The Doctor's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

her true self, and she was right. Now her longish nose suited her longish face and wide mouth, all of it softened by that nimbus of frizzy dark hair.
    I picked up a teaspoon and looked at my own distorted, inverted image in its bowl. My pale neck stretched out like the original Alice’s after she’d eaten that piece of cake. I put one hand to it. “No,” I said, “but maybe I should.”
    “So what is it, then?” Violet asked, too loudly over the general din. “Are you having an affair?”
    A woman sitting with her back to Violet turned around and gave me the once-over before going back to her salad. “Yeah, right,” I said sourly. But I fanned my face with my menu until the waitress came by a few moments later and took it, along with our orders.
    “What’s the matter with you?” Violet said. “You look like a boiled beet.”
    “It’s just . . . well, do I seem a little
off
to you?”
    “In what way?”
    I wasn’t sure how to explain it. Given her psychoanalytic leanings, Violet might interpret my complaint as a simple panic attack, but I’d had a couple of those in college—with mild tachycardia and vertigo—and this was different, less transient for one thing. So I said, “It’s just . . . well, do I seem more forgetful?” Which was only a skewed and inadequate way of saying that I might have forgotten something essential, and it had come back to torment me.
    “Uh-oh,” Violet said. She raised her water glass and clinked it against mine. “Welcome to the seniors’ club.”
    “Oh, are you losing it, too?” I remembered Violet’s outrage when she received her first, unsolicited issue of
Modern Maturity
soon after she turned fifty. I think she mailed it right back to them.
    “Not me. My memory’s perfect, knock wood.” She rapped twice on the table and immediately cracked, “Who’s there?”
    I’d told that joke to her in the first place, a long time ago, but I laughed dutifully, before I said, “That’s how my father started, you know, by forgetting little things. First, he couldn’t find his keys. Then he couldn’t remember what doors they opened. Now I don’t think he even knows anymore what keys are
for . . .
”
    “Alice,” Violet said firmly. “That’s not happening to you.”
    “Oh, yeah? Well, this health magazine I bought has a memory quiz, but I keep forgetting to take it. Don’t laugh, I’m serious.”
    “Aside from the fact that you’re crazy,” Violet said, “there’s nothing wrong with you.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because I just do. What are you working on, Doctor?”
    “A few things,” I said.
    “What?”
    “Well, I’m still editing that elderly ex-debutante’s memoir. It’s completely irreverent, but it’s quite amusing and
very
dishy.”
    “Can she write?”
    “No, but I can, and she’ll go to some vanity press, anyway, and distribute copies to all her new enemies. Oh, and I’ve got some hotshot scientist’s proposal for a popular book on bioethics, fascinating stuff if it were only readable.”
    I took a long sip of water. “Then, there’s this first novel,” I said, as offhandedly as I could. Michael Doyle’s book was on my mind much of the time lately.
    “Aha!” Violet exclaimed. She knew my weakness for debut fiction, for discovering new writers. She’d once said it was the way I compensated for never having been discovered myself. Violet wasn’t known for her diplomacy. “Is it any good?” she asked.
    “More than that, actually,” I said. Michael—we were now on a firstname basis in our e-mails—had sent another fifty pages, with some of the same virtues and the same problems as the first batch. He seemed to start dragging his feet whenever the tension really built around his protagonist, Joe, and his missing sister, as if he didn’t know or like where it was heading. But he’d included a lingering sexual scene between Joe and an older woman he meets in a bus station that was hotter than anything I’d read