The Doctor's Daughter

by Hilma Wolitzer

  As often as not lately, I ate directly from take-out cartons, sometimes standing at the kitchen counter, and I didn’t usually even go out to pick stuff up anymore; I had it delivered from one or another of the million ethnic places in the neighborhood: a noodle dish or something with chicken or tofu—they all tasted pretty much the same after a while—topped by an unpeelable complimentary orange or a packet of fortune cookies. Your honesty will be its own reward. Yeah. The winds of opportunity sew the seeds of success. Oh, the mysterious East Side!

  So many people are on their own in the city. That’s why those bicyclists with plastic bags hanging from their handlebars are always crisscrossing the streets in the paths of taxis and pedestrians. I felt exposed in my aloneness every time the doorman announced over the intercom that I had a food delivery, and by the obviously modest size of my order. Dinner for one. I could swear that my skin was starting to smell like soy sauce, and every few days I threw out another refrigerated carton of petrified rice, a congealed version of what’s thrown at the newly married for luck.

  At a bistro on Third Avenue, Suzy observed that I looked a little drawn, before she launched into a kind of joyous operetta about George and herself while she slid the red Bakelite bracelet up and down her arm. Somehow she also managed to finish everything on her plate. Then we went off to Bloomingdale’s.

  There was a white sale in progress, and as soon as I saw the sign at the head of the escalator, I was reminded of my dream. I thought of telling Suzy about it, but I was afraid its hidden meaning might turn out be too intimate to share with her. Maybe Violet’s sexual metaphors were as common as rice, and maybe Freud was mistaken when he maintained, as Violet once informed me, that not all dream material was necessarily sexual. It was imperative not to lose my real place in my children’s lives by trying to become their friend.

  While I was thinking all of that, Suzy worked her way determinedly along the sales racks, riffling through packaged sheets and pillowcases as if she were looking for something she’d misplaced. Even from a few feet behind her, I could hear her murmured exclamations about the superiority of one shade of parchment white over another, or about thread counts that seemed to reach into infinity.

  When Ev and I first lived together, in Iowa City, our bed linens were a colorful assortment from our hastily merged households. His dark percales were permanently scented by a floral fabric softener, yet a stray sock or two often clung to them with static tenacity. I’d usually wake up with a rash on my cheeks, which might have come from the marathon kissing we did, or an allergy to the fabric softener. Or maybe we had a dangerously low thread count. But the only thing that mattered then was how recklessly we threw ourselves down onto those scruffy, mismatched sheets for love or sleep. They could have been clouds or cacti for all we noticed.

  “So, what do you think, Mom?” Suzy asked. “Manila or alabaster? Lauren or Charisma?”

  I grabbed her arm. “Listen,” I demanded. “You’re still happy, aren’t you?”

  Suzy looked nervously around us. “Of course I am!” she exclaimed. “What’s the matter with you? Haven’t you been listening to me?”

  I glanced around then, too, releasing her arm. I was embarrassing my children, one by one, in public places. “Of course I have,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure, that’s all. Lauren. Manila.”

  The following Wednesday I told Dr. Stern that I hadn’t had the dream again. “I’m worn out from thinking about it,” I said. “And yet I feel remiss, as if I haven’t completed an important homework assignment.” Afterward, I started to walk home through Central Park again, despite my lingering lassitude, and the fact that I wasn’t dressed for the sudden, unseasonable chill. Leaves blew around my feet, and the birds near the reservoir pecked disconsolately or huddled together in their inflated feathers.

  This walk was the starting point of the resolution I’d made that morning to be more active and hopeful. I had been lying around the apartment too much—brooding about everything, sleeping in sudden, uneasy little installments, and not getting enough exercise. I planned to begin eating healthier foods, too, and maybe even join a gym. On the main floor of Bloomingdale’s the other day, Suzy had urged me to have a makeover, or at least buy a new lipstick, and I’d reluctantly agreed. But when the beauty consultant approached, wearing a white lab coat and a dazzling professional smile, I had a moment of panic and headed for the doors.

  The park wasn’t crowded this time, maybe because of the unsettled weather. There were several empty benches along the water, and I sat down on one of them to rest for a few minutes. I must have fallen asleep instantly, my brand-new talent, and I woke to something stinging my face. I couldn’t have been out very long; I was much too guarded to take a real nap in the middle of the park. But I seemed to have slept into winter.

  It was snow that was stinging my face—pelting it, really—in a deluge of colossal flakes flying out of a thick sallow sky. There were already sugary little piles on my lap and on my open-toed shoes. I glanced at my watch; I hadn’t been asleep for more than ten minutes or so. I could hear people shouting to one another in the distance, and a dog barking raucously somewhere. This was an event, a phenomenon, a freak snowfall on an ordinary October afternoon.

  I stood and brushed myself off, but new flakes kept coming swiftly from every angle, onto my bare head and my eyelashes. I had to blink them away. Everything—trees, benches, birds—appeared blurred, and it was the most surreal sensation, like being trapped inside a snow globe shaken by a hyperactive child. How could I be sure I wasn’t just dreaming again?

  But when I resumed walking, the true dream began to surface, unbidden, behind my eyes. I was at my father’s office door once more, demanding, begging to be let in. The book was securely in my arms, and I heard the music and those voices—still tinny and unclear. Then I was around the corner at that other door, the one that gave too readily at my touch, and there was that great blaze of whiteness, a nothingness that was something, like the blinding snow of an unexpected storm. Miss Snow.

  24

  I turned and headed in the other direction, back toward Andrea Stern’s, feeling slightly disoriented, and skidding and slipping in my ridiculous shoes. Before I was halfway there, the bizarre little storm abruptly ended. Only a few more feathery flakes drifted down, and I glimpsed the sun through that dense sky, like the first bit of fruit uncovered in a cup of yogurt.

  It seemed to bring me to my senses. What had I been thinking? The patient right after me would still be in the office, spilling out her story, and given all the human misery and mystery around, the rest of Dr. Stern’s schedule was probably filled, too.

  When I got home, I called and left a message on her machine, saying that I needed to talk to her, it was urgent. Then I sat on the bed with my hands in my lap and waited for her to call me back. The pride I’d taken that summer in my independence, in my ability to cope with anything, fell easily before the fear of dealing with this alone. But I couldn’t stop my goose-stepping thoughts and the panoply of pictures going by in my head.

  I knew that I wasn’t ever going to be certain of what I’d seen more than forty years ago in my father’s office. Andrea Stern wasn’t a magician; she couldn’t just pluck an irrefutable memory from my brain, like a living dove from her sleeve. Some events are forever lost, except for the evidence of souvenirs—the outing at the beach with Tom and Emily Roman, for instance—or else skewed into fantasy.

  Children are famous for that, for recalling what they’d only imagined and holding on to it as some sacred truth. When Jeremy was three or four, he told me he remembered being in my belly, how dark it was, and how he had to grab at bits of food that went by after I ate them. Suzy once swore that she was a flower girl at Ev’s and my wedding, which struck me as an intuitive lie, since she had been there, all right, but still on the inside. And then there’s the whole Rashomon of family argument, with all those competing, sworn testimonies.

  I was only ten years old on that fateful day, and
a relatively protected, innocent ten, except for my exposure to Violet, who always seemed to know so many more things than I did. I was a cherished child who fed gourmet bread crumbs to the birds in the park, and still half believed it was possible to find your way back home from anywhere, following a path of similar, carefully strewn crumbs.

  As I sat there waiting for the phone to ring, I kept seeing myself rapping politely on one door to my father’s consultation room, before going to the other one and turning the knob. No one was around, none of the usual nurses or secretaries, not even Parksie or Miss Snow. I didn’t pound with my fist and I didn’t call out, except in the dream, where I’d attempted to be a hero. I never ran down to the street, either, and the door didn’t fall off its hinges; it just opened.

  She was sprawled across his desk, her thighs parted by his trousered leg. He could have been sawing her in half with it. Where was his silver clock, the onyx inkstand, the photograph of my mother and me? I don’t think there was ever any music; I probably invented that part to cover up the sounds I must have heard: the farmyard grunts, the swish of serge against nylon. Just as I began blinking to hide everything unbearable to see.

  By the time the phone rang, I’d replayed those moments so many times, they became almost ordinary, the way appalling images on the news sometimes do. Dr. Stern was between appointments; we could speak for only about ten minutes, but she’d had a cancellation for the next afternoon at four, if I’d like to come in. I said that I would and then I told her as quickly as I could what had happened: sleep, storm, revelation. Ten minutes, it was like a meter running.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Shocked,” I said. “In shock. As if I’ve lost a lot of blood. How could I have forgotten something like that? And how can I be sure it’s even true?”

  “You can’t be,” she said. “You just have to trust yourself, and the process of remembering.”

  “I don’t know that I do,” I murmured. Maybe I was the ultimate unreliable narrator.

  “Why do you think you were there alone?” Dr. Stern asked.

  “That’s a good question,” I said. “But I can only guess at the answer. I imagine it was the end of the workday, with the typewriters covered and the patients all gone. And my mother may have gone somewhere, too, for a few minutes, just around the corner or to the gift shop to get something. She might have put me on the elevator first.”

  “Would she do that?”

  “Maybe. She struggled against being overprotective. There would have been at least a few other people, and an elevator operator who knew us, and where I should get off.” I paused. “But my father couldn’t have been expecting us, could he? It must have been a surprise visit. Some surprise.”

  “Yes,” Dr. Stern said, “I’ll bet it was. But I’m going to have to go now. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “There’s more,” I said, that old delaying tactic, the one I’d used so often as a child to put off bedtime. “I have to tell you something,” I’d say to my mother, after the last kiss, one more sip of water, the final words of the story she’d been reading to me. And I’d win her back for a few extra minutes, a dozen extra kisses. But there really was more now; I could feel it crowding out that tired scene at my father’s office door. I had to remind myself that I was an adult, someone who could take no for an answer and postpone gratification, or at least pretend to. “But it can wait until tomorrow,” I said, and we hung up.

  I said, “I have to tell you something,” and my mother turned in the doorway to face me. Her dark hair was haloed by the light in the hallway, and I could barely make out her features.

  My father was waiting for her downstairs—I could hear dance music, the plaintive growl of horns, a throbbing bass. Her voice was mild, though, and only slightly impatient. “What is it now, Alice?”

  In the past I’d groped for stories to keep her there: Violet had been mean to me at lunch, the art teacher liked my red sweater, we’d learned four new vocabulary words and the principal exports of Bolivia. I was too old for bedtime stories by then, so we’d only had our usual little end-of-the-day chat, and I’d already expended all of my inconsequential daily news.

  The other thing, the extraordinary thing I had seen or believed I’d seen in that other doorway, had been flickering on and off in my mind for weeks, like a lightbulb that needed tightening. While we ate dinner somewhere the evening it happened, and on the ride home. And before that, right after I left my father’s doorway and ran down the corridor to the patients’ restroom, where I peed and washed my cold hands and burning face, and stared into my eyes in the mirror to see what might still be reflected in them. Someone knocked on the door after a while, and I held my breath, waiting, until there was more knocking and I heard my mother call, “Are you in there, Alice?”

  I wasn’t supposed to use public toilets without her permission—it had something to do with safety and hygiene—but she hadn’t been around to be consulted. “Can’t I ever have any privacy?” I barked, and I heard her walk away.

  By the time I came out, my mother was in my father’s private restroom, “fixing her face,” as he called it, and he was sitting a few feet away at his desk, wearing his pristine lab coat and writing into a patient’s folder. Everything was in place: the clock, the photograph, the inkstand, the plaster models of the kidneys and the lungs. Only Miss Snow was missing. As I watched he dipped his pen into the inkwell and wrote something inside the folder.

  “Well, look who’s here,” he said, putting his pen down, and beckoning to me.

  Can you dream when you’re awake? I went to him, and he kissed the part in my hair and retied the ribbon that tamed it into a ponytail. He always pulled it tighter than my mother did.

  I said, “I have to tell you something,” and my mother said, “What is it now, Alice?” It was weeks or even months later. Dr. Pinch was already in the picture. My mother’s hand was on my bedroom doorknob, the music was pulling her away. And I said, “Daddy was kissing Miss Snow on his desk.” Did I actually say those words? The part about the desk would be critical, because otherwise I could have been mistaken. He might have just been taking a speck from her eye, or examining her throat, if they were standing up.

  Somehow I’d turned the feral act I’d witnessed into kissing, smooching, something playful and tender. Whenever I revisited that moment, his mouth was buried in her neck, like a vampire’s. They were struggling fiercely against each other, and she appeared to be losing the battle.

  My mother’s face was still in shadow, but I could see the shift in her expression. More of the whites of her eyes were showing, and there may have been a glint of her teeth. “What are you talking about?” she said.

  “Come lie down with me,” I said, whimpered, really.

  But she didn’t come. Her hand was on the door frame, keeping her there, blocking even more of the light. The music went on and on. “Alice, is this a story you’re telling me?” That was one of our euphemisms for lying. Exaggerating was another, and so was stretching the imagination.

  She’d given me an easy way out. “April fool!” I could have cried, if it were April 1. Or, “I was only kidding.” I didn’t say any of that, though. I was rolling downhill; there was no way to stop. “No!” I said. “Daddy was kissing her neck, and he was holding her down.”

  It felt like a lie as I said it, but it had the impact of the truth. “Go to sleep right now,” my mother said, and she closed the door. The ordinary, scary darkness was a blessing of sorts. It let me fall asleep quickly, just as my mother had commanded me to do.

  “So,” I said to Dr. Stern. “That’s everything, I think.” She waited, watching me. “I don’t feel any better,” I said, and I laughed.

  “Did you expect to?” she said.

  “Not really. Violet always prepares me for the worst, you know. She said . . . what did she say, again? Oh, yes, that you aren’t a trauma doctor.”

  We sat in silence for a few seconds and then she said, “Do you think you stoppe
d blinking after you told your mother?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Probably. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? I didn’t have to look at that scene in my head anymore, because I’d passed it on to her.”

  “And were you relieved?”

  “I suppose so. This is all conjecture, though, isn’t it?” Or hocus-pocus, I was thinking. I had expected to feel better, and I felt worse, really anxious, and the pressure in my chest had become urgent.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking,” Dr. Stern said.

  “That you’re a fake,” I blurted. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be, it’s fine. You’re disappointed in me.”

  “We got this far,” I said. “I mean, we dug all this crap up, and what good is it? Now I know that I finked out my father and hurt my mother.” I’d done more than that; I had broken her heart, the very thing I had once sworn that I would never do. “She must have been furious with me.”

  “You were a child,” she said. “Her child. Do you really think she was angry with you?”

  “Yes, at least for that moment, but she knew enough not to kill the messenger. So she killed something else instead.”

  “What?” Andrea Stern asked. She was leaning forward slightly in her chair.

  “Her ambition,” I said. “Whatever desire she’d had to become a known poet.”

  “I thought your father did that,” she said.

  “Not single-handedly,” I told her, and myself. “We were in it together.”

  “Why would you do such a thing?” she asked.

  I could only guess. “Because I wanted to be the writer in the family?” I saw myself hammering away at the keys of my silver Olivetti. My father once stopped outside my room and said, “Christ, Alice, you’re going to break that thing.”

  “You know, the queen is dead, long live the queen. Or maybe it was just the old Oedipal triangle. He was the first man in my life, right? I don’t know, you tell me.”