And what of Maribeth? Why had she given her up? What would make a mother do that?
You might ask yourself the same thing, she thought.
27
She continued writing letters to the twins, the stack of pages on her nightstand growing. One afternoon, she stopped into a stationery store in Shadyside and dropped forty dollars on a package of Crane’s paper and another twenty dollars on a fountain pen. It was her most decadent purchase since she’d left home.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d written letters on paper like this. Her wedding thank you cards? When the twins were born, she’d e-mailed thank yous for the gifts. Not very classy but she was lucky to manage even that. These days, thank you notes tended to fall to the bottom of the pile, except for those to Jason’s mother, who got offended if her gifts were not properly, and promptly, acknowledged.
It felt good to write on paper that smelled like old libraries. The pen scratched noisily across the page as it filled up with words. It seemed to imbue her letters with more substance.
Dear Oscar and Liv,
There are lots of museums where I am. Last week I started exploring some of them. First I went to an art museum, and then yesterday I visited a natural history one. It had so many dinosaur fossils, but no blue whale. Do you remember when we saw the blue whale at the Dinosaur Museum? Do you remember what you said, Liv?
The Dinosaur Museum was what they called the Museum of Natural History, because when they visited, it was mostly to see the giant dinosaur skeletons. But on this particular day—which had been that rarest of birds, a Sunday free of birthday parties and playdates and classes—the four of them had explored further afield, looking at the moon rocks and then the Hall of Ocean Life, where the enormous blue whale hung from the ceiling.
We were all lying down, which you two thought was crazy, and we were looking up at the whale. And Liv, you said, “At school, we learned the blue whale has a heart so big you can walk through it.” And Oscar, you said, “I want to walk through someone’s heart.” And I squeezed your hands and said, “You already walk through mine.”
They still did. Though she didn’t write that. A woman on a business trip would have no cause for such sentimentality, no need to prove the capacity of her flawed heart.
28
A week after what she’d come to think of as the ice cream intervention, she had another follow-up with Dr. Grant to check her weight. She’d gained two pounds, which seemed to please Dr. Grant, and had gone grocery shopping with Todd and Sunita without any drama, which had pleased her.
As they were finishing up the exam, she asked Dr. Grant about her neck. “I thought it was eczema. I’ve been using this cream but it hasn’t helped,” she said. “I’ve changed soaps, shampoo. I looked online and now I’m worried it’s a vitamin deficiency.” Talking about it made not just her neck itch but her entire body. “I was thinking you could refer me to someone who wouldn’t be averse to my, um, insurance situation.”
“Hmm. I might know an understanding dermatologist, but why don’t I take a look first.” He patted the stool. “Have a seat.”
She sat down and leaned over. He parted her hair, and for a second the itchiness was replaced by the warmth of being touched by another human.
“So the good news is that it’s not a vitamin deficiency,” he said.
“And the bad news?”
“You appear to have lice.” He paused. “A rather robust case of it, I might add.”
She dropped her head into her hands. “I used an entire bottle of that RID shampoo.” She scratched her head again. “That stuff is literally poison.”
“But it only kills the live bugs, not the eggs. You have to pick those out.” He scratched his temple as if the talk were making him itchy, too.
“Oh, yes, I’m familiar with the process.” She tried to imagine combing herself out as she’d done the twins. She remembered that horrific day back home. Niff passing judgment. Walking through the rain. Liv shoving her. Her hitting Liv.
She started to cry.
“It’s not that bad,” he said. “Lice don’t discriminate. It doesn’t mean you’re dirty.”
“It’s not that . . .”
“What is it then?”
“I just feel as if it will never end.”
She kind of detested herself. Whatever self-pity points she’d earned had already been spent. And then some. “I’m sorry.” She stood up and wiped her eyes, prepared to leave, even though her favorite part of the appointments was fast becoming the talk after the exam in his office. “I have to go find one of those combs.” She imagined getting it through her rope of shoulder-length hair. “Shit.”
“I have a better idea,” he said. “Let’s go upstairs and I’ll get them out for you.”
“You?”
“Yes, me.”
“Do they teach nitpicking in medical school?”
“No. But I have a daughter and she had them a few times.”
“But you need a special comb?”
“Says who?”
Niff Spenser.
“You just need a good pair of eyes and a fair amount of patience,” he said, “and while my eyes aren’t what they used to be, my patience is improving with age.”
She looked at him. He was serious.
“I don’t think I can let you do this. It’s too . . .” Intimate, she wanted to say. “Icky.”
“I’m familiar with icky. I am, after all, a doctor. And a father.”
This made her smile.
And when, in a softer voice, he added, “It’s okay to ask for help, you know,” it made her relent.
HE TOLD LOUISE he was done for the day. There were no other patients in the waiting room and, obviously, none coming. Maribeth wondered, not for the first time, if she was his only patient. Outside, she headed down the walk, toward his car, but he went in the opposite direction, up the pathway toward the front porch of the house.
“You live here?” Maribeth asked.
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
He opened the door, sweeping Maribeth inside with an after-you gesture. She walked into a grand foyer; the light streaming through the stained glass transom colored the dust eddies blue and gold. To the right was a mahogany staircase, to the left a parlor with built-in bookcases and a fireplace with a neat stack of logs next to it.
“Come on through,” he said.
Come on through. Her friends back home might say “come on in” but no one said “come on through” because few abodes were large or deep enough to warrant a “through.” Except perhaps for Elizabeth and Tom’s townhouse, but she had not been there since the Christmas party last year when she was ushered in by a coat checker.
She followed him down a long, narrow hallway, the walls covered with framed photographs, through a dining room, the table piled high with mail and medical journals, and into a bright, open kitchen with top-of-the-line stainless steel appliances and fire-engine red laminate cabinets. It looked like a showroom, pristine, as if the kitchen had never been sullied by the messy act of cooking.
He slid open a pocket door on the far side of the kitchen. Inside was a powder room. “We’ll do the deed here,” he said.
Maribeth raised an eyebrow.
“The lice,” he said, coloring slightly. “Let me fetch some tools.”
He returned, carrying a magnifying headlamp, a towel, a fine-tooth comb, and a bottle of olive oil.
“Are you going to lecture me about the benefits of a Mediterranean diet?” she joked.
“Yes.” He handed her a towel. “It’s best when applied directly to the hair.”
“You’re going to put that on my head?”
“We’ll leave it for an hour. The oil smothers the bugs.” She remembered the Wilsons’ babysitter Joanne putting coconut oil on the twins. Perhaps it wasn’t cheating after all. “Then I’ll pick the nits out.”
“How did you become such an expert?”
“Well, that’s somewhat involved.
My daughter, Mallory, hated to get her hair braided. She said it hurt. She wanted to wear her hair down. But her mother, Felicity, insisted she wear it in braids,” he said as he massaged the oil into Maribeth’s hair.
Maribeth was only half-listening now. His touch was having a strange effect on her, at once soothing and exhilarating. Though he had laid hands on her before—he was her doctor, after all—this felt different somehow.
“Mal had these beautiful curls so I told Felicity she should let her wear it down. She called me soft-hearted and said that if I wanted to be in charge of managing the mess, it was on me. So I did. We developed a nice bath-time ritual, Mal and me.”
She pictured him giving a little girl a bath, gently combing her hair. “You sound like a good father.”
“Not particularly. I was gone a lot and we made this special time. And then when she was maybe seven or eight, Mallory came home with her first case of lice. Felicity said if Mal’s hair had been in braids, it wouldn’t have happened. So it was my responsibility to get rid of the lice.” He paused, as if remembering something. “Needless to say, those nitpicking sessions were a little less pleasant.” Then he smiled sadly. “Oh, how she screamed.”
“Yes, I know something about that.” Maribeth stopped, realizing that she’d given another bit of herself away. Because who but a parent would say that? Then again, who but a parent would have such a robust case of lice to begin with?
If this new information registered, Dr. Grant didn’t show it. He continued to massage the oil through her hair and she relaxed back into it.
“The irony is,” he said, “Mallory wears braids all the time now.”
“Does she still live here?” Maribeth asked dopily.
“All grown up and moved out.”
“So you live here alone?”
“I should sell it. It’s too big a house for one person to rattle around in.” He sighed. “But I’ve been here so long. I’m stuck, I’m afraid.”
By the time her hair was saturated, she felt almost liquid. When he announced he was finished, she was a little sad. She would’ve liked this to go on forever. He offered her a cup of tea, which she declined. He said he had to run back down to the office and he’d be back.
Alone in the house, Maribeth went into the hallway to look at the gallery of pictures. There was Dr. Grant in his younger days, his hair more pepper than salt. There he was with Mallory. And there he was with Felicity, dark skinned, angular boned, bright laughing eyes. She was a beautiful woman. Or had been. She must be dead, Dr. Grant a widower. No divorced man would display so many family photos, or speak so affectionately of an ex.
She looked into the kitchen again. It was almost new. And very much a woman’s kitchen. Yes, a widower. And a recent one.
The hour passed quickly. When he returned, she was back in the bathroom. “Options: you can shampoo it out here or I can just comb it with the oil and you can shower later.”
She couldn’t bear the thought of showering here. “I’ll shampoo later,” she said.
“Okay.” He put on his glasses. “Let’s see what we have.” He ran a comb through her hair. When it snagged, she jolted.
“Sorry,” he said. He tried again. The comb snagged again. Maribeth tensed even more. It really hurt. She began to sympathize with Liv.
“Here’s the source of your misery.” He flicked the comb against his thumbnail, and showed her a tiny insect. She inspected it, fascinated. In an odd sort of way, it was like a piece of her children had been traveling with her. Which wasn’t to say she didn’t want to get rid of the lice.
But that was proving to be a challenge. Dr. Grant couldn’t seem to get the teeth of the comb through her unruly hair. “It’s very tangled,” he said.
“I know. It’s a disaster. I haven’t had time to deal with it.” This was a lie. There was a salon on her corner that advertised twenty-dollar blowouts; she could’ve had one every day if she wanted to. Instead, she shoved her hair into a ponytail, often falling asleep with it in a tangle at the base of her neck. She was, as her mother might say, allowing herself to go to pot.
He hit another snag. “Wow, it’s almost dreadlocking in places.”
“You know what?” she said as he attempted to detach the comb. “Let’s cut it off.”
“If I managed Mallory’s hair, I can manage yours.”
“Not all of it. Just hack a hunk off. To here.” She pointed to the top of her neck. “Do you have some scissors?”
“Not haircutting scissors.”
“Any old kind will do.”
“I really can handle this. I don’t think cutting your hair is necessary.”
She wasn’t sure if it was necessary but right now it felt urgent.
“And you might regret it,” he added.
She had not cut her hair short since the summer before senior year of college, when, inspired by Demi Moore in Ghost, she’d gotten a pixie. Her mother had warned her she might regret that—curly hair and short cuts did not mix, she said—but Maribeth had loved the jagged look of it. Or at least she had until she’d seen Jason’s expression upon returning to school a few weeks later. “You cut your hair,” he’d said mournfully, as if she’d amputated a limb.
“I won’t regret it,” she told Dr. Grant. “Look, if you don’t want to do it, just give me some scissors. I’ll hack off the four or five inches and we can carry on.”
They stared down one another’s reflections in the mirror. And then Dr. Grant dropped the chunk of hair he’d been holding and left the bathroom.
As soon as he did, she thought of the pink ribbons in his office. They’d seemed so incongruous on his bookshelves. She’d glimpsed more on the bookcase in the parlor.
They were breast cancer ribbons. Felicity must have died of breast cancer. (She now remembered she still had not gotten a mammogram.) Maybe Felicity’s hair had fallen out from the chemo. Maybe he’d had to preemptively shave it for her. Maybe he’d shaved his own head in solidarity. That was why he hadn’t wanted to cut her hair. And now she’d practically bullied him into it.
Sometimes she really did think her heart no longer functioned. Sure, the muscle beat fine, but the feeling part of it was completely damaged.
“Never mind,” she called out in a reedy voice. “It’s okay.”
“Why? You lose your nerve?” Dr. Grant returned snapping a pair of surgical scissors. He did not look the least bit mournful.
She couldn’t help but grin. “No.”
He stood behind her, fingering the greasy locks. “Should we rinse it first?” he asked. “So I can be more precise.”
“I’ve spent most of my life trying to tame my hair,” she said. “I think I’m just going to give in to the mess.”
He liked that. She could tell. “Where to then?” he asked.
“Here.” She pointed to a bony vertebra at the top of her neck.
“That’s C-5, if you want to be anatomical about it.” He gathered her hair into a pony tail and twisted. It hurt but pleasantly so, the force paradoxically draining her of any remaining tension. She felt like a kitten, held snug by the scruff.
“Ready?” he asked. “One, two.”
Three.
She heard the wet slap of hair dropping to the floor, felt a tickle of breeze against her newly bare neck.
She looked up. The itching had stopped, though she knew she must still have lice. And her face, it looked lighter, less haggard. For the first time since the surgery, she felt like putting on some lipstick.
“Better?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. Only smiled.
“Shall we finish the job?”
“Go forth.”
He tidied up the cut as best he could with the oil in it and then he picked out the nits. As he did, they talked easily. He told her more stories about Mallory, who had graduated from college last year and was in California, making her way in the working world. She in turn told him about initiating the search for her birth mother.
Beneath the chitchat
, Maribeth sensed a whole other conversation taking place. One about the family she’d left behind. One about the family who’d left him behind. It was as though they already knew, as though they’d mutually decided to bypass huge chunks of their history and get straight to the heart of the matter.
29
Maribeth, Todd, and Sunita were driving to their weekly shopping trip when the conversation turned to plans for the upcoming holiday.
Thanksgiving was in four days, a fact that Maribeth had managed to ignore until a few days before, when she’d looked out her living room window and seen a balloon turkey wearing a Steelers cap and realized the holiday was imminent. She’d been gone almost four weeks. How had that happened?
It wasn’t that she was unaware of time. But with no deadlines, no staff meetings, no potlucks, no playdates, no school week, no work week, the indicators changed. She had a few repeating events—trips to the library, shopping with Todd and Sunita, checkups with Dr. Grant—but those weren’t what demarcated time anymore. Rather, she noted the days passing by the way her leg no longer swelled if she went an entire day without wearing a support stocking, or how back-drawer words (ubiquitous, semiannual) were becoming easier to pull up. Or by the stack of letters to the twins, which had grown as thick as her thumb.
“I’m not sure what I’m doing,” she told Todd and Sunita. “What about you?”
“Sunny’s parents will be enjoying the traditional Thanksgiving ritual of naturalized Americans living in Hyderabad,” Todd said. “And my family will be enjoying the traditional Thanksgiving ritual of the broken home.”
Sunita patted him on the shoulder. She turned back to Maribeth. “His parents split up five years ago. He’s not over it.”
“I’ll never be over it.” He sighed dramatically. “Dad’s spending the holiday with Barbie Wife and Mom is off with her new boyfriend in Altoona.” Todd winced. “I don’t want to go to Altoona.”
“I don’t blame you,” Maribeth said, even though she’d never been to Altoona and for all she knew it could be the Shangri-La of the Keystone State.