The Doctor's Daughter

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “There’s no particular way,” she said. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Your last patient, actually.”

  “Why does she interest you?”

  “She doesn’t. I mean, I was just trying to figure out who she was. Not her name or anything, just . . . No, that’s not true. I was really thinking about myself—who else?”

  “That’s why you’re here.”

  I glanced at my watch and saw the second hand flit past the hour. “Is it normal,” I asked, “for a fifty-one-year-old woman to be obsessed with her mother, who’s been dead for many years?”

  “Most of us are concerned with our parents all of our lives.”

  “Then maybe we should choose them more carefully,” I said, winning a faint smile. And I remembered Dr. Pinch asking if I’d ever imagined I didn’t live with my “real” parents, and that I would be claimed by them someday. Years later, I found out that Freud referred to this fantasy as a “family romance.” But to me the true family romance was the one I lived, as the beloved child of a happy marriage, an essential part of the perfect triumvirate.

  I realized that Dr. Stern was waiting for me to say something else. “Do you have a mother?” I asked, quickly adding, “I’m not supposed to ask questions like that, am I?”

  “You may ask anything you like,” she said. “I do have a mother. But you really are here to talk about yourself.”

  “I had this all planned, what I was going to say. I was afraid to leave it to chance.”

  “What did you think might happen if you did ‘leave it to chance,’ as you say?”

  I shrugged. “That’s the thing—I didn’t know, but it seemed dangerous, like opening Pandora’s box.”

  “You’d release some evils?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Or bore you to death. The last time, I just bawled, remember? I was determined not to do that again, to just stay with the script. And then something happened on my way here.” I sat forward in my chair. “I saw a couple making out in the park.” She waited. “Big deal, I know,” I said, “but it seemed so weird, this time, like a sequence in a dream.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  “Kind of helpless, the way you do in dreams. And like an intruder.”

  “Helpless and intrusive. Something like a child?”

  I nodded and paused, but it was apparently still my turn to speak. I cleared my throat and hastily switched gears. “I’ve been working a little since I was here last. Not a real job. I’m just sort of a freelance book doctor now.” As soon as I said it, it sounded absurd. Physician, heal thyself! I thought, and then I changed the subject again.

  The fifty minutes went whizzing by, and I’d barely touched on most of the things on my agenda. Being in therapy, it seemed, was something like writing a book, a novel; you simply made it up as you went along. And there was a plot and a theme, distinct from each other, yet entangled. I’d tell Andrea Stern my story and together we would try to figure out the theme. That would make her sort of the editor of my life. But it was such a convenient and smug correlation. Would a plumber in therapy envision his angst as just a clog of hair and shit in the pipes, something to be snaked out so that the truth could come gushing through?

  Later, I waited for the crosstown bus at the corner of 65th Street, suddenly too tired to walk anymore. I hadn’t cried at all during my session, which was a modest triumph, but now I felt close to tears, although I wasn’t sure why. I’d finally gotten around to talking about Ev and me and the children, of the push and clutch of our marriage, and of how lucky we were, really, despite the setbacks we were having, that everyone was healthy, and functioning pretty well in society.

  I know I didn’t convey how awful things actually were at home, or even mention that persistent sensation in my chest, the catalyst for my going back into therapy in the first place. Had I come there merely to gloat, or to comfort myself? No, certainly not, and my mind flitted off my family so quickly, they might have been only minor characters in my narrative. I began to tell Dr. Stern about my work with Michael instead, but that seemed like just a subplot of my life, irrelevant to the real matters that had brought me there.

  I sat quietly for several seconds before I felt a desperate impulse to break the silence again. “I’ve been writing a little, myself,” I said. I could feel the heat rise in my neck and my face. It was like a great, guilty confession. I opened my bag and took my notebook out and held it up, as validation of my claim, I suppose, although I didn’t open it. “I was going to be a writer once. Like my mother.” Mother!

  Then I put my hand to my breast, where the feeling had been patiently crouching, and it leapt at my touch, clamoring to be announced. And I would have done so, but of course my time was up then, in the middle of a thought, of what I belatedly knew should have been my first thought. Another patient rang the doorbell, and Dr. Stern stood and so did I.

  “Why don’t we pick up there when you come back?” she said. We shook hands and made another appointment for the first Wednesday after Labor Day. When I stepped outside, the sunlight, the whole busy world, was as astonishing as it is when you leave a darkened movie theater and the story of someone else’s life.

  14

  It was August and I was on my own, feeling as warily independent and lonesome as a latchkey child. Dr. Stern had said she’d be reachable by e-mail or by phone. From the area code I knew that she was on the eastern end of Long Island, and in a fit of pseudo-nostalgia I envisioned a damp, cozy little cottage, the creak and twang of a screen door as happy children ran in and out. It was a silly, wishful fantasy—I didn’t even know if Dr. Stern had any children, happy or otherwise. Her invitation to intrude on her vacation was sincere, but nothing had radically changed in my life since I’d seen her, and I prided myself on my lack of neediness, my ability to wait until our appointment in September.

  In the meantime, I kept that disturbance in my chest in careful check, like a leashed but potentially dangerous pet. And I tried to muddle through things at home, where Ev and I were still sleeping apart and still on pointedly civil speaking terms, in what I thought of as a shaky cease-fire. (The metaphors of the embattled Middle East were always so apt and handy.) We had no summer vacation plans ourselves, having decided earlier in the year to go to Europe in late autumn, to southern Italy or Provence. Of course, everything was on hold now. Traveling together in our current state would be impossible, especially with the forced intimacy of shared hotel rooms in foreign places; it hardly seemed as if we still spoke the same language. In our apartment, at least, we could retreat to separate, silent corners, and take some of our meals apart. And we could both seek relief in work and in the company of our respective friends.

  I made a lunch date with Lucy, but when I arrived at G&F to pick her up, she was in the middle of a production crisis and couldn’t leave. The familiar chaos there, the much ado about something—an endangered book—revived my longing to be a part of it all. Come on, kids, let’s put on a show!

  In the street again, I called Violet on her cell phone and found her at her studio. She sounded distracted, but she agreed to meet me for a quick lunch if I’d come downtown. Violet was going to be in a group show again in early December, called Women at Work. She’d already started to spend most of her spare time in the studio, or in meetings with the other female members of her co-op gallery. I was frankly jealous of her excitement, of the unwavering attention she paid to her painting, so I suppose I was less than tactful when I told her, at a crowded Soho sushi bar, that I thought the show’s title was kitschy, and the accompanying logo, of a highway construction sign, tacky and dated.

  Apparently I’d tapped into Violet’s own submerged doubts, because she immediately said, “What would you call it?”

  I was caught off guard, and I had to think for several frantic moments before I said I wasn’t sure, but that I would organize the show around common concerns rather than gender, and perhaps mention gender in the catalog as one of the reasons for the artist
s having common concerns. I was just blathering to cover my mean-spiritedness, but Violet nodded thoughtfully and said she’d bring it up at the next artists’ co-op meeting.

  A few days later she called and asked if I’d like to help the group rename the show and then write the copy for the catalog, which should briefly describe each artist’s work, and then expound on their collective mission. I quickly demurred: I couldn’t, it wasn’t my field, I didn’t really have the time, but Violet cut right through my sputtering objections. “That’s a load of crap, Allie,” she said. “Just do it. If you can’t visit everybody’s studio, you can look at slides. And I’ll give you one of my paintings for your trouble.” Just what I needed. But I finally said that I would try.

  And I told myself that I would try to do something about the situation between Ev and me, too. When he came home that evening, I was wearing a gauzy lilac-colored dress he liked, and I had dinner all prepared. It was mostly comprised of the unhealthy foods Ev favored, including rare roast beef, buttered potatoes, and a rich chocolate tart—not exactly light summer fare. This will either seduce him or kill him, I thought when he walked in looking so handsome and hateful that either scenario seemed reasonable.

  But the dinner only succeeded in making him sleepy; he kept yawning during dessert and he declined the espresso I offered with a little wave of his hand, as if I were merely an overly solicitous waiter. Being the wronged party had imbued him with a kind of magisterial power. I couldn’t even rouse his interest in Violet’s new project, and I didn’t bother mentioning my part in it. My hands were shaking as I started to clear the table.

  When he was shuffling out of the kitchen, heading for the boys’ bedroom, I flung a plate into the sink, smashing it, and shouted at his back, “This is so damn stupid, Ev!” I felt sick to my stomach, bloated with animal fat and anger and sadness. “Either really live with me or don’t at all!”

  He turned and looked at me in my wilted lilac splendor for a long moment before he said, coldly, “You’re right, I am pretty stupid, to hang around here and take this crap. It’s time I found another place.”

  His words went through me like a spray of bullets, but I said “Yes!” as if I’d just had the same bright idea myself. “I really wish you would.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be out of here tomorrow,” he said, and of course I came right back with “Good!”

  This conversation, or something very much like it, was probably taking place in kitchens and bedrooms all over the country, maybe the world— you only had to look at the divorce rates—but that knowledge didn’t alleviate the horror of it taking place between us, in our kitchen, with the nesting spongeware bowls we’d received as a wedding gift all those years ago, and Ev’s blue-and-white paperweight winking innocently at us from the windowsill.

  How impossible marriage was; it had to be a matter of sadomasochism or just plain lethargy when it lasted. Ev never really listened to me; no wonder he’d always misread my stories. It was our quarrel I’d meant was stupid; how could he not have understood that? And what I’d said after that may have sounded like an ultimatum, but it was meant to be an invitation— come live with me and be my love. The man I had been prepared to take back to my bed, to my shredded heart, seemed repulsive to me now. We were so conspicuously different from each other we might have been members of separate species. Look at the foods he preferred—if it weren’t for Ev’s carnivorous appetites, and my own occasional meat hunger, I might have been a vegetarian by now. And didn’t he once admit that he found To the Lighthouse “too political”?

  Even our metabolisms were out of sync; I turned the heat up, he turned it down. All the emotional injuries I’d ever endured at his hands, from the workshop insults to the arguments over Scott, were instantly, blisteringly recalled. Most of all, it shamed me to think that his darkly bristled jaw, his hairy otherness, had once been a source of such arousal in me. Lumbering from the room now, he most resembled a bear leaving a campsite he had just plundered. Good riddance, I thought, go to hell, die.

  When the phone rang the next morning, I almost didn’t answer it. It was after ten, but I was still in bed, dazed by the Valium I’d finally washed down with a little vodka after midnight, and swamped with misery. Now there was something concretely wrong in my life, alongside the other, unaccounted-for something. I remembered hurting my own foot in a temper tantrum when I was about three or four, and my father saying, as he rubbed away the pain, “Well, now you really have something to cry about.”

  I’d heard Ev leave hours before, without a word. What was left for us to say, anyway? But when I finally picked up the phone, it was Michael, not Ev, on the line. “Is this a good time?” he asked, and I had to contain a hysterical urge to laugh. He seemed to be a genius of bad timing.

  “Sure,” I said, shutting my eyes against the light seeping poisonously through the blinds. Another day. “How are things going?” It was actually a relief to have my concentration jerked away from my own troubles like that.

  “Not so hot,” he said. “I was wondering if I could see you.”

  “What? When?” I opened my eyes and sat up. My heart began chugging, like a reluctant motor that had unexpectedly turned over.

  “Whenever it’s convenient.”

  “Michael,” I said, “where are you?”

  “Well, the airport, actually.”

  “What airport?”

  “La Guardia.”

  “You’re in New York,” I said inanely. “Then why don’t you just grab a cab and come here.” And I gave him the address. Alice, think before you speak!

  Then I was completely, urgently awake, throwing off the covers and rushing into the shower, where the water, too hot at first and then too cold, lashed at my defenseless skin until I howled a little, and felt better.

  I had had little daydreams about Michael for weeks, about how he’d look, and how I would look to him. Mostly, I simply saw him as Joe Packer, that rawboned hero whose melancholy was modulated by a killer smile, but at other times, when I was feeling guilty or preposterous, I pictured Oliver Hardy, jammed into a squeaky desk chair, eating éclairs and writing a novel about a sexy, rawboned hero. As for myself, I seemed to be able to revamp my looks at will, becoming younger and more supple and vibrant each time—they were my own daydreams, after all.

  But when I looked in the mirror after my shower, squinting to soften my view of a faded, menopausal redhead, there was clear confirmation of my decline: the gray strands, the persistent gravitational pull (even when I sucked everything in), the freckles that might just as easily be seen as age spots. And only recently, I’d had to get reading glasses. Maybe I’d gone downhill since the defection of the man who once swore he “loved the sorrows of [my] changing face.” I thought grimly that I would need cataracts to do a real job of revision, and I’d probably have those pretty soon, too.

  “Michael is here,” the doorman told me in jovial tones half an hour later, as if he were announcing the arrival of an old, mutual friend. I watched through the peephole until the elevator door opened at the other end of the hallway, releasing a block of silvery light, like a spotlight on a stage, onto which the small, distant figure of a man, wearing jeans and a backpack, stepped.

  If he’d begun to recite a soliloquy then, or burst into song, I wouldn’t have been all that surprised. But he only paused for a moment before setting out in the direction of my apartment, growing larger and larger as he silently, inexorably approached. No Oliver Hardy, I was relieved to see, but no Joe Packer, either. Someone in between those impossible brackets of comic miscreant and romantic idol. Someone ordinary and oddly familiar. Had I ever seen him before?

  Soon we were inches apart, almost eye-to-eye, with only the thickness of the door between us, and I watched as he grabbed a comb from his pocket and ran it through his thick, close-cropped hair. Then he licked his lips, the way I always do before my photograph is taken. He had a nice, curly mouth that seemed primed to register amusement.

  When he rang
the bell, I dropped the flap of the peephole as if it were hot, and waited for several beats before I opened the door. After the briefest pause, I put my hand out to shake his, but he’d already begun to embrace me, and I ended up poking him in the midsection, which made him let out a little “Oof!” and then laugh.

  “So this is you,” he said after putting his backpack down in the entrance. His expression was uncritical, even admiring. At least he didn’t seem to be counting the rings in my neck to assess my age.

  And you, I thought, but I only said, “In the flesh,” and then worried because that sounded so provocative. “Come on in,” I added hastily, gesturing toward the living room.

  “This is great,” Michael said, meaning the apartment. He went to the west-facing windows and looked out at the city. When he whistled in appreciation, I felt proud, as if I had erected the skyline myself moments ago, just for his appreciation. But I might have constructed him, too. “It sure beats my view,” he said.

  “Oh? What do you see?”

  He shrugged. “A couple of scruffy trees, my neighbor’s chain-link fence—with her pit bulls behind it—a shutdown GM plant in the distance. The same one I was laid off from.”

  Other people’s lives. Exactly what had made me want to write fiction in the first place, so I could get inside someone else’s psyche, someone else’s experience, even if I had to seek them out in my imagination. It was the same reason I read fiction; curiosity and desire and fear made one measly life seem not nearly enough. I acknowledged the many privileges of my own, though, and wondered how I still managed to be so unhappy.

  Michael looked unhappy, too, behind all his polite enthusiasm about me and my surroundings, and I reminded myself why he was here. “Let’s have something to eat,” I said, leading him into the kitchen. Somehow I still clung to the notion that it was easiest to talk across the common ground of a table spread with food and drink.