MIND AND BODY
(Disclaimer: I have no business connection with JOAN. My only purpose in writing this story is to have fun and maybe share it)
(Author's Note: This story is part of a series that takes place in the year after the JOAN OF ARCADIA TV show ended. A listing of the other stories is on my profile. This particular story is set in April, 2006.)
(Author's Note: Alexandri's story about Friedmann inspired me to write a story for Glynis, also in the stream-of-consciousness style. I hope you don't mind, Alexandri. In an earlier story (REVELATION OF JOAN) I had independently come up with the idea, never specified in the show, that Friedmann's drug-taking was a response to Judith's death)
Glynis dreamed.
She did not know that she was dreaming. To her it seemed that her mind was hovering over her life, reviewing and judging it, and it seemed to be the most natural thing in the world.
---
There was a crucial incident in her life when she was six, midway through first grade. On a perceptive teacher's advice, her parents had taken her to an eye doctor. After some weird tests involving the letter E, he had put eyeglasses on her nose. It was like magic: everything around her became much clearer, sharper than she had ever seen or thought possible before. She had never known that she was nearsighted; she had no basis of comparison. Of course she asked how it worked. The doctor's explanation was over her head, but she emerged with a powerful lesson. Your body may be faulty, but almost any problem can be solved if you put your mind to it. And, as she soon discovered in school, her mind was much better than most kids'.
---
There were two kids she especially liked: Friedmann and Ruth. Friedmann was as brainy as Glynis was: if she got interested in some subject, Friedmann soon caught up with her, and likewise he was able to point her to fascinating ideas. Ruth was less clever, but Glynis could talk to her about girl things that she could never talk about with Friedmann. Though she could not remember when or how she had made the discovery -- maybe it was Friedmann who told her -- she had found that boys and girls were different under their jeans.
---
In sixth grade, Ruth fell in love with horses, and persuaded Glynis to visit the stables with her on a couple of occasions. Glynis hated it: there was crap all over the place, and the horses had nonhuman minds of their own. Ruth's nearly ran away with her on one occasion; Glynis demanded that somebody else lead her horse on the two occasions that she was coaxed to get up on one. And the whole thing seemed pointless. Hadn't cars made horseback riding obsolete?
When Ruth's parents sent Ruth to riding camp during the summer and Glynis' Mom and Dad offered to follow suit, Glynis put her foot down. She wanted to go to computer camp instead. Computers were safe and clean, and they did what you told them to, once you found out how. Friedmann shared her interests, and by the end of the summer, she had definitely grown closer to Friedman and further from Ruth.
---
In sixth grade, the girls started going through physical changes. Glynis, disturbed by her transformations, tried to tell herself that the Mind remained the same, but nevertheless noticed that other girls suddenly developed an intense interest in boys. They started dressing to attract the boys' attention; some even started wearing tight jeans on the assumption that boys thought butts were sexy, an idea that Glynis thought very weird.
---
In seventh grade all the children of the Jewish community started preparing for their bar- or bat-mitzvahs. One of the requirements was an ability to read a passage from the Torah in the original Hebrew. Many of her friends had great difficulty learning a foreign alphabet, language, and culture, but Glynis managed, and so, in a curiously uninvolved way, did Friedmann. She even learned that, outside the Torah and the rest of the Tanakh, there was a vast work called the Talmud, containing debates between wise scholars and based on the idea that intelligent debate was the key to finding the Truth. Her textbook pointed out that even the founder of Christianity had respected and participated in the tradition. The confrontations between Jesus and the Pharisees were really Talmudic debates on the real meaning of the Torah, though generations of Christians had misunderstood the fact.
----
In tenth grade Ruth moved away altogether, and Friedmann seemed to develop other interests: video games and talk about sex, which never seemed to include Glynis. She needed to seek for other friends, and she found them, unexpectedly, in her AP Chemistry class. There was Adam, a quiet, artistic boy utterly lacking in stupid machismo. There was Grace, the rabbi's daughter, who had a reputation as a Bad Girl, though close up it looked more like the pose of a rebel. There was their friend Joan, who was pretty weird, though Adam seemed love her for all her peculiarities. And then there was Luke, Joan's younger brother, who was just as brainy as Friedmann and far more sensitive.
That's when she finally understood the girls from her sixth grade class. Luke was not like any other boy she had ever met and instantly, she felt something new.
She told herself that this was a meeting of minds. . But that did not explain her heart pounding every time she saw him, her palms sweaty at the mere thought of his blond hair tousled, her tongue unable to emit a coherent sentence without sounding like a fool. She read that, scientifically, hormones were released from her brain telling her that there was something about this boy she liked. Once she found the rational explanation she felt better about it.
They soon began dating, much to Glynis' delight. But she could tell his attention was split. It was so obvious to anyone with eyes that he liked Grace more than he liked her. Still, she turned a blind eye because she liked him so much and relished the fact that he would rather be kissing her... at least for the time being. They broke up soon after, neither having to explain what direct cause was their downfall. A week's worth of chocolate consumed in a time span of 2 and a half hours, and a viewing of Hitchcock's movie REBECCA, helped Glynis through it.
---
On the last day of class, Joan fainted and had to be rushed to the hospital. She was diagnosed with Lyme Disease from a tick byte. They said that she was out of her mind for a couple of days, and that it took all summer for her to get back to normal -- normal for Joan, that is. That frightened Glynis, that something as noble as a human mind could be eaten up by a tiny insect that one could barely see.
---
At the beginning of eleventh grade, Glynis attended a wild party in which illegal alcohol soon started floating around. She drank too much, flirted with some college guy whose name she couldn't recall afterward. Judith Montgomery did far worse, consuming so much that she passed out. Grace, of all people, kept her head and summoned doctors in time. It wasn't as serious as Joan's disease, but more frightening in another way, because Judith had done it to herself. Glynis resolved to avoid drinking from then on.
----
A few months later came one of the most shocking days in the high school's history, even surpassing the abandoned-baby scare of the year before. Numerous friends were missing: Friedmann, Luke, Joan, Judith, Adam, Grace. Vice-Principal Price called an assembly and announced that Judith had been stabbed to death in a botched drug deal. The others were all right, but had gotten the news first-hand and were in shock, particularly Friedmann. He had had a quixotic crush on the girl. Joan had at least recovered from her illness. Judith was forever lost, mind and body.
----
Friedmann's attraction toward Judith hadn't bothered Glynis because, she told herself, she had no romantic interest in him... she was still secretly in love with Luke. But, to her dismay, Luke and the Bad Girl, Grace Polk, who had supposedly not even been interested in boys, went public with their relationship. And, what was worse, Glynis thought she had won out precisely by being Bad. Glynis finally had a confrontation with Grace, starting with a dignified reproach by also including an obscene remark about Grace's rear end. Grace was so startled by Glynis's uncharacteristic coarseness that she burst out laughing instead of getting mad. That seemed to seal Glynis' defeat.
It was only months later that Glynis found what really happened: that Luke had loyally seen Grace through a crisis that she hadn't wanted to reveal to the rest of her friends. Badness had nothing to do with it. By that time Glynis had had an experience of being the "Bad Girl" herself.
----
Halfway through the summer separating junior and senior years, Glynis got a second shock, almost as bad as Judith's murder. She and Joan Girardi were paying a visit to Friedmann, and he bluntly propositioned both of them, within the space of a few minutes. Friedmann often talked about sex, but he usually took care to make his references witty, and he never directed the remarks at his female friends. Glynis realized that he was on some drug. Joan guessed, accurately, that he may have been driven to drug abuse by his grief on losing Judith, but she could think of no solution. Glynis didn't want to bring the parents in on this, much less the authorities. She had to figure out a way to wean him off the drugs, all by herself.
She had heard the slogan "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" and agreed whole-heartedly. Her personal mission would be to rescue Friedmann's mind.
Eros seemed to be the key. Glynis had read Plato's Symposium, in which some of the greatest minds of antiquity tried to define the power of love. Aristophanes' image of man as an imperfect creature always searching for his missing other half. The scientist's cold-blooded theory that love was given man by the gods (or in modern terms, natural selection) to persuade people to reproduce. Socrates' final summation that love purified the soul.
Roughly a year ago Glynis had taken a course in cosmetics. She had soon lost her fascination for the subject, but still remembered the how-to. The next day she visited Friedmann, prettied up to the best of her ability and murmuring sweet nothings. Unfortunately, Friedmann acted as if the sweet nothings were really nothing. Stronger tactics were needed.
At a sports shop, Glynis bought a sports bra and shorts, both deliberately one size too small. She would never have the nerve to jog in this getup, or even let any other friend see her like this. But, she was coming to realize, Friedmann mattered more to her than anybody else in the world. She had never admitted it to herself until now, when there seemed to be a chance of losing him. Then she visited him in his bedroom again.
"Wow, Glynie, you look awesome. Why haven't I noticed it up to now? Oh, I know. It's the pills. You should.try some; it'll make you see things in a new way."
Glynis lost it.
"No, no, Friedmann. Don't you see? Anything the pills give you, any pleasure, is an illusion that they create by poisoning the brain. Search for things that used to give you real pleasure. Learning, friendship, love. Yes, I'm sorry Judith's gone too, but you can't let yourself be haunted forever by a dead girl. Look at the live girl who's sitting in front of you."
Friedmann looked. Maybe it was just lust; but if she could hold his attention long enough, keep him from taking the pills, her argument seemed to be getting through to him. And it also occurred to her that it was nice to be desired, by somebody that she---
Holding her breath, knowing that she was playing with fire, Glynis reached behind her back and unhooked her bra.
----
She was lying on the bed, on her bare back. This had stopped being about weaning Friedmann off the drugs several minutes ago. Eros had worked both ways; she wanted Friedmann now. Then the miracle happened.
"I can't do it to you, Glynis. This isn't like you. Are you sure you want it?"
Until Friedmann said that, Glynis was tempted to back out. But the statement proved the Friedmann had finally transcended the drug-induced egotism. He cared about Glynis' welfare more than his own drives. The boy she loved was back.
"You won't be doing anything TO me. We'll be doing it together. I love you."
And at the back of her Mind a voice screamed: Don't be an idiot! You've done nothing to protect yourself! You could be impregnated! You could be ruining your life! But Glynis wasn't listening.
----
Glynis awoke.
Joan Girardi was smiling down on her. As always happened with the Girardi girl, Glynis was not sure exactly what the other was feeling, and behind the smile Glynis seemed to detect a sense of awe. "Congratulations!"
"Why?" Glynis said in confusion. "What happened?" She suddenly realized that she was very week, and that her stomach hurt.
"She doesn't know?" Joan turned aside in concern, and Glynis became aware for the first time that a nurse was standing there.
"Mrs. Friedmann insisted on the traditional anaesthesia to avoid the pain of labor. She's just a little confused. It's probably pass in a few minutes." The nurse walked up and put on Glynis' glasses. That made her eyesight clearer, but not the general situation.
"I 'll see if we can remind her," said Joan, dashing out.
A few moments later Joan returned with Friedmann, and another participant, a tiny infant cradled in Friedmann's arms. Suddenly Glynis remembered: she had been giving birth, to the child conceived during that wild summer day. Friedmann had married her. And he had promised, months ago, never to abuse drugs again. He wanted to be the perfect role model for their child, and to live up to Glynis' faith in him..
And Glynis' long reverie now made sense. At this crucial moment, her mind had been scanning her life for lessons that she would want to teach her child over the years.
One lesson was obvious: mind wasn't always in control. It had failed Glynis at a crucial point in her life, even though everything seemed to have worked out, almost as if the G-d of her ancestors had been watching over her and pulled her back from ruin..
"Mind, body, and spirit in proper proportion," said a voice. Glynis thought at first it was her imagination, the anaesthesia playing a last trick on her. After all, how could anybody tell what she was thinking? But then she saw a boy of her own age standing in the door. If she weren't in love with Friedmann she might describe him as a very cute boy. "That's the key, Glynis. Remember all three." He extended his hand toward the child as if blessing it, then vanished out the door again. Only Joan seemed to notice, and even she looked startled.
Mind, body, and spirit. I'll remember.
THE END
(Author's Note. I haven't abandoned Lo, I Will Tell You a Mystery. I just wanted to slip this story in first, since Joan mentions visiting Glynis and her baby at the start of the mystery.)