Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind Read Online Free PDF Page B

superficial, the surface of style. Or was the leather rip a style of its own, a vote for mind over matter? There was a TV in the living room. It was flat as the world in a fourteenth-century map. It came to life for the Sunday talk shows, for CNN, for Yankees games and Sunday football and HBO series. Meyer downloaded science fiction movies on his computer and Anna wouldn’t tell her parents what she watched. Probably Oprah , said her mother. Porn, said Fritz. Oh God, said her mother, whose paperback copy of The Story of O was on a top shelf, high up but within reach and never out of memory.
    Only the fearful and the pretentious avoided TV, Fritz said, a real swimmer dives into all waters, deep, shallow, salt, fresh, narrow, wide.
    Was there an unhappy love affair? Fritz asked his wife. Daughters might tell their mothers something like that, something ordinary that would pass over, leaving them all unharmed, the way they had been once upon a time. I don’t know, said Beth, she hardly speaks to me. It wasn’t always that way. The way it had been, was that an illusion? Once upon a time she would come home from her last class and her daughter would rush to her side. Once she felt free with her child, free of all the effort and the discriminations and the distinctions she made each moment of her working life. She felt only the word home , the word child , the safety of her armchair, her rose quilt, her daughter’s hair that she brushed in the mornings and sometimes braided.
    Had they let something slip, something fall down, something they were supposed to do but didn’t? Had they harmed, not meaning to, but harmed the person they had created between them, thigh to thigh, heat rising, and with good intentions perfectly aided by the moonlight flooding the cedar planks in the floor of the cabin they had rented by the lake for two weeks in August? Do you remember that summer we went to Maine? asked Fritz. Yes, said Beth, who then opened her black bag and took out a memoir she was preparing for her Thursday seminar, a story of survival in a women’s prison. The narrator wrote in brave sentences that bristled, holding the reader the way any car crash would, with fire, crumpled metal, broken glass, a body on the tarmac.
    Fritz had an office twenty blocks away. He walked there as he did most weekdays. All the way uptown, he kept the image in his head of his daughter’s face, a kind of blankness, making it seem more like a mask than a face. It frightened him, this face of the child he had created, valued, overvalued? Even a confident man, with five significant books listed in the congressional library’s catalogue, has days when his faith in himself is shaken.
    Dr. Berman looked at Anna sitting across from her in the large patient’s chair. Her cat Lily sat on the window ledge asleep. Felines could not break patient confidentiality. Dr. Berman suppressed a sigh. It was going to be a long forty-five minutes. Anna did not seem pleased to be there. She did not seem comfortable in her chair. She played with the ends of her hair. She looked out the window intently as if she were immensely curious about something happening in the park across the street. Dr. Berman was not going to rush matters but wasn’t going to sit in silence either. Did you have a roommate? she asked. Yes, said Anna. Did you have any particular difficulty with her? asked Dr. Berman. No, said Anna. She was all right. Did you find the work hard? asked Dr. Berman. No, said Anna. Dull? asked Dr. Berman. Yes, said Anna. Tell me about your classes, said Dr. Berman. Anna said nothing. Dr. Berman tried another direction. Did you have a boyfriend? No, said Anna. Did you want one? said Dr. Berman. Anna said nothing. Did you want a woman? For what? said Anna. Were you perhaps sexually attracted to women? Dr. Berman’s voice was neutral. She might have been asking if Anna preferred Gouda or Brie. Anna said nothing. Have you had intercourse, sex