Author’s Note: “When I saw an old ‘Visible Woman’ in a battered box at a yard sale, vivid memories of the one I received for Christmas arose and prompted this poem. Having access to the nude anatomy of a grown-up woman felt thrillingly transgressive back then, though I had parental approval. The transparent plastic model was a sort of key to unlock the mystery of my own changing body, even as the prevailing model of womanhood was being questioned and disassembled.” 

Girls and Dolls

The anatomical model of the female body
Santa left when I was ten was no Barbie doll. 

The plastic lady came boxed with a skeleton,
vital organs, and the (optional) “miracle of creation”
transparent uterus complete with baby
that I could click in and take out,
although I didn’t know how a real baby
got in and out, or what to call a vagina and vulva,
parts I vaguely had but she didn’t:
she was plastica intacta down there. 

The see-through Visible Woman
wasn’t visible at all except for her insides.
She (totally) could have opened the door
wearing Saran Wrap and a glassy look
of biological destiny on her non-face,
but like Barbie with those working girl outfits
the VW wasn’t intended to show me
a person to be reckoned with,
or to model the actual real
doing disagreeing choosing
the-hell-you-say visible woman
her bold title prophesied
and who was coming into view
the year I was ten. 

Nevertheless she showed me
the sturdy bones of my durable body;
she showed me breasts and ovaries
and female embodiment;
from then on, from ten on
I was learning that it is vital
—listen, Invisible Girl—
to put in and take out,
to investigate and create,
to stand and show up in
my own visible, my own
miraculous self. 

⧫

Marda Messick is a poet and theologian living in Tallahassee, Florida on land that is the traditional territory of the Apalachee Nation and other indigenous peoples. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Christian Century and Literary Mama. 

“Girls and Dolls” was published in the Delmarva Review Volume 15, a nonprofit literary journal that selects the most compelling new poetry, nonfiction, and short fiction from thousands of submissions during the year. It is available from Amazon.com and other bookstores. The review is designed to encourage outstanding new writing from authors everywhere. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: “Stranathan’s was the name of the barber’s shop in the town where I grew up in Northern Ireland. My essay is, in part, a recollection of this fondly remembered place, where my brother and I were regularly taken for haircuts throughout our childhood. But it’s also a meditation about something that has fascinated me for years – the nature of memory, and the relationship between remembering and imagining.”

Remembering Ramathan’s 

Memories are all we get to keep from our
experience of living, and the only perspective
that we can adopt as we think about our lives
is therefore that of the remembering self. 

Daniel Kahneman,

Thinking, Fast and Slow 

IT’S MAY 2020 IN ST. ANDREWS, SCOTLAND. I’m sitting in my kitchen on a sunny morning in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown. My wife is cutting my hair, grown longer than accustomed—or wanted—over these weeks of seclusion and social distancing. Her barbering prompts a memory I wasn’t expecting. Instead of making me remember how she used to cut my hair when we were students or think of the plight of my usual hairdresser—business closed and undertaking strict shielding measures because of an elderly parent’s vulnerability to the virus—the rhythmic clipping of the scissors summons something far more distant. I picture Stranathan’s, the barber’s shop in Lisburn, the town in Northern Ireland where I grew up. My brother and I were regularly taken there throughout our childhood. The hair that fell around me then was dark, undusted by the gray that now runs through it. It’s hard to believe how long ago it was that those two little boys used to delight in feeling the prickly stubble on the back of their heads as they emerged, newly shorn, from the shop. 

I don’t remember the name of the man who used to cut our hair—in fact, I’m not sure we ever knew it. He comes back to me in fragments. Much of him is missing. He’s full-lipped—his most memorable feature—with black hair slicked back in a brilliantined wave. The breast pocket of the white coat he invariably wore is filled with razors, combs, and scissors. Once, when he stooped to pick up a bottle-top, they all fell with a clatter on the lino floor. He said nothing but simply knelt and picked them up one by one, carefully brushing and blowing the hairs off them before replacing them in the same pocket. His complexion is sallow yet overlaid with the pallor of indoors. He wears more rings than most men did back then, and his shoes are sufficiently pointed and polished to qualify as “winkle-pickers.” His style suggests Teddy boy, though he’s in his early thirties and should therefore be, as my mother put it, disapproval of him evident in her voice, “old enough to know better.” 

These remnant details only add up to a partial picture. If it were a portrait, most of the canvas would be blank. Such incompleteness is tantalizing—it offers a sense of this individual, but one that won’t come into proper focus. Alongside this patchy recall of my boyhood barber, a much clearer image comes to mind that sums up the nature of the fragmented memories I have of him. I think of the candyfloss accumulations of spiders’ webs that fur the windows of my garden shed. Their nets of dirty gossamer strands are like cotton wool thinned and soiled, flecked with an array of insect debris, a record of predation presented in a kind of dry pointillism worked in tiny body parts. What I can remember about my first barber is like these dried-up bits of insect—antennae, wings, mandibles—a peppering of particles caught on memory’s web. There’s not much left, yet the pieces still manage to conjure echoes of the living person, in the same way as the shards held in the woolly ossuary that crusts my shed’s windows still summon whispers of the butterflies, moths, bees, and flies they came from. 

Trying to reconstruct from these fragments a fuller picture of Stranathan’s barber shop and the full-lipped, white-coated man who used to cut my hair reminds me of a scene from Homer’s Odyssey. Descending to the underworld, Ulysses meets the souls of the dead. Before they can regain their memory and recognize him, he needs to provide them with the blood of sacrificed animals. Only after drinking this life-imbued liquid can the dead be parleyed with. The blood restores a level of consciousness that allows them, albeit temporarily, to communicate again, recalling enough of life to connect with the concerns of those still living. 

Given the mnemonic potency accorded to blood in the Odyssey, it’s ironic that the memories awoken by my wife’s lockdown cutting of my hair are focused on a barber’s shop. Stranathan’s had one of those red-and-white-striped poles outside the shop,  

an internationally recognized sign of a barber (see Note). Theirs was a modern version of this ancient symbol. It was fixed like a flagpole above the shop’s front door. Encased in a kind of elongated bell jar of glass or plastic, the red and white spirals must have been electrically powered. Turning endlessly, even when the shop was closed, the moving helix drew the eye with the illusion of infinite repetition, the prospect of perpetual continuance, red and white appearing, disappearing, reappearing without end.

[Note: Red and white are the traditional colors for barbers’ poles in Europe. The addition of blue in America is variously explained. Some suggest it stemmed from patriotic motives—introducing blue so that the pole echoes the colors of the US flag. Others say it’s an extension of the original symbolism with blue representing the color of veins opened during bloodletting.]

 

The reason for the red-and-white-striped spirals on a barber’s pole is all to do with blood. The poles are often capped at the end with a kind of bowl-shaped cup—Stranathan’s glass bell jar was topped with just such a device. It, too, is blood related. Only a few centuries ago, barbers didn’t just deal in coiffure. They offered surgery, bone setting, and tooth pulling. Bleeding was relied on as key therapeutic measure in the 

treatment of many ailments; barber-surgeons used to bleed their customers as routinely as they tended their hair and beards. The pole represents the stick customers gripped tightly as they underwent this procedure. The red in the spiral stands for blood, the white for bandages. The shape that tops the pole represents the bowl into which the blood was drained. Some poles have a second bowl shape at their base, representing the container in which medicinal leeches were kept. 

Though bloodletting has long been abandoned by barbers, something curiously elemental still attended our visits to Stranathan’s. Perhaps the skillful wielding of sharpened metal implements at close quarters suggested something less quotidian than cutting hair. Or perhaps the strange mix of intimacy and distance conferred a special quality—the way the hands of someone scarcely known touched our heads, those warm receptacles of what we thought and felt. I find an almost elegiac note accompanying the realization that the full-lipped barber used to touch the head that, all these years later, is writing about him and still holds fragments of him in the invisible embrace of memory. I can’t help wondering how many other minds he’s held in. If I could access the way in which all the little boys whose hair he cut stored him in the mazes of their minds, would that bring back a fuller picture or just further fragments? And how did he see us? My brother and I were just two among droves of little boys brought in for haircuts (girls were taken to an upstairs salon). He may scarcely have distinguished one from another in this crowd of juvenile customers, or perhaps he remembered via a kind of phrenology, his memory holding a whole array of contour maps for the different shapes of heads he felt beneath his fingers. 

Is there any equivalent to Ulysses’ sacrificial blood that I could offer to the fragmented shades from Stranathan’s that roam the underworld of my remembrance, something that might make more whole the memories they represent? I don’t think there’s anything straightforwardly efficacious, no magic pill, no obvious medicine to take, though perhaps writing this kind of reflection is a type of self-bloodletting that makes an incision in the psyche’s store of what has passed and collects what flows in its bowl of words. I’m not sure how seriously to take that conjecture. But whatever’s made of it, there are two more prosaic strategies that can help. 

The first involves an almost meditative focusing and disciplining of the mind as I imagine myself returning to that point in childhood. I think through the years, reach back and back again, try to discount distraction, let the noise of the present fall away until I’m there again in spirit. I hope the spectral touch of this kind of concentrated attention can nudge some of the particles of remembrance into new alignment, send a pulse of voltage through them so that they can come together, cohere into more viable patterns, even jerk back into momentary life. 

The second strategy is more straightforward. It simply involves asking my older brother what he remembers. We were always taken to Stranathan’s together, which means I can tap into a second perspective, access another set of memories to lay beside my own and see what tallies. Using the whetstone of his independent recollection offers a way of sharpening my version of the past, giving it a keener, truer edge so that it can cut through the years more cleanly and see those vanished days again, cleared of the overlay of time that’s passed since they were present. 

Putting these two strategies into play has helped me to imagine going through the door to Stranathan’s again, passing under the endlessly turning barber’s pole. My brother and I are ushered in by a parent—we don’t agree whether it was our mother or father who most often accompanied us. The three of us sit down, side by side, in the row of chairs arranged against the back wall, waiting for our turn. There’s a warm, sweet smell of perfumed oils and lotions. As for noises, the snip-snip of scissors, the buzz of electric clippers, and the sporadic conversation don’t quite blot out the sound of clumps of hair falling on the floor in featherlight swishes. If you listen closely, you can hear this gentle 

punctuation every now and then, making a sound that’s reminiscent of wire-brush drumsticks touched gently to a cymbal. The single window in this back room of the shop is always closed. Its lower half is net-curtained, its upper half is misted with the heat of the muggy salon atmosphere, blurring the view of nearby buildings. On the windowsill sits a large valve radio. Is it switched on? Is there music playing? My memory is of it being tuned to a sports channel with commentary on horse racing. But my brother doesn’t remember there being a radio at all, so perhaps my mind has conjured it from somewhere else, and those excited cadences of the commentator’s voice as the horses near the finish line are not part of the aural background of Stranathan’s at all but have strayed here from some other fragment caught on remembrance’s candyfloss web of pieces. 

We both agree that there were three red leather swivel chairs with silver levers for adjusting their height and angle. Each chair is facing a large, rectangular mirror. The mirrors are fixed to the wall by screws at their corners. Each screw is covered by the small domed globe of a shiny, gold-plated head. I’m fascinated by the missing screw at the bottom left of the center mirror. It reveals a small dark hole that I imagine some secretive insect creeping out of once the shop is quiet. Perhaps there’s a whole warren of tunnels hidden behind the mirror’s surface. When customers sitting in the red leather swivel chairs look at their reflections, they can also see the row of chairs behind them where my brother and I—and often one or two others—sit fidgeting, waiting for our turn. Under the line of mirrors, there’s a shelf that runs the full length of the room. It’s littered with combs and brushes, scissors and clippers, shaving brushes, cutthroat razors and the leather strops used to sharper them, bottles and tubes of hair oil and brilliantine, all the tools of the trade. 

Of the three barbers who worked in Stranathan’s, we remember the full-lipped Teddy-boyish one so much more clearly than the others that it’s almost as if he’s in color while his two colleagues are in washed-out sepia or black and white. He always worked at the middle chair, between an older, balding man—possibly called Billy—whose station was the chair beside the window, and a younger man about whom all that we can summon now is the fact that he was younger, and of slighter build, than the other two. He was so quiet that the silence could be uncomfortable on those rare occasions when he cut our hair. 

Is it possible to be sure what’s accurately remembered and to distinguish it from what may have been invented? By “invented,” I don’t mean something deliberately fabricated in order to deceive, but rather something generated automatically by the mind in passing, without thinking, as it strives to complete the patterns that are hinted at, finding the missing pieces in the jigsaw of recall. I’ve tried to reconstruct a picture of place and people from the traces of them that remain in memory. But for all my sense of being there again, there are many gaps in what comes back, and I know that it is exactly these kinds of spaces that the imagination is quick to fill and gloss over, supplying absent detail that may not match the way things actually were. 

I wonder what befell my full-lipped barber. In one sense, I already know the answer. Since he was in his thirties when he cut our hair, he’d be a very old man now or more likely dead. A common fate awaits us all. In that sense, there’s no mystery, no enigma. I can be quite certain about the outcome. What I wonder about is not so much the inevitable conclusion of his life as its unique texture. What twists and dips and camber marked the unfolding of his days? I’m interested in the specifics draped over the generalities we all encounter—desire, pleasure, pain, fear, regret, longing, satisfaction – our whole repertoire of feelings— the particular weave of one person’s fabric of experience that results in the precise contours of the peaks and troughs that shape the map of who they are, the seismograph that marks the meanderings and undulations of the paths they followed. And this is precisely what’s lost—or what, in truth, was never known. For even as we watched him in the mirror as he cut our hair, we knew little more about him than what’s suggested by the fragments lodged in memory, fragments that seem so hollowed out and substance-less that they recall the husks of insects in a spider’s web. Memory has preserved a sliver of what only ever was a sliver. The intimate texture of his life was invisible to us then and is now vanished beyond hope of any full-blooded retrieval. 

How memory operates is something that has fascinated me for years. It’s easy enough to see why some things are retained— they fall upon us with such force that we’re permanently imprinted with their signature—but with others, there’s often no obvious reason why the mind has latched on to them and preserved them from forgetting. Clearly, it would be impossible—and undesirable—to remember everything. We’d soon capsize under the weight of such a cargo. But it’s often hard to fathom what criteria have been applied so that some things are salvaged and others cast aside. What algorithm was in play to result in the few details of my full-lipped barber being kept while everything else about him was let go? 

As I’m writing these reflections, I remember the expression “harking back.” It means to turn back to an earlier topic or circumstance, to go back to something as origin or source. It stems from “hark,” an ancient word meaning “listen.” Originally, it was a call used in hunting. The master of a hunt might shout “Hark forward!” or “Hark Back!” directing hounds and hunters to where it seemed the quarry’s trail was strongest. The cries became set phrases. A hark back is a retracing of a route, a turning back along the course a hunt has followed to try to find the scent again. From its use in hunting, figurative meanings soon developed. I’ve directed the hounds of memory to hark back to Stranathan’s. But the dogs are tired. Beside them run the unruly mongrels of the imagination. The scent has all but gone, and I worry that I’ll end up chasing something that was never there. 

If I’m not to end up with a hybrid—a chimera—where garden shed cobwebs and the barber of my childhood merge into a single macabre figure, I need to keep apart the strands of memory from those woven by the imagination to create a metaphor that shows what this particular instance of remembering is like. The full-lipped, Teddy-boyish barber is remembered. The open fibrous sarcophagus of the garden shed cobwebs is something pressed into service as an image that represents the nature of the remembering in which he’s held. Or, to use a different image, what’s left of him is like shrapnel created by the detonation of moments exploded long ago as they came into what was then the full glare of my present experience. I’m not sure how feasible it is to reconstruct from these fragments an accurate sense of the force of the present as it lit my youthful consciousness back then. Can I regain anything of the luminescence of its immediacy, the bright light of its passing, as it struck me all those years ago? However much I reach back through the psyche’s store of memories, however much I check the details against what my brother recalls, there’s a sense of an elusive something that has slipped away or that perhaps was never there in the way I now imagine it. 

We know so little of each other. What did my full-lipped barber feel when he woke in the middle of the night and looked out at the stars? What did he most desire? What was his idea of a perfect day? What was he proud of? What made him ashamed? Who was the person he loved most in all the world? Was the gap between how he wanted his life to unfold and how it did unfold, such as to allow contentment to warm his psyche, or did it breed the acid of resentment, regret, and disappointment? How far could he be trusted, relied upon? Had his heart ever held hatred in it? Was he loved? Had he ever written a poem? Listened to Beethoven? Read James Joyce? What favorite places soothed his spirit and made him feel at home? What was the last dream he ever dreamed? Who was the last person he ever thought of? 

Stranathan’s has long closed. Its premises have seen various other businesses come and go. A gap of decades yawns between now and when the full-lipped barber cut the hair of the little boy I was. Thinking myself back, and talking with my brother, has led to a sense of the place flickering into the light of consciousness again. A great deal has, of course, been lost; there are many gaps in the picture I can summon, and I have no sacrificial blood to revive the shades that stir in memory’s underworld. Yet despite this, I find, to my surprise, that underlying all the loss and absence and forgetting, all the uncertainty, I can still savor the feeling of being there. A sense of the place’s atmosphere has been rekindled; I can feel its notes playing out excerpts of a signature tune I recognize, sounding in the same register I used to hear back then. In the end, the strongest image that remembering Stranathan’s leaves in mind is of a barber’s pole, turning and turning without end, bright with the possibility of retrieval and meaning. 

⧫

Chris Arthur is an Irish essayist currently based in St. Andrews, Scotland. He is the author of several books of essays, most recently Hummingbirds Between the Pages (2018). A new collection, Hidden Cargoes, was published in 2022. His awards include the Sewanee Review’s Monroe K. Spears Essay Prize. Website: www.chrisarthur.org.  

Delmarva Review is a nonprofit, independent literary journal that selects the most compelling nonfiction, fiction, and poetry from thousands of unpublished, new submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding writing from authors everywhere. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org. 

 

#  #  #

 

Author’s Note: “In grade school, I remember encountering Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ and leaving with the false impression—encouraged by well-meaning teachers—that the poet was exhorting his readers to follow the road ‘less traveled by.’  In hindsight, while this reading of the poem is rather simplistic, I have continued to find myself fascinated by paths never traveled, alternative realities that deviate slightly (or greatly) from my own, and the increasing recognition with age that much of life is shaped by roads not taken and doors closed by choice or circumstance.  My parents deserve credit for opening doors for me, but also for closing them, as this essay reveals….” 

Closing Doors

IN KINDERGARTEN, FIRST GRADE, SECOND GRADE, infinite futures opened before us like the automatic doors at the Pathmark—some leading to fire stations or ballet stages, others as far as the moon—and then suddenly in third grade, at Miss Spillman’s command, we found ourselves forced to choose. Our teacher’s decree arrived in the form of a dittoed handout, purple ink still pungent with methanol from the duplicator, instructing us to decide upon a career and depict this vocation on an oak tag poster. Alas, I was not one of those striving nine-year-olds endowed with detailed fantasies of becoming a big game veterinarian, or a Ringling Brothers clown, or of replacing Bucky Dent at shortstop for the New York Yankees. Any musical ambitions I might have nurtured had been dashed earlier that autumn when my parents arranged a “bedtime talk”—a formal affair—to reveal that Mrs. B., the Swiss taskmaster responsible for my weekly piano lessons, had abruptly carted up her instrument and relocated out-of-state. Around that time, as I recall, having stumbled upon a historical atlas, I’d voiced an interest in cartography, only to be met with disdain: the eldest sons of nephrologists in bedroom suburbs might reach for the stars but not chart the earth. 

Of this point only was I certain: I did not wish to become a doctor. My father, who was a prominent kidney specialist, had ensured my resistance during a hospital visit in the late 1970s: We’d gone together one weekend afternoon to check up on his dialysis patient and, while he demonstrated the “lost art” of physical examination, a faulty catheter in her groin led to geysers of blood. This was before AIDS, largely pre-PPE. I remember being ordered to a corner, stunned and in terror, until the unfortunate woman could be stabilized. Yet only a portion of the responsibility for my negative impression of medicine belonged to my father’s crimson-splattered glasses. Stories handed down from my grandfather, a one-time military psychiatrist, deserve a share of blame: how he’d treated servicemen who’d butchered their own commanding officers, how he’d later performed electro-shock therapy in his home office on a table also used for family dinners. The Lord’s work, maybe, but not exactly Marcus Welby, MD. 

So that was my poster: “NOT A DOCTOR.” Sensing that my parents might not approve, I conducted my drawing clandestinely in my bedroom. Today, I might have depicted maniacal surgeons, eyes and bone saws equally agleam, or possibly medical atrocities like Tuskegee and Willowbrook. At nine, my approach was to depict doctors in action, stethoscopes dangling, white coats crisp, as though I did intend a Hippocratic adulthood—and then to slice through my creation with the red circle and backslash of universal prohibition. In the end, my poster proved as clear and decisive a rejection of the medical arts as could be hoped for, and no grade school Picasso has ever been so proud, or rightly so, smuggling his masterpiece to school in a cardboard tube. 

Miss Spillman, to her credit, didn’t fail me outright. She was one of those old-style elementary school educators who carried with her an aura of perpetual amusement, and her teaching style, while not exactly Socratic, involved asking naïve questions: What kind of training did one require to ‘not become’ a doctor? Did a person need a license? A uniform? She pressed her broad flat palms together in front of her lips, as though deep in reflection, and it was almost as though she were winking without moving her eyelids. And what, she asked, would I do with all my free time while I was not being a doctor? In the end, I agreed to craft a second poster. 

I believe this magnum opus remains preserved in my parents’ attic, awaiting discovery by twenty-second-century critics. Or possibly termites. I fear that upon this one masterwork hangs my hope for posthumous artistic glory. Its theme: “NOT A PSYCHIATRIST.” 

READER, I BECAME ONE. Despite my most valiant efforts— and even a detour through law school—I now earn my keep as a headshrinker, a trick cyclist, a couch quack. What the Germans call a Seelenklempner or “soul plumber,” and my mother, for whom I remain her son-who-is-not-the-rabbi, terms “almost a real doctor.” Whether as a result of predestination or Brownian motion or free will, I stumbled through the gates of Aesculapius and never looked back. In contrast, I am not a pianist. By not a pianist, I don’t mean not a rival to Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubenstein, nor even Victor Borge, but rather three-thumbed and tin-eared, no longer capable of playing “Jingle Bells” or “Frère Jacques” with the sheet music. Mrs. B.’s mad dash for the state line had managed to block permanently my path to Carnegie Hall. My own floundering efforts merely obstructed temporarily the asylum entrance without managing to padlock its gates. 

Closing doors is no easy business. Even edging them shut a few inches can be challenging for many contemporary Americans, especially those of the middle and upper classes, trained from childhood to keep their options open and to reach for the moon. Our ambitions may be Caesarean, but the underlying mantra is pure Cassius: if we do not achieve stardom, the fault lies in ourselves for failing to preserve our opportunities. Alas, these goals—more choices, higher aspirations—are often incompatible: With a few rare exceptions, maybe Leonardo da Vinci or Benjamin Franklin, success comes from specialization—from targeting relatively narrow but worthwhile objectives and pursuing them relentlessly. Usain Bolt may try his legs at the 100-meter sprint and the 400-meter dash, but he doesn’t also pursue medals in archery and curling. To master the clarinet, Benny Goodman had to forgo the French horn and the sitar, as well as training in astrophysics and architecture. For all Emma Goldman’s talk of dancing after the revolution, she kept her nose on the anarchist grindstone and left Fred Astaire to Ginger Rogers. 

In fact, closing doors is essential to well-adjusted living. Pursuing a career in law or medicine generally means waiving the other, and failure to do so risks the fate of Richard Carstone in Dickens’s Bleak House, who trains in both professions, yet is able to practice neither. When a bride and groom stand before the altar and declare, “I do,” they are presumably also proclaiming, “I don’t,” to countless other former passions and prospective suitors. Love itself is the supreme act of door slamming. Of course, we all know lotharios who adopt the collect-them-all approach to romance, like ice cream aficionados taste-testing all thirty-one flavors at Baskin Robbins, but at some juncture, failure to commit becomes self-defeating. Basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, who died unwed and childless after a record-setting course of regretted promiscuity, serves—by his own admission— as people’s exhibits one through 20,000. 

When medical students approach me for career advice, which is a staple of my work in academic psychiatry, I generally avoid discussing Wilt the Stilt’s sex life. In any case, I suspect many would not recognize his name, and a few might even mistake him for Winston Churchill’s predecessor on Downing Street. (To anyone doubting that fame is fleeting: I’ve already encountered students who believed Lou Gehrig’s disease took its eponym from a neurologist.) But these young men and women— in their own modest way—are fighting to win a version of the battle that Wilt lost 20,000 times. They have discovered that becoming a transplant surgeon means not becoming a pediatrician, and that becoming a pediatrician means losing the opportunity to procure livers and implant kidneys, and for some, still struggling to fit into their psychological white coats, that embracing either may preclude writing plays for the stage. 

Helping this last group is often the most difficult. Medical education, an in-for-a-penny, in-for-a-pound enterprise to the tune of many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, does not make second-guessing easy. How does one advise a student to jump off the Hippocratic conveyor belt? And when? Should they complete their degrees? Finish their internships to acquire licenses and prescription pads? Stick it out long enough to pay off their loans? These questions are all the harder when approached with a mindset that equates closing doors with failure. Among the many words of wisdom attributed to deaf- blind activist Helen Keller, mostly false, she apparently did write: “Often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.” This is the fate of Lot’s wife on the plain of Jordan, of Miss Havisham in the darkness of Satis House. I can echo this sentiment firsthand: I hardly ever encounter a piano, whether in an upscale parlor or a cocktail lounge, without thinking of Mrs. B. and her distant betrayal. 

THE MEDICAL STUDENTS often ask how I became a doctor. I rarely mention my contribution to Miss Spillman’s occupational gallery, the row of tagboard sketches that hung like laundry across the back of her classroom for much of that winter. One of my classmates, in my memory, aspired to rescue elephants from poachers. Another planned to become the next Michael Jackson. (I wish I could attach a name to these remote dreams—to track down my erstwhile classmates to assess their prognostic skills, or just for a good laugh—but you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to realize that surveying your former third-grade classmates on their dreams derailed is a sign of an incipient midlife crisis, or at least far too much time on your hands.) I see no upside in relating to the students Miss Spillman’s response to my second poster: how she stood, arms akimbo, as though at the unveiling of the Mona Lisa or Washington Crossing the Delaware, and then served up a silent nod that I took for approval, but likely represented calculated resignation. 

What I do tell the medical students about is Robert Frost. Particularly, Robert Frost’s celebrated poem, “The Road Not Taken,” which Miss Spillman recited to generations of grammar school students as a paean to individualism. We had read the poem previously as second graders in Mr. Minard’s class, alongside standards by e. e. cummings and Emily Dickinson, there being considerable curricular overlap in the era before relentless standardized testing, but for Bob Minard, the poem had been about roads. I vaguely recollect an exercise that involved drawing hobos carrying bindles. For Ruth Spillman, Frost’s verse was all metaphor: “Two roads diverged in a wood,” and by choosing “the one less traveled by,” we might someday become the next Edison or Einstein or Earhart. She was a lovely woman, Ruth Spillman. Hopeful, encouraging, and authentic. (Decades later, I sent her copies of my early novels, and following her death, her partner approached me at a public lecture to thank me.) I still have no idea whether she misrepresented Frost’s lines intentionally or had absolutely no idea what they were about. 

The poem serves as an ideal mirror for the questioning medical student. Frost’s point—as elucidated in David Orr’s well-known Paris Review essay, “The Most Misread Poem in America”—may be that both roads hold equal promise. Only in hindsight does the road we choose, for better or worse, make “all the difference.” According to an alternate reading considered by Orr, “the poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.” When I broach the century-old stanzas with future doctors, my goal is for them to recognize their good fortune: Many of the roads before them lead to auspicious futures. A contented pediatrician does not suffer nagging doubts about the transplants she never performed any more than a happily married husband reflects with regret on the countless women he never accompanied down the aisle. 

Life does not offer one right answer, just multiple good ones. And poor ones too, of course: anesthesiology and obstetrics may both lead to distinct yet rewarding lives; murdering strangers on contract bodes less long-term joy. I used to recommend that uncertain medical students read Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide (2009), which argues that some choices are best rendered on emotion and instinct. He suggests this gut check is a good method for buying a home. I also find this approach works well in choosing a medical specialty. Alas, the decision to recommend the book was taken away from me in 2013 when its author was accused of plagiarism and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt yanked the volume from bookstore shelves. Now I just tell the medical students to make a visceral decision and try not to second guess themselves. 

Some doors are shut to us from the outset: several billion would-be heirs apparent, for instance, likely stand between my Ashkenazi-Jewish head and the English crown. Others close of their own accord. It is too late for me to win a Rhodes Scholarship or become a Navy SEAL—neither of which accept candidates in their forties—although the army did allow my grandfather to enroll in middle age after Pearl Harbor, so I suppose exceptions do remain possible. Even with daily lessons and first-rate coaching, I am no longer likely to sing Turandot at La Scala or play Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” to rival Glenn Gould. Yet most of my successes in life have resulted from paths that I have consciously shunned: rejected professions, third dates that didn’t follow seconds, essays that never met a printed page. Miss Spillman feared her students might lack the courage to open doors; my fear is that my own students won’t possess the confidence to close them. 

Would Miss Spillman be pleased to see me a psychiatrist? Disappointed? I do not sell widgets for a living or ride a commuter train to Stepford, but I’m also not exactly the Wizard of Menlo Park nor will I be flying a biplane solo across the Atlantic anytime soon. I can’t help wondering if there is a parallel universe where Mrs. B. never moves away, and I grow up to become not-a-psychiatrist, licensed and uniformed, and Miss Spillman spends her final days listening to my classical piano recordings. He took the road less traveled, she tells her partner. Like in the poem. Shame on me for thinking he’d give in and end up shrinking heads…. 

I DIDN’T FULLY UNDERSTAND how I’d become a psychiatrist until several years after completing my residency. We’d gathered for a Thanksgiving dinner at my boyhood home. Upon entering, one immediately encountered a cased archway leading to a low-slung sitting room that remained frozen in the final days of the Carter administration: tight plaid upholstery in earth tones, hard-backed copies of American Heritage and Horizon shelved on rosewood. The piano, too, stood precisely where I’d left it decades earlier, a console model, although now it served primarily as an oversized plinth for family portraits and greeting cards. Someone, most likely my aunt, had deposited her coat and purse atop the bench. I doubt anyone had played the instrument since the evening before my final lesson unless one counted contests my preteen nephews had to gauge who could bang its keys the loudest. You’ll find similar relics all across the suburban landscape, untuned testaments to the aspirations of men and women whose parents had escaped Pinsk or Palermo—and later fled integrated blocks in Morrisania or Brownsville. For couples like my parents, what mattered was owning the instrument, not playing it. On the remote chance you wanted to listen to a Grieg concerto, or “Stairway to Heaven,” you turned on the radio. 

In the weeks leading up to the holiday, I’d been contemplating tracking down Mrs. B. As a psychiatrist, I find myself attributing the behavior of others, and my own, to the ordeals of early childhood, and—for whatever inexplicable reasons—the abrupt end to those weekly musical forays loomed large in the rehashing of my personal history. Or maybe my interest was mere self-deception, a twist on Professor Orr’s reading of Frost. If those who chose a less traveled road of their own creation could take credit, why shouldn’t others (like me) who had opted for the opposite fork—at least in hindsight— castigate themselves? Why hadn’t I argued for a new piano teacher rather than accepting Mrs. B’s departure as decisive? Somehow reconnecting with my Swiss piano instructor seemed essential for closure. Assuming she were even still alive. Ruth Spillman had passed away the previous June in her mid-eighties, but I’d only learned of her death that autumn, adding to the urgency of my quest. In my memory, Mrs. B. had been as ancient as music itself, although in hindsight, she’d probably been younger than I am now. 

The challenge was that I didn’t know Mrs. B.’s first name, nor even the precise spelling of her surname, so my only hope was to recruit my parents into my efforts. I did this gingerly— with some trepidation. My parents are not ones to dredge the past, and earlier attempts to track down the previous owners of their home and to locate long-lost relatives of my grandmother had both been met with indifference. Sometimes people drift apart for a reason, my dad had said of the abortive hunt for Grandma’s second cousins. Why spend your time on that? Think of all the people you could be helping instead . . . .So I waited until a post- prandial lull in the conversation, hoping pumpkin pie and apple cider might help them swallow my question. 

“Do you remember Mrs. B.?” I asked. “My piano teacher….” 

My father glanced up blankly from his dessert. “Did you take piano lessons?” 

“With that Swiss woman,” replied my mother. 

“For three years,” I emphasized. “Do you remember her first name?” 

My mother shook her head. “I don’t think I ever knew it….” 

Then she ducked into the kitchen to retrieve fresh coffee for our guests and the conversation drifted back to vacation plans, gardening, whether my aunt might retire. Case closed. Had the meal lasted until the Pilgrims returned to Plymouth Rock, nobody would have inquired why I’d suddenly sought the name of a piano tutor not mentioned for nearly four decades. 

I tried a different tack. “I’m thinking of tracking her down,” I said. “Mrs. B. To ask her why she moved away so abruptly….” My mother had returned with more coffee cups than she could safely carry. She’d taken piano lessons as a child herself, I knew—so maybe she could empathize. We still kept her old metronome and several of her method books. Had she laughed off my questions, I’d have taken her lack of interest in stride; to my surprise, she responded with silence. I could see her trying to draw the attention of my father, who was busy regaling my date with a joke.

“Maybe I can find her without a first name,” I pressed. “You don’t happen to remember where she moved to….” 

“She didn’t move anywhere,” said my mother. 

“Yes, she did,” I insisted.

“No, she didn’t. We just told you that.” 

A hush had descended upon the table, as though my extended family had sensed the relative unimportance of their own conversations; even my dad had resisted another joke. Suddenly, my mother found herself with an audience. “We’re talking about his piano teacher….” 

“I thought she moved away,” I said. 

Now my mother smiled, as though recognizing a dose of unanticipated humor in the episode. “She called us and said you were one of the worst students she’d ever encountered—that you couldn’t hear when you made a mistake—and no amount of practice could fix that.” Even vicariously, after half a lifetime, the critique stung. I had practiced. Religiously. I’d curled my fingers precisely as she’d instructed and always sat up straight. “She said we were doing you a disservice,” Mom added, “by letting you continue. I can’t believe we never told you….” 

“When would it have come up?” I asked. 

Yes, when? Only on the literally thousands of occasions I’d had dinner with my parents between the ages of nine and forty- two. But the dark comedy wasn’t lost on me. If fate had steered me away from Carnegie Hall, it was on account of my own innate dearth of talent—not a-man-with-a-van who’d hauled off Mrs. B.’s piano. For all I knew, if she were still alive, she might be residing at the very same address, even giving lessons on the same baby grand piano. That interested me much less. What was I going to do? Knock on her suburban door and ask: Remember me? Your worst student ever? 

So that was that. I suppose my musical career would have ended anyway, sooner rather than later, but somehow Mrs. B.’s rejection towered over my future choices like a Mount Rushmore of Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms. She had closed the doors of virtuosity, driving me along the well-worn path that led to medicine and then head-shrinking. How could anyone have been so heartless? I asked myself. And what could I possibly do to thank her? I forced a smile, trying to brush off the shock. “Glad we’ve cleared up that mystery.” 

Only there had never been any mystery. Only the echo of doors: closing and opening, opening and closing. Maybe a pair of tin ears had kept me from hearing the din. 

My mother laughed. “We’re just not a musical family,” she said. 

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Jacob M. Appel is a physician, bioethicist, American author, lawyer, and social critic in New York City. He is the author of twenty volumes of fiction and nonfiction, and most recently the novel “Shaving with Occam.” He is also known for his short stories, his work as a playwright, and his writing in the fields of reproductive ethics, organ donation, neuroethics, and euthanasia. Website: www.jacobmappel.com 

Delmarva Review is a nonprofit, independent literary journal that selects the most compelling nonfiction, fiction, and poetry from thousands of unpublished, new submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding writing from authors everywhere. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

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