Cambridge (6 page)

I pictured Eustace in the long black coat with green feathers peeping out, coughing and coughing until he dropped over dead.

“You can’t catch it from a patient,” Ingrid said.

She was a doctor too, so it was hard to know which version was true. Ingrid and A.A. were both doctors, but in almost every other way they were different. Ingrid was small and nervous. She was always saying, No, no, no. A.A. was from the center of America, from an old-time Tom Sawyer–ish place with big trees and a big river. Ingrid was from Sweden. Actually, Ingrid was Viennese. Well, not exactly; it was complicated.

Ingrid’s family was even more medical than A.A.’s. Her father and her three brothers were all doctors. The family started out in Vienna and then things went badly after the First World War
so they moved to Sweden, where Ingrid was born. Technically, she was Swedish. This turned out to be important. Maybe immigration quotas for Swedes were more generous than those for Austrians or maybe all the Austrians scrambling to escape history filled their quotas in a flash—whichever it was, Ingrid got into America because she was the only one in the family with a Swedish passport.

I loved it when she would tell the story.

She was nineteen. First she flew to London, where she was going to get another plane to Finland. Maybe the plane was going to Saint Petersburg? Was it called Petrograd then? Leningrad? How little I can remember it, this story that when I was eight and nine and ten seemed like a fairy tale because of all the mishaps and the happy ending. At any rate, in London she boarded the second plane, which seemed very full. There wasn’t enough room for everyone to sit down. The steward stood near the cockpit and said: Is there anyone here who is not going to Berlin? This plane is going to Berlin and there are too many people on it.

“That was lucky!” Ingrid would say at this juncture in the story. “Suppose the plane hadn’t been full. I would have gone to Berlin by mistake. That wouldn’t have been any good.”

Ingrid did not go into detail about just how not good it would have been for an Austrian-Swedish Jew to arrive in Berlin at that moment.

So she got off the plane and got onto the right plane and went to Finland or Russia or the Soviet Union and then she got onto the Trans-Siberian Railroad and went to Japan.

“And tell about the railroad,” I’d say.

“The train had bunks,” Ingrid would continue, “but it had three bunks, not just two. I was on the top, top bunk. All there
was to eat was potatoes and sour cream. We were on the train for ages.”

“How long, Ingrid?” I’d ask.

“At least a week. I think it was maybe for ten days. We had to keep stopping because of all the trains filled with soldiers heading to war, and we’d have to wait and not be in their way. Anyhow, everyone had diarrhea from eating sour cream three times a day. And I had to jump down from that top, top bunk with diarrhea all the time.”

“But you got there, to Japan, right?”

“Oh, yes, eventually we got there. Then we got on a boat that was going to San Francisco. We had to go that way because of the German submarines in the Atlantic. It wasn’t safe. That was why we were going on the Pacific. And then, two days out from Yokohama, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.”

“And then?”

“So then we didn’t know if we would be allowed to land in America. Because it was an enemy ship now. So we waited, and waited, because maybe we were going to go back to Japan. But they worked something out, and we went to San Francisco.

“And that’s how I came to America,” she would say. She always concluded the story with those words.

One reason I loved this story was that I was crazy for sour cream, and eating it all the time sounded great. Also, it vouched for the story’s authenticity. I knew that sour cream
was
Russia. My Russian grandmother gave it to me every morning, a bowl of blueberries suffocating in sour cream, in those summers when I’d been sent away from polio to spend two months with her in Atlantic City. Post-Salk, I no longer went there.

My Austro-Hungarian mother did not believe in sour cream. Cream, maybe, and after Italy, not much of that. But my father (the Russian side) loved it too. My mother kept a bottle in the
refrigerator for him. My father and I sometimes stood in the kitchen together and ate sour cream with teaspoons straight from the jar, one of the few disorderly, uncouth activities he was willing to indulge either himself or me in.

They met during their residencies in San Francisco. After Eustace died from psittacosis, A.A.’s mother moved to the West Coast, and when A.A. graduated from Harvard he dutifully went out there for medical school. To find Ingrid, fresh off the enemy boat, speaking her singsong Swedish English. She was going to be a psychoanalyst. A.A. decided he was going to be one too.

So there they were at the top of our hill, two psychoanalysts, one semi-brother, and a house full of oddities. I could trot over there in less than two minutes on a winter day; pedaling the bike uphill in summer took longer.

Roger was good at being a student. Tests were fun, he said. He liked to memorize things, and he did it automatically. If you told Roger something, he’d remember it in exactly the words you’d used. He also remembered entire pages from books and where to find those pages in the books. I envied him. Almost everything I heard and read in school fell right out of my brain or bounced off it, as if my brain were the opposite kind of magnet from the information, the repellent kind. Roger loved arithmetic; I was still doing multiplication as addition—on my fingers. Third grade is long division, and doing long division on your fingers is a laborious process. I didn’t like “arithmetic” in Cambridge any better than I’d liked “maths” in England.

A worse problem was that my classmates had begun to catch up to me in reading. I probably read more, and more difficult, books than they did, but it was no longer obvious that I was superior, because I wasn’t.

I was a good speller. That wasn’t much of a thrill. Also, the school was progressive enough to value spelling less than a regular
school would. Content and comprehension: Those were the things. Spelling would follow, was their theory.

Theories were everywhere at that school, and they led to some pretty strange teaching. For instance, the Stick Man. He wasn’t a regular teacher. He came in a few times a week with his new way of explaining arithmetic: colored sticks. Different lengths and colors for different numbers. It was hateful because it added one more dimension to remember—in my case, to forget—about the intractable, confusing realm of numbers.

A white stick an inch long was one, a red stick a bit longer was two, and so forth. They were made of fragile, splintery balsa wood like Roger’s airplanes, and dyed with colors that leached out over the course of the year. The weightlessness of the wood bothered me. I wanted three to feel heavier than two, but they were indistinguishable.

This synesthetic theory had a name, now lost to me, that sounded like Cuisinart, though it must have been something else. Its proponent the Stick Man was cheerful, and we liked to see him appear at the door to the classroom. Nobody (except the teachers, of course) thought these sticks were helpful in any way, but his presence enlivened things.

I liked the Stick Man enough to confide in him, one day after class, that I detested arithmetic.

“It makes my head hurt,” I explained.

“That’s why sticks are good!” he said. “Sticks make the numbers visible.”

“Not to me,” I said. “Sticks are just a new way to feel mixed up.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “That’s terrible.”

He sounded so concerned that I started to cry.

What upset me was the feeling that he cared about my being mixed up. I didn’t think anybody cared—or I told myself that
nobody cared. And once I’d started heaving and sobbing, I couldn’t stop. A big hot backlog of feeling sorry for myself and misunderstood and unappreciated and incompetent began to slither out of me.

Poor guy! He patted my eight-year-old shoulder and said, “There, there,” and probably felt put upon. He wasn’t a child psychologist or even a grade-school teacher, he was just a guy preaching the gospel of the stick.

“Let’s spend some time together working on this,” he said.

I could tell that he meant working on sticks, not working on how miserable I was.

So we did that for an hour in the dusty, deserted classroom. He was a nice, kind person. The only stick I liked at all was the number six, an intense blue-green wand. I held it tight in my sweaty, teary hand while he tried to soothe and engage me. My index finger was tinted a pale version of that green when we finished. But, as usual, nothing else stayed with me.

In addition to spelling, I had a talent for braiding hair. I spent a lot of the fall semester braiding the hair of the girl who sat in front of me. Her name was Meg and she had lovely, water-smooth light-brown hair down to her shoulder blades, the kind that slides shinily out of the braid as soon as you make it, even if you tie it at the bottom, which meant I had an excuse for braiding it again. My involvement with Meg’s hair gave me the idea that we could be friends. Face-to-face, though, we had nothing to say to each other. Better to stick to the braiding relationship. And then the teacher decided I was too distracted by Meg and her hair and moved my seat. In Purgatory, sitting near the door, I looked down the empty hall and squinted toward the future I could almost see, when the last bell would ring and it would be time to go home.

Being confined in school, in a classroom, in a particular seat,
listening to a teacher, made me stir-crazy. It wasn’t that I couldn’t sit still; I could sit still for hours watching my ants tramp along the paths I made for them by pressing the grass down with my hand, or lie without budging on my stomach until I was completely numb reading the
Narnia
books. But I couldn’t sit still for all the school stuff. And beyond my physical restlessness was a more profound disquiet, which was: What is the point of all this?

I kept asking my father.

“What’s the point of all this arithmetic? Why do I have to know this? I don’t like this.”

“You need it in life,” he said.

“Why? What’s it for?”

“It’s like being able to read. It’s being able to read numbers. You must be able to read numbers as well as words.”

That made a little bit of sense. Just a little.

Then we started studying the Revolutionary War. We had to draw diagrams of battles. We had to learn lists of generals.

“I don’t care about this,” I said to my father. I never said these sorts of things to my mother. “I don’t want to know these things.”

“They’re interesting,” my father said. “The Revolution is interesting. And a lot of it happened right here.”

“I don’t care. I’m not interested.”

“You don’t give it a chance,” he said. “You get all riled up about it before you even try. Calm down.”

That sounded like something my mother would say. They were in cahoots.

I began to understand that, at bottom, school was a way to get me out of my mother’s hair for the day. Also, a way to break my spirit. It was meant to grind me down, bore me into submission,
and lure me into accepting its values until all I wanted was to be the best at reciting lists of generals and battles of the Revolutionary War.

Roger was interested in learning new things just because they were new. A little anti-intellectual, I kept asking about utility with my What’s the point question. Nobody would address this question, which made me all the more intent on it. My father always put it back on me, telling me to relax and pay attention. Roger was worse than my father with his cheery “It’s fun!” and his game mentality, in which everything he encountered was a puzzle to be worked out and seemed (as far as I could tell) to have no emotional content. I didn’t even bother asking the teachers. I assumed they were totally brainwashed about how important all the stuff they were teaching was.

The only person with any sympathy for my position was A.A.

Sometimes when I ate dinner at the Bigelows’ (which I did two or three times a week), Ingrid would start chastising me.

“You don’t pay attention at school,” she’d say. “Why don’t you pay any attention?”

This would cause me to wriggle around on my chair as if I were in school at that moment and mumble, “I’m not good at it.”

“It’s not that hard,” she’d say. “And you won’t even try. Your parents are worried about you.”

This information perked me up. It made me feel powerful.

One night A.A. came to my defense, in his languid way. When Ingrid told me it wasn’t that hard to pay attention and I told her it was, A.A. asked me why, exactly, it was.

“I can’t concentrate because it’s boring,” I said. “I don’t see the point of it all.”

“That does make it hard to listen,” he said.

“No, no, no,” said Ingrid. “You’re encouraging her.” She was a bit screechy, which was how she sounded when she was nervous or mad.

“Why not?” said A.A. “If she’s bored, she’s bored.”

“That’s no good to say!” Ingrid was really squeaky now.

“Oh, I don’t know.” A.A. turned to me again. “You might feel different someday. Things can change.” He paused. “Of course, sometimes they don’t.”

I did feel encouraged, enough to say, “I don’t want to know anything about that Revolution.”

This made A.A. laugh. “I never found it very interesting either,” he said.

“But you don’t get to just pick and choose,” said Ingrid.

“I like the Revolution,” Roger put in.

I glared at him. “You like everything.”

A.A. lit a cigarette and chewed on the smoke for a while. “It’s really just a question of time. Waiting it out. There has to be the right thing, something that feels so interesting you want to know all about it. Then things will change. I’m sure. No point worrying.”

“
You
don’t have to worry,” Ingrid said. “She’s not your kid.”

“It’ll be fine,” he said.

A.A. always thought things would be fine, and Ingrid always thought things would get worse. They disagreed constantly, which was yet another fascinating aspect of Bigelow life. My parents mostly disagreed in private. They liked to present a united, impenetrable front, and that made me feel they were ganging up on me.