And Give You Peace

by Jessica Treadway

  “I heard him come in and run a glass of water. I heard him squeeze out the rope in the sink and hang it on the coat hook. He stopped at my door and whispered, ‘Rose, you asleep? I did it, Rose.’ You know what I said? I have no idea why, because I really was happy for him, but I said, ‘Big deal, Tom.’ When he got upstairs, Ma whacked him with the hairbrush.”

  I knew that this story stabbed at Justine’s heart as deeply as it did mine, and probably in the driver’s seat our mother also felt the cut. But no one said another thing the rest of the way back to Delphi, and after a while the silence took on a weight, like humidity, in the air around us. We were all remembering my father in different ways: as a child, a brother, a husband, and a father.

  And when those memories had come and gone in our heads, there was the common image of the stone marking his grave site. He was loved. The words became the rhythm of the tires beneath us, growing louder with each mile. By the time my mother pulled into her space and parked, I couldn’t wait for the engine to be turned off; I opened the door and stepped out to feel the solid pavement and to take a long breath of the cooling air. My mother asked Rosemary if she wanted to stay over, but our aunt said no, she’d just use the bathroom for a quick pee and then get on the road again. Harold Webb, the ex-priest, was waiting; but besides that (she didn’t have to say it), being with us had of course reminded her of our father, and she could only take so much. We all hugged her hard before she left, nobody wanting to let go.

  “She looks like Dad, a little,” Justine said, as we waved her off. “I never noticed it before.”

  Although it was not even five o’clock, our mother went straight to bed and turned on the Buffalo game. Justine and I took our usual places in the living room, but I couldn’t concentrate on my book and she kept flipping around channels on the remote until finally she switched the set off and announced, “I’m going for a walk.”

  “A walk?” I looked up from my page as if she had used a word in a foreign language. The Justine I had always known liked my father to drive her to the bus stop, at the end of our block, on his way to work in the morning. For her, exercise was a purely social activity. “You are?”

  “There’s too much crap in my head,” she said, grunting slightly as she bent over to put on her sneakers. “I have to get out of here.”

  “I’ll come with you.” I started to close my book, but she put a hand up like a crossing guard.

  “Ana, no. Okay? I just want to be alone.” She called Bill Buckner over, clipped on his leash, and stepped out into the dusk.

  When she didn’t come back in forty-five minutes, I went out after her. The air held the nip and shiver of Halloween. I wasn’t really afraid that something had happened, but I couldn’t feel safe until I knew where she was. I walked around the perimeter of the development, waiting to catch a flash of pale flesh in the twilight or the tune of Bill Buckner’s tags. I called Justine’s name, but softly, because the residents of Deer Run Gardens could be skittish about noise.

  I didn’t find her around the condo. Hesitating, I took a few steps into the woods behind the backyard, and heard the sound of ripping paper. Justine knelt at the foot of a tree, biting the head off a Hershey bar. She looked like a communicant, her face turned up to the sky; I thought of the girls in the Salem witch stories who made sacrifices with their teacher Tituba in the middle of the night.

  I hid behind a trunk and watched. When Justine finished the piece of chocolate in her mouth, she reached into a clothespin bag tied around a low branch and pulled out a Baby Ruth. As she tore into the candy, she let the wrappers fall around her like abruptly shedded skin. Bill Buckner sniffed at them. “No, boy,” Justine told him. “It makes you sick.” She snatched up the discarded wrappers and stuffed them back into the bag, which she pulled tight with the drawstring and wound three times around the branch. Then she began to stumble her way toward the path.

  I sneaked out of the woods and ran back to the condo. My mother had gotten up and put on her bathrobe and was making tomato soup and tea. “Where were you guys? I was starting to worry,” she said, eating a spoonful of soup straight out of the pan. She made a face and I could tell it had burned her tongue. “Goddammit. I have to get that stove guy over here.”

  “Just out for a walk,” I answered, though my mother seemed to have forgotten she’d asked me anything. On impulse I added, “It was Justine’s idea.”

  “Really?” My mother poured soup into an I♥N.Y. mug. “Good for her.” She blew vigorously across the red cream surface, swallowed a sip, and said, “You know I don’t want to nag her about losing the weight. But she can’t go on like this.”

  “She knows that,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I was right. I watched my mother crush a fistful of Saltines into her soup. “What about you?” The words came out before I even realized, and she looked up at me surprised. “Can you?”

  “What?” Her spoon remained poised over the bowl.

  “Go on like this.”

  “Like how?” But I could tell she didn’t really want me to answer.

  “Mom.” She wouldn’t look at me. Intently, she stirred the cracker crumbs around in the soup. “Mom.” I reached over to stop her hand from moving, but my own was shaking, and red soup spattered the table between us.

  “Ana, what’s wrong with you?” Her voice was sharp and she began reaching for napkins, but I caught her wrist so she couldn’t move.

  “What did Dad’s note say?”

  “I told you. I never read it.” She reached for the sponge and carefully wiped up the spilled soup.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Ana, I don’t know what you want from me.” My mother lifted the spoon of soup again to her mouth.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You don’t know?” Again I reached over to stop her hand, and this time I took hold hard of her wrist. “Mom, what’s wrong with you?” Behind me the door opened and I heard Justine come in, but I didn’t turn around. “What aren’t you telling us?” When she didn’t answer, I squeezed harder, and the skin in my fingers turned red. Although my mother winced, I did not release my grip.

  “Ana, stop it.” Justine dropped Bill’s leash and came over to the table, where she pulled at my arm. “Let go of her, goddammit!” My fingers fell away as our mother drew her arm close and began massaging her wrist.

  “Look,” she told us, pointing down at her skin, but we couldn’t see anything. “That’s going to leave a mark.”

  6. Human nature is upon you

  Q. What are the doldrums?

  — C.S., Elsmere

  A. A theoretical line—the heat equator—girdles the globe through its hottest points. On both sides of this shifting line lies the region known since sailing-ship days as the doldrums, but which meteorologists call “the inter-tropical convergence zone.” The air over the doldrums has very little horizontal movement; the sun’s blazing heat lifts it almost straight up.

  The week after our trip back to visit the graves, I went to the Delphi Public Library and took down the Albany-area phone book from the Resources shelf. Under “Physicians” I found the name I’d come across in my parents’ divorce file at the lawyer’s office: Geoffrey Zeldin, M.D.

  I called the number from the pay phone in the library lobby. When I got his machine, I used a fake name, because I was afraid that if I said who I really was, he might not have agreed to see me. I left a message saying that I’d come across his ad in the phone book. I said I was new to the area and was feeling depressed. It was a bit urgent; I hoped he could help. I gave my name as Clarissa Dalloway, knowing it was something of a risk but assuming that even if he did have time to read, it was a pile of psychology journals he kept on his nightstand and not the novels of Virginia Woolf.

  He called back the next morning. My mother had left for work and Justine was in the shower, and I stood over the machine, without picking up the phone, while he offered some appointment times. I listened to his message twice for evidence that he recogniz
ed my pseudonym, but his tone was annoyingly neutral; it gave nothing away. He said he was returning Ms. Dalloway’s call and he had the following hours available in the upcoming week; which, if any, could I make?

  I answered by leaving another message, and so the doctor and I had communicated, though not spoken a single direct word to each other, as I sat in the waiting room of his office the next day listening to a white-noise machine simulate air whishing. Or was it sounds of the sea? I held an old National Geographic open on my skirt-lap and pretended to leaf through it. I was early by twenty minutes, and there was no one else in the room. I arrived with time to spare because I wanted a chance to calm down, close my eyes, and prepare myself. I realized, sitting in the softest chair with both feet on the carpet, that I was also trying to understand something about my father, who had probably sat in this same chair dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of times. I pictured him counting the tiles in the ceiling, tapping his toes the requisite number of times against the swirl design on the rug to keep the worst from happening. I imagined him hoping that this doctor would have a cure.

  At 3:50, the door to the inside office opened and a middle-aged woman emerged, not looking at me as she wiped her eyes with a tissue that wasn’t doing the job because it was already soaked. She didn’t merely dab; she dug at the sockets as if to stanch bleeding from a wound. The doctor had followed her to the door, and he left it open to watch, surreptitiously, as she fled the outer office. Then he saw me looking at him through the crack in the door. “Do you always have that effect on women?” I said. If you had asked me then, I would have said I was trying to be funny—break the ice—but the truth was that I laughed to chase the fear clotted in my throat.

  The doctor seemed taken aback that I had glimpsed him in his sanctuary, let alone dared to address him in this casual, offhanded way. “I’ll be right with you,” he said, without a trace of a smile, and he closed the door between us, making sure it clicked.

  Well, fuck you too, I thought. No wonder my father killed himself. The person who was supposed to help him, to take care of him, was a humorless bastard without compassion or warmth. Who did these therapists think they were? I thought of the last time I had seen Nora Odoni. My mother and Justine had already left therapy (Mom told Nora she didn’t see the point, and Justine was afraid not to side with her), but I kept my appointment every week, not so much because it was helping as because I was afraid of what might happen if I didn’t. If I go to her office on Tuesdays at three o’clock, then nothing else bad can happen.

  My last appointment had been on a hot day in August, and the air conditioner in the Delphi Professional Building was on the blink. I sat in the chair opposite Nora and watched my foot in its sandal jiggle above the rug. “I just don’t see how he could do it,” I said without looking at her and feeling the words surge without my planning them. “I don’t understand why.”

  She looked at me for a moment as if considering whether to let me in on some ancient secret known only to the Greeks. Then she stood and reached to a high shelf above her desk. She brought down a glazed pot, like the one Pooh kept his honey in, which I’d never noticed up there before. It had the word ANSWERS engraved on the front.

  “Go ahead, take a look,” Nora said. The pot had a lid with a ceramic knob for lifting. I thought that maybe there were little pieces of paper inside, like the fortunes at the end of a Chinese meal; whichever one you picked held a special message intended only for you, a nugget of inspiration or advice. I didn’t want to play this game, whatever it was, but I felt that I didn’t have any choice. I didn’t want to hurt Nora’s feelings. Reluctantly, I raised the lid.

  But when I stuck my hand inside and reached my fingers around, I felt nothing except the shiny bottom of the pot. I tilted it toward me and saw that it was, indeed, empty. I remember so vividly the shock I felt that even recalling it makes me flush with shame. Nora seemed to be waiting for a reaction as I replaced the lid on the jar.

  “Okay, I get it,” I said. “There are no answers, right?” She nodded. “I’m completely humiliated,” I murmured. I was also angry, but I couldn’t say that yet.

  “It’s not meant to humiliate you.” She looked surprised by my response, but it was too late to make any difference. When she took my check that day I don’t think she understood how she had failed me, or that I would not be coming back.

  Remembering this in the waiting room of Geoffrey Zeldin’s office, I put my magazine aside and started to stand, thinking I would just leave and the hell with it, when the doctor’s door opened again. This time he stepped outside to speak to me, extending a hand as he said, “Clarissa Dalloway?” He was a big man, built like a barrel with a beard. He did not precede me into his office, but waited for me to enter first. He must have been familiar with this routine—and with the fact that, his stomach protruding as it did, two people could not fit in the doorway at one time; he stepped aside as I passed by him, gesturing forward with a thick-fingered, open hand. He smelled like coffee but also like the peppermint candy he must have been sucking to mask his coffee breath. Because I was looking at the floor when I went by him, I saw that the hem was falling out of one pant leg, and that his shoe heels were worn down at the sole.

  But he also wore a vest and a tie, and I appreciated this. It suggested that he took his work seriously, and whatever my father had suffered, it was serious. Dr. Zeldin indicated a chair and I took extra seconds to settle myself in it by arranging and then smoothing my skirt. When I finally looked up and met his eye, imagining that he might have been rummaging for a notepad or writing the date on a fresh page, I saw that instead he had been watching me, waiting. I blushed, and across the space between us I felt that he was trying to place where he’d seen me before.

  “So. Ms. Dalloway.” He nodded a bit in my direction. His voice startled me; I was accustomed to Nora’s habit of silence in opening a session. “Maybe you can start by telling me something about why you’re here.” His eyes narrowed behind their wire-rimmed glasses and I searched them for scrutiny, but to my confusion I saw invitation instead.

  I looked away from him again. His office was neat but dusty; the sun illuminated a fine layer on the surface of the desk. My eyes settled on the nubby fabric of my chair arm, and I began to pick at it. I shrugged, wanting to keep my shoulders raised in protection—though against what, I wasn’t sure. “Well,” I said. “I’m having some trouble, I guess.” Suddenly, I so regretted having used a fictional name that the sensation of shame slithered through me in a nausea I barely contained. Not for my own sake; but it would have embarrassed my father, I knew, to have me mocking the doctor he’d sought out to save his life. I blurted, “My name’s not Clarissa Dalloway.”

  I could see he wasn’t surprised. “Ah,” he said, giving the nod again. “I thought it was possible your parents had named you after the character in Virginia Woolf’s book. Or that you’d taken the name yourself. Then again, it also occurred to me that you might be using a pseudonym, for some reason.” He was making a tower with his fingertips, each pressed against its partner on the opposite hand.

  “I guess that’s how you could say it. A pseudonym.” Now I took a closer look around the office. A bookcase lined the far wall, and without being obvious about it, I squinted to make out some of the titles. The Bonfire of the Vanities snuggled in next to Look Homeward, Angel. So this man also alphabetized his books by author; was that one of the reasons my father had chosen him? Just before I looked away from the Ws, Mrs. Dalloway on a slim book-spine caught my eye. “So you have read the book?” I asked.

  “A long time ago. But yes.” He had not followed my gaze toward the shelves, but kept his eyes on me. Then, carefully, as if he weren’t quite sure he was doing the right thing but wanted to follow an impulse, he recited, “She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”

  The words cleaved the air between us. They had struck me hard enough to force me back in my seat. “Where did that come from?” I asked. />
  “Mrs. Dalloway.”

  “I know that. But did it just pop into your head?” My voice scaled an octave but I was helpless to call it back.

  “Actually, no.” Dr. Zeldin shifted slightly in his chair to redistribute his bulk. “I knew someone—a patient of mine, in fact—who liked to quote that line.”

  I took in too much air on my next breath and had to cough as I exhaled. I knew who the patient was, and now I realized that the doctor knew that I knew. “Tom Dolan is my father,” I said.

  This time it was Dr. Zeldin who paused before speaking. I wanted to believe that he was overcome by emotion at the sound of my father’s name, but a part of me suspected that he was just buying time until he figured out what to say. “I’m sorry,” he told me. “Of course he is. I’m sorry.” Even in my electrified state, I noticed that he used the present tense, as I had. And instinctively I knew that he was not adjusting his language to mirror mine. My father existed in that room; he was alive between us, and so we referred to him as if he might be outside parking the car or leafing through Prevention magazine in the waiting room.

  “What are you sorry for?”

  Dr. Zeldin looked surprised, as if I shouldn’t have had to ask. “I’m sorry for a lot,” he told me after a moment, and I sensed that while he struggled to maintain the demeanor of a professional, he was also acknowledging that in this room we were merely two human beings trying to understand the same thing. “What comes to me is ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ but that’s what people always say when somebody dies. I don’t want you to think I’m just mouthing a formality. But I mean it. I know what you lost. Who you lost. I mean, in the case of your father. I never met Meggy.” At the mention of my sister’s name, he paused again, seeming to realize that he and I hadn’t yet been officially introduced. “You are Anastasia?”