cut.
The next waiting room was soft and beige, like the tissuey inside of an expensive shoebox, and I could have lain there forever, till the robins covered me with magazine leaves. Of course I had to get up and go and lay myself down when the time came—why this eternal lying?—on an even softer, browner couch in a smaller, safer room. I asked the doctor right way to let me stay forever. He held my hand for a moment, introducing himself, and my cold began to fade. Can it fade from the hand up and will the heart in the end be heated, like a tin pot on a gas burner turned high? I had always assumed that my body warmed up independently and that my heart, at the end, would always be safe and cold. He did not want anything from me—you can’t count money in a desperate situation like this—except my compliance, so that he could try to help. And I believed him.
My mother would have said there is no such thing as a disinterested man; she would have gone on to add that since he had green eyes, he must have other things in view. He did have green eyes, pale, finely lashed, and a pale, tired face. He seemed to have spent himself warming people up. By the second session, I hated the idea of any particle of him going to other people, and I ground my teeth when I passed the next patient—always a woman—in his little hall. I wanted him all to myself and it seemed to me that this was my last chance. My day was flooded with sights I had never seen in my life, views of my lean body folded up on his lap or the back of my neck as I knelt to kiss his feet. I had been cross and mean all my life and now, like a three-year-old with a lollipop, I was all syrup and sunshine. Shame had no part in it. As I went my rounds to the other doctors, letting them fill my teeth or put contact lenses in my eyes, as patiently as I have seen horses stand to be bridled and saddled, I imagined myself in my doctor’s arms. Of course, he did not respond. How could he respond? He wanted to help and, as he explained, holding me in his arms for a while or even for fifty minutes could not do me anything but harm. It is true that afterward I would never have let him go.
I thought I could push him. After all, other men had always wanted me. So I started to bring him little presents, bunches of chrysanthemums from Aunt Janey’s garden, jars of my own grape jelly, poems on yellow paper that would have embarrassed a twelve-year-old. He made me take them all away, always neutral, always kind, always ready to listen, but never won or even tempted. My wishes were making me wild and I wanted to gather myself up and wrap myself in a piece of flowered paper and hand myself to him—not for sex or compliments, but only to be held.
Aunt Janey caught me crying after three months of this and offered a trip to Paris as a distraction. I told her I couldn’t go because I couldn’t bear to break a single appointment with my doctor; she was taken aback. We had a long talk in the late-night kitchen where Uncle John had been making pancakes. She told me that analysis works, but not in that way. “I can understand you wanting to go to bed with him, that’s what everybody wants, but I can’t understand you letting it get so out of hand.”
“I don’t want to go to bed with him,” I said. “I couldn’t feel him any more than I could feel the furnace repairman. I want him to hold me on his lap and put his arms around me.”
“Yes, that’s childish,” she said, tapping her cigarette out.
“If I can’t persuade him to do it, I’ll die. I’ll lie down and die.” It was as clear to me as an item on the grocery list.
“You will not die,” she said firmly. “You will go to Paris with me and we will shop for clothes and visit the museums and we will find you a nice free man.”
“With green eyes and rays around his eyes and long hands with flat-tipped fingers?”
“That I can’t promise,” she said. “But he’ll be free.”
“I won’t go if it means missing an appointment.”
She started to figure how we could leave late on a Friday and come back on a Sunday, but then she saw it was no use and decided to go for a longer time with the second cousin.
So I was left alone for two weeks, except for Uncle John and the children. He was gone most of the time, coming back at night for his ginger ale and his smoked salmon and a spot of conversation before the late news. He wouldn’t let me fix real coffee in the morning; I think, being old and tired, he was afraid of the obligation. (The quid pro quo, my mother called it; nothing was free in her world, especially first thing in the morning.) The two girls spent most of the day in school and when the bus brought them home, I would have our tea picnic ready and we would take it out to the field behind the house. Late autumn by now and not many flowers left to pick, so we found milkweed pods and split them into the air. The little girls sat on my lap, either one at a time or both together, and when I kissed them, their hair smelled of eraser dust. I was in pain because the hours between my appointments were the longest hours of my life, and yet I never saw anything as beautiful as that field with the willows at the far end and the two little girls in their navy skirts and white blouses running after the milkweed parachutes.
By then I had discovered that my doctor had a wife and three children, and they all loved one another and managed well. More than that he would not tell me, and I was forced to believe him. After all, the owners of pale green eyes and flat-ended fingers tend to find the wives and get the children they can enjoy, the way a girl I met in one of my many schools knew exactly—but exactly—what to say to win a smile, and what flavor of milkshake would bring out the angel in her.
As my mother used to say, “Those that know what they want, get it.” But she had feeling all over her body, not just lodged here and there in little pockets.
Meanwhile my doctor was trying to take the bits and pieces I gave him and string them together to make me a father. I had never known or even asked which one of the cousins was my father, and so I gave him all the pieces I remembered from the whole bunch of them. Ronny and his truck. He had thick thighs that rubbed together when he walked and made him roll like a seafaring man. He liked to hold me between the thighs and comb my hair. Edwin with his briefcase that reminded me of my doctor’s (although Edwin’s was more expensive) and which, he once told me, held a surprise. The surprise, it turned out, was my cough medicine. Louis the railroad man who said he would take me with him on the train except that white girls brought bad luck; it was just like in the mines. The Air Force regular who yelped with joy and hugged me the day my mother said she would go to Honolulu.
My doctor wanted to know which one was my father, and he proposed that I write my mother and ask. I wrote her because I did everything he even hinted at and I would have as soon slit my own throat. Word came back a week later; she thought I had known all along. My father had been a Kansas boy stationed at Fort Knox one summer when she was working at a diner called the Blue Boar. I remembered then that she had always kept a picture of a big-faced smiling boy on the mantelpiece, when there was one, or on the table by her bed. She said he had been killed in Korea.
My doctor did not try to do much with that scrap. Probably my father never even saw my mother’s big stomach; if he had, he might have told her what to do about it, as a farm boy familiar with cows. So we had to start all over again with the scraps and pieces, trying to undo the way my memory simplified everything, trying to get behind the little pictures I wanted so desperately to keep: the shape of men’s hands and the ways they had let me down.
We were still at work when Aunt Janey came back from Paris and she made me get on the scales that first evening. I told her the work we were doing was wearing me down; it was like ditch digging, or snaking out drains. She knew I was better, and she told me not to give up now with the end in sight. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I knew I had to keep on. There was some hope for me somewhere in all that. At my doctor’s, the sweat would run down my face and I would have to pace the floor because there were months and even years of my life when all I could remember was the pattern a tree of heaven made when the sun shone through it on a linoleum floor. My doctor thought some of the scraps might have forced me into bed, but I only remember being tickled or chased with the hairbrush or locked in the car while they went into a road house. Nothing high or strange but only flat and cold. Something killed off my feeling, but it wasn’t being raped by Ronny or Edwin or any of the others. Mother had sense enough to find men who wanted only her.
I told my