The Writing Circle

by Corinne Demas

  “My bride,” he said.

  “Did I make any promises last night?” asked Nancy.

  “You sure did,” said Oates.

  “Maybe it was like one of those drugs they give you—you say things but have no memory of it the next day.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Oates.

  She untied her bathrobe and pushed up his T-shirt so she could nuzzle against him, her skin against his skin.

  “And you’ll love me still, even after we’re married?” she asked.

  “I love you now, and I’ll love you then,” he said.

  “It’s probably too early to call Aliki, don’t you think?”

  Oates looked up at the clock and then at Nancy. “We could have breakfast first,” he said. “But I bet Aliki won’t mind being woken up for this.” Oates gave the eggs a last prod, covered the pan, and turned off the stove.

  “Let’s call her right now.”

  Aliki’s voice was full of sleep, but when Nancy said, “We’ve got some news for you,” she immediately perked up. “Hooray!” she shouted. “It’s about time. Put Oates on.”

  “I’m on,” said Oates. “It’s the speakerphone.”

  “How did you finally persuade Mom to come to her senses?” asked Aliki.

  “There was no persuasion necessary,” said Nancy. “It’s just that it seemed the right time.”

  “At last!” said Aliki.

  “So you’re happy for us?” asked Nancy.

  “Duh,” said Aliki.

  There were other people to call with the news. But that could wait till after breakfast. Oates put the eggs on the plates, and Nancy got the toast. They sat across from each other, and Nancy rested the soles of her feet on top of Oates’s warm feet. When she was a little girl, she’d waltzed with her father at a cousin’s wedding reception, with her feet (black patent-leather shoes) on top of his feet. How they’d flown around the room! She hadn’t had to know the steps, all she had to do was keep her balance, keep from sliding off.

  The breakfast table was beside the window, and the sun caught the facets of the glass butter dish, setting them aglow. The butter on the toast melted in puddles, the shape of continents. The minute hand on the clock clicked from one designated minute to the next. It would go on like that all hour, all day. Forever. This is what happiness is, thought Nancy. And while so much of what she thought and felt went into her writing, she knew she’d never make use of this moment. It was hers to be remembered, hers alone.

  LATER IN THE DAY Oates was sprawled on the sofa in the den, eating a cinnamon bun and reading the “Week in Review” section of the Sunday New York Times. The rest of the paper was spread out on the floor beside him. A piece of gummy walnut was stuck to the corner of his lip. He nabbed it with his tongue.

  “I feel guilty leaving you this afternoon,” Nancy told him. “You’ve been back only a day.”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Oates. “I rarely have the house to myself. I’ll putter to my heart’s content.”

  “I don’t have to go,” said Nancy. “It’s Sunday. We should be spending it together.” The room was all sunshine now. It smelled of coffee and morning.

  “Go,” said Oates. He looked up over the top of his glasses at her. “I know you’ve been worrying about reading anything to them, sweetheart, but believe me, they’ll love your work.”

  “They’ll shred my chapter,” said Nancy.

  “I doubt it,” said Oates, but Nancy interrupted him.

  “And then I’ll lose heart in the entire project,” she said.

  “You’re not going to lose heart in your book, Nancy. You believe in it. I believe in it.”

  “I don’t have to be doing this,” said Nancy. “I can call Bernard and tell him I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Nancy. Just go,” said Oates. “Have fun at your Leo Party, or whatever it is they call themselves.”

  “The Leopardi Circle,” said Nancy. “Named for a famous early-nineteenth-century Italian poet and philosopher.”

  “Oops,” said Oates. “I never heard of him. Do you want to reconsider what you promised last night?”

  Nancy bent to kiss him. “It’s all right, darling,” she said. “I had to look him up, myself. I’m sure I shocked Bernard when I displayed my ignorance, but he was uncharacteristically nonjudgmental.”

  Nancy straightened the waistband of her long, grey skirt. “How do I look?” she asked.

  “Fine,” said Oates.

  “You don’t think I’m too dressed up?”

  “You look fine.”

  Nancy bent down again to kiss him good-bye. “Why do you put up with me?” she asked.

  “I can’t imagine,” said Oates.

  “Still want to marry me?”

  “What do you think?” asked Oates, and he pulled her down again for another kiss.

  NANCY’S FATHER graded his students’ papers at the table in the middle of the kitchen. He had a desk—a mahogany desk with its green leather top protected by a piece of glass—but Nancy couldn’t recall him ever sitting there. The desk had come from the office of his father, a cardiologist, and Nancy wondered later if that was the reason it went unused. Nancy liked having her father work in the kitchen, his glasses perched cockeyed on his face, an extra red pencil tucked behind his ear. He was part of the hum of the family: her mother stirring lentil soup on the stove, her little brother, Nick, racing his Matchbox cars along the floorboards, and she reading on the old sofa under the window. When her father needed his pencil sharpened, she’d jump up to do it. He had a pencil sharpener in a clear plastic case, so she could watch the red-tipped curls of wood peel off the pencil as she turned it against the blade.

  When Nancy was little she’d been told that her grandfather, Papou, was a heart doctor, and even when she was old enough to know better, she still connected him with the paper hearts of valentines. She understood he was eminent because he treated the most important organ of the body, the one that determined life. But even so, what he did seemed removed from people. He attended to a particular part of the human body, not to the person herself. He was not someone you went to when you were throwing up or had a fever or broke out in hives. When she got a splinter at the boardwalk on the beach, it was her grandmother who removed it. And when she had to have surgery on the arm she broke falling off a horse, her Papou came to her hospital room carrying a stuffed bear. He wasn’t wearing a white doctor’s coat; he looked like any visitor.

  Nancy’s father loved his students. Not as much as he loved his own children, but sometimes, Nancy felt, almost as much. Not in a gushy way, like her own fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. O’Reilly, a cooer, but in a serious, almost reverent way. Every child, even the most obdurate of the boys, was worthy of his infinite patience, of his kindness. He worked tirelessly for them, but he wasn’t one of the popular teachers, the cool ones who went by their first names and gave kids high fives in the hallway. In time, Nancy believed now, his students would all appreciate him in retrospect. She’d never been assigned to her father’s class, and she avoided running into him at school as much as possible. At school she aimed to be invisible. Once she had been in the toilet stall when she overheard two girls in his class complaining about a paper they’d just gotten back.

  “He took off five points just because I didn’t do the outline right,” said one girl. “He’s so unfair!”

  “Yeah,” said the other girl.

  Nancy wanted to rush out at them. Her father was never unfair. He was the fairest person in the world. She waited in the stall until they had left the bathroom, afraid to flush, afraid to let them know she had been in there, her hands pressed against the grey marble.

  Nancy dreaded anyone thinking she got special treatment because her father taught at her school, and she was an obsessively conscientious student to dispel any accusation of favoritism. Even in high school and in college, where her father could have had no possible influence, even years after he retired, she was still burdened by a little fear that she had to do
everything right, that the A she got (and she usually did get A’s) had to be a grade she had truly earned. It was not just that she was worried she’d be accused of having an unfair advantage. It was that secretly she was worried that perhaps she did have one.

  Nick, two years younger, never shared these worries. He hated to read and was a screwup in school, though he excelled at standardized tests. As an adult he’d made a success of himself in Silicon Valley. He’d redeemed himself, but their father hadn’t lived to see that redemption. Yet their father hadn’t worried over Nick. He had trusted that Nick, once mature, would thrive.

  It was clear to Nancy, though it was never spoken of directly, that her father’s career choice was a disappointment to his parents. It was as if they had expected him to do something more with himself, as if he was meant for better things than to minister to the learning of eleven-year-olds. Nancy’s grandmother spoke, always hopefully, as if Nancy’s father were in some temporary job and would then move on to something better.

  “There’s an opening for principal in our district,” Nancy remembered her grandmother saying, but her father just shook his head gently and placed his hand on her shoulder. “Thanks, Ma,” he said, nothing more. Nancy’s grandmother let out an exaggerated sigh that conveyed in its exhale an entire litany of disappointment and resignation.

  Nancy’s mother was a teacher, too, an art teacher, but that wasn’t seen to be a disappointment to her parents. Nancy wasn’t sure if that’s because expectations were different if you were a woman or if it was because her mother’s family wasn’t Greek. But while her father was content with what he did, in fact treated it like a calling, teaching seemed a job Nancy’s mother had settled for. There was a restlessness about her. She wanted something more than teaching—she wanted a career as an artist. She blamed the failure of her career on fashion, on the politics of the art community, but certainly not on her talent, which she believed in always, even now, when she lived in a Florida condominium and never put it into practice. She constantly bemoaned the limited resources the public school put into art and the fact that her program was considered dispensable. In her last years teaching, her art room was turned into a classroom to deal with overcrowding. She was reduced to a peripatetic status, all of her supplies housed in a cart.

  “Like a hotel maid,” she complained.

  Nancy could picture her aggrieved mother, cart in front of her, steaming through the Middlebrook Elementary School hallways, colored markers and jars of poster paint flying off in her wake.

  Nancy’s father believed in her mother’s art career as much as she did. He made over the breezeway into a studio. He took Nancy and Nick off to excursions on weekends so Nancy’s mother could have undisturbed time. She worked in silverpoint pencil, meticulous grey drawings of things that were themselves ordinary but that were transformed, that took on a luminescence. A drawing of simple oak leaf gall would take her months to complete. She occasionally showed her work, occasionally sold a few drawings, but she would never be reimbursed for all the hours she put into those infinite, hair-fine lines. She chose not to draw lovely things—which might have been more popular—but instead those with asymmetry and flaws. She scorned commissions. In her drawings of people, even those she loved, everything was slightly distorted—in the way a bad snapshot changes things. She drew Nick with a scowl, Nancy’s hair unwashed. It was a portrait of how you feared you might look, rather than a portrait of what you wanted to look like. And although Nancy was actually quite pretty, she never thought of herself as such, and her mother’s drawings of her only confirmed this.

  With her father, Nancy never felt it mattered what she looked like. He just wanted to know what she thought. Her father never cared about what anything looked like. Nancy’s mother cared about shape. She cared about line. She cared about shadow and light. Nancy’s father cared about how things worked. He cared about the why.

  . . .

  FICTION, NANCY THOUGHT, was like a block of ice, created out of nothing more than water, and inside was a pebble, which was the real story, the truth that everything was built up around. If the ice melted, you’d have that left. In the novel she was writing, the true little story, the nugget within the fiction, came from a moment in a conversation with her father, their last long car trip together before he died.

  He’d picked her up at the airport when she came home for Christmas her second year in graduate school. It was raining, and the side windows of the car were steamed up, insulating them from the outside world. The car felt snug and private. Only in a car, when something else was being accomplished—the moving from one place to another—was it possible to talk about difficult things. If you sat down face-to-face in a room, it didn’t happen. Perhaps it was the soothing motion. Or the fact that they weren’t looking at each other, that her father was looking forward, that all she saw of him was his profile, the right half his face.

  They’d been on the road for half an hour before she steered the conversation to what she had planned to tell him. It was easier to bring something up to her father alone than tell both her parents at once, and he’d always been the one she could confide in, and the one whose judgment she trusted. She took in a breath, then started talking, quickly, before she could think about it. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “I decided I’m not going to continue in the program after this year.”

  “Oh,” said Nancy’s father. “When did this happen?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it since the start of the semester.”

  “Michigan’s not the place for you?”

  “It’s not the university. I just don’t want to do a Ph.D. I’ll stay through spring semester since I have my teaching fellowship, but that’s it.”

  “You don’t like math anymore?”

  “It’s not that—”

  “You’re not giving up on it because it’s getting hard?”

  “No. Actually, it’s not really hard. I’m good at it, Daddy.” She looked at him, and he took his eyes off the road to turn towards her full face. “It’s just that it’s not what I want to be doing with my life.”

  “I see,” he said. Then he asked, “Is there something else you’d rather be doing?”

  “I’d like to write.”

  He didn’t speak right away. “Do you have something in particular you’d like write?”

  “A novel.” And then, when he didn’t say anything, she added, “I’m not sure what it’s about yet, but there are some characters I began writing about in my short story course in college. I want to do more with them.” She hesitated for a moment, then said, quickly, “I’m applying to MFA programs.”

  He didn’t respond right away.

  “Is that okay?” she asked.

  “Of course it’s okay.”

  “Mom won’t be happy.”

  “It’s not her decision,” said Nancy’s father. “It’s yours.”

  Nancy cleared a small porthole on the window so she could look out. They were driving on an overpass over a river, but the gorge was thick with mist, and she knew a river curled below only because she’d seen it before.

  “Was being a doctor Yiya and Papou’s decision? Is that why you weren’t happy with it?” she asked.

  “No, it was my decision,” said her father. “They’d always hoped I’d be a doctor—but they didn’t push me; I was the one who pushed myself. I was so uncertain of what I myself wanted, it was easy to be guided by their certainty, by what they wanted for me.”

  “So when did you realize you wanted to do something else?”

  “It wasn’t until I was actually in a practice. It was all right being pre-med in college. I hated medical school, but I managed to get through it, and I got through my residency. And after all that work, it made sense to just keep going. So I did.”

  And then he told her about the dead baby. About the night that his life changed. She’d never heard anything about it before. For most of her childhood she’d had only a vague idea that sometime in his past her father h
ad had a different job, that when he’d been young, before he married her mother, he’d been a doctor. It wasn’t discussed. All she knew was that being a doctor hadn’t suited him.

  She didn’t know then that she would ever write about it. She didn’t file it away thinking: someday I’ll use this, there’s a novel here. She didn’t know then she would ever write about her father. All she knew then was that her father had told her something about himself that she had never guessed at, that he had revealed something that illuminated so much of him, the way he was.

  “You left medicine because you’d made a mistake,” she said. “But don’t a lot of doctors make a mistake sometime in their career, especially when they’re young?”

  “Oh no,” said her father. “That wasn’t it at all. I hadn’t made a mistake. I could have lived with that. I could, eventually, have forgiven myself if it had been my fault. It might even have made me a better doctor. I was young and would have learned from it. Its grief could have served me. No, it was that it was not my fault, it was the fault of medicine itself. The baby could not have been saved. And that’s why I left.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Nancy. “If it wasn’t your fault—”

  “I was up against something too big. I felt powerless. I realized there would be conditions—not just that one—that could never be cured. Babies would die. People would suffer. And even the most brilliant, the most diligent, even the luckiest doctor could not save them.” His voice rose on the word luckiest.

  He paused for a moment. His voice was softer now. “We think we know so much about the human body, but we know so little. Most of it is a mystery, still. I couldn’t spend my life in a profession where I toiled against such odds.”

  She understood then why he was the kind of teacher he was. Why he’d gone off each day with the leather satchel with the repaired handle, his head not square over his shoulders but nosing forward, eager at the prospect of what lay ahead. Why, when he had settled at the kitchen table with a pile of yellow test papers before him, he ruffled through them and straightened the pile like a cardplayer handling a deck of cards, pushed the sleeves of his plaid shirt up on his wrists, took a sip of coffee, and gave a little grunt of pleasure at the enterprise that awaited him. Why he had beamed when the clerk at the hardware store who got up on the ladder to reach a dehumidifier for them turned out to be a former student, and said, “Hey, Mr. Markopolis, great to see you!”