by Paul Cody
The shrink’s office was at the side entrance of her big house in Newton, and she was matronly. Large breasts, hips, tall, quiet-spoken, and she had several African masks on the walls of her office. Of course. And where did we begin?
I barely remember, except that she took a lot of notes on a yellow legal pad those first few weeks. Father, mother, brothers, husband, daughter, education, work, depression, suicidal thoughts, sleep, diet, sex life, general health, and on and on.
So what brings you here? she asked, and I talked and cried and cried and talked, and our fifty minutes were up. See you Wednesday.
So it went for twelve, thirteen years. And I don’t know what I got out of it. She rarely said much.
She’d ask, What about that?
Or, It’s as though you’re inviting us not to analyze that.
Or, You sound quite angry, quite resentful of Samantha.
No shit, Sherlock.
I became a person who didn’t do or want very much. Except I shopped all the time. But I wanted my daughter not to die or hurt herself, though God knows, she tried.
We brought her to every specialist at Children’s Hospital—neurology, psychiatry, audiology, speech therapy. She had brain scans, MRIs of every part of her body.
They talked depression, Asperger’s, anxiety disorder, personality disorder, ADD.
But one good thing we did, and we did it from around the age of two, when she stopped screaming and we were settled into Chestnut Hill, was read to her. During the day, before dinner, before bed. Even when Nathan was getting home at eight or nine, he’d check on her, and if she was still awake, he’d lie on her bed, sometimes still in his suit and overcoat, and they’d read Frog and Toad, Owl Moon, Big Red Barn, Beverly Cleary, Katherine Paterson, and later Harry Potter.
It was as though she became a different child then. Quiet, attentive, and we could even see her mouth the words along with us.
She did begin to speak, of course, but very quietly and in a whispery voice at first, sometime around the age of three. And she spoke in full sentences, and she had quite a vocabulary. She even smiled once in a while, and she had gorgeous blond hair that had wavy curls. Her nose was long, but Nathan said, I guarantee you she’ll grow into it.
At school, beginning with preschool, she was always a loner. Does not play well with others. That appeared on just about every report we ever got. And because so much of school at that age was about socialization, we were off to more doctors, more diagnoses.
At one point we toured a school for Asperger’s kids, and the kids, such beautiful children, crouched or stood alone or ranted to themselves as though to some internal audience, and we both said, No. Not Samantha.
My analyst asked, Denial?
And I said, No. It wasn’t right.
We did eventually get her to schools with resources for bright kids with special needs. She tested extremely well. And by that time we had enough money for a lifetime, and Nathan had moved to Harvard, in part because it would be fewer hours, and more time for Samantha. And things settled for a year or so.
Then we thought, Groton. Small. Intimate. Caring. A great deal of individual attention.
Then the Groton disaster, a year of hospitals, and here we are, like a whirlwind, Dorothy’s house set down in Oz, and I’m actually teaching a class in finance at Cornell.
I know a lot of this is on me. Me, we, all of us, have miles and years to go.
But every now and then, say in the morning, looking out at the flowers and trees in the backyard, I get this strange momentary feeling, and I think it might be hope. It doesn’t erase the last seventeen years, Nathan and I still argue and have the occasional fight, it doesn’t make up for what a clusterfuck I was as a mother, but maybe there’s still time. For something. For some kind of, some shred of redemption.
Thirteen
Avery
I was the self-appointed premier queer of the Clock School, and that carried with it certain duties and responsibilities, all of which I took both seriously and not seriously. I was a kind of social arbiter. I knew nearly everybody, had been there forever, and I paid attention to social and fashion trends. Who was going out with whom, what people were wearing, who was palling around or not palling around with whom, and I generally knew why.
In short, I paid close and careful attention.
By the end of September, certain things had settled down and trends had been spotted. Nothing dramatic, because how dramatic can it get with a school of a hundred-odd kids? But the leaves were changing on the trees outside; we were noticing the beginning of light coats, pants and shirts replacing shorts and the lone T-shirt, and we were noticing more boots and shoes intermixed with the standard sneakers and sandals.
Sierra, our fashion leader, was still tall and beautiful, but now had the left side of her head shaved; the remaining hair was streaked black and blond, she had four piercings in each ear, one in a nostril, and she was favoring black, a good deal of leather, and very high heels, which caused her to wobble. She and Anna were still tight, but not as much as last year, and that had everything to do with our most interesting and dramatic new student, Samantha Vash.
Rumor had it that Samantha had spent the previous year in a series of high-class mental hospitals, but you couldn’t tell, not as far as I could see. She was the Princess, to my mind. Quite tall, gorgeous, tightly curled light brown hair which she wore in a variety of weaves and plaits, with combs, and sometimes just free and floating like a lovely cloud around her head.
Her clothes were understated and elegant, and her body was long, her carriage erect, and she had shoulders, not insubstantial breasts, and as far as one could discern, the longest legs, and the highest, sweetest, tightest ass I had ever seen. It was a bum that would make a boy proud.
Anna had befriended Samantha. (And as a side note, I did not approve of her nickname, which was Sam. That would be like calling Jacqueline, Jack. Shouldn’t she be Sammy?) And that didn’t sit well with Sierra, who had been undisputed Princess for perhaps too long.
Was there room in the Clock School for two Princesses?
Frankly, I thought Sierra pushed her fashion thing a bit far. Tried too hard. As though she was drawing too much attention when she didn’t need to. During her hippie stage last year, she wore peasant blouses without a bra for weeks, and had all the straight boys mooing. I couldn’t help but think, Dairy products.
The thing is, Sierra is quite bright and funny and interesting, and she doesn’t have to go to such lengths. Sierra could walk into a room in jeans and a T-shirt, and you’d notice.
The other thing that caused a stir was that Samantha Vash and Levon Grady, our uncrowned Prince and man of mystery, were engaged together in a major, secret senior project that counted for two courses, and they met alone with Meg in Meg’s office for two two-hour sessions a week. With the door closed. And the Clock School is not a closed-door kind of place. Its motto could be All Doors Are Open.
I had known Levon Grady at least half my life, and have had half a crush on him for half that time, like at least half the girls and every queer boy in school. And now this new Princess had arrived, a girl with exquisite taste, with the deportment of a DuPont, and they seemed to have been given special access to each other somehow.
Not that they were necessarily palling around, but they occasionally walked the halls together, and I would see Samantha, Anna, and Levon sitting at the table out back, and that was unusual. Levon at the table, drinking coffee.
He seemed somehow looser, more likely to look up and smile, to say hello, and I had actually had two brief talks with him, one of which he initiated. It was little more than, How’re things, Avery? But that was not the sort of thing Levon did. I also once saw him walking with Anna and they were talking and laughing, and that was another thing you did not see.
Louis, my sometime companion and fellow observer, said that Levon was coming out of his shell, but I didn’t think so. Asperger kids, no matter where they are on the spectrum, don’t
come out of their shells, but Louis, like a lot of the kids here, thought those labels, those diagnoses, were—well, to put it bluntly—bullshit. He thought they were diagnoses we were given very early on, and that we molded our behavior to fit the diagnosis.
I partly agreed, but what did I know? When you wash your hands fifty times a day, you’ve got something wrong with you. Or for that matter, if you’re one of the robotics kids, and you wear tie-dye T-shirts every day, there’s something wrong with you too. One may be a problem of medicine, one of style. But why can’t we tolerate differences? Isn’t that the real question?
The coolest girl, and the one who most intrigued me, was Anna. Part of the reason was that she didn’t know it. If I liked girls in that way, she’d be the one I’d want. She was kind of on the short side and she was more cute than beautiful. She wore glasses, and had the loveliest pale skin in the world. Her hair was kind of wavy and bobbed at the same time and was reddish brown. She played the trumpet, she went over to the regular high school to take calculus and AP physics, and she organized this Rock the Arts festival every spring where she got all the kids in the high schools to play music, show artwork, do a poetry slam—and tons of kids showed.
She was also a very good writer, as I could attest from being in two writing seminars with her. Clear and brave and honest. (Levon, when he showed his work, could be a brilliant writer as well, but he rarely showed it to anyone but Meg. I wondered if Samantha was now seeing it. And if that could be part of why he might possibly be acting a little differently. If that had anything to do with the mysterious project they were working on.)
The difference between Anna and Sierra was coolness itself, and working at being cool. I guess the word would be authenticity.
I need to discuss this with Louis.
Anyway, I’ll report back later as things develop. My early-decision application for NYU is nearly done (absurdly early, I know), but there is just nowhere else for me. Maybe I’ll apply to Pratt as a safety school. Whatever happens, a year from now, yours truly will be observing and reporting from the only place really worth reporting and observing from: Lower Manhattan.
I hope the City will be ready.
Fourteen
Levon
I didn’t know anybody who didn’t know who his dad was. I knew plenty of kids whose parents were divorced, and sometimes the dad moved to Colorado or Oregon, but the kid spent Christmas or Thanksgiving or spring break or part of the summer with the dad.
Moms always got custody of the kid or kids. Or that’s the way it seemed. Or sometimes one of the parents had died young, but there were pictures and stories, and aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents, and in that way, the kid kind of got to know the missing parent.
And I suppose in the world there were tons of kids who didn’t know who their fathers were. Say, if your mom was a prostitute, or the dad just took off when the kid was a baby, and the mom didn’t want to talk about the bum, except to say he was a bum and a loser and a deadbeat.
But for me, it was like nothing and nobody I knew of. My mom knew, she just wouldn’t tell me. It was always, He doesn’t exist. It’s best that you not know. It could only harm you.
And I guess I kind of bought that. Susan was so strong and smart and confident. Her whole family was like that. All those doctors, and this is this, and that is that, and you don’t question science. And I always got the feeling that they didn’t know who he was either. And if Dr. Grady, Susan’s father, didn’t know, who was I to press the matter?
There were times when I’d bring it up, every once in a great while.
Was he handsome? I’d ask, and Susan would say, Who? And I’d say, My dad.
Forget it, she’d say in this really cold way, and she had this very icy, dismissive manner about her, like a professor whose student had just asked the dumbest question that had ever been known to humankind.
So I learned not to ask. In some way, I learned, at least consciously, not even to think of it. At least almost all the time.
And in my head the question became not, who is my dad, but, why does Susan think it’s best for me not to know? What harm would come from knowing?
Then I’d start doing the math, and I’d figure that I had to have been conceived during her last year of grad school. And so I was probably conceived in Chicago, unless, of course, Susan was away on a trip.
Then I’d think that she was doing all this work with psycho killers in grad school, meeting with them, interviewing them, doing brain scans and such, and that maybe she fell in love with one of them, or felt sorry for one of them, and in some moment, some weak moment of pity or something, she had sex with one and got pregnant. And of course she wouldn’t want me to know about that. Having a father who raped and killed a half dozen women, or killed his family, or did some awful, horrible thing.
And I could handle that. I could see feeling pity for someone who was going to live their entire life in a cage. It would be strange as hell, of course, but I could deal.
Otherwise, what the fuck?
It was like you’re a very small child, and you imagine creatures under the bed, in the dark, at night. Nothing in reality could be a fraction as bad as what you imagined.
I started imagining everything. A guy who killed and raped twenty-seven women. A guy who killed and ate little children. Someone who burned down a houseful of nuns or unwed mothers, killing all of them.
Or then I thought maybe it was someone I knew. Someone who lived in Ithaca, who taught at Cornell, but was just very strange, or someone who was so ordinary that Susan couldn’t admit ever having sex with him. I’d see guys in the street, tall guys in their forties or fifties, with curly hair, and I’d think, That’s my father.
And because of her big brain, and her vast knowledge of the brain, and me, and the guy who was my dad, she decided I was unable to handle the knowledge of his existence. Which was worse, I think, than knowing he was dead. Because if he was dead, then I could cry and mourn and go through the stages of grief, and then just get on with life.
But as it was, I had Mom’s word, and this gigantic question mark that was dangling there.
Fifteen
Susan
I grew up in what was considered a nice suburb of Kansas City, Kansas, where oaks and ashes and hemlocks and maples and sycamores had been planted by the city, because fifty miles west of there, there were no trees. Just grasses. Oceans and waves of grasses. Amber waves of grain.
My mother taught high school biology, and my father taught pathology at the University of Kansas Medical School, which was in Kansas City, Kansas, not Lawrence, where the main university campus was. The Jayhawks. Famous for their great basketball teams, where Wilt Chamberlain played way back in the 1950s.
My father taught gross anatomy, but his specialty was forensic anatomy, which had to do with the legal ramifications of anatomy, often in criminal cases, and he frequently taught classes at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and was consulted on specific cases and often testified in court.
My brothers, Chris and Rob, and I are all tall and blond and straightforward. From birth, it seemed, we were all going into some sort of medicine or science, and Rob and Chris, who make decisions quickly and confidently, became—what else?—general surgeons. But I was a girl, a tall girl, a half inch under five ten, had blond hair, and was—so I was told and so I believe—unusually attractive. But my parents drummed it into me that I was never to slouch, to be in any way ashamed of my height, and that I was bright, and that I was never to play the ditzy, dumb blonde, or to defer to boys in classes, or to hide my light under a bushel.
You don’t have to be rude or arrogant, my father said. In fact, you have the extra burden of being kind to those less naturally gifted than yourself. But don’t ever be ashamed of your brains, your talent, or your height.
We used to joke as kids that it was a good thing Dad worked with dead people because his bedside manner would have been less than desirable. When we were young, whenever one of us
fell and scraped a knee or elbow and started screaming and crying, he would stand us up, and say calmly but firmly, Stop that now. Crying makes you hyperventilate and increases the pain. That’s why they teach Lamaze to women in labor. Stop crying. Take slow, deep breaths. Slow, deep, slow, deep. He’d repeat this, and I swear, it worked. The sting didn’t go away, but it became something you could manage, you could reason with.
Then he’d take us to the bathroom, wash the scrape off, put on an antiseptic, and bandage the cut or scrape.
But even Mom, who’d grown up tough on a farm, who’d seen the heads of chickens cut off and hogs butchered, sometimes thought Dad could be a bit stringent. We were, she reminded him, children, not cadavers.
One summer, when I was eleven or twelve, I got Dad to take me to the anatomy labs at the medical school. School was not in session, of course, and there were no cadavers present. But I was fascinated by the giant silver lights, the rows of silver beds, which were sloped and had two drains at the base, the hoses, and the trays of shiny tools. Straight and curved scalpels, probes, tweezers, very thin scissors, and something with a handle and a U at the end of it. They seemed almost holy, like the instruments for some sacred rite.
He showed me the wall of silver boxes, and opened one, and pulled it out. It was a long tray or gurney.
This is the cooler, where we keep the bodies. Because the moment life ends, decomposition begins. Cooling the body slows decomposition.
The room smelled funny. It smelled like heavy cleaning fluids, but like other things too. I later learned it was formalin, one of the major tissue preservatives, which seemed to have crept into the very tiles of the room.
So I grew up in a family that was frank, where death and basic biology were familiar, and where we were all quite comfortable and easy with the very basic things in life. While others squirmed dissecting a frog in high school biology, I went right to it. I was fascinated. It was amazing to me. To see what was inside. I mean, the frog was dead. It didn’t feel anything. It was up to us to look and see and discover.
