by Lisa Alther
“That list was really hard to do,” Caroline said. “All I could come up with was what other people have told me I’m like. But their versions contradict each other. I felt canceled out.”
“So why did you do it?”
There was a long pause. Good question, thought Caroline. It hadn’t occurred to her not to. She lowered her eyes to the box of IGA tissues on the carved wooden chest beside her. “Because I wanted you to like me.”
They both blinked. Caroline froze, not daring to look up. Why in hell had she said that? It was a firm rule with her not to let people know what she wanted from them. I know what you want and you can’t have it. If you pretended you didn’t care, sometimes what you wanted came to you unasked. But in this particular case, she really didn’t care. Why should she care whether this aging British housewife liked her? She absolutely didn’t.
Hannah felt herself blush, whether from embarrassment at such vulnerability or from a hot flash, she wasn’t sure. She fought an urge to assure Caroline that she did like her. It wasn’t the right time for reassurance. But how could anyone who’d been a mother not give it right then?
“Do you feel you need to make lists for people to like you?”
Hannah asked kindly. She felt a stab of pain for that infant, so eager to please.
“I feel I’d better do what they want, or there’s not a chance in hell,” Caroline was surprised to hear herself say. “Do you see where that comes from?” “What?”
“That feeling. Do you remember telling me about trying all the time as a child to be helpful?”
Caroline closed her eyes and squeezed the bridge of her nose. It looked to Hannah like a direct hit. After many direct hits, the point would begin to sink in.
Gazing out the window across the yard where the stubble formed a five o’clock shadow on the dusting of new snow, Caroline recalled how the various maids used to set her mother’s hair. Caroline would stand in the corner of her dressing room, one foot atop the other, wishing she could help. Her mother laughed and gossiped with the maids, and almost purred when they massaged her neck. Her brown satin dressing gown would fall open at the throat to reveal sculpted collarbones and soft hollows. If Caroline could do the things the maids did, her mother would act like that with her too.
As Hannah watched Caroline’s eyes cloud over and narrow with pain, she reminded herself not to go too fast. If the pain was too great, Caroline would shut down. You had to balance their developing trust in you with the unveiling of their ancient sorrows. “You’ve been thinking this week about how people see you. Do you want to hear what I see?”
“Yeah. Okay.” Caroline dug her fingers into the tweed sofa. What was the woman going to bitch about? She’d done the assignment the best she could. She couldn’t help it that she was a nonperson.
“I see a kind, gentle, vulnerable person who’s been through some difficult stuff without losing those qualities.”
Caroline looked up. For a moment her eyes met Hannah’s. Then she looked away quickly and studied the brass doorknob, frowning. It didn’t sound right. She remembered the radio program she, Tommy, and Howard listened to as kids, sitting as close as possible to the large wooden box with its fabric front, and shuddering with delicious terror as a voice leered, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men…” If gentleness was what Hannah saw, she was less perceptive than she seemed.
“What makes you say that?”
Hannah shrugged. This assessment was so remote from what Caroline was used to that she couldn’t even take it in. She would have argued with St. Peter that she wasn’t fit to enter heaven. “Your face, your expressions, the way you stand and sit, how you speak.” And not just Caroline, but most clients. She tried to hold that image in her mind as she worked with them—of affectionate, capable people, with an overlay of crap from things other people had laid on them when they were too little to protest. She shifted her gaze from Caroline’s troubled eyes, which were assessing her bare feet, to the small gray stone Willendorf Venus on the windowsill, with its huge thighs and swollen belly. She’d bought it at a stall in Camden Lock the last time she was in London.
As she studied a run in the foot of Hannah’s stocking, Caroline itemized her failings for the past week. She forgot a lunch date with Pam. She argued with Jackie over his messy room. He yelled, “I never asked to be born!” She yelled back, “And if you had, the answer would’ve been no!” She snapped at Diana about the electric bill when she stayed out until 3:00 a.m. with Suzanne, leaving her lights blazing. Caroline knew she could pass herself off as polite and charming. But her true self was a raging virago. Harpy. She’d add that to her list. Diana had seen this true self often enough. It was probably what had driven her away. Diana said she was a taker. That was the least of it. She was a selfish, self-centered nightmare of a woman. Kind and gentle? It was what Hannah was being paid to say.
“You wouldn’t think that if you really knew me,” Caroline said.
It seemed to Hannah there were only two types of behavior in all the world. One said “come here,” and the other said “go away.” “All right,” she said with a smile, “reveal to me all your true flaws and failings.” You could go away angry, or you could go away amused.
Caroline shook her head no. And studied the red tread on one white shoe, feeling irritated. “Nobody in this nation is entitled to see herself as kind and gentle,” she announced. “America is looting the world, and all Americans are beneficiaries.”
Hannah studied Caroline. What a panicked reaction to hearing something nice about yourself. “And you, of course, are personally in charge of American foreign policy?”
Caroline looked up at Hannah. Then she looked back to the tread on her shoe. Her parents, David Michael, her comrades at the abortion referral center and in the hospitals where she’d worked had all taken for granted that they were responsible for their nation’s behavior, that collectively they were the nation. This woman was British, so maybe she didn’t understand democracy. But it did sound as though Hannah was on her side. She sat in silence for a long time, tracing the stitching on her shoe with her fingertips. Unfamiliar sensations having to do with relief and gratitude flickered on the horizon of her awareness like the northern lights over Lake Glass on a clear winter night.
“What about transference?” Caroline finally asked. She knew from psychology courses at nursing school that this was how therapy worked. She recalled reading about it in her text. But then it had actually happened, with Arlene. The bland textbook description had very little to do with the real thing.
“What about it?”
“I don’t want to do it.”
“If you don’t want to, you won’t.” Unfortunately, it had to happen for the process to work. Caroline had to accept Hannah as an authority figure so she could rehear things she’d misheard as a baby—such as the notion that she’d caused World War II.
“I’ve already done it once, and that’s enough.” The last thing she needed right now was to lapse into that state of doglike devotion and dependency.
“I didn’t know you’d done therapy before.” The fact that Caroline was bringing up transference probably meant it was happening. Hannah made a mental note to do what she could to undercut it, which usually involved telling lots of bad jokes.
“I haven’t. I mean in my personal life.”
“Well, what do you mean by transference?”
“Turning someone into God.” She haunted Arlene’s office. Her every waking moment became devoted to Arlene’s service. She cleaned the windows in her office and waxed her VW, brought her sandwiches from the deli down the street and sharpened her pencils, took her uniforms to the laundry and typed up her reports. She copied the angle at which Arlene wore her starched white cap, the purposeful stride with which she marched down corridors dispensing mercy. It had been terrifying having people’s lives depend on your delivering the right medications at the right intervals. Aping Arlene gave her the illusion she was equal to her job.
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nbsp; Hannah nodded. “Well, I don’t like it any better than you do. Imagine what it feels like having someone do that to you.” When she was first doing therapy, it freaked her out. A client’s eyes would take on a milk-sated glaze, and he or she would start laughing at all the bad jokes, and repeating her comments from previous sessions as though they were the Ten Commandments. It was a strain to have her every remark scrutinized for hidden meaning, when most of the time she was just goofing off. But she eventually realized she could have propped a dust mop in her chair and the same idolization would have occurred.
She glanced out the window to the street just as the orange Le Car crept by. Transference run amok. On the other hand, Maggie used to point out from time to time, “Face it, my friend: Sometimes you adore being adored. We all do.” And Hannah couldn’t deny it.
“You sound British or something,” said Caroline. Hannah’s clipped accent was reminding her of her mother, who thought that because her father was British, she was entitled to sound like Queen Victoria: “We are not amused….” She could just barely remember her grandfather, delivering a sermon in his Shaker Heights church when Caroline was four, dressed in a black bathrobe with a huge purple satin bookmark around his neck. Caroline started hiccoughing and couldn’t stop. Her mother kept glaring at her. Later she made Caroline apologize to her grandfather. He died a week later. For years Caroline thought his death was her fault for hiccoughing during his sermon.
“I was born in Australia and moved to London when I was four,” Hannah explained. To disclose things about herself was to open herself up to a real exchange; real exchanges led to caring; each person you cared for was one more you might lose; and there had already been so many. She understood the appeal of Freudian detachment: “Let’s look at why you’re interested in my accent….” Appealing, but counterproductive if you were trying to downplay transference, which fed on mystery and remoteness. Caroline had had too much remoteness already.
“So how did you end up here?” A gray stone statue of a bulbous naked woman sat on the windowsill across from Hannah. Had it been there all along? Caroline hadn’t noticed it before.
“I married an American during the war.”
“Oh.” It hadn’t fully sunk in for Caroline that Hannah had a life outside the hour they spent together in this room. She wasn’t crazy about the idea. “My grandfather was from England. He was an Anglican priest.”
“Really? Where in England?”
“Dartmouth.”
Hannah pictured the lovely little town, on hills around a harbor, the closest England could come to the Mediterranean. She’d gone there once with her grandparents. They marched along the cliffs above the harbor, her grandmother leading, an ocean liner flanked by two tugboats. They ended up at an inn on a narrow twisting road, where they had a wonderful cream tea with fresh strawberries.
“But your accent is Boston Irish, isn’t it?” asked Hannah.
“My father is Irish. Our neighborhood was mostly Irish. My mother must have felt like a missionary among the heathen. She used to make fun of our accents. ‘Good mawning,’ she’d say when we came down to breakfast. She’d make us repeat ‘heart’ and ‘bar’ time after time until we got them right. My brother Howard didn’t speak at all for about four months when he was five. It was wonderful. Except that he hasn’t shut up since…”
Hannah was watching and listening closely. Caroline was smiling, but what she was saying wasn’t funny.
“…we used to have this parrot named Cracker, and everybody said his vocabulary was bigger than Howard’s. When the phone rang, Cracker would say, ‘Hello?’ When you walked in the door, he’d say, ‘Hi!’ If you called his name, he’d say, ‘What?’ Did you ever hear the joke about the man who went into the pet shop and asked for an armadillo?”
As she told it, Caroline searched her brain for her best jokes. Hannah was probably exhausted from dealing with loonies all day. Why not give her a break? As she told another joke, about a frog taking out a bank loan, she watched Hannah’s face carefully and thought she could detect color rising into her pale cheeks. As Hannah smiled, then chuckled, Caroline felt a surge of pleasure. Good sense of humor. Maybe she could add that to her list?
After the third joke, Hannah glanced at the clock, realizing that if Caroline was already somewhat transferred, this was probably how she tried to charm her mother. And Hannah had to confess to being charmed as she tried to memorize the punch lines so she could tell Arthur the jokes at supper. But being charmed wasn’t part of her job, she reminded herself. “I’ve really enjoyed this hour, Caroline. But I feel I should point out that these are probably the most expensive jokes you’ve ever told.”
Caroline looked at her, bewildered.
As the boys watched “Welcome Back, Kotter,” Caroline fried pork chops and thought about transference. Gradually she realized Arlene wasn’t her only case of it. Her first case actually involved her pink blanket, whose miraculous powers she discovered when she was three. She remembered waking in the dark with a full bladder, pleased not to be surrounded by a warm puddle. She got out of bed, dragging her pink blanket, and started down the hall to the bathroom. There were terrifying shadows. She wasn’t absolutely sure they weren’t monsters. She stuck a thumb in her mouth, but it didn’t help. Drawing a deep breath, she raced into her parents’ room, where her mother lay sleeping on her side. Alone in the bed because Caroline’s father had been captured by the Japs. Caroline shook her shoulder, whispering, “Mommy, got to go potty.”
After the third shake, her mother began sobbing. Caroline froze. What had she done? She thought her mother would be pleased she wasn’t wetting the bed. “I’m too tired, Caroline. Go by yourself. You’re a big girl now.”
She had to do something fast. Dancing on her toes, she wrapped herself in her pink blanket and assured herself that no monsters could get her as long as she was encased like that. She dashed to the bathroom, arriving unharmed.
Feeling awful to have made her mother cry, and knowing she’d be pleased to learn that Caroline had negotiated the monster-filled hallway and the toilet all by herself, Caroline pulled some tissues from the box on the toilet tank, wrapped herself in her blanket, and returned in triumph to her mother’s side, where she dabbed at her mother’s tears with the tissues. Her mother pushed her hand away and said, “Stop it. Get back in bed and go to sleep.”
After that, Caroline knew that as long as she was wrapped in her pink blanket, nothing could harm her. Never mind that her mother and Maureen complained it was smelly and dirty, she knew it possessed magical powers inaccessible to adult scrutiny.
She glanced at Jackie and Jason, who lay on their stomachs on the hooked rug with their feet in the air and their chins on cushions, giggling at Barbarino on the TV. Jason held his hockey stick in one hand. Caroline wouldn’t have been surprised to discover he slept with the stick. Jason took after Caroline’s father, was short and compact with auburn hair, green eyes, and lashes so long they looked fake. He laughed a lot and had a blustery self-confidence. Jackie was more like herself—tall and slim with curly dark hair and tortured blue eyes. He took everything too seriously, and covered that up with a pained but pleasant social manner. It amazed her that both boys had the same father and had emerged from her body.
Arnold was daintily chewing one of Jason’s new blue Nikes. “Stop it, Arnold!” she called. “Jason, don’t let him chew up your new shoe, honey.”
“He can if he wants to, Mom.”
“No, he can’t. I paid for those shoes, and I’m not’” She halted, already bored with the upcoming lecture. “Jackie, would you please put some more wood in the stove for me, honey. It’s getting chilly in here.”
As Jackie stood up slowly, eyes fixed on the TV, Caroline returned to her memories of Pink Blanky. Usually she dragged it with her wherever she went. But one morning her mother persuaded her to leave it behind when she went to nursery school. She folded it carefully and laid it on her pillow, patting it reassuringly. All morning long, as
she cut and pasted construction paper, she kept clutching at thin air for Pink Blanky with her left hand. When she got home, Maureen announced she’d needed cleaning cloths and had cut Pink
Blanky into four pieces. Caroline climbed into bed for her nap in a state of shock. As she pulled up the patchwork quilt her mother had purchased by mail from the blind wife of an Appalachian sharecropper, she assured herself that this quilt would also safeguard her from fire in the night, thieves in the closet, monsters under the bed, Japs on Okinawa, and British rule in Ireland.
But the quilt smelled like the cedar chest where it lay in summer, rather than mildew, snot, and saliva. It lacked Pink Blanky’s limp threadbare kneadability. Sucking on its corner was like sucking cardboard. Pink Blanky would yield to the caresses of fingertips, but the quilt just lay there like a tin washboard. As she sought safety in its stiff, clean folds, she thought wistfully of the disgusting delights of Pink Blanky, who now lay surrounded by her father’s old jockey shorts. How had she caused this? She should never have left Pink Blanky behind, even if its presence did make her look like a baby at nursery school. If she hadn’t clung so insistently to Pink Blanky, maybe they’d still be sleeping together. I know what you want and you can’t have it. If you didn’t let them know you wanted something, they wouldn’t have to take it away. She shoved a thumb in her mouth and fell asleep, comforted by this insight into the curious workings of the adult world.
A couple of nights later, she sneaked at midnight to the cleaning closet, rummaged through the dust rags, and rescued two of Pink Blanky’s four pieces. Racing upstairs to bed, she caressed one piece. It was smooth and stiff, coated with floor wax. Grabbing the other piece, she buried her nose in it. It smelled of lemon oil furniture polish. She began to cry. Not only could Pink Blanky not save her from the loss of its magical protection, it couldn’t even save itself from this humiliating dismemberment and exile. She had to face it: Pink Blanky was merely mortal.