by Laurel Brett
I gave her the print during dinner. She had no gift for me, but that didn’t bother me. In fact, I would have probably been uncomfortable accepting a gift in the midst of all this ambiguity.
“I don’t know how I found my way to art history,” she said, gazing admiringly at the print in her hands. “Going home this time made me realize that there was absolutely no art at all in my parents’ house. Ever. This time at home I really missed the consolation of paintings. I forgot how bleak winter in a farm community in Indiana can be. Yes, there’s Fort Wayne, but the farm was just so lonely. I’m relieved that my parents decided not to sell after all, or I would have had to spend more time packing them up.”
“You seem tired.”
She nodded.
“Are you going to tell me what the hell we’re about to discuss?”
“Not today. Tomorrow. I’m too tired from traveling.”
More suspense.
“I’ve been on tenterhooks for months.”
“Relax. It’s not as bad as all that. I promise. What have you been up to?”
I told her about Jerry.
“Oh no. How’s he doing?”
“I assume he’s doing very well because they’re letting me pick him up for the day next Saturday, although they extended his stay. He tried for an overnight, but his psychiatrist said he isn’t ready.”
“It’s strange to imagine Jerry with his own psychiatrist. I hope I’ll get to see him again . . . We agreed that if I dated you it would be inappropriate for me to be his patient.”
“How did you afford all those sessions—five days a week at those rates?”
“I didn’t go for psychoanalysis. Just therapy once a week.”
“I thought Jerry only did psychoanalysis.”
“Apparently there are a lot of things about Jerry you don’t know.”
I paused. “He said he wanted to settle down.”
“Right now he needs to concentrate on his recovery. I saw a lot of alcoholism growing up in the sticks. It’s a demon disease.”
I was relieved when Caroline said that she wanted to go to bed, but then she said that she wanted to use the guest room. Okay. So, there was to be more frustration. I showed her to her room.
I left for class before she was up.
* * *
When I got home, she met me with high spirits. “At least someone’s happy,” I said. She seemed to have made some decisions because all the unfocused, lost demeanor she’d had when I saw her in Indiana had vanished.
“I slept pretty well, but that room doesn’t really get warm, Garrett. Let’s go find a second quilt for that bedroom.” I couldn’t believe it. She wanted to go shopping? Did she have a strategy in mind? She had the air of a general, yet her objective mystified me. We faced each other like large wary cats, she a panther, sleek and black, with her liquid dark hair, and me a lion with a scruffy mane and a pair of spectacles. I wished I’d known the rules of engagement.
“Is this elaborate foreplay? Right now my stomach’s in knots.”
She shook her head playfully. “Nope. I just want to buy a quilt.” Her exuberance was not contagious. She was singing “Good Day Sunshine,” just like the first morning we’d spent together, but I still felt anxious. The weather, however, had turned a bit warmer, the sky a radiant blue.
In Woodstock, we entered a store that displayed quilts and other handmade items on consignment. I enjoyed watching Caroline haggle with the salesclerk. She bargained the price down, and we purchased the quilt, a simple patchwork design in soft, faded colors. So, being domestic feels like this, I thought. Helena and I had lived in student housing, worried about tests and writing papers and the coming baby, and never made it as far as buying household items, or going to a nearby town just on a lark.
Back at home Caroline raced upstairs and put the quilt on the bed. The second bedroom became inviting. She confused me. Did she plan on spending many nights in my guest room?
She turned to me and announced, “Now we’ll talk.”
We seated ourselves in the parlor of my nineteenth-
century house. Wide pine planks made up the floorboards with wide joists that allowed tiny objects to fall through to the basement. The mellow amber wood was so soft that a woman’s high heels had dented the surface throughout. I had lived here for over five years, and it was my first real home—the first place I’d ever furnished. I’d splurged on a leather couch, and sometime later I purchased two armchairs covered in soft brown velvet. I’d found the coffee table at the side of the road. The discarded glass-topped wrought-iron piece had been meant for the garden, but functioned perfectly in my living room, even with all its flaking paint. I had tried to repaint it, but the paint just kept chipping off, and I decided that I liked it that way. The legs were decorated with vines that I now glanced at for the hundredth time as Caroline sat on the couch. This was the first time I noticed they were laurel leaves. Of course, I thought of Daphne.
I sat in a velvet chair facing Caroline. She took a deep breath and said, “Garrett, the thing is . . . I want to have a baby.”
Her statement was so surprising that I blurted out, “No way.”
She went on. “I’m thirty-three. When I was engaged, I daydreamed about the two perfect children we’d have, and the home we’d make for them. We even had a dog in these fantasies. When the engagement ended I focused on establishing a place for myself in the art world.”
“You’ve done a great job.”
But she held up her hand to signal that she wasn’t finished. “I never met anyone else special, so I gave up thinking about that future. My thirtieth birthday came, and I figured that was it. You know, we live in a world in which almost anyone who’s going to marry is married by then. But the night we made love, and I cried, all those dreams came rushing back.”
I tried to respond, but she still wasn’t finished.
“When we saw each other again, a few weeks later at your house, I felt the same connection. And then I saw the time line.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t take it down.”
“It scared me. I had imagined you to be the perfect father and saw this house, and pictured the white picket fence, and the dog and all of that, and then it just seemed like you were crazy, and my whole fantasy fell apart. I’ve been going back and forth about you ever since.”
So, Caroline wasn’t exactly who she seemed. I’d been right. She’d been run by a hidden agenda, and now so many of her reactions made sense. I had been auditioning for a part I knew nothing about. She’d been keeping this baby hunger from me. No wonder any sign of my instability sent her into a tailspin.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m old enough to know that nothing is really perfect. But they start you out on these dreams when you’re little. When they give you a doll. Then they read you Cinderella, and you dream of Prince Charming.”
“I guess I’m not Prince Charming.”
“Well . . . I’ve been struggling to let go of Prince Charming. He’s only in a story. Anyway, I don’t need a Prince Charming. People compromise.”
“So I’d be a compromise?”
She said nothing to that.
“I had no idea you were thinking about children.”
“Men are dumb.”
“You are asking me to have a child with you, right?”
She nodded. “But I still want you to give up your Schrödinger girls.”
Happy Valentine’s Day to me. “I give them up, or what?” The ultimatum just hung in the air.
“There’s something else. I don’t want to have sex with birth control. Baby-making sex, or no sex.”
“That’s why you slept in the guest bedroom.”
She stared at me, trying to glean a crumb of my reaction, but I had so many conflicting feelings I wanted to hide that I worked at keeping my visage neutral. She’s the crazy one if she expects me to give up the Schrödinger girls.
“Why are you telling me this now?”
�
�My trip, I guess. Seeing people just getting on with their lives. And I can finally admit that I miss you when we’re apart.”
“That’s good to hear. I have something to say too, but I need some tea.”
My teapot was a squat, gunmetal-colored, Japanese-style vessel. A few years back I’d gone through an Alan Watts Zen phase, like everyone else at the time, and the teapot was its only legacy. I heated the water in a teakettle, but I removed it from the flame before it could whistle. I poured an ounce of hot water in the pot, rolling it around to heat the metal evenly. I poured the water out and spooned in the loose leaves of Irish breakfast tea and filled it with the boiling water. My mom had loved the ritual of teatime, and she had given me a cream-and-sugar set that I put on a tray with the teapot and two creamy china handleless cups that seemed Japanese. The tray was a charming amalgam of Japan and Ireland.
I watched Caroline’s beautiful, long-fingered hands pour cream in the cups and spoon in the sugar. She held the pot at the perfect angle to avoid getting the loose leaves in the cups. Without handles, the cups were a little hot to hold, but the heat brought comfort too. An old house in upstate New York is drafty on February 15.
I began, “Most men just don’t think that much about having kids.” Not once had I ever considered Caroline and me having children, not even when Jerry talked about wanting kids. The thought of her wanting them hadn’t entered my mind. She never cooed at babies on the street or dragged me to the window of a baby store or mentioned her friends’ babies. “You remember me telling you about Helena? About how we got married as kids and got divorced soon after?”
“Of course.”
“We got married because she was pregnant. And the baby, who was a girl, was stillborn. The umbilical cord choked her. Helena named her Amy. We fell apart after that, and then I stopped thinking about them—Helena and Amy.”
I could see a shadow of anguish in her eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know.” I sounded shallow and evasive. “I just didn’t know what to say. Jerry says it’s because I never dealt with the pain of their loss. I only saw . . . Amy . . . once . . . so briefly. And I was ashamed to feel so little.”
“And you couldn’t tell me?”
“I never tell anyone. Jerry knows. He was at the wedding.”
She was nodding to show me she understood. We finished our tea and repeated the tea ritual to have something to do. That’s the beauty of having a metal teapot—it holds the heat without a cozy.
I broke the silence: “I resolved to never have children. Things can go wrong. Why open the door to pain?”
“But when we were at Coney Island and I wanted to ride the teacup ride, you said you’d take our daughter and me on the ride. Don’t you remember?”
I did. I had no idea why I’d said that except as a ploy to go ride the Cyclone. Talking about a hypothetical daughter had led Caroline to hope. Now she stared deep into my eyes. I felt uncomfortable. I thought of my glasses, my eyes hidden behind the lenses.
I said nothing, so Caroline continued: “You were young. You can change your mind.”
“I would make a horrible father. Behaviorists do. The children of John B. Watson didn’t fare well. One tried to commit suicide multiple times, and one succeeded. The other two had severe, lifelong stomach problems. There were rumors about B.F. Skinner doing experiments on his own two daughters, and he invented a crib that some derided as the ‘Skinner box.’ Though I don’t believe the stuff about Skinner.”
All the skeletons were marching out of the closet.
Caroline went on, “We don’t have to raise her that way.” And then she asked, “Does any of this have anything to do with your father?”
“Maybe, but you know I don’t like to think about the past.” I didn’t want to acknowledge that psychoanalytic thought was beginning to influence me.
“Maybe John Watson was just a prick,” she said.
“Maybe he was.”
We were at an impasse.
“Let’s table this for now. It’s a lot to absorb,” I said.
“No.” She was adamant. “We should go on. What else are you keeping back? Tell me. More skeletons?” As she spoke, she stood up and began pacing. She wasn’t as in charge of herself as she seemed.
“I’m worried that I’m stalled in my career. Behaviorism isn’t the ‘it’ thing anymore, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to publish or get promotions. Maybe I won’t even be able to support a child.”
“Is that all? That’s called the human condition. You can expand.” She still stood over me, but she had stopped pacing.
“I don’t know if I can.”
She spared me further reassurances.
“About the time line,” I began. Even though I had taken it down, it was still very much on my mind. I wasn’t giving up on my exploration of the mystery of Daphne. Not for Caroline, and not for a child. I missed those girls, and I was still convinced they held the clue to something important. “I just can’t agree to give all that up. Not now.”
Making quotation marks in the air, she ironically asked, “Do you have a ‘time line’ for when you might be willing to?”
“I don’t.”
“Being in Indiana, seeing my parents’ dysfunctional lives, makes me want us to do better. My father drinks. My mother thinks she talks to ghosts and makes ridiculous hats she tries to pawn off on people. They haven’t spent an entire evening together in twenty years. They go their separate ways. I want more than that. But they raised me anyway. And I want that too.”
“Aren’t you interested in the Schrödinger girls at all?”
“How old is Daphne?” she asked.
“About to turn seventeen.”
“And how old would Amy be?”
I paused. “The same,” I finally said.
“Do you need help putting these tea things away?” she asked.
“No, it’s nothing.”
“Then I’m going upstairs for a nap.”
I could hear her climbing the stairs to the guest bedroom while I remained downstairs tidying up. I imagined her folding back the quilt we had just bought. She never articulated the or else part of her ultimatum. I could have described our relationship in two different ways. Either we were two people deeply in love trying to make our way toward each other, or we were adversaries, each fighting for self-fulfillment while trying to cede as little freedom as possible. Caroline was fighting for a child and a mate who conformed to her picture of normalcy. I was fighting for the right to see my Schrödinger girls and continue my relationship with Caroline at the same time. Both were true—we were loving friends, and we were adversaries.
We resolved nothing that day, but we agreed to keep talking to each other. She seemed to have crossed a bridge to more acceptance and was less angry.
Then, soon after this conversation with Caroline, I heard from Daphne again.
Chapter Seventeen
* * *
Daphne Note
Date: February 23, 1968
Days since last Daphne meeting: 124
Time line entry: Daphne at Stony Brook
A week later, I had just gotten off the phone after checking on Jerry when it rang again. The voice on the other end of the line was young, female, and tentative.
“Dr. Adams?” she said. “This is Juliana Schloss. A friend of Daphne’s? She’s not in a good way, and we just didn’t know who else to call. She had your card.”
Which Daphne is this? I could feel the roller coaster of exhilaration and confusion that started in me whenever I had a chance to see one of the Daphnes. “Where are you calling from?”
“Stony Brook University.”
“On Long Island, right?”
“Yeah. We’re in my suite in the dorm. Daphne is sitting in a corner, high on drugs, and we can’t get her to eat, shower, go out, or go to bed. This is the second day, and we’re all very worried.”
“Can I speak to her?”
“I’ll go see if she’ll
come to the phone.” After a pause of several minutes she came back and reported, “No. She won’t get up, and the cord doesn’t reach that far. Could you come?”
Of course I’d go, but I considered for a moment. I had no classes the next day, Friday, so that was fine. “Should I come tonight or can it wait until morning?” I had never been there, and I didn’t know how long it would take, but I figured somewhere around three hours.
“Tonight,” she said immediately in a hoarse voice. “We have been taking turns watching her, but no one has been getting much sleep, and she hasn’t slept for two days.”
As I packed a few things in an overnight bag, obsessive thoughts circled repeatedly: How did she get to Stony Brook? What’s wrong? My fingers compulsively drummed on the steering wheel. It was a long drive in the semi-black. I also gave some thought to which Daphne I’d encounter. Not Galen’s Daphne for sure. My money was on SDS Daphne. Her rebelliousness might get her into this scrape.
Finding the dorm wasn’t easy. The roads were dark and lined with barren trees. I drove around a little more, feeling increasingly anxious about the girl I’d find. In the darkness of the car, I couldn’t make out the directions I’d written down. I reached into the glove box and retrieved a flashlight, and I was finally able to find the dorm. A cacophony of songs assailed me. Each room seemed to be playing a different album with stereos cranked up to maximum volume. I wondered how the kids could stand it. The sweet, earthy scent of marijuana was unmistakable. Juliana’s suite was on the first floor at the end of the hall.
After my vigorous knock, she came to the door, an athletic, curly haired girl with the same wispy voice I’d first attributed to nerves. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “I just didn’t know what to do.” She must have been nineteen or twenty.