I looked out onto the Promenade. There was the typical lineup of nannies with strollers, old people leaning over the railing, the resident homeless woman with her shopping cart of junk. She was splayed out on one of the benches, her head rested on a carefully tied garbage bag of empty Coke cans. There was a little smile on her lined, dirty face, as if she was terribly pleased with her makeshift pillow. It jolted things into perspective-it was unclear when this woman had last slept in a real bed or eaten a real meal, and yet she seemed more grateful and content than I was.
It was the day after my father’s first treatment. He and I had come home from his first ECT appointment in a cab-I didn’t want to subject him to the subway. At home, he lay on the couch, staring at the wall. After a while, he started crying. ‘I can’t think,’ he kept saying. ‘This is horrible, I can’t think. What the hell happened to me?’
I tried to tell him what happened. He signed the papers, I said over and over. He agreed to this. But I can’t think, he kept repeating. I can’t feel. In the end, I called Dr North; he prescribed a sleeping pill. I begged the pharmacy to send someone to deliver it; I was afraid of leaving my father out of my sight, but also knew he wasn’t capable of leaving the house.
If I went to Ireland, I could study genetics with Dr John Shea. He was working on finding genetic markers for all the important things in the world, or at least was linked to those who were. He was looking for links to certain cancers, multiple sclerosis, ALS. He was associated with those who were looking for a link between our genes and depression. I could study that. I could study whatever I wanted.
But if I went to Ireland, my father would be alone.
I didn’t know if he was supposed to be left alone; doctors hadn’t told me one way or the other. Perhaps there were terrible side-effects of ECT that hadn’t shown up yet-other than, of course, the memory thing. Something else I’d learned: doctors were often loath to mention the staggering side-effects of medications. They said, just take this, it might help, but they so rarely explained that you might not sleep or you might see things or that it might make you more depressed or gain weight or lose weight or stop eating or not be able to produce natural tears. There were no instructions that came with ECT, just a pamphlet, What Is ECT? featuring a smiling blonde woman in a pink sweater, proffering a teapot to the camera. Just do it! her smile said, but it seemed coerced, like someone was pushing a gun to her back. Your life will be as carefree as mine, really, honestly! Would you like some tea?
I picked up the phone and called the number I’d written on the little slip of paper last week, the number from the flyer in the East Village. It rang a few times, and a woman answered. ‘Learning Annex.’
I cleared my throat. ‘Hi, I was calling about the talk that’s in two weeks, the one with Meredith Heller at the Mayflower Hotel? Acting For Beginners?’
‘Yeah. And?’
I gripped the phone. I hadn’t rehearsed past this point; I’d expected them to say Meredith Heller? Who? ‘What will Miss Heller be speaking about?’
She flipped some pages. Sighed. ‘Um, acting?’
‘Right. And…is she around forty?’
‘I don’t know. Harold?’ She moved her mouth away from the phone. ‘Do you know anything about Meredith Heller?…I don’t know, she’s speaking next week, or…yeah. That’s her. Yes. How old is she, roughly?’
There was mumbling. ‘Harold says she’s fortyish, yeah. If you want to buy tickets, though, you should call back tomorrow. I’m just manning the phones because the regular person is sick.’
‘Okay,’ I said weakly.
‘You can buy them at the door, too, Harold says. The day of.’
She hung up without saying goodbye. I held the phone at arm’s length, worried for a moment that it had recorded the conversation in its little plastic fiber-optic parts, storing it for a later time when my father could rewind it and hear everything. Did my mother have any idea what things were like with us? Surely she assumed we might find out about this lecture and come to see her. It was possible-it was very possible-that she had no idea what had happened to my father. Perhaps she thought we would show up, happy and well-adjusted and completely forgiving, ready to hum or pantomime or pretend we were dead or whatever it was people did in acting classes. But all this was waiting for her. She didn’t even know it.
It was late afternoon; the sky had faded from gold to lavender. I sat on the back of the couch, rubbing one foot against the other. After a while, I looked up the Mayflower Hotel on a map of Manhattan. I imagined us walking into the lobby and seeing my mother. I imagined my father healthy and my mother dumpy and silly, teaching a Learning Annex class to make ends meet. We wouldn’t want her. We’d laugh. We’d leave the lobby without taking the class, without paying the twenty bucks.
15