by Sue Halpern
And then, nothing. Or, rather, nothing like that. Upon hearing our news, my willfully single mother jumped up from the table, went to the sideboard in the dining room, and retrieved a bottle of Jameson and three small cut-crystal glasses. Then she toasted us to a long and happy life together. Cal extended his arm and raised his glass high, said cheers, and threw back the whisky as if he was doing shots. Mother said cheers, too, and swallowed hers in a single slug. They seemed to realize at the same moment that they’d left me out of their salute and simultaneously held their empty glasses in my direction so we could clink them in unison, and then watched with apparent approval as I downed the alcohol, which scorched the back of my throat. I realized, looking at the two of them—he beaming, she dewy-eyed—that I’d been unconsciously counting on my mother to shut this whole thing down. I also realized that that wasn’t going to happen. Mother was happy. She was passing the baton to the not short, not tall, not boy, not man standing in her kitchen, and the baton was me. The project that she’d had little choice but to take on at the age of twenty-six and pursue for the next twenty-one years was coming to an end. She was almost fifty years old. For the first time in her adult life, I would be someone else’s responsibility. She could relax. When I thought about it that way, I was happy, too—happy for her.
One parent down, two to go. We drove to Grosse Pointe the next weekend.
The Sweeneys’ house, at the end of a winding, poplar-lined driveway, might not have officially qualified as a mansion, but it was bigger than any house I’d ever been in and surrounded by a placid, well-tended ocean of Kentucky bluegrass. Think of a southern plantation and you’ll get an idea of its sprawling, portico’d grandeur. It wasn’t old, just built to look old, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if servants stepped out to attend to us as we approached.
“You didn’t tell me you were to the manor born,” I said to Cal as the place came fully into view, wondering for a minute what he must have thought when he saw the Oliver homestead, a one-thousand-square-foot Sears kit house sold under the name “the Puritan” back in the 1920s, which could use a new coat of paint and had a chimney that was disengaging from the roof.
But servants didn’t emerge from the etched glass double doors, Cal’s mother, Lydia, did, a compact woman with a damp handshake and a breathy voice that did not carry. She gave Cal a quick, distracted hug; looked me over, up and down, as if I were a dress in a store window; smiled wanly; and directed us to drop our bags and go into the kitchen, where there were sandwiches, cut into triangles, on the table. I had heard about finger sandwiches, which is to say that I knew they were not made from chopped-up fingers, but I didn’t know anyone who actually called them that, or made them, or served them, or ate them. They were liverwurst, liverwurst and mayonnaise, which Lydia claimed were Cal’s favorite, which was news to me and possibly to him. As soon as her back was turned, I dumped mine onto Cal’s plate, and he made a face but quickly stuffed them in his mouth.
“You’re a good eater,” Lydia said to me when she saw my empty plate, but it didn’t sound like a compliment. Like Cal, I was neither fat nor skinny, though to some people, if you’re not skinny, you’re fat. It seemed like she could be one of those people.
The Doctor—also named Calvin—showed up not long afterward in his golfing clothes, a little wobbly on his feet. He had seen patients in the morning and then gone to the club on whose board he sat—a fact he mentioned more than once—and on whose board my Cal might someday sit if he so chose—a fact he also mentioned more than once—deciding who got in and who didn’t, even though this was obvious. (The first black member was elected in 1928, by accident, and the next one was elected sixty years later, and in between, members applauded themselves for being affiliated with the first integrated country club in the state.) Side by side, I could see a vague family resemblance between the two Cals, but the Doctor was shorter and appeared to be carrying half a watermelon under the front of his tight maroon-and-gray argyle vest. He spoke deliberately, in what were mostly declarative sentences: “You will join us for dinner.” “You will have the Cointreau.” “You will sit next to me.” “You will let me put my hand on your thigh.” Obviously, he didn’t say this, he just did it, resting his hand on the top of my leg during dinner, as if it were part of the furniture. Was I wrong to think it was weird? Could it be the custom here? Could it be a welcoming gesture? No one could see. His hand and my thigh were behind the curtain of tablecloth. He had patted the chair, told me to sit next to him, and I’d obeyed. He was a chubby old guy. It was probably nothing. His hand wasn’t moving. It was just parked on my flesh. He removed it, though, when Cal announced that we were engaged.
“That’s lovely,” his mother said in her quiet, uninflected way.
The Doctor was more effusive. He said, “Here, here!” which I took to mean he approved, and made a long-winded speech about palaeogenesis and ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, which made no sense to me. When he was done he said “Here, here” again and declared that Cal would help his mother in the kitchen so “our special guest” could join him in his study for a “digestif.”
“Let me help, Mrs. Sweeney,” I said when dinner was over. “Cal can tell you—I’m an excellent dishwasher.”
“We have a Miele,” Lydia said, and whatever that was, it was obvious that there was no getting out of it. I was going with the Doctor to his study. Even Cal was resigned to it, which did not endear him to me right then.
The digestif turned out to be a “finger”—that word again—of “extremely cleansing” and “extremely expensive” and “extremely rare” Islay single malt that burned my lips before it ever got into my mouth, which amused the Doctor.
“Puts hair on your chest,” he said, appraising mine. He swallowed his in one smooth motion, poured himself another, and turned suddenly serious, his brow slightly furrowed and his face wiped clean of merriment.
“Katherine,” he began.
“Kit,” I said.
He ignored me. “Katherine,” he said again, and didn’t wait for me to correct him but instead launched into another oratory, lubricated by generous dips into the extremely cleansing, extremely expensive, and extremely rare well by his side.
“As you know, I am a physician,” he said. “My father was a physician. His father was a physician, a small-town doctor. And now my son will become a physician, and you”—here he paused for emphasis and looked at me hard—“you can help or hinder that course. Are you with me so far?”
I nodded meekly. It’s here where I should have gotten up, thanked him, and walked out of the room. I didn’t, of course. Who does?
He cleared his throat. The Doctor was a showman. I had to give him that. Plus, he had to be more than a little inebriated. I wouldn’t say drunk, but definitely getting there.
“As I find myself explaining to my dear wife more often than I’d wish, sex is important for men. The male sex drive is a man’s life force.”
He wanted me to nod, so I nodded. I really wanted to leave, but he held me down with the power of his stare—his eyes were red and blue—and the punch of his words.
“I understand that I should be grateful to you for, let us say, giving yourself over to my son in this way.”
Before I could protest, before I could say anything, he held up his hand and splayed his fingers, like a traffic cop in an intersection. This was a lecture, not a conversation. “The process of becoming a doctor is an arduous one, a long one, and sexual release is as crucial as sleep and food, maybe more so.
“But,” the Doctor continued. “But,” he said again for emphasis, “we wouldn’t want anything to get in the way. Am I making myself clear?”
I said, “I think so,” which was an outright lie. I had no idea what he was talking about or why he was saying it.
The Doctor, who had been standing over me, walked over to his massive inlaid mahogany desk and sat down.
“Let me be as clear and as frank as possible,” he said, knitting his fingers together
and leaning his chin on his steepled hands. “Are you using rubbers?”
“Rubbers?” I echoed, confused for a moment. “Oh,” I said, deeply embarrassed. “That.”
He looked at me, waiting for an answer.
I nodded my head. Barely.
“All of the time, or some of the time?” he asked.
“Most,” I said. “Most of the time.” I was mumbling, but even so, I couldn’t believe I was having a conversation with my future father-in-law about my sex life with his son.
“I am a doctor,” he said, which I suppose was meant to make this less weird, but didn’t. “You need to use rubbers all the time. Every time. You can’t take chances.”
And then, as if he were reading my mind, he said, “I’m telling you this, not Calvin, because in my experience it is the woman who is more responsible in these matters.” I was thinking that he meant this as a backhanded compliment, not just to me, but to all women, but then he said, under his breath, “And it is unseemly for a man to discuss his emissions with another man.”
The Doctor reached into a drawer and removed an amber-colored medicine vial. “No method is one hundred percent foolproof,” he said, standing up and coming over to where I had crammed myself into a corner of his enormous leather couch. He held out the vial, which didn’t have a label, and waited for me to take it, and when I didn’t right away, he took my hand, unfolded my fingers and wrapped them around the bottle and gave them a squeeze. The pills inside rattled. “Take these in that case.”
“You want me to take these pills?” I asked.
“Not at once,” he said, and laughed. (He laughed. I was terrified. This was not funny.) “Read the instructions inside the bottle. You’ll start bleeding. You may experience a little discomfort from the cramping. It’s perfectly safe. Trust me.”
This was my future father-in-law, telling me to trust him, handing me an illegal abortion drug in order to eliminate his future progeny so it wouldn’t get in the way of his son carrying out some master plan, clearly hatched before I came on the scene, but that I was now a part of. And this was me, paralyzed, unable to say what I was thinking (“This is so fucked up!”), unable, even, to move.
The Doctor pulled me to my feet and drew me into a hug.
“You feel tense,” he said. “Let me know if you need something for that.”
He stepped back, keeping his hands on my shoulders, like a dance move, like one of us was supposed to step to the left or bow, though it couldn’t be me. I was frozen in place.
“Look,” he said, his voice softening. “I don’t like it, either.” He let go and went back to his desk, pulled out a pad and pen, and wrote something down and signed it with a flourish. “Here,” he said, handing the paper to me. “Bring this to your physician. It’s a scrip. He’ll know what to do.”
“She,” I said.
The Doctor looked at me blankly, like I’d just told a joke he didn’t understand.
“My doctor is a she.”
He snorted and opened the door, and I wandered back to the kitchen. The whole encounter couldn’t have taken more than ten minutes because Cal was still cleaning up from dinner.
“We have to talk,” I said, and when I told him what had just happened he took the vial from me and put it in his toiletries bag, where I’d see it from time to time when I was looking for dental floss or mouthwash, when I couldn’t find mine. The scrip stayed with me.
“I’ll take care of it,” Cal said, which at the time I found comforting.
Chapter Five
7.5.10–7.11.10
Welcome strangers, but study daily things . . .
—Delmore Schwartz
As soon as Evelyn saw her, she wanted to know how it went, and if Sunny was more normal outside of work, and what Kit fed her, and what they did together. Kit didn’t mention the vegan hot dogs or the fact that Sunny’s parents didn’t show for nearly an entire day. She said as little as possible, but enough for Evelyn to tell her about the boy on her grandson Jayden’s T-ball team who found a package of sparklers and tossed them on the barbecue when no one was looking and the fire department had to come.
“As if they didn’t have enough to do,” Evelyn said, and was about to launch into the stories that had been all over the news about the man who went to investigate why his string of M-80s wasn’t exploding and managed to blow off his nose, and the crazy Iraq vet who shot up his neighborhood with a SIG Sauer during the fireworks display because he thought it was under attack, and the idiots who broke into that company in Sandown again and pulled the fire alarms and triggered the sprinkler system, which basically trashed the place. She did tell these stories, but not to Kit, who could hear Evelyn chatting with Carl as she made her way over to reference.
Sunny wasn’t in yet, and Kit felt a little apprehensive—what would they say to each other?—but then the girl arrived, and instead of seeming chipper, like she usually did, she seemed downcast and tired. She was also wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing when she left Kit’s house. But maybe that was what teenagers did, wear the same outfit till it had to be peeled from their bodies. Wasn’t that in that story Sunny liked to read to the preschoolers, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, where the boy never washed and never changed his clothes and was so dirty that Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle was able to grow a crop of carrots on his skin? But Sunny didn’t look dirty, she looked washed out.
“You okay?” Kit asked. The girl was just standing by Kit’s desk, hands in the back pockets of her cutoff cargo pants, her right leg moving rhythmically, as if it were pumping up a tire, eyes fixed on the floor, saying nothing.
“I think I know where that guy is living,” she said. “Don’t ask me how I know. I just know.”
“Okay,” Kit said. “But which guy?”
“The guy who comes in here and hogs the computer.”
“You can’t hog it if no one else wants to use it,” Kit said.
Sunny rolled her eyes. “You know who I mean.” And then, under her breath, “Adults are ridiculous.”
Kit heard, and felt stung, but pretended she hadn’t. “Where?” she said. Did she care? Why would she care? But she was curious.
“The Tip-Top Motor Inn.”
“Where’s that?”
“Not sure. Off Exit 38 I think. We saw his car there.”
“We?” Kit said, but Sunny was walking away.
The Four had come in by then and were assembled in their usual places, and when Carl (the former barber) saw Sunny wander away from Kit’s desk, he called her over and asked if she wanted a doughnut hole. “It’s the chocolate glazed kind,” he added.
“You know there’s no eating in the library, Carl,” Sunny said. This was a common refrain. One of the Four would stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts on his drive in and pick up the morning’s coffee—three sugars for Rich (the driver); milk, no sugar for Rich (the former executive); two sugars, no milk for Carl; straight up for Patrick—and doughnuts, though now that Carl was on a diet, imposed by his doctor, doughnut holes, lots of them.
“There’s also ones with powdered sugar,” he said, holding out the box to her. “Whatever you like.”
“You know she’s a Veg-etarian,” Patrick said.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Carl said, smiling.
Kit, watching this scene unfold, was smiling, too. In his day, Carl must have been quite the ladies’ man. Now he was just cute, though she knew better than to tell him that.
Suddenly, like a squirrel that had just spied a nut, Sunny reached out, grabbed a doughnut hole and popped it in her mouth, and started chewing.
“Attagirl!” Carl said. “Have another.”
And she did. Kit was amazed. Sunny seemed to be, too.
“These are really good,” she said between bites. There was powdered sugar on her cheeks and fingers and a dusting on her shirt.
“That’s what I’m saying!” Carl said, and everyone but Sunny laughed. She was too busy chewing.
Whatever bad mood, or sad mood, or dark m
ood, or moody mood Sunny was in when she got to work, she was out of it by the time the Four had moved on to lunch at the hospital. Maybe it was the sugar, Kit thought, but more likely it was the harmony and counterpoint of the Four themselves. Smart and salty, droll and sharp—when they told a joke at someone else’s expense, it was never to be mean, only amusing. They were the kids who sat in the back of the class and cracked everyone up, even, despite herself, the teacher. They were the neighbors who shoveled the widow’s driveway and made sure she had enough wood stacked before it turned cold. They were the masters of gag gifts. They were the ones who sent boxes of paperbacks and bags of Chips Ahoy! to the soldier kids from Riverton sidelined in Afghanistan and Iraq. They were everyone’s favorite uncles. They were the friends who valued loyalty above all else, and without having to say so, Sunny, though she had only recently come into their orbit, was their friend.
“Oh my goodness, oh my goodness,” Sunny said, rushing over to Kit’s desk shortly after escorting the Four out the front door. She was excited, talking fast, eyes alive with mischief. “That guy? I think he’s a spy!” She was whispering, but loudly. “He works for the CIA.”
“And you know that how?” Kit said.
“It’s on his briefcase. The letters. CIA.”
Kit had noticed the man’s briefcase, too. It was a messenger bag, made of supple leather, Italian, possibly handmade, definitely expensive.
“C-I-A,” Sunny said. “You know. As in CIA.”
“So you’re saying that the CIA gives its undercover agents briefcases that say where they work?”
“I’ve seen people come in here with backpacks that say sierra club. Patrick has a duffel bag that says smithsonian.”
