I can’t get to Austin’s. I had to pull off the highway at a dangerous intersection. I couldn’t turn off the unsafe cell phone sounds. I need to check on the tiny red smart car that I might have smashed into on my way getting off the highway.
I’m at a nine for my anxiety level and it’s building to a nine-point-five and I’m caught listening to the phone ring over and over, what I assume is probably eight times.
But it’s not eight times. It’s not Beck calling me after all. It’s Dr. Pat. And when I answer the phone with a shaky, squeaky, trying-too-hard “Hello?” Dr. Pat pounces.
“What’s your level?” she says. And I can’t decide between answering honestly and trying to breathe, so I reach into the backseat where I’d flung my notebook. And I start reading, one finger helping me follow along with the words. I read until I start to chill the hell out. But Dr. Pat notices my sudden silence. “Are you compulsing?” she says to the quiet, chilling-out me. “What are you doing? Don’t compulse.”
“Don’t therapy me right now!” I whine into the phone.
“Where are you?”
“Dunkin’ Donuts.”
“Somewhere off the highway? Beck thought maybe you might go to Harvard Square?”
“You can’t talk to Beck about me. Doctor-patient confidentiality. If he’s so sure of where I am, tell him to come get me.”
“Bea.”
“It’s not like you’re helping me! It’s not like I’m getting better!”
“I’m coming to meet you, you’ve just got to let me know a little more specifically where you are. You have a sense of what exit I might find you off of?”
It’s impossible to read lists and talk to Dr. Pat and pinch my thigh all at the same time so I just keep letting out exasperated sighs that sound like growls. Maybe it’s a good thing that Beck’s not the one coming to save me this time.
“Is that even allowed?” I say.
“Sure, it’s allowed. It’s encouraged. We’re not doing Freud stuff here. For this kind of therapy to work, I have to be part of your life; you have to let me in. Remember? We talked about this.” I guess I read some of this in a pamphlet Dr. Pat gave me about exposure therapy and how it differs from traditional blah, blah, blah. “I’m along for the ride,” she says. I think we both shudder at the double meaning. “You know what I mean. This isn’t traditional boundary time, okay? I’m doing this with you, not at you.”
And because I can’t drive even one foot farther in this compromised state and I can’t expect Beck to come pick me up and I can’t let Lisha see me like this, I nod my head. Tell her where exactly I am.
“Okay,” I say. “It’s not pretty.”
“I know. I’ll be right there.”
There is a little bit of hope in all of this. A tiny pocket of possibility that there could be a day when I could do things the way other people do them. I managed to give up the Kurt thing once upon a time. I stopped compulsively following that Reggie kid’s story in the newspaper after a while. I have stopped myself before.
My anxiety starts to sink. Eight, seven-point-five, seven.
I’m okay. As long as I can keep Austin and Sylvia safe, I can deal with the rest of it. If I can just keep myself from—
Oh, shit. I let my mind go back to him and it’s drowning me again. The Need. I’m desperate to get back on the road. I don’t care that Dr. Pat’s coming. I have to check.
I have to check.
I have to check.
I take the deepest kind of breath and hold it in hard as I merge back on to the highway. I decide not to blink, just in case, so my eyes start to sting with unblinked tears. I don’t get very far before my phone starts ringing again, and I do everything in my power to tune it out. I slow down even further. I adjust my rearview mirror and take mammoth breaths that do nothing but get even more caught in my throat than my normal pathetically little ones do.
I manage to travel one exit farther before I have to pull over again.
“Aghhhhhhhh!” I scream at myself. The sound gets caught in the car with me, its echo reverberating against the windows. The tears are coming again so I dig fingernails into both thighs at the same time and wince from the pinch as I make the bruise worse, still. I let my head collapse against the steering wheel.
And that one-second thrill of screeching away from Dr. Pat seeps out of me as quickly as it seeped in. I’m sweating so hard under my clothes that I have to crack the windows a little. I smell myself, all fear and sweat and unfocused adrenaline, and it’s not pretty.
• • •
Last year when the whole thing with Kurt came to a head, we ended up in mediation.
“I don’t want to embarrass you,” he’d said. “I just really don’t want you to drive by my house anymore, okay?” I’d nodded and we’d agreed on more therapy, upping my Zoloft, and some kind of unofficial restraining order that would go away when I turned eighteen. “We don’t want it to stay with you forever,” his mother said, “but we are serious about this. We don’t feel comfortable with you around so often. I’m so sorry we had to involve authorities, but I have to protect my family.”
Against me, I remember thinking, breathless from the reality of what I’d become.
The mediator referred me to Dr. Pat, and before we all shook hands and said good-bye, she unbuttoned the too-tight button of her suit jacket and cleared her throat and looked me in the eye.
“Surrender,” she said, like she cared for some reason that I get my shit together. “That’s the most important thing I ever learned. You seem like a nice girl. You’re catching a break. Surrender.”
I made fun of her to Lisha in my retelling of the event. Some middle-aged former alcoholic, I decided. It made it easy to dismiss her. Weirdo, I’d called her.
But now here I am, on the side of the road with bruised thighs and a hoarse voice from all the manic yelling and a list of all the items in some rock star’s lobby.
The word comes back to me: The breathy voice of the mediator finally hitting something in me.
Surrender.
The next time the phone rings I pick it up.
“Bea . . . ,” Dr. Pat says in a warning tone. She doesn’t need to guilt me though. I’ve done the math and I know full well I’m not making it to Austin’s today. I tell her where I am and she’s there in five minutes since her dimension of time and space is so vastly different than my tortured navigation of these things. She pulls her little Jetta right up next to my Volvo and comes around to the passenger side. I let her in with my head bowed.
She settles in.
“What’s your level?” she asks. I dip my head even closer to my neck, all of me folding in on myself. It won’t work, of course; I’ll eventually give in to the growing urge (stronger by the second) to tell her everything. But I try anyway, swallowing as best I can the words I know are going to bubble out.
The windows of my car are fogging up. The highway’s white noise of vehicles is on a constant whirr.
Dr. Pat waits. She sits all solid and unspeaking. I don’t want to tell her too much and I can’t stay silent, so I do the conversational equivalent of driving myself off a cliff.
“Don’t ask where I’m going,” I say, instead of admitting it straight up, which is what my mind would like me to do. I know that the instant (inevitable, looming) I admit to what’s going on, Austin will be taken away from me, so I resist. This means that I have to do something else, so I start jabbering about a stabbing that happened in the Bronx over the weekend.
“It was a girl,” I say. “Girls don’t usually stab people, but it happens. And actually the rate of girls stabbing people has gone way up. So. There’s that. I mean, if ever there was a time to be worried about someone like me stabbing you . . . it’d be now.” Dr. Pat nods. It’s a move that means she understands this is emotionally true for me but that she isn’t about to enter into a real-life conversation about it because it’s not realistically true. Allegedly.
“I want you to drive me home, Bea. Okay?�
� She buckles her seat belt. Snap.
This is not expected. Again something flickers, telling me that this can’t possibly be legal. She’s crossed some therapy line and she’s putting herself at risk. I say as much and pinch my thigh for extra security.
“I’m not concerned,” Dr. Pat says. “I know you’re a good driver. What’s your anxiety level?”
“Six . . . ?” I say.
“Great. Let’s just wait until it goes up more, then,” Dr. Pat says. “Why don’t you tell me how you think Kurt’s doing these days.” Dr. Pat has her hands folded and her ankles crossed and it all fits so well with the pressed pants and the flouncy blouse and the expensive haircut. She’s exactly who she is supposed to be.
“I don’t think about it much,” I say.
“Mm-hmm. Let’s talk about the car accidents that happened on the highway this year, then,” she says. I don’t think you’re supposed to talk about car accidents when you are in a car. That’s sort of asking for it.
Dr. Pat is sort of asking for it.
“No thanks,” I say.
“Bea. Try harder.” I give my thigh the hardest pinch yet, and hate the pain. It’s a reminder of the bruise there, the part of me that is as ugly as Jenny’s bald head or Rudy’s scabbed face or the dry and flaking palms of Beck’s hands. The pinch both helps and hurts. Like all the other compulsions, I guess.
“I have some articles . . . ,” I start. We have never had therapy quite like this.
We have not had therapy even remotely resembling this. Where is Dr. Pat’s Laura Ashley floral couch from her office? Where are the metal folding chairs from our group meetings? Where is the box of tissues positioned squarely in the middle of the coffee table every single session: the innocuous, semithreatening presence a reminder of how vulnerable you are supposed to get in that room.
“I bet you have them with you,” Dr. Pat says. “The articles? If I know you, you wouldn’t get anywhere near this car without your notes.”
“I’m like a seven,” I say, shoving myself into her cooling-off tone of voice.
“That’s what we’re going for. We’re going to start driving when you’re at a nine, okay?”
No. Not okay.
“I can’t drive when I’m at a level nine,” I say.
“Why don’t you just read some of those scary articles. Out loud. Whatever the most recent car accident is.” She’s done it again. Saying the words “car accident” inside an actual car. I wince and pinch my thigh and this time Dr. Pat catches it. “You’re not hiding it well, I hate to tell you,” she says. Then she puts a hand on my hand, flattening it against my thigh, and looks right at me the way she does with Jenny. “Just wait.” Then she reaches under her feet where I did a terrible job of hiding my crazy-person scrapbook of serial killers and car accidents and things that I have to try to prevent from going wrong. I hold my breath, praying her fingers don’t find the Austin and Sylvia star notebook that’s also down there. Luckily, her hands emerge with just the accident notebook. She’s seen it before, but I think the weight surprises her: the heft of it, the splintered pages, the rough edges, the sloppy glue job, the fact that I have doubled, maybe even tripled, the thickness of your average spiral-bound notebook. “This thing’s turning biblical,” she says.
Dr. Pat has made me laugh. Not dutifully, not to divert attention away from my nervousness, not in that accidental “time to laugh now” way that I think everyone does a little too often. She makes me laugh because underneath the loose-fitting, pale pink blouse and indeterminate age of her face, she’s brassy and a little bit sarcastic and completely not afraid of anything, even me. Even after the disaster of today’s session.
She gives me a page to read from and I do. My own notes always calm me down, but the articles terrify me, especially knowing I have to drive. I read the most gruesome details of the article over and over until the shaking and sweating and unbelievable urge to cry and cry and cry get strong enough to scare the absolute shit out of me.
“What level are you at now?” she says when I repeat the part about the unseen ice patch that the car skidded against.
“Eight.”
“And now?” she asks in the same steady voice after I read again how the driver thought she’d looked both ways, but must have only looked one way because a bicyclist zoomed right in front of her from the other side.
“Eight.”
My voice dips into shaky, baritone territory as I describe the car flying off the road and into a tree, severely injuring the driver, the passenger, and of course the bicyclist. My hands keep trying to make their way to my thighs, but Dr. Pat urges me to not compulse, not compulse, not compulse.
“Time to drive,” she says when I declare myself at a nine. And I fight everything in my body that tells me no and I turn onto the road that will lead me to the highway.
“I’m going to hurt you, I’m going to hurt you,” I say, begging her to insist I stop driving.
“Stay with that feeling. What are you experiencing physically? Drive and tell me how your body feels as your drive.”
“It’ll make it worse,” I say. I don’t want her to know that I’m nauseous and dying to scream and sweating so badly that my shirt is shrinking with the dampness, fitting too tightly around me, suffocating me and making it that much harder to breathe.
“Bea. What are you feeling? Talk me through it. Stay with it. Talk.” It’s a whole new thing from Dr. Pat: an order. An inarguable, deliberate, military-type order. And the certainty of it shocks me into speaking. I tell her every single thing my body is saying and every single thing I want to do to make it stop: slow down, turn around to look for dead bodies that I might have run over, pinch my thigh. The list goes on and on and I speed up in tiny increments like Dr. Pat orders.
“It’s a nine, it’s a nine. What if I hurt someone? Was there a school back there? With kids? Can we check?”
“No. Stay with the anxiety. It can’t last forever. It’s too tiring to stay at a nine for very long.”
But in the cloud of the anxiety I can’t see even the hint of a way out: not a shadow, not a slit of calm opening up in me, not a crack in the walls. I can’t imagine ever leaving this terrible place. But I keep doing what she says.
“Can I just put on this CD?” I say, and press play. Tryst’s album comes on quietly and a secret part of me collapses with a bit of relief. Dr. Pat must see my shoulders drop. There is also a silent flicker of recognition behind those tortoiseshell glasses. Like maybe she knows Austin and Sylvia’s album. Like she might finally have guessed at the real secret here.
“I know a compulsion when I see one,” she says, turning off the music. “Sorry. We need to get through the anxiety the old-fashioned way, okay?”
The panic swirls inside me.
“It’s a ten. This is a fucking ten, I swear to God,” I say.
Seconds pass. They could be months based on how fucking intense and deeply felt they are.
And then:
The road is smooth underneath my car. Cars aren’t honking at me to speed up. My level’s starting to wane. The heart pounding hasn’t flatlined, but I feel it go down just the tiniest decibel.
It feels like giving up.
It feels like falling into bed after an all-night rave.
It feels that right.
It’s surrender. It’s that thing I have been searching for.
“What’s your level?” Dr. Pat asks.
I like the way her voice sounds with hope in it. I like the way she’s looking at me: focused but relaxed. She’s not gripping the door handle. She’s not wincing or holding her hands together in prayer.
“Seven-point-five,” I say. And as soon as those numbers come out of my mouth I feel it drop again. “Seven.”
“Good. See? It drops away. It lowers. Keep driving. Keep talking.”
“I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“Okay.”
“Six-point-five,” I say.
“There you go.”
“Six.”
“Stay with it. Keep driving. We’ll get off up here.”
It’s funny how short the trip is when you are traveling at the same speed as the rest of the cars. It’s funny how I’m already nearing my exit. This is what people mean when they say something is anticlimactic. It’s been the longest day of my life and all I’m doing is going home.
“Five,” I say as we exit the highway.
“I think that earns you a trip to Friendly’s,” Dr. Pat says. The Friendly’s is right there: red sign, cursive lettering, a kind of home base of everything I like about the suburbs, about the world I’ve grown up in.
When we are tucked into a booth, I think I could fall asleep on the familiar red vinyl.
Dr. Pat orders us a peanut butter sundae. They bring us the extralong spoons that anyone with a heart would have to fall in love with, and the supersweet overload of vanilla ice cream and fudge sauce and peanut butter topping and airy clouds of whipped cream have never tasted even close to this good.
Fifteen minutes later we are sticky mouthed and staring down at a mountain of used napkins and that perfect, exaggerated nostalgia of an old-fashioned ice cream cup. The kind that looks like a vase and not a bowl. It could be made of crystal in this moment.
It’s all made of crystal: all of me. I haven’t been so clear in such a long, long time.
CLARITY DOES NOT MEAN I suddenly make good decisions.
Kinda the opposite. I decide instead that I have earned a night out, after what happened in the car with Dr. Pat.
Three nights later I am armed with the promise of free tickets from Austin and a few bottles of juice spiked with peach schnapps. Lisha’s gone full out: An oversize schoolgirl skirt hangs off her hips. On top she’s in a corset that would show cleavage if she had any. Instead there’s just orange-streaked fake tan skin and the unmistakable shape of her collarbone sticking out more or less where her breasts should be.
It’s spring break, so there’s no holding back. Besides, Lish is still fighting with her parents about the money for Harvard, so her drinking and her wardrobe have both gotten a little crazier. Her enormous luggage-size purse could hold not only our alcohol supply but also my pink shooting-star notebook.
OCD Love Story Page 21