The Road Taken (20 page)

“I don’t know why you like her.”

There was a rapping on the door. “Dinner is ready,” his mother’s cheerful voice called out.

“I’m sorry, Chris,” Ginger whispered. “I didn’t mean to start a fight.”

“Oh, that wasn’t a fight,” he said. He put his arm around her and squeezed her shoulder, and then he kissed her cheek. “Come on, let’s go.”

Ginger could hardly eat a bite of the meal his mother had obviously prepared with care, a special dinner—roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and home-baked chocolate layer cake—and she knew she was being impolite. His parents asked her harmless personal questions, about school and home and her family and her interests, and she answered them, trying not to cry. Chris’s little sister, who looked just like him, seemed bewildered. Children always picked up on tension. Chris didn’t say much either. I should never have come, Ginger thought. But it’s good to have reality. We are still best friends. We are. And people change from friends to lovers after time, it’s the best way, friends first. We did that once before, the night we met, and we can do it again. We have years. We’re both young.

“Hey, Dad,” Chris said, “do you have film in the camera?”

“Yes.”

“Then would you take a picture of Ginger and me? Neither of us has one.”

Why are you doing this, Ginger thought, but the coldness in her heart began to thaw. His father got the camera. Chris, who was sitting next to Ginger at the table, put his arm around her and smiled. He was so sweet, she thought. He had to have some love for her to want to pacify her this way. . . .

“I’ll mail it to you,” Chris said to her.

“Will you frame yours?” she asked lightly.

“Of course.”

“Then so will I.”

After the family and their guest had finished dinner and sat in the living room for a while making more small talk until there was literally nothing left to say—almost to the point where Ginger thought someone should be humming—Uncle Hugh appeared to take her home. She had never had dinner with a boy’s family before, and this occasion didn’t bode well for what she hoped would be others to come with other boys. But she still loved Christopher Riley. Nothing could change that. Maybe she would never have to have dinner with other boys’ parents; who would ask her anyway? And she could always say no.

At the front door she shook hands with his parents and thanked them, and then Christopher kissed her. It was a quick kiss so his parents wouldn’t think it was anything but good night, but he put his tongue into her mouth. He was being seductive, he felt safe because she was leaving, he wanted her to keep on wanting him. She understood all this, because she had always understood him, but she didn’t understand that it was manipulative.

“Call me tomorrow,” he whispered to her. “Okay?”

Of course she would.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Lately, like touching her tongue to an aching tooth, Joan had been seriously thinking about her life. It was 1956. Time was marching on. She was growing more and more aware that she needed to pull herself together and get a normal job, or even to do the previously unthinkable: find a man she could bear to marry and start a family of her own. She was twenty-five already, and if not now then when? She was accustomed to being the black sheep, the aimless one, but it was becoming ever more obvious that her two sisters, as focused survivors, made her look even worse.

Ginger, a senior in high school, had been accepted at NYU, and would be taking premed, which surprised only the people who didn’t know her. She would continue to live at home. Cellular biology fascinated her, and she had said she was not going to her senior prom, even though her best friend, Nancy, and her date had offered to take her along with them. Ginger said she didn’t care about proms and dating, that she was devoting herself totally to the life of the mind.

Joan couldn’t imagine how that could be true. Ginger loved the new sexy singer Elvis Presley, she played his records all the time, and how could a girl like that not want to do the things girls her age did—have fun? But Joan understood that having no escort and being unable to dance would be enough of a deterrent to someone with an even more robust will than Ginger. Apparently talking to her friend Christopher on the phone once a week was all the social life she needed, but Ginger was pushing ahead with her life as best she could, and she was ambitious.

Compared to her, that compassionate and stubborn creature, Joan with all her physical faculties intact felt frivolous and useless.

Peggy too, with whom Joan had become much closer now that she went to Larchmont to visit from time to time, continued to make Joan feel guilty by being such a good wife and mother. Her days were full with things that Joan knew would have driven
her
crazy. But Peggy was happy, and her sole complaint was never getting enough sleep. It was only Joan who slept until noon, who still took three Dexamyls a day to stay awake, when one would have been enough to make a normal person climb the walls, who had no ambition. Her parents didn’t nag or push her, but she knew they would have preferred her to be a better person.

“Joan, I need to talk to you,” Ginger said finally, in a voice that did not bode well.

“What about?”

“I think you should go to a doctor.”

“Why?”

“You sleep way too much, you drink coffee and Cokes all day, and they don’t help. You only have to sit down in a chair and you fall asleep. I’ve noticed. My friend Nancy’s cousin is an endocrinologist. You should have him look at your thyroid.”

“I did that once. I blew into a bag and he said I was fine.”

“That was a long time ago and that method is outdated. They have a blood test for it now. It’s more accurate.”

“And besides, I’m not fat,” Joan said. She avoided going to doctors if she could; they seemed a waste of time for a young, healthy person.

“A person doesn’t always have to be fat,” Ginger said. “Just take his number. Trust me.”

“Oh, all right,” Joan said. She didn’t feel guilty about the Dexamyl tablets, which no one in the family knew about anyway, but still it would be nice to find something that worked better.

Ginger’s friend Nancy’s cousin the endocrinologist was a dark, youngish man named Dr. Stanhope. He was wearing a wedding ring, but Joan didn’t think he was cute enough to flirt with in any case. She told him her problem and it didn’t seem to surprise him. He drew blood rather painfully from the vein in the crook of her arm. On her next appointment when she came for the results he was almost laughing.

“You have one of the lowest thyroid functions I’ve ever seen,” he said. “On a scale of zero to six, you’re a one. If you were one point lower you would be a cretin.”

“So that’s why the Dexamyl doesn’t work.”

“You’re addicted to it, like most people who come to me with low thyroid,” he said calmly. “I want you to get off it and then I’ll give you Cytomel, which is a synthetic thyroid.”

She had seen people suffering from trying to get off drugs, and she wasn’t eager to go through anything like it. “What will getting off Dexamyl be like?” she asked nervously.

“It will take a weekend, and it’s the nicest detox I know of. You’ll just be tired and you’ll sleep.”

“Okay.”

“Where did you get that scar on your forehead?” he asked. She hadn’t noticed that her hair had gotten pushed back. Automatically she moved her bangs over it again.

“It’s a radium burn.”

“A
what?”

“I was born with a blood blister, and the doctor put radium on it, and the radium slipped and I got burned.”

“Radium,” he said. “Very nice. He should have left the ‘blood blister,’ as they called it, alone. They go away eventually. Meanwhile, the radiation probably is what knocked out your thyroid function. I can’t believe they did that to you.”

“It was the new wonder drug, my mother said.”

“Overkill. Hiroshima. Maniacs. But don’t worry. You’ll be all right. You have a few small nodes on your thyroid gland, but the action of the Cytomel will keep them from turning into anything we don’t like. When you take a synthetic thyroid your own thyroid gland just goes to sleep. It’s the same with most medications. The body needs just so much, no matter what the source is, and then it says okay, I don’t have to bother.”

“A
cretin?”
Joan said. “You think I’m almost a cretin?” They looked at each other and smiled.

Dr. Stanhope hadn’t lied. Dozing all weekend, Joan had never felt so calm. She had expected to be depressed, but instead she was happy. Her family was used to her peculiar sleep habits and didn’t say anything. She realized that it had never occurred to her parents, or anyone else but Ginger, that her behavior all these years had a medical basis. They had thought it was a sign of deficient character.

How many people, Joan wondered, get blamed for things that have absolutely nothing to do with their minds or will?

On Monday she started her new medication, and in a few days she felt like everyone else. Then she told her mother about her visit to the doctor and what had happened, although she omitted the cause, since Rose had always felt guilty enough about the radium incident. “So you see,” Joan said, “I wasn’t lazy and undisciplined after all.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Rose said, her hand at her throat, where her own thyroid gland was, feeling her daughter’s pain in her own cells without even being aware of it. “We didn’t know anything in those days. Remember, I did take you to a doctor. I wish we had found out sooner.”

“Well, I’ll be fine now,” Joan said.

It was to Ginger, of course, that Joan told the whole story. “My first case,” Ginger said happily.

“When you’re famous we’ll tell people.”

Finding an answer and getting rid of some of her guilt made Joan even more determined to do something about herself before the noble feeling went away. After some thought she quit her gig at the coffeehouse and got a normal daytime job at a bookstore in Greenwich Village called Toward the Light. She liked being surrounded by books; there was a richness to it, all the bright covers, the stories wrapped within, like being in a candy shop. As a bonus, a lot of Beats hung around the bookstore, so it didn’t seem strange to her to be there. She sold, kept inventory, met the public in a different way than she had as a waitress, and was able to purchase books at a discount. In her free time, she read. Her salary was as meager as it had been before, but at least she felt a little more conventional. Her parents seemed pleased.

On a nice weekend in summer she went to visit Peggy and Ed and the kids, her suitcase full of children’s books. Peter, who was almost eight, could of course read by himself, and Marianne, at three, liked to be read to.

Peggy picked her up at the station as usual, in her big, wood-sided station wagon, and rapturously pointed out all the new luxuriant growth as they drove by everyone’s yards. Mrs. McCoo had fixed a pile of tuna fish sandwiches for anyone who wanted them, the crusts cut off, the bread cut on the diagonal, because that was the only way the kids would eat them and she prepared the adults’ food the same way as she did the children’s. She had her straw hat on, standing there in the kitchen, and she left for the weekend as soon as Peggy walked in. The house was quiet. Peter was at day camp, his first year there, and Ed was out playing golf, his new passion. Peter would be back at half past three, and then later Ed would be home in time to make his excellent martinis and put steaks on the backyard grill while the three grown-ups got a buzz on.

Joan put her things in her room, sniffed the cut flowers Peggy had put in a vase on the dresser for her, braided her long hair, and changed into shorts so she and Peggy could coat themselves with iodine and baby oil and sit in the sun. They brought their lunch out to the lawn on paper plates. Letting herself be drawn into the household, settling down, Joan felt the familiar combination of boredom and envy, security and discomfort that she always felt when she visited her married sister. She had recently read the Kinsey Report on women, and she wondered how many times a week Peggy and Ed had sex.

She and Peggy lay out on the lawn in long white metal chairs with green cushions. “How’s your love life?” Peggy asked. “Tell an old married lady what’s going on in the city.”

By now they had become so comfortable together that Joan could even discuss her downtown escapades, telling her older sister the things no one else in the family knew. Peggy seemed to enjoy her stories; living vicariously, Joan supposed. She wondered when she would get comfortable enough to ask Peggy about Ed. It was silly of her, she supposed, but she followed what she thought of as the marriage taboo. When you’re single you can tell everything; when you’re married it’s sacred, grown-up, private, like your parents.

“Well,” Joan said. “I met a really sexy man at the bookstore last week, and he took me out for cannabis and cannoli, but . . .”

“But what?”

“I don’t know. I think I’m actually beginning to look for a man with substance. You know, a real job, a normal life.”

“You?”

“Yes, me.”

“Well, I’d gladly introduce you to one,” Peggy said, “but everyone here is married.”

“I know. You don’t have to.”

Joan settled Marianne on her lap and began to put the child’s hair into braids like her own. But Marianne’s silky blond baby hair was so soft that the braids never kept long, and the barrettes Joan put at the ends slid right out. Peggy wouldn’t let her use rubber bands; she said they tore the hair.

“Did you know,” Joan said, “that a child’s head at two years old is almost the size it will be as an adult? That’s why they look so top heavy.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Ginger.”

There was a silence. “Poor Ginger,” Peggy said then. “Do you think she’ll ever have children?”

Joan didn’t answer. You might also ask if
I
will, she thought. We are each handicapped in our own way. But yes, poor Ginger. Joan put her nose into her niece’s neck and breathed in her little girl smell. “Look at those cute pigtails!” she said. “Just like mine.”

Marianne flashed her a smile of absolute pleasure. Sometimes Joan thought it was those open instants of emotion that made it all worthwhile to have kids. When you made them happy you
really
made them happy, not like grown-ups. It took so little to make kids feel good, just as it was too easy to make them cry, to give them bad memories. Did they forgive you? Did they forget? Maybe it was that ugly adult power that had always made her afraid to have a child of her own, for fear of ruining its life, bad black sheep Joan.

Joan put her head back and watched the huge, fluffy clouds moving across the cobalt blue sky. A speck of a plane flew by deceptively slowly, its buzzing far away. Peggy, Joan knew, worried about those things too, but she accepted them as a part of human existence, not a big issue, something she dealt with as best she could. She had her books on how to raise a child, and took them seriously, like homework.

How could two sisters be so different? Maternal instinct was in your genes, but apparently Peggy had inherited the genes for both of them. Or maybe the difference was that Peggy had a good husband.

“Do you know what I’m dreaming of?” Peggy said. “Eskimo Pies. Remember we used to eat them when we were kids?”

“Of course, and there were no sticks, so they always melted in your fingers before you were finished.”

“I want pie,” Marianne said.

“It’s not pie, it’s ice cream, honey,” Peggy said.

“I want ice cream.”

“Not right now, and dear, Mommy’s talking.”

“What made you think of Eskimo Pies?” Joan asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I used to love them.”

“Mommy, I want ice cream,” Marianne said, in her piercing little voice. “Mommy . . .” She pronounced it Momm-
ee.

“Not right now, dear,” Peggy said. “We just had lunch, and soon we’ll have dinner.”

“Momm-
ee.
I want ice cream.”

“There isn’t any,” Peggy said. “If we ask him nicely later, maybe Daddy will get some for dessert.”

“I want ice cream
now,
Momm-
ee.
” Marianne jumped off Joan’s lap and planted herself in front of her mother.

“When they’re three they repeat,” Peggy said. “They think they’ll wear you down.” She sighed. “And they often do. I don’t care what they say about the ‘terrible twos,’ three is the worst age. When it’s over nothing will ever be as bad as that. No, Marianne. There isn’t any. We are an ice creamless house.”

How tiny Marianne’s feet were in her white sandals, how shrill her voice. I want a kid, I want one not, Joan thought.

“Momm-
ee
!” Marianne demanded. “Momm-
ee
! I want to get ice cream.”

“No.”

“Momm-
ee . . .
” Her voice rose to a piercing wail.

Why don’t you make her stop, Joan thought. You’re her mother, the boss, she worships you; make her shut up. Suddenly she had to get away.