An Uncommon Education (28 page)

Almost immediately I got jostled to the side and stood there, watching. I wondered if Keigo and Jun would show up again, if I could really get away with anything with him, given Jun. I had no ideas about the rules of her family, if she would care about such a thing. I wondered what it would be like to be touched by someone, intentionally. I felt myself grow distracted, thinking about it.

“You know, Shakespeare himself loved to wear masks,” a voice said beside me. “But you probably already knew that.”

I turned to see Reagan staring back at me. “That’s creepy,” I breathed.

He smiled. Again, just the corners of the mouth. It was a nice smile, I thought, an inviting smile. I moved closer to it. He stopped smiling, leaned forward, and kissed me, fluidly, shocking me into kissing him back before I could think of anything else to do. I leaned into him, into the curves of his mouth, doubt only a distant voice.
Had he read my mind?
Fear rose in my stomach. The first person I was kissing since Teddy was probably a rapist disguised as Ronald Reagan.

I grabbed the back of his head and pulled him into me, surprising us both. Maybe it didn’t matter if Keigo was there. Maybe I was just wanting a warm body, any warm body at all.

“Take off the mask,” I whispered.

“No,” he whispered back, his voice now a little hoarse. He broke away from me for just a second. “Meet me in the back,” he said. He stood up suddenly and walked with surprising confidence through the crowd, opening the greenroom doors on the south end of the room and closing them behind him. I downed the rest of my drink and followed him.

It was cold in there, but I could just barely feel it with the alcohol rushing through me. I began to think I shouldn’t have followed him in.

“You shouldn’t follow strangers into a dark room,” he muttered, taking my hand. All of a sudden he seemed shy, too.

I had to stand on my toes to reach his lips. “Who are you?” He kissed me, quieting me. I reached my hands into his shirt, but he pulled them back down.

“No,” he said, his voice breaking, just above his whisper. “Just your mouth.”

I wanted more. I was suddenly angry at his evenness and it felt so easy to get what I wanted and the ease was intoxicating. I forced my hands back up his shirt and he pressed them to him, a compromise. His skin was soft and he was narrower than I’d thought. I wondered if he were very thin. I took a step back, trying to see him better. He wouldn’t let me, stepping with me as I tried to step away.

The door opened. “Oops, sorry!” Whoever had opened it giggled before slamming it shut. It opened again while we were still watching it.

“Naomi, you’re drunk.” It was Phyllis. “Go home.”

I followed her orders, spending the rest of the night and most of the next morning in a dreamless sleep.

A
s my father had promised, I met the surgeon that Monday, between the two weekend runs of
Hamlet
. Dr. Stern acknowledged me when my father announced my connection to Dr. Orchuk at Brigham and Women’s, then turned eagerly to my mother, studying her in a naked way that unsettled me, if not my father. He slid over to her, taking her head in his hands almost immediately, speaking his hushed explanations, all the while sketching lightly on her scalp with a pencil by parting the hair aside, not leaving a mark, only impressions, like an object being viewed from a distant height as it moves through tall grass. He offered several words to me—
acoustic neuroma, craniotomy
—and a handful of statistics to my father—the percentage of such tumors removed completely (65%), the percentage of such tumors removed completely under his hands (92%).

His information was multifaceted, almost colorful. Had he not delivered it with such impassivity, spinning on his backless chair as if he were at the center of some odd carousel—we the horses, each with our own rigid purpose: names for me, numbers for my father, promises for my mother—it would have been a speech worth remembering.

Over the course of the appointment he continued to dote on my mother in his uptight, clinical way. I began to have the irrational feeling that if I didn’t watch him closely, he just might try to take her away. There had always been something about my mother that made people want to possess her; maybe it was because she was beautiful, maybe it was because she was so deeply contained. At the time, I couldn’t have said why I found Dr. Stern so distasteful, especially given that he was so solicitous toward his patient, but now I acknowledge that it had something to do with my own lingering, childlike desires to own my mother, to command her, open her up as easily as he planned to.

“When will her hair grow back?” I asked, interrupting one of his closing lectures. My father looked at me quizzically.

“Her hair?” Dr. Stern asked hesitantly.

“You’ll have to shave her hair, won’t you? To make an incision?” Dr. Stern stared at me as though I had asked him if he planned to pull it out strand by strand.

“I think you could guess at that, Naomi,” my father interjected, trying to save the moment for me, “a bright premedical student such as yourself.” He leaned in to the surgeon. “We should’ve known we had a biology major on our hands the minute she pulled apart her first insect. Did
you
know what a thorax was when you were four years old?” He shook his head with stale admiration.

I glared at my father. “I’m actually thinking of majoring in English, Dad.” I didn’t have the heart to break his in one breath, so I amended: “English and biology.”

“English?” he asked, incredulity lifting his voice into its highest register. “Isn’t that the language you already speak?” Again, a tone closer to a primal objection than an utterance.

“English and biology,” I reminded him.

“What are you going to do,
read
to your patients?” My father laughed nervously, trying unsuccessfully to gain Dr. Stern’s sympathy by opening his eyes wide in disbelief in his direction.

“Her hair depends on whether or not she needs to go through chemo,” Dr. Stern said. My mother looked blankly at me. Until that moment, no one had thought of it never growing back. In an instant, I saw my questions for what they were: ugly, false curiosities. I put one hand on her arm, and she let me leave it there.

Before we left, Dr. Stern took one more look into her eyes, her mouth, her ears, like a man at a horse he admired and wanted to run. I stood before the X-ray of the tumor, taking in the gray orbs as a psychologist might Rorschach patterns, studying the film as most would an oracle, not a simple black and white image. I turned my back to it, pulling my cold hands into my armpits. I glared at Dr. Stern, who seemed to find my stance amusing. My mother asked a few more questions; my father wrote everything down; I dropped my hands and stood taller. I told Dr. Stern I wanted to know what her recovery would be like, and Dr. Stern told my mother that she would be in the hospital for three days and then would be allowed to return home, provided that he was pleased with her progress and he was satisfied that she had adequate care there. Even he didn’t want to mention how all this depended on the results of the postoperative biopsy. Or at least I thought he didn’t want to mention it. All he said was, “Brain cancer is something none of us want to see, of course,” like a salesman genteelly distracting potential clients from the weaker elements in his product. My grandmother was not at the appointment, but she was identified as the at-home caretaker, and Dr. Stern nodded his approval.

I envisioned Grandmother Carol in my mother’s orange apron, a frown set on her face at the sight of food cooking on the stove, the crown of steel-gray hair groomed just so. I began to understand why she had come to my mother’s side; it must be easier to care for the sick than for the well if you’re not particularly good at caring for anyone. The sick have clear needs that can be addressed efficiently and at a distance. I wondered if my grandmother loved my mother. I didn’t think my mother could ever have been as strange and vibrant a child as I had been, a child infused with imperfect and baffling affections, who could easily frustrate any mother. But there was something, clearly, about my mother that made my grandmother uncomfortable, and I knew the tension between them didn’t grow out of the one note of discord my mother had ever specifically mentioned, a dispute over the house her father had left to her. And I think I began to realize then I would never know what was truly between them. Though I think, even now, that the origins of such a significant rift shouldn’t have been so easy to disguise.

I
didn’t drink the next weekend. I began searching the masks as soon as I had dressed and come back upstairs, hungry again.

“He’s Carter tonight”—Phyllis found me. “Thought I would liven things up for you two.” She pointed to a far corner of the room. “Also, you should have your fun early. We have one more show. And don’t drink; it insults us both. No need to pretend you want sex only when inebriated. This isn’t the fifties—or the eighties, for that matter. It’s better when you’re not, anyway.” She put a hand on my shoulder and looked at me clinically. “I think this is good for you.” She patted me a few times in an affectionate, satisfied way before walking away.

It occurred to me then that she knew him, that I could ask her who he was. But then she was gone, and I was glad the opportunity had passed. She seemed to understand something about me that I had not admitted to myself. Sex. I suppose that was what I wanted. The thrill and keen pain of running had brought its own pleasure, but what about pleasures of the less complicated kind? I thought of the long kisses Teddy and I had exchanged like gifts. Was that when I had last wanted things for myself instead of just insisting upon them?

I found him.

“Are you going to tell me who you are?” I asked him once, and when he didn’t answer, I didn’t ask again.

T
he next night, the final night of
Hamlet
, I stood in the greenroom with him for the last time. When he was done letting me kiss him and not touch him, we sat together in the dark.

“This will have to end here,” he said after a minute. If it weren’t for his voice and the sound of his breath, I might not have known he was there.

“I could meet you somewhere else,” I said. “You could take off that mask and let me see you.” I barely saw him shake his head no in the dark.

“That’s fine,” I replied. The top of my head tingled in response to the disappointment in my body. Then the desire returned, and with it a need to feel something stronger than the anger that came along with it, something that could consume even the worst of emotions. I reached out to him in the dark and found his hand. My fingers intertwined in his, which were warmer than mine in the cold room. He moved my hand up to his neck, then his chin, nudging the mask with my knuckles.

“No,” I said. He froze. “No.” It was suddenly important that I not see him, that I not take in an image and remember it, play it over and over again. I pushed him down on the bench against the window and straddled him. “Like this.” I let my desire free: a terrifying, almost hostile thing. I had never, suddenly, wanted anything more badly than to be with him just then, just as we were.

I touched his belt first, then his stomach, a soft gasp the only other sound he made until we were both partially undressed and I pressed his chest to mine. His body was long and warm and full of new lines for me: the sinewy length from his thigh to his knee, the shorter, tight ligament running from his hip to his groin, the thick trunk of muscle on his lower back. I began pushing down on his waistband so I could feel more of him, and then that wasn’t enough, either. I stood up to take what was left of my clothes off and he stopped me, breathless, with one hand.

“What?” I whispered.

He shook his head. Then he leaned it back against the bench we were on, letting me take over. I climbed over him, finding my way in the dark. The anonymity drove me like a compulsion. I was hunting something just out of sight, the quick, unknown burst of sensation just out of reach. I pushed us harder, wanting to consume my defenseless need with a ferocity I didn’t care to check, though he stopped me, just for a second, and kissed me on the shoulder. He might have been thanking me, or marking me, or giving me the chance to stop. He must have sensed it was my first time, but I ignored his tenderness. We moved quickly.

“I should go,” I said when he was done, still wanting more.

I stood up and pulled everything back on. I was fully clothed before he’d moved. As I reached to tie my hair back he pulled me toward him, resting his head for a moment in the space between my ribs.

“I wish I could see you again,” he said softly.

I turned around and walked quickly toward the door.

“Naomi,” he whispered. My hand was already on the knob. I didn’t turn around.

Twenty

M
y mother’s surgery was scheduled for a few weeks after
Hamlet
closed. I didn’t want to officially notify the college, so I simply skipped classes to be with her. She let me come back to the house, so long as I slept in my old room and avoided The Carol (my father’s name for her). She also let me stand by her when she walked. Her dizziness was worsening, and her balance was off.

My grandmother had been helping my mother for a while by then, but she was always slow to come around when my mother wanted to get up, and even then she’d grumble about how my mother should just stay seated, that she or I could get her anything she needed.

Finally, toward the end of one afternoon, she still hadn’t come to help my mother move from her chair to the couch, and I stood to do it, though I had been asked not to interfere. My mother gave me a look, but at the same time my grandmother appeared at the door.

“I don’t know why we don’t just get you a walker, Theresa. It would be so much easier. And who knows if you’ll even be able to get around after the surgery.” She threw down the towel she’d been folding in her hands. “Naomi and I can’t be running around for you all the time and then leading you wherever you want to go. Really, it’s just selfish.” She said all this calmly, but I could tell she wasn’t. She made a noisy, disapproving exit a few seconds later, but despite her deliberateness I had the sense she was rushing, anxious to leave.