The Doctor's Daughter (7 page)

As soon as she left, I went to my desk and tore the poem I’d written about her into pieces almost as small as the splinters of glass. How had I ever thought I could squeeze her large and complicated life into my narrow, sentimental rhyming scheme? Her life was a
story,
a story that I immediately began to compose inside my head. “Fayella Henrietta Brown was born in Charleston, South Carolina . . .”

Mattie told Violet she absolutely couldn’t wear her Headless Horseman costume during supper, which we were going to eat in the Steinhorns’ kitchen. She was not even allowed to drink her milk through a straw pushed into one of the airholes in the oak tag. Violet said that she hated Mattie, right to her face, and Mattie said, “I hate you, too.” Then she served us her special baked macaroni and cheese and buttered green beans.

By nightfall our decorous Riverdale neighborhood had undergone a metamorphosis. Jack-o’-lanterns leered from windows and doorsteps, like ill-behaved children of the moon that followed us faithfully from behind the trees. The more creative families on Morning Glory Drive had fashioned fluttering ghosts from bedsheets wrapped around lampposts, and the people at the house that was always so overdecorated at Christmas had installed sound effects for this holiday: owls hooting, chains clanking, and maniacal laughter.

On Magnolia Way, our class mother at Chapin came to the door dressed as a witch, and she cackled unconvincingly as she dropped Milky Ways and Mounds bars into our trick-or-treat sacks. Violet’s costume was as big a hit as I’d feared it would be, and she tipped her father’s hat over and over at every stop, to repeated acclaim and Mattie’s and my disgust.

At home my mother emptied my sack onto the kitchen table and carefully examined my loot, on the lookout for razor blades embedded in caramel apples, or ant poison stirred into homemade treats. “What is this world coming to?” she said sadly to my father, who was helping himself to some M&M’s in passing.

Faye was in her bedroom with the door shut. I could see the yellow light under it, flashing blue, and hear the murmur of her television set, interrupted by bursts of canned laughter. I can swear that time lurched forward at that moment, like a train that had been stalled between stations. But of course I couldn’t have known then that someday I would keep a series of my own slaves, with exotic names like Grazyna and Olympia and Lupe and Esmeralda.

That Halloween night, my mother allowed me to have only one piece of candy, from a known source, before bedtime. I made my final choice after agonizing consideration—a hard, red, bite-sized square—and I sucked on it slowly, letting its sweetness last as long as I could.

7

On June 12, the day before my scheduled mammogram, I was awakened by the telephone. It was Marsha, the receptionist at the radiologist’s office, calling to remind me that I was expected there at noon the following day. As if I could forget. She instructed me, as she does every year in that militant manner of hers, to be on time and not to use any deodorant or talcum powder. I listened to her groggily. I had been dreaming about work, about my old job at G&F. There were piles of manuscripts on my desk and I couldn’t find my pencils. It was only a variation on the old examination dream, where I’m either late or unprepared, that I’ve had on and off since high school.

A few weeks after Everett and I got married, I had what I realized was the wedding version of the same dream: I’d forgotten to buy a bridal gown, my flowers were wilting and they were the wrong color, a truly violent purple. As I told Violet later, none of that made any sense, because we had eloped, and a formal dress and flowers were never even a consideration.

She immediately began to pontificate about purple as a symbol of mourning and that the wilted flowers might signify my fear of the marriage’s failure, its
death
—maybe just in the sexual department.

“Oh, yeah?” I said, to cover the little ripple of panic she’d elicited. “And maybe it’s just a dream about flowers and dresses. Didn’t Freud himself say that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar?”

Violet gave me a pained look. “Our dreams are not merely transparent comments on our lives,” she said sternly, “or we wouldn’t bother having them.”

Now I glanced at the bedside clock. It was only ten of eight—why did they have to round up their patients a day ahead of time, and at the crack of dawn? I could sense, without looking, that Ev was no longer beside me in the bed. I listened for the shower or for noises from the kitchen, but the apartment was silent. Of course; he’d told me the night before that he had to be at the plant in Hoboken first thing in the morning. “Yes, thanks, Marsha,” I said into the phone, cranking my voice up from its usual low morning register, so she wouldn’t think I was a late riser with nothing important to do. Then I was stuck with the day, a whole long day before my mammogram.

I’ve never met a woman who doesn’t worry, at least a little, about her breasts. It starts in early adolescence, when you think you’ll never get them, or, as in Violet’s case, that the ones you’ve gotten are too sudden and disgustingly big. Sometimes they grow, as mine did, modestly, but at independent rates, like a pair of fraternal twins. My friends and I were spared some embarrassment by going to an all-girls school, although we were pretty critical of one another and of ourselves. And on an intramural outing in the park with some boys from Collegiate, we were wearing our regulation shorts and gym shirts with our names embroidered over the breast pocket, and a keyed-up fat boy yelled, “Hey, A. Brill! What’s the name of the other one?”

I guess I was lucky. The first words most girls ever hear about their breasts are vulgar—
tits, jugs, boobs, hooters
—creating further humiliation in the bearer of such conspicuous accessories. But then men fall in love with them, and babies are nourished at them, and they sag a little or a lot from years of service, and you mourn the beauty you were late to recognize, and you start to think of cancer. Well, I did, anyway. There was history at work—my grandmother, my mother—putting me at high risk. So I’d always been meticulous about self-examinations and checkups.

Sitting in one of those little airless changing cubicles in a paper gown, waiting my turn at fate, I would pretend to read the withered, dated
News-week
in my hand, but all I could think of were the scary odds, and how much I
needed
deodorant or talcum powder. Once the exam was over, though, and I was given the all-clear, my relief was profound, as if the governor had just called the warden to grant me a one-year reprieve.

Later on the morning of the twelfth, I buried my concerns in work, first on my socialite’s memoir, with all its thrilling gossip and fractured sentences, and then on the riveting issues of stem-cell research and euthanasia in the bioethics manuscript, which was slowly growing and becoming more accessible. Finally, I got to Michael’s novel. I was always hungry for new pages from him, even when they were flawed, and I imagined how eagerly Dickens’s readers must have looked forward to each installment of his serialized novels. Michael had developed a similar skill for finishing nearly every chapter on a note of emotional or narrative suspense that pulled you right into the next one.

In his latest pages Joe Packer was recalling the childhood he shared with his sister, Caitlin, a relationship far less easy than Holden and Phoebe Caulfield’s. Joe was ambivalent about Caitlin, who had stepped on his heels, as he put it, by being born only sixteen months after he was. He had been much happier before her appearance, and she’d been a source of trouble all their lives, but he credits his sentimental education to his sister. Although she’s younger, by mere months, she seems years older and wiser than he is, as if she had been born experienced.

During one retrospective passage, when the family is on vacation at a lakeside cabin, Caitlin dares Joe to go skinny-dipping late at night when everyone around them is asleep. They’re ten and eleven years old, in transition between innocence and knowledge, and she leads the way into sexual curiosity, without any subsequent action. He compares her sleek, featureless body seen in moonlight with a flower caught in the freeze-frame of a movie he once saw in school that depicted, in slow motion, the flower’s blossoming. He’s ashamed, in an almost biblical way, and as delighted as he will be one day by the sight of the fully developed female form, that movie speeded up to its grand, voluptuous conclusion.

I was reminded of the satisfying neatness of my own body in childhood, before modesty and impatient desire kicked in, before the coming attractions of life became all that mattered. Violet and I, doing our sister act in the carriage, my small lolling self in the bathtub, under Faye’s liquid gaze. And then I came back with a start to the body I was currently living in, and from there right to the next day’s appointment.

If I had married Arthur Handler, as I’d once believed I would, the whole thing might have been resolved by now. Arthur had become a gynecologist; he’d have examined my breast right away and assured me that the thickening I’d felt was just normal tissue. When you’re married to a writer, or just a writer at heart, all he can do in a medical crisis is succinctly articulate his own fears, which only confirm yours. So I’d decided not to tell Ev what was worrying me until I’d had the mammogram and my worries were over.

I was on the verge of becoming engaged to Arthur when my mother’s chemotherapy stopped working. Arthur was in his final year of medical school at the University of Iowa and I was just across the river in the English-philosophy building, finishing my MFA. We’d met while jogging around the campus, so we were both sweaty and breathless before we’d even exchanged any words. I thought his opening gambit, “Do you run here often?” was kind of cute. It was the mid-1970s, when jogging was just becoming a national craze, and we earnestly compared our speed and stamina and the buoyancy of our sneakers. What else did we talk about? I’m not sure, but it must have been something pleasant and provocative because we arranged to meet for a drink later.

He was fair-skinned, with sandy blond hair, and by the end of the evening I’d had the shockingly inappropriate thought that our children would have to wear sunscreen. So I suppose there was an immediate physical attraction, and it was exciting to get to know someone outside the incestuous world of the workshop. Everything we did there revolved around our writing, around the worlds of our imaginations and ambitions. The fiction writers didn’t even mingle that much with the poets and playwrights, as if there were a danger of cross-pollination.

Arthur’s education was far more grueling and wide ranging and concrete than mine. He had memorized the Table of Elements and Newton’s Laws of Physics, and he could name every bone in the human body, from the cranium to the metatarsals. I listened with rapt appreciation for the beauty and logic of the language. If my father had discussed the humerus or the scapula at dinner, I probably would have been bored to tears, but when Arthur did it, it became a kind of poetry.

I understood that part of my pleasure in him was an echo of my parents’ pleasure. When my father heard that I was dating a medical student, he expressed his instant, enthusiastic approval. “Now your head’s out of the clouds,” he said, with an oblique reference to my previous boyfriend, a double major in meteorology and Victorian literature. And in a telephone call from my mother, when she was still feeling reasonably well, she asked if things were “getting serious” between Arthur and me and I said, “sort of,” with complicit coyness. She sighed, with what I took to be contentment.

Arthur and I had already talked dreamily of a future together, like collaborators outlining a novel about our own lives. He would doctor and I would write; it sounded so sane and so safely familiar. Best of all, he loved my stories, which I read aloud to him in bed, our version of the postcoital cigarette. Looking back, his unconditional admiration seems unsurprising. He was still flushed with sexual happiness whenever I read to him, and I mostly wrote about us, in a thoroughly idealized fashion. Things didn’t always end happily, but even tragedy, in my hands, had a kind of romantic appeal, at least for Arthur.

Everett Carroll, on the other hand, was my literary nemesis, and I, in turn, was his. The trouble with my stories, he pronounced in the workshop, was that too much happened in them, without any credible foundation for what he termed “all that
sturm und drang.
” His own stories, usually written in the popular and annoying present tense, were so minimal they were barely there, and I observed that he was stingy with language, and much too reserved emotionally. Besides,
nothing
ever seemed to happen in his fiction.

In the middle of the wintry spring semester, I presented a story to the group only a day or two after Arthur had declared it sublime. Ev was the first one to comment in class, as usual, with almost a knee-jerk reaction. “What’s missing for me,” he began, with a surreptitious glance in my direction, “is true cause and effect. The guy only dies because the author
authorizes
it.”

“And you don’t believe in randomness,” I said mockingly.

“Hold it, Alice,” our instructor, Phil, said. “Let Everett finish.”

“This is a
story,
” Ev continued, as if there’d been no interruption. “It’s supposed to give random events a meaningful
shape.
” I couldn’t stand the way he emphasized certain words, in that condescending tone some people use to talk to children or the elderly. What kind of phony name was “Everett,” anyway? And “Ev” sounded like a woman, even if he was so blatantly masculine.

Someone else in our group tried to interject, citing Chekhov and siding with me, I think, but Ev cut him off. “Chekhov’s characters
earn
their tragedy by their humanity. But there’s no shock of recognition here. Not for me, anyway.”

How could there be, when he was hardly human? “It’s not about you!” I shouted.

“Exactly!” he shouted back.

We went on like that until Phil slammed a book on the table and yelled, “Bong!” to indicate the round was over. He’d given up on pushing his philosophy of noncompetition. Now he just wanted to keep us from killing each other.

That evening there was beer and pizza at somebody’s house on South Gilbert Street. Arthur was cramming for exams, so I went to the party without him. It was the usual scene: loud music, blue lights, manic postworkshop chatter around the crowded room. Ev came up to me soon after I walked in. I was immediately aware of how aggressively big he was. Arthur was muscular, but compact, and we were almost the same height. At least we see things eye-to-eye, I thought at that moment, as if I’d been called upon to defend our relationship. Ev handed me a bottle of beer and grabbed another for himself. “Listen,” he said. “I’m afraid I was a little hard on you this afternoon.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, and turned to walk away.

He touched my arm. “I think you’re really smart . . . ,” he began.

“Thank you,” I said stiffly, before he could continue. I wasn’t in the mood for a belated handout from such a complacent bully.

“You just have to curb your passion a little.”

I took a long swig of beer, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and plunked the bottle down on a table. “Oh?” I said. “And how would you know, since you don’t seem to have any at all?”

He set his bottle down alongside mine. Then, without warning, he put his arms around me and kissed me hard on the mouth. I could feel the pressure of his teeth and taste the cold, beery breath we shared. I pulled away from him, enraged and intensely self-conscious. I glanced around, but to my amazement no one seemed to be looking at us. “What do you think you’re doing?” I demanded.

“Demonstrating my passionate side,” he said, flashing a sudden, unnerving smile.

“Save it for your writing,” I told him, and I strode out of the room onto the front porch. It was snowing again. I had gotten a ride with friends, but I wasn’t going to look for them now. I’d walk back to my place, even though it was very cold and I’d worn only a light denim jacket.

Ev came out a moment later, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, okay,” he said. “So I’m an idiot.”

“At least we agree on something.”

“Don’t go, Alice,” he said. “Please don’t.”

“Why not?” I wasn’t fishing, I was genuinely curious. What did he want from me, anyway?

“Because I’ll feel like hell if you do.”

“That will be your problem, won’t it?” I was shivering, shuffling my feet in a little get-warm dance.

“I’m trying to say that I’m sorry. Can I give you a ride, at least?” He was in shirtsleeves and shivering, too. He took a loose cigarette from his pocket. “Or a smoke?” He held it out to me and then lit up. “Or a brand-new Buick convertible?”