Pharmakon (13 page)

For the third time, Willy inquired, “Who’s cold-budded?”

“It’s cold-blooded, Willy, and nobody we know is that way; we only know nice people.” Nora wasn’t feeling nice. Why not tell them how it really is? Nice is the exception. Less than nice is the rule. Why make them learn the hard way?

Fiona waited until she had caught her mother’s eye in the rearview mirror to confide conspiratorially, “Dr. Winton’s not nice.”

“Why do you say that?” Nora tried to make her query sound more casual than it was.

“She called me precocious.”

“From Dr. Winton, that’s a compliment.”

“The fish in
The Fisherman and His Wife
had feelings.” Lucy was still worried. “That fish could talk. He gave the fisherman three wishes because he didn’t want to stay caught, so he had to have feelings.”

Fiona gave Lucy a withering look. “That’s a fairy tale for babies, baby.”

“Lucy’s a baby, Lucy’s a baby.” Willy teased Lucy because he was scared to do it to Fiona.

“I’m older than you, baby.”

“If I catched a talking fish, I’d sell it for lots and lots of money to the zoo and buy a boat and catch more fish.” Willy had already announced he wanted a toy cash register for his birthday.

“I wouldn’t let you,” Lucy told him flatly.

“It’s my talking fish, I can do whatever I want . . . baby.”

“You’re the baby. You still wet the bed, baby.” Lucy smiled triumphantly. She enjoyed being mean in defense of the helpless and magical.

“Lucy, we don’t tease about things like that. Your brother had an accident. Everybody has them.”

“I don’t have accidents. Fiona doesn’t have accidents. Mommy and Daddy don’t have accidents. Only babies have accidents.”

Willy swung the fishing rod at his sister. Lucy pushed it away. The rod tip whipped across the side of Nora’s face. She felt like she was being mugged by life, punished for something she hadn’t done.

Willy wailed. Fiona had just slammed her book down on his knee. “I told you to stay on your side of the seat.”

“Quiet, all of you!” Nora was shouting.

“He got his boogers on me.”

“Wipe them off. It’s not going to kill you.”

Nora reached around to grab the fishing rod. Jack rolled off her lap, his head hit the steering wheel, he woke up crying, “I’m hungry.”

“Stop it!” If anyone had been listening, they would have thought she was being attacked. Nora scrambled out of the car. She slammed the door without thinking of little fingers.

“Mommy, what are you doing?” Lucy called out. But Nora didn’t answer. She didn’t know what she was doing.

Jack was reaching out the window, “Hungry . . .”

Fiona started to get out of the car. “I’m coming.”

“Nobody’s coming with me. Everybody: Stay in the car.” She ran from the vehicle like it was going to explode.

“Mommy, don’t leave!” Willy was getting scared. So was Nora. “What’s wrong?”

Nora took the stairs to her husband’s office two at a time. By the time she’d reached the second floor, she was muttering, “I’ve had it.” She stormed down the green linoleum hallway, her Mexican dress billowing around her. The least depressed of the four lonely undergraduates who were waiting to tell Dr. Friedrich their problems looked up at Nora and thought to himself, “Hot stuff.”

Nora opened the door without knocking. She didn’t care if she embarrassed her husband or one of his goddamn spoiled Yale brats. She didn’t expect to find her husband talking to a pretty forty-three-year-old woman whose skin was the color of orange marmalade. Blue straw hat, flowered dress, polished shoes, she looked like she was going to church. Nora had seen the colored woman cleaning the toilets in the ladies’ room at Branford College. She did not say what she’d been planning to say to her husband out of respect for the cleaning woman, not Will. “Excuse me for interrupting.” Nora shook the woman’s hand. “I’m Nora Friedrich.”

“Betty Stackhouse.”

Nora’s head swiveled to her husband. “You promised.”

“Miss Stackhouse, I apologize for this intrusion.” His voice was infuriatingly flat and emotionless. Inside, he was raging,
How dare you?
He saw Nora’s invasion as symptomatic of a growing lack of respect for him, his work. Things were going so well, something, someone had to sabotage him. Why not his wife? Not that Nora would do it on purpose. But he had female patients who had done that to keep or gain a hold on their husbands. No, Nora would do it out of love, because when you love someone, you overlook their weaknesses, and in doing so, unintentionally encourage those weaknesses until you are taking turns being cripple and caretaker. Between heartbeats, this thought came and sank inside him like a stone. “As you can see, there are people who need to see me.”

“Your children need to see you. Your wife needs to see you.”

“I hear that.” Miss Stackhouse looked at Friedrich as if he were a comb dropped in a urinal.

“Is there anything you have to say before I leave?” Nora gave him one last chance.

“Drive carefully.”

“It was a pleasure meeting you, Betty.”

Miss Stackhouse eyeballed Friedrich sternly. “You just gonna let her leave?”

“She’s just going fishing.”

“Yeah, but for what?”

“Where were we, Miss Stackhouse?”

“You asked me why I thinks I de-pressed.”

“And?”

“How you feel, all you got to look forward to in this life is cleaning up other people’s messes?” The truth was, that was just how Friedrich often felt.

When Nora got back to the car and told the children “Daddy has to work” each displayed their disappointment differently. Fiona sulked and said she wanted to go home. Lucy began to draw a picture to give to Daddy to make up for all the fun he was missing. Willy waited until after they had stopped for gas and everyone had used the bathroom to wet his pants, and Jack sang the only line of the only showtune he knew, “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” over and over and over again. After they pulled over and put on the extra pair of dungarees Nora had brought in case Willy fell into the river, they all sang along with Jack: “I’ve got a beautiful feeling . . . everything’s going my way.”

They were meeting Jens, the animal behaviorist’s wife, and their two girls on a sandy stretch of brook called the Mill River that ran through a forest of ash and maple and dogwood just below a two-mile-long scenic rise of traprock called Sleeping Giant, picnic spot by day, lover’s lane at night. She and Will had talked about attempting the latter but never made it. As she drove down the muddy, rutted road to the stream, the Whale’s muffler scraping dirt and rocks, Nora wondered if they would make it.

Jens, barely five feet, Anka, over six, and their pale, blue-veined daughters had been there for over an hour. The Dutch contingent had built a fire, rounded it with river rocks, and laid out blankets. His wife knitted as their twin girls solemnly played “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on a pair of midget violins. Jens was trying to teach their poodle, who could already sit, lie down, roll over, and play dead, to walk on a beach ball.

What was their secret? Being Dutch? Communists? Did getting bombed in World War II make it easier for this mismatched couple to make peace with the disappointments of life? Nora didn’t knit, her children couldn’t play musical instruments, they didn’t have a dog, and her husband’s only hobby was ambition. Being an only child, Nora had an ideal of family life that only seemed to be realized in other families.

Nora watched her children tumble out of the Whale and wreak havoc with the sylvan setting. Willy kicked the beach ball out from under the poodle, Fiona bullied away one of the violins and promptly broke a string, Lucy hooked her foot in Anka’s yarn as she skipped toward the river, making a snarl of a morning’s worth of knitting. And Jack was naked. “I’m sorry . . . Willy, stop it! Fiona, don’t. Lucy, say you’re sorry . . . Oh, Jack . . .” Her youngest had just thrown his diaper into the campfire.

“What happened to your husband?” Jens nibbled on one of the dog biscuits he had brought to train the poodle.

“Work.”

“Your husband is such an American.”

“That’s one word for him.”

Jens, in his short shorts, sandals, and socks, wife and daughters with their clogs and long, blond braids, Dutch beer cooled by the river . . . their foreignness made Nora think of the unused steamship ticket in her underwear drawer and all the steamships that had set sail without her. At that moment she felt like a prisoner to her husband and her children and, most of all, to love. The thought made her feel guilty, less than maternal. Jack reached up to her, “Uppeee!” Nora pulled the youngest up into her arms and began to cry.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” It was the eighth time she’d apologized since arriving.

“Being loved is exhausting. Go for a walk, you’ll feel better, we’ll look after the children.”

Nora wiped away her tears. As she headed up the path that ran along the brook she heard Jens call out, “Which ungrateful child wants to catch the first fish?”

When she looked back and saw her children clambering around the beer-bellied Dutchman shouting, “Me . . . me . . . me,” Nora started to cry again, for just the opposite reason she had burst into tears in the first place. To have life pull on her was maddening. But not to feel that pull was worse. She wondered if it was the same for a man, specifically for her husband.

A half mile later she was feeling better. She’d crossed the stream on moss-covered rocks without falling in. A trout rose and swallowed a dragonfly whole, and a monarch butterfly up from Mexico mistook the red rose on the hem of her skirt for the real thing.

As she turned to go back to the life she had made for herself, Nora looked up at Sleeping Giant. Its feet pointed east, head west, its chin reached for the sky. She hadn’t realized she had wandered so close to the slumbering Spirit Monster—that’s what her husband had told the children the Mattabeseck Indians believed the sandstone and green traprock to hold. She had been sure Will would give them nightmares with the stories he told them about Sleeping Giant. But Will had a gift for casting a gentle light on scary things.

“According to the Indians, the first thing that Giant’s going to do when he wakes up and shakes off his dirt blanket is drink up all the java in the world. Then he’s going to eat all the ice cream. And then . . .” She missed her husband when she thought of him like that. Craning her neck back, shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun, she followed the flight of a pair of red-tailed hawks. As she watched them ride the thermals her eye caught hold of a small figure pushing a bicycle across the side of the Giant’s nose a hundred feet above her.

What with distance, angle, and glare, it was hard to be sure, but it looked like a child. Stepping back to get a better look, Nora scanned the precipice for a parent. There had to be someone up there with him? It was crazy to let a child drag a bicycle up there.

She had been gone close to forty-five minutes; it was time to get back to her own children. But the reproachful father or mother she expected to appear and pull the child away from the edge didn’t. And there was something about the way the boy (she was sure it was a boy now, one wearing a striped T-shirt) kept looking over his shoulder. It reminded her of Willy when she spied him doing something he knew was forbidden—playing in the street, about to light a match—but didn’t think anyone but God was watching.

She cupped her hands to her mouth to shout a warning, “Get back . . . Stay where you are . . . are you lost? . . . where are your parents?” But what if he heard her and looked down and got scared and slipped, or fell? Feeling foolish and yet as sure as only a mother can be that something terrible was on its way to happening, Nora began to run.

The path up to the Giant’s head was steeper than she remembered. She slipped on loose rock. The boy was no longer visible by the time she got to the top. She was breathing hard, her face was beaded with sweat, and her dress was torn. The sky was dizzyingly blue. You could see all the way to the Long Island Sound. But Nora wasn’t looking at the view. As soon as she saw the rusted old girl’s fat-tired bicycle, she knew the child that needed her help was Casper.

She found him sitting on the edge of the cliff face that formed the Giant’s chin. His legs dangled in the wind. It was a hundred-and-fifty-foot free fall from his perch. Nora didn’t know that the black, imitation leather case next to him contained his dissection kit. Or that he had sterilized all the instruments it contained, even though he only needed the scalpel to sever his antecubital vein. He could have cut himself in his dorm room, but he did not want to risk rescue.

His plan was to make an incision at “the faucet,” the crook of the arm where blood was taken. Too much of a coward to talk to a crippled girl in a college library, he knew he didn’t have it in him to jump. But he could bleed. Once he’d lost enough blood, gravity would pull him over the edge. And even if the sight of his own blood made him nauseous just the way pig blood did in biology class, the dizziness that accompanied his squeamishness would only make it easier to fall.

Casper had chosen this spot for its view of the sea. He wanted to end life looking out at where life began. Perhaps as he fell he’d find a pattern to the irrational numbers that added up to disappointment.