Divorcing

dresser, careful not to catch a shocking reflection of herself in the mirror. She stared at the variety of flasks and jars and bowls, all the same blue crystal. She sniffed all the flasks, ran her finger over the fluted silver handles of her mother’s brush, her hand mirror, the sheath of her comb. In the left-hand drawer was the little box of black beauty patches. She knew where her mother kept her jewelry, her scarves, her silk stockings, fancy evening shoes, her fine underwear and furs. When most of her things were not in the drawers, Sophie knew that her mother would be away for a long time. Some mornings she saw her mother asleep, but when she came home from school her mother’s bedroom vanished; instead there was the big room which went all the way from the dumbwaiter to the divan. Sometimes the sliding doors were closed. The dining room was small. She listened. If there were voices, she went away. If it was silent, she unlocked the buffet, filled her pockets with cookies. She looked at the porcelain parrot behind the glass—did he see her steal? She went out.

If the door to her father’s office was open it meant he was out. She went in, sat in his chair, bounced on the couch which was covered with a scratchy carpet. She took sheets of paper from his desk with the stationery heading: Dr. Rudolf Landsmann, Neurologist. She tried out all the buttons on the typewriter. She opened the bookcase and looked at the pictures of two-headed babies. Was it like having two eyes or like being two perfectly different people where one could have secrets from the other? If one could still be one person it might be very interesting.

Grown-ups were stupid; they hid keys where she could find them, on top.

The first year they lived in Buda she played every day with a little boy who lived in a big white house across the fields. Petie was four and a half and very skinny, with short-cropped woolly hair. It was marvelous how he peed. Very casually he pulled a slender tube of flesh from the slit in his pants that tapered like a spout of a gardening hose, and tilted the nose upward making an arc of water. They both watched the arc diminish to a dribble, then resumed playing.

They were going to run away to America. Petie’s mother had an evening gown covered with diamonds; if they’d cut off just ten or twenty they would get enough money. The stones were sewn on very tightly, and they were afraid of being found in the closet so they cut strips from the gown. His mother found out. She laughed, the stones were only glass, Sophie could keep them and her father had to pay for the ruined evening gown.

They would fly to America, she told Petie. She went up on the roof with her father’s big umbrella and her rain cape for their first flying lesson. After a while, Petie started to scream and the maid came running and then her father.

She was told she couldn’t play with Petie any more. She was a bad influence—always getting him into trouble, tempting him to eat worms, to leap off the roof, making him steal from his parents. “They are right,” her father said. She went to cry in the kitchen; she complained to the cook, a fat Slovak woman.

The cook said, “If you were a good girl they wouldn’t make up stories like that about you.”

All this time she was drawing pictures, always battle scenes with planes on fire and bloody heads and arms flying in the air, till school started her drawing flowers, snowmen and maps.

HER FATHER wasn’t an ordinary kind of doctor. He didn’t have a bag and visit sick people. He cured her cousin of stammering. When he was still a medical student he could hypnotize a frog and a chicken, sometimes even people. “It is wrong to teach a child to say thank you!” Papi always said, raising his index finger if anybody in the family or the maid or the shopkeeper asked her to say thank you. Omama was no exception. He was no exception. Sometimes Papi stopped in the middle of a sentence to correct himself, just as he stopped to correct anybody else. Papi belonged to a movement dedicated to rooting out hypocrisy and roundaboutness whose leader was a man called Freud. When you asked for something you mustn’t say, “Do you have...” or “Could you give me...” or “I would like to ask you...” no, there was no getting around Papi; Sophie wouldn’t get that piece of chocolate till she said, “Give me...” She couldn’t; she cried. “Why is it so difficult?” Papi laughed.

“I want some chocolate,” she said sullenly.

“Is that so?” Papi said and walked on, poker-faced.

The shingle on the gate said, DR. RUDOLF LANDSMANN, NEUROLOGIST; he was a medical doctor and a neurologist, her father explained to her, but he was really a psychoanalyst. It was a new science that a very few people really understood; it was a difficult science and a lot of people were against it, not only people who had wrong ideas about it but even his own patients; it was part of it that you didn’t like it; this was called “resistance.” He explained to her the Electra complex: She was really in love with him and wanted to marry him and there was no point in denying it; that was part of her Electra complex to deny it. Mostly Papi was talking to himself: he asked her a question and answered it himself. Sometimes he quoted something she said or did when she was three or four so that it seemed as if she had answered. He said she would deny this so she didn’t have to bother to deny it. Her father believed that the discovery of this new science was the most important event in human history; he