way up to the door?” he asked, as he always did.

“No, sir,” I said. “I like the walk through the trees. But you are the finest gentleman I know for asking.”

He smiled his wide, half-toothless smile and ran a hand over his black, stubbled hair.

“Aw, honey, you make an old man feel young.”

I reached into my pocketbook to pay him and he hurried back to the passenger seat.

“No charge today,” he said, rolling up his window. “I won at cards last night, and I said to myself, ‘If I win, I’m not chargin’ Anna.’”

I laughed, and opened the door to shove the money down the back of his shirt.

“Don’t get fresh with me, young missy,” he called. “I’ll tell the wife.”

Lincoln talked only about baseball and his wife, the former being his greatest love. Time for him was marked by the passage from preseason, to season, to postseason. He was fond of telling me he bled black and orange for his beloved Baltimore Black Sox, and that his favorite player, Jud “Boojum” Wilson, would have been good enough to play against any of those major leaguers, if only colored men were allowed.

Lincoln and I had a standing date once a month. On every third Saturday morning he delivered me to my parents’ place in the rural part of Towson just outside the Baltimore suburbs, argued with me about paying before he drove away, and returned Sunday evening to take me back to the city.

I closed his laugh into the car and started up the drive.

Though it was the end of February, the day was a lazy sort of cold. The sun slipped through the clouds in bursts, reminding the landscape that it was still there, prodding snow piles to relax into puddles and stirring sleeping seeds under the ground.

My breath always caught when I looked at my parents’ house. It was a brown ranch style nestled among poplars and pines, with shiny green holly lining its front porch lattice in the winter and deep blue hydrangeas in the summer. It was equal parts comfort and affliction for me. It held so many happy memories and my parents, whom I adored, but it also reminded me of the daughter I’d lost, and the time we lived here after the war.

I saw my mother in the window smiling out at me, and the tension left my shoulders. When I opened the unlocked door, the aroma of coffee and banana bread greeted me first, followed by my mother, limping around the corner, clutching her cane.

“Please stay seated,” I said. “I saw you there.”

“Let me get up to greet you while I still can,” she said.

At fifty-nine, my mother still held the beauty of her youth, with only a peppering of gray hair at her temples and the faintest
lines around her eyes. She wore her brown hair in a loose bun at the base of her neck. Her warm brown eyes had a glint of mischief, and she still dressed every day for visitors, though she and my dad didn’t often have them. Her body, however, had betrayed her, as she often said. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis around the time I began working at the Phipps Clinic, five years ago. I embraced her and she allowed me to walk her back over and lower her into her chair. I took the seat across from her.

“Are you losing weight?” I asked, worried by the prominence of her bones I could feel through her sweater.

“Now, don’t start fussing over me as soon as you’ve walked in the door,” she said. “Tell me about your month.”

I’d been waiting for this query with great anticipation for weeks. I usually had nothing of any importance to report. I’d say so and watch my mother’s face fall from a mixture of boredom that I had no news and worry that I was not embracing life—points that, I reflected, she had a right to worry about.

But not this month.

Dr. Meyer did not want us to speak about our patients outside of the clinic, but I rationalized my guilt away by telling myself my mother needed stimulation and I needed advice. My eyes flickered over her bookshelf, bursting with well-worn spines, and immediately found the object of my glance.
This Side of Paradise
and
The Beautiful and Damned
winked at me from their positions, causing me to smile.

“You have news,” she said with genuine pleasure. “Tell me!”

“Maybe I’ll make you guess,” I said, raising an eyebrow and enjoying her anticipation.

“You’ve found a man!” she said.

What she blurted out so completely surprised and shook me that it took me a moment to remember what my news
actually was. I thought of Ben and felt a cold sweat form on my forehead. She could see she had said the wrong thing and reached for my arm.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” she said. “You just looked so animated, I thought…”

“No, it’s okay,” I said. “I shouldn’t have made you play a guessing game.”

An awkward silence settled over the room. I watched a male cardinal fly past the window and land on a nearby branch, shaking off the light coating of snow that clung to it. I looked back at my mom and smiled at her.

“Let’s try again,” I said. “You’ll never guess who’s been admitted to the clinic.”

“Who?” My mother leaned forward in her chair.

“Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald!”

“No!”

“Yes!”

The awkwardness dissolved and I told my mother all about Zelda and how she came to Phipps. My mother wanted to know what she looked like, what she ate, and what she did all day.

“Wait,” she said. “Did you see
him
?”

“I did. And he looked as broken as his wife.”