An Uncommon Education (13 page)

He stood at the wire gates and spread his arms across them. He looked like a huge bear, soft and unwelcome. I ran to the corner farthest from him and hunkered down, pressing my cheek against the cool chain link of the fence. In a few more hours happy children would meet their friends here, calling and being answered. My father and I were in the company of the first birds, their occasional songs wafting through the half-light like experiments in being heard.

My father walked through them and along the side opposite to me, picking up a racket and a ball someone had left there. The increasing light showed him weighing the ball in his palm, then dribbling it first with his hand, then with the racket. His silhouette with these props was comical; a bushy gray muzzle for a beard, a potbelly that had begun to distinguish itself over the past year or so above his thin legs. After a while he pocketed the ball and picked up another racket that had been left, crossing the court casually and placing it before me.

“Stand up,” he commanded before turning his back to me and returning to the opposite side.

I curled my hand around the handle, enjoying the heft of it, the vague way it felt like a weapon. I stood up. My father lobbed the ball to me and I slammed it back at him, first with aggression and then with more fluidity, more power, a gentleness seeping into me as the rally took on a rhythm. I could feel my body wanting this, reaching for the soft
pock
of the ball against the strings, again and again. When I was exhausted I let my arm drop by my side and looked to him. He extended only one arm this time.

I was across the court and sobbing into his shoulder. I dug my head into his chest and hugged him as hard as I could, searching for his heartbeat, the rough canvas of his jacket releasing a scent of dry leaves and wool and soap as I pressed myself into it. He lowered his chin as best he could to kiss me on the head, smoothing my hair with his hand in response to my uneven gulps for air.

“Hush,” he said soothingly. Then I felt him hold his breath as he measured out his thoughts. “You must have other friends,” he whispered. It might have been a hope, a demand, a question: it might have been all three. I could feel his body grow still with worry, waiting for me. How could I make him understand that I didn’t? I wiped my nose wetly on his jacket.

He continued, “Friends at school. Other girls?” I stopped crying but didn’t answer him. I thought of Anna Kim and her unforgiving, cold leadership, the way most of the other girls followed her so gamely, the way I’d accepted my role as outcast willingly, even as I imagined other ways of being. How I had indulged myself in ideas of drifting among them as one of them, wearing both a light-colored skirt of my own and the bright, confident smile I practiced sometimes in the mirror. Teddy had caught me doing this once and tried it himself, prompting me to shove him away. Most of the girls had forgotten why I was to be avoided at this point, and I’d forgotten why I was supposed to object. All at once my body deflated in my father’s arms.

He waited a long time for an answer from me. “When I was a boy,” he finally said, “when I first came to this country, I had no friends. The only English word I knew was ‘doll,’ because a girl on the boat had carried one. I was seven years old by the time the ship docked. Too late, already foreign. The other children at school had made most of their friends. And I was not the most outstanding of boys.” He stopped, lost in thought. “But you,” he bent to kiss my head, “you can learn, do, be whatever you want. And with your memory! You can know everything, if you want.”

I pulled away and wiped my face with my sleeve, trying to see him better. How could I know everything? “How could anyone know everything?” I asked him.

My father looked surprised by the question and didn’t answer me at first, just continued to stroke my face. “I sometimes wonder what goes on in that head of yours.” He looked at me closely. “Do you still wish to be a doctor, Naomi?” I nodded. “A cardiologist, no?” Again I nodded. “The heart is not an easy thing to save. It can be broken. You know this, now. Yes?”

“My heart isn’t broken,” I said bitterly. If it were broken, I wouldn’t feel so angry. I wouldn’t have run so far just to feel it pump even harder.

“Of course,” he said, looking both startled and satisfied. “You are too young, too strong.” He took my face in his hands. “A great heart,” he concluded, his eyes glittering with a crazy kind of hope. It upset me, but also drew me, like a gnat before light. The sun was already warm, drying the dirt and salt on my cheeks into a tight film. I wanted to be home, to have my mother rub my face in the dark of our house with a clean, wet cloth the way she had when I was younger and had skinned my knees trying to ride a bike with my eyes closed.

“We’ll find a way out of this,” my father murmured. “It won’t hurt forever,” he added, kissing my eyelids so that they stayed shut.

S
omething passed through me that morning and the grief began loosening its hold. I woke up the next day wanting to run again, but I came down to breakfast first.

My father knew what I wanted the minute he looked up at me. “Another game?” I nodded. “Good.” He patted his belly. “Good for me, too.”

Every day after that I woke up early for a run, then met my father on the Roosevelt courts before school began. At first it was the two of us; before long he was watching me take a lesson. I had a good instinct for the impassivity of competitive practice, having learned a stoic face from my mother, but it was my father’s eyes that drove me. Keen, never missing a movement, proud.

And while I had once shunned my ability to memorize texts, after Teddy left I filled my mind with whatever I could get my hands on. When my father found me with Einstein’s essays on relativity, I confessed that I could not understand what I’d read. But it didn’t bother either one of us very much. The rhythms of a confident intellect were like a lullaby to me, constantly soothing the ache that, before long, began to dull.

I wrote to Teddy every week on Sunday, after the longer practice, but after a year or so the letters became more routine than heartfelt. But I’d still come home after practice on Sundays and take the stairs by two, sweating as I sat down with my pen and paper.

Teddy’s replies arrived regularly, usually toward the end of the week. He told me nothing about where he now lived, or about his mother, but he did write about the woods nearby and the birds he was finding there. He was doing a special study on yellow birds. He would try to describe them, but frequently failed. The worse his description, the more beautiful the sketch he included. My favorites were the ones that were simply annotated, a black word, underlined, beside a detail of yellow feathers.

Before long he began sending sketches he’d done of people, though most of them were of me. His letters came more infrequently, and were more dramatic, less personal, seeming to steal lines from his mother’s soap operas—“I miss you even more than I ever did,” he would write. And much of it was disjointed, “My mother barely talks to me now. I don’t think she ever wants to leave this house.” There was a sketch of a brown-and-gold falcon with the head of a boy enclosed, a frowning girl lifting him on her arm to the sky.

Nine

T
he last letters came just as I started high school. The first of them was addressed to “Dr. Feinstein.” For an instant I thought he was teasing, joking with me before I even opened the envelope. But the tone of the letter was bland: some notes about poor weather, a lost cat found with a disturbing tear in her left ear, a cold that lingered in both his mother and him. I found myself searching for a certain sly humor, like the assurance of a friend’s face glimpsed in the crowd of a strange city. I read it through twice, then a third time.

The next letter was addressed simply to “Doctor.” Again more mundane details. But the final one was different:

Doctor,

The hospital is not far from my house. I will be going there on April 13th. Visiting hours are from twelve in the afternoon until twelve in the afternoon. I will not accept any medications when you come. My mother will pay your bill.

TR

I stood at the front door, staring at the black lines. I dropped my arm to my side, pinching the paper between my fingers until they began to sting, then hurt. His words ran over me, chilly, their chattering like a foreign language, my mind straining to pull sense from them. And all the while I was realizing that I was about to come face-to-face with some terrible thing that would show itself, even if I wasn’t ready to look. Somehow I knew that the letter in my hands had opened a portal, one that offered a new view of something I thought I had seen in every light; a view of Teddy and his openhearted, naïve love in a retreating light, the kind of light that creates shadows.

I sat down heavily where I was and, with the letter in my hands like a tether, summoned the memory I’d been fighting to keep fuzzy since the day it imprinted itself. It came at once, as though it had been waiting to step forward:

Unknown 34 y/o female adm. 3/22/74. Escorted by police re: c/o public disturbance. On admission to the ED patient found to be mildly obtunded and in early labor. Initial examination revealed track marks BUE, BAC of 0.18%, and 3rd trimester pregnancy est. 34 wks. gestational age. Admitted to ICU. Treatment initiated for substance abuse and withdrawal. 3/28/74 PROM. 3/31/74 delivered of 4 lb 2 oz (SFA) boy. 4/6/74 further obtunded. 4/7/74 manifested right hemiplegia. Expired 4/9/74. PM revealed ruptured left cerebral aneurysm in the distribution of the left middle cerebral artery. Massive intracranial hemorrhage. Also fibrosis of the liver; portal hypertension; mild early ascites.

It terrified me as much as it had when I was nine. Maybe more so now, when I could admit to myself that Teddy had brought it to me because he suspected it contained information that related to where he had come from and how it had shaped him, information that someone else should know. And I had buried it.

My mother was on the phone, trying to make sense of our heating bill, when I walked into the kitchen. My father was away for the weekend to consult with clients who were too old or infirm to travel. He usually waited until he had at least three such clients to visit before hurriedly booking a motel and scheduling them all within one weekend. He didn’t like to leave his girls alone, he would say, but I knew which of us worried him.

I went to the spot where we kept the medical dictionary my father had bought to accompany the
Gray’s Anatomy
he’d given me on my ninth birthday. Along with Einstein’s
Relativity
, he kept the three tomes on the shelf next to the stove, right above the salt, pepper, and other everyday seasonings. It was his decision to put them there, so he could quiz me while he cooked, a duty he’d recently begun to share with my mother. She didn’t look up as I pulled the dictionary down, flipping to the words that I’d read that first week I’d met Teddy: “obtunded”:
made dull
; “hemiplegia”:
total or partial paralysis of one side of the body that results from disease of or injury to the motor centers of the brain
. “Massive intracranial hemorrhage” carried enough description on its own. The fear began swimming through me, rushing to my head. It doesn’t take a trained doctor to create a picture out of a little medical terminology, especially when we are desperate to understand how it might reveal something about someone we love.

And the words I already knew, like “disease” and “brain,” knocked up against one another, threatening. Diseases could be genetic. Even a nine-year-old might have known that, but I hadn’t. And then there was the mention of the track marks on her arm, which as a younger child I envisioned as lines of black marker for an imaginary train, not to be confused with the mark on my mother’s wrist, but now understood them for what they actually were. I was also able to guess that BAC meant blood alcohol content, and that 0.18% would have pervaded everything in her system, that if a baby were born in such conditions he might be compromised in countless ways. Sometimes I wish I could go back to the times when I could remember but not understand, when my mind felt like a vessel rather than a stopping point.

I made for the drawer where we kept our maps and train schedules and pulled a schedule out for South Station, the railway hub of Boston. I also dug out the heavy book of maps for the Mid-Atlantic area. It didn’t take me long to sketch out the journey in my mind. I looked at my watch. It was 2:30. The next train was in an hour and a half and would get me to Trenton, New Jersey, the closest city to Freehold, by 10:30. I pulled my jacket on at the door and walked out without my mother looking up. I should have gone to find him long ago. Now I might have waited too long. I walked to the T, filling my lungs with the icy air.

T
he Greater Boston area is served by a comprehensive system of trolley and subway lines, so that if you are within fifteen miles of the city in any direction, the chances are good that you can ride public transportation into its center. Thanks to the Green Line running through Brookline and the Red Line into Boston, I was at South Station in plenty of time to catch the train to Trenton and begin to wonder about what I was doing, the danger I was putting myself in, the worry I would create at home. I tried to shake my fears off, letting what was now my desperation to see Teddy guide me instead. When the train arrived, I was the first to stand and found a good seat right away in a nearly empty car. I tried to settle in and make myself comfortable. We were expecting snow, and the underground heat had been turned up so high that the train had great gusts of stuffy, hot air blowing through it.

As the train heaved and jerked along the freezing rails, doubt began to seep in. I knew I might not be headed for the reunion I so wanted. Something had changed in him. I didn’t know what it was, I just knew that
he was different, and the undefined shape of it terrified me. He had gone to live a new life since seeing me last, and somewhere along the way he seemed to have drifted completely out of reach. Tears blurred my vision by the time we were above ground and I could look out at the passing cities. People don’t always want you to remember them so well, day in and day out. For all the joyful images I had of Teddy, there were ten more I might see now as off-kilter and disconnected, piling over the Teddy I had known like layers of clean, cold snow. I dozed for a while, dreaming of him as a bear, Mrs. Rosenthal the one who hunted for his food. The screeching of the brakes woke me, and when we emerged the snow was falling in the dark over a town I wouldn’t have recognized anyway.