For the first time, he didn’t try to run for his truck. Instead, he leaned over and hugged me.
“Congratulations!” he said, his arms wrapped around my back. “Wow, you did all that already, and with a kid too? I’m proud of you.”
I stood there, shocked and moved, embracing my UPS guy. When we finally let go, he told me that he had news too: He wouldn’t be on my route anymore. Like me, he’d decided to go back to school. And to save on rent, he needed to move in with his family, who lived a few hours away. He wanted to become a contractor.
“Congratulations to you!” I said, throwing my arms around him. “I’m proud of you too.”
We probably looked odd (“That must have been some package!” I imagined the neighbors murmuring), but we stayed that way for what felt like a long time, delighted by how far we’d both come.
“I’m Sam, by the way,” he said, after we finished hugging.
“I’m Lori, by the way,” I said. He’d always called me “Ma’am” before.
“I know.” He gestured with his chin to the package with my name on the address label.
We both laughed.
“Well, Sam, I’ll be rooting for you,” I said.
“Thanks,” he replied. “I’ll need it.”
I shook my head. “I have a feeling you’ll do just fine, but I’ll root for you anyway.”
Then Sam asked for my signature one last time and left, giving me a thumbs-up from the driver’s seat as he pulled away in his big brown truck.
A couple of years later, I received a business card from Sam. I saved your address, he wrote on a Post-it attached to the card. If you have any friends who need my services, I would appreciate the business. I was midway through my internship, and I placed his card in my drawer for later, knowing exactly when I’d use it.
The bookshelves in my office?
Built by Sam.
26
Embarrassing Public Encounters
Early in our relationship, Boyfriend and I were standing in line at the frozen-yogurt place when one of my therapy patients walked in.
“Wow, hi!” Keisha said, taking her place in line behind us. “It’s so funny running into you here.” She turned to her right. “This is Luke.”
Luke, who was thirtyish and attractive like Keisha, smiled and shook my hand. Although we’d never met, I knew exactly who he was. I knew that Luke was the boyfriend who had recently cheated on Keisha and that she’d figured this out because he’d been unable to get an erection with her. Each time he cheated, the same thing happened. (“His guilt,” she once said, “is in his penis.”)
I also knew that Keisha was preparing to leave him. She’d come to understand what had drawn her to him in the first place and wanted to be more intentional about choosing a trustworthy partner. In our last session, she had said that she planned to break up with him this weekend. It was now Saturday. Had she decided to stay with him, I wondered, or was she going to break it off on Sunday so that she’d have the structure of Monday’s workday to help her stay the course? She’d told me that she wanted to tell Luke in a public place so that he wouldn’t make a scene and beg her to stay, which he’d done when she attempted the conversation at her apartment twice before. She didn’t want to cave again just because he said all the right things to convince her to change her mind.
In the yogurt line, Boyfriend was standing next to me expectantly, waiting to be introduced. I hadn’t yet explained to him that if I see therapy patients outside the office, in order to protect their privacy, I won’t acknowledge them if they don’t acknowledge me first. It could be upsetting, for instance, if I said hello to a patient and the person accompanying her asked, “Who’s that?,” leaving the patient in the awkward position of having to hedge or explain on the spot. What if I were to say hello to a patient who was with a coworker or boss or who was on a first date?
Even if patients said hello to me first, I didn’t introduce them to whomever I was with. That would also be breaking confidentiality—unless I were to lie when asked about how I know the patient.
So Boyfriend was looking at me, and Luke was looking at Boyfriend, and Keisha glanced at my hand, which Boyfriend was holding.
Unbeknownst to Boyfriend, I’d already run into a patient while he and I were together. A few days before, the husband in a couple I was seeing walked by us on the street. Without stopping, he said hi, I said hi back, and we both kept going in opposite directions.
“Who was that?” Boyfriend had asked then.
“Oh, just somebody I know through work,” I said casually. Never mind that I knew more about his sexual fantasies than I knew about Boyfriend’s.
At the yogurt place that Saturday night, I smiled at Keisha and Luke, then turned around to face the counter. The line was long, and Boyfriend took the hint and made small talk with me about yogurt flavors as I tried to tune out Luke’s voice while he excitedly discussed vacation plans with Keisha. He was trying to pin down dates, and Keisha was being cagey, and Luke asked if she’d rather go next month, and Keisha asked if they could talk about it later and changed the subject.
I cringed for both of them.
After Boyfriend and I got our yogurts, I led him to a far table by the exit and took a seat with my back to the rest of the crowded room so that Keisha and I could both have our space.
A few minutes later, Luke stormed past our table and out the door, Keisha trailing behind him. Through the glass walls, we could see Keisha making apologetic gestures to Luke and then Luke getting in his car and driving away, nearly running Keisha over.
Boyfriend seemed to be putting it all together. “So that’s how you know her.” He joked that dating a therapist was like dating a CIA agent.
I laughed and said that being a therapist sometimes felt more like having an affair with your entire caseload, past and present, simultaneously. We’re always pretending not to know the people we know most intimately.
But often it’s therapists who feel uncomfortable when our outside worlds collide. After all, we’ve seen our patients’ real lives. They haven’t seen ours. Outside of our offices, we’re like Z-list celebrities, meaning that hardly anyone knows who we are, but for those few who do, a sighting is significant.
Here are some things you can’t do in public as a therapist: Cry to a friend in a restaurant; argue with your spouse; hit the building’s elevator button relentlessly like it’s a morphine pump. If you’re in a rush on your way into the office, you can’t honk at the slow car blocking the entrance to the parking garage in case your patient sees (or because the person you’re honking at might be your patient).
If you’re a respected child psychologist, like a colleague of mine, you don’t want to be standing in the bakery when your four-year-old has a meltdown about not getting another cookie, culminating with the ear-piercing proclamation “YOU’RE THE WORST MOM EVER!” while your six-year-old patient and her mother look on, aghast. Nor, as happened to me, do you want to run into a former patient in the bra section of a department store as the salesperson announces loudly, “Good news, ma’am! I was able to find the Miracle Bra in the thirty-four A.”
When you’re making a restroom run between sessions, it’s best to avoid the stall adjacent to your next patient, especially if either of you is taking a malodorous dump. And if you use the pharmacy across the street from your office, you don’t want to be seen in the aisles buying condoms, tampons, constipation aids, adult diapers, creams for yeast infections and hemorrhoids, or prescriptions for STDs or mental disorders.
One day, while feeling flu-like and weak, I went to the CVS across from my office to pick up a prescription. The pharmacist handed me what was supposed to be an antibiotic, but when I looked at the label, I saw it was an antidepressant. A few weeks earlier, a rheumatologist had prescribed the antidepressant off-label for fibromyalgia, which she thought might explain some lingering fatigue, but then we decided I should hold off due to its potential side effects. I never picked up that prescription, and the
rheumatologist canceled it; nevertheless, for some reason, it still sat in the computer, and every time I got a medication, the pharmacist would bring out the antidepressant and announce its name loudly while I prayed that none of my patients were in line behind me.
Often when patients see our humanity, they leave us.
Soon after John began seeing me, I ran into him at a Lakers game. It was halftime, and my son and I were waiting to buy a jersey.
“Jesus Christ,” I heard somebody mutter, and I followed the voice and spotted John ahead of us in the line next to ours. He was with another man and two girls who looked to be around John’s older daughter’s age, ten. A dad-daughter outing, I figured. John was complaining to his friend about the couple in front of them who were taking a while to make their purchase—they kept losing track of which sizes the cashier had said were sold out.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” John said to the couple, his booming voice catching the attention of everyone around us. “They’re out of the black Kobe in all sizes but the small—which is clearly not your size—and they only have the white Kobe in a kid’s size, which is also clearly not your size. But it is the size of these girls here who came to watch a Lakers game, which is starting up in”—here he made a great show of holding up his watch—“four minutes.”
“Chill, buddy,” the guy in the couple said to John.
“Chill?” John said. “Maybe you’re too chill. Maybe you should think about the fact that halftime is fifteen minutes and there’s a sizable crowd behind you. Let’s see, twenty people, fifteen minutes, less than a minute per person—Oh shit, maybe I shouldn’t be so chill!”
He flashed his gleaming smile at the guy, and that’s when John noticed me looking at him. He froze, stunned to see his mistress-hooker-therapist standing there, the one whom he didn’t want his wife or, probably, his friend or daughter to know about.
We both looked away, ignoring each other.
But after my son and I made our purchase, as we were running hand in hand back to our seats, I noticed John watching us from afar, an inscrutable expression on his face.
Sometimes when I see people out in the world, particularly the first time it happens, I ask back in session what the experience was like for them. Some therapists wait for their patients to bring it up, but often, not mentioning it makes it bigger, the elephant in the room, and acknowledging the encounter feels like a relief. So the following week in therapy, I asked John what it was like to see me at the Lakers game.
“What the fuck kind of question is that?” John said. He let out a sigh, followed by a groan. “Do you know how many people were at the game?”
“A lot,” I said, “but sometimes it’s strange seeing your therapist outside of the office. Or seeing their children.”
I’d been thinking about the look on John’s face as he watched me run off with Zach. I privately wondered what it was like for him to see a mother hand in hand with her son, given the loss of his own mother when he was a boy.
“You know what it was like seeing my therapist and her kid?” John asked. “It was upsetting.”
I was surprised that John was willing to share his reaction. “How so?”
“Your son got the last Kobe jersey in my daughter’s size.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, so that was upsetting.”
I waited to see if he’d say more, if he’d stop with the jokes. We were both quiet for a bit. Then John began counting. “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi . . .” He shot me an exasperated look. “How long are we going to sit here saying nothing?”
I understood his frustration. In movies, therapist silences have become a cliché, but it’s only in silence that people can truly hear themselves. Talking can keep people in their heads and safely away from their emotions. Being silent is like emptying the trash. When you stop tossing junk into the void—words, words, and more words—something important rises to the surface. And when the silence is a shared experience, it can be a gold mine for thoughts and feelings that the patient didn’t even know existed. It’s no wonder that I spent an entire session with Wendell saying virtually nothing and simply crying. Even great joy is sometimes best expressed through silence, as when a patient comes in after landing a hard-won promotion or getting engaged and can’t find the words to express the magnitude of what she’s feeling. So we sit in silence together, beaming.
“I’m listening for whatever you have to say,” I told John.
“Fine,” he said. “In that case, I have a question for you.”
“Mmm?”
“What was it like for you to see me?”
Nobody had ever asked me that before. I thought for a minute about my reaction and how I would convey it to John. I remembered my irritation with the way he was talking to that couple at the front of the line and also my guilt at silently cheering him on. I, too, wanted to get back in the stadium before the second half started. I also remembered, when I was back at my seat, glancing down and noticing that John and his group were sitting courtside. I saw his daughter showing him something on his phone, and as they were looking at it together, he put his arm around her and they laughed and laughed, and I was so touched that I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I wanted to share that with him.
“Well,” I began, “it was—”
“Oh, Jesus, I was kidding!” John interrupted. “Obviously I don’t care what it was like for you. That’s my point. It was a Lakers game! We were there to see the Lakers.”
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay, you don’t care.”
“Damn right, I don’t.” I saw that look on John’s face again, the one I noticed when he was watching me run with Zach. No matter how I tried to engage with John that day—by helping him to slow down and notice his feelings, by talking about his experience with me in the room, by sharing some of my experience in our conversation—he remained closed off.
It wasn’t until he was leaving that he turned back to me from the hallway and said, “Cute kid, by the way. Your son. The way he held your hand. Boys don’t always do that.”
I waited for the punch line. Instead, he looked me right in the eye and said, almost pensively, “Enjoy it while it lasts.”
I stood there for a second. Enjoy it while it lasts.
I wondered if he was thinking about his daughter—maybe she’d outgrown letting John hold her hand in public. But he’d also said, “Boys don’t always do that.” What did he know about raising boys, being the father of two girls?
It was about him and his mother, I decided. I tucked away the exchange for when he’d be ready to talk about her.
27
Wendell’s Mother
When Wendell was a boy, every August he and his four siblings would pile into the family station wagon and drive with their parents from their Midwestern suburb to a cabin on a lake for a vacation with their large extended family. There were about twenty cousins in all, and the kids would wander as a pack, taking off in the morning, checking back in with the adults for lunch (which they ate ravenously while sitting on blankets spread over a verdant field), and disappearing again until dinnertime.
Sometimes the cousins would go for bike rides, but Wendell, the youngest, was afraid to ride a bike. Whenever his parents and older siblings offered to teach him, he feigned indifference, but everyone knew that the story of an older boy in town who had fallen off his bike, hit his head, and gone deaf from the blow had stuck in Wendell’s mind.
Fortunately, bikes didn’t matter all that much at the cabin. Even when some of the cousins went out on their bikes, there were always enough kids with whom he could swim in the lake, climb trees, and play epic games of capture the flag.
Then one summer, just after Wendell turned thirteen, he went missing. The clan of cousins had returned for lunch, and while they were munching on watermelon, somebody noticed that Wendell wasn’t there. They checked inside the cabins. Empty. Groups dispersed to search for him at the lake, in t
he woods, around town. But Wendell was nowhere to be found.
After four terrifying hours for his family, Wendell returned—riding a bike. Apparently, a cute girl he’d met by the lake had asked him to go on a bike ride with her, so he went to the bike shop and explained his problem. The owner looked at this eager, skinny thirteen-year-old and instantly understood. He shut down the store, took Wendell to an abandoned lot, and taught him how to ride. Then he gave him a free day’s rental.
Now there he was, riding a bike toward the cabins. His parents cried in relief.
Wendell and the girl from the lake rode together every day for the rest of the trip, and when it was over, they wrote letters back and forth for the next several months. But one day Wendell got a letter from her saying that she was very sorry, but she had found a new boyfriend at her school and would no longer be writing to Wendell. His mom found the ripped page while emptying the trash.
Wendell pretended not to care.
“That year was a crash course in biking and love,” Wendell’s mother later remarked. “You take a risk, you fall down, and you get back up and do it all over again.”
Wendell did get back up. And in time, he stopped pretending not to care. After graduating from college and joining the family business, he couldn’t pretend any longer that his interest in psychology was just a hobby. So Wendell quit and got a doctorate in psychology instead. Now it was his father’s turn to pretend not to care. And like Wendell, eventually his father got back up on that metaphorical bike and embraced his son’s decision.
At least, that’s how Wendell’s mother tells the story.
Of course, she didn’t tell me this story. I know all of this courtesy of the internet.
I wish I could say that I accidentally stumbled on this information, that I needed Wendell’s address to send in a check and typed in his name and—Oh, wow, look what popped up—right there, on the very first page of results, was an interview with his mother. But the only part that would be true is the part where I typed in his name.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone Page 19