The Uses of Enchantment

by Heidi Julavits

  “Just because someone doesn’t have a driver’s license doesn’t mean they don’t know how to drive,” Mary said.

  Roz tented her fingers, the knuckles flexing inward like roof joists about to cave.

  “A person who drives without a driver’s license—to extend your own metaphor—tends to be a person who owes his landlord rent money, a person who doesn’t make his alimony payments, a person who believes that the rules do not apply to him. Dr. Hammer did not believe that the rules applied to him. But the rules do apply.”

  Mary nodded. Her queasiness persisted. She’d made a mistake coming here.

  “Our board has a remarkable record,” Roz said. “One hundred percent of the wrongful treatment cases we’ve investigated have resulted in the successful prosecution of the doctor in question. Which is only to say: we do not waste our time chasing innocents. If a case has been brought to the board’s attention, it’s for a well-founded reason.”

  Doubt is not a pleasant condition, Mary thought, but certainty is absurd.

  “But if I haven’t yet…adhered,” Mary pointed out, “how can I testify that what Dr. Hammer wrote about me was false?”

  “Some truths transcend adherence,” Roz said. “Don’t get fouled up by adherence.”

  “But if I don’t remember what happened to me, how can he be wrong?”

  Roz leaned her elbows on her knees, hunching so low that Mary could see the part running down the center of her head and the raised mole that protruded from the center of the part like a beetle or a drop of blood.

  “I have a vested interest in you, Mary,” she said. “You were supposed to be my patient. I passed you along to Dr. Hammer because I was busy with my book, and don’t you think I feel guilty about that? Don’t you think I feel guilty that my self-absorption meant that you’ve been made the object of psychiatric ridicule by a man I was trying to help emerge from a professional holding pattern? Post-traumatic amnesia, yes, it’s in vogue right now, but if I’d been your doctor, here’s what I would have said: You know what happened to you. You have the power and authority to tell your own story. And you know that I know that you know this. Isn’t that why you’ve been avoiding me? Isn’t that why you treat me as though I’m your enemy?”

  Mary puzzled this out. Roz knew that she knew that she knew…And what did she, Mary, know exactly? She knew that she had ostensibly started this game as an imaginative way to complete a school assignment. But it was more complicated than even that—a complication that arose, in part, when she had been assigned, via sheer coincidence, to Bettina Spencer’s former doctor. She had muddled Bettina and Dora and herself together so tightly that nobody’s story felt distinct anymore. Dora had been kissed by Herr K; Bettina, so went the Semmering rumor, had been abused by an uncle, which explained, or was meant to explain, her troubledness. Mary had been kissed by her parents’ friend Kurt Thatcher. A harmless enough event, the kiss had occurred while the two families were on vacation at the Cape and Kurt had been so drunk at the time that he was able to look Mary in the face the next day without any sense that a boundary had been trespassed. Mary, who was twelve, was ecstatic. She viewed the kiss—which was gently administered and almost fatherly, a just-this-side-of-too-long pressing of dry padded flesh against dry padded flesh—as confirmation that she was, or had the power to be, bewitching. That night in her bunk bed, still headily replaying that two-second snippet of the evening in her mind, she stupidly confided in Regina. Her mother cornered Mary the next day as the two of them were shopping for dinner in the local grocery: Do not ever tell lies about our friends again. She’d slapped Mary in full view of a college boy buying beer, and the boy had sheepishly abandoned them in the aisle to their shameful mother-daughter business. The kiss did not ruin her; her mother’s slap did. And so years later, when she had read Dora, the book ignited a chain of electric connections. She thought of herself like a bulb in a string of Christmas lights; one bad bulb left the bulbs after it in darkness. So she ignited herself, and the string reached back and back and back, and she became emboldened not only by her own injustice but by a continum of injustices linking her to Bettina and Dora and Dorcas Hobbs and Abigail Lake and beyond. She’d begun playing games, games inside of games inside of games. But now when she tried to visualize that string of lights, all she could see was an expanding brightness that erased more than it revealed.

  “I don’t remember,” Mary said. “And if I don’t remember, then Dr. Hammer’s version is as good as true.”

  She slung her backpack over her shoulder with a finality that implied we’re done here.

  Roz placed her hands on the arms of her chair, threatening to stand but remaining seated.

  “This may sound like a cheap platitude,” she said, “but I honestly believe that truth is what you make of it.”

  Mary rolled her eyes.

  “I’m trying to encourage you to be a little more circumspect. A little less selfish.”

  “Selfish,” Mary said.

  “You might not be willing to come to terms with your own past. But girls like you need to be protected from men like Dr. Hammer.”

  “You want to make an example of him,” Mary stated bluntly.

  “As you well know,” Roz said wryly, “pour faire une omelette il faut casser des oeufs. And what we will gain—what the innocent Marys of the world will gain—it will be immeasurable. You could be a part of this, Mary. We’re involved in a narrative revolution here. The eradication of Freud’s legacy of misogyny—Freud who, like Dr. Hammer, chose to overlook instances of actual patient sexual abuse to support his fantasy theories. The freeing of the stories of hundreds of women and girls, like your friend Ida Bauer, whose own versions were plowed under the dirt so that the careers of their male doctors could flourish in the sun.”

  Roz bloomed her hands in her lap.

  “I’m asking you to help these women to reclaim their stories. Mary,” she said, “these women are depending on you. Men like Dr. Hammer view girls like you as an absence that needs to be filled. You are the blankness that allows his phallocentric expression of ideas. Frankly, I thought you’d want to do something about it.”

  Mary nodded, wondering to herself, How does anyone take this woman seriously? But of course Roz’s seeming absurdity went unchecked by her colleagues. Mary was equivalently dumbfounded by Regina’s ability to convince the teachers at Semmering that she possessed a fragile poetic genius, but had soon come to realize that power was about believing you were powerful and insisting, to the point of silliness, that others believe it too. Most people are too polite to object, or simply too lazy to fight another’s ludicrous misperceptions about their own importance, and so power was, through graciousness and laziness, conferred. Her colleagues didn’t want the hassle of contradicting Roz Biedelman, so they let her have her way, assuming she’d eventually run up against her own mediocrities and retreat to her proper station in life. But this was never going to happen, and eventually Roz would be their superior. Mary suddenly saw Roz in a stark, allegorical light. Stupid people are the new smart people. An apt epigraph, she thought, for Roz’s brochure.

  “I’ll think about it,” Mary said.

  “You’ve been thinking a long time already,” Roz said. “In my practice, with my patients, I’ve started to set deadlines. Leave your husband by this date. Stop having affairs by this date. Maybe you would like a deadline,” Roz offered.

  “I’m busy studying for midterms,” Mary said lamely.

  “So you’re no stranger to pressure.” Roz flipped through her desk calendar, forward then backward. She wrote something on a pad, tore off the top sheet, handed it to Mary.

  “I’ll see you next week,” she said.

  Mary wadded the paper and shoved it into her anorak pocket.

  She left, shutting Roz’s office door behind her.

  A girl about her age sat in Roz’s waiting room. She wore glasses, one lens blanked out by a nude-colored medical patch. The girl appeared totally unself-conscious both abo
ut her eye patch and about finding herself in a therapist’s waiting room. She met Mary’s gaze with her one eye and smiled at her. Mary didn’t smile back. She hurried down the narrow hall, her anorak rubbing against the wall, making a frantic hissing noise. She thought about saving that girl. But from whom, she wondered to herself. From whom.

  Notes

  MARCH 11, 1986

  Mary, it became clear to me after our third session, exhibited an atypical disclosure progression. Again I found myself struck by the discrepancy between the patient I’d received and the patient Hicks-Flevill had treated. H-F wrote in his transfer summary, “patient exhibits markedly average intelligence; is frequently confused by my questions, a confusion that is not, I fear, due to her distressed mental state; she truly struggles to keep pace with me; not up to the mental challenge of deviousness.” How H-F could have found Mary, whose mental aptitude was so far above average that I felt, at times, intimidated by her, to be a girl of “markedly average intelligence” was deeply perplexing. Then again, our contradictory perceptions of Mary’s mental capacities were in some—possibly significant—way consistent with my own contradictory session reports. Mary’s first session indicated she suffered from paranoid delusions that might be due to an endemic disorder (like schizophrenia) but was more likely evidence that she suffered from a textbook case of post-traumatic stress. Her second session suggested she suffered from an obsessive-compulsive disorder (her repetitive act of swirling her finger in her compact), a mild anxiety disorder (evidenced by her coughing fits), and an intermittent explosive disorder with antisocial tendencies (her insensitive comments about my physique). The third session suggested that she suffered from amnesia and a mild-to-moderate bipolar disorder, leading her to experience alternating bouts of lethargy and manic intelligence. Her fascination with Dorcas Hobbs also indicated a possible imago issue involving her mother; her mother’s commitment to clearing the name of her family’s “witch” relative, and Mary’s fascination with Dorcas Hobbs, suggested that Mary both revered her mother and over-identified with her, possibly to the point of wanting, subconsciously, to destroy her.

  In short: Mary was an unusual case. The faked amnesia (regarding her claim that she had no recollection of discussing K during a previous session) became even more apparent to me after listening to our session tapes, and made me wonder how many of her other so-called amnesias, for example those involving the golden tomahawk and the “spell” and the suggested molestation by numerous unidentifiable individuals, had also been faked. In particular I noticed how Mary cut me off during my explanation of the Dora case at the precise moment I was about to pronounce the letter K. Clearly, despite her avowals, she had read this book before, and knew that her captor shared the same name as Dora’s molester; perhaps she had even named him after Dora’s K. Consciously or unconsciously, Mary was preventing her K from reappearing, “castrating” him from my sentences, which would, under normal circumstances, suggest that the patient had been abused in a sexual matter; but her golden-tomahawk fantasy, coupled with my prior experience with Bettina Spencer, encouraged me not to jump to easy conclusions before all the evidence was submitted and carefully, rationally scrutinized.

  Mary’s mood, on the day of our fourth session, was best described as elated confrontation. She slumped tensely in my waiting-room chair, her legs splayed open, her knees wipering back and forth in an agitated manner. She wore frayed jeans and a pair of mismatched wool socks into which her cuffs were partially tucked. Her hair was unwashed, her complexion splotchy, a constellation of blemishes on her chin worried into scabs.

  Once inside my office, her agitation minimized slightly. She sat on the couch, she asked for a tissue. She blew her nose then dropped the soiled tissue to the floor.

  You seem agitated, I said to her.

  I have my period, she said.

  Are you usually agitated by your menstrual cycle, I asked.

  I didn’t get my period until I was fifteen, she said. Regina got her period when she was twelve. So did Gaby.

  Did that make you feel abnormal, I said. I was thinking: a girl’s failure to menstruate in a timely manner—or any form of emmeniopathy, including primary dysmenorrhea and mittelschmerz—often indicates regressive emotional tendencies (not to mention literal or figurative impotence on par with the male castration complex) manifesting specifically as a failure to separate from the mother, a refusal to see herself as the mother’s sexual competition, and an inability to acknowledge the increasingly sexualized dynamic with the father. I was reminded of Bettina. Also a late menstruator, also a girl with regressive emotional tendencies who unconsciously found her inability to act on her sexual impulses toward her father so loathsome, so damning, that she fabricated a sexual relationship with a father figure to fill the psychological void.

  I faked it so my mother wouldn’t be worried, she said.

  How did you “fake it,” I said.

  The obvious way. I sprinkled red food coloring on my underwear and left it in the hamper where my mother would find it. That afternoon I found a box of pads on my bed and a pair of cameo earrings. This is how we communicate, my mother and I.

  This form of communication creates a lot of space for misunderstandings, I observed.

  It makes it easy to keep people happy without technically lying, she said.

  You faked the commencement of your menstrual cycle to keep your mother happy, I said.

  My grandmother gave me the pair of cameo earrings for my thirteenth birthday and my mother said: “No no, Mary isn’t a woman yet. She isn’t a woman.” My mother kept the earrings and gave them to me after she found my underwear in the hamper.

  Were your sisters given cameo earrings when they started to menstruate?

  Mary nodded.

  Did that make you envious?

  They’re ugly, Mary said. The earrings I mean.

  Did you see these earrings as symbolic? I asked. I was thinking: what an unfortunate gift, one that subconsciously accentuates the teenage girl’s classic bifurcated psyche, to literally imply that she is not one uncomplicated child anymore but has been split into two conflicting beings—a girl and a woman.

  The first time I wore them I lost one, she said. Maybe that’s symbolic? That fact that I lost one?

  Losing an item can be a way of denying that item’s inherent symbolism, I said. For example when a reluctant fiancée loses her engagement ring. She is denying the symbolism of the ring.

  Meaning I don’t love my mother, Mary said.

  Your mother gave you a gift of two female faces, I said. Two halves of a woman that can never be whole.

  It’s just a stupid family tradition, Mary said.

  Traditions do not spring from nowhere, I said. We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving because we want an excuse to eat turkey.

  You think my mother has a split personality, Mary said.

  An unfortunate by-product of our cultural approach to women is that many women suffer from a type of psychic division, which complicates their happiness but does not qualify as a diagnosable personality disorder.

  You think I have a split personality, Mary said.

  I think your mother, as is the case with many mothers, put a great deal of emphasis on your commencing menstruation, for reasons that probably elude her.

  Emphasizing it by not talking about it.

  Emphasis through oversight is not an unheard-of tactic, I said.

  You have an answer for everything, Mary said. You’re so quick to be right that you don’t notice when you’re dead wrong.

  What am I dead wrong about, I said.

  The reason I faked my period to make my mother happy.

  She was worried that you weren’t developing normally, I said.

  She was worried that I was pregnant.

  That’s a natural worry, I said.

  Actually, she wasn’t worried that I was pregnant. She was worried that I was having sex.

  Because she didn’t want you to become pregnant.


  Because she didn’t want me to enjoy myself, Mary said. She fired our landscaper’s assistant because she was convinced he was having sex with Regina.

  Was Regina having sex with the landscaper’s assistant, I said.

  Duh, Beaton, she said. He was a total fox.

  The landscaper’s assistant behaved in a predatorial manner toward your sister, I said.

  Mary regarded me with undisguised scorn.

  I’m saying he was cute, Beaton. It logically follows that he wouldn’t touch Regina with a ten-foot rake.

  Has Regina ever had sex, to your knowledge?

  Not with the landscaper’s assistant, Mary said.

  A pause.

  No, she said.

  What about Gabrielle?

  The last person Gaby kissed was a girl.

  Does your mother know about Gabrielle’s sexual preference for girls?

  It’s not a sexual preference, she said. She just kisses girls sometimes. It’s harmless.

  Do you consider lesbianism harmful, I said.

  Mary didn’t respond.

  Or maybe I should rephrase: Do you consider consensual sexual contact between two same-sex people to be more harmful than, say, nonconsensual sexual contact between two people of a different sex?

  You mean rape, she said.

  Is that your interpretation, I said.

  Mary toyed with her ponytail.

  I was only saying that Gaby likes kissing girls, she said.

  Maybe that question was too confusing for you, I said.

  If you’re going to ask a stupid question, at least get your stupid question right.

  What’s wrong with my question, I said.

  What about consensual sex between two people of a different sex, she said.

  Consensual sex, I said. Meaning that both parties are in agreement.

  I know what consensual means, she said.

  Mary gazed at me, calmly confrontational. It was a curious clarification. Was Mary saying that she’d had sex with K, and that the sex had been consensual? If so, this suggested a fourth yet completely divergent diagnosis—Mary suffered from a simple, easily manageable adjustment disorder, brought on by an intense experience of guilt. She’d engaged—perhaps willingly—in a sexual manner with her captor. I was reminded of Mary’s final request at the conclusion of our first session: I would like to know if I enjoyed myself. Perhaps she already knew the answer: she had enjoyed herself, and was dealing with the emotional fallout of this illicit sexual pleasure that was so frowned upon by her mother.