continued, “certainly have, I’m not denying it, an inexplicably perfect roundness.”
He paused. He’d been headed somewhere with this information, but he’d temporarily forgotten where.
“Oh,” he said, remembering. “The inexplicable perfect roundness. Did you know there’s such a thing as Paranormal Geology?”
“I didn’t know that, no,” I said. Of course I knew it, but it excited him to think he was telling me something I didn’t.
“I thought you might get a kick out of that,” he said, making it clear that he absolutely did not get a kick out of it—territorial incursions by soft science into hard he found distressing—but that he could, as a father, allow himself to get a kick out of my getting a kick out of it, and wasn’t that something?
I had to agree that it was.
More ill-at-ease silence. I held the phone away from my head, the full length of my arm. I recognized, however, now as always, it wasn’t his fault that he behaved toward me as he did. To be honest, I doubt I would have been able to receive his adoration in any less clumsy or oblique a manner. Our relationship was a sensitive coproduction, no one person’s brainchild, no one person’s fault.
“And so how are you feeling?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Good, good. By any chance did you get the article Blanche sent about candida?”
“The opera?”
“The systemic yeast infection,” he said. “A common affliction among unmarried women in their twenties. You should ask your doctors about it.”
I promised I would. This prompted him to launch into a story about a colleague who’d contracted a rare variety of flesh-eating bacteria while hiking in New Hampshire, but none of the doctors could quite believe he’d contracted the flesh-eating bacteria where he claimed to have contracted it, because this particular flesh-eating bacteria had never been documented so far north of the equator.
I wasn’t sure what to make of this anecdote. That doctors were immune to surprise? That his colleague was a hypochondriac, an amnesiac, or a liar?
The latter was the more likely interpretation, given my father and Blanche were effortlessly, incurably healthy people, and thus convinced that a variety of mental weakness must plague any person who wasn’t equally vigorous. Though neither my father nor Blanche had ever said as much, I knew they both figured me for a hysteric, Blanche repeatedly plying me with copies of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and reminding me that“hysteria, in Greek, means ‘traveling uterus.’ ” They were concerned but skeptical; they doubted the symptoms, if not the existence of a cause.
I did not take their concerned skepticism personally. Concerned skepticism, after all, had been my father’s default mode toward me since the age of three, when I was diagnosed by a pediatric neurologist with electromagnetic hyperactivity, which explained why our household appliances—toasters, radios, computers—were perpetually blowing fuses or known to spontaneously, in my presence, fail. By the time I was eight I could darken streetlamps by walking beneath them, I could set off car and house alarms and inspire automatic garage doors to a state of rapid fibrillation. By the time I was twelve I realized that I could, on the random occasion, mindfully direct these electrons (if that’s what they were) into spaces where my body had never been. I knew when I saw a woman crying on the street that she’d had her purse stolen on the train. I knew by the backs of a bank teller’s hands that his wife had recently suffered a miscarriage.
My father and I did not speak about my predilections, and I honored his sense of decorum by keeping to innocuous practices, such as telling him that he should be very nice to his secretary because her husband had lost their nest egg at the track. We functioned as a family until I started menstruating and Blanche became necessary. When I left for
He paused. He’d been headed somewhere with this information, but he’d temporarily forgotten where.
“Oh,” he said, remembering. “The inexplicable perfect roundness. Did you know there’s such a thing as Paranormal Geology?”
“I didn’t know that, no,” I said. Of course I knew it, but it excited him to think he was telling me something I didn’t.
“I thought you might get a kick out of that,” he said, making it clear that he absolutely did not get a kick out of it—territorial incursions by soft science into hard he found distressing—but that he could, as a father, allow himself to get a kick out of my getting a kick out of it, and wasn’t that something?
I had to agree that it was.
More ill-at-ease silence. I held the phone away from my head, the full length of my arm. I recognized, however, now as always, it wasn’t his fault that he behaved toward me as he did. To be honest, I doubt I would have been able to receive his adoration in any less clumsy or oblique a manner. Our relationship was a sensitive coproduction, no one person’s brainchild, no one person’s fault.
“And so how are you feeling?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Good, good. By any chance did you get the article Blanche sent about candida?”
“The opera?”
“The systemic yeast infection,” he said. “A common affliction among unmarried women in their twenties. You should ask your doctors about it.”
I promised I would. This prompted him to launch into a story about a colleague who’d contracted a rare variety of flesh-eating bacteria while hiking in New Hampshire, but none of the doctors could quite believe he’d contracted the flesh-eating bacteria where he claimed to have contracted it, because this particular flesh-eating bacteria had never been documented so far north of the equator.
I wasn’t sure what to make of this anecdote. That doctors were immune to surprise? That his colleague was a hypochondriac, an amnesiac, or a liar?
The latter was the more likely interpretation, given my father and Blanche were effortlessly, incurably healthy people, and thus convinced that a variety of mental weakness must plague any person who wasn’t equally vigorous. Though neither my father nor Blanche had ever said as much, I knew they both figured me for a hysteric, Blanche repeatedly plying me with copies of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and reminding me that“hysteria, in Greek, means ‘traveling uterus.’ ” They were concerned but skeptical; they doubted the symptoms, if not the existence of a cause.
I did not take their concerned skepticism personally. Concerned skepticism, after all, had been my father’s default mode toward me since the age of three, when I was diagnosed by a pediatric neurologist with electromagnetic hyperactivity, which explained why our household appliances—toasters, radios, computers—were perpetually blowing fuses or known to spontaneously, in my presence, fail. By the time I was eight I could darken streetlamps by walking beneath them, I could set off car and house alarms and inspire automatic garage doors to a state of rapid fibrillation. By the time I was twelve I realized that I could, on the random occasion, mindfully direct these electrons (if that’s what they were) into spaces where my body had never been. I knew when I saw a woman crying on the street that she’d had her purse stolen on the train. I knew by the backs of a bank teller’s hands that his wife had recently suffered a miscarriage.
My father and I did not speak about my predilections, and I honored his sense of decorum by keeping to innocuous practices, such as telling him that he should be very nice to his secretary because her husband had lost their nest egg at the track. We functioned as a family until I started menstruating and Blanche became necessary. When I left for
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