The Measures Between Us (18 page)

Until that moment he had never thought of himself as particularly fascinating. He always earned good grades and he read voraciously, everything from the newspaper to novels to fat
biographies and history books. And he was a fierce observer of the world around him. But he didn't think this was unique. Surely many people took note of their surroundings. What else was there to do?

His gift didn't go unnoticed among his friends. Jealous of his conquests, they ribbed him constantly. Wheeling, man, don't know how such an ordinary fucker like you scores babes. What do you do, bribe them? Drug them? Not that he had an endless string of girlfriends. But once he discovered how his sentences and attentiveness could make up for an unremarkable face, a build that was hardly athletic, he thought no one to be off-limits.

He met Lucinda during their junior year in college, when they were taking the same history class. Henry noticed her early on in the semester. She always sat at the same desk, toward the front of the classroom, and she rarely looked up from her notebook. She filled its pages with minuscule handwriting, so tiny it barely resembled English. It looked like the scrawlings of a madman. The professor once called on her unexpectedly and her face turned bright red. Henry found her blushing charming; he didn't understand why such a beautiful girl would ever be embarrassed.

He found excuses to talk to her—questions about a lecture, a lost reading assignment, an upcoming test. At first she was cool, almost distant, answering him with single words or clipped sentences before muttering something about how she had to get back to her dorm or go to the library. Gradually she warmed up. On the last day of class, Henry timed his finishing of the final exam so he would exit at the same minute as her, a charade that required considerable patience since he had completed the test
forty-five minutes earlier. Once outside, he asked her out for a drink when exams were over.

Their relationship quickly grew serious. She said to him early on, “I'm not one of those girls who likes to have lots of boyfriends. I can't switch gears like that. I'm kind of a long-term girl.” They had been at McSwiggan's, a local campus bar, Henry drinking beer and Lucy vodka tonics. She was smoking Parliaments.

“What if you don't like the guy—you're still a long-term girl?”

“Obviously not,” said Lucy. “If I don't like someone, I don't waste my time. Life's too short. Scared yet?”

“Not even a little,” he said. “Try something else.”

“What if I kick you really hard?” she said, and tried. He easily swung his leg out of the way and they both laughed. Then she punched him playfully in the arm.

He liked her forthrightness. He liked her green eyes and dark brown hair and the way a Blondie song on the jukebox could turn her mood light as air. He liked that she blushed a lot, and once when he told her she was blushing, she said, “Never tell a blusher she's blushing. It only makes it worse. Besides, we always know. There's no antidote.”

There wasn't a single moment that made him realize he was in love with her. It was a gradual accretion of things, and the fact that the buildup was slow made him all the more convinced, all the more thankful. There were gestures both large and small, from something as routine as the way she knelt on the bed and said, “I'm bored—entertain me,” to her deftly shifting the subject when his father started pressuring him about his postcollege plans one night during a holiday weekend. She cared about him,
genuinely wanted him to be happy, and Henry knew how rare that was.

He asked her to marry him over dinner. They were in Chinatown, at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant where the best dishes weren't on the menu and the waiters barely spoke English. The ordering process revolved around pointing, nodding, and faith. He hadn't planned on asking that night, and he didn't have a ring, but when they toasted, water glasses filled with bring-your-own wine, he knew: She surprised him, and she would keep surprising him year after year, and that meant he could stay with her. He could wake up grateful each morning, glimpse her head on the pillow, hair falling over her forehead, Lucinda, lips parted, still asleep. Lucinda, beautiful, beautiful Lucy. That's what he wanted: someone he would never want to run from.

“Are you sure you're not cold?” Samantha asked. “Feels like you're shivering.”

Henry shook his head, forgetting for a moment that her back was to him. It didn't matter whether she handed him his shirt—that wouldn't still his tremors. It wouldn't matter even if he broke their embrace and watched her leave. Neither of those things would explain how he had arrived here.

Rangely wasn't what Cynthia had imagined. She had anticipated people babbling nonsense, or old women catatonic in bed. She had been afraid she would have to listen to wild tales of CIA surveillance and alien landings. Yet most of the patients were surprisingly tame. There were occasional outbursts, when burly orderlies dressed in white would storm the halls from their discreet hiding places and whisk the offending patient away, fearing that the episode might stir up others. For the most part, though, the hallways and common areas were quiet and calm, not a straitjacket or emergency syringe in sight.

Cynthia was required to speak to a psychiatrist, Dr. Eliot, every other day. She often answered his questions with a yes, a no, or a shrug, wondering how fifty minutes could take so agonizingly long. There was no clock in the office, which only added to the torture. She thought her curtness would drive him away, cut short their sessions, and she could return to the lounge and waste another day with TV and cigarettes and magazines. She didn't hate it as much as she thought she would, though it was hard for her to imagine how being there was going to help.

Dr. Eliot was unfazed by her lack of disclosure, and midway
through one of their early appointments Cynthia said, “Doesn't it piss you off that I won't tell you anything?”

“No,” he answered without pause, which only made her more frustrated. Either you're a liar or you're more patient than is fair, she thought.

Their sessions were punctuated by long stretches of silence when Cynthia would stare out the window or at the diplomas and certificates framed on the wall. Once, she pointed at them and said, “Do you think those mean you're really intelligent? Smarter than the rest of the world? Smarter than me?”

Dr. Eliot chuckled. “That's not why they're there.”

“Then what's the reason?”

“Partly it's tradition—for years, doctors have hung their diplomas,” he said. “And part of it is that I'm proud of what I've accomplished. Everyone should be. Is there something you're proud of?”

“We're talking about you and your diplomas,” Cynthia said. “I don't want to talk about me.”

“Why?”

“
Why
?” she repeated. “Because I don't want to—why isn't that a good enough reason?”

He would let the silence go on for a few minutes, then ask, “What are you thinking about?”

He made it sound like such a straightforward question, as if you could just open your mouth and string together sentences that would reveal your thoughts. That the words were lined up, orderly, in your brain, waiting to stream out, tidy as a speech or a book. I don't fucking know, she wanted to say, isn't it your job to tell me what I'm thinking? If I knew, I wouldn't have to be here. We could all just go home.

She resented all his inquiries, all the questions meant to figure her out and shovel away her depression.
What am I thinking about?
I'm thinking I don't want people trying to fix me. Not my parents, not some shrink I just met, even if he graduated from Harvard. Is anyone trying to fix you? Why don't you have to be fixed? Why don't you have to sit in a chair like this? Why aren't there people watching you? Why aren't you a zoo exhibit?

Occasionally, though, she welcomed the doctor's intent listening, his slew of questions. Because there were moments when she chose to take him at his word and believe that he was genuinely interested in her thoughts. The urges she didn't understand, the ones that scared her. No one had ever paid attention to her the way Dr. Eliot had. She had had boyfriends who had fallen in love with her, but they seemed more drawn to her body, to sex, and they had little patience when she tried to talk about her confusion. She watched their eyes glaze over, their attention wander. They grew fidgety and bored, and she wondered if they were already calculating when to leave. She knew how to draw them back in—it was as easy as a kiss, or even a palm to a knee, sometimes just a lingering gaze—but she didn't want to, didn't want to face the possibility that that was the only reason they liked her. And she knew her parents loved her as well, yet they loved her from a distance and whenever she did or said anything that baffled them, they backed away even further rather than press her for an explanation.

Dr. Eliot liked to ask about her childhood more than other therapists she had seen in the past, who had suggested things like going to the gym regularly or taking a hike. He seemed almost obsessed with it, and at first she tried to avoid his tack. “I don't see what my behavior at the dinner table, when I was six or
seven, has to do with anything,” she challenged. “I mean, does it really matter that I refused to eat my peas and then my mother made me feel bad about not liking the taste of peas by telling me that children in Africa were starving and would love some peas? She could have mailed them some peas if she was so concerned about their hunger—and, who knows, maybe they wouldn't like the taste of peas, either. I didn't know anyone from Africa, but not many kids I knew liked peas. The bad taste of peas might easily cut across all nationalities.”

“Well,” Dr. Eliot said, “why don't you let me worry about whether it's relevant and just try to report what you remember. We don't have to talk about vegetables.”

“Fine. Whatever. I had a perfect childhood. Flawless. I cleaned my plate. Now can I leave?”

“Do you really believe that?”

“What?” said Cynthia.

“That you had a perfect childhood,” said Dr. Eliot.

“Yeah. But clearly you don't believe me. Why not?”

“It's been my experience that that's pretty rare, if not nonexistent.”

“Maybe that's because you only talk to people in the loony bin,” Cynthia said.

“But I don't. I have a practice outside of the hospital as well, along with many friends who've told me about their childhoods.”

“Maybe you only talk to people who are nuts, even if they're not hospitalized.”

“I don't think that's the reason,” said the doctor with a hint of exasperation.

“Look,” said Cynthia, “if you want me to tell you stories
about my mother burning me with her cigarettes or my uncle molesting me, I will. I could come up with lots of shit, like the time my dad shoved my head under scalding bathwater because I moved his golf clubs an eighth of an inch to the right. He was yelling about his tee time while the water was pouring into my ears. He said, ‘Young lady, do you have any idea how long I've been waiting for that tee time? Now I'm going to teach you how long.' ”

“Did that happen?”

“Yeah. Why? That's not your definition of ‘perfect childhood'? I thought everyone got smacked around for moving sporting goods.” Cynthia sighed, bit her thumbnail. She laughed; her father didn't even own a set of golf clubs, probably had never set foot on a course. “No, of course it didn't happen,” she said. “But I feel like you're fishing for some sort of trauma.”

“I'm not,” said Dr. Eliot. “Why don't you just tell me what you remember.”

Tired of resisting, she gave in a little. “It all just seemed completely normal,” she said with a shrug. “The three of us had dinner together every night. That was really important to my mom, for us to eat together. My dad said grace and then we ate. I didn't like that he said grace.”

“Why?”

“When I got old enough to understand, it seemed silly. Not real, just some empty ritual, and I thought if he kept repeating this stupid ritual without questioning it, then that meant he wasn't as smart as I wanted him to be. I felt like he should see through it, too, not just inherit something or do something because my mom expected it.”

“And that was disappointing to you?”

Cynthia shrugged again. “Yeah. I guess it was. Wouldn't it disappoint you?”

“Then what happened at dinner, after grace?”

“We talked about what I did in school that day, or current events, or just insignificant stuff, like whether we were going to visit my grandparents over the weekend. They lived in Nashua. They were retired and had plastic sleeves over the arms of the sofa.”

“Did you enjoy those times—the supper times?”

Cynthia nodded. “Mostly. I mean, I don't remember not being happy at the dinner table. When I was a teenager, I sort of thought my parents were really square and they began to annoy me more and more.”

“Why?” Dr. Eliot asked.

“Because that's what happens when you're a teenager. That's the whole point, you start hating your parents, and probably they hate you a little too, for being so rude and ungrateful and self-centered. It's just the natural process. You hate them and then hopefully you circle back to not hating them before it becomes permanent. Everyone does that. Probably even people like you who go to Harvard and become shrinks.”

Dr. Eliot ignored the jab. “Did they do something specific to make you hate them?” he asked.

“Yes, they chained me by my ankle to a radiator and fed me by slipping food underneath my door. Really flat food, like crepes and those round crackers they serve at Indian restaurants.”

“I'll assume you're joking.”

“Good assumption.”

“Seriously,” said Dr. Eliot, “why don't you try to tell me why you started disliking them?”