Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain (27 page)

The doctor shrugged, wished her luck, said that she could always elect to have reconstructive surgery, later. Insurance might even pay.

She walked alone into the clinic lobby. Water spurted from her uncle's rounded fountain. How much gel had seeped into her tissue? What had it done? Did it do? Could it still do? Had her breasts made her sick? Had she poisoned her daughter? These were the weights she now carried, close to her heart, where her silicone breasts once sat.

T
HE
D
OCTORS

I don't know my father is sick until the hospital calls. Dad threatened his cleaning lady at gunpoint. He accused her of cheating on him, stealing his credit cards, ruining his career.

I didn't even realize he owned a gun.

“What's his present condition?” I am still in my nightclothes drinking a late morning coffee. On Thursdays I usually do rounds or lab work, but I took the morning off because I haven't taken a day off in months. My daughter, Arabella, earnestly examines my lower calf with my stethoscope. She finds an old razor nick, presses it. Outside, July heat forces the pigeons to the speckled shade of our fire escape.

“He's calm now. Sleeping. Is he on any medications?”

“I don't talk to my father much.”

D
AD HAS AWOKEN
by the time I arrive. The pale blue hospital robe exposes the loose skin of his neck and upper shoulders. He looks thinner than I remember, and he hasn't dyed his hair, blond ends and gray roots.

“Elizabeth,” he says. His eyes meet the space between my nose and upper lip. He tries to pull his blankets higher, but they are taut, tucked tightly around the foot of the mattress.

“Feeling better?”

“I need my glasses.”

“I'll pick up whatever you need.”

“I'm fine,” he says.

I sit down. “Have you had any tests?”

“They're doing an MRI tomorrow.” My father smiles, waves a hand to convey the dismay already betrayed by his face. “At least it was the cleaning lady and not a roomful of surgeons.”

“Dad,” I say.

“They're sending a specialist.”

“Do you want me to stay?”

He shakes his head. “Pick up my glasses, today's paper, a change of clothing, my travel kit, and two pastrami sandwiches on pumpernickel with pickles and slaw. Come back at seven, that way I won't starve.”

“Two pastrami —”

“One's for you. Keys are in my pocket.”

My father's pin-striped button-down and corduroys are folded neatly on a narrow table by the window. No one has sent flowers. As I feel through his pocket, I realize I might be the only person — aside, perhaps, from the cleaning lady — who knows where he is.

“Do you want me to call anyone?”

“No,” he says quietly. “No calls.”

E
VER SINCE COLLEGE
, I've told friends that my dad and I don't see eye to eye. I tell them we never have, though I don't think that's entirely true. I understand my father more now that I'm older. Age has afforded me insight into a man so concerned with appearances he's forgotten what a face can hide.

Years ago, and not long after my mother moved out, Dad invited me to the Catskills, famous for golf and trout fishing. I was twelve and a half and I beamed despite the strange, sharp pain in my gut. At the time, I thought it was grief — that my body was still tied to my mother's in some odd, inexplicable way, and that she'd return when she heard I was dying. The prospect of a trip alone with my father — a first — to the exotic and mountainous land of the Catskills made me reconsider. School had started, but the days were still warm enough for swimming.

“Pack your bags!” Cheer discolored my dad's voice, and he smiled, but not a smile I recognized from the dinner
table, where he shared stories of the day's successful augmentations. “We're taking the company car.”

The company car was new — a luxury my dad's practice could afford because the beauty business was good. He showed me pictures: a wide, white, boxy thing he described as a Mercedes.

We had to go to the clinic to pick up the car. Before we could leave, Dad saw a few patients. I sat in the lobby reading pamphlets about face-lifts and the joy of feeling young. I'd taken two Tums, but my stomach still hurt. When Dad emerged from his office, I didn't say anything for fear of jeopardizing the trip.

“No talking or radio until we leave the city,” he said, and I agreed without question.

“No music, period,” he declared an hour later. I didn't mind. I'd never been in the front seat of a car before. I could see everything — the road before us, and behind us through the outside mirror. Dad sat straighter than I'd ever seen him, so I sat straighter, too. I counted the mile markers at the side of the highway; I held my breath between exits; I tried to predict the next toll and prepare the correct change. Then I saw it.

“A rabbit! Look! Dad! A rabbit.”

The rabbit bolted forward into our lane, the slow lane. I heard the clunk of bone against metal, and I'm sure my father did too, but all he said was, “Don't yell like that.”

“We have to go back.” I watched the rabbit in the mirror, already violently twitching, covered in blood.

“I can't stop on the highway.”

My dad never looked away from the road, and we didn't stop until we reached the hotel, where my father had a conference and I found the pool, cold beneath a yellowing scum of blown leaves.

The next day, I got my first period. I spent the afternoon folding toilet paper into thick rectangles or curled up in bed thinking about blood — the rabbit's, mine, one bloody mess where I had no one to talk to and nothing to do.

I later learned Dad skipped the keynote dinner to sit with me in the hotel room. All I remember was his insistence that he understood how hard everything was on me and that I'd get better with time. I didn't tell him about the cramps or the blood. He understood my troubles; he approved of them. I didn't want to disappoint him by admitting that something as trivial as womanhood confined me to my bed. Not until I got to college did I learn that my father has never had a driver's license and that the day he appropriated the company car and drove his girl-woman daughter to the country, he had little more experience behind the wheel than I.

T
HE DOORMAN AT
my father's building doesn't recognize me. When I introduce myself, I feel curiosity, or
perhaps pity, in his gaze. He notes the deep furrow between my eyes and the slight overbite that leads many to believe me stupid. For the first time, I am conscious of the fact that I did not iron my blouse or trouble with my hair, which is not even parted properly.

I have not been to my father's apartment since Christmas, the one holiday we celebrate together — perhaps because Dad wears his Santa suit and we can all pretend he is someone else, someone who cares so much about us and what we want that he keeps lists. Pink-faced and round, Dad wears a fantastic white beard and black gloves and carries a sack of gifts that makes Arabella squeal.

“Ring the bell if you need help with anything,” the doorman says before the elevator door closes between us, and I am left alone in front of my father's door.

The apartment, a luxurious two thousand square feet with views of Central Park, has a peculiar smell: souring milk, molding peaches, ripe French cheese. A dark, sticky residue — spilled soda or a thick after-dinner liqueur — covers a wide stretch of the usually spotless hardwood floors. My father has covered the windows with taped newspaper, two weeks old and already yellowing. Even after I turn on the lights, the flat remains dim, foreign without the view of skyline that grounds it in New York.

I set down my purse. The answering machine blinks eight new messages. A cane rests against the wall beside a
pair of podiatric shoes. The clock on the wall reads 1:28 a.m.; the one on the bookshelf reads 6:28 p.m. I reach for the phone. The dial tone startles me; I'd half expected the line to be dead.

When I was young, my father forbade me to enter his bedroom. When he and Mom were at work, the door remained locked. I'd put my ear to it, listening for signs of a child — a secret child, one they loved more than me, one they played with, one they praised for her accomplishments. In high school, I picked the lock. My dad kept a few boxes of porn videos, some hand-blown glass vases, a pack of cigarettes. A series of graphic before- and after-face-lift photos hung on one wall — portraits of my mother from before she left us. She looked happy, almost radiant, even in the ones where her face was still bruised and recovering. By then, I hated her. I hated that my mother could put on a new face and leave me with nothing but the fading memory of fine wrinkles. Her old face belonged to me, but it no longer existed.

I didn't move anything in the room, and I locked the door behind me, but Dad knew I'd been inside. He grounded me for three weeks, and when I had “the impudence” to ask why, he made it four.

Today, the bedroom door stands wide open, the bed unmade, the curtains drawn. I find a half-used package of adult diapers, a collection of prescription medicines, all
from Doctor Stuart Steenwycks, a letter in a hand I don't recognize until I realize it is my father's — shaky, distorted, falling apart. How long has he been sick? How long has he hidden here in his rooms? The last time I visited my father, he said good night with a hearty “ho, ho, ho.”

I sit on the corner of his unmade bed and read his unfinished letter. The note is addressed to his twin, my uncle Jack, a man I've seen only in pictures. Last I heard, he was in Florida serving time for driving drunk without a license, but that was years ago.
How are you feeling
, my father asks. He inquires after Sheila — is she still in a wheelchair or has the new treatment helped her arthritis? He asks after her kids, Evany and Stan, though as far as I know, Uncle Jack has not spoken to his family in decades. He mentions he will be flying out to Hawaii in mid-June (more than a month ago). I wonder if he made the trip. I imagine my father bent over his unfinished letter. I cannot reconcile the frail man in the hospital bed with the one I knew growing up. I cannot prevent the isolation, the emptiness of his deserted bedroom from infecting my thoughts, or the tears from forming and falling.

I
RETURN TO
the hospital after seven. Not even dusk breaks the midsummer heat. The nurse tells me Dad has mistaken her for his wife. My training and years of
study are as useless as graduation robes. His illness, his apartment, this entire day have proved me inadequate.

“Dad,” I say. I have his clothing and toiletries in a grocery sack, and the sandwiches — two pastrami on pumpernickel, just as he'd asked — in another. “It's Elizabeth.”

I pull up my chair beside him. “Elizabeth, your daughter.”

I feel large — a parent in a child's seat, a grown-up trying to hide beside the bed because I can no longer slip beneath it. I take my father's hand.

“Elizabeth.” Though he speaks my name, my father's eyes show no sign of recognition. He squeezes my hand so tight it hurts.

“Have you been self-prescribing?” I ask. “Have you?” I ask again. “Damn it, Dad. You can't —”

But my dad isn't with me. His eyes are open, but he is looking past me, through me, to the shadow beneath the silent television fastened high on the wall. My father, the plastic surgeon. I don't think he ever really looked at me. When I refused to take over his practice, Dad joined a Christian charity and began sending monthly checks to a six-year-old boy named Guillermo; according to the article in
Plastic Surgery Today,
which pictured my dad on the cover, he never leaves home without the boy's snapshot, the child's big brown eyes the doctor's hope for “the future
generation.” Only in the last four years — since Arabella — have we begun to speak again.

I use Dad's hospital phone to call the lab. The new tissue samples are ready, waiting.

T
HE BEST THING
about my lab is that I have access to it at all times. I can spend the day caring for my dad, and the night examining tissue from spontaneous abortions or blood from children with congenital anomalies. I can care for the health of the passing generation and the coming one.