Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind, page 16
And so it was when she met Mary Rose O’Brian who was pre-med and friends with a faculty member in the Classics Department who invited everyone to an annual Christmas party at her home. Mary Rose was tall and broad. She had large feet like Cinderella’s evil stepsister. She was not shy like Anna. She had a loud voice and a very deep laugh. She had wide shoulders and when she walked she stepped firmly, she moved like an ice cutter through the Antarctic. There was no one who was going to mess with Mary Rose. She wore an army jacket and sometimes she wore a blue striped tie. She was what she was and a lock of her hair kept falling into her eyes and she kept brushing it away and when she looked at Anna a strange new electric pulse ran through Anna’s body. It was not an unpleasant feeling.
Which is how the two women found themselves eating Mexican food in a small restaurant near Anna’s dorm. It was how they talked to each other about their families, about their favorite movies, about the admiration Mary Rose felt for the beauty of nature. They talked about swimming in cold lakes and both of them disliked Florida where Mary Rose’s parents had moved and Anna had received a nasty sunburn one vacation when she was nine.
At the end of the evening when they parted outside of Anna’s dorm they did not touch but the possibility hung in the air. It made Anna anxious but not unhappy.
It took Anna several weeks before she told Dr. Z. about Mary Rose. She expected he would have some stuffy damning Freudian response, but instead he asked, What do you feel when you are with her? Anna told him. That’s good, he said. That is all good. Anna could practically hear him purr.
Maybe that was just the radiator.
Have I made a bad choice? Anna asked him.
What do you think? he asked her.
She blushed.
I’m okay, she said.
Good, he said.
I’m really okay, she said.
That is really good, he said.
And so it went through the semester and the one after that. In the summer Mary Rose and Anna both had jobs as a counselors at a nearby day camp. The two shared a small apartment above a garage and Mary Rose and Anna together went to work every morning and to bed at night. They watched summer reruns on an old television and listened to music on their iPods and went swimming on the weekends at the local public beach. Under the water they held hands and when they surfaced they pulled at each other’s bathing suits and tossed seaweed in each other’s faces. At such times it would be hard to tell how old they were. Were they sisters? The tall one was older or maybe not.
Anna’s parents spent August on the Cape. Come with your friend, they said. The family crisis had come and gone. Anna was independent, making up for lost time. Yes, there were a few white scars on her arms. Yes, her mother listened to her voice carefully, always hoping not to hear what she might hear. Meyer was at Stanford, something about zebra fish and brain tissue.
I know what my life will be like, Anna told Dr. Z. Mary Rose and I have plans. After I graduate we are going to get married. We’re going to move to a village in Vermont and I’m going to open a bakery and Mary Rose will go on to study forestry, and then when she has her degree we’re going to have two or maybe three children. I’m going to carry them and Mary Rose will donate the egg so the children will be both of ours. In the winter the children will ski to school, said Anna. Sounds like a fairy-tale life, said Dr. Z.
And then one night in a bar called Barney’s after a famous woman who dressed in men’s clothes and in the 1920s lived in Paris and was a daring beauty before such beauty could show itself all over town, Mary Rose saw a young woman wearing high black boots and a shirt that had a drawing of a racing car over the left pocket. Anna knew nothing about car racing. Mary Rose did. Anna put her hand on Mary Rose’s arm. Mary Rose didn’t even turn around, she shook off Anna’s hand and leaned toward the racing car as if gravity were pulling her hand and there was nothing she could do to stop its forward motion.
Outside the bar the last of the smokers were puffing into the night. Anna waited for Mary Rose but she didn’t appear. Anna went back to their apartment. She left the car for Mary Rose. She walked past the 7-Eleven and the gas station with its cold white lights and the Dairy Queen shuttered against the dark. Her limbs were tired. She hated Mary Rose but not as much as she loved her. She realized she was stomping around after midnight. She did not take a razor to her arm but she remembered how that felt and the memory accompanied her all through the night and the next day when Mary Rose appeared she took one look at Anna’s face and said, Darling, nothing lasts forever. A little longer, said Anna. We’ll always be friends, said Mary Rose. No we won’t, said Anna. Mary Rose was sorry, but not sorry enough.
I’ll never love anyone again, Anna said to Dr. Z. For better or worse, said Dr. Z., you will.
No, said Anna.
Yes, said Dr. Z. He had the last word because the session was over.
Do you know, said Dr. Z. to Dr. H. at the annual fund-raising party for the institute where they shared a table with their wives and a wealthy patron and his aged mother, why all the young mothers are reading that Sendak book, Where the Wild Things Are, to their toddlers?
Yes, said Dr. H. They want their children to know where to go if a crisis arrives.
You mean to an island? asked Dr. Z.
No, came the reply, inside of books. In the pages of books, that’s where you go when trouble comes.
Dr. Z. laughed. He sloshed his wine on his pants, which was all right because it was white wine. Good drawings of the id, said Dr. Z.
An imaginary animal, said Dr. H.
Are you presenting that theory at the May meeting? asked Dr. Z.
I have no desire to be famous, said Dr. H. I’d have to chair too many committees.
twelve
Dr. Z.’s daughter was not one of those little girls who played dress-up in princess dresses, letting silver beads and purple feathers drift across the carpet. She was a chess player and very fond of puzzles. Her mother and father were careful with their children: reality was presented unadorned, no tooth fairy, no elves, and no higher power beyond Con Edison. There were piano lessons and a brief bout with Mandarin which was abandoned for shell-collecting by the beach, bird-watching and the West Side Soccer League.
Ronit was named after a grandmother who as a little girl escaped in a sixteen-foot fishing boat captained by a Dane. Dr. Z. had never been sure if this Dane who had saved his mother was a righteous man or one who demanded certain favors or funds in return. The story, like most of the stories from the other shore, was uncertain in detail, accurate in emotion, but fogged over by the mist of time and the confusions of memory.
Dr. Z. was proud of his daughter who was not overly anxious, phobic, timid, or aggressive. She was not joyless or friendless and could navigate setbacks, like not being invited to someone’s birthday party, with grace. The muscles in her legs tensed as she ran and climbed and swung from high bars. She had long shiny black hair that she wore in braids until her body changed and her breasts appeared, expected but still surprising, a gift, one that came with a dark side.
And from her excellent college she went to an excellent medical school, the same one that had granted a degree to her mother some thirty years earlier. She had no interest in neurology, her mother’s field, or psychiatry, her father’s. She was drawn to oncology. This was where the battle against the enemy was at its fiercest, the stakes were high, the losses many. It wasn’t a field for the faint of heart. Ronit wanted to go to war and she did.
Perhaps it wore on her. She seemed to reject boyfriends after a few months of promising sleepovers. One lasted a year and a half. To soft-spoken inquiries from her mother she always smiled and said she wasn’t ready. Why not? asked Dr. Z., who was not only eager for a grandchild but convinced that union, sexual and otherwise, was necessary for a good life. Was this old-fashioned of him? Would he have felt the same way about his son who had in fact married before he was thirty to a woman who taught the learning-disabled and seemed in perfect harmony with her fate. Also, she baked and broiled and sautéed blissful dinners for all occasions. Not to mention birthday cakes for the children decorated with tiny plastic horses, clowns, trains riding on their chocolate tracks. Ronit ate cafeteria food in the hospital and kept a box of energy bars in her pantry for emergencies.
The family celebrated her thirty-first birthday with a picnic in the park followed by a performance of Hamlet under the stars. Dr. Z. wanted to ask about the men she had met, any interesting ones, any long-term possibilities. He had no ethnic or religious requirements, no specific occupations, no visions of a beloved son-in-law keeping him company in his old age.
That is not quite true, a better way to say it would be that he was ready to give up all his personal wishes for the happiness of his daughter, anyone she loved he would embrace.
Ronit had a cat she was quite fond of. Several of the young men she had dated began to sneeze and cough when settled on her couch with a glass of wine and expectations of a move into the bedroom. Ronit bid them good night, walking them politely down the long hall to the elevator. Her loyalty lay with the cat, who slept in her bed, his body giving warmth to the cold winter nights, his tongue licking her face before the alarm rang in the mornings.
A healthy life, said Freud, requires work and love. So I have half a healthy life, said Ronit to her friends when they met for drinks at the end of a very long day. Dr. Z. did not laugh when she said this to him. Perhaps you should consider therapy, he said. When, just when, asked Ronit, would I have time for that? Dr. Z. did not press her. She became chief resident, received an appointment at the hospital and published several papers on the success or lack of it of this new protocol or that. When Dr. Z. looked carefully at his daughter he saw the way her jaw tightened when she watched her nephew play with his toy doctor kit, a present from her on one family occasion. He saw that the soft shine of youth was disappearing from her skin, her hair held back by a clip was not free to bounce and flow as it once had been. He saw a few gray hairs at her crown. It was unthinkable that age should reach her, drain her, and he was helpless in the face of time, the facts of life and death could not be altered by his love. Ronit was sliding through time and she was still without a partner. Did she want a woman? Dr. Z. dared to ask. Ronit laughed at him. Oh Dad, she said, leave me alone.
Maybe if the cat would die, he thought. How old was that cat?
And then, shortly before her thirty-seventh birthday, Ronit met her father for dinner at an Italian restaurant near the hospital and before they opened the menus she said to him, I’m seeing someone. Oh, he said, using his neutral voice, his doctor voice, when a patient told him of wanting to put a knife in the heart of her sister, or of planning to hide his fortune offshore. Oh, he repeated. Ronit waited. She made him ask, Who? He asked. The man was a poet. She had met him at his mother’s bedside. A poet, said Dr. Z. who admired poets in principle but considered them like rare flora, better kept at a distance, far down some Amazon river and not in one’s own living room, or for that matter in one’s daughter’s bedroom. Is he healthy? he asked Ronit, visions of Keats and consumption passing through his mind. Nobody—not even poets—has consumption anymore, he reminded himself.
Dr. Z. said, Tell me about him. And she did, leaving out a few things, the second wife for instance, as well as the long ago stay at a rehab hospital in Minnesota. As she talked Dr. Z. saw the color rise in her face and he saw that his daughter had something else in her life besides her patients and he was relieved and would have been joyous but he had one important question to ask, before he would really allow joy to romp in his heart.
And what about children? he asked so casually he might have been asking if this prospective son-in-law liked pumpkin pie or did he prefer apple?
Yes, said Ronit, he wants children right away and so do I. And, she added, he is not allergic to cats.
There was a wedding, not too expensive, but with dancing and Ronit’s brother lifted his own child into the air and tossed him into his new brother-in-law’s arms and everyone clapped and circled around. Then Dr. Z. found himself high up above the small crowd sitting on a small chair supported by six friends of the groom consisting of the entire staff of a small literary magazine. The musicians played on and on. Dr. Z. glanced over at his wife who was visibly alarmed by her suspension up in the air but nevertheless took the time to blow him a kiss, an expression of love he welcomed even in the din, even as he worried that his large and somewhat overweight body might crash to the floor, causing mayhem.
Because of that vivid thought he recognized in himself the blood red thread of regret: Ronit was no longer his alone, although it was precisely what he had hoped for, and had worried might never happen.
For the millionth time he saw in himself what he taught his patients to see in themselves, the raw other side, the dark selfish maw of his soul. Up in the air above the dancing wedding crowd he shut the door against the less pleasant part of himself which accompanied him everywhere, even to his daughter’s wedding, the wedding he had waited for so long and so eagerly.
Shortly afterwards the cat developed an aneurysm in his spine and, wailing in pain, was put to sleep in an early dawn visit to the only animal hospital open in the city at 4 a.m. Ronit did not seem overly grieved. She was trying to get pregnant.
Dr. Z. did not want to ask any questions that would cross the important boundaries between a married child and her attentive father. He did not want to be the one who accompanied her to the fertility clinic when it came to that and it did come to that after twenty-one months of failure. He wanted to appease the right gods, the ones he did not believe in, so that Ronit could have a child. The poet seemed steady in his affection. He published a book that he dedicated to Ronit, giving a galley to Dr. Z. and his wife with a thank-you note for their faith in him. Faith was not Dr. Z.’s habit. But he had grown fond of the poet and when he imagined his grandchildren he thought of them like Wallace Stevens, doctor poets, poet doctors. He knew that was absurd—they might very well become football players or die in some war he himself wouldn’t live to see. Nevertheless, in his daydreams as he waited for a late patient or walked home from his office, he conjured them up, reading Dante in Italian and Freud in German and giving papers at international conferences and poetry readings at the local Y.
I’m becoming a fool, he said to his wife. You always were a fool, she said, my fool.
It turned out the poet had a low sperm count. It turned out that while she was now only thirty-nine, Ronit had pushed the flexibility of her female parts to their limit. She now could hear the drip of time as month changed into month, season moved into season. Time was no longer the unnoticed river that ran through her life, it was the nightmare that woke her in the dark. The first in vitro failed. The second in vitro failed too. She had begun to stare at every pregnant woman she passed in the street. A bitter taste of envy and rue would come over her and she would look away, ashamed of herself, unable to be glad for the woman who was not her. She had trouble sleeping and in the early hours before dawn she would look over at her husband and despise him for no reason at all. The hormones she was taking in preparation for the in vitro made her emotions careen about as if they were in a perpetual car derby, smash, crash, crunch. She burst into tears when a scan of a young girl with bone cancer came back with the wrong shades. She had never done that before. She promised herself never to do that again.
And so the night before the third try she would have prayed but she had no one to pray to. Instead she called her father. He said, I have a good feeling about this. This time it will work. He didn’t have a good feeling about anything but he wanted to comfort her. He wanted to spare her. You know, he said, you could adopt. I don’t want to talk about that tonight, she said, and he said, I’m sorry. Good night Daddy, she said, and he felt a sharp pain in his heart. It wasn’t angina. It wasn’t a crucial vein closing. It was just the fact: his child in danger.
You had to wait a few days, almost a week, to see if hormone levels changed, if anything had happened in the mysterious cave of the womb. Dr. Z. rehearsed his lines. He had prepared exactly the words he would say to her if the eggs remained lifeless. He prepared his voice, he prepared his words, no man about to go into battle concentrated as fiercely on his purpose, to blunt the pain, to encourage, to simply be there, but not be intrusive. How not to be intrusive when he was, most surely, intruding. Above all he was determined not to let his daughter see or suspect his own disappointment. Also he knew that was impossible. She would know. It would add to her pain.
And so he was sitting in his chair, his doctor chair, in his office, his feet up on the stool in front of him, waiting for the bell that would announce his next patient, when the phone rang and he picked it up. What now, what now? ran through his mind as it always did. It was Ronit. He knew instantly almost before the first word was sent soaring through the air. It was the lightness of her tone, the way she said, Dad. Yes, she was pregnant. The following weeks brought her word of twins. It also brought new fears. What if they die in utero? What if they are damaged? When was the amnio? When would they know if the babies had avoided the diseases of older mothers, the dread diseases that he could recite in his mind and did each morning as he rose from his bed?
Dr. Z. had not asked the poet if his family history contained schizophrenia, manic depression, suicides, thieves, sociopaths. It would have been rude. His daughter would have been furious with him. He knew better than to ask those questions. A simple tell me about your family had produced a story of a potter mother and a father who baked bread and taught Asian history at a progressive New England college. Also he had spoken of an aunt who had died of leukemia in her thirties. Dr. Z. wasn’t worried about leukemia or at least no more so than all the other threats that now gathered around his daughter. He banished them from his mind. He was too well analyzed himself, too sane to allow the normal dangers of life to spoil his pleasure, to darken his brain with appalling grief. He banished such thoughts, almost, sometimes.
