SO

The office is furnished with beanbag chairs and red plastic kiddie tables. A teddy bear has a pink heart stitched to its chest. In one corner is a bulky desk, flanked by two office chairs, in which the child psychologist and Karen Cadwallader face each other. She is restless, has declined to take off her coat, scowls. One hand is at her rib cage, kneading in an habitual gesture, probing the spaced bones. She tells herself, No one put a gun to your head, to come here.

“Well, let’s hear your ideas first, and then I’ll give you my ideas.”The child psychologist folds his hands.

Karen Cadwallader sighs. “I don’t know that I have any ideas. She’s very clever. That can be problematic.”

“You’re . . . British?”

“Yes. Yes, actually, I thought, we moved to America about the time this began. And of course her father is still in Britain.”

“Why of course?”

“We work.”

“And would you say . . . was that about the time you began to feel ill?”

“That’s not connected. She doesn’t know: work doesn’t know. I haven’t felt tempted to make it a mainspring of my life.”

“You know, children notice much more than we realize.”

Karen feels this escaping into some awful irrelevance. She wants to protest, she’s six, she doesn’t know mummies die. She can’t know, she’s six, don’t make it worse than it is.

She says stiffly, “I didn’t come here to talk about me.”

For the remaining thirty minutes they discuss Karen Cadwallader’s marriage, her early youth, her uterine cancer. She never had much faith in the radiation treatments. They caught it early, she should have had a chance, but there’s no right and wrong. She winds up with a phrase she’s rehearsed tirelessly in her mental practice runs of finally telling Peter: “I can’t take it so terribly seriously, the dying part. I’m a doctor myself, at the end of the day, it’s rather old hat.”

The psychologist waits her out. It’s a probing silence that Karen physically opposes, squaring her shoulders in her now-baggy raincoat. When it is plain she will say nothing more, he rebuts gently: “Even doctors have feelings.”

She catches her breath, feels idiotically that she’s betrayed something. It’s a feeling she recognizes from her occasional dreams about being kidnapped by the KGB, the truth serum dreams. In those she is lying strapped to a bed – naked, what else – and she has already talked. It’s done beyond remedy: she is going to die in disgrace.

She summons up a flip, professional tone, fires back: “No, you see, I’m a medical doctor.” And the time’s up, she can frown apologetically at her watch –

and gather her things to go.

There’s still time to get into her office at Bulwer-Sutton Industries if she takes the freeway.

She phones her husband from the office for privacy’s sake: privacy meaning no Denise. It’s a trade-off because office conversations are automatically recorded: theoretically someone combs these hours of tapes for suspicious exchanges. Since only senior staff have the clearances to listen to the tapes, however, and senior staff are far too busy to waste time in this fashion, Karen prefers to believe the tapes rot in a safe.

Peter answers on the first ring. He’s per usual guarded, speaks rapidly to get it over with. She lets him rabbit on, hums to imply listening, dreads her turn. But when he has related the intricacies of his latest actuarial project, he winds up breathlessly, “This must be costing you.”

In the ensuing silence, she grips the receiver with all her strength. Her face collapses into a rictus of grief. She knows she has yet again failed to tell him, that she will die before he learns she was ever ill, that this is all wrong: she is cruel.

Perhaps it’s because she’s in the office, but she’s unhappily visited by the burly shade of Jack Moffat. It’s a fantasy that’s plagued her these six months.

Jack Moffat is her husband. It’s him she comes to with her troubles.

In some versions of the fantasy, the Jack Moffat figure dissolves in a frenzy of activity: he is fixing everything. In some he just enfolds her in his arms. For this purpose, he is always wearing a voluminous coat, into which she disappears, gratefully, probably bloody fainting.

Karen, you hardly know the man, she tells herself, as if it were really anything to do with Jack, after all.

“I’ll let you go,” Peter says.

She blurts: “Darling, there’s Denise.”

“What? What about her?”

“Well, she’s been upset, she’s in trouble at school –”

“I don’t know what you want me to do about it from 3,000 miles away.”

She begins to speak but he breaks in:

“I am 3,000 miles away.”

She begins to speak but he, angrily:

“Be fair.”

She does not say, Look, I am dying, you’ll have to take her. She does not say, Be kind to me, for Christ’s sake, I’m in pain. She does not say, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying.

She will not plead to be missed.

She says, “I won’t keep you.”

And then she gathers her things to go.

– to get home to pay the sitter: “Good night, Elaine, thanks ever so much!”

– to lean at the kitchen table drinking cold black coffee poured from the morning’s pot, but she must

carry on after all regardless at the end of the day

– to change her clothes standing next to the washing machine, start the next load and take the stairs in three goes

count to ten and rest and count to ten and rest and

The damned mirror waits at the top.

“Careworn” is putting it mildly.

Someone loved that face once. Someone went down on one knee. He went into debt buying that crone a diamond ring. Karen, my dear, it boggles the mind.

ONCE

1     It was always raining and it was always dusk.

1.1   It must be when we lived in London: this must be that grotty bedsit.

1.2   He had always already had one drink. In those days, people held hands.

1.3   “I’ll remember this as the happiest time of my life.”

2     It’s real love plus my first real job.

2.1   Even the waiter has to hear her callow boast: “We work at the Hospital for Tropical Medicine.”

2.2   You could say we worked: twenty hours at a stretch, and how you laughed at any damn thing, that exhausted, when you stood up your heart lost its footing. Every light swam.

2.3   “I bet he won’t serve us now. Look at his face, he thinks we have germs.”

3     Two unbeautiful science graduates hold hands in a wet meadow. A cloud drifts across the sun, extinguishing its glamor. When the gloom is complete, the scientists walk away, as if satisfied by a job well done.

3.1   Then we lived together in the rainy darkness for ten years.

TEN YEARS LATER THEN

4     In a Chinese restaurant in Monterey he whispers: “History.”

4.1   She puts down her fork, startled from her food reveries.

4.2   “History, Karen. You have heard of it?”

4.3   He flags her with his new prop, his broadsheet newspapers even at the dinner table (her mother would forbid it, but oh, just please don’t bring up class).

4.4   Yes, Peter, everybody knows Dad was a lorry driver, what else? Oh, you had to work while everything just fell in my lap.

4.5   She is almost crying. She pleads, crumbling a wonton: “Well, tell me about history, then. What’s it all about?”

4.6   He looks at her with no love in his eyes, showing her the no love, in retaliation.

5     Tells her, slowly, with a viciousness, “It’s about conscience.”

5.1   And he starts up, he leaves without his coat.

5.2   The Washington Post lies crumpled on his plate in all the grease.

5.3   A blotch spreads through the headline: KENNEDY PLEDGES TROOPS FOR INDOCHINA.

6     Alone on the bus, she held his coat in her lap.

“Some things are beyond me, do you understand? I can’t judge.”

“Oh, it’s not for us to question why. Too right, Karen.”

“You wouldn’t even be saying this five years ago. You just . . . regurgitate.”

“You weren’t working on germ warfare five years ago.”

“Non-lethal,” she cries. “Oh, how you can not see.”

“Well, I believe you, thousands wouldn’t.”

“But, that’s what it is. That’s what it is. I can hardly believe this fuss when all I would do, at worst, is give the Russians a bad cold.”

“Oh, my God, Karen. I thought you were cynical. Not stupid. I never thought you were that stupid.”

– but, after all, we were only standing in a Holiday Inn bathroom in dirty terry robes to have that historical exchange, and I was only this same homely swot, nobody: only five foot two! In fact, my bare feet were cold on the tiles and that distracted me from your important history, thinking I had best buy slippers. But I wanted to protest,

I’m a good scientist. I’m just a good scientist.

She said, “Let’s just please just get dressed.”

Deesey:

When you were born I didn’t want to hold you. They’d washed you but you still smelled, and I thought, I can’t do this. I’ll have to get a nanny. You were too much like other newborn things, like the rabbits and baby mice, all the wet infants with their squashed faces we bred for experimental purposes. I don’t know why things are born. I didn’t make it so that things are born, for experimental purposes. But I wouldn’t dare to be a mother to anything, I didn’t realize but that’s how it was, I wouldn’t dare. Something about the sins of the fathers. I do realize no one wants to dissect you for medical science, I’m not crazy! But I couldn’t hold you like a mother, I was nervous of touching you. Now I know how it was for that silly waiter; I have germs. Somehow I must have, I have germs. Now I’m so tired, I can’t think what I mean I’m that tired.

She leans against the foul mirror, damning her awful sweat, the sickness, the tedious, tedious pain that she can’t stop fearing. Tells herself, Don’t try to puzzle it out, you don’t have that kind of mind.

You were a good scientist.

And then she gathers her things to go.

And you remember how they wheeled her down hospital corridors, Deesey, you envied her for being given a ride in bed. You ran behind as if you’d catch her, and she wouldn’t die. You must save her but they’re so fast. Your feet jarred you. And you remember double swinging doors which close to form a word, and this picture is what comes to mind when you think of death.

And that picture of a very little girl, in a coat whose nautical buttons twinkle

in a big smelly new car, stopped on the highway in windy desert

Mum has pulled over to the breakdown lane just in time.

Deesey be good I’m, she says, struggles;

and falls asleep.

The little girl tugs Mum’s limp arm. She announces, “You wait here, Mum, I’ll go call for the nambulance.” When the child has opened the door, though, she just perches sobbing in the car’s small light.

And the big light comes down her face. The shadow focuses.

“– so, he’s telling me all this shit and I’m, whoa, dude, slow down. It’s, you remember when Dad went away the first time and it was like, I got to ride in front? In the car? You ever remember things like that?”

Eddie was lying propped on an elbow, smoking menthol Dorals and flicking the ash into his tennis shoe. I was sitting up with my arms crossed over the frivolous nightgown. By then I had given up waiting for Eddie to leave and was tolerating his rant with listless stoicism.

I said, “Dad was never away the first time. He always went away.”

“I don’t care about fucking fact.” Eddie bugged his eyes at me. “But you would never remember that cause you were so his pet.”

I flinched. “Was I?”

“Jesus Christ! Were you. Now it can be told, Chrysa, there was some untoward too-pet element, which . . . Like, maybe that’s why Mom never really liked you.”

I said, “I wasn’t in reality his pet.”

Eddie snorted. “Dad was queer for you, Chrysa. Like, talking as a guy? Window-dressing shit to one side, a guy can form a deep romantic attachment for an oven-stuffer-roaster fucking chicken, given you dethaw it and it’s got that, you know that neck hole? Guys are just a prick with attachments. Sorry.”

“You’re just trying to make something dramatic from . . . poor materials.”

There was a silence. In the dark, you couldn’t tell what so terribly impended. I had the familiar feeling that Eddie’d dismantled something in my chest.

He said, “Chrysa.”

His hand groped over to my ankle and up my calf, to grip me solemnly on the swell of my new muscle. I started to cry. He continued:

“Chrysa, you got to learn to face stuff. It’s a million years ago, already. Like, Columbus was President –”

“I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“Mongolia was a world power – shit, are you crying? Oh, no. No, I made you cry? Come here.” He shifted about ponderously to sit and hold his arms out.

He sat there with his arms out, waiting.

I was going to be manipulated into hugging him, and then my world would come to an end, my soul would go out, what he said would be true. I was still crying though the original feeling was gone. If I hugged him I could wipe my nose surreptitiously on his shoulder, dispensing with the looming need for a tissue. Perhaps the nose-wiping could redefine the annihilating hug, turning it into a light-minded prank. Crying jaggedly, I marveled at the power of toilet/snot humor, a universal of human experience: I thought of writing to Lévi-Strauss and suggesting it as a rival to the incest taboo, if Lévi-Strauss were still alive. I wondered if Lévi-Strauss, like Saint-Lazare, had lost his mind and cashed in his chips in a sly poststructural manner.

“Oh, fuck it,” said Eddie, and let his arms fall. “Trying to reach out. Okay, listen, if I’m that transparent, I just need to know if Dad screwed you for my personal reasons, cause –”

“No.”

“No?”

“No, he didn’t. I was ten.” The word ten came out in a little-kid falsetto, and I sobbed horribly behind it, snorting like a drain.

“Oh, man. No. I gotta hug you. Do not try to resist.”

Eddie shuffled toward me on his knees. I held my arms stiffly crossed over my stomach, to mime noncompliance. He got me roughly and crushed my face to his chest. He seemed very big and too much like a man, musky-smelling. As long as I stayed tense, my soul would not go out.

“Kiddo, kiddo. Kiddokiddo. Honestly, stop, I get this pain thing in the small of my back. An actual symptom.”

“Oh, you don’t care,” my crying said / I listened but it meant nothing to me.

“Okay,” said Eddie. “But – you do? You do?”

“I care. I care,” my crying said / while I triumphantly did not care.

“Well, fantastic: care.”

I stopped crying and was shivering feebly. He stroked the back of my head. You could tell he wasn’t consciously stroking, it was just a reflex. I said on my own behalf, coldly, to try how it sounded:

“Okay, I don’t. I don’t care about you anymore.”

He let me go so violently I seemed to bounce out of his arms.

I could hear him breathing rapidly. He said, “Turn on the light.”

I turned on the light. He was sitting up, hugging his knees. The light felt chill where I’d sweated through the nightgown. The mussed bed shocked me. It looked as if we’d been energetically throwing the covers in the air.

Eddie said, “Okay, you can turn it off again now.”

“No.” I shrugged, brattish.

“Oh. Suit yourself.” Then he sat there making frown after frown, as if preparing to make a difficult disclosure. I began to stare dully, out of focus, at his shoulder. The blue nightgown felt now like the costume my character wore in the “brother” scene.

“Chrysa,” Eddie said, vehemently.

Despite myself, I met his eye. He went on, encouraged:

“I just, I thought, what would make it better, right? Is for us to sleep together. Cause, it’s like, we’re not even related. And – oh, don’t. Don’t –”

Without having intended to move, I found myself standing against the wall. I said, in that kid falsetto,

“Very. Funny.”

“No. Not very funny. Very serious. Really. I thought about this.” He pointed to his head.

“You thought about this.”

He scrambled out of the bed, taking the top sheet with him. His tennis shoe tumbled to the floor, dispensing ash. I said,

“Get out of my room.”

He put his hands on his hips. “No.”

“You better get out this second.”

“Not.”

“Look, this isn’t funny.”

“Come on, lighten the fuck up.”

“Will you get out of my room before I –”

He came toward me with his arms out like the Mummy. “Oooh – oooh – I’m gonna touch you! Oooh!”

“OUT! GET OUT!” I dodged, but he sidestepped and cornered me.

I was screaming OUT! while he danced, making tickling movements with his fingers. I started to laugh, helplessly, breathlessly, and say,

“Oh, come on, give me a break, Eddie, you got to be kidding me –”

And then he swooped and caught me in the corner, both of us laughing hysterically and he pulled me against him and I shouted –

The door flew open: it was Ralph.

Eddie and I jumped away from each other like naughty children.

Standing against the lit doorway, Ralph looked huge and dark. He said in a cool, carrying voice, “What are you doing?”

Eddie spoke up first. “Yeah, we were just, fooling around. Cause I was saying about the aliens coming down to save the Earth –”

Ralph said to me, “What’s going on?”

I gasped: “Eddie wanted to fuck me.”

Eddie and I glanced at each other. I couldn’t help it, I smirked. It was mainly shame, but there was a crazed undertow of glee. I thought of announcing that the snake had tempted me, but when I looked at Ralph, it was chilling how untickled he was by our (I suddenly, conveniently believed) mere horseplay.

Ralph said, “Eddie?”

His voice described an arc from disgust to a kind of friendly amazement. He was prepared to hear it never crossed Eddie’s mind to fuck his sister.

Eddie said, “Yeah.”

Ralph stepped into the room. He said, “Maybe I should leave.”

The horseplay scenario held for a long long moment, then I said,

“Don’t leave. Don’t leave me here with him. Jesus Christ!”

Ralph said, “Okay,”

and walked straight to Eddie. He put one hand on Eddie’s shoulder and said down into his face, “I ought to kill you.”

“Look, I’m going,” Eddie said. “Cause, your thug deal, me no like.”

“Go, then,” said Ralph, not taking his hand from Eddie’s shoulder.

“No, serious. The whole I-kill-you-motherfucker thing? I got one word for you, man. Cops.”

Ralph took his hand off of Eddie’s shoulder. I caught my breath.

Eddie said again, in a tight, smug voice, straightening up to enjoy Ralph’s retreat: “Cops.”

Ralph drew back slightly and punched Eddie in the head.

The fist carried Eddie’s head back to the wall and pinned it there momentarily, then sprang free. Eddie staggered, shuffling and reaching out for nothing, then found the wall with his shoulderblades and slumped there.

Ralph said, “Say that again.”

As if in reply, Eddie began to bleed. He bled in real time: you could see the trickle run from his nostril to his chin and drip. He began to say, “Man, that sucks, that just so sucks.” He dabbed at his face with his knuckles and inspected the blood. “Asshole.”

“I’m going to hit you again,” Ralph said with absolute clammy hatred.

Eddie flinched and took a step to one side. Then he squared himself against the wall and said, “Fuck you.”

I said, “Don’t, this is so crazy.”

Ralph looked at me in frozen unrecognition. Before turning back to Eddie and curling his arm back to gather the deep force of his whole body, punching again so Eddie’s lip split over his tooth and needed two stitches, Ralph said to me:

“Aren’t you going to cry?”