My Famous Brain

by Diane Wald

  Eventually I had to stop driving altogether. Moving closer to the campus was out of the question (my apartment was too cheap to give up), so I had to pay for transportation as well. I hired another grad student to ferry me back and forth in the Caddy (I still clung to it as a reminder of happier times), and although he, a kind and intuitive soul, tried to charge me practically nothing for this service when my unfortunate circumstances became clear to him, I forced him to accept a reasonable wage.

  I was close to despair about this money shortage. At times I would imagine myself ending up in some kind of welfare hospital, doomed to live out my days without privacy, dignity, or even much comfort. Comfort. I found myself craving things I’d never before much cared about, like special foods, and lots of them. Had my metabolism not been so churned around by both my nerves and the medication I was taking, I probably would have gained twenty pounds during this period. I also loved clothing that soothed my skin and required little upkeep; records and tapes, both musical and literary, to fill the blank spaces wherein I used to do my omnivorous reading; and many other little things that simply, I suppose, made me feel somewhat more alive. It was difficult to sustain my greedy new lifestyle on my present salary, but I felt powerless to control my habits.

  One morning I was sipping my mug of tea and listening to the radio when I heard the announcement of a fabulous contest. By simply filling out a postcard with one’s name, address, and phone number, and printing the words “I listen to WKRD” in block letters underneath, one could enter into a drawing for the unbelievable sum of fifty thousand dollars. At first, I thought I had misheard: how could a radio station, even one originating in New York City, be offering such a gigantic prize? But the announcer went on to explain, as if answering my question, that the prize money had been put up by the station and its many nationwide affiliates to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the station’s success. This was to be a highly publicized one-shot deal that would put the station’s call letters on everyone’s lips.

  As I rummaged around in my desk to find a postcard, I laughed at myself, but I thought, why not? It wasn’t any sillier than buying a lottery ticket, something I’d been meaning to do for quite a while. Sometimes life itself presented one with a deus ex machina worthy of a bad movie. With the aid of a magnifying glass, I was able to complete the task, and I dressed and made my way to the corner mailbox as soon as I’d finished breakfast. It was silly indeed, but it was something to do. On my way back to the apartment I half-saw what I thought might be a little dog on the lawn of one of the neighboring houses. Without even thinking I said to myself, “If that doggie comes up to greet me, I will win the contest.” The doggie did. We had a fine little minute or two of petting, jumping, licking, and general goodwill between the species. I walked on.

  On the Monday morning of what was to become one of my last days in the employ of NSU, the WKRD station manager called me. He told me we were “on the air”—I guess to warn me not to say anything uncouth—and congratulated me on being the winner of the contest’s grand prize. Not only did I not say anything uncouth, I did not say anything at all for nearly a full minute. The poor man must have thought I’d fainted; he kept saying, “Mr. MacLeod, are you there? Are you there?” Finally able to complete the conversation and hang up the phone with some modicum of normalcy, I went into the living room and lay down on the couch. My head was literally pounding, as if a great, pulsing, angry beast were trying to be born out of it. I opened my eyes, but could see nothing, and considered that I had gone totally blind at last. I don’t know how long I lay there, but I must have fallen asleep rather quickly and mercifully.

  When I awoke it was dark outside, the pain had miraculously abated, and my eyesight was no worse than it had been earlier in the day. My first thought, of course, was that it had all been a dream, a ridiculous method of solving the unsolvable created by my unconscious to mitigate the problems of my dismal existence, but I soon realized it was not. I had won an enormous amount of money. The station was sending over a man with a certified check tomorrow; he would be accompanied by a notary and a representative from the IRS. The tax man! Well, fine, I thought, he’s welcome to his due. I wouldn’t have to worry about money for a while. I thought fifty thousand dollars unspendable: little did I know that by the time I died, having made out a will I thought would bring my prime beneficiary a valuable bequest, almost all of what remained of my precious prize would be promised to very real creditors.

  I thought I ought to celebrate somehow. I called my Lizzie and Don but could not reach either of them. Unable to postpone my desire to celebrate, I called a fancy French restaurant several towns away and had a sumptuous meal delivered, complete with champagne. It might have been the first take-out order they’d ever filled: it was no easy chore to convince them to humor me). I tipped the delivery boy lavishly and invited him in for a glass of bubbly, telling him I was celebrating a momentous personal victory over skepticism. I’m sure he thought me a nutcase, but I was clearly not dangerous, and he was kind enough to join me. As I sat there across the kitchen table from that rather silently cheerful young man, sipping my own glass of champagne, I thought to myself how wonderful life was, how mysterious, and how sad. If the boy had been Eliza, I would have been endlessly happy.

  25. Hail, Full of Grace

  Strangely enough, it was Grace Rinkette who broke the news to me about Sarah and Mussel. Some weeks after the little scene in my office when Sarah lowered the boom on my unsuspecting head, I was shopping for shirts in a local department store. I had put this task off so long I was beginning to look like a frayed old scarecrow. Since Sarah’s terrible words, I had been speaking and moving mechanically and forgetting each day almost as soon as it was over. I was surviving, but barely. I’d nearly stopped speaking to Frances altogether, but I think that was all right with her. I acted pretty well around the boys and at school, but that was all it was: acting. Don Rath was the only one I talked to about Sarah, and I hadn’t told him much. He was mystified, sympathetic, and friend enough not to press me for details—not that I had many. What broke both our hearts, I think, was that we were so close to having Mussel where we wanted him, and now, though defrocking Mussel for any reason would be a joy in itself, the urgency had mysteriously evaporated, and we both felt its loss acutely. We would take up the banner of our crusade again one day, but we came to a halt for a while, stunned by the injustice of it all.

  So there I was in Harwood’s, the big department store near school, cruising the menswear department like a sleepwalking mannequin escaped from one of the displays. I stopped in front of a huge stack of white shirts and stood there fingering the cuffs. I’d been aimlessly walking around for so long I felt the salesperson had probably pegged me as a shoplifter. Everything looked so white, so clean, so unreal. After stroking the collars of several shirts, I picked up a couple I thought were my size, though I wasn’t certain I remembered what that was.

  Frances had been picking out my shirts for centuries; now I was on my own. One of the shirts I’d chosen was white, and one was a clear pastel green—a beautiful color. I felt I had to buy it, though I was fairly sure I’d never wear such a thing. I wondered if this was how a compulsive shopper felt, and if I were turning into one.

  I was just about to purchase both shirts when I felt a little tug at my shoulder, accompanied by a whiff of lavender water. I looked down. There was Grace Rinkette, cuter than ever. I realized I had never seen her out of her chair in that baroque study of hers and was amused at her height; she appeared to be a bit less than five feet tall. She was smiling radiantly out of a lacy architecture of scarves and stickpins that would have made Queen Victoria proud.

  “Miss Rinkette,” I said, beaming at her, “How lovely to see you again.”

  “And you, Dr. MacLeod,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in quite a while. You really ought to come by and visit my gardens sometime soon: they’re beautiful in every season, you know.”

  “Thank you, I’d love to. A
nd how have you been feeling?”

  “Well,” she said, obviously delighted to tell her story, “I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite so well since I was a girl!” Her pink, chubby little face was alight with mischief, and the sight of her lifted me instantly out of my gloom. It was the first truly beautiful, truly glowing human face I’d seen in a very long time.

  “That’s wonderful news,” I said. “You’re not suffering from the arthritis now, I take it?”

  She pulled me aside to a less congested area and, keeping one hand on my arm, flipped open her tiny handbag and produced a little pamphlet. Her movements, quick and sure, were certainly not those of a woman in pain. I remembered how she used to labor to do so much as lift a teacup. I took the pamphlet from her. On the front was a rather lurid drawing of a dark, elderly, loin-cloth-clad man sitting cross-legged on a vast, glowing cloud. One of his hands was lifted in a gesture of peace, and the other lay across his knee in the frozen yet graceful manner of religious statues. Below him, and encircling the cloud, stood a host of people with their arms lifted in praise, or perhaps prayer. I gave Grace a puzzled look, and she giggled.

  “I know what you must be thinking, Doctor,” she said, “But I really haven’t completely lost my marbles—just a few of them. I’ve been dabbling in what some people call ‘alternative medicine.’”

  “My goodness,” was all I could muster.

  “This man,” she said, pointing to the figure on the flyer, “is Rama Bamakresh, an Indian healer—or maybe not Indian, I’m not sure …” She paused and gave me a deadly serious look. Her eyes twinkled.

  She delighted me so. I felt a genuine smile race across my face and thought, so that’s what it feels like—oh yes, I remember that now. “And he’s healed you?” I asked her.

  “Yes—well, indirectly. I got tired of all my potions and salves. I was beginning to fear I’d get addicted to all those pills. I started to hate my doctor, to miss appointments for no good reason. And my garden was suffering too; I could hardly move to care for it anymore, and hiring a gardener just took all the joy out of it. So one day I said to myself, ‘Grace, you’ll just have to stop being so stuffy and old-fashioned and try out some of these new cures you’ve been reading about.’ Oh, don’t worry, Doctor, I’m old, but I’ve never been gullible. I wasn’t about to start buying copper bracelets or magical Mexican jumping beans or anything like that.”

  She stopped a moment to allow me to finish laughing. I stashed the shirts I was carrying in a nearby pile of sweaters, put my arm around her, and steered her toward the door.

  “Forgive me. It’s just been a while since I’ve heard such a good story, so well told,” I said. “I’m dying to hear all about it. Can I offer you lunch?”

  “Oh dear,” she said, plucking a little cameo-covered watch-pendant from amidst her ruffles, and making an impatient face, “I’m afraid I’m already on my way to an engagement, but thank you so much.”

  Reminded of her appointment, she began walking briskly away from the store; it wasn’t easy to keep up with her. Her feet were so tiny and her legs moved so quickly she looked like nothing so much as an animated hedgehog from some wonderful Disneyesque movie.

  “Then, please,” I begged her, “do finish your story.”

  “Oh yes. Well, anyway, I started researching the subject in earnest. I was looking for someone local, and someone who’d had a good deal of success. Finally, I discovered this healer’s people through an article in one of those health magazines, and I gave them a call.”

  “They helped you, I can see that. But how?”

  She laughed happily. “I’m just not sure how,” she said, “but they certainly did help. They changed my diet all around: that was the big thing. They suggested I get some acupuncture. They taught me to meditate. And,” she continued, still racing along the street like a twenty-year-old, “they gave me these.” She pulled a little plastic packet out of her bag and handed it to me. It contained some tiny, grainy-looking pellets that looked like rabbit food.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Herbs!” she announced proudly. “I forget their names, I’m sorry to say, but I have the whole list at home: nothing harmful, but it’s supposed to be the delicate combining of them that does the trick … and it certainly did the trick for me!” She glowed in my direction, stuffing the pills back into her purse.

  A momentary concern for her well-being, a lifelong habit of skepticism, flitted across my mind for a second or two, but then I looked again at Grace and dismissed it. “You look wonderful,” I told her. “I’m really very happy for you. Did all of this happen quickly?”

  “Oh no,” she said. “It took a couple of months, but I noticed some improvement almost immediately: that’s what kept me going. And now I’m a total convert. Oh I know it sounds unbelievable, Doctor MacLeod, but at my age why should I care? I hardly have any pain anymore, I can get around all I like, and, best of all, I can garden to my heart’s content. I can hardly wait until next spring when I’ll reap the rewards of all the new varieties of iris I’ve planted.”

  I suddenly realized we were getting quite far away from where I’d parked my car, and that I’d have to be getting back to the campus soon. I decided to ask what I’d feared to ask all along.

  “And Sarah must be so pleased with your recovery,” I ventured. Grace gave me a soft, wise glance, and sighed a little. She stopped walking, took one of my hands in both her tiny ones, and patted it.

  “I’m sorry, my boy,” she said. “I know you cared for her a great deal. I tried not to be too nosey, and Sarah never told me too much, but I could tell that you and she were very close.”

  She let my hand go and looked off into the distance. “In fact,” she went on, “I know it must be painful for you to talk about her, but I have to tell you that I always hoped it would be you she married instead of Dr. Mussel.” She stopped, abashed. “But who can fathom the human heart?”

  She was wringing her tiny hands and examining my face with the greatest concern. “I really mustn’t talk like this. I’m sorry. I’m just a foolish old woman.”

  I could not believe my ears, but I did not question her further. I made some kind of excuse and beat what I hope was not too rude a retreat. I went directly to a phone booth and called Don Rath. No one answered, either in his office or at home. I knew I had heard Grace correctly. I guess I thought, if I repeated it to Don, he would tell me it wasn’t true. If only, I thought, I could take some little pills like Grace’s and wake up tomorrow knowing all of this hadn’t really happened. A terrible vision of Mussel’s greasy face reared up before me as I got into my car. I had to sit there a few minutes before the apparition would go away. People lusting after my parking space honked at me, but I ignored them. I was drowning in unshed tears. The severity of my headache was frightening, but at the time I thought of it only as the result of the shocking news I’d just heard.

  I sat there I don’t know how long, sweating, and lost in a daydream of incredible clarity. I imagined myself dancing with Sarah through Grace Rinkette’s iris gardens. Grace sat on a little velvet tuffet, wearing a yellow and lavender dress and looking like a wonderful, fuzzy old iris herself. The moon was amazingly high in the sky, like the Star of Bethlehem on a Christmas card. There was no music, but we waltzed effortlessly, with exquisite precision. Sarah felt light as a leaf in my arms. She threw her head back and I twirled her around breathlessly.

  The more detailed this daydream became, the more I realized its unreality, and the more I clung to it desperately, afraid to cease creating it and return to the real afternoon. The moon in my dream was silver and golden, all at the same time, and the breezes cool and lightly scented by far-off oceans. I wore a tuxedo and had combed-back hair. Sarah wore diamonds. She wore a wedding dress.

  26. Making a Date with Don

  It was around that time that I first got to know Eliza. I didn’t pay much attention to her at first; she was just one of a number of well-scrubbed, long-haired upperclassmen in m
y advanced psychology course. But after the Patchen episode, we began to run into each other more and more, and at first I could not determine if this were somehow planned by Eliza or if it were only an accident of fate. Eventually, of course, I came to realize that Eliza and I were simply swimming in the same psychic stream and were bound to encounter each other at frequent intervals.

  It was also around this time that some of my symptoms really began to haunt me: headaches, vision problems, periods of imbalance, sudden and heavy bouts of depression. But they were all easily and rationally explained away by the trauma around Sarah. My reaction was to ignore them or, when that failed, to try to beat them down, and I worked harder at my classes than I ever had before, becoming the quintessential workaholic and a member of the Great Unaware. I was oblivious to almost everything, centering my whole existence on a foundation of ritual and exhaustion. Somehow it seemed to hold me together.