Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind by Anne Roiphe Read Free Book Online

to eat for two days. But then she made a new friend. Once at camp Anna had called and asked her parents to pick her up. It had something to do with a boy from across the lake who had said her eyes were crossed. They weren’t. They told her to call again if she still wanted to come home at the end of the week. She didn’t. When at the end of the summer they went to the bus stop in White Plains Anna cried in her counselor’s arms because camp was over.
    Beth was angry at Fritz. If it was her fault it was his fault. Fritz decided to go to work at his desk. He didn’t want to hear his wife breathe. She almost smelled of confusion and disappointment. He couldn’t bear the weight of her soul. It was too heavy. It smothered him.
    Beth considered: drugs, drugs were the destroyers of children’s minds, their sense of purpose, their relationship to their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. Drugs were the seducers promising immediate pleasure and guaranteeing loss, loss of clarity, loss of a future. Oh Mr. Tambourine Man, what have you done with my child? But Anna didn’t seem to be on drugs. Beth had searched her room, rummaged through old papers, found a list of clothes she had wanted for college.
    Had someone rejected her? Who? Was it sexual? Was she struggling with gender identity? Beth would not be shocked. It was a new world. Anna could love anyone she liked as long as she loved. Fritz would agree. Was she afraid she wouldn’t do well? She had always done well.
    Beth was suddenly afraid to talk to Anna. She didn’t want to say the wrong thing. She wanted to help but anything she said might make matters worse. The thought seared her brain: Anna might hate her, must hate her, wouldn’t really look at her. Had she delivered a stillborn child who happened to be eighteen years old?
    Fritz said, I want to talk to Dr. Berman. Beth said, She doesn’t want to talk to us. We pay her, said Fritz. She has to talk to us. Insist, he said. Beth insisted.
    Dr. Berman had referred the Fishbeins to Dr. Z. He noticed the half-completed gesture of Fritz who had wanted to hold his wife’s hand and then changed his mind. He offered no thoughts speculative or otherwise about Anna. He listened. His phone rang. He ignored it. He asked if the parents were planning a divorce. They weren’t. He asked if Meyer was having trouble with friends or schoolwork. He wasn’t. He asked if Anna had had an abortion that they knew of. They didn’t think so. He assured the parents that many children found their first year away from home difficult. He did not think the problem was unusual. Let’s see how it goes, he said. She’s in good hands with Dr. Berman. He hoped that was true. Beth wanted to mention the blood on Anna’s arms but she thought that might be a betrayal of her daughter. Maybe it was nothing, nothing worth mentioning.
    Afterward, as they waited for the elevator and put on their coats, Fritz pinched Beth in the spot above her second rib which was his signal to her, come lie down with me, leave the TV, leave the dishes, leave the children, lie near me, naked, now. Beth pulled away. She did not look at him. In the street as Beth waved down a taxi to take her to the university, Fritz said, Cold fish. Beth sighed. Was he talking about her or Dr. Z.? It would not be so bad, she thought, to be a cold fish, a cold fish with a slice of lemon for an eye.
    In the cab she considered, was there a circle in hell for failed mothers? She would have liked to have wept or to have howled, instead she closed her eyes and thought of herself on a beach blanket near the ocean’s edge listening to the pounding waves, the hissing of spray, the way the meditation counselor had taught her when she’d had a cluster of migraines after Meyer’s birth.
    Beth was not sleeping. Fritz was not sleeping. He felt a vague fluttering of unsatisfied desire and turned to his wife. She was lying there