Emma leaned toward him and whispered, “The ugliest little boy I ever saw in my life.”
Willie wailed one long cry and burst into terrible tears. He pushed back his chair and ran from the room. Martha turned, said, “What—” and ran after him down the hall.
Emma grabbed the custard, ate it, and put back the bowl and spoon. Martha came back into the kitchen. “What did you do to him?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t tell me that.”
“What?”
“Don’t roll those eyes at me. If you’ve finished, get out of my sight. The way you hurt that child is disgusting to me and I don’t like to look at it.”
Emma got up and left the room. She thumped with dignity down the hall. There was no sound at all from Willie’s room. She closed her heart to the silence, preferring to forget the custard and to return to her usual put-upon feeling. She flipped on the television set as she entered her room, picked up the heavy book she had been reading, and went back to her work, plunking herself down in her armchair, which was so torn, rubbed, and washed out that it looked as though it had fleas.
Willie lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, fat tears running slowly down his cheeks. He cried silently, not wanting Emma to hear, not wanting to talk to anybody ever again about anything. The television, which he had left on through dinner because he hated coming back into a silent room, was softly going through its tricks. Horatio Selby, MD, was telling everybody how to live, as usual. Willie watched the complacent white man explain how simple everything was if you just did such and such. He’d never had Emma for a sister—that was clear. He’d never wanted to be a dancer, either.
The thought of this skinny white man as a dancer made Willie laugh. He thought of Dipsey with joy, Dipsey with his neat body moving so good, moving around, just slow and easy. He tried to imagine Dipsey on a stage, but then he had seen a stage only once, when Dipsey had taken him into a theater.
All Willie had seen was a darkened orchestra pit and an enormous empty stage lit by one light, but then he had looked up and his heart had soared with him, up and up, and he had run up onto the stage and looked out into the audience and felt like his pants were falling off. The whole thing did something to him and he couldn’t say what it was, but the question of living with Emma became unimportant. Emma became, in fact, boring. Emma, next to whatever was in that place and the life that went on there and the way it all felt to him, became a heavy old frump, meaningless.
The knock surprised him, and Emma’s face, when he opened the door, even more. He had become caught up in Dr. Selby’s easiness, lulled into dreams of the stage and the life that went with it, a life that meant to him, essentially, a life without Emma.
“I’m sorry.”
“What?” He looked genuinely puzzled, but memory pushed at him. “Oh.” He stared at her. To say the wrong thing at this moment promised a worse horror.
“I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”
“Okay.” He laughed at her. “I know I’m not ugly.”
A look of fury came over her face, and, too late, he knew he had said the wrong thing. Why could he never say anything right to her? She turned on her heel. He closed the door.
She marched into the bathroom. “Little rat,” she muttered. She sat on the john with a thud. “Little creepo rat. Hates me. Laughs at me. Thinks he’s beautiful. An entire Sidney Poitier.”
She looked across to the mirror on the door, at the vision of herself on the john. “Blech,” she said loudly.
Before she flushed, she examined her productions with earnest horror. “I guess his have ribbons on them,” she said as she flushed enthusiastically. She laughed as she washed her hands. She had a silent laugh. Her shoulders shook, but no noise came out.
She gave herself a particularly murderous look in the mirror. “Burn, baby, burn,” she said ominously. Laughing silently again, she watched herself laugh silently. Suddenly she thought of the ceiling of the bathroom gone, as in a dollhouse, and people looking in on her, in there wagging her head and laughing at herself in the mirror.
“Into the booby hatch, right?” she yelled up to the ceiling. The flat bathroom light looked back at her blankly.
She opened the door, let it crash behind her against the sink, and marched down the hall. There was something to look up, she remembered, something that had to do with the legal rights of, for instance, brothers, little brothers. She could hear Willie in his room, dancing wildly.
When she got to her room, there was a program on television that made her drop everything and watch. Gloria Steinem was interviewing some women prominent in the women’s liberation movement. One of the women was a lawyer.
Wow. The woman said that her father had been a lawyer and that he hadn’t wanted her to be a lawyer and that he had, in fact, taken her to court when she was seven years old for stealing a dime from her mother’s purse. The judge had told her father he was crazy to bring a kid into court like that and ought to have his head examined.
Emma nodded sagely. The woman said that it hadn’t changed the way her father was, even having a judge say something to him hadn’t done a damned thing. Emma nodded again, feeling friendly. She watched Gloria Steinem’s face as she talked and wished that she looked like her. There was one black woman on the panel. She was a producer in the theater. Emma dismissed her, after taking in her clothes, as not as serious as the other people. What the hell was the theater compared to the Law and other important things that got changes made in this world? What was the difference between the theater and singing and dancing on the levee? Fools. Running for Congress, now that meant something. They were talking about male mentality, about it causing wars. Wars? They ought to have a talk with Willie the Flit. He couldn’t even rouse a good battle, never mind a war. Emma thought they were all wrong. The trouble with men was that they were butterfly-headed, not dangerous, just silly; then, suddenly, she thought of her father. She had never thought of her father as a man before. She thought of him rather like one thinks of Boulder Dam. He was something to scale or go over in a barrel.
In thinking of her father, she changed the way she listened. Yes. Was this thing, this male chauvinism they were talking about, what made him treat her that way? Is that why he ignored what she said, squirmed around, and looked embarrassed? Although he looked embarrassed when he looked at Willie, too. But then, who wouldn’t look embarrassed looking at Willie? That was understandable, but what was embarrassing when she, Emma, asked a perfectly reasonable question? Why did their mother seem proud of them both in that ineffectual way, and their father seem to hate them both?
Jealous. They were saying that men were jealous and didn’t want competition. Jealous? Her father jealous of her?
Wouldn’t that be nice!
Wasn’t that the kind of thing he indicated last night when he said to her mother that he thought Emma would get a better grade on the bar exam than he did?
Okay. It was clear what to do then, just get a better grade on the bar exam than he did.
But who would get her in to take the bar exam? Eleven years old. Had anybody ever taken the exam at eleven? Here was something to look up tonight in his law books before he got home. If anybody ever had, even at twelve, then she would write a letter to the Bar Association. Naturally, it would help to have him back her up, but it was not impossible to do without him.
Getting up quickly, she went into her father’s study. She began to look through the law books, but was soon frustrated because, in truth, she did not know where to look. She expected to find a book which said something like “Requirements for Passing the State Bar Exam” on the cover, and when she didn’t, she wandered among the books like a dog lost in the snow, turning in circles and walking up and down, then turning again.
She sat down at the desk and went into a trance of pretending. She pretended to pick up the phone and rail at her secretary. “Where are those contracts? What do you mean, you don’t have them? Your baby lost one of its arms? What doe
s that mean, Miss Googler? Be more specific if you can. That is, which arm, and where did she lose it? In Bloomingdale’s? So? I don’t see that that’s any reason for not getting back from the hospital in time to type those contracts. Get them in here on my desk in fifteen minutes … What’s that? Each contract is fifty to one hundred pages long? So what, Miss Googler? You’ll never think like a man until you get rid of all this emotional nit-picking. Fifteen minutes. Is that clear?”
She pretended to bang the phone down, then leaned back in the swivel chair, on her face an expression of sublime, besotted joy.
Bored with that, she began to look through the papers on her father’s desk. One stack was topped by a note which said “Old Cases—Put in Dead File.” Obviously these were cases he had tried before becoming an assistant district attorney. Under the note was a small book with Bible-thin pages entitled Merck Manual.
Emma opened it up. It was a medical book. As she flipped through, reading parts of entries, she began to marvel at it. It seemed to be a book you could take into the jungles of Africa. You could stay for years curing people right and left without even being a doctor. It even had directions for operating. You’d have to take along a dictionary, of course, for half the words were gibberish.
Emma looked up menstruation, which was new to her, an addition to her life activities which she could not be said to have welcomed.
The index referred her to Menstruation, disorders of, and the first one on the list was Amenorrhea, under which it said Absence of menstruation.
“Wow!” Emma spoke loudly to the room. “How can I get that?”
She read on: Physiologic amenorrhea occurs before the menarche [Who is he? the King? the King of the Period?], after menopause [The pause that men take?], during pregnancy and lactation [I have so many lacks that now I have a severe case of lactation?].
She decided she’d better look up a few words, but first, it occurred to her to wonder why this book was on her father’s desk.
She rummaged around. It had been lying neatly on a stack of papers.
In this stack she found the legal pad on which her father had sketched out his brief. She began to read, picking through his handwriting as through a dark closet.
From what she could gather, her father had been the attorney for a man who had had an operation during which the surgeon had been forgetful. He had left inside the man’s stomach a large rubber glove, a pair of forceps, and a small sponge.
The man had, needless to say, become uncomfortable and had submitted to another operation at another hospital, wherein the lost objects were found and reported. The man had retained Emma’s father as attorney and was suing the first hospital and the doctor who had so carelessly misplaced his tools.
Emma felt slightly ill. She looked at the medical book and saw that there was a piece of paper marking a place. Turning to that place, she read what her father had evidently been reading, a passage entitled Obstruction, and felt even worse.
It became important to see if the man operated on was a black man. He was.
“Typical,” Emma said aloud. “If it had been a black woman, they would have left fourteen scalpels and a coat hanger inside.”
She put everything back into the stack neatly and leaned back into the chair.
Musing, she reviewed things she had heard her father say about doctors. Sifting through various comments, she realized that even though there had been a lot of grumbling, her father seemed to have a grudging respect. Even when the doctor was a woman?
Yes! She remembered now. A friend of her mother’s was a doctor. She had come to visit a couple of times. Yes! Her father had seemed afraid of this woman.
Emma felt a surge of greatness. Oh, to make her father afraid. What a feeling that would be. Not only to impress him but to have him actually afraid of her, Emma!
She sat up abruptly and grabbed the medical book. Deciding that there was something bothering her about the small mole on her left ear which had been there since birth, she looked up moles in the index. She found: Nevi (Moles, Birthmarks). Moles vary in color from yellow-brown to black. [Just like us darkies, thought Emma.] They may be small or large, flat or raised, smooth, hairy [hairy!] or verrucous [what?], and have a broad or pedunculated base. [I’m going to tell Willie he has a pedunculated base.]
Emma stopped reading. She went off into a dream. She was in medical school. The men made fun of her, but she persisted. She was a drudge about her studies, she made all A’s. She was then a resident. Finally, she was a doctor. She sat behind her white desk, in her white office, in a white lab coat. She pushed the buzzer for her secretary to send in her first patient, her very first patient. The door opened and in walked her father.
“Yes, what can I do for you?” (Emma, well-known and respected young New York doctor.)
“Doctor, it’s this enormous mole—”
“Ah, yes, no doubt verrucous”—nods head wisely—“and probably having a pedunculated base. Take off your clothes.”
“What in hell are you talking about?”
Too late, Emma realized that reality was presenting itself to her in the form of her real father standing in his real doorway to his real office after she, in his real swivel chair, had just said to him, “Take off your clothes,” like an ass.
“Hi, Dad.” She jumped up and started for the door like a runaway horse. Only casualness could save her now, casualness and quickness—the quick and the dead.
“Oh, no, you don’t! What did that mean?”
She wasn’t quick enough, so she wished she were dead.
“Sir?” All innocence now. Try to make him think he’s nuts. Last-ditch-stand time.
“What were you doing in here?”
“Sir?”
“What did you mean by saying to me, ‘Take off your clothes’?”
“Sir?”
A certain stillness in her father signified the change in him that she feared the most, the switch from father to prosecuting attorney.
His eyes became darker, flatter, colder. “You stated as I entered the room, stated clearly, ‘Take off your clothes,’ did you not?”
“I did.” Hopeless.
“To what purpose did you state this?”
“I was a doctor.” No hope except for truth.
“Make yourself clear.” Was there a hint, the lightest touch of a feather brush of fear in his eyes?
“I was pretending I was a doctor.”
His grip on her arm relaxed. He swung from district attorney back into father quicker than Wolf Man. He smiled.
“Daydreaming?”
“Yes.” What a baby thought, what a baby word, day-dreams; but it worked. It got her off the hook, and today the hook hurt more than most days.
“I’m thinking of becoming a doctor.” She said it flatly because she couldn’t help herself. Something inside her said it when she had planned to say nothing.
“Oh?” Touch of the feather again, the white feather? He had been moving toward his desk and now he looked back at her, a large, thickset black man with a weary face. “I forgot some papers,” he said, opening a drawer.
“Yes.” She said it too loudly. Even more loudly she said, “I’m going to be a doctor!” She looked him hard in the eyes and went out, slamming the door in his face.
On the way to her room, her knees shaking from delayed fear, she wondered at her own courage and wondered even more why the whole thing had taken courage and wondered even more than that at what in the world she was doing or saying. She didn’t want to be a doctor. Blech. Touch people. Ick.
She wanted to change. She opened the door to her room. She relaxed, seeing the familiar mess. She wanted to change, but there must be some other way.
The next night, Emma sat contemplating the infinite boredom of family dinners. Martha was serving Mrs. Sheridan the green beans. Mr. Sheridan was cutting his steak left-handed in that curious roundabout way of his. Willie was pushing his food around, trying to hide it under his knife, separating it to make his plate loo
k empty when, in reality, he had eaten nothing.
For a moment it seemed to Emma they were caught in a time tunnel. She saw them reeling through space, Willie pushing his food, her father cutting, her mother taking green beans, and herself looking sullenly at them, all of it happening endlessly, never going forward, never going back, just hurtling on forever through parting stars.
“No, thank you,” said Willie to Martha.
“Finish the beans on your plate,” said Mrs. Sheridan.
“Some dancer you’ll be,” said Martha. “If you don’t eat, you’ll be too weak to stand up, let alone dance.”
“He’s outgrown that, anyway,” said Mr. Sheridan, taking an enormous second helping of beans. “People outgrow things, don’t they? Isn’t that right, Willie?”
Willie kept pushing, looking down and saying nothing.
“How was it downtown today, dear?” Mrs. Sheridan hurried to cover Willie’s silence.
The talk droned on over Emma’s head as she thought about Willie. Rotten little weasel—his mother protecting him all the time. Doesn’t have the guts God gave a banana peel.
“Dad?” Willie looked at his father.
“Don’t interrupt,” said his father. He was getting to the best part of his story, the part where he won the case.
“Dad, I want to go away to summer stock.”
“You want to what?”
“Go away to summer stock.” Willie seemed to be holding his breath.
“What’s the kid talking about?” Mr. Sheridan turned helplessly to his wife.
“Summer theater. He wants to try being a dancer for one summer.” Mrs. Sheridan looked as if she’d swallowed a fork. “Dipsey knows a theater that’s doing Oliver this summer and they need a lot of children for that.”
“Dipsey? What’s that no-count got to do with this?”
“Dipsey’s a great dancer!” Willie said excitedly. “He’s not no-count. He works all the time. He’s teaching me and he says I’m good enough right now to work with him!”
“Out of the question.” Mr. Sheridan returned to his food.
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