Women and Children First (3 page)

Gordie says, “Could he have seen the picture?” and when Janet shakes her head, he says, “You really should get this checked out.” This sounds like medical advice, which in a way it is. Gordie has a friend at Georgetown Medical School who told him that someone there has gotten a small grant to study family ESP. What friend? wonders Janet. Gordie often uses the word to mean some guy he found attractive and maybe even had a long conversation with at a bar.

Janet says she’ll ask Kevin; she knows he’ll never agree. Kevin takes it for granted that he and Janet have the same thoughts, he can’t understand why Janet gets so excited about it. Maybe he worries that thinking like a girl means you are one. He says that all kids and parents think alike; it comes from living in the same house, and if it doesn’t happen with his father it’s only because Will doesn’t live with them but in D.C. When Janet asks Kevin
how
he knows this, if he has asked other kids, he says, “Are you crazy?” What, then, would he think of scientists getting grants to ask other parents and kids? He’d think it was weird; and worse, he’d know that it would involve every kind of attention he hates.

Just before Janet leaves Georgetown, Gordie asks if she doesn’t at least want to keep the cow jumping over the moon. Janet makes a little sweep with her hand. “Gordie,” she says, “I’m just a conduit. Hear the wind blowing through?”

On the drive back to Monterey, Janet keeps looking in her rearview mirror, imagining Gordie’s armies, the convoys of househunting Volvos and Saabs bearing down on her. She feels nearly queasy with secret knowledge, as if she alone sees the enemy massing on the Eastern front. Nearly home, she stops for a couple of hitchhikers—local characters, old hippies Kevin refers to as Mr. Time Travel and his wife. They are often on the road; Janet has picked them up a few times before and does so again today because Mrs. Time Travel appears to be hugely pregnant. When the man helps his wife into the cab of the truck, Janet smells patchouli. The woman was overweight to begin with, but her husband is very bony. It averages out; they fit fairly comfortably on the front seat. As Janet drives them into Staunton, Mr. Time Travel tells her how their welfare worker is threatening to cut them off if his wife doesn’t get to a doctor. He talks very softly about the horrors of hospital birth—women trussed up and drugged, bright lights shining in babies’ eyes—and every time he says “trussed up” Janet feels his wife flinch.

Something about this makes Janet determined to bring Kevin in for the ESP experiments. Maybe it’s the impulse to distinguish herself from
these
dinosaurs, to identify as the modern, if downwardly mobile, former wife of a surgeon and the mother of a perfectly healthy hospital-born kid. Partly, she just longs for something new. When she and Will split up and she found this way to live out here and make money, she’d thought that the rest of her life would be a treasure hunt. The auctions, the sales, checking the local obits—how quickly it all came to seem like a job. It’s got so her heart sinks at the sight of another beautiful oak hutch. Also, she wonders if this new desire to be a famous ESP guinea pig is just that old dream of specialness, of celebrity and revenge: mind-reading mom and kid amazing talk-show hosts, written up by Oliver Sacks so even Will can read it.

She wants to just do it—just go there for the experiments, not argue—so that night at dinner she tells Kevin that if he comes with her, no questions asked, he can have a new baseball mitt and two computer games.

“Medical school?” Kevin says.

“Trust me,” says Janet, and they both smile, because this is Kevin’s expression. “No doctors,” she says. “Looking at pictures. ESP experiments. That kind of thing. Okay, listen. They’ll pay us ten dollars an hour. You get to keep the money.”

“Ten dollars an hour?” he repeats, and when Janet nods, he says, “That and the ant farm.” Lately he has been asking for an ant farm; she should have thought of that right away. Where did he hear about ant farms? And where in the world do you get one? Tracking down items from science-museum shops is not the kind of thing either she or Will does well, especially not now, with Will spending every free minute with his new girlfriend. She thinks there’s some rigamarole about getting the ants. And the way Kevin takes care of things, there’s a good chance that dirt, broken glass and a million ants will wind up on his bedroom floor. Still, it seems like something you’d want to buy your kid, feel better about than computer games.

“Okay, the ant farm,” she says.

Janet makes an appointment at the medical school for a Wednesday; she tells Kevin he’ll learn as much as he would have from two days at school. At one time he liked missing school, no matter what. But now he’s clearly torn, and on the day of the appointment, Janet feels so guilty that she stops, without his even asking, for take-out McDonald’s breakfast. As they merge with the stream of trucks on Route 74, she says, “In a few years, you’ll be driving. It seems impossible—you were just this little baby.”

After a long silence, Kevin says, “Do you have to
catch
the ants, or can you just buy them somewhere?”

“I don’t know,” Janet says. “I’ll find out.”

And that’s it for conversation. For most of the drive, Kevin stares out the window. Glancing over at him, Janet thinks how soon he will be a teenager; now he is right on the edge. It occurs to her that being so handsome may make it easier for him, but she can’t tell him this; it is already too late.

She pulls into the Park ’n Ride lot, where Gordie is waiting. His metal-flake emerald ’56 Buick gleams like a giant eight-cylinder scarab. Janet is glad to see him, glad that he offered to close the store and come with them. She loves riding in Gordie’s car: everyone turns to look at you as you sink into the deep sofa-like seats and breathe in the stuffy, indescribable smell of your childhood. Gordie said he wanted to expedite their trip, to free their minds for higher things, but Janet suspects that he’d like to run into his friend at the medical school. She can’t blame him. At the back of her mind is the fact that where they’re going isn’t far from Will’s office. She imagines meeting him, imagines the look on his face, that sympathetic doctor’s look of perplexity and concern.

The waiting room reminds her of an expensive obstetrician’s—in fact, of the office of the old man Will knew who delivered Kevin for free. It’s smaller, of course, and empty, but even so, Janet has that waiting-room self-consciousness as she sits between Kevin with his punky baseball cap pulled over his eyes and Gordie with his ginger moustache and leather bomber jacket; as if there were anyone there to approve, she feels proud to be sitting between them. Kevin likes Gordie, though he spends too much time with his dad and Will’s doctor-intellectual friends to give Gordie much credit as a full-scale human adult. Gordie has brought Kevin treasures—special marbles, a rooster-shaped tin bank, a revolving lamp with a scene of Niagara Falls—which Kevin seems to like but leaves all over his room.

After a while, a receptionist calls Janet and Kevin. Gordie says, “Adios and good luck. If I’m not here, I’m taking a walk, I’ll be back.” The receptionist, a barrel-like young woman, takes off down the scratchy-industrial-carpeted hall; Janet and Kevin fly after her, and so have to brake sharply when she motions them through an office door.

Inside, a woman sits behind the desk, a man in the chair beside her. The woman is wearing a lab coat. Janet wonders why she needs it; she’d always thought lab coats were to guard against spraying mouse blood. The man and the woman stand to shake hands. They are both about Janet’s age, a fact which horrifies and convinces her that she shouldn’t have come. She feels humiliated, as if being on the opposite side of this scientific investigation is an admission of failure in life.

The woman introduces herself as Dr. Wilmot. She is tall, a light-skinned black woman with huge, stylish eyeglasses, a clear, lively smile, and unruly, half-straight hair. She introduces the man as Dr. Becker, and he laughs and says, “Eric.” He is good-looking in that clean, academic way that can make jeans and rolled shirt sleeves look like a lab coat: not clinical, exactly, just terribly pressed and neat. When Eric shakes Janet’s hand, he smiles and looks at her closely. She focuses on a postcard tacked to the cork-board on the wall behind him—a vintage anthropological photo of two pygmy women playing ping-pong.

Dr. Wilmot says she’d like to say a few things about the study. She says they are lucky, that there’s really no money around for this kind of project these days. She says the experiment is simply the classic model: they’ll be put in separate rooms and asked to look at pictures. She asks if they have any questions. Janet can’t think of one. Kevin looks too bored to speak.

They leave Dr. Wilmot’s office and walk awkwardly down the hall; no one knows who to walk with. After a while they reach two open doors. Dr. Wilmot motions Janet and Eric into one room, she and Kevin take the other. Janet is glad that it’s not the other way round. She wonders if this arrangement is accidental or if research has discovered that ESP gets sharper around a slight sexual buzz.

As Kevin disappears through the door, Dr. Wilmot smiles encouragingly, but with a certain strain, so that it comes out almost a leer. Janet feels strange, as if she’s involving her child in something scandalous, like some Victorian father introducing his son to the local bordello.

The room Eric takes her into is dimly lit, bare but for two wooden chairs and a wooden table, rather like the set of a low-budget avant-garde play. On the table is a stack of cards, face down, also a clipboard and pen. Eric picks up the clipboard and says he is sorry, he has to take a history. Again Janet has a flash of the obstetrician’s, more panicky now, but at least he doesn’t ask when she got chicken pox or her first period, facts she’s long since forgotten and so always has to reinvent. He asks about traumatic childhood illnesses or experiences, hers or Kevin’s. Janet says, “Normal, normal, normal.” Finally he asks, “When was the first time you sensed some special connection with your son?”

“Special connection?” she says.

Eric’s gesture takes in the room. “You know,” he says.

“Do you have kids?” asks Janet.

Eric jumps slightly, then says, “Three. They live with their mother. I get them alternate weekends.” He says this with some bewilderment, as if he hasn’t yet figured out why this should be. Janet finds it encouraging, and goes back to considering his question. Special connection? There was that night just before she went into labor, when the baby’s kicking woke her up, and she knew—she just knew—he was miserable, he didn’t want to be born. But maybe mentioning this will label her right from the start as an unreliable subject.

So she tells him about the first incident actually witnessed by bona fide–scientist Will. “This is a crazy story,” she says. Eric moves his chair nearer hers. “I was breaking up with my husband. At that time I thought I’d stay in D.C. For Kevin. Will was helping me find an apartment. The first place we saw was full of eyeballs. Everywhere—the kitchen counter, the toilet tank, every surface was covered with plasticene eyeballs. It turned out that the woman who lived there made models for a medical supply house and she’d gotten a big order. My husband is a doctor, he’d used models like that in medical school, so they had lots to talk about. I knew I couldn’t live there, even though she was taking the eyeballs with her, and on the way home my husband and I had a fight, because otherwise it was a perfectly good apartment, and why was I being so squeamish? We picked Kevin up at my friend’s. And
she
was in a bad mood because her kid was Kevin’s age and couldn’t draw a straight line and Kevin had spent the whole afternoon drawing these perfect eyeballs.”

“Wow,” Eric says. “Is that really true?”

“Every word,” says Janet, though she’s left out the fact that the eyeball-apartment woman was young and pretty.

“How did your husband feel about it?” Eric asks.

“He hated it. He acted like I did it on purpose, coached Kevin. I stopped telling him when things like that happened, but sometimes, when they happened in front of him, he used to say he felt like an actor in one of those disaster movies with the
Titanic
sinking and everyone yelling, ‘Women and children first!’ except that his wife and kid had already gone and left him standing on deck, watching their lifeboat float off.”

Janet realizes she has never even told Gordie about Will saying this. She only mentioned it once, drunk, at a D.C. party. Someone was talking about the actual
Titanic,
and she stopped the whole conversation by quoting Will. There was a terrible silence, till finally some lefty lawyer type said something lame and solemn—meant, nonetheless, as a halfhearted come-on—about the whole male sex being stuck on a sinking ship.

“I used to feel awful when he’d say that,” Janet says. “I’d think: Hey, he’s a doctor, he has enough in his life without envying me and Kevin. But I don’t know. I guess he felt left out; I guess everybody wants everything.”

Janet pauses, slightly embarrassed and pleased that saying “everybody wants everything” may have made her sound like a greedy slave of appetite. She doubts that it’s even true. One night last fall, when Kevin was in D.C., Janet went home with a man—a candlemaker—she met at a Charlottesville crafts fair. After a while, he showed her into his bedroom; he’d lit mushroom candles all over. Though touched by his attempt at romance, she was appalled by those hideous glowing mushrooms, and she couldn’t go through with it; she excused herself and left.

What she wants to tell Eric is how, in the end, Will was really the prescient one. Because, finally, wasn’t he right? Janet and Kevin in one boat, Will in another, an ocean—all right, a highway—between them. Sometimes it astonishes her that her strongest—her only—connection is with a child. It’s common enough, she knows, just not what she expected. And now, when she imagines those disaster films, it’s the women’s faces she sees, the looks on their faces as they climb down into the boats: fear mixed with amazement that when the order came, they so readily, so instinctively complied. But saying this might make her life with Kevin sound impenetrable, closed-off, full-up. It’s why, she sometimes thinks, she’s so adamant about not accumulating lots of stuff. What man wouldn’t hesitate in the doorway of a house where a woman and child live surrounded by perfect antiques?