Pharmakon (38 page)

“Sounds more like a schizophrenic.”

As my mother climbed the stairs, she unpinned her hat. “Maybe depression’s God’s way of testing us, of seeing what we’re capable of. I mean, how weak we are.”

My father was right behind her, and I behind him. “Let’s talk about this another time.” They were in their bedroom now. He knew I was eavesdropping.

My mother didn’t seem to hear him. “Maybe you’re right.”

“How’s that?”

“Maybe we are Druids after all.” I didn’t get it. But when my father closed the bedroom door and turned the latch, I knew a “lie-down” was being prescribed.

The box spring squeaked. My mother giggled. My father growled like a bear who had just been woken up, and then she began to sob. “What’s wrong?” My father’s voice was husky.

“That sermon about Abraham made me think of Jack.”

“Don’t.”

“It was my fault.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“I should have done something to stop it.”

“We’ve done everything we can do.”

“You don’t understand. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see it happening, but I don’t stop it.”

“The past doesn’t exist.” Friedrich told himself that in the hopes that one day, when he recalled the chain of events that made up his life, they’d be different.

“Do you forgive me?”

“For what?” My father’s voice was impatient. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“You don’t understand.” Neither did I.

There were whispers then that I couldn’t make out. Then I heard my father talk to her the way he spoke to our dog when there was thunder and she didn’t want to come out from under the bed. “All we need is this.”

I heard my mother sigh a groan of painful pleasure. My father gasped. No one had told me sex sounded so sad. I felt creepy for listening. But since all the popular kids in my class bragged about listening to their parents doing it, I thought I, like my mother, was finally figuring out how to be normal.

We were doing it together: She was keeping the house clean, sleeping in the same bed with Dad, I was going to Sunday school . . . I figured Little League would be next. But my mother came out of their bedroom that day with a new resolve. She dropped her infatuations with God and being the perfect suburban mom as quickly as she had picked them up and committed a heresy that made her more suspect than ever in Greenwood—she got a job.

Officially, she worked for the university. Her employment category was “research assistant”—my father’s research assistant. She had always helped him with his work, typing out manuscripts, proofreading galleys, but being paid, having a job title, gave her an excuse to fill up every free moment of her days and her nights, of her life, with his life. The job wasn’t just full time, it was all the time. And that was the point. She went to the office with him in the morning and worked with him into the night. At the time, it seemed like she was sacrificing her life for his. But as I think back on it, I see that she didn’t want time for herself. By embracing my father’s career so completely, she found a way to escape her own nightmare. The circle of their partnership closed into a knot that held us fast—but didn’t include us.

Except for when they went to the bathroom, they were joined as tightly as Siamese twins. They took turns between being parent, child, and lover to one another. My mother didn’t mind that my father got all the credit, that his name was on the book jackets, that the checks were made out to him. My mother didn’t relinquish her ego; she merged it with his. Weaving herself so tightly into the fabric of his being was her way of keeping herself from picking at the past and unraveling her hope for a future.

And because they worked so many nights and weekends, I got to watch them without their knowing I was watching. I’d stand in the doorway and stare at the backs of their heads, wondering how long it would take for them to feel my presence. They didn’t feel it. But when I got tired of waiting, I’d interrupt them, even if I didn’t need anything, ask them to help me with my homework, even when I didn’t need it. How to spell M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i, help me build a papier-mâché Statue of Liberty, and later a plaster of Paris imitation of the Hoover Dam for an imaginary cross-country trip my class was taking.

Both believing now that work was going to set them free, they would always stop what they were doing if my interruption was connected with school. My mother would do all the helping, my father would tilt back in a chair and impatiently call out every few minutes, “If you do his work for him, he’s never going to learn.” Or, if he was feeling funny, “Nora, you’re not being paid to do his homework, you’re being paid to do mine.”

My mother knew all the tricks of being a good student. But as my father waited impatiently for her to get back to his work, their work, I sensed I was stretching the invisible membrane of interdependence, gossamer and slightly spooky, that connected them. Like a spiderweb against your face, even though you knew you couldn’t see what connected them, you knew you were caught in it, and it would be rewoven as soon as you left the room.

Amazingly, the friction of living and working together twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year didn’t diminish their post-Casper ardor. Their flirtation was at times by nature of their research unfathomably academic. Late at night, for fear of waking us, they’d whisper words like “meprobamate,” “diazepam,” “chlorpromazine,” as if they were speaking a secret language of love. As I got older, watching them go at it day after day, fertilizing each other’s minds with ideas beyond my interest and understanding, I realized they were having intercourse even when they weren’t.

The closest I ever came to hearing them argue over work occurred when my father was dictating to my mother at the typewriter. Like most scientists, he had a weakness for the run-on sentence. Adding commas on top of colons on top of parentheticals, and mixing in both dependent and independent clauses, my father would have to take three breaths and seventy-five words before he finally got to the end of a sentence. My mother, meanwhile, would listen without bothering to strike a single key; then when he finally said “period” she’d nod appreciatively and think for a moment, before quickly typing fifteen, rather than seventy-five, words. My father, eventually tiring of waiting for her to put down the other sixty-odd words on paper, would come around to her side of the table to see what was holding her up, and, seeing what she had written, would protest, “Nora, that’s not what I said.”

She’d look up at him innocently and reply, “I know. It’s better.”

It was, for them. With my mother sitting beside him, serving alternately as audience, critic, and groupie, my father’s career experienced a second spring. With my mother’s help, twice as many articles were written; Dad cranked out a new book in six months. With her sharing the load, he took on more consulting jobs. Invitations to give speeches and attend conventions and colloquiums and conferences suddenly began to pour in from all over the world. And with no Casper to fear, there was no reason for them not to attend.

Or as my father put it to my mother one evening when I was eight, “Nora, it’s time for us to start making the most of our lives.” It was just after dinner on a Saturday. As usual, they and their work were at the dining room table. We ate in the kitchen. Lucy, Fiona, Willy, and I were having dessert.

“I didn’t know I wasn’t making the most of my life.” My mother had spent the previous half hour scurrying back and forth between our dinner and my father and his deadline. She was back at the typewriter now.

“Nora, don’t be obtuse, you know what I’m talking about.” My father had been invited to read a paper in France and then fly on to Geneva and give a speech. He’d been trying to talk her into going with him for days. My siblings had urged her to go; two unchaperoned weeks was their idea of heaven. Willy, thirteen, wouldn’t have to do his dreaded French homework, and Fiona, age eighteen, and Lucy, now sixteen, would have a brief respite from the shame of my father telling the teenage boys who mustered up the nerve to ask them out on a date, “I want you to enjoy yourselves, but I also want you to know I expect you to return my daughters on time, and, more important, in the exact same pristine condition in which you found them.”

We listened in the kitchen as my father hammered away at my mother in the other room about the trip. “Your tickets are paid for. There’s nothing to keep you here.”

“Nothing but our four children.” I alone was relieved to hear my mother say that.

The kettle on the stove whistled and my mother hurried back into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea.

“Nora, it will be good for them,” my father called after her. “The girls can look after the boys.”

Dad stood in the doorway and looked at us with the same exasperation that surfaced on his face when he was stuck in traffic behind a stalled car. “Fiona in particular might benefit from looking after a household, caring for children. See what she’s turning up her nose at by insisting on going to college in New York City.”

Fiona had passed on Vassar to go to art school at NYU. Worse, she had thwarted him by winning a scholarship so he couldn’t accuse her of making him pay for her mistakes.

Fiona took offense. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Simply that in New York City, you’ll never find a husband interested in providing you a home like the one you grew up in.” My father had a farm boy’s mistrust of the big city. He also felt cheated that she chose to go to a school he couldn’t brag about.

“That’s why I’m going there, Dad.” Fiona knew how to give as good as she got.

My father was momentarily relieved when he glanced over and saw Lucy’s head buried in the SAT study book. When he looked closer, she closed the study book quickly. The copy of
Confidential
that she’d hidden in its pages slipped out onto the floor. She’d been reading an article about Chuck Berry’s getting arrested for taking a fourteen-year-old Mexican girl across state lines for immoral purposes. All my father said as he handed it back to her was, “Planning for your future?” Lucy’s cheeks flushed like she’d just been slapped.

Willy laughed. That was a mistake when my father was in one of his moods. He picked up one of the six Oreos Willy had stacked next to his ice cream. “Willy, do you know how many calories are in each one of these belly builders?”

Willy split one of the Oreos and licked the creamy center before he answered, “Fifty-five.” Willy was smart.

My father threw up his hands and went back to work. “I give up.”

But he didn’t. Not ever. As soon as my mother sat back down at the typewriter he started in. “Nora, just give me one reason why you’re fighting me on this trip.”

When you didn’t agree with my father, you were fighting him. And if you fought him, he knew how to make you feel like you had lost even if you won. Part of my mother’s job was to jolly him out of these moods.

“Zach’s too young. In a few years, I’ll go with you.” She smiled at him, fingers poised over the keyboard.

“I don’t want to wait a few years. I’ve waited too goddamn long for this as it is.”

I sat with my siblings, trying to figure out what “this” was that made my father slam his fist on the table so hard her tea sloshed over the lip of the cup and a stack of computer printouts toppled onto the floor. As my mother cleaned up the mess, she said, “For God’s sake, I’m not saying you can’t go. Go on without me.”

“If I wanted to go on without my wife, I wouldn’t have married you.” The way my father said it, it wasn’t clear if it was a compliment or a threat.

Fiona heard it the same way. “Does that mean you’re going to divorce Mom if she doesn’t go to Europe?”

“This is a private conversation.”

It was Lucy’s turn to give it to him. “If it’s private, why don’t you close the door? Or go to the bedroom?” Lucy smiled innocently.

“Or go out to the car like you used to do back in Hamden.”

My sisters giggled conspiratorially. Willy and I didn’t get it.

“This happens to be my house, and I’ll say what I like in it.” My father was not a shouter, it was when he lowered his voice and cut the emotion out of it that told us it was time to shut up.

Having silenced the peanut gallery, he softened his tone, reached out, and took hold of my mother’s hand. “Nora, this trip, this kind of opportunity, this is what we’ve been working for all these years.”

“This is what
you’ve
been working for.”

“Well, if it’s all for me, why do I want you there?”

“I’m not sure.” My mother had never been to Europe.

“Christ, most wives would jump at the chance to go to Paris. Why would you want to be here when you could . . . ?” My father shook his head in genuine bafflement. “What aren’t you sure of?”

My mother raised an eyebrow. “A great many things. But we’ll leave that for another time. What I am certain of is, I don’t want to miss Zach’s play.” Struggling to decipher the code they spoke in, I had completely forgotten I was to be the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

“You are going to pass up an all-expenses paid trip to Europe with your husband to attend a third-grade play?”

“Yes.” My mother hadn’t had time to help me with my costume or rehearse my lines. I felt guilty for thinking she didn’t care.

My father thought for a moment, then clapped his hands. “Well, since it’s Zach’s play, why don’t we let Zach decide if he thinks it’s a good idea.”