I looked at my nipples in amazement. I hadn’t thought of them like this before, as deep and important as eyes. They had always just been decoration.
I didn’t know what to do or who to call. I couldn’t quite imagine going to the emergency room and explaining to the doctor about my possible Immaculate Conception.
I walked into the bedroom and did the only thing I could think of, I picked up the phone and dialed the number of my ex-shrink. Of course she didn’t answer, but as soon as I heard her voice on her answering machine, I started to cry. I could barely speak. “This is Rebekah Kettle. I’m breast-feeding,” I said. “I mean, I think I’m lactating. I don’t know why this is happening. Maybe it’s because of the abortion I had when I was almost thirteen, but why would I just start lactating now?”
I guess this news flash was too juicy for her to ignore, because she picked up the phone. “You’re lactating?” she asked. I didn’t say anything. “Why do you think you’re suddenly lactating?” I stayed silent. Obviously, I had no idea or I wouldn’t have called her. Then I remembered the dream I had the night before. I was in a bookstore looking for a book on Cervantes. I was desperate to read Cervantes because I was going to be meeting him. Cervantes had written me a letter telling me that I would be the most creative person he knew if I wasn’t so hysterical. I told my ex-shrink the dream.
“The word ‘Cervantes’ is very close to the word ‘cervix,’ ” she said. “And ‘hysteria’ and ‘hysterectomy’ come from the Greek word ‘hystera,’ which means ‘womb.’ If you think about it, the womb is the center of creation. It’s where the ultimate creativity or creation occurs, right? Having a baby is the ultimate creation. A baby enters the world through the cervix. In your dream, your cervix was the one who wrote you the letter.”
I pictured my cervix lying on a white sand beach in sunny Hawaii, and writing me a postcard. Aloha, wish you were here.
Meanwhile, I could now fulfill my lifelong goal of being an Elizabethan wet nurse.
“Have you ever heard of someone having an hysterical pregnancy? ” my shrink asked.
“Just Queen Isabella of Spain,” I said. I wished more than anything I hadn’t called her. Soon I would be shopping for a maternity bra with Ivy Vohl.
“You know, I’m not a medical doctor, Rebekah, but I think you’re producing milk to feed the child you lost. I think you’re having an hysterical pregnancy to replace the baby. The mind is a very powerful thing.”
When she said the words “producing milk,” I almost threw up.
“That’s crazy,” I said.
“I know you’re not going to want to, but I think you should go to a doctor,” she said. I hated doctors and actually never went to one without discussing it with her first for several sessions.
“I wish I could go to Doc Baker,” I said.
“Yes,” she said sincerely. “Wouldn’t that be nice? Many of my patients would love to go to Doc Baker and be driven home by Pa in a horse-drawn wagon. I think you should resume treatment. We have to unravel this.”
I told her I would think about it and got off the phone, feeling strangely better. I remembered the name of the psychic kinesthesiologist, Anita Stefano, who the pregnant woman in the elevator had told me about. I got the number from information and called.
Anita Stefano answered in her heavy Spanish accent, and we made an appointment for the next day. She told me not to eat or drink anything on the day of the appointment. “Do you have metal fillings?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Good. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I didn’t tell her about the lactating.
Then I went out to get dinner because I was suddenly starving. I put on my bra, tucking little wads of toilet paper in the cups, put on the biggest sweater I could find, and headed toward the East Village. My cell phone rang. It was my father asking if I wanted to have dinner with him. We hadn’t had dinner together in a long time. For a second I wondered if my shrink had called him about my medical problem, and then I wondered if the bank had called him about the check for twenty-two thousand.
“Sure,” I said. Then I felt relieved that he had called. Maybe when he saw me he would know right away that something was physically wrong, and he would know what to do about it. He could give me one of those little computerized referral slips, even though I didn’t have insurance. “Great timing. I was just about to eat.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m uptown at the office and I’ll jump on the subway. I can meet you downtown in an hour. How does Mc-Bell’s sound?”
“McBell’s closed eight years ago,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, trying to register that he would never again have a beer at McBell’s. “Hell, what’s there now?” He sounded wounded.
“Some kind of fast-food wrap place,” I said.
“I don’t like rap music,” he said.
“Not the music. A wrap, like the food.”
“What’s a wrap?”
He actually had a point there. “I’m not sure, I think it’s some kind of thing from California with avocado in it.”
“Oh yes, pita bread.”
“Maybe I should come uptown. Or we could meet in the middle,” I said, feeling hopeful. My father really came to life at a place like Joe Allen. I loved when he whispered something like, Don’t turn around now, but I believe that’s Barbara Walters. My father hadn’t wanted to spend this much time with me since I was twelve.
“No, I feel like coming downtown to the old Village. How about the Second Avenue Deli?” he asked.
“That closed too,” I said.
“How about a Polish joint? Teresa’s?” he asked, defeatedly.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll see you there in half an hour.”
“Great, I’m on Eighty-sixth Street, I’m just going to jump on the subway right now. The number 6.”
As I talked to him I started to walk slowly up St. Marks’s toward Second Avenue. That’s when I saw him. He was wearing his hopeless green sports jacket. He was standing in front of a little kiosk where an African man sold giant batiked pants with animal prints on them, mostly elephants and giraffes. He was talking on a cell phone.
“Where did you say you were, Dad?” I asked.
“I’m on Eighty-sixth Street and Lex, right at the subway stop,” he said. “A half hour should do it.”
“Oh, okay, bye,” I said. And I hung up. I must have been wrong, I thought. There were plenty of people with gray hair and green jackets, carrying an old-fashioned doctor’s bag. I walked toward the man who looked like my father, and then I saw that it actually was my father.
“Hi, Dad,” I said.
“Oh, uh, hi,” he said.
We just stood there staring at each other. It was so awkward, that for a moment I considered trying to pretend I wasn’t me, just someone who looked like me, but I had already called him Dad.
“I guess you caught me lying to you,” he said.
“I guess so.”
I couldn’t believe this was happening. And I couldn’t imagine why he had lied to me. This made my writing the check for a very good reason seem like nothing compared to his lying to me for no reason whatsoever.
I couldn’t think of any reason for my father to be standing there at that moment. I thought it was unlikely that he had come to the Village to buy a pair of African elephant pants. I couldn’t imagine what my father was doing that he had to lie about.
Maybe he had a girlfriend, or maybe he was seeing a hooker, or maybe he was pursuing some secret dream and was taking improv classes at HB Studios or something. Maybe he was going to join an improv group and give up being a doctor and he thought I’d try to discourage him. I thought of Arthur Weeman’s film, Literary Suicide, in which a popular author of spy novels writes a book about a gay recluse living in North Dakota. There’s a scene in which his daughter tries to convince him to stop writing something that will never sell.
Or maybe he had Alzheimer’s. He hadn’t remembered that McBell�
��s was closed even though I had told him that before. Maybe he really did think he was on Eighty-sixth Street and Lexington.
Somehow the fact that I was lactating put this in perspective. I was calm and docile as a cow. I was strong and solid, like an old tree leaking sap. I felt motherly.
He looked nervous and sheepish. “I lied to you, because I just needed some time to make a few phone calls.”
Phone calls?
I shrugged it off. “Oh, okay,” I said. I smiled a little too brightly at him. It was strangely freeing. He was the one who had lied to me. I, for once, wasn’t the one who had lied to him. This one incident, this one bizarre lie he had committed, wiped out every bad thing I had ever done. The thousands of lies I had told, the money I had stolen from his wallet, the semester of college he paid for in which I didn’t attend a single class, the constant forgeries of his name on his prescription pads. The twenty-two thousand dollars I had just spent from his checking account at the Arthur Weeman sale.
“So, I’ll see you in half an hour,” I said, releasing him the way he had once let me release a fish, as I stood crying in waders up to my chest.
“Come on, let’s go to Teresa’s now,” he said, stammering a little, glancing at his watch. I knew we would never speak of his lie again.
“No, Dad, that’s okay. You do what you have to do, and I’ll see you in half an hour.”
I turned and walked away, leaving him standing there in a miserable stupor. I heard him call a feeble “Toots” but I just kept going. Fathers were like men. You couldn’t spend your whole life trying to figure them out. Although it did occur to me to crouch behind a car and follow him, but I resisted.
I also resisted the urge to call my mother who loved to hear about things like this.
A half hour later he sauntered in to Teresa’s.
“I have to ask a favor of you,” he said.
"Sure, Dad,” I lied. I had done favors for people my whole life and that was going to change right now. Something about a person’s father lying to them for no reason caused them to reevaluate things.
“Irmabelle seems to have quit.”
“Why?” I asked, with a voice filled with accusation like a kid who blames her father for her parents’ divorce.
“I don’t know,” my father said. “People quit.” He said it simply, like Sometimes I cancel.
People borrow twenty-two thousand dollars, I almost said.
“You know your generation turned out to be a particularly demanding species.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
"Health insurance. Aetna U.S. Healthcare. Oxford. Young people your age calling at all hours, demanding conferences. All for two dollars. And I’ll tell you something, if you want a conference with a doctor, at least be on time. Don’t be forty-five minutes late. And don’t come in there demanding a diagnosis so you can get a refund from a travel agent, or ask me to write a phony letter to your employer and have the insurance company pay for it. All the paperwork, all the forms. She said it was either Aetna or her. So I pulled out of the insurance companies, but she left anyway. That’s why I called you.”
“To tell me Irmabelle quit.”
“To tell you I need you to come work with me for a few weeks until I can train someone else. I can’t manage by myself. Or would I be tearing you away from the boob tube? It wouldn’t hurt you to be a little productive.”
“I’m extremely productive,” I said. I’m producing enough milk to feed Christian Children’s Fund, I wanted to say. “She’ll come back,” I said.
“Of course I’ll pay you a fair salary.”
If he paid one thousand dollars a day I could pay off the twenty-two thousand dollars in twenty-two days. It also occurred to me that the job would include going through my father’s mail and therefore intercepting the Citibank statements.
"I don’t know,” I said. "I’m thinking about moving to L.A. and trying to write for television.”
“You certainly watch enough of it,” he said.
It’s amazing that you can still have the same argument with your father that you’ve been having since you were three.
“How was the lecture?” he asked.
“What lecture?”
“The lecture. The talk you gave at Princeton.”
“Oh, the talk. It was fine. I didn’t know what you meant by ‘lecture,’ I don’t go around lecturing people.”
He took out a deck of cards. “How about this?” he said. “Pick a card, any card, and don’t show it to me. If I guess what it is, you start working for me tomorrow, and if I don’t, you get a job writing for the boob tube.”
“I can’t tomorrow,” I said, thinking of my appointment with Anita Stefano, which I certainly had no intention of telling my father about.
“Okay, if I guess correctly, you start the day after tomorrow. Would you like to examine the deck?”
I examined it and found that it was marked as always.
The next day, after Ma and Pa forced Mary to go away to the blind school where she meets Adam Kendall, her teacher and the man she will one day marry, I went to see Anita Stefano all the way up near the George Washington Bridge.
The office was filled with crystals and big chunks of fuzzy amethyst and photographs of a donkey and a monastery. She told me to sit on a couch and close my eyes while she did a meditation to surround me in an egg of light and diamonds.
I watched her while she did it. She was around fifty, thin and curvy, with long fine black hair coiled on top of her head with a million pins. She would have been very pretty except for a terrible red rash covering her entire face. I wanted to tell her to use a little hydrocortisone cream, but I didn’t think that would be appropriate. Still, it was better than going to a regular doctor.
She was really playing it safe, I noticed. There were angels and crosses, a Star of David, Ganeshes and Buddhas, and a Muslim half-moon. But no magazines or candy. In my father’s waiting room there was usually toffee.
When I’d been sufficiently surrounded by diamonds she handed me a small plastic specimen cup and told me to give her five cc’s of saliva. “Spit in the cup,” she said. I sat on the couch, spitting and spitting until it was filled about halfway.
Then she took the cup and held a small silver pendulum over it. She asked the saliva a series of questions and the pendulum apparently answered yes or no. After about half an hour she said, “You have two souls attached to you. Have you ever had an abortion or a miscarriage?”
“Yes,” I said. I had been almost asleep and her question sent a jolt through me. I wondered how she knew about my abortion. I hadn’t told her anything on the phone, and I didn’t think the pregnant woman in the elevator would have told her about me.
“The soul of that child is still attached to you. But what about the other one? Did you lose two babies?”
“No,” I said.
“Did you ever lose a brother or a sister?”
“No, I’m an only child,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
She asked my saliva if I was an only child and my saliva said no. My saliva said I was one of three. First my cervix was writing me letters and now my saliva was having conversations about me behind my back. “Miscarriages and abortions count. Perhaps your mother had a miscarriage or an abortion?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, there are two souls attached to you, draining you, taking your nutrients. You are not getting enough potassium!” She made me lie on a massage table while she released my two extra souls into the light. “Now your daughter and your little sister are gone. It’s much better this way.”
She placed a Tinker toy-like pyramid on my chest. I tried to close my eyes and say good-bye to my baby and the mystery soul, but I was having trouble concentrating because I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink and I wondered how long until pizza.
“What do you do?” she asked.
“I’m a writer,” I said.
“Really? That surp
rises me because your throat chakra is completely blocked. The throat chakra is the chakra of expression. You don’t feel blocked in this area?”
I felt like I was wearing a thousand turtlenecks.
“When you are ready, you may sit up.”
I was pretty much ready, so I sat up and went back to the couch. She had a beautiful view of the Hudson River. It was almost worth the forty-dollar taxi ride.
“It’s nice here,” I said.
“I used to be right next to the World Trade Center until September eleventh. Now I will go through the endocrine system.” I sat back down on the couch, and she went back to my saliva and the pendulum and then turned to me and said, “You have an obstruction in your brain.”
“Okay, release it,” I said, lying back down on the massage table. This woman was really crazy, but I was kind of enjoying being there. I put the pyramid on my chest.
“No, you do not understand what I am saying. You have some kind of blood clot or brain tumor. You could have an aneurysm. You could go blind, die, anything. You have to go to a doctor immediately. ”
“No, I’m just having an hysterical pregnancy,” I assured her. I noticed a brain-shaped ball of coral on the windowsill.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “What kind of lunatic told you that? You’re not having an hysterical pregnancy, you have something wrong with your brain. Promise me you will see a doctor, Rebekah!” She was practically screaming at me, and I felt touched by her concern and by the way she said my name, Rebekah, rolling the R and coming to a full stop on the K before saying the ah like a sigh.
I paid her three hundred dollars, promised I would see a doctor, and left with the phone number of a psychic priest, one Father Louis O’Mally, who she was sure could help me.
As I traipsed toward the A train, I called my mother at the inn she owned in Woodstock. The whole time I lived with her she never cleaned or cooked a single meal, but as soon as I moved out she bought an inn and practically turned into Caroline Ingalls. She baked little muffins and left them in baskets for her guests. “Did you ever have a miscarriage?” I asked.
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