by Molly Giles
The trouble with total recall was that it worked like a charm once it got going. Francis tapped an unlit cigarette and clicked his tongue against the dry roof of his mouth as the first scene from the night before began to play out, followed, a little more nimbly, by the next, then the next, until the whole evening was spread before him like a bad hand of cards.
It had started with a toast. To Morpheus, God of Sleep. He and Kay had stood in the kitchen, clicked goblets, and drained their glasses. Then they had a cigarette together. Last time, Kay had said. She was quitting. As well she should. Then they said good night, her breath on his cheek, his hand patting her shoulder, one-two, one-two, and then she remembered some toy of Nicky’s she’d left in Ida’s studio so she went in to get it. And didn’t come back. Passed out on the cot in there, he’d decided, which was probably a good place for her, safer than driving home. He’d had a few more cigarettes and gone to bed himself.
And then?
“Daddy?” The soft, wounded, curious voice. The hand on the back of his head as he hunched in the dark by the side of the bed. “Daddy, are you all right? What’s the matter? What’s wrong? Daddy, are you crying?”
Crying? No. Francis lit the cigarette at last and inhaled. He had not been crying. Kay should have stayed in the studio. She had no business sneaking into his bedroom and catching him off guard, doubled over himself. She thought he was grieving. He had not been grieving. He had been having some sad, rigorous drug-induced sex with himself and it was no business of anyone’s, certainly not of his grown daughter’s, if he did it stone drunk fallen off the side of the bed whimpering like a wounded wolf. He did not need her sympathy. He did not need her understanding. The only thing he needed was his privacy. Whatever happened to his privacy? He shuddered, remembering the heavy surge of her body against him as she tried to raise him from the floor, her intense, stricken whispers. “Daddy, poor Daddy,” she’d said. “Don’t feel bad, I’m here, don’t worry, we’ll make it, we’re going to be all right.” Her tears, tangled hair, warm breath on his bare skin as she tried to lift him onto the bed. He’d had to contort like a yogi to conceal his erection and he still wasn’t sure what she’d seen and what she had not. It would serve her right to see her old dad buck naked and coming on himself but it was not the way he would choose to be remembered. He had always been so careful.
So he’d pushed her.
He shouldn’t have.
But he’d always pushed people who pushed him. You had to fight for your space in this world. You had to fight for your life. Ida knew that. Why didn’t Kay?
He’d said, “For God’s sake, get away,” and he’d pushed her, hard, and she’d flown back, no resistance, and crashed into the vanity. She hit her head on the edge, her shoulder on a drawer. He’d had to haul her up and lay her flat, passed out on the bed. He’d checked her eyes for reflexes, felt her pulse. And, yes, he’d looked at her. The raincoat she’d been wearing as a bathrobe had fallen open and her woman’s body, with its full white breasts and its pelt of dark curls, lay open like a question mark. Not the baby he’d diapered when Ida forgot. Not Ida herself. Someone new. He’d started to cover her, and then damn if her arms didn’t come up and if she didn’t octopus around him and drag him down, off balance, on top of her. “Daddy,” she’d said. “Oh Daddy.”
And he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything but lie there, stirred, stricken, and suffocating, not moving until he was sure she was talking in her sleep. And then he’d jumped back like a man on fire. Grabbed some clothes. Grabbed some keys. Left.
So what had he done?
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
Francis watched as light filled the car, limning his knuckles. The frost had crushed to a thin diamond jam along the sides of the windshield. He could feel the heat of the winter sun on his face, its bright bite on his tired eyes. He pulled into a motel somewhere near Vegas, fell into bed, and slept without dreaming for eleven hours. When he woke, he showered, went out to breakfast, found a shopping mall, bought some jeans, a sweater, a jacket and six pairs of wool socks, and went into a casino to try his luck. After he’d won the first thousand dollars he remembered the dog and went to a pay phone to ask Kay to feed her. If she wants me to say I’m sorry for pushing her, he thought, I will. I should not have pushed her. As for the rest of it—she should not have pushed me.
“Hey,” he said when she picked up the phone. “Kay.”
“Dad?” That hesitant voice. “Are you all right? Where are you? We’ve been worried.”
“About me? Waste of time. It’s the dog I’m worried about. When I left she was still at the house.”
“Coco’s here, with me. I brought her home. Dad …?”
“Well good. Guess there’s no problem then. You know how to feed her.”
“Yes. Dad … did something happen last night?”
“Wunnerful, wunnerful. See you when I get back then. Whenever that is. Toodle.”
That was easy, he thought, returning to the casino. Winning the next thousand was going to be the challenge.
The dog followed Kay everywhere, nervous, cringing, and it was the dog, Kay explained, who needed therapy. “Much more than me,” she said. “I.”
Dr. Tamar straightened her skirt and crossed her legs. “Why do you need therapy?” Dr. Tamar asked.
“I told you.” Kay was wringing her hands again but it was all right here, she reasoned, this was a place where many people must weep and tear their hair. Dr. Tamar’s office was a small dim cubicle in a large medical complex; it was painted in solid beiges and tans, with a leather couch Kay wouldn’t go near and a butternut-colored chair with armrests she would not lower her arms onto. A crazy person had sat here an hour before she came in and another would be sitting here an hour after she left and it was possible that they all left crazy germs which could be contagious. She untwisted her hands, floated her palms a careful half-inch above her lap, and stared at a calendar on the wall that showed a desert scene, endless sand dunes with a camel trudging across it. She noticed the date. Ten days ago, Ida had still been alive.
“Tell me again.”
“I killed my mother. And I slept with my father.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
“So what’s the problem? That you did these things or that you don’t know what you did?”
Kay shifted in the chair. Dr. Tamar didn’t like her. That was all right, she didn’t like Dr. Tamar. How could Zabeth have recommended her? She was a plain, brainy-looking middle-aged woman in a pin-striped business suit. Her sharp manner made her seem more like a criminal lawyer than a confidante. This is how I was raised, Kay thought, some adult mocking me in a snotty voice. Transference should be no problem here.
“Have you ever been in therapy before?”
“No. I’ve never been well enough to see a therapist.”
“Humor?”
“But I’ve always wanted to see a therapist.”
“Why?”
Kay shrugged. The word “why,” as always, worked as an instant eraser, leaving her mind smudged and clouded but essentially empty. Dr. Tamar leaned forward. “Let’s go back and review what you’ve already told me. First: Do you have any physical evidence to support your verdict against yourself? Did the doctor say your mother died of an overdose?”
“No.”
“And as for what you think may have happened with your father. You say you blacked out. Did you perceive signs of penile penetration when you came to? Any soreness or signs of lubrication? Any semen? On your clothes, on your skin, in your vagina?”
“No.” Kay bit back tears and looked down at her hand, automatically moving to twist the sapphire. But the ring was not there. She’d left it at home, convinced that if she wore it to Dr. Tamar’s it would relay the interview straight to Ida in the heavens like some surreal transmitter. “But my mother had this hallucination this would happen.”
“You think you enacted your mother’s fantasy.”
&
nbsp; Kay could see how crazy the words were when the psychiatrist said them, but they were true, weren’t they? Ida had known she and Francis could kill and then copulate. She had called them demons.
“What about your fantasies,” Dr. Tamar pursued. “Is having sex with your father on your mother’s deathbed one of them?”
“Oh no. That’s not what I want.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know. The usual. Love.”
“You want your father to love you.”
“Yes.”
“But not like a lover?”
“No!”
“Not like a husband?”
“No, no, no. Although, actually, my husband isn’t much of a lover either.” She stopped. She had not come here to talk about Neal. She did not know how to talk about him. He had been subdued and tender ever since she had driven home in a stunned panic from her father’s house at three in the morning. He had rubbed the back of her neck as she bent over the toilet, throwing up the last of the Stuff. He had held her as she’d shivered all night. He had accepted her excuse—flu—with the same easy incuriosity he probably wished she’d show him.
“You know the easiest way to find out what happened,” Dr. Tamar said, “is just to ask your father.”
“He’s not that easy to talk to.”
“No. He doesn’t sound like it.” Dr. Tamar made a note. Kay sank further into the nut-colored chair, brought a thumb to her lips, bit down on the cuticle, and closed her eyes. For the thousandth time she tried to remember what happened that night, and for the thousandth time, she failed. “I’m really in bad shape,” she said, “if it’s all in my head.”
“Oh I don’t think it’s all in your head. What interests me is the way you appropriated what was in your mother’s head—her worst nightmare—and botched it. This overdose certainly sounds botched. Your mother was already in a coma and yet she lived another ten hours after you and your father administered the ‘extra Stuff,’ as you called it, so it doesn’t sound as if it had anything to do with her actual death. It didn’t seem to hurt her or help her. As for the incest: that doesn’t make sense either. Your father and you seem to have a lot of issues but lust isn’t one of them. For now, what I’d like you to do is stop drinking.”
Kay nodded. Okay. That was easy enough. She’d been meaning to anyway, and except for that half-bottle of Chablis last night, practically had. “Anything else?”
“That’s all. Just quit drinking. And go to an AA meeting tonight. I’ll see you next week.”
“Next week? You think I should come back?”
“Of course. Don’t you think you’re worth it?”
“If I thought I was worth it I wouldn’t be here,” Kay said.
Dr. Tamar tapped a pencil against her lips. “Do you know who you remind me of? Someone from mythology. He killed one parent, married another, and blinded himself. Do you know who I mean?”
Kay nodded. “A cat I used to have. Eddy Puss.”
“Humor again?” Dr. Tamar handed Kay an appointment slip and the next minute Kay was out on the street, buttoning her coat as she hurried head-down through the rain toward the Lincoln. She coaxed Coco out from behind the steering wheel where she had curled shivering and pushed her into the passenger seat. She turned the key and looked up to see a blond woman in a wheelchair motoring into another medical office, her proud head and the set of her hands over the controls so like Ida’s she almost drove after her.
“I like you just the way you are.” That’s what Mister Rogers was saying as she walked in the front door. Nicky looked up from the television set with the pleasant masked expression that meant he was hiding something—he’d probably been watching war robot cartoons until he heard her drive up. She paid the sitter, then carried the groceries into the kitchen, Coco close to her heels. It was not until she set the bags down that she noticed the letter from Francis among the other pieces of mail on the table. She recognized the small square print at once. Oh-oh, she thought. He couldn’t tell me what happened on the phone. But he’s going to tell me now. She reached for the last bottle of red wine in the cupboard, remembered her promise to Dr. Tamar, and poured herself a glass of water instead. She was trembling as she opened the freezer and groped through the mysterious agars Neal kept in there, looking for a cigarette, but there weren’t any. No help for it—she would have to take her father’s letter straight.
She pulled a chair to the kitchen table and sat down. She tried to think if she had ever received a letter from Francis before. At any of the fat camps she had been sent to in the summers? No. At Tanglewood, after she won that music scholarship in high school? No. At the conservatory, that brief year? No. Never with Biff or in the years since. Ida used to track her down wherever she went—a phone call to every safe house she fled to in her twenties, a letter in every mailbox. Come home, I’m sick again, I need you. But Francis? Never. This is a first, Kay thought. She reached for the envelope and drew it toward her. It was date-stamped four days ago, mailed from Nevada—what was he doing in Nevada? Just open it, she thought.
She did. A check for $10,000 fell out.
And nothing else.
Without taking her eyes off the check she reached for the phone and dialed her brother.
“Isn’t it incredible?” Victor’s voice was warm and young and happy. “Stacy just brought mine in from the mailbox.”
“But what is it?”
“It’s Mom’s inheritance, Kay. I can’t believe it’s so much and he got it to us so fast. This is a miracle. It solves all my problems.”
That was what Neal said too, when he walked in, heels dragging, lunch box in his hand like a schoolboy’s. “Oh babe!” His face broke into the old lines of radiance she remembered from their courtship. “We’re saved!”
“From what?”
“For a while, anyway. Man oh man. And to think this came from Francis. I never thought … I take back everything I ever thought about your dad. This is a lifesaver, Kay, believe me.”
Kay watched him, pleased but wary.
“We need to celebrate,” Neal said. “Where’s that French champagne?”
“Still in the refrigerator where it’s been for the last six years.”
“This is the time to open it if ever there was.”
“I’ll join you in a toast. But I can’t drink. I have to go to an AA meeting tonight. I saw a psychiatrist today and—”
“You don’t need a psychiatrist.” Neal drew her to him, and suddenly she found herself once again back in the warm bony hollow of his chest, that old sanctuary. “You just need me to stop being such a prick.”
“Hey,” Kay breathed. “Yeah.” She jabbed him lightly in the ribs. “I do.”
“Well I’m going to change, babe, I promise. This money helps so much. I can’t tell you. I was afraid we were going to have to sell your mother’s ring.”
“We?” Kay lifted her head, alert. The money—well, that was all right—she’d already decided Neal could have the money. But the ring was hers. And she’d never sell it. Again her finger curled to her pinky, found it bare, and again she reminded herself: the ring is on the bathroom counter.
But it wasn’t. She looked for it after dinner, on her way to the AA meeting. There was nothing on the counter but their toothbrushes, and nothing on the dresser but a handful of change and Neal’s comb, which she absently ran through her hair and dropped into her purse. I probably put the ring in with the rest of Mom’s jewels, she thought. Which meant that they were either tucked into her piano bench or lodged behind the space in the window seat or hidden inside a Tupperware container of turtle beans.
I’ll check when I come back, she told herself, for already, despite her hurry, she was late for the AA meeting. It was hard to leave Neal, who was still glowing, sitting in the living room with the television off and Francis’s check propped before him, working out figures in a notebook with a smile on his face, and it was hard to leave Nicky, who was having a dinosaur war in the bath. It wa
s even hard to leave Coco, who had scrambled to her toes at the sight of the car keys and had to be locked, yowling, inside. “I really don’t want to go to this meeting,” Kay confessed.
“Then don’t,” Nicky called in his clear and reasonable voice.
“What meeting?” Neal said, not looking up.
She went.
The meeting was held in the same church where her concert had been held last November. Kay slipped into a seat near the door. Tonight was an all-woman’s session, and she recognized another mother from Nicky’s school and a checker from the supermarket. This is where I first met Zabeth, she thought, and she looked around, hopeful, as a few more latecomers came in, but no one tonight had Zabeth’s style; these were just normal, tired, after-work women: alcoholics—all of them. What am I doing here? Kay thought. She felt the same spasm of revulsion she had felt earlier in Dr. Tamar’s office, staring at the depressing calendar. This is no place for me. Bad as I am, I’m too good for this. She glimpsed a cap of silky blond hair in the front row and caught her breath, but the woman who turned in profile was older than Ida. And anyway, Ida wouldn’t be caught dead at an AA meeting.
Kay got up and left.
She half-expected someone to stop her, to yell “Halt! Seize her!” but no one did. Two women smoking in the parking lot kept talking as she passed. She sat in the car listening to Bach until her heart slowed down. I did the right thing, she told herself. I can quit drinking without any smug, sanctimonious, twelve-step program full of strangers telling me how sick I am. And I don’t need therapy either. I already know how sick I am. She started home but halfway there she veered and turned off toward Charles Lichtman’s house. She parked and watched the lights in his studio for an hour. You never knew. He could come out, cross the street directly to her, open the door and say, Come here, dear Kay. Come in. Come home.
Neal was asleep on the couch when she walked in the door an hour later, same as always, though there was a faint smile on his face and he did not groan when she woke him and sent him shuffling off to the bedroom. Nicky was asleep too, but with a piece of bread and peanut butter in his hand, and as she bent to kiss him she got a whiff of his unbrushed teeth. She let the dog out of the music room—hadn’t anyone heard her whimpering?—and cleaned up the kitchen before starting to look for the ring.
