Zoe Letting Go

by Nora Price

  As I made my way down the staircase to the office that Angela had pointed out yesterday, I floated on this plan and thought of calm images to set my mood right. Babies cooing, soufflés rising, sea horses floating at the bottom of the sea. If I were going to meet the therapist, I might as well make a good impression. A sane impression. The noises of the dining hall receded as I reached the ground floor, and I began to ponder my strategy. It all depended on what sort of therapist Alexandra was. I’ve found, over the course of my comparatively short but relatively overstuffed life, that therapists are like teachers: Variations among individuals are great, but certain mannerisms are consistent across the board. For example, all therapists will start a session with a question. A standard entry query. It will be the same every time: “How are you feeling today?” or “How are you?” or “How are things going for you?” The query itself differs among therapists, but it’s always the same when you walk in the door. People, like dogs, are comforted by consistency.

  Alexandra’s door was closed when I got there. How inviting.

  I looked at the chair propped outside her door, as well as the adjoining wicker table. The arrangement suggested that I sit down and wait, but I was in no mood to twiddle my fingers. What to do? The red box sitting atop the table gleamed impossibly brightly, as though it had been polished again since the day before. Curious, I tugged on the box’s lid to see what was inside—candy? Kleenex? Mints? The lid wouldn’t budge. Sealed shut. Only a narrow slit on top of the box provided a window to its contents, but as I bent to peek inside the slit, the door swung open.

  “Hello,” said Alexandra.

  I snapped up like a cartoon rake. “Hi.”

  “Come on in.”

  I blinked. This person did not conform to my expectations. Nor did the room behind her.

  Stepping inside, I was nearly blinded by the pale office light. I scanned with feeble eyes. Where were the usual signs of a therapist’s habitat? The well-traveled Oriental rugs? The house plants? The Navajo wall hangings? This place looked like a cross between an art gallery and a doctor’s office: a white cube of a room with minimal furnishings and no smell whatsoever. A sterile zone. A chemist’s laboratory. At one end of the space lay a chrome desk and a chest. At the other end, two white leather chairs, a small white leather sofa, and a glass coffee table with nothing on it completed the room. It was as though the entire office had been erased of human sediment. Except for a single box of tissues, it was the emptiest room I’d ever seen. Alexandra herself was dressed head to toe in white. She resembled a Q-tip floating in a giant glass of milk.

  “Take a seat wherever you like,” she said, folding herself into an Eames chair. I peered at her, taking mental notes for later documentation. Alexandra is a slender woman about the same age as Angela and with the same dark hair, though in Alexandra’s case it is chopped into a severe bob that barely skims her chin. The bob contrasted starkly with its snowy backdrop.

  I sat down on the sofa. It was surprisingly comfortable. A knock at the door announced Angela, who entered with a covered plate. “Breakfast for Zoe,” she said officiously, setting the plate on the coffee table. “They’re having whole-grain waffles upstairs, but Devon thought this might be less messy to eat in the office. I’m afraid I didn’t have enough hands to bring coffee.”

  “That’s all right,” I said, though I wanted coffee.

  Angela brushed invisible crumbs from her skirt. “Oatmeal-raisin bread and fruit compote. Hopefully it’s still warm.”

  She left, clicking the door shut as the smell of the bread scented the room. “Smells good,” Alexandra commented. A tuft of steam warmed my face as I lifted the napkin to reveal a slab of brown bread, a bowl of purplish fruit, and a spoon. Was I supposed to eat this? Fat chance. The portion was big enough for a lumberjack. I gingerly replaced the napkin and sat back on the sofa.

  Alexandra crossed her legs.“It’s nice to meet you, Zoe.”

  “Likewise,” I said, not making eye contact. My eyes were distracted by an object that glittered on her hand. A flare of color, sparkling like stained glass.

  She noticed my look and held out her left hand, where a bulky cocktail ring bedecked the index finger. “It’s a sea turtle,” she explained, revolving the ring. “Sometimes it catches the light and creates a glare. Let me know if it gets in your eyes.”

  I stared at the object. It was costume jewelry, but it looked expensive, somehow. Like one of those antique baubles that rich ladies wear because their real jewels are too valuable to go anywhere except into a locked bank vault. Alexandra’s did, it seemed, depict a sea turtle. The ring had four legs, a shell, and a head with diamond-like eyes. Suddenly my mind was fuzzy from the competing sensations of food, glare, whiteness, and sea turtle.

  “It’s a miraculous animal,” Alexandra said. “Do you know that baby sea turtles can swim at birth?”

  I did not know that.

  “It’s true,” she said, her diction crisper than rye toast. “Imagine, by comparison, if human babies could walk at birth. Imagine if they could sit up, brush themselves off, stroll right out of the delivery room, and fetch a candy bar for themselves from the hospital vending machine.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to this, either.

  Alexandra’s eyes returned to her cocktail ring. “It’s wonderful to think about sea turtles swimming at birth,” she said, tapping the turtle’s shell with a fingernail. “Knowing that such an animal exists makes me intrigued about the world’s possibilities.”

  In the back of my mind, I made another mental note to scout out a similar piece of jewelry on eBay. For Elise’s seventeenth birthday, perhaps. Even though I still have four months to find a gift, I know she’d love it. My mind was wandering.

  “Can I get you any water? Tea?” Alexandra asked.

  “No, thank you,” I said. Given that the room contained no glasses, mugs, pitchers, or boxes of tea, I wondered where the drink would come from. My breakfast sat untouched on the coffee table. It smelled as heavy as it looked. I would not be eating it, obviously. The sight of the covered plate alone was making me ill.

  But where else could I look? Alexandra sat neutrally, her expression empty but vaguely unnerving. She looked familiar. Had I seen her somewhere—? No, my mind was doing weird things, seeking to draw connections where none existed. I waited for Alexandra to ask an opening question, but she sat motionless and in silence. It occurred to me that the offer of water or tea might have been her opening question, in which case, she was waiting for me to open my mouth.

  Well, screw that. Instead I decided to reinspect my oatmeal-raisin bread. I picked it up from the plate, rotated it until I found a corner without too many nuts, sniffed, and put it back down. It was studded with all sorts of suspicious-looking whole grains and looked less like bread than a pile of trail mix formed into a loaf shape. I wiped both hands on the napkin. Now what?

  Alexandra spoke. “Do you mind if I ask what you’re thinking about?”

  I pointed to the slab on my plate. “I was thinking that ‘bread’ is an awfully liberal description for this thing.”

  “Ah.”

  “Why do you ask?” I asked.

  “You seemed to go AWOL for a moment. I was wondering where you went.”

  “Oh. I spaced out.”

  “What do you think about when you space out?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Nothing. I don’t know.”

  “Do you space out often?”

  (What was she getting at?)

  “Everyone spaces out,” I said. “Some people do it more than others. If you’re asking whether I zone out during Latin American history class, the answer is yes. If you’re asking whether I zone out twenty-four hours a day, the answer is no. Obviously. There’s a term for that. The term is ‘insanity.’

  “Look,” I continued. “I’m not going to sit here and try to convince you of anything. Insanity is a zero-sum game—either you’re crazy or you’re sane, but you can’t be both. And I’m not insane.”
>
  “I wasn’t accusing you of insanity, Zoe. We all create little worlds of our own. We do it on a daily basis.”

  Okay, so maybe she wasn’t calling me crazy.

  “Tell me more about when you space out,” Alexandra said. “Have you always been able to disconnect?”

  “Not always.”

  “When did it start?”

  “I have this one memory,” I said. “I was eight years old. My mom has always been strict about letting us watch television, especially when I was little. Cartoons on Saturday was about it. But one night, for whatever reason, she let us eat dinner in front of the TV. Which was a big deal. Major excitement. My brother had control of the remote, which could have been disastrous, except that we instantly agreed on a show to watch. It was about women with extreme plastic surgery. There was one lady who looked exactly like a duck and another who looked as though her face had been assembled from spare celebrity parts. You could actually piece together the individual elements: Angelina Jolie’s lips, Halle Berry’s nose, Julia Roberts’s chin, Jennifer Aniston’s hair. The sum total should have been pretty, but it wasn’t. It was horrifying.

  “Anyhow, at one point I smelled sesame oil and soy sauce in the air. Mom’s making stir-fry again, I thought. We ate a lot of stir-fry. I could hear the pan sizzling as we finished the plastic surgery show and moved on to a new one about heroic dogs. My stomach grumbled. The entire room smelled like garlic and seared chicken, and I was starving. After forty-five minutes of watching canine reenactments, I got up to go into the kitchen, where I found my mom loading the dishwasher. ‘When’s dinner?’ I asked.

  “My mom glanced at me, but continued to rinse out a bowl. ‘Stop it,’ she said.

  “I tried again. ‘I’m hungry,’ I whined. This time, Mom straightened up and got a furrowed look on her face. ‘There aren’t any leftovers tonight. Want cereal? Or …’ She looked vacantly around the kitchen. Then she frowned in a mom-like way—I remember the moment clearly—and came over to where I stood in the doorway. ‘Damn, Zoe’ she said, grabbing the hem of my shirt and scrubbing at it. ‘Sesame oil.’

  “I looked down. There was a sesame oil stain on my shirt. But how had it gotten there? Then I realized: I had eaten dinner. I’d eaten a plate of stir-fry in front of the TV—probably a big one. Who knows? I could barely remember swallowing it down. I hadn’t tasted the food or remembered eating it because I’d been so focused on watching the show. My stomach didn’t even remember, even though it was full of broccoli and diced red pepper. That’s how out of it I was. Completely gone. On another planet.”

  I realized how much I’d been talking and clamped my mouth shut.

  “What did the experience teach you?” Alexandra asked.

  Ugh, what a therapist question.

  “Mainly that the average human is crazier than you’d think.”

  “Do you feel that way?”

  I paused. The meaning of her question was unclear. Was she asking whether I felt crazy? Or whether I believed that most other humans are crazy? I hate when adults ask open-ended questions—I hate the phrase “open-ended question,” period. Questions should always be specific. That’s the whole point of asking them.

  Alexandra registered my hesitation. “What we talk about here stays between you and me,” she assured me.

  “I know.”

  “The exception would be if I had reason to believe that you were at risk of harming yourself.”

  “I’ve been in therapy before. You don’t have to read me my rights.”

  “I see. You know the drill. How about I give you a few specifics, then? While we’re on the subject? We can circle back to your memory in a moment.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  “The first rule is simple. If my door is closed, it means I’m with someone. Otherwise, you are welcome to come in and have a chat any time, if there’s something you’d like to address outside of our scheduled sessions.”

  “Got it.”

  “I’m here from nine a.m. until dinner, but if it’s an emergency, you may ask Devon to contact me. I don’t live far from here.”

  This protocol seemed unlikely to become relevant, but I didn’t dwell on the matter. Instead I let my attention wander to Alexandra’s lipstick, which was the burnt-berry color of raspberry jam. In the white room, her mouth functioned like the signal at a tunnel’s end. Why did she wear such conspicuous lipstick? Maybe it encouraged patients to concentrate on what she was saying.

  I nodded absently until she finished running through the ground rules of therapy. It was nothing I hadn’t heard before in my wide and varied experience with shrinks.

  “Any questions?” she asked at the end of her spiel.

  “Yes,” I said. “Not about the rules, though.”

  “That’s fine. Go ahead.”

  “Can I be honest?”

  “I hope you will be.”

  No problemo, I thought.

  “I’ve been forcibly air-lifted into a house filled with girls who have forgotten how to function like human beings,” I said. “My roommate is unbalanced. I slept for two hours last night and have no way of contacting my family.”

  “That’s actually not true,” Alexandra interjected.

  “What’s not true?”

  “You can contact your family, Zoe.”

  I frowned. “That would be news to me, given that I have no phone or Internet access.”

  “You can write letters.”

  “Letters,” I repeated. “Great. Why stop at letters, though? Why not telegrams? Why not smoke signals?”

  Alexandra smiled indulgently at my little tirade.

  “How about a pair of soup cans connected by a piece of string?” I suggested. “I hear the reception on those things is great.”

  “I’m just pointing out that letters are an option,” Alexandra said. “Are you cold?”

  I looked down at my knees. They were trembling slightly. Had the temperature in the office dropped?

  “It’s freezing in here,” I said. Despite the summer weather outside, my arms were stippled in goose bumps.

  “I’m sorry,” Alexandra said, getting up from her chair. “I should have offered you something when we started.”

  She opened a white lacquered chest and plucked a folded afghan from within, where perhaps a dozen identical blankets were folded and stacked in a tower. I blinked at the sight, recalling the chest upstairs from which Victoria had retrieved last night’s blankets. How many of these chests were there at Twin Birch? Alexandra handed me the blanket, which I draped over my lap. The material was lighter than a cotton ball.

  “Better?” Alexandra asked.

  It was better, but I was too guarded to confirm it. I didn’t like the fact that she had noticed my chilliness before I had. I get nervous when I can’t control other people’s perceptions of me. What else had she noticed?

  “I try to keep the office comfortable, but the room gets drafty in the morning. Clean blankets are always in the chest, and you’re welcome to help yourself any time.”

  “Thanks,” I said, working to keep my voice neutral. Alexandra wore a thin linen tunic and pants, I noticed. But she was evidently unbothered by the frosty air.

  “Hot tea helps, too,” she added.

  I assumed the tea was stashed somewhere in the same chest.

  “Picking up from where we left off earlier,” Alexandra resumed briskly, “I get the sense that you feel disoriented here.”

  “No,” I replied. “If I felt disoriented, that would mean that the solution would be to orient myself. But this is not an issue of adjusting to my environment. This is an issue of me being in the wrong environment entirely.”

  “I see.”

  It was hard to tell if my reply had penetrated her serene, white exterior.

  “Perhaps you’d feel better if you spent some time writing a letter today,” Alexandra suggested.

  “Letters again?” I said, exasperation creeping into my voice. “Are you even listeni
ng to me?”

  “Very closely,” Alexandra said. “Most people, when confused, will either act out or clam up. You’ve done neither since arriving at Twin Birch.”

  “Oh?” I said. “Tell me, then. What have I done?”

  “You’ve watched,” Alexandra said, leaning in to look closely at me. “You’ve noticed.”

  How would you know? I thought. You’d never even seen me until ten minutes ago. An uncomfortable sense of surveillance caused me to tuck the afghan tighter around my knees. Now that her gaze was focused so intently on me, I wished I could assimilate into the whiteness of the room and disappear.

  “You have an eye for the uncommon detail,” Alexandra went on. “For the unexpected.”

  I was silent.

  “My ring,” she continued. “The red box outside my office door. You noticed both immediately.”

  “I was curious,” I said. “Anyone would be curious about the box.”

  “Quite the opposite,” Alexandra said. “I’m impressed with how inquisitive you are.”

  “Thanks, I guess, “I muttered. “What’s the box for, anyways?”

  “The red box is for outgoing mail. I empty it at the end of the day and bring any letters to the post office.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You sound disappointed.”

  “I was hoping for a more interesting explanation.”

  Alexandra stood up and walked to her desk, where she soundlessly opened a drawer. I wondered what she stored inside the all-white drawer in the all-white room—Wite-Out? A bag of marshmallows? Blank sheets of paper? She pulled out a box, closed the drawer, and returned to place the box in front of me.

  “I think this will make you feel a lot better,” she said. “But you’re going to have to trust me.”