Nobody's Family is Going to Change. Louise Fitzhugh

write a letter to the Bar Association. Naturally, it would help to have him back her up, but it was not impossible to do without him.

      Getting up quickly, she went into her father’s study. She began to look through the law books, but was soon frustrated because, in truth, she did not know where to look. She expected to find a book which said something like “Requirements for Passing the State Bar Exam” on the cover, and when she didn’t, she wandered among the books like a dog lost in the snow, turning in circles and walking up and down, then turning again.

      She sat down at the desk and went into a trance of pretending. She pretended to pick up the phone and rail at her secretary. “Where are those contracts? What do you mean, you don’t have them? Your baby lost one of its arms? What does that mean, Miss Googler? Be more specific if you can. That is, which arm, and where did she lose it? In Bloomingdale’s? So? I don’t see that that’s any reason for not getting back from the hospital in time to type those contracts. Get them in here on my desk in fifteen minutes . . . What’s that? Each contract is fifty to one hundred pages long? So what, Miss Googler? You’ll never think like a man until you get rid of all this emotional nit-picking. Fifteen minutes. Is that clear?”

      She pretended to bang the phone down, then leaned back in the swivel chair, on her face an expression of sublime, besotted joy.

      Bored with that, she began to look through the papers on her father’s desk. One stack was topped by a note which said “Old Cases—Put in Dead File.” Obviously these were cases he had tried before becoming an assistant district attorney. Under the note was a small book with Bible-thin pages entitled Merck Manual.

      Emma opened it up. It was a medical book. As she flipped through, reading parts of entries, she began to marvel at it. It seemed to be a book you could take into the jungles of Africa. You could stay for years curing people right and left without even being a doctor. It even had directions for operating. You’d have to take along a dictionary, of course, for half the words were gibberish.

      Emma looked up menstruation, which was new to her, an addition to her life activities which she could not be said to have welcomed.

      The index referred her to Menstruation, disorders of, and the first one on the list was Amenorrhea, under which it said Absence of menstruation.

      “Wow!” Emma spoke loudly to the room. “How can I get that?”

      She read on: Physiologic amenorrhea occurs before the menarche [Who is he? the King? the King of the Period?], after menopause [The pause that men take?], during pregnancy and lactation [I have so many lacks that now I have a severe case of lactation?].

      She decided she’d better look up a few words, but first, it occurred to her to wonder why this book was on her father’s desk.

      She rummaged around. It had been lying neatly on a stack of papers.

      In this stack she found the legal pad on which her father had sketched out his brief. She began to read, picking through his handwriting as through a dark closet.

      From what she could gather, her father had been the attorney for a man who had had an operation during which the surgeon had been forgetful. He had left inside the man’s stomach a large rubber glove, a pair of forceps, and a small sponge.

      The man had, needless to say, become uncomfortable and had submitted to another operation at another hospital, wherein the lost objects were found and reported. The man had retained Emma’s father as attorney and was suing the first hospital and the doctor who had so carelessly misplaced his tools.

      Emma felt slightly ill. She looked at the medical book and saw that there was a piece of paper marking a place. Turning to that place, she read what her father had evidently been reading, a passage entitled Obstruction, and felt even worse.

      It became important to see if the man operated on was a black man. He was.

      “Typical,” Emma said aloud. “If it had been a black woman, they would have left fourteen scalpels and a coat hanger inside.”

      She put everything back into the stack neatly and leaned back into the chair.

      Musing, she reviewed things she had heard her father say about doctors. Sifting through various comments, she realized that even though there had been a lot of grumbling, her father seemed to have a grudging respect. Even when the doctor was a woman?

      Yes! She remembered now. A friend of her mother’s was a doctor. She had come to visit a couple of times. Yes! Her father had seemed afraid of this woman.

      Emma felt a surge of greatness. Oh, to make her father afraid. What a feeling that would be. Not only to impress him but to have him actually afraid of her, Emma!

      She sat up abruptly and grabbed the medical book. Deciding that there was something bothering her about the small mole on her left ear which had been there since birth, she looked up moles in the index. She found: Nevi (Moles, Birthmarks). Moles vary in color from yellow-brown to black. [Just like us darkies, thought Emma.] They may be small or large, flat or raised, smooth, hairy [hairy!] or verrucous [what?], and have a broad or pedunculated base. [I’m going to tell Willie he has a pedunculated base.]

      Emma stopped reading. She went off into a dream. She was in medical school. The men made fun of her, but she persisted. She was a drudge about her studies, she made all A’s. She was then a resident. Finally, she was a doctor. She sat behind her white desk, in her white office, in a white lab coat. She pushed the buzzer for her secretary to send in her first patient, her very first patient. The door opened and in walked her father.

      “Yes, what can I do for you?” (Emma, well-known and respected young New York doctor.)

      “Doctor, it’s this enormous mole—”

      “Ah, yes, no doubt verrucous”—nods head wisely—“and probably having a pedunculated base. Take off your clothes.”

      “What in hell are you talking about?”

      Too late, Emma realized that reality was presenting itself to her in the form of her real father standing in his real doorway to his real office after she, in his real swivel chair, had just said to him, “Take off your clothes,” like an ass.

      “Hi, Dad.” She jumped up and started for the door like a runaway horse. Only casualness could save her now, casualness and quickness—the quick and the dead.

      “Oh, no, you don’t! What did that mean?”

      She wasn’t quick enough, so she wished she were dead.

      “Sir?” All innocence now. Try to make him think he’s nuts. Last-ditch-stand time.

      “What were you doing in here?”

      “Sir?”

      “What did you mean by saying to me, ‘Take off your clothes’?”

      “Sir?”

      A certain stillness in her father signified the change in him that she feared the most, the switch from father to prosecuting attorney.

      His eyes became darker, flatter, colder. “You stated as I entered the room, stated clearly, ‘Take off your clothes,’ did you not?”

      “I did.” Hopeless.

      “To what purpose did you state this?”

      “I was a doctor.” No hope except for truth.

      “Make yourself clear.” Was there a hint, the lightest touch of a feather brush of fear in his eyes?

      “I was pretending I was a doctor.”

      His grip on her arm relaxed. He swung from district attorney back into father quicker than Wolf Man. He smiled.

      “Daydreaming?”

      “Yes.” What a baby thought, what a baby word, day-dreams; but it worked. It got her off the hook, and