Ruth massaged the back of her neck with both hands and ran her fingers through her short auburn hair, lifting it from her neck. Then she shook her head to settle it back down. She tilted her glasses up over her hair to the top of her head and rubbed her eyes. When she opened them, they flashed toward the full-length mirror on the inside of the open closet door. For just a brief moment, she saw her mother looking back at her in her reflection. The color of Ruth’s hair and her hazel eyes were gifts from her mother. “Well, at least I didn’t inherit your freckles,” she said out loud. “Or your feeble sense of responsibility.”
Ruth was raised in Tacoma, Washington, principally by her dad. Her mother had left them both when Ruth was eleven years old, just about the time when she needed her mother most. Her father had tried his best to be both father and mother to her but placed more emphasis on sports than on tea sets. He never remarried and did the best he could to raise a normal young woman.
Ruth’s family life, compared with that of her friends, felt anything but normal, and her unusual physical stature only added to her problems.
“Hey, beanpole,” Jake Brandon would shout. “Don’t let the wind blow you away.” Jake was one of many boys in middle school who’d found joy emphasizing anything that would make someone feel self-conscious. Not that she needed much help in that area. At thirteen, Ruth was already over six feet tall and gangly. Her arms and legs seemed to grow at a much faster rate than her ability to coordinate their movement.
That all changed in high school. After mastering control of her ample extremities and filling out her frame to more womanly proportions, she played varsity basketball and helped the Olympia Lady Dragonflies win the 1986 high school state championship. Although her academic grades were outstanding, it was her basketball skills that won her scholarship to the University of Washington to play for the Washington Huskies. It almost made tripping over those awkward feet for several years worthwhile.
Ruth checked her schedule for her next patient. Sylvia Radcliffe should be here soon; the woman was always on time. Sylvia’s faithfulness to her schedule and her high energy level, almost to the point of being manic, were exhausting to watch. Ruth glanced at the small gold-and-rosewood clock on the corner of her desk for confirmation and then looked out the window at the long shadows cast by the oak tree, filtering the light from the lamppost in front of her office. It was just 5:45 p.m. and nearly dark already.
Sylvia worked as an assistant manager at Stanton’s Fine Gems. She left work sharply at five each weekday evening. On Tuesday, today, she would order a salad at the Maplewood Diner, eat her dinner quickly, and arrive exactly five minutes early for her six o’clock session with Dr. Klein.
Ruth envied Sylvia’s discipline, even if Sylvia was a little compulsive about it. It’s too bad obsessive compulsive disorder isn’t contagious. I’d take a month’s worth and get caught up on my life. Ruth scanned her personal planner and grimaced at the number of items crossed out, moved, or written over.
Most of Ruth’s patient sessions were scheduled during the evening primarily to accommodate their work hours. This agenda, however, did benefit Ruth as well, since it provided time in the morning, early afternoon, and late evening for routine domestic chores and enough time to perform at least a minimum of parenting responsibilities for her eleven-year-old daughter, Emma. Unfortunately the demands of maintaining a clinical psychology practice and managing her household eroded much of the quality from the quality time she tried to make available for her daughter.
Ruth was dedicated to her career, but these short days and long, cold nights, as winter approached, seemed to strip away some of her motivation and enthusiasm. “Let’s concentrate,” she said as she crushed a sheet of paper into a tight ball and tossed a foul shot at the wastepaper basket near the couch on the far side of the office. She stood frozen with her right hand over her head and watched the paper ball bounce off the rim of the basket and roll along the floor near the coffee table. “That makes the day perfect!”
Ruth rubbed her hands together to warm them and to help focus her thoughts. She opened the manila folder titled, “Radcliffe, Sylvia, November 19, 2011, Session Summary,” and stacked it on top of a loosely assembled pile of folders and papers filled with handwritten notes. She adjusted her glasses, picked up her small handheld dictation recorder, pressed the talk button, and stared at the notes in the file. She began to read the patient overview: Sylvia Radcliffe began therapy in September 2008. She was born in 1971 and has been divorced for the last four years. She has issues with family members and feels that her life is unfulfilling and pointless. “Join the club,” she murmured under her breath, then immediately erased the accidental recording. She smiled and shook her head.
Ruth looked back at her desk clock. Her father gave it to her when she opened her practice eight years ago. “You’re going to have to learn to be on time,” he had said, “or your patients will feel you have more problems than they do. I was going to give you an alarm clock, but this one was prettier.” She smiled a tender but sad smile. “Note to self,” she said into the recorder. “Call your father.”
A knock on the door startled her. She immediately closed Sylvia’s file and gathered the conglomeration of papers and folders on her desk and pushed them together into a ragged pile. She then stuffed them into the open lower drawer of her file cabinet. Ruth stood and looked into the mirror on the closet door. She frowned at her towering six-foot-one-inch height. Ruth looked at her feet, and a slight squeak escaped from her lips. She kicked her fuzzy pink slippers off, one at a time, into her closet and slipped on her plain black flat shoes. She adjusted her skirt, checked and smoothed her hair, and turned, shutting the closet door with her left foot. She then kicked the file drawer closed with her right and said in a serious, slightly deeper than usual voice, “Come in.”
***
A slender woman about five feet six inches tall, wearing a navy-blue pantsuit, the jacket straining at its button enclosing her ample breasts, entered the room in a hurry and sat with perfect posture on the couch. She tossed her head and pushed her long black hair back off her shoulders. “What a week I’ve had,” she exclaimed. Sylvia reached down, picked up the ball of wadded paper from the floor near the couch, and turned it over several times in her hands.
“It’s so hard to get good cleaning help,” Ruth said as she reached over and took the paper ball, raised her arm in the direction of the wastepaper basket, paused, and then placed the paper in her pocket.
Sylvia slouched back on the couch and placed both hands on her head. “I need to get control of my life,” she said. “My boyfriend still hasn’t called me. I can’t believe I let him talk me into getting a tattoo. I’ll probably get blood poisoning or some other infection.” Dr. Ruth Klein lifted her notepad and secretly wrote: Here we go!
Sylvia began, “Last Friday my mother came to visit and stayed until yesterday. You know how I feel about my mother. I guess I owe her something for raising me, but I wanted her to leave almost as soon as she arrived.”
At that point, Ruth postulated that Sylvia needed some new material. She had complained about her mother either making disparaging remarks that demoralized her or asking her for money in almost every session for the last two years. At least she has a mother. Ruth wondered what her own mother was like now. Had she grown old alone? Did she have a new family? Were there half brothers or sisters Ruth had never met? For Christ’s sake, she hasn’t even seen her own granddaughter. She probably didn’t even know I was married and divorced. She missed the first eleven years of Emma’s childhood. She probably wouldn’t recognize me on the street if we met, much less recognize her granddaughter.
As a child, Ruth would fantasize about her mother’s return. Ruth would open the front door, and her mother would be standing on the steps with her suitcase in one hand and a tearstained handkerchief in the other. She would apologize for having left and beg Ruth for forgiveness. After remaining indignant and scornful for an appropriate amount of time, Ru
th would run to her. Her mother would drop to one knee, hug Ruth, and swear never to leave her again. But that never happened. Instead Ruth grew into a young woman struggling to catch up on life’s lessons missed in a male-oriented, single-parent household. From puberty through dating and her eventual marriage, she’d learned to face the passages of youth without the gentle guiding hand of a loving mother. Sometimes she thought she’d really married Tom because her father adored the guy. So much for Dad’s ability to judge character. Tom and Ruth had five good years together, but Ruth was dedicated to her career, and Tom’s lack of wanting one further weakened a relationship that was not strong enough to survive their differences. She wondered about Tom. It’s been—
“So I hid all the liquor bottles before she came and told her I didn’t have any. Did I do the right thing, Dr. Klein?”
Oh God! Where are we? “Do you think you did the right thing?” Ruth asked. Very psychoanalytical, Ruth, she said to herself as she glanced at the recorder to ensure that it was still running.
“I hate her!” Sylvia said, dabbing her eyes with a tissue and trying not to completely smear what was left of her eyeliner.
“I doubt that that’s true,” Ruth said, glad for the pronouncement, which gave her an opportunity for a comment. “Have you tried to think about the good experiences you had with your mother while growing up?”
Sylvia looked squarely into Ruth’s eyes and said, “There weren’t any.”
“You’ve talked at length about recent experiences with your mother, but you never told me much about your youth. You’re a successful businesswoman. You must have developed at least some of your character from lessons learned at your mother’s knee.”
Sylvia bit her lip and looked across the room. Several boxes on the table under the window caught her attention. “Do you treat a lot of children?” she asked. The boxes were brightly colored with plastic windows displaying their contents. A bright-red truck with flame decals on its side shone through one box. Another boasted a set of wooden blocks with pictures of animals and large capital letters on each one. Sylvia walked to the stack of toys and retrieved the one that had been the focus of her attention. She picked it up and held it out to Dr. Klein.
“Where are the rest of Barbie’s accessories?” she asked. Ruth looked up from her notes, noticing for the first time that Sylvia had left her spot on the couch.
“Those are toys for the Red Cross drive. They’re all supposed to be new packaged toys, but my daughter insisted on donating her Barbie doll to a less-fortunate child,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “I’m not sure the Red Cross will take it, but I promised her I’d try.”
Sylvia held up the doll by its waist. “Barbie’s been around for a long time. Do you mind if I hold her while we talk?” Ruth nodded as Sylvia returned to the couch, cradling the doll in her arms. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen her. Her name was Alice.”
Sylvia seemed unusually subdued, causing Ruth to ask, “Did your mother buy Alice for you when you were a child?”
“Not a chance,” Sylvia said, suddenly focusing back on the session. “She thought that dolls were a waste of money. Why buy the kid a doll when you could buy five drinks with the same ten bucks?” Ruth waited for Sylvia to continue.
“When I was eight years old, I really wanted this doll. Barbie was tall and pretty with long hair. She had lots of clothes, and everybody liked her. She even had a boyfriend.” Sylvia held up the doll and adjusted its hair. She bent the doll’s limbs into a sitting position and placed her on the edge of the coffee table so that the doll was leaning back comfortably, listening to the story.
There was a gleam in Sylvia’s eyes as she went on. “One night my mother came home, drunk as usual, and passed out on the living room sofa. I tiptoed to her purse and found a ten-dollar bill inside. I really didn’t need to tiptoe; once she passed out, she was out for hours. There was little chance she would remember how much money she had left at the end of a night of drinking, so I took it. I felt a little guilty about taking the money, but I really wanted the doll.
“I felt so grown up standing in the department store holding the box with the doll and its wardrobe in my hands and the ten-dollar bill in my pocket. I saw a stack of bags with the store’s name on them, and I took one and put my doll in it. I guess I didn’t realize that it was customary to buy the doll before putting it in the bag. Well, anyway…” She leaned forward. Ruth’s eyes brightened, responding to the newfound excitement in Sylvia’s voice.
“‘Excuse me,’ I said to this tall saleswoman with a face like a prune, and I held up my bag with my new doll.” Sylvia stopped talking and stared at the floor.
“Please go on,” Ruth said. “It’s a wonderful story.”
“Well, I guess I wasn’t a very experienced shopper,” she said with a chuckle. “I was so proud of myself for just being there, so I said, ‘This is going to be my new best friend. Her name is Alice.’ The saleswoman tried to ignore me, but you know how bratty kids can be. I tugged on her dress until she finally looked down. I guess I really pissed her off, because she said, ‘Please stop bothering me and go find your mother.’”
Ruth laughed at Sylvia’s imitation of the saleswoman’s haughty tone.
“When I told her my mother wasn’t in the store, she said, ‘Well, why don’t you take your new friend and go home?’ Then she rushed off to help some lady who was trying on a big flowered hat. I really didn’t know what to do, so I just tucked the bag with Alice under my arm and went home. I wanted to pay for the doll, but she really didn’t give me a chance. I probably should have just left the money on the counter.”
“I wouldn’t beat myself up over it,” Ruth said. “You were a small child, and you intended to pay for the doll, even if it was with ‘borrowed’ money. The important thing is that you knew that taking the money from your mother’s purse was wrong. I think it was a valuable lesson learned—a character-building lesson for an eight-year-old child.”
Sylvia thought of telling Ruth about her mother’s interpretation of the incident. Of course her mother didn’t have all the facts. Sylvia had told her mother that she was playing with the doll, not that she wanted to buy it—not with money stolen from her purse, anyway. She said she didn’t realize that she still had the doll until she was halfway home.
Her mother seemed to be proud of the fact that she had taken the doll. Her reaction was classic Henrietta Radcliffe. She’d said, “It’s not your fault. If people can’t pay close attention to their belongings, they deserve to lose them.” It was a lesson well learned by an eight-year-old at her mother’s knee, but not the same lesson Ruth was describing.
After Sylvia left, Ruth organized her notes, labeled the memory card from the recorder, and filed it away to be reviewed sometime before Sylvia’s next session. Ruth felt that they had experienced a minor breakthrough for both of them. Sylvia had never talked about her childhood before. There was much more work to be done, but Sylvia was finally opening up to her and revealing her true emotions. And for Ruth, a patient whose therapy had been going nowhere now showed signs of progress. Ruth was confident that she had finally broken through and reached the real Sylvia Radcliffe. Although Ruth never judged a book by its cover, she gave a great deal of weight to the summary on the panel of the dust jacket. She knew as much about Sylvia as Sylvia wanted her to know. The details of Sylvia’s life, however, differed greatly from the CliffsNotes version she had presented in therapy.
***
Sylvia Radcliffe was born Laura Sylvia Carpenter. Her first year of life was spent in a three-story walk-up apartment that smelled of cigar smoke and bourbon near Fifth Street in South Philadelphia. Her cradle was the middle drawer of an old scratched dresser her mother, Henrietta Carpenter, bought from the Salvation Army for seven dollars. Sylvia never knew her real father. At that point in Henrietta’s life, men came and went, literally. It wasn’t Henrietta’s finest hour.
When Laura was two years old, her mother, dispirited by the meagerness o
f her surroundings and the pressure of current financial circumstances, married Joshua Radcliffe.
Joshua felt that marrying Henrietta was the right thing to do since she was six months pregnant with his child at the time. He knew all about her past life of barhopping and frequent sexual indiscretions, but he was sure that his influence, and the good Lord, would change all that.
The marriage lasted for only one year. Soon Henrietta Radcliffe was back on her own with little more than she’d had a year ago and an extra mouth to feed. She decided, after much introspection, to turn to her mother for help. She began to call Laura Sylvia in honor of her mother, or maybe it was an attempt to influence her to help support the children, but it was to no avail. Within weeks the old woman passed away, leaving Henrietta less than one hundred dollars after the funeral expenses were paid. Henrietta never forgave her mother for failing to provide for her in her youth; it seemed to be a family trait.
Henrietta kept the name Radcliffe after the divorce. Maybe she kept it as a reminder of a better time, when life was easier and someone cared about her. Maybe she was just too lazy to change it back to Carpenter. When her children were old enough to be enrolled in school, they were enrolled as Sylvia and Emily Radcliffe.
Sylvia Radcliffe grew into an attractive woman. She was smart and cunning. She appeared to be a warm, loving person, but she knew how to focus her efforts to improve her life and let no one stand in her way. By the age of thirty-seven, she had married and divorced, continued her education with two years of computer science at a community college, and secured a job as a sales associate at Stanton’s Fine Gems.
It was at Stanton’s that she developed her fascination, almost an obsession, for fine jewelry, and through her love of the jewelry she sold, and her skill at selling, she rose from the rank of sales associate to assistant manager of jewelry sales in just two years.
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