by Kris Radish
“I didn't care that he was fucking someone else.”
“What else?”
“I got excited.”
“Sexually excited?”
“A little bit, which in my case is really something.”
“What else?”
“You are relentless,” I tell her, looking to that same spot on the window where Dr. C focused when she told me about her daughter.
“Once you say these things, a long white sheet falls over them and they slowly disappear,” she tells me, so softly I can barely hear her speaking. “It doesn't mean it will get easier right away, but it's a start. You know it's the beginning.”
I want to begin something, but there is this strange sensation that if I begin something then something ends, and I am hanging on to everything so tightly that I can feel my fingers swelling. There are rope burns on the palms of my hands and there is a pool of blood right where I am sitting.
“Can you say it?”
“It's a couple of things and it's everything. I am running through the yard and it wasn't the sex thing, it was that I didn't care and that I had no idea where I was running to.”
“You were lost?”
“I've been lost for a very long time, and I just don't want to be lost anymore. I need to figure out how to be happy. I cannot remember the last time I was happy.”
The good doctor is smiling. When I finish talking, she moves back into her chair and begins tapping her fingers together again.
“There,” she says loudly. “You have had your slap and now you begin again.”
There is a wave as high as forever about to crash on top of me. Begin again. How in the hell do I begin again?
“How?” I whimper. “How do I do that?”
“Well, we just started. Now we get to work. There will be no more passiveness and waiting and there will be wondering, but you have to agree, right now, here, Meg, in the next second, to work with me and to remember what it felt like when you were floating around in that bedroom of yours. Can you do that?”
“It's not my bedroom anymore,” I remind her.
“I take it that is a yes?”
“Yes.”
There. That's it, then. We are out of time, which is mildly irritating but also a relief. During the next five minutes she asks me to make what she calls a “Life List.” “Write out your whole life, all the people in it, places, everything you can think of, put it all down on paper. Then you must look at each item, and this may take a while, and decide what goes and what stays.”
It's just on paper, she adds, so I can change my mind when I get to the real part. “The real part?” I ask.
“Yes, that's when you actually begin discarding things.”
All righty, then.
“Can I sit in the lobby until next week?” I ask her as we both rise to leave.
“There are already fifty-six people living in the lobby. All clients of mine. There's no room left, but if someone jumps out the window I will be sure to give you a call. You just never know when there might be an opening.”
I laugh but I also want to cry. Now I actually have to leave the building and get into the car again, and when I manage to do that, I steer myself over to Elizabeth's house, which is the only place I can think of where I might find safety, shelter and a glass of wine before noon. I am worried about the list, not to mention the next fifty or so years of my life. Worried as hell. And now, on top of everything else, I also worry about Jane.
Jane has entered my life like an out-of-control band saw. She needs constant attention, and oil in all the right places. I cannot wait to give her Dr. C's card. I cannot abandon her either. Suddenly, we are both swimming toward an unseen shore and I'm the one pulling the raft. Sweet Jesus. Poor me. Poor Jane.
Halfway to Elizabeth's, I realize that I have left my purse on the floor in Dr. C's office. Now what? This kind of thing has been happening to me since the day I watched Bob and the geranium woman. Maybe some kind of secret powder was released and I'm doomed to spend the rest of my life looking for things that I have lost. How ironic. Yesterday I forgot to turn off the iron, lost my car keys and could not remember if I parked in front of the building or behind the building. I am so distracted, I suddenly think, I should not even be driving a car.
My purse is sitting on a chair in the waiting room when I get there. It looks just a bit lonely, and when I go to pick it up I decide to sit in the chair for a while. Just sit. I could be in a dentist's office. Magazines are on the table. A photograph of geese flying over a long cornfield is tipped to one side above a long table by the door. I move my hand to the wall behind me, where I know there are several offices where psychologists listen and then listen some more, with their fingers tapping against the sides of their chairs, legs crossed, words rationed out like pieces of old bread to starving birds. I think of the piles of secrets and the damaged souls and hearts and minds that must have reached some interesting conclusions just beyond my fingertips.
“Touch the wall,” I wonder to myself, “and will I feel a beating heart, the swell of a heartache, the devastation of a lost love?” No one is in the office, so I get out of the chair and stand with my back against the wall. It does not matter to me that I am in this suite of offices and that someone could come in at any moment or that my own doctor could walk back and see me caressing the wall and have me committed. People do worse things than fondle a portion of a room.
I close my eyes and place my palms against the wall, fingers spread, and I listen through my skin for those beating secrets. I sense the rumbling announcement of an avalanche of emotion, but is it theirs or my own? The wall is moving into my hands, a slow cascade that seems to be pushing me out into the room. There is so much hidden in the fabric of walls. So much. Heartaches and healing hands. A secret sorrow released from its cage and into the arms of a kind and smart woman who will throw it out the door so it lands in the lobby, where it will be swept away after hours. But in the corners, some of the secrets linger and there are piles of transparent tears that cling to each other longer and harder than their former owners kept them melded to their souls.
I know also that the swirling mess of my life must be nothing compared to some of the tragic complications that have walked past my chair. Death. The loss of a child. Suicide. Incest. Rape. Lost love. Mental illness. My pain is a simple scratch compared to what I see when my hands are pressed to the wall.
“How easy to feel guilty,” I say out loud.
A woman comes into the waiting room. There are dark circles under her eyes and she cannot bring herself to say hi to me. She looks at the door that leads down to the offices and I think she must be deciding if she is going to stay or run back out the door she just came into.
“Hello,” I say. “How are you?”
She catches my eye for a second and I see the breath go out of her. Is she on medication? On the verge? Accustomed to coming into an empty room? Or maybe she can see through my skin and into my dungeon of terror. Maybe.
“Fine,” she responds, and I see that she decides to sit and stay. I think she will stay. This makes a sigh, wide and long, leave my own chest, and that mother spot in me, the spot that brought me back home, that keeps me weighted to a place that can no longer be ignored for the deep pit of its uncomfortableness, makes me want to reach out and take her hand. I am a toucher; there is no doubt about that. It has gotten me in trouble plenty of times with babies at the mall, young boys on the verge of adulthood—why is it no one wants to touch adolescent boys when that is the one thing, simple and true, that they so much desire?
Shaun was fourteen when I discovered this. My son was in one of his constant angry and selfish stages where speaking to someone who had the same last name took way too much energy. One day he kept bumping into me. We'd be in the kitchen and he'd brush against my arm. We passed in the hall and he reached out to grab my hand. After about fifteen encounters like this, I lunged at him as he ran to catch a ride downtown with his father. I pulled him into my chest a
nd he fell against me in a movement that can only be called surrender. My fingers waltzed through his hair and I felt his sweet breath against my neck. He let his arms glide across my back and for ten seconds he was my boy again. Then the car horn beeped and he was gone.
We never talked about that, but it happened again and I started going into his room at night and he let me massage his hand, and once I dared to sing him a song from the days when he was a boy.
This did not last long. Shaun bounced into a darker phase after this and pulled so far away from me and everyone else he knew that I have not seen him come back since. I know he will. He will drift and move closer and pull away again, and then one day he will show up and find me and maybe he will tell me what it is that he has buried so far away from his own heart. It is something I count on, otherwise I may go blind with worry. I want my son back. Someday.
My waiting room companion shifts abruptly to the left and makes me realize I am still in my psychologist's office. It takes me a second to remember why, and pulling that thought into focus exhausts me. It simply exhausts me. I cannot remember ever being this tired. When I think about it, my feet and hands and face and bones and blood and skin—every piece of me that I can touch and feel and visualize—aches. Wouldn't it be funny to be lying on the floor when Dr. C comes into the waiting room for this woman?
Which she does, of course, the second I have this thought. The doctor looks startled to see me there.
“My, you moved in fairly quickly.”
“I came back for my purse and then I sat down and now I realize that I am almost too tired to drive.”
The good doctor looks away and addresses the other woman. She puts me on hold by raising her hand as if she is trying to direct traffic.
“Sydney, can you go wait in my office and get your usual beverage and I will be right with you?”
The woman rises, looks at me as if to say, “You thought I was the crazy one,” and disappears down the hall.
Dr. C stands in front of me, hands on hips, that hair hanging wildly behind her ears, and waits for me to say something. I have no clue.
“Doctor?” I ask.
“Meg, are you okay?”
“Maybe not.”
“Is there someone you can call?”
“I already called her once. Do you think she will come get me again?”
“Who is it?”
I tell her. Everyone knows Elizabeth. Maybe she has been lovers with Dr. C. Maybe she has been a patient. Maybe it's her wild and wide reputation.
“She will come.”
Dr. C moves forward. She touches me on the shoulder and tells me she is a bit worried.
“I just came back for the purse and then I sat down and then I started thinking and that woman walked in and I realized that people don't touch anymore, not enough. People don't touch just to say something like, ‘Hi, how are you,' because we are all worried about lawsuits, and then my mind realized that my body was exhausted and then—”
“Meggie, can you stop?”
“I have no idea, Doctor. I think I may be exhausted or having some kind of breakdown. What is wrong with me?”
“Nothing is wrong with you, sweetheart, but you are suffering, right now, right this instant, from something known as depression.”
“Wow.”
She laughs when I say “Wow,” and her laugh is so damn infectious, I begin laughing too.
“Meg, I think you need a break, but I need to go help my other patient now. Call Elizabeth. If she cannot come, then you must promise me that you will wait for fifty minutes until I am finished. Can you do that?”
“Yes. I think I can dial the phone, just don't ask me to do something like get up and drive a car.”
“Meggie, I have Elizabeth's number and your cell phone number. I will call you tonight and give you some instructions, and I want you to think about whether or not you would take some medication.”
“Really?”
“Maybe, not necessarily, but maybe.”
“Can I just drink a little bit?”
“Sometimes that makes it worse. Are you a good drunk or a bad drunk?”
“Life of the party, baby.”
“Maybe you shouldn't drink, unless you want to jump off Elizabeth's back porch, naked.”
Ha! I knew it. She's been to Elizabeth's house. I am already thinking that I will just sip some wine to keep me calm while I wait for her to call me. She pushes her hand into my shoulder, not hard, but very firmly.
“I know who you are and that you will do what you say you will. Call Elizabeth now. Drink if you must. Wait for my call.”
“What?”
I say this like a drunk would, slurring my words, and she pushes off from me and swims to her next patient. “Bye-bye, Doctor,” I think to myself, and then I sit for a few minutes.
I never just sit. It is something so rare that I must actually focus on sitting. I have no idea what will happen next. The patterns of my life are dissolving one by one and I am not certain what to hang on to. The thought of being alone has never occurred to me. Not once in all of the years I have been married. I am never alone. A-L-O-N-E. I silently roll the letters around inside of my mouth and wonder what it would feel like to say them out loud.
“I am alone in this office,” I say like the most quiet whisper in the world, so softly that tiny birds and small people and clouds with ears cannot even hear it. Someone could be sitting on my lap and they would not hear it.
I cannot say it again. The word has been lost. I do not even know what it looks like or remember what it felt like to say it two seconds ago. What is that all about? What is anything all about?
Minutes pass and I do not move. When I hear a voice rise in anger and then extinguish itself, I know I must get out of the room before the good doctor and Sydney tiptoe back into the waiting room and discover my secret.
Elizabeth is home. She says, “Of course I will come. Do not move. DO NOT MOVE.”
I do not tell her where this office is, but she gets here in twenty minutes. My goal now, besides not getting drunk and taking any antidepressants, is to find out how these two babes know each other. How hard could that be?
Elizabeth has on black tights, a denim shirt that is apparently posing as a dress, cowboy boots and a baseball hat. She is also smoking a cigar in a building that is, like every building in America, smoke free.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“We sound like a bunch of guys,” I tell her.
“That's a stretch,” she tells me as she lifts her shirt to expose her breasts.
“Jesus!” I scream.
“That perked you up.”
“You look pretty perky yourself.”
“Wanna roll?”
“Elizabeth?”
“Yeah, baby?”
“Please tell me it's all going to be okay.”
She comes over to touch me. Her hands on my face are a soft kiss at midnight, three bottles of French wine, a morning when I do not have to get out of bed, cardinals singing on my windowsill in spring, warm sheets in winter, clean sheets anytime, someone else cleaning the bathrooms, and everything grand and glorious that will definitely not be crossed off of my Life List once I actually make one.
“You have no idea who you are, how beautiful you are, where you are going—do you?”
“No.”
“Listen, sweetie, listen to this.”
“I'm listening. Really, I might be an inch away from nuts right now, but I am listening.”
“You couldn't be nuts if you tried. Still listening?”
“Yes, Elizabeth.”
“Everything is going to be okay.”
1967
Sister Aloysius has a fabulous trick that has worked so well on the bad boys that third- and fourth-graders line up in anticipation at recess to see who will be next. Her voice sounds like the voice of God, not that anyone at St. Monica's Grade School has ever heard the voice of God, but they know because Father Geparski told them it w
ould be deep and strong and full of power, and if Father says it, then that's it—it's true. That's Sister Aloysius for sure, because her voice is deep and strong and full of power and she is always ready to whack someone upside the head.
Here is what she does. Every day it's almost always someone different, except you can pretty much count on the fact that John Blakeman, Stevie Black and Martin DeBuris will get whacked several times a day because they are such terrible sinners. Sister likes to back them into a corner or against a wall. A wall close to a good corner is like the best place of all. Everyone knows what she is going to do, but there is something about this nun that scares the living hell out of the entire world. She has a river of meanness that is so deep, there is no bottom. Her bottom does, however, edge out on the cliffs of Hell. That is one thing everyone at St. Monica's knows for sure—the cliffs of Hell.
Sister likes to sneak up. Everyone knows that too, but no one is ready. How can you be ready? Jesus was not even ready. He knew, but was He ready? Well, maybe He was ready, but we won't know for sure until we ask Him. So she sneaks up and grabs her daily pick by the collar. Everyone had a collar back then, and this was in the days when you could get whacked or punched or, as we know now, sexually abused, and it was okay because they were teaching us the Fear of God, so violence, well, that was okay. It was okay to be violent.
Sister grabbed them and then she always had a book in her right hand, a very hard and solid book, and she would smack them in the head. Right in the head. Honest. She would smack them in the head, and when they had their eyes closed and would place their hands on top of that now painful place, she would step on their feet. She wouldn't just step on their feet, she would STEP on their feet until an explosion of pain made these boys, and an occasional girl, forget about the awful ache in their heads and wonder if they would ever be able to walk again.
Meggie Callie knew about this and she walked on a tightrope every single day she attended St. Monica's. One false move at St. Monica's and you could be a dead duck or possibly crippled for the rest of your natural born life. Meggie had straight A's and her best friend's mother was the volunteer English writing coach, which usually meant the boys got help to prepare them for the rigors of high school and the girls wrote poems, but sometimes the girls did boy things, but not often enough. Hardly ever.