Laura & Emma

by Kate Greathead

“Understood,” Laura said, “but as I just explained, I’m not here as a visitor, I’m the driver of a visitor. My brother is visiting his wife and their baby—my nephew. I need to speak with him.”

  The exchange caught the attention of a passing doctor, who said he would get Nicholas and invited Laura to take a seat in the waiting area.

  Enough time passed so that her outrage subsided and she began to feel silly, but then Nicholas appeared, looking confused and a little cranky to see her, and it riled back to life. As Laura stood up, the seat of her chair made a flatulent squeaking sound. Her skirt was still damp from sitting in the clammy heat of the car and now it clung to her thighs like cellophane. She peeled it off but it immediately reestablished contact.

  “I feel like you hate me,” were the first words that came tumbling out. “And I don’t know why.”

  Nicholas looked more weary and annoyed than concerned or defensive. “I don’t hate you, Laura,” he said, his eyes half-shut.

  “Then why do you treat me with such contempt?”

  Lids fluttering half-mast: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “This.” Laura’s voice quivered. “What you’re doing right now: closing your eyes when I talk to you, making me feel small and ridiculous—like I’m some irrational, emotional woman.”

  Nicholas sighed, looked down, and cupped the back of his neck. “I’m not sure what’s going on, or what you want from me right now, but whatever it is, it’s going to have to wait.” Standing up straight, he crossed his arms and looked her in the eye. “Visiting hours are over soon and I would like to see my family.”

  “Your fam-ily.” Laura’s voice rose and cracked over the word, which came out in a regrettable high pitch. “You say that like I’m . . . like I’m . . .”

  Nicholas appeared to exchange a look with someone over her shoulder, and Laura turned and saw that they had a small audience. Staff, judging from their clinical stares and white coats.

  “Go be with your family,” she said curtly, and walked out to her car.

  As she drove home Laura’s anger cooled. By the time she reached the Henry Hudson tollbooth she was deeply ashamed. All those people watching her erupt like that, and now Nicholas had to deal with the embarrassment of it, too, as if he didn’t already have enough on his plate. She called him as soon as she got back to the apartment and left a message on his answering machine to apologize and let him know that there was no need to continue their discussion—in fact, she’d love it if they never spoke of the episode again.

  “I don’t know what came over me,” she reiterated before hanging up. “It must have been the heat.”

  * * *

  EMMA WASN’T THE ONLY ONE with the stomach flu; Dr. Brown’s waiting room was full.

  “Ally Hutchinson,” the receptionist called, “Dr. Brown is ready to see you.”

  “Our appointment is with Dr. Wendell,” Ally’s mother spoke up.

  “Yes,” the receptionist said, “but he’s running behind, so Dr. Brown is taking some of his patients.”

  “We will wait to see our doctor,” Ally’s mother said briskly and disappeared behind a copy of The New Yorker.

  The receptionist read the next name on the list. “Thomas DuPont!”

  “Is this for Dr. Wendell?” the boy’s mother asked. “If not, we’ll wait as well.”

  Laura was baffled by Dr. Wendell’s sudden popularity. In the beginning, Dr. Brown had been the more sought-after of the two partners, but recently things had reversed. It made no sense. Dr. Brown was everything anyone could hope for in a pediatrician, while Dr. Wendell, old and gruff to begin with, was only getting older and gruffer. It was amazing more children weren’t scared of him. When she was very young, Emma had once asked Laura if he was Mr. McGregor—the evil farmer who tried to kill Peter Rabbit. That was the kind of energy he projected.

  Laura wondered what Dr. Brown made of his overnight demotion to second fiddle of Carnegie Hill Pediatrics. She hoped it hadn’t hurt his self-esteem. He was a wonderful doctor, competent, wise, patient, and compassionate. She wanted to convey these sentiments to Dr. Brown, but couldn’t imagine doing it in person; he was too modest and would start to laugh or tell her to stop. She would have to write them in a letter. But when and how would she give him the letter? One day Emma would be too old to see a pediatrician—perhaps that would be the appropriate occasion. Thinking of that day, their final appointment with Dr. Brown, Laura’s throat swelled, and she had to blink back tears.

  “You know what the best part of diarrhea is?” Emma greeted Dr. Brown as he entered the examination room.

  “Getting to see Dr. Brown!” Laura answered.

  “No.” Emma shook her head. “You’re allowed to drink Coke.”

  “I would switch to ginger ale,” Dr. Brown told Laura in a no-nonsense tone. Putting on a pair of rubber gloves he added, “Caffeine is never great, especially when a child is dehydrated.”

  Laura nodded. Dr. Brown must have been having a bad day; his curt tone was out of character. Everyone was allowed to have bad moods, she told herself.

  * * *

  UNLIKE ACTORS IN FILMS WHOSE performances at least tried to feel true-to-life, stage actors seemed determined to remind you that they were in show business. Between their affected gestures, exaggerated facial expressions, and hammy delivery of their lines, Laura found it difficult to believe whatever story it was they were trying to tell. Not to mention that plays invariably contained at least one major, implausible revelation about a family secret or some such, after which the cast fell silent and the audience was supposed to gasp with shock.

  However, like church, it was something she knew it was important to do every so often, and when Margaret called to say she had two tickets to Miss Bennett that night, Laura pretended she’d heard of the show and said she’d love to go.

  “I’m not exactly looking forward to it,” Margaret confessed before getting off the phone, “but as the secretary of the alumni association, I feel I ought to see what all the fuss is about.”

  And then Laura realized she had heard of Miss Bennett, an off-Broadway musical about Winthrop, written by a girl who’d been in the class below theirs. It was a satire and, according to the New York Times critic, “a scabrous, gender-bending send-up of female prep-school culture.” The gender-bending part was that it featured an all-male cast.

  Margaret believed in dressing up for the theater, and Laura felt obligated to change out of her turtleneck, skirt, and cowboy boots. She was on her way out the door—pumps, blouse, blue satin skirt—when she remembered this wasn’t Lincoln Center they were going to. The theater was on Broome Street. The turtleneck, skirt, and cowboy boots went back on. Her instincts were right; Laura felt a smug sense of victory upon arriving at the theater in her uniform, where she fit right in among a downtown crowd of blue jeans and leather jackets. For once in their lives it was Margaret—in her pearls and pink tweed skirt and blazer—who looked out of place.

  They sat in the front row. The actors were dressed in the school uniform as it had been in the sixties, which, in addition to the tunic, included hats and blazers. Laura had mixed feelings about her alma mater, but watching it ridiculed in a small black box theater stirred up tender affection for the institution.

  The second scene depicted Prayers. As the cast recited Bible verses, they got really into their roles, and their enunciation of certain words released a spray of saliva, the heavier, dewier fragments of which occasionally made contact with Laura’s face. Margaret, who’d always been deathly terrified of germs, slunk back in her seat, but this did little to protect her from the mist, and after a minute of looking very uncomfortable and unhappy and taking deep nervous breaths, she incrementally leaned forward until she was no longer on her seat, but on all fours and crawling down the narrow space between the stage and the knees of everyone in the front row. After reaching the end of the row she stood up and disappeared through the swinging doors that led to the cocktail lounge. Laura waited unti
l intermission to join her.

  “I didn’t feel safe with all that spitting,” she whispered, pulling Laura into the ladies’ room. After fishing around in her purse she held up a little bottle of Listerine.

  “Here, drink this,” she said, handing it to Laura.

  Laura took a swig and spat it out in the sink.

  “No, you need to drink it,” she said. “One capful, don’t spit it out.”

  “You’re not supposed to swallow Listerine,” Laura protested.

  “It’s nothing,” Margaret said dismissively. “It’s like taking a shot of vodka.

  “Do it,” she said, when Laura hesitated to take the bottle back from her. “Please, Laura, don’t be stubborn. I took you here tonight and I couldn’t live with myself if . . . if you caught . . .”

  Laura laughed. “If I caught a cold?”

  “I’m not talking about a cold, Laura,” she whispered sternly. “I’m talking about . . .” She looked around the ladies’ room to make sure no one was listening and whispered the letters: “A-I-D-S.”

  They did not return to their seats for the second half of the show. Margaret buckled her seat belt in the taxi home and shook her head.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking, getting front-row seats. We’re already so vulnerable living in New York City, the homosexual capital of the world. So much is already out of our control. God forbid you get hit by a bus and need a blood transfusion!”

  “What made you think any of them were homosexual?” Laura asked.

  “Oh, Laura,” she said. “Most theater actors are. And these ones certainly were.”

  “They were?”

  “You really are slow to pick up on things,” Margaret said, looking at her fondly. “It’s kind of sweet.”

  Within seconds, however, Margaret’s face turned serious.

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about your pediatrician,” she said.

  * * *

  IT WAS THEIR FOURTH DAY in Ashaunt and they’d yet to see the sun. The rain had been intermittent but today it was steady. According to the thermometer it was sixty-two, though the damp draft made it feel much colder. Laura tried to light a fire but ran out of newspaper before it got going. Poking around the attic, she found a copy of the New York Times. She was about to take it before she saw it was from August 10, 1974, and the front page announced Nixon’s resignation. She couldn’t bear to burn that. Instead she used a 1964 edition of the Summer Social Register.

  “You’re burning a book,” Emma said, sounding vaguely impressed. “Isn’t that bad?”

  “Normally, yes,” Laura acknowledged, ripping out another page. “But this is an idiotic book.” She got on her knees and stuffed the balled-up paper beneath the logs. Palms on the floor, she leaned in close and blew until the flame caught.

  Emma laughed. “Mom, you’re sticking your butt in the air.”

  The weather became more volatile as the afternoon progressed, with thunder and sudden gusts of wind that shrieked like a teakettle.

  They ate an early dinner of leftover lasagna. After doing the dishes, Laura went back to the living room, revived the fire with a fresh log, and returned to her book. She’d read Anna Karenina in high school, and then again in her twenties, but it was just as engrossing a third time. Laura didn’t even notice it had stopped raining until Emma came scampering downstairs.

  “Gotta go save the worms before they get run over!” she announced.

  The front door was swollen with moisture, making it difficult to open. As Laura wrestled with it, Emma lost patience, opened a window, jostled the screen loose, and climbed through.

  “Wait,” Laura called, crawling out after her.

  The front had passed, leaving the sky in fluorescent shambles. The light was shrill and cast everything in bewitchingly crisp resolution. A beautiful, bruised sunset was in the works.

  The lawn was like a soggy sponge beneath their bare feet, and by the time they reached the road, their toes were threaded with loose strands of grass. There was only one worm on the stretch of road in front of their house, and after Emma relocated it to a bank of moss beside the driveway, Laura suggested they take a walk to look for more.

  On their way up the point they crossed paths with Uncle Frank and Aunt Alice, their perky gaggle of corgis faithfully trundling behind them. As was their custom to do in the evening, the couple was dressed up: Alice in pearls and pink lipstick; Uncle Frank in his faded red pants and brass-buttoned jacket. What was left of his hair wasn’t much, but he’d parted it to the side and matted it down.

  Laura admired Alice and Frank, but not for the reasons everyone else did. Among their extended family, Alice and Frank’s childlessness was alluded to as a tragic circumstance, their upbeat, cheerful demeanor hailed as “brave.” Laura found this patronizing because Alice and Frank struck her as genuinely happy—the rare husband and wife who truly enjoyed each other’s company. Certainly more so than any other couple she could think of.

  “We were just talking about the new millennium,” Alice said with a mischievous smile. “We’re in the eighties now, soon it’ll be the nineties, and I asked Frank, ‘What will we call the decade after that?’ And Frank said—”

  “And I said,” Frank cut in, “ ‘We won’t call it ana-thing, dear, we’ll be up there.’ ” He wagged a finger at the sky and the two laughed merrily.

  “Didn’t you call it the aughts?” Laura asked, realizing they would’ve been children in the first decade of the nineteen hundreds.

  “Yes.” Alice nodded. “I think that’s right.”

  “I ought to agree,” Frank said, and Alice made a raspberry sound of playful disapproval.

  A butterfly came along and landed on a nearby stone wall. Emma slowly approached to admire it. Alice and Frank continued on their way; as Laura turned to watch them go, a frisky breeze snaked out of the bushes and inflated the skirt of Alice’s dress like an umbrella. At the same time it gently lifted Uncle Frank’s comb-over, revealing the primitive contours of his skull, which was the delicate pink of the inside of a conch shell. If either of them noticed, they didn’t seem to care. Unfazed, arm in arm, on they strode, each step just barely grazing the cusp of their shadows, which, being longer and more limber, loped valiantly ahead into the evening.

  * * *

  IT WAS COMPLETELY IRRATIONAL. THERE was no reason to believe Dr. Brown had AIDS. Furthermore, in the event he did have the virus, the possibility of his infecting Emma involved ridiculous scenarios of a highly unlikely nature. Still, this didn’t stop Laura from conjuring them in the middle of the night.

  Margaret had succeeded in planting a seed of anxiety, and Laura couldn’t deny that her immediate reaction was relief when, in August of that summer, a letter was forwarded to her at Ashaunt announcing that, after thirty-seven years of serving the community, Carnegie Hill Pediatrics would be closing its doors in November. Dr. Wendell was retiring and Dr. Brown would be joining a new practice: Downtown Pediatrics.

  Given his new office’s location near the Bowery, it wouldn’t make sense for them to see him anymore. Laura knew Dr. Brown would understand this, but the thought of picking up the phone and telling him put a lump in her throat.

  “I’m afraid the location is a little inconvenient,” she wrote. “You have been an important part of our lives and it’s hard to imagine someone filling your shoes. You have gone above and beyond. We wish you the very best of luck.”

  After reading the letter over, Laura decided it wasn’t enough. She would pick up the phone and call him. Not this afternoon, but tomorrow or the next day, by the end of the week, she promised herself.

  In the meantime, she canceled Emma’s back-to-school checkup. It didn’t make sense to have her see two different doctors in the same school year. She called Margaret to ask for the number of Charlotte’s pediatrician.

  * * *

  NOW THAT EMMA WAS IN second grade, Laura allowed herself the luxury of sleeping in until eight on weekends. This meant that Emma, who rarel
y slept later than seven, was in charge of making her own cereal.

  “Get back in bed!” Emma demanded one Sunday as Laura walked into the kitchen. She was standing in front of something she clearly didn’t want Laura to see.

  “Get back in bed?” Laura laughed. “But it’s eight o’clock!”

  “Get back in bed!” Emma barked again.

  Laura got back in bed.

  A moment later her door was flung open. “Breakfast in bed!” Emma announced, bearing a tray with a bowl of oat bran.

  “Breakfast in bed?” Laura affected a gasp of surprise. “What a treat!”

  Emma proceeded across the rug in ceremoniously staggered steps, moving her right foot forward, dragging her left foot up to meet it, and so on.

  “Happy birthday!” Emma said, passing her the tray.

  “How sweet of you to remember,” Laura said. “Thank you.”

  She had just picked up the spoon when Emma whisked the bowl away. “Forgot the milk,” she said, running out and returning a minute or two later.

  “Mmm,” Laura said after the first bite.

  “Why are you sad?” Emma asked, scrutinizing her face.

  “I’m not sad.” Laura smiled, but Emma looked unconvinced, and her probing stare did not relent. Laura became aware of her breaths. She felt brittle and hollow. She wasn’t sure why. She had always felt this way on birthdays, starting in her childhood.

  “I made you a present.” Emma unzipped her fanny pack and procured a piece of clay in the shape of a ball. “It’s a paperweight. It’s so your papers don’t blow away.”

  “How useful,” Laura said, cradling it in her palm. It was still moist; she must have made it that morning. “How thoughtful of you.”

  “It’s supposed to look like a rock,” Emma explained. “Sorry it’s not very good.”

  “It’s beautiful. And that’s exactly what it looks like. A rock.”

  The intensity of Emma’s gaze was too much.

  “Okay, maybe I’m a little sad.” Laura smiled through her tears. “It’s the happy kind, though.”

  “You’re not supposed to cry when someone gives you a present.” Emma grabbed the ball of clay from Laura’s hand and threw it against the wall, where it stuck.