The Doctor's Daughter

by Hilma Wolitzer

  In his latest pages Joe Packer was recalling the childhood he shared with his sister, Caitlin, a relationship far less easy than Holden and Phoebe Caulfield’s. Joe was ambivalent about Caitlin, who had stepped on his heels, as he put it, by being born only sixteen months after he was. He had been much happier before her appearance, and she’d been a source of trouble all their lives, but he credits his sentimental education to his sister. Although she’s younger, by mere months, she seems years older and wiser than he is, as if she had been born experienced.

  During one retrospective passage, when the family is on vacation at a lakeside cabin, Caitlin dares Joe to go skinny-dipping late at night when everyone around them is asleep. They’re ten and eleven years old, in transition between innocence and knowledge, and she leads the way into sexual curiosity, without any subsequent action. He compares her sleek, featureless body seen in moonlight with a flower caught in the freeze-frame of a movie he once saw in school that depicted, in slow motion, the flower’s blossoming. He’s ashamed, in an almost biblical way, and as delighted as he will be one day by the sight of the fully developed female form, that movie speeded up to its grand, voluptuous conclusion.

  I was reminded of the satisfying neatness of my own body in childhood, before modesty and impatient desire kicked in, before the coming attractions of life became all that mattered. Violet and I, doing our sister act in the carriage, my small lolling self in the bathtub, under Faye’s liquid gaze. And then I came back with a start to the body I was currently living in, and from there right to the next day’s appointment.

  If I had married Arthur Handler, as I’d once believed I would, the whole thing might have been resolved by now. Arthur had become a gynecologist; he’d have examined my breast right away and assured me that the thickening I’d felt was just normal tissue. When you’re married to a writer, or just a writer at heart, all he can do in a medical crisis is succinctly articulate his own fears, which only confirm yours. So I’d decided not to tell Ev what was worrying me until I’d had the mammogram and my worries were over.

  I was on the verge of becoming engaged to Arthur when my mother’s chemotherapy stopped working. Arthur was in his final year of medical school at the University of Iowa and I was just across the river in the English-philosophy building, finishing my MFA. We’d met while jogging around the campus, so we were both sweaty and breathless before we’d even exchanged any words. I thought his opening gambit, “Do you run here often?” was kind of cute. It was the mid-1970s, when jogging was just becoming a national craze, and we earnestly compared our speed and stamina and the buoyancy of our sneakers. What else did we talk about? I’m not sure, but it must have been something pleasant and provocative because we arranged to meet for a drink later.

  He was fair-skinned, with sandy blond hair, and by the end of the evening I’d had the shockingly inappropriate thought that our children would have to wear sunscreen. So I suppose there was an immediate physical attraction, and it was exciting to get to know someone outside the incestuous world of the workshop. Everything we did there revolved around our writing, around the worlds of our imaginations and ambitions. The fiction writers didn’t even mingle that much with the poets and playwrights, as if there were a danger of cross-pollination.

  Arthur’s education was far more grueling and wide ranging and concrete than mine. He had memorized the Table of Elements and Newton’s Laws of Physics, and he could name every bone in the human body, from the cranium to the metatarsals. I listened with rapt appreciation for the beauty and logic of the language. If my father had discussed the humerus or the scapula at dinner, I probably would have been bored to tears, but when Arthur did it, it became a kind of poetry.

  I understood that part of my pleasure in him was an echo of my parents’ pleasure. When my father heard that I was dating a medical student, he expressed his instant, enthusiastic approval. “Now your head’s out of the clouds,” he said, with an oblique reference to my previous boyfriend, a double major in meteorology and Victorian literature. And in a telephone call from my mother, when she was still feeling reasonably well, she asked if things were “getting serious” between Arthur and me and I said, “sort of,” with complicit coyness. She sighed, with what I took to be contentment.

  Arthur and I had already talked dreamily of a future together, like collaborators outlining a novel about our own lives. He would doctor and I would write; it sounded so sane and so safely familiar. Best of all, he loved my stories, which I read aloud to him in bed, our version of the postcoital cigarette. Looking back, his unconditional admiration seems unsurprising. He was still flushed with sexual happiness whenever I read to him, and I mostly wrote about us, in a thoroughly idealized fashion. Things didn’t always end happily, but even tragedy, in my hands, had a kind of romantic appeal, at least for Arthur.

  Everett Carroll, on the other hand, was my literary nemesis, and I, in turn, was his. The trouble with my stories, he pronounced in the workshop, was that too much happened in them, without any credible foundation for what he termed “all that sturm und drang.” His own stories, usually written in the popular and annoying present tense, were so minimal they were barely there, and I observed that he was stingy with language, and much too reserved emotionally. Besides, nothing ever seemed to happen in his fiction.

  In the middle of the wintry spring semester, I presented a story to the group only a day or two after Arthur had declared it sublime. Ev was the first one to comment in class, as usual, with almost a knee-jerk reaction. “What’s missing for me,” he began, with a surreptitious glance in my direction, “is true cause and effect. The guy only dies because the author authorizes it.”

  “And you don’t believe in randomness,” I said mockingly.

  “Hold it, Alice,” our instructor, Phil, said. “Let Everett finish.”

  “This is a story,” Ev continued, as if there’d been no interruption. “It’s supposed to give random events a meaningful shape.” I couldn’t stand the way he emphasized certain words, in that condescending tone some people use to talk to children or the elderly. What kind of phony name was “Everett,” anyway? And “Ev” sounded like a woman, even if he was so blatantly masculine.

  Someone else in our group tried to interject, citing Chekhov and siding with me, I think, but Ev cut him off. “Chekhov’s characters earn their tragedy by their humanity. But there’s no shock of recognition here. Not for me, anyway.”

  How could there be, when he was hardly human? “It’s not about you!” I shouted.

  “Exactly!” he shouted back.

  We went on like that until Phil slammed a book on the table and yelled, “Bong!” to indicate the round was over. He’d given up on pushing his philosophy of noncompetition. Now he just wanted to keep us from killing each other.

  That evening there was beer and pizza at somebody’s house on South Gilbert Street. Arthur was cramming for exams, so I went to the party without him. It was the usual scene: loud music, blue lights, manic postworkshop chatter around the crowded room. Ev came up to me soon after I walked in. I was immediately aware of how aggressively big he was. Arthur was muscular, but compact, and we were almost the same height. At least we see things eye-to-eye, I thought at that moment, as if I’d been called upon to defend our relationship. Ev handed me a bottle of beer and grabbed another for himself. “Listen,” he said. “I’m afraid I was a little hard on you this afternoon.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, and turned to walk away.

  He touched my arm. “I think you’re really smart . . . ,” he began.

  “Thank you,” I said stiffly, before he could continue. I wasn’t in the mood for a belated handout from such a complacent bully.

  “You just have to curb your passion a little.”

  I took a long swig of beer, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and plunked the bottle down on a table. “Oh?” I said. “And how would you know, since you don’t seem to have any at all?”

  He set his bottle down alon
gside mine. Then, without warning, he put his arms around me and kissed me hard on the mouth. I could feel the pressure of his teeth and taste the cold, beery breath we shared. I pulled away from him, enraged and intensely self-conscious. I glanced around, but to my amazement no one seemed to be looking at us. “What do you think you’re doing?” I demanded.

  “Demonstrating my passionate side,” he said, flashing a sudden, unnerving smile.

  “Save it for your writing,” I told him, and I strode out of the room onto the front porch. It was snowing again. I had gotten a ride with friends, but I wasn’t going to look for them now. I’d walk back to my place, even though it was very cold and I’d worn only a light denim jacket.

  Ev came out a moment later, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, okay,” he said. “So I’m an idiot.”

  “At least we agree on something.”

  “Don’t go, Alice,” he said. “Please don’t.”

  “Why not?” I wasn’t fishing, I was genuinely curious. What did he want from me, anyway?

  “Because I’ll feel like hell if you do.”

  “That will be your problem, won’t it?” I was shivering, shuffling my feet in a little get-warm dance.

  “I’m trying to say that I’m sorry. Can I give you a ride, at least?” He was in shirtsleeves and shivering, too. He took a loose cigarette from his pocket. “Or a smoke?” He held it out to me and then lit up. “Or a brand-new Buick convertible?”

  I laughed, attempting to sound sardonic. “You shouldn’t smoke,” I said with my father’s imperious inflection. And get a haircut, I almost added; his dark curls were in a tumult around his attentive face.

  He flicked the cigarette into the snow below the porch. “Okay,” he said. “I won’t.”

  “Good night,” I told him, and made my way carefully down the icy steps. But this time he didn’t come after me.

  As Arthur and I became more deeply involved, the news from Riverdale grew more and more harrowing. Arthur was with me in my bed on Church Street when my father called and asked me to come home. “Daddy!” I cried. “What are you saying?”

  Arthur gave me a questioning look, and I threw myself against him. He stroked my back and kissed my hair, while I finished my sobbing conversation with my father.

  All they could offer my mother now was palliative treatment, something for the pain, something else for her spirits. It would probably be just weeks now, my father said in a weary, heartbroken voice, and she wanted to see me. Arthur offered to go, too, for the weekend, anyway, but I told him not to, that he needed to study. And I went home by myself.

  I was shocked, not just by what had happened to my mother in my absence, but that I had been absent while it happened, and by what I had been doing during that time—writing my passionate little tales, and talking and talking about fiction, that inadequate imitation of life.

  My father had referred all of his surgeries to colleagues, and he kept my mother at home, in a hospital bed in their bedroom. He hired nurses for two twelve-hour shifts each day, and he and Faye and I all took our own turns at her bedside. My mother had wanted to see me, but I wasn’t supposed to see her. Don’t look, sweetheart. Come back later, okay?

  She had never let me see her scar, either, and I’d finally resorted to searching out post-op photos in one of my father’s medical books, like a kid sneaking peeks at something pornographic behind her parents’ backs. But the photos reminded me most of mug shots—the dispassionate faces, the defeated posture.

  I wanted to ask my mother everything I had neglected to ask during those lost, languorous years. Mother, were you happy? What did you really want? Have I disappointed you? But she asked all the questions and they only skimmed the surface of things, as if this were an ordinary spring-break visit and we still had plenty of time to catch up. So I babbled about Arthur and school, and even about the weather, in that weatherproof room—a failed Scheherazade who couldn’t keep anyone alive with her stories.

  When the screaming began, only my father and one of the nurses stayed with her. I’d go to my old room, preserved like a shrine to my girlhood, and shut the door. Sometimes I’d cover my ears and even hum, but I could still hear everything, even the pleading, mollifying woodwind of his voice under hers. And, as if we still shared a bloodstream, I always knew the very moment the morphine hit home, temporarily quelling the fire. I wept when I saw my father’s face after those sessions, but I had murderous feelings toward him, as well, because he had let this happen, because he’d let it go on for so long. It took almost four weeks before it was finally over.

  Arthur wasn’t at the Cedar Rapids Airport when I arrived. I hadn’t really expected him to be; although we’d spoken on the phone every day since I was gone, I’d never told him exactly when I was coming back. It was a very late flight—we were delayed by a snowstorm in Chicago—and the terminal was empty, except for a few people waiting to meet other passengers. I stood and watched as they embraced and departed. The ticket counters and the car rental places were closed, and there were no taxis on hand. By the time my suitcase came down the chute, only three or four stragglers were left, and soon they were gone, too. I wondered if I’d be able to get a taxi when I phoned, and knew belatedly that I should have asked someone for a ride before the terminal emptied.

  Then the door swung open and Everett Carroll came through, stamping snow off his boots and calling my name. He was carrying a small paper sack. I was too surprised and grateful at that moment to ask how he knew when I was arriving. Much later he admitted that he’d done a little homework, asking around and checking with the airline on a regular basis. But then he just grabbed my suitcase and handed me the paper sack.

  In the parking lot, he curled his free hand around the back of my neck, laying his claim to me and offering consolation at once. My thighs trembled as we walked, from jet lag, I supposed, and the layover. From longing. There were bagels in the sack, Iowa bagels, and they felt hard and cold through the paper. The heater in Ev’s car was broken and I had to wipe the fogged-up windshield with my sleeve every time we spoke. We didn’t speak all that much, though. When we got to my apartment, we warmed the bagels in the toaster oven and they were wonderful.

  8

  “Good morning, M! Alas, no e-mail from you today, just the usual unbeatable offers to refinance my mortgage and enlarge my penis. The new pages are simply splendid! I only have some semantic nitpicking, which I’ll send on. Does Joe have a nickname for Caitlin? Please don’t let it be Cat! Cheers, A.”

  Out of habit, I looked over my message to Michael with a critical eye, sharpening my mental red pencil as I read. Three exclamation points—I sounded like a teenager on speed, so I deleted the first two. Then the word penis looked startling on the screen, even in that ridiculous context, and why had I commented so plaintively about not hearing from him; he wasn’t my pen pal, he wasn’t obliged to write to me. I deleted that entire sentence, and the word simply from the next one. What was left had the economy of a telegram; the art of letter writing had clearly been sacrificed to the convenience of technology.

  I remembered the letters my mother had received from that poetry editor in Massachusetts, and how effortless and friendly they’d seemed. Even his handwritten signature, his carelessly scrawled given name, imparted a sense of closeness between them. “Yours always, Tom.” In comparison, “M” and “A,” in neat, legible Courier 10 font, might have been distant relatives in a Russian novel, and “Cheers” came across as utterly phony and ironically cheerless. I moved the cursor back down to the closing of my message to Michael, deleted it, and typed in “Yours, Alice.”

  Ev came into the room, knotting his tie, and I shut my laptop so quickly I caught my fingers. “Ow,” I said, shaking them.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  Yeah, I thought, except for this one-sided cyber affair I seem to be having, not to mention cancer in my breast and a sensation of disaster right next to it. But all I told Ev was that I was feeling a little achy,
which wasn’t completely untrue, and he offered to bring me some tea and Tylenol before he left for work. I waved him away, saying I’d be fine, that I just had to go back to bed and sleep it off.

  As soon as I said it, it seemed like a good idea. It was early, not even nine yet, and my appointment at the radiologist’s wasn’t until noon. There was plenty of time. I hadn’t mentioned the appointment to Ev, and he couldn’t really be expected to remember on his own that another year of grace was up. The more casually I treated the whole business, the less spooked I felt by it.

  But I couldn’t fall asleep again, so I began rereading Michael’s new pages in bed. During Joe’s moonlight swim with Caitlin, she darts away from him in the water, appearing and disappearing like a silvery fish. Michael wrote, “When she truly vanished years later, I always imagined her in water, swimming just out of sight, out of my grasp, swimming for her life. What have I done?”

  I think I dozed off for a moment or two, and then something strange happened: my mother came suddenly and urgently to mind, as if she were swimming alongside Caitlin, a couple of restless ghosts in search of . . . What? Justice? Retribution? Peace? I felt oddly excited and nervous. God, maybe the thing that was wrong with me was a brain tumor.

  At ten o’clock I called Violet, with the idea of presenting all of this to her as an actual dream that required her expert interpretation. She relished those rare concessions I made to the role of the unconscious in my life. But after several rings her machine picked up, and I was treated to a few bars of hip-hop followed by Violet’s throaty voice saying, “Hi, you’ve reached Nirvana. Well, actually you’ve missed me, so leave the usual details.”