Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain (24 page)

Jack pinches my cheek, rests a hand on my shoulder. His hair is still matted from the hat he no longer wears. “No kiss from you?” he says. I feel my dress, too small, pull against my back.

Mother glides across the living room, stops with her heels facing each other and slightly apart. She wears a long strand of glazed beads and a dress that resembles our lace curtains, loose and transparent. It flows around her like a necklace or bracelet, something she wears for decoration.

Jack takes my brother's hand and leads him to the far end of the room. Usually, now, we'd have the debate. I am too old for the game, but Jack always makes it fun, so much fun that the hours pass, and Mother forgets to pour drinks, and my brother forgets the kids who have beaten him, and I forget the taunting and Walter, or rather, I imagine that Walter is Jack, or Doctor Jack as my brother calls him.

Today's topic is polio, which I know about. Four boys in
my first-year class were stricken, and two now walk with metal leg braces and brown high-top orthopedic shoes. Audrey, a blonde with perfect small teeth, died, but I never knew her well. I've seen iron lungs with emaciated children tucked inside. I've heard stories of children quarantined in hospital rooms, with parents who visit once a week and speak through cloth masks. During polio summers the pools close and the movies stop showing. And my brother and I are slapped — by any passing grown-up — when we step through the mud puddles we now know are really dark pools of polio, polio, polio.

Jack says that we will discuss vaccines, which he has to explain to my brother. “The body makes antibodies when it's injected with dead virus,” he says. “The antibodies protect against disease.” He says that vaccines are the science of life and that there is no more noble pursuit than the search for a cure to man's greatest foe. He speaks fondly of Salk. I've had two injections of the Salk vaccine, as has my brother, though he doesn't remember. Then Jack mentions Sabin, and I pretend to have heard of him, too.

“Who's Sabin?” my brother asks, and Jack tousles his hair and says something like — I don't know for sure because I am more interested in his hands; he has one on my brother's shoulder and the other folded loosely over his own stomach, but I realize that his nails are long and dirty — Jack says something like Sabin is developing a vaccine with a live
virus, a weak virus that doesn't grow in the nerves, just the gut, the intestine, where it can't hurt us.

I still don't know what we're debating. Usually Jack's debates have a single question and two sides, one of which I argue, the other, my brother. Two sides, with a clear winner and loser and ultimately, a single truth. Jack always states the truth, at the end, before he leaves: malaria is worse than syphilis; you should save the soldiers first.

My mother lights a cigarette, removes her walking shoes, turns on the radio, a soft jazz piano. She's wearing her good jewelry — an opal ring she's promised me, and a bracelet that once belonged to my father's grandmother. We both hear the key in the lock, though my mother doesn't look away from Jack until Father closes the door behind him, his gray three-piece suit and hat nearly the same as the brown ones he wore yesterday. He sets down his briefcase. He usually carries it into his study before we sit down to eat Velveeta cheese over toast or cream soup, something prepared quickly.

“I'm home,” he says. He should not be here. He should never be home when Mother's lover is. He is not part of our afternoons, and I sense that he feels this, that he imagines he stands on the tiled landing, waiting for us to answer the door. He must wonder why he returned at all. I wonder, too, and look to see if anything is different about him. I look and look but don't see anything.

My mother starts walking, slowly, her hair falling loose over her shoulders. She should be carrying something, a box of chocolates, a plate of sandwiches, a pair of dance shoes to return to a young pupil. But her palms are open and empty. She has nothing to explain Jack's presence.

Jack says, “But the live virus — Sabin's virus — can travel. We'd infect each other with a polio that would never hurt us, and once infected, we'd become immune. Isn't it wonderful to think: a virus spreading to save our lives?” He seems untroubled by my father's arrival. If anything, he speaks louder than usual.

My mother brushes Father's chin with a kiss so brief it seems like a whisper.

“What are you doing here?” my father asks Jack, and I realize that the two know each other, perhaps from party meetings.

“We're discussing polio,” Jack says. “Salk and Sabin.”

“Sabin?” my father says. “I've not heard of Sabin.”

“His work is only known abroad.”

“Ah,” my father says, but he is watching my mother. She has moved to the window, where she gazes two stories down to the street. My brother is still asking questions, “Wouldn't an infection kill us? Won't we kill everyone?”

“Comrade.” Jack rises and extends his hand to my father in belated greeting. “I am having an affair with your wife.”

M
Y MOTHER RETIRES
as soon as Jack leaves, and my brother, who senses but does not understand what has happened, complains of a stomachache and lies in bed. I make dinner, bread with cut apple and cheese, and pour two glasses of water.

My father rests his chin in his hands and stares across the table at me. The empty seats to his right and my left don't seem to bother him. In fact, the way he sits and looks at me, I feel like dinner has always been just the two of us. That I am his wife, not his daughter, the woman who cooks and cleans and enforces his rules, at least when he is home. I will clean his dishes, as I do every night, and then take a stroll where I'll meet Jack and have a cigarette or a drink, or whatever it is Mother usually does when Father retires to his study. I can be an adult with my father because he has always treated me so. Even before I started school, I went to his meetings, where I helped take attendance and pass out stacks of printed fliers.

My father chews. “How was school?” he says.

I stare behind him, to the one small stretch of bare wall in the adjoining living room. I've never told him about the bullies at school. I've never mentioned the taunts or the jeers. But the silence around the table, the fact that we are sitting together while Mother lies alone in her room, the fact that I feel like everything changed today in some way I
do not yet understand, makes me bold. “Jonas came home early,” I begin.

“His stomach,” my father says with his usual authority.

“They hit him.” I pull the crust off my bread. “Like they do all the time, because he's a communist.”

“They hit him because they are ignorant,” my father says.

“No one likes us,” I say.

“Don't be a fool.” My father says the same words he spoke to Jack only hours before. I wait for him to order me to leave the house, too. I remember how Jack reached for my mother, how she didn't move, and how much greater his limp seemed when he walked alone from the apartment.

My father takes another bite of his meal.

I D
ECIDE TO STAY
home from school — to take care of my brother, I say, though he doesn't really need me around. Mother is here, even if she doesn't leave her bedroom.

I spend the morning rewriting my homework assignments and the afternoon reading
Jane Eyre
. I make sandwiches. I listen to the telephone ring. My brother lies under the dining room table, his ledger open, yesterday's homework not yet begun. He speaks only of Salk and Sabin, Salk who killed the virus, and Sabin who spread the live one. “I still don't understand,” he says. “Why would we take a virus?” I pretend I understand and call him a fool.

At two o'clock, I slip out of the flat and take the subway north to the park.

Walter and Katherine have chosen the south shore of Central Park Lake, close to the place where Vaux's boathouse once stood. Last fall I watched the construction men pull it down, the sagging roof and pillared porch and balustrades. I watched the new boathouse rise as well. Saw the limestone and brick before it was set, the gabled roof, the new dock and boat ramp. I know the lake intimately, each landing and path, and where to hide to secure the best vantage of every small clearing.

I pull a branch of new growth maple, spreading the leaves enough that I can see.

Walter, his trousers collecting around his ankles like folds of soft skin, sprawls on top of Katherine, who lies with her eyes tightly closed and the red of her lips spreading outward over her chin and onto her teeth. She jerks when Walter does, but only after a moment. She draws a sharp breath, and I think she might cry. I've seen her call out once or twice on previous days. I've watched Walter kiss her. I have to imagine his tongue, but I know it finds hers. I can hear the sticky sound of moist bodies meeting. I can smell bitter sweat. I watch his legs. He presses his toes into the ground, his calf and thigh becoming one long muscle that collects in a flattened mound before giving way to back. He holds his shoulders up, like wings.

Their meeting ends abruptly. Walter stands and stretches, allowing me to examine the dark hair around his groin and the other parts — the ones no girl is meant to see without a wedding ring. Katherine, more modest, straightens her skirt and brushes her hair. Silently, they stroll along a pebbled path and then part ways.

The clearing becomes mine: the matted grass, the dents where toes or heels or fingers pressed. The cherry trees are beginning to bloom. The yellow-green lake reflects only darkly. The grass is still warm. I sit where Katherine had and try to imagine myself beneath Walter. If he closed his eyes, as he did with her, he would not see my skin. I lie back and, with only emptiness above me, think of Jack.

Things will go back to how they were before he arrived and after Mother left her previous lover: She would give dance lessons; three of her old students had followed her from uptown. She'd schedule them for the afternoon instead of the morning. She'd sleep late and my brother and I would make breakfast. Nights, when Father worked or went to party meetings, we'd go on city walks, me and my brother, searching for salt cod or fresh ginger root. We'd pretend not to notice our neighbors, too, though perhaps people would be kinder here in the Village. My brother and I could make dinner and clear the dishes. And after, when no one was looking, we could steal cigarettes from the cloth sack Mother kept full and guarded when she was sober, and
trade them for hard candy or respect in the school playground. We'd start a new school, closer to the Village, start over ourselves.

I run my hands through the grass where Walter and Katherine had lain. The air seems different, thicker somehow, and beginning to darken, though it is not so dark that I can't see her dropped lipstick. I open it, note the curve her lips have pressed into the pigment. It is mine now. I can paint her desk with it, tall letters advertising that she is a whore. Dark red marks on her books and chair. Red, as she's marked me. Or maybe, I stand and turn homeward, I can summon the courage to paint my lips, just like a grown woman, and spread my red smile.

As the complexity of an organism rises, its silicon content decreases. The ratio of silicon to carbon is 250:1 in the earth's crust, 15:1 in humus soil, 1:1 in plankton, 1:100 in ferns, and 1:5000 in mammals.

—
F
RONTLINE
,
“B
REAST
I
MPLANTS ON
T
RIAL
”

T
HE
S
TORY OF
H
ER
B
REASTS

Thirty days after Sheila paid for her implants, she had troubles with her right breast. She was twenty-one, a senior in college, and one of her nipples pointed sideways and down, toward her crotch. She'd gone from an A-cup to a D, and now she'd begun to deflate.

The surprising thing was, nothing hurt. She didn't recognize the problem till she brushed her teeth, and she noticed only because the neckline of her nightshirt hung too low on one side. She squeezed a fistful of misaligned flesh, still heavy and foreign. Perhaps she could sculpt her breast, like clay, into a more pleasing shape. Her uncle, Doctor Stuart Steenwycks, had massaged it into its previous form, after all. He'd told her that silicone gel and breast tissue had the same weight and feel. Not even he could tell real
breasts from augmented ones. The implant, however, did not respond to Sheila's fingers.