The Doctor's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

since
Endless Love.
“I mean it’s still pretty rough,” I told Violet. “But I think he’s the real thing. You know—the writing is funny and it’s very wise and sexy.” I sounded like a dust-jacket blurb, like an imbecile.
    “Oh, so
that’s
your affair.” Violet said, and my face grew hot again. I hadn’t just admired those pages, I’d been turned on by them. Why did Violet always know things about me faster and better than I did? I suppose it’s because she’s my oldest and best friend, if that latter designation is still applicable at our age. But we’ve shared far more than the experience of years between us. We’ve been each other’s confidantes in all matters of the heart and spirit since childhood.
    She was the first to learn, in a breathless letter, about my sexual initiation, soon after it happened, like a news bulletin from a war zone. “It was okay,” I wrote, “but I don’t think I’ll do it again.” Actually it was terrible and amazing and a little blurry because both Stuart Rothman and I were both pretty high at the time. It was August and we were junior counselors at Camp Winnetoba, which was alleged to mean “rustling pines” in Chippewa. I bled like crazy on a bed of pine needles—God, would I need stitches?—and for a moment Stuart thought
he
was the one bleeding, and all was almost lost. Afterward I reached out to embrace him, because I thought that’s what you did, and he shook my hand instead. Mission accomplished.
    That same year, I tried out my first, embryonic short stories on Violet, who loved them completely, as I had known she would, a cushion against all subsequent criticism. In turn, she showed me her paintings, and I said that I loved them, too, although in fact I found them harshly ugly and disturbing. They were dark and vaguely figurative, as if the figures were skulking in the painted shadows.
    We pledged to become lesbians and live together if neither of us ever found anyone we liked as much as we liked each other. Years later Violet called from New Haven to tell me about Eli Kahn right after he proposed, and she was the only one from home to know about Ev when I was still afraid to tell my father.
    Our parents had been good friends before we were born. They were neighbors in Riverdale, and Violet’s father, Leo Steinhorn, retired now, was on the staff at Mount Sinai with my father. Both men were renowned in their fields—Leo was a hematologist—and our mothers had been consummate doctors’ wives. Gracious hostesses in the dining rooms, first ladies at awards ceremonies, keepers of their husbands’ flames. Violet’s mother, Marjorie, continues to play that supporting role, with considerable flair, to a diminished audience.
    Violet’s birthday and mine are two weeks apart, in November, and she was my first playmate. There’s a faded photograph in one of my mother’s albums of the two of us, in bonnets, facing each other in a baby carriage, like Siamese twins joined at the sternum. “At least you’ve always had Violet,” people used to say in comforting tones, on the popular assumption that it was lonely being an only child. I tried to perpetuate that myth myself when Suzy complained about her brothers, but when I was young I never really suffered an absence of siblings.
    I didn’t have to share my room or my toys—except on the occasion of a friend’s visit—or my parents’ ardent attention, ever. And the relative solitude of my early life probably served to stimulate my imagination. I held frequent conversations with myself, not with a pretend friend, as my mother liked to think. “What’s her name, dear?” she once asked, trying to join my game, and I said, “Alice, of course.” I heard her whisper something about this episode to my father later, followed by little bursts of conspiratorial laughter.
    My parents were devoted to each other, with the particular, exclusive intimacy of childless couples. They had already sadly accepted my