The Big Black Hole Cont...

Sometimes, when I hear the same stupid questions asked again by some other stupid nosey person pretending to be interested in me, I open my eyes and stare at them until they stop looking at me. They are beginning to hate me now, I can tell. They want me to answer but I won’t. Why should they care? Why must they know everything? I don’t ask them things like that. I don’t ask them what their father was like! I don’t ask them if they like their parents! Why do they want to know if my parents beat me? They didn’t. Why do they want to know if my parents said nasty things to me? They didn’t. Well, these aren’t exactly the questions they ask me but I know that’s what they want to know. I’m not like them, the doctors and the students, I don’t probe.

I think the next nosey person who asks me about my father, well, I think I’ll... I’ll just... I’ll just... I don’t know what, but maybe I’ll have a fit, I’ll jump out of my bed and hit them! Right slap across the face! That would scare the hell out of them! Ah! Ah! Quiet, silent, little Nicholas having a fit! They’d freak out! Have to be brought in as patients themselves! Have to be tortured with a million questions!

Why didn’t that stupid shrink student ask me who my mother is? Oh no, that would be too easy! He wants to know who my father is, that’s what! The father, the all-important father!

My mother is Cynthia. The only reason I’m telling you is that you didn’t ask; you’re not nosey like the rest of them. Anyway, Cynthia, my mother, married Arthur. They were still studying at Queen’s University, the two of them. After he graduated, Arthur was offered a teaching assistantship, so he stayed on to do graduate work in the Psychology department. Cynthia wanted to study law. I heard it was really prestigious in those days for a woman to be accepted into Law School. Well, prestige, apparently, is a very important thing. She applied at three schools: U of T, Queen’s and the one in Ottawa. I think it’s Carleton but I’m not sure. Anyway, that’s not important; what is important is that she was accepted at all three. You must be thinking she was brilliant. Well, maybe she was; I’m not so sure, myself. I know some lawyers are brilliant, some psychologists too, but let me tell you some are not! Idiot-savants, maybe, (my friend’s brother is an idiot-savant; he can tell you what day of the week you were born but he can’t spell banana), but brilliant all around, well, not all of them; I don’t think so.

Anyway, my mother, of course, decided to accept the most prestigious of the three. It was apparently very unusual in those days for a married woman to go to law school and, on top of it, to have that law school three hours away from where she lived. She didn’t ask my..., she didn’t ask Arthur for his opinion. The days of women having to ask permission from their husbands were over. Gloria Steinem had said so, and every day Gloria Steinem’s followers were repeating it in newspapers, in women’s magazines, on university campuses. So, off my mother went to U of T, (although she wasn’t my mother yet because I had not been born yet; I had not even been conceived. Not in her womb, especially not in her mind, I am sure; she had other things on her mind then; success for example, prestige....)