The Almanac Branch (5 page)

The day the television was introduced into Scrub Farm was a rite of passage day. There can be no overstating its importance to the spiritual ecology of the place. From the first moment it glowed and blared in the library (so called, though few books were in it), Shahrazad's tales were in a competition for my attention. Faw would still read to me when he was around, but I knew that there were other stories, too, the black and white picture stories.

I suspect that some of the principles I hold dear can be traced back directly to these afternoons spent in the library. A grown woman, I still believe there was some ineffable value in the way Elizabeth Montgomery stood in her middle-class house, in her Jackie Kennedy sleeveless dress, and closed her eyes and twitched her pert nose to project herself into a different time and space—wherever she wanted to be, whenever she wanted to freeze situations until she could figure them out, or fiddle with the future as she saw fit. She was transcendental, she was Shahrazad's own boon sister. So was Jeannie, the hieratic Jeannie, the busty and sensuous “I dream of” Jeannie. She crossed her arms out before her, closed her eyes, nodded her head, and just like that, moved herself into a different world.

Different worlds, I knew from the box, existed. I finally had corroboration. Shahrazad had not been lying, and I was not crazy. Here were real women, I thought. They remain real to me even now.

Theirs were the maps I learned how to read. They became the rule by which I measured things around me. Samantha, the witch, for instance, I compared, and contrasted, to myself, and Darrin, her husband, to Faw. How I wanted to be like her, a quiet power. A woman with secrets, with a sweet exterior and a soul of certain fire. She was my ideal, and whenever she put her foot down—which sometimes she was forced to do, transcending the laws of nature with the same ease a baker makes bread—the earth and air moved in accordance with her wishes. Yet however much I idolized her I could never comprehend her taste in mortal men. I never understood how she could put up with Darrin, and his job, his boss, all of his worries and interests. I looked at my own life, and thought that as supernaturally powerless as I might have been I had some strengths around me upon which I might rely. Faw, to wit. Faw was strong, Darrin weak. Darrin was the furthest thing from Faw that there was on earth. Darrin's was a square jaw, Faw's was pointed; Darrin's body was encased in bourgeois musculature, just fit and trim enough to look passable in plaid shorts and a white shirt. I have never seen my father's body, since even when he accompanied us to the beach he wore long trousers and a long-sleeved shirt, but I know that he was a man whose litheness and powerful will carried him through anything. My love for Faw made sense to me, Samantha's for Darrin did not, except insofar as it gave me the first inkling of how distorting an emotion love could be. It was all so useful. Surely, I thought, it was love that kept her there with him, and allowed her to be able to sleep with him every night secure in the knowledge that if he did something to her that she really didn't like, say he got carried away a bit, had a bit too much of his favorite poison at the office party, she would be able to twitch her nose, and rematerialize him in the closet, perhaps, having turned him into a giraffe the height of a fire hydrant. I always wished that she would do something like this. Why not turn him into a hobnail boot and walk him through a dump site? There had to be girls in the audience besides myself who saw the drawbacks of this man. But whenever she did freeze him, leave him standing in the room with an insipid grimace on his face while she figured out her next move, no matter what she made up her mind to do he'd come out of the spell scratching his head and still thinking he was the boss. I knew I'd never freeze Charles Brush.

But Darrin, fastidious Darrin, saucer-eyed at the slightest thing, mind-boggled at every turn—how at home he will look in heaven, walking its courses, proceeding from tee to infinite tee, shooting nothing but holes in one. Part of me must have tolerated him because of his obvious love of her. Love of Samantha and her magical power was something he and I shared. Not to mention how much I still admire Jeannie for how she, too, kept her household in order, ruling it from her genie's bottle. There was no way her astronaut captor could keep his hands off that Aladdin's lamp or whatever it was once he'd found out who was inside. Those were the days when a little flesh on the belly of a woman was considered a good thing, those were the days when America was feeding on the same innocent Wonder Bread that Jeannie made her peanut butter sandwiches with, and got that jelly belly with. So, yes, Jeannie looked fine in her bikini top with those low-waisted pantaloons, she had style, and wasn't the slightest bit embarrassed by a life that consisted of keeping the astronaut happy. She even kept his fey psychiatrist friend in check, and never let him discover what he suspected: that Jeannie was a genie and had powers far beyond anything he had ever read about in his textbooks.

“Master,” she called her man all the time. “Oh, Master,” she'd intone, and then proceed to do whatever she wanted to do, and he, very much like Darrin, had to take whatever she got it in her head to conjure up. This, that, whatever it was he had to like it, ultimately, because hidden under the surface of their relationship was a mutual understanding that it was she who wielded the final authority, she who wore the pants. She never did him any serious dirt, though. In the end, they were all happy, after their half an hour of crisis.

I sat and delighted at how Samantha and Jeannie and Darrin and the astronaut got into trouble all the time, delighted in how things inevitably got resolved, week after week after week, and problem after problem. It was better than any junk you could find in the Bible. Okay, so problems came up, and these television people worried, got themselves into seemingly inexorable jams, sad but so funny predicaments, and their enemies began to rub the palms of their hands together thinking that this was going to be it, and they were going to get caught off base doing something that would disgrace them forever. But with the shake of a head, the wrinkling of a nose, everything was set right, and the bad guys were foiled. Spirits and magic and common sense were put to the test. This was better than religion, this was the way things should work.

Jeannie and Samantha could do nothing wrong in their men's eyes, or in mine. No matter what they did, they did it in such a way that their men were able to maintain a sense of being the man, and not merely a man but
the
man, the boss, the transcendent hero of a clearly ridiculous, clearly delusory drama of male predominance. Jeannie slept in a bottle, Samantha was reclusive for fear she might twitch her nose by mistake and manufacture a disaster. Both were hidden from the world not because they were ugly, or stupid, but because they were beautiful and unique and clever, because, above all, they had real powers against which a man possessed neither defense nor even a strong argument. They had powers like I thought I might someday like to have, as I lay there curled on the floor like a cat.

Trudeau I saw every other week. Faw and Mother would drive me in, leaving the boys in Djuna's charge. It would be a sultry morning, with the drear heat already sitting on the road, and the commuters looking harried behind the wheels of their cars. Manhattan would finally start showing itself, in its pinnacles and the tops of its towers, here and there between Queens overpasses and billboards. Through the tunnel, and already I'd begin saying, “Do we have to go?” and my mother would say, yes I had to go. Trudeau had hours at Mount Sinai, and that was close to the old neighborhood, which made me feel an ambivalence, happy to be near the light people, uneasy to be near them, too, because I had tried—as Djuna recommended—to forget about them, forget everything I could, and being there forced me to realize how utterly I'd failed at doing that.

“Meaning what?” Faw would ask.

“As I've said before,” she (Trudeau was a woman) said, “the icicles are something more common in post adolescents, as Grace has described the blind spot in the center of her visual field—”

“It's not a blind spot.” I was fussy about the details, if only because I knew them so intimately.

“Well, what is it, Grace?” Faw asked.

“There's nothing there, inside the icicles.”

“Well, that's what she just said.”

“No, she said it was a blind spot.”

Trudeau said, “There isn't supposed to be anything there, it isn't that you can't see it, whatever would be in the blind spot, it's that there isn't anything to see, is that what you mean, Grace?”

“Yes.”

As my episodes dated to when I got my braces, the traditional Brush braces—canted front teeth ran in the family—Faw had some theory about the braces being the cause of all my troubles. My brothers teased me about my silvery mouth (“Maybe we should melt Grace down, silver's worth a lot more than—”) but what was of interest to Trudeau was my appetite—the braces certainly didn't stop me from eating. Faw noted I was “quite the pig,” though I was thin as a birch limb, my arms and legs strong and spidery under the colorful frocks I liked to wear.

Said Dr. Trudeau, “My presumptive diagnosis would still be”(at this medicalese my father was always seen to roll his eyes)“that her migraines—”

“Megrims,” interrupted Mother, trying to be helpful.

“—are congenital, and not the result of an injury to the brain, or progressive dementia, or a tumor—looking through these materials, by the way at some point I'd like to find out from you why it is she's been through so many analyses without getting on a single program before this. Grace is, or has the model physiognomy for this, reddish-blonde hair believe it or not is common in migrainous females, as is Grace's appetite coupled with the fact that she is—”

“She is awfully thin,” Erin said.

“I'm not too worried about that, but some of these other things are more unusual. For instance, that these phosphenes precede her full scotoma, well … Grace, you're a rather extraordinary girl, whether you like it or not.”

I smiled, liking it that I was extraordinary.

“And it hasn't the least thing to do with teeth”—which meant, of course, upon Faw's hearing that it was still all his fault, just as the “goddamned crooked teeth” had been (there'd been no crooked teeth in Mother's family, as she pointed out to the doctor, from where she sat in the chair near the door, her already narrow and pale face appearing thinner, whiter, under the fluorescents of the office). When Faw mentioned to Dr. Trudeau he sensed he should feel responsible somehow about her condition, Trudeau's response was that, no, that while “the gene pool doesn't lie,” megrims don't seem to run down family trees.

At the end of the fourth or fifth visit with us Trudeau got some insight into why and how the case had gone through so many hands. She had prescribed ergotamine, a “paso-constrictor,” which sounded like a kind of big murderous African snake, and recommended that to prevent hyperventilation I breathe into a paper bag, which I should always keep nearby. I wondered at her masculine face, which I thought was handsome, but not as handsome as either my father's, or Desmond's, “Like under my pillow?”

Dr. Trudeau straightened the chart papers on her desk and smiled. “Under your pillow would be fine.”

“Like, where the sandman lives?” and as I said it I noticed a rod of light flowered upside down through the clinic office.

“And breathe in, out, in, out, as deeply as you can, into the bag. Just think of the bag as your friend,” and turning to my father catching him just as he was about to interrupt again, “once learned never forgotten, like swimming, there are precursors to this, and if inductions are ferreted out, like in her case this additional structure of fear which induces hyperventilation, and from what she's said and what I can piece together I believe that even mild circumoral paraesthesia—”

Faw frowned. “Excuse me, but at the risk of sounding coarse I've got a lot to do still today. It's not these headaches, but the flare man stuff that—”

“Migraines are not headaches, Mr. Brush.”

“I like the flare man okay.”

“She needs quiet, support, understanding—it's the only way to help her to be rid of her fears.”

I protested, “I'm not afraid.”

“Grace has nothing on earth to be afraid of,” Mother said, and straightened her back; how was it these doctors always made her feel defensive?“She has a family that loves her she's got that lassie apso, lasso—”

“That was Damsel, Bung is a beagle.”

Dr. Trudeau continued, “Grace. This dog, is this the dog you said your brother—is it Burke is his name?—dropped out the apartment window?”

“What did, did Grace tell you that?”

“Is that true?”

As I said, “Yes,” Faw said, “Christ almighty that's not the way, that's not what happened, totally fallacious, that dog was constantly getting himself into one jam after another, did you tell the doctor about how Midge ran him in the clothes dryer, she heard the barking so he didn't go through the whole cycle but he had plenty of time to cough up all over the laundry before she could turn it off and get him out of there, so that's not accurate about my son throwing him out the window.”

“Did you get her, that is to say did you replace—all that concerns us here is whether this symptom complex, because this isn't a disease, you remember my telling you about the variant familial hemiplegic migraine, because I don't think this stops here—”

“I mean he died—”

“Damsel was a she and she went to heaven, really a darling she was more darling than Bung is although Bung is a darling, too.”

“Right, see?, Bung, another one of the same—”

“No, Damsel was a lasso apso.” I smoothed down my skirt over my thighs, straightening every fold in every pleat.