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By Root 480 0

you waiting to call the car service and two kids screaming in the basket?” So where did she fit it in? She was always at home when she was supposed to be. She was always in bed with me all night. She never canceled an appointment with a patient. Sometimes she was late coming home from choir practice, once a week, but she had been late in the past, and she was never more than half an hour late. But sometimes she was desperate with sadness and sometimes she was fine, and these states of mind didn’t have a thing to do with me, or our household, or the office. And in addition to that, she denied that they even existed, that she was ever in turmoil or that she was ever at peace. I don’t mean to say that we spoke of them. I wouldn’t have allowed that under any circumstances. But she would catch me looking at her, and she would stare at me with that same stare I remembered from dental school, defiant, daring me to have any opinions about her at all.

I should say that it didn’t take long for Lizzie to realize that something was up. Lizzie’s situation as the oldest and her observant character make her the point man most of the time, and a lot of our battles have been fought in her digestive tract over the years. The pediatrician, whom I like a lot, does not always go for the psychosomatic explanation. In the case of Lizzie’s stomach, he suggests that some children simply suffer more intense peristaltic contractions than others. Any food triggers digestion, which may or may not be painful. And it is certainly true that Lizzie has stomachaches all times of the year, all seasons of the spirit, and also tends to throw up a lot, as does Dana’s sister, Frances. It has been routine on every car trip for thirty-seven years for whoever is driving Frances to pull over so that Frances can give her all on the side of the road. It is a family joke, and Frances doesn’t get a lot of sympathy for it. Ditto Lizzie. Nature or nurture? My observation is that parents believe religiously in nature, while the hidden family forces that are acting to deform the plastic child are glaringly apparent to any college psych major. At any rate, Lizzie woke up every morning of the week after our trip into the country with a raging bellyache and an equal determination not to go to school, but to stay home and keep her eye on the domestic situation.

Each morning I carried her to school in tears, deposited her in the arms of Mrs. Leonard, brushed off her clutching hands, and turned on my heel to the screams of “Daddy! I need you! I need to be with you!” School, though she always settled down to her work at once, didn’t make her forget my betrayal, and explanations, about how sometimes when mommies and daddies argue it makes the children feel bad, did not convince her that she wasn’t actually sick. We took her temperature morning and night, promising that if it went up so much as a degree she could stay home.

I took her to the pediatrician, who put his arm around her and said that sometimes when mommies and daddies argue it makes the child feel bad. He also felt her stomach and checked her ears and throat, but she wasn’t convinced. I tried to explain to him, because he is rather a friend, and certainly a fellow in the small professional community of our town, that we weren’t exactly arguing, but his gaze—warm, sympathetic, resigned—flickered across my face in disbelief. Here was the child, her stomach, her panicked look, the evidence of forces at work. He said, “The stomach problem she’s always had is going to be the focus of all her uneasiness. Some kids get headaches. Some get accident-prone. Every feeling is in the body as well as in the mind.” His voice kept dropping lower and lower, as if he didn’t know how to speak to me, a medically trained white male, and it’s true, I was rather resentful. More resentful of him than of Dana or the Other. Maybe he was the Other. I wanted to punch him out.

Instead, I took Lizzie to the grocery store and let her pick out dinner. Canned corn, mashed potatoes, pork chops, orange sherbet. Not what I would have chosen, personally.