The Doctor's Daughter

by Hilma Wolitzer

“Do you remember when we were ten, and I started blinking and my parents took me to that awful Dr. Pinch?”

  “Am I on This Is Your Life?”

  “Violet, wait. That bad feeling I’ve been having? I think it has to do with that, with my blinking, with my father and mother, and something I couldn’t stand to look at.”

  “I thought it was just a midlife crisis.”

  “Well, maybe that, too,” I conceded.

  “So what couldn’t you stand to look at?”

  “That’s the thing,” I said, feeling the air go out of my elation. “I don’t really know.”

  “Then why don’t you try finding out?” Violet said, gently for her.

  “You mean, go to see someone?” I asked, beset by a sudden wave of panic. “I’m liable to start blinking again.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a Dr. Pinch. How about that psychologist you saw after you lost your job?”

  “Andrea Stern,” I said, and I remembered sobbing in her office as she studied me with contemplative sympathy. I was surprised and pleased that Violet had brought her up, since she hadn’t found her for me. Lucy Seo, my friend at G&F, had recommended Dr. Stern as “literate and compassionate.” “I did like her,” I told Violet. “And at least that was short-term therapy.”

  “Alice, you quit.”

  “I suppose so. But why go digging up things that might not even be true? And I hate all that recovered-memory crap. Do you remember the travesty in that nursery school in California? What am I supposed to find out, anyway—that my father abused me?”

  Violet’s silence, fraught with everything unsaid—You brought this up, you know. Don’t you want to feel better? What are you afraid of?—was finally, mercifully, interrupted by the beep of my call waiting, and I said, “I have to take that. It might be Ev.”

  But this time it was Scott, returning my call. “Thanks for the message, Ma,” he said, “but I don’t think Dad was all that thrilled to see me the other day.”

  “Well, I guess he’s still a little mad at you.”

  “Way more than a little.”

  “Yes, maybe,” I conceded. “But you know that he loves you. He even made a point of telling me that, right after you came to see him. He just wants you to behave more responsibly. Me, too, of course,” I added. I realized that Ev and I were acting in concert, for once, even if he wasn’t actually aware of it, and even if we were working Scotty over like the proverbial good cop and bad cop.

  It seemed to be effective, though, because Scott sighed and said, with seeming sincerity, “I’m really trying.”

  “Good, dear. That’s all we ask of you.”

  That night, alone in bed again, I browsed through my new library of Leaves, the way I used to scour other literary magazines, on the lookout for new talent. That was a long time ago, when I was still a real editor at a real publishing house and profit mattered, but it wasn’t all that mattered. A couple of the stories were truly promising—Tom Roman had had a good ear and a responsive heart.

  I could hear Ev padding down the hallway to the kids’ bathroom, brushing his teeth, flushing the toilet. He’d come home late; his secretary had called during the afternoon to say he wouldn’t be here in time for dinner, that he’d get something downtown. I’d eaten my dinner alone, choosing undemanding nursery foods—poached eggs on buttered toast—with the TV on for company. And now I was listening like a nocturnal animal for further sounds from his end of the apartment. But I didn’t hear anything else, and soon the bar of light under my door went out.

  Scott’s narrow single bed had to be confining for Ev; he was such a turbulent, sprawling sleeper. I squeezed my eyes shut and sent him a telepathic message, the way Violet and I used to beam messages to each other over the rooftops of Riverdale, when we were seven or eight and convinced that we had special powers of communication. Ev, I signaled, with fierce concentration, come back to bed. Come back to me. I lay very still in the waiting silence, but of course nothing happened. So I shut off my light, too, and tried to prepare myself for sleep.

  And then the phone rang, with that jarring shrillness it always seems to have late at night. I glanced at the clock—it was almost midnight—before I grabbed the receiver. “Hello,” I said, and I could hear Ev breathing into the extension in the boys’ bedroom. A man said, “Alice?” and Ev abruptly hung up.

  “Who is this?” I demanded, identifying the voice on the phone in the same instant. “Michael?” Had the message I’d tried to send to Ev gone that far astray? I switched on the lamp. “What’s the matter?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “It’s late, isn’t it? Did I wake you up?” I could hear background noises now: other voices; music; laughter in little bursts, like gunfire. He was probably in a bar, but he sounded sober, in every sense of the word.

  “No, it’s all right, I was reading. Are you okay?” I realized that I had slid down under the covers with the phone, and I was whispering, the way I did when I was a teenager and a boy called.

  “Yes. No.” He gave a dry little laugh. “I guess I’m having some sort of a crisis.”

  “With the writing, you mean?”

  “Yes. It seems to have stopped.”

  I heard Ev’s footsteps again, going past my door this time, heading for the kitchen. The water ran and then stopped with its customary little shriek. “You’ve been really prolific,” I said into the phone. “This might only be a normal pause, you know, to catch your breath, collect your thoughts.”

  “You think?”

  “I do, Michael,” I said. “I really do.”

  Ev went by once more right then, in the other direction. Had he hesitated for just a moment? I couldn’t be sure, and soon I heard the door to the boys’ room close.

  “Maybe,” Michael said, doubtfully.

  “Some people, some writers, have a fear of closure,” I told him, thinking, with a start, fear of disclosure. When he didn’t respond, I said, “Do you know how the book ends? Have you done an outline?” These were questions I usually asked much earlier in a project, but the pages had been coming steadily, so I’d simply assumed his answers—that he did know the whole story, and that a formal outline would have been stultifying.

  “No outline,” he said. “And I thought I knew the ending, but I’m not so sure anymore.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “That happens.” I felt oddly like an actual doctor as I rummaged in my head for something else to say, something professional and practical. I remembered the chirpy advice given in writing manuals for overcoming a block, everything from not writing a word to forcing yourself to work for at least one hour every day. “Listen, Michael,” I said. “Writing is like sleeping or breathing, those things you do naturally, and you’re a natural writer. But if you fixate on it, it might become harder and harder to do. You know, the way you get insomnia when you try to sleep, or start to hyperventilate when you think about your breathing.” I was scrambling now, saying anything that came to mind.

  “So you think I shouldn’t try to go on?”

  Was that what I’d said? “No. No, I just think you shouldn’t become too anxious about it.” Oh, great. Relax, why don’t you, just breathe normally, go to sleep this minute, stop blinking. “But if you want to talk it over, or try things out on me, I’m here.”

  “That’s good to know. I probably will want to. Soon. But I’ll let you go to bed now. Sweet dreams, Alice.”

  “You, too,” I said, although he seemed to be hours away from sleeping.

  Of course, I couldn’t fall asleep after that, either. I wondered why I’d tiptoed so carefully around Michael’s problem, why I wasn’t more direct. Hadn’t I learned anything from Violet? I might have asked him to tell me the ending he’d planned, and why he wasn’t sure about it anymore. Or I could have simply asked what he was afraid of.

  And why hadn’t I apologized to Ev? I knew that his feelings were terribly hurt. I’d accused him of being a bad father and reminded him of being a failed writer, all in one argument. But he’d
attacked me, too, blaming me for having had a pampered childhood, and he hardly ever apologized for anything. He should have discerned, somehow, that I was struggling with something else, that peculiar burden I couldn’t seem to name or set aside.

  The room was dark—I had turned off my lamp again—but the silhouettes of our bedroom furniture were becoming visible, that known landscape I always gazed at just before sleep. Ev was probably out cold by now; he was able to escape that way no matter how troubled he was. I took his pillow and punched it a few times before clutching it to my breast, trying to smother whatever was still smoldering there.

  Suzy must have been entwined in sleep with her lover; it gave me a pang of wistful pleasure to imagine them. And down in Philadelphia, Jeremy and Celia were surely sleeping, too, the music in their heads stilled for the night. Scotty, I hoped, with a rush of meanness, was tossing and turning in Alphabet City.

  I thought of my father in his crib at the home, with light and voices filtering in from the nurses’ station. Was he restored to his former, sentient self in his dreams? Then, languorously, I conjured up my mother, reading to me in bed. But it wasn’t a children’s story she read; it was her poem in Leaves, the one in which “the blade cuts through that maiden blush / to the bloodless radish heart.”

  13

  Help was on the way or, more accurately, I was on my way to getting help. Andrea Stern had called back to say that indeed she remembered me, as well as her offer to resume treatment whenever I was ready. The only problem was that she was going to be away for all of August, the month New Yorkers had better not be in emotional crisis. She could fit me in for one session before she left, though, giving us a chance to reconnect; and then, in September, we’d be able to pick up where we had left off. Or she could try to find someone else for me who’d be more available.

  It was like the condition set before the hero in a fairy tale: you may have only one session, one wish. Dr. Stern’s voice was instantly recognizable, even after all this time, like an old friend’s from school or from work. I thought of her brownstone office with its two worn leather chairs, where we sat facing each other at a civil distance, and the way the blinds were slanted at the tall windows to let in just enough light, and I made an appointment to see her the following Wednesday at noon.

  Wednesday turned out to be the kind of day we so rarely had that summer, without either oppressive heat or drowning rains. The office was in the 60s on the West Side, and I decided to walk there, going through Central Park at 66th Street. Everything was green and abundant, fulfilling the promise of that April morning when my sense of something wrong had begun. I’d given myself lots of time to get to Dr. Stern’s, and to think about what I was going to say once I got there.

  As I walked along, I went over the issues that concerned me, in chronological order, beginning with that sensation behind my breastbone and ending with my estrangement from Ev. My father’s voice might have been in my head, warning, as he so often had, “Why don’t you think before you speak, Alice.” I was sure that Violet would have objected to my careful preparations for therapy. Free association, she’d often told me, was the best way to get to the crux of things. But I felt that my father was right, for once. I’d been guilty too often in the past of blurting out whatever was on my mind. That’s what had escalated the recent hostilities between Ev and me, and I was afraid of what might fly out of my mouth at Dr. Stern’s if I didn’t have a good idea first of what I wanted to say.

  It was the middle of a workday, but the park was crowded with people who had abandoned their offices and shops to collapse on the fragrant grass for an alfresco lunch, or to run or bicycle on the paths. Lovers, families, friends. For a while I followed a group of day campers and their counselors on a nature hike, feeling as if I had been away for a long time, but was back now in the current of life. The children, in green camp T-shirts, walked in orderly pairs, holding hands, while their counselors acted as sheepdogs, herding them along. Real dogs ran about the lawns off their leashes, against the law, but true to their own nature.

  I crossed the path to lean against a tree and scribble something in my notebook about the scene and about the conflict between rules and desire. Then I skipped a few pages and started to write down the list of concerns I was bringing to Dr. Stern. Was I becoming too compulsive? But it was only going to be a fifty-minute hour, and I wanted to be sure to raise the things that bothered me the most. I had to mention the business of Scott and the paperweight because that was so closely related to my troubles with Ev. But I would feel as if I were playing favorites if I left the other children out, especially Suzy and her new love affair. And I probably had to fill Dr. Stern in briefly on the freelance work I was doing, and, of course, there was my father’s continuing deterioration.

  In the middle of the park I veered north for a while, so I could walk alongside the lake where my mother and I used to feed the ducks and geese. Sometimes, after school, instead of boarding the bus, I would wait near the reception desk inside the main entrance for her to fetch me, and we would take a taxi to Rumpelmayer’s for ice cream or hot chocolate before walking into the park. Later, we might go shopping or to the Met, and then up to Mount Sinai Hospital to meet my father, who would drive us home in his Lincoln. Parksie or Miss Snow usually gave me paper and some colored pencils to draw with in the back of the car, and I chose safe little suburban scenes from memory—house, trees, flowers, child— rather than the hard-edged city landscape I glimpsed as it raced by the windows.

  It may have been cloudy or chilly on a few of those excursions, but memory is a benevolent editor; all I could envision now were golden afternoons like this one, under a flawless blue sky. Occasionally my mother took Violet along, too, but my sharpest recollections were of just the two of us, strolling hand in hand in the park, like the little day campers I’d just followed.

  I sat down on a bench—maybe the same bench where my mother and I had once sat—and swigged some water, while new generations of birds pecked around my feet, looking for the bread crumbs I hadn’t brought. I opened my notebook again and pondered mentioning my “writing” to Dr. Stern. It was still such a tentative, self-conscious endeavor, nothing more than dabbling, really, and I couldn’t bring it up without filling her in about my time at Iowa, the competition with Ev, and our forsaken ambition.

  I remembered Phil Santo saying that all experience is useful to a writer—a mild consolation then for every painful or pointless act I’d ever committed—and I could easily imagine Violet’s paraphrase about an analysand. But my efforts weren’t significant in the context of my crowded life, and the little bit of time I had to convey it, so I didn’t add writing and not writing to my list.

  I had cried my eyes out during the few previous sessions I’d had with Andrea Stern, with the loss of my job as the ostensible focus of my misery. But she’d suggested that there were probably other, buried grievances causing my tears, and that it was important to try to uncover them. That, of course, was when I balked, when I left. Now I was determined not to waste my time and money by crying that way again, or by refusing to face up to things. Yet another reason to be prepared. There wasn’t anything or anyone on my list, even Ev, I couldn’t talk about now without breaking down.

  When I was almost out of the park, I became aware of a couple lying on the lawn to my left, kissing and writhing with passion. The man straddled the woman, who was wearing a hiked-up sundress. The sun highlighted them with an almost theatrical brilliance. It was such a deliberately public act—they hadn’t even bothered to retreat behind a nearby stand of trees—but I felt unaccountably like a trespasser. Everything around them seemed to have gone still and the grass was too green, the sky almost piercingly blue. The whole scene had the surreal, spooky quality of a dreamscape, something in a painting by Magritte or Dalí.

  I turned away abruptly and began to run. And I kept on running until I was out of the park, breathing hard and with my heart drumming. By the time I came to 68th and Amsterdam, close to Dr. S
tern’s office, my pulse had slowed, and everything around me was reassuringly ordinary again: buildings, traffic, strangers going about their business. It was as if I’d just witnessed a crime I had no intention of reporting.

  I rang the doorbell at the brownstone, and after a long beat I was buzzed in. Another patient, a woman about my own age, left as soon as I entered. We were like the husband and wife in a Swiss weather clock, and we didn’t make eye contact as our bodies skimmed past each other. I caught a whiff of a citrusy scent. In the waiting room, I saw the Time magazine she must have been reading before she was called in to her session. It was on the coffee table in front of the sofa, set apart from the neat, fanned display of other periodicals, and it was open to an article on the occupation of Iraq.

  What could I tell about that unknown woman from these meager clues? That she’d chosen to look at Time over ARTnews or People. A middlebrow, then, with an interest in the larger world, or apprehension about it. And a sentimentalist, who clung to the season with that summery cologne. I sniffed my own arm, which smelled a little like laundry starch and bread. What did that say about me? Out-of-season hausfrau. My hand came up and twirled a strand of hair, and I sniffed at that, too.

  Dr. Stern had come quietly to the doorway, and when she said my name I jumped up, poking and patting my hair back into place. She was younger than I remembered, only thirty-eight or forty, and shorter, too. If I wasn’t exactly old enough to be her mother, I might have once been her babysitter. I had a moment of misgiving as I went past her into the office and took my assigned seat.

  The room, at least, was the same. Grass cloth on the walls, the green sofa in the background, that Hockney print of irises, instead of the typical swimming pool. As soon as we were facing each other again, I thought of my last visit here, that awful, abject weeping, and of being released, finally, like a homesick child let out of school. I thought, too, of Portnoy and his long complaint. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Dr. Stern was looking at me, waiting, and I felt inexplicably shy. “I’m not sure I know how to do this,” I said.