Wonderland (45 page)

Her father had made the appointment for her, telephoning all the way from Cambridge. Today at eleven. To make sure she would go, he himself had called to make the appointment with a man he had known for many years, a Chicago obstetrician and gynecologist.

Today at eleven.

And now it was twenty-five minutes to six, a September morning. Already hot. Helene straightened Jesse’s desk top so that it was in perfect order. She felt drugged, lightheaded, as if she had just had another of those quiet arguments with Jesse:
How can you want me to have a baby? At this time in our lives?
Or with her father:
Why do you keep telling me to make Jesse do this, do that?
Fiercely, she would defend her husband against her father. She would not talk Jesse into coming East. No. Though she wanted to return to Boston herself, she would not press Jesse. No application for a research position. No application for a grant. She did not really want Jesse to be a doctor, a practicing doctor; she hated the thought of his running a big clinic someday; but she would not try to argue with him. She told her father that he must not ask her to argue, he must leave her marriage alone. With Jesse, she defended her separateness, her crystalline, frightened body: why
couldn’t he understand how bad an idea it was to have a baby now? Why couldn’t he understand her fear of the pain, the bitter, inevitable ripeness her body had to suffer? And then she would be a mother for life.
For life
. She did not want to be a mother. She was frightened. She did not want to enter that new state, to be delivered over into that new condition for a lifetime.…
Mrs. Vogel, a mother
.

Her father did not seem to listen to her and Jesse did not seem to listen to her. They talked at her. They talked at her and then went about the business of their lives, which had little to do with her.

She went out into the small kitchen and heated water for coffee. She lit a cigarette. Since coming to Chicago she had begun to smoke, though Jesse disapproved and she herself did not like the look of people smoking. Her forehead wrinkled sharply at the thought of women smoking, pregnant women smoking, pregnant bellies.… No, it was too ugly. It was impossible. She could not really be pregnant. Her body was too lean and somber, it had no glow to it, no resiliency. She had become acquainted with the young wife of one of Jesse’s residents in Medicine. The residents, like the interns, received little pay. And yet this woman was pregnant and her face and body were hearty, almost arrogant with health, and she expressed only scorn for the reprimands given her by her family. Her name was Susan; her husband, Milton Kuzma, seemed to think highly of Jesse. Milton said of Jesse: “They’re not going to break
him.
” And this was meant to be a compliment. They’re not going to break
him
.

Helene stared out the kitchen window. She wondered if she would be broken. What did that mean, to be broken? She kept seeing Trick collapsing to the sidewalk, his legs giving out.… He was in a private hospital in Minnesota now. She kept seeing, half-seeing, the patients Jesse spoke of when he came home especially saddened, until the rooms of this small apartment were crowded with ghostly strangers, all pleading for attention. Helene stared out the window, feeling herself very much alone. Their apartment was on the fourth story of an aged brownstone not far from the hospital. The neighborhood was decaying: big, handsome, ruined buildings with tall windows and doors and columns, front stoops that flared outward to the street, everything dirty and weathered and very human, so that Helene wanted to stop on the street at times to stare, to memorize. The buildings had been handsome at one time. Ridged with scrollwork, with odd eroded animals
and human heads, even their chimneys impressive. Their spirit stern, masculine. Now they were marked for extinction. Some were already razed, and you could see the marks of stairways on walls that still stood; the veinlike marks of pipes; the places where wires had been torn out or hung dangling like exposed nerves. Negro children played in the rubble. A few lots had already been cleared and bulldozers had covered the gutted valleys with fill of sand and clay and brick, preparing for new construction. Smaller buildings remained, like the one in which Jesse and Helene lived, and other brownstones that were two family houses. The air of the street was excited and dusty on any weekday—always a sense of wonderment, the surprise of walls about to collapse, bricks about to crumble, always the dull heavy half-pleasant rhythm of a weight striking something. The workmen would arrive at eight o’clock and begin work at once. Pounding, breaking, the high sharp angry buzz of machines, the churning of great wheels in soft earth.… The Kuzmas lived only a half a block away, on a side street. Their apartment was smaller than Helene and Jesse’s, closer to the demolition work. Susan would sit and press her hands against her stomach, frowning, and complain about the noise. The vibrations. She hated the noise but Helene secretly liked it because it was not human. Jesse and Milton didn’t notice it, they hadn’t time for such things. But Helene liked it because it was not a human noise, not like the shrieks and footsteps in this old building that brought the faceless tenants too close to her, inflicted an intimacy on her that she did not want. When she was alone in the apartment, which was often, she tried to concentrate on the distant noise, the heavy reliable noise of machinery, in order to blot out from her consciousness this nearer, more disturbing noise. A father yelling at his son … a child’s scream of frustration … women yelling perpetually at children, as if these children were still bound to their bodies by some frantic, agonizing strand of flesh.

It was not possible that she was pregnant.…

All her life she had felt wild rushes of expectation and fear.
To be a woman. A wife
. You needed a man to complete you; that was obvious. In order to be a woman, a wife. She had been afraid to think about love, about loving a man, because it had seemed to her impossible, ugly, brutish. She had resisted thinking about it the way she resisted thinking about death. It was too ugly. She had grown up with a dislike of being touched, even by her parents. Yet she knew she must be touched
eventually. She must be touched, loved, completed by a man and made over into a woman.
A woman: a wife
.

She wanted to be loved but to be separate and suspended, inside the idea of love, so that the man might exist in a part of her mind, chastely. Always she had feared her body. Her mother had referred to certain things obliquely, with a curt clipped shame—her father had never referred to them at all—and Helene had grown up with a resistance to them, to the thought of them, and to her own body with its helpless flesh. What did that mean exactly, to have a body? To live in a body? Did she inhabit her body like a tenant? She imagined her body as a substance of a certain weight, pure and inviolable from the outside. And so it did not seem possible that a man, a man’s body, might freely enter her own and do such damage to it.… Layer upon layer the years formed her: Helene was now a married woman, the same age as her husband, and yet she was also nineteen years old, she was twelve years old again, she was a child. All the layers were intense, quivering, conscious of existing. Conscious of being female, a little ashamed of being female.

Susan Kuzma showed no shame about anything. She talked about her bladder irritation in front of anyone, had made up a kind of joke about the humiliation of a gynecological examination at the hospital. Helene listened in amazement. It hardly seemed possible that another woman could speak of such things. She could never have spoken that way herself. Never. She was suspended in a fearful, cautious state, cautious especially of Jesse’s love, as if surrendering to him would infect her with that coarse blatant bodiliness she hated so in other women.

She took a shower, dreading the ugly shower stall and its perpetual smell. But it was one of the things she must do every day. The drain was rusty and always clogged with hairs and soap, though she cleaned it often. Jesse showered at both the hospital and at home, and every time he showered he washed his hair. Soap came apart in his fingers, he must have used it so brutally. He brought home from the hospital the habit of scrubbing himself hard, for many minutes. The hospital was so contagious … and Jesse himself, his hands, was so contagious.…

Yes, small bits of soap were caught in the drain this morning and Helene bent to pick them out one by one.

When she got dressed the workmen had begun their pounding. Great weights seemed to fall from the sky upon solid, resisting masses.
It was eight o’clock, and by eleven she would be in the waiting room of her father’s friend. He would decide her fate. It had nothing to do now with her or Jesse or even her father’s wishes.
Jesse gathering her up in his arms, breathless, in that instant before his mind blacked out …
But now it had nothing to do with him. The doctor would examine her, he would test her, and then he would tell her what had happened to her. To her body.

Jesse knew nothing about this. Tonight he would spend the night here and she would have to tell him. He would bring home with him the faint sorrowful odor of sickness, a two days’ duty on seven floors of a hospital; he would pass his hands over his eyes and whisper, “My God, there are some people I’ve gotten to hate.…” and she would feel the tension in him, that he should admit to such an emotion: Jesse, who rarely hated. Then, with an effort, he would ask her about herself. How was her job? Exhausted, he would try to talk to her as if she were a special, challenging patient he must work up, her sickness a mystery. It would take probing, prying, to discover what was wrong with her. It would take all his youthful shrewdness. But a certain wavering of his gaze would tell Helene that he was about to collapse, and so she would lead him gently to bed, like a child, while he tried to talk with her, shaking his head to stay awake. It had happened so many times.… Sometimes Jesse went for thirty-six hours without sleeping when he was on duty. His eyes were ringed with exhaustion and he had lost weight. But he never complained except to tell Helene in amazement that he hated someone, or had lost track of a patient, or had been cut down by one of the staff, or had made a mistake. But these were not really complaints. Jesse seemed to contemplate himself, Dr. Vogel, as if this person were a stranger, without emotions. There was no time for emotions. Jesse, a husband, sometimes seemed to have emotions because he understood that people had them, that he owed it to his young wife to display them. But really there was no time. She would lead him to bed and lie beside him, holding him in her arms, and he would sink into a sudden stuporous sleep. Sometimes he ground his jaws. Sometimes he seemed to be arguing inaudibly. Helene would whisper, “Jesse, you’re home. You’re in bed.” But still his muscles twitched, his eyeballs moved behind his closed eyes. What was he struggling with? Helene had a dim view of people running in the hospital’s corridors—Jesse among them, running—Sometimes he said out loud, “The elevator is stuck,” or “Where is the light?”

Helene wanted to sleep that night, so she went out to a drugstore to get some pills. Ordinary sleeping pills, the kind sold over the counter. She had never taken anything stronger because she had never wanted to ask her father for a prescription; she hadn’t wanted him to know about any of her weaknesses. Her father had made a great deal of money on several types of barbiturates he had patented, so this seemed a further reason to resist taking them. In the drugstore she hesitated over several brands of pills. She imagined the pharmacist was watching her closely. Her fingers were trembling a little. Yes, they were trembling, and at the front counter, where she paid for the pills, a woman clerk seemed to feel sorry for her. There must have been some meager, helpless sorrow on her face.

She walked out with a jar of one hundred pink pills. The entire day belonged to her.

She could telephone Dr. Blazack and cancel the appointment. It would only take a minute. Then she could drive downtown and around the city aimlessly, or she could drive out along the lake, anywhere, in the car her father had given her and Jesse back in Ann Arbor.

Her wristwatch was small and delicate. It had been her mother’s. The face was a tiny oval, its numbers dots of white gold. The strap was like a bracelet, a lacy interweaving of threads of white gold.
Only ten-thirty
. She had been up since five-thirty that morning, waiting for eleven o’clock to come, her face going hard and ironic at the knowledge that it would come so slowly. She held her watch up to her ear to see if it was ticking. The dots had the look of being blind. She wondered what time meant, why she was sitting here in this strange city, a city she didn’t know or like, why she was beginning to fill with a cold sick panic, why she had married and had completed herself. She was a woman now, a wife. She was completed; if she was pregnant she would be completed. It would be a sign of how a man had completed her. She stared at her watch and saw that time moved very slowly.
That anonymous jellyfish, that balloon, its lesions and hairs and flimsy stubborn transparency
.…

She decided to drive downtown now. She had always wanted to explore Chicago on one of her days off from the university. She and Jesse had planned to explore it together, but Jesse had never had time. He said he liked to walk, but he never had time to walk. In Cambridge,
Helene and her father had often gone for long walks on Sunday. They had also walked a great deal in Ann Arbor; in fact, it had been on one of their weekend walks that Helene had met Jesse. Someone had called “Dr. Cady!” and they had turned to see a tall young man, red-haired, very fair in the face and yet not pale with that sickly paleness of some red-haired people, dressed in old clothes, a certain quick urgency to his step that alarmed Helene—for it had seemed to her, in the first few seconds’ confusion, that he had called out to warn her father of some danger. But it was only a student, a medical student. He was polite, frank, a little nervous. Helene, staring at him, had felt a familiar sense of helplessness rise in her, for this was the kind of man she had never been able to confront calmly—she had never felt herself equal to such a man; she had always turned away shyly, withdrawing. He had an excited, intelligent, attractive face. It was obvious that he was intimidated by her father, and yet he spoke clearly and frankly. There was something new about him, something very new, unique, that startled this young man himself as if with its audacity, as if he were creating himself as he talked, inventing himself. That day he had seemed to Helene too vigorous. A threat. She had turned away from him slightly, distrusting him.