Women and Children First

by Francine Prose

  Ceci was the last one in the lobby. She could have used this moment of solitude and peace to prepare; instead, she tortured herself wondering what airport she was in long ago when everyone else was called for a flight and the place emptied out and she realized that the plane she was about to take was a lot smaller than she’d thought. Finally Ceci heard her name, and she entered the Lama’s red and gold room.

  At the moment Ceci walked in, the Lama was looking at his watch. Ceci caught him at it, and he laughed. Ceci laughed too, then was amazed to discover that she was on the verge of tears. She was just so disappointed. But what had she expected? For one thing, someone older. Only now did it occur to her that she’d had no clear picture of the Lama. Now she recognized him from his portrait, the baby-faced one, but in some new adolescent stage—gawky, thin, with the skinny head, dark-rimmed glasses, and flattop crewcut of a guy in a fifties high-school yearbook. Some strain around the Lama’s eyes convinced her that she had been correct, that right now the Lama felt just as she did by this point in the school year: drained, longing for it to be over, unable to even fake interest when another child came for help.

  Ceci’s mind raced wildly over everything she had to tell the Lama—an exhausting story, she saw now, endless and impossible to get through. Walter had mentioned that if they didn’t have a specific question, they could simply throw themselves on the Lama’s wisdom and ask for any advice that might help. Now Ceci considered doing that. But the Lama kept staring at her, his gaze so direct that Ceci could only return it in small doses.

  After a while Ceci said, “My husband broke up with me at a sushi bar. We were sitting side by side. The sushi chef wasn’t watching exactly, but he was there. My husband told me that he was moving to Arizona; then he ordered another cucumber salmon-skin roll. It was early for dinner. Only one table was full. Four young people, a girl and three guys—Wall Street types. I’d seen them on our way in. It had surprised me to see them so early, at such an unchic Japanese place uptown. After my husband said what he had to say, I didn’t feel like talking, so we eavesdropped on their conversation about how hard it was to meet someone in the city. And I was so filled with hate for them, such bubbling-up, boundless hate. There was nothing wrong with them, they weren’t obnoxious. I just hated them for being young. And I thought: Oh, I’ve changed. I am exactly the kind of person you tell you don’t love anymore, sitting shoulder to shoulder with at a sushi bar.”

  The Lama’s expression shifted slightly, crossed some nearly imperceptible line between boredom and relief. He looked at Ceci a few seconds longer. “There is a simple meditation called the meditation of loving kindness,” he said, with hardly any accent. “Its aim is to increase your compassion. You just breathe in and out. You breathe in the suffering of those you want to help, and the suffering goes straight to your heart and destroys whatever is most self-loving and self-cherishing. And you breathe it out as white light, which goes to whoever needs it and gives them what they want.”

  Well, it sounded as if it couldn’t hurt, but finally, what was the point? What did it have to do with Ceci or anything she had told him? How could breathing white light in and out help her, or anyone? How could her disappointment be translated into compassion, and what good was compassion without action? Don’t send white light, she thought. Send money. She wanted her fifty dollars back.

  The Lama said, “Just give it a ten-minute try. Ten minutes for something that’s worked for three thousand years. What have you got to lose?” And Ceci thought: Why not? Really, ten minutes was nothing, nothing to lose. And what if it helped? She remembered how, in high school, she read Franny and Zooey and so loved the idea of a prayer becoming part of your heartbeat. Working its biochemical magic.

  The others had started without her. Only for the briefest moment did Ceci let herself feel slighted. She tiptoed into the temple and settled onto a pillow near the door. She crossed her legs and thought of what the Lama had said and started breathing. First she concentrated on that—inhaling, exhaling—then moved gingerly, testing the water, toward suffering, toward how much you saw if you opened your eyes on an average day in the city, how much you never saw. She conjured up stories, that restaurant for the dying, photos, terrible images of violence and death and disease until she couldn’t hold her breath and breathed out, sending out health, long life, love, work—a miracle, if need be. She sent it streaming out into the world and even—this was the hardest part—to the others in the room, wishing for them whatever healing they sought in the Medicine Buddha.

  She inhaled again and the images began to blur, growing brighter, coming up behind her eyelids, brilliant and warming. She felt slightly dizzy, surrounded by so much light, and yet she could still check back on herself, probing, tongue in sore tooth, for what hurt. And after some minutes it began to seem to her that her problems were, when one took the larger view, really very manageable, and rather small.

  But though she kept breathing steadily, taking in and sending out, the light began to fade, gradually, as at dusk, when she used to read and not notice till her husband would come in and say, “You’ll go blind.” She breathed harder, slightly panicky now as the white light turned an odd shrimp color, then deepened to a dull blood red, and a memory stung her before she quite knew what it was.

  It was something her husband once told her about his first astronomy job, as an observatory tour guide. The best part of that job, the part he never tired of, was helping the tourists see through the solar telescope, see the sun. It took quite a bit of focusing, and as the tourists struggled with it, he would look into their eyes and know exactly when they saw. Because at the moment they focused, the solar reflection flashed onto their irises: a brilliant, perfect, red disc of sun, shining at him from each eye.

  Women and Children First

  GORDIE LIKES TO SAY he can read the writing on the wall: Soon armies of upscale D.C. couples will be buying second homes in quaint Highland County, driving property values sky-high. They’ve already done the Blue Ridge. Janet can’t quite believe that the moving finger is writing about real estate, but she knows that for Gordie prophecy means advice. Janet rents a farmhouse in Highland and trucks in antiques which Gordie sells at American Beauty, his Georgetown shop. Gordie says that renters in Highland will soon be dinosaurs in museums; Janet should buy some failing crackerbarrel mom-and-pop store and turn it into American Beauty West.

  They have just smoked a joint in Gordie’s bedroom in the basement of his shop. They are sitting cross-legged on his carved four-poster bed, amid the Chinese knickknacks, the Oscar Wilde bearskin rug, the moth-eaten taxidermy Gordie says is illegal even to own, and looking through a carton of antique nursery-rhyme illustrations, the remnants of some disintegrated kids’ book that someone recognized as beautiful and worth saving, and which Janet found yesterday at an estate sale in Slate Mills.

  Janet turns a cardboard wheel, and beneath a cut-out window, a cow jumps over the moon. Next comes the laughing dog, then the hand-in-hand dish and spoon. Gordie says, “These are a gold mine. I can frame them—the perfect new-baby gift. Sure you don’t want to steal a couple for Kevin’s room?”

  “Kevin?” says Janet. “Gordie, this is ‘Hey Diddle Diddle.’ Kevin’s got Tina Turner on his wall.”

  “I had Tina Turner on my wall,” Gordie says. “Well, anyway, Ike.”

  Janet would like to keep the page she is holding, but feels that her work gives her daily instruction in letting go. It would be easy for her to accumulate objects, to be buried beneath them. Yesterday she wondered how the elderly brother and sister who had come to supervise the estate sale, the disposal of their parents’ things, could sell these pictures at all—their childhood fantasy images, a dollar for the whole box. She kept reminding herself that there was a lesson here, that basically they were right.

  “I’ll tell you something weird,” she says. “Last night I was spinning this ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ wheel, just looking at it. Kevin was upstairs asleep. After a while I heard him come dow
n. He said he’d had a great dream about a flying cow.”

  Gordie says, “Could he have seen the picture?” and when Janet shakes her head, he says, “You really should get this checked out.” This sounds like medical advice, which in a way it is. Gordie has a friend at Georgetown Medical School who told him that someone there has gotten a small grant to study family ESP. What friend? wonders Janet. Gordie often uses the word to mean some guy he found attractive and maybe even had a long conversation with at a bar.

  Janet says she’ll ask Kevin; she knows he’ll never agree. Kevin takes it for granted that he and Janet have the same thoughts, he can’t understand why Janet gets so excited about it. Maybe he worries that thinking like a girl means you are one. He says that all kids and parents think alike; it comes from living in the same house, and if it doesn’t happen with his father it’s only because Will doesn’t live with them but in D.C. When Janet asks Kevin how he knows this, if he has asked other kids, he says, “Are you crazy?” What, then, would he think of scientists getting grants to ask other parents and kids? He’d think it was weird; and worse, he’d know that it would involve every kind of attention he hates.

  Just before Janet leaves Georgetown, Gordie asks if she doesn’t at least want to keep the cow jumping over the moon. Janet makes a little sweep with her hand. “Gordie,” she says, “I’m just a conduit. Hear the wind blowing through?”

  On the drive back to Monterey, Janet keeps looking in her rearview mirror, imagining Gordie’s armies, the convoys of househunting Volvos and Saabs bearing down on her. She feels nearly queasy with secret knowledge, as if she alone sees the enemy massing on the Eastern front. Nearly home, she stops for a couple of hitchhikers—local characters, old hippies Kevin refers to as Mr. Time Travel and his wife. They are often on the road; Janet has picked them up a few times before and does so again today because Mrs. Time Travel appears to be hugely pregnant. When the man helps his wife into the cab of the truck, Janet smells patchouli. The woman was overweight to begin with, but her husband is very bony. It averages out; they fit fairly comfortably on the front seat. As Janet drives them into Staunton, Mr. Time Travel tells her how their welfare worker is threatening to cut them off if his wife doesn’t get to a doctor. He talks very softly about the horrors of hospital birth—women trussed up and drugged, bright lights shining in babies’ eyes—and every time he says “trussed up” Janet feels his wife flinch.

  Something about this makes Janet determined to bring Kevin in for the ESP experiments. Maybe it’s the impulse to distinguish herself from these dinosaurs, to identify as the modern, if downwardly mobile, former wife of a surgeon and the mother of a perfectly healthy hospital-born kid. Partly, she just longs for something new. When she and Will split up and she found this way to live out here and make money, she’d thought that the rest of her life would be a treasure hunt. The auctions, the sales, checking the local obits—how quickly it all came to seem like a job. It’s got so her heart sinks at the sight of another beautiful oak hutch. Also, she wonders if this new desire to be a famous ESP guinea pig is just that old dream of specialness, of celebrity and revenge: mind-reading mom and kid amazing talk-show hosts, written up by Oliver Sacks so even Will can read it.

  She wants to just do it—just go there for the experiments, not argue—so that night at dinner she tells Kevin that if he comes with her, no questions asked, he can have a new baseball mitt and two computer games.

  “Medical school?” Kevin says.

  “Trust me,” says Janet, and they both smile, because this is Kevin’s expression. “No doctors,” she says. “Looking at pictures. ESP experiments. That kind of thing. Okay, listen. They’ll pay us ten dollars an hour. You get to keep the money.”

  “Ten dollars an hour?” he repeats, and when Janet nods, he says, “That and the ant farm.” Lately he has been asking for an ant farm; she should have thought of that right away. Where did he hear about ant farms? And where in the world do you get one? Tracking down items from science-museum shops is not the kind of thing either she or Will does well, especially not now, with Will spending every free minute with his new girlfriend. She thinks there’s some rigamarole about getting the ants. And the way Kevin takes care of things, there’s a good chance that dirt, broken glass and a million ants will wind up on his bedroom floor. Still, it seems like something you’d want to buy your kid, feel better about than computer games.

  “Okay, the ant farm,” she says.

  Janet makes an appointment at the medical school for a Wednesday; she tells Kevin he’ll learn as much as he would have from two days at school. At one time he liked missing school, no matter what. But now he’s clearly torn, and on the day of the appointment, Janet feels so guilty that she stops, without his even asking, for take-out McDonald’s breakfast. As they merge with the stream of trucks on Route 74, she says, “In a few years, you’ll be driving. It seems impossible—you were just this little baby.”

  After a long silence, Kevin says, “Do you have to catch the ants, or can you just buy them somewhere?”

  “I don’t know,” Janet says. “I’ll find out.”

  And that’s it for conversation. For most of the drive, Kevin stares out the window. Glancing over at him, Janet thinks how soon he will be a teenager; now he is right on the edge. It occurs to her that being so handsome may make it easier for him, but she can’t tell him this; it is already too late.

  She pulls into the Park ’n Ride lot, where Gordie is waiting. His metal-flake emerald ’56 Buick gleams like a giant eight-cylinder scarab. Janet is glad to see him, glad that he offered to close the store and come with them. She loves riding in Gordie’s car: everyone turns to look at you as you sink into the deep sofa-like seats and breathe in the stuffy, indescribable smell of your childhood. Gordie said he wanted to expedite their trip, to free their minds for higher things, but Janet suspects that he’d like to run into his friend at the medical school. She can’t blame him. At the back of her mind is the fact that where they’re going isn’t far from Will’s office. She imagines meeting him, imagines the look on his face, that sympathetic doctor’s look of perplexity and concern.

  The waiting room reminds her of an expensive obstetrician’s—in fact, of the office of the old man Will knew who delivered Kevin for free. It’s smaller, of course, and empty, but even so, Janet has that waiting-room self-consciousness as she sits between Kevin with his punky baseball cap pulled over his eyes and Gordie with his ginger moustache and leather bomber jacket; as if there were anyone there to approve, she feels proud to be sitting between them. Kevin likes Gordie, though he spends too much time with his dad and Will’s doctor-intellectual friends to give Gordie much credit as a full-scale human adult. Gordie has brought Kevin treasures—special marbles, a rooster-shaped tin bank, a revolving lamp with a scene of Niagara Falls—which Kevin seems to like but leaves all over his room.

  After a while, a receptionist calls Janet and Kevin. Gordie says, “Adios and good luck. If I’m not here, I’m taking a walk, I’ll be back.” The receptionist, a barrel-like young woman, takes off down the scratchy-industrial-carpeted hall; Janet and Kevin fly after her, and so have to brake sharply when she motions them through an office door.

  Inside, a woman sits behind the desk, a man in the chair beside her. The woman is wearing a lab coat. Janet wonders why she needs it; she’d always thought lab coats were to guard against spraying mouse blood. The man and the woman stand to shake hands. They are both about Janet’s age, a fact which horrifies and convinces her that she shouldn’t have come. She feels humiliated, as if being on the opposite side of this scientific investigation is an admission of failure in life.

  The woman introduces herself as Dr. Wilmot. She is tall, a light-skinned black woman with huge, stylish eyeglasses, a clear, lively smile, and unruly, half-straight hair. She introduces the man as Dr. Becker, and he laughs and says, “Eric.” He is good-looking in that clean, academic way that can make jeans and rolled shirt sleeves look like a lab coat: not clinical, ex
actly, just terribly pressed and neat. When Eric shakes Janet’s hand, he smiles and looks at her closely. She focuses on a postcard tacked to the cork-board on the wall behind him—a vintage anthropological photo of two pygmy women playing ping-pong.

  Dr. Wilmot says she’d like to say a few things about the study. She says they are lucky, that there’s really no money around for this kind of project these days. She says the experiment is simply the classic model: they’ll be put in separate rooms and asked to look at pictures. She asks if they have any questions. Janet can’t think of one. Kevin looks too bored to speak.

  They leave Dr. Wilmot’s office and walk awkwardly down the hall; no one knows who to walk with. After a while they reach two open doors. Dr. Wilmot motions Janet and Eric into one room, she and Kevin take the other. Janet is glad that it’s not the other way round. She wonders if this arrangement is accidental or if research has discovered that ESP gets sharper around a slight sexual buzz.

  As Kevin disappears through the door, Dr. Wilmot smiles encouragingly, but with a certain strain, so that it comes out almost a leer. Janet feels strange, as if she’s involving her child in something scandalous, like some Victorian father introducing his son to the local bordello.

  The room Eric takes her into is dimly lit, bare but for two wooden chairs and a wooden table, rather like the set of a low-budget avant-garde play. On the table is a stack of cards, face down, also a clipboard and pen. Eric picks up the clipboard and says he is sorry, he has to take a history. Again Janet has a flash of the obstetrician’s, more panicky now, but at least he doesn’t ask when she got chicken pox or her first period, facts she’s long since forgotten and so always has to reinvent. He asks about traumatic childhood illnesses or experiences, hers or Kevin’s. Janet says, “Normal, normal, normal.” Finally he asks, “When was the first time you sensed some special connection with your son?”