White Dancing Elephants

by Chaya Bhuvaneswar

  From the beginning, feeling that things were sure to turn around, Maya denied that anything serious brought her to therapy. Therapy was just “covering her bases” or “ taking advantage of how Boston had so many shrinks.” It was something Maya’s internist, a real doctor, not just a psychologist or “a mere social scientist” like Sylvia, had pressed upon her, even writing Sylvia’s address on a prescription pad.

  The internist diagnosed Maya as being “a little depressed.”

  “But it’s not like I’m having a nervous breakdown, you know?” Maya had said. And anyway, these days, for patients like Maya who held down jobs and weren’t doing drugs, big-impact nervous breakdowns went in slow motion if they happened at all, like young leaves quietly fading into brown before they curled up and, disintegrating, disappeared.

  Maya was already a beautiful shade of brown—a much darker shade than Sylvia herself, though, in the political color scheme, it was Maya, not Sylvia, who was considered nearly white. White enough so that there was an Indian-American governor in Louisiana nowadays.

  Sylvia had read about the Christian-converted Indian-American Southern man while sitting in her mother’s warm kitchen at home, turning pages slowly and halfway listening to the perpetual sound she knew she’d never get away from, her father talking back to Rush Limbaugh or some other right-leaning blowhard on the air. Daddy ranting from his room during commercial breaks, about how disgusting it was that now the KKK white folks and all their unrighteous brethren could call on the monkey immigrants, the currysmelling, greedy Indians, the fucking Hindoos, to do some of their dirty work and call it “diversity.”

  Sylvia’s mother hadn’t grown up hearing language like that about Indians. Sylvia’s grandmother was an old white Democratic fundraiser. Sylvia’s Virginia-born grandfather was the descendant of slaves who’d escaped. Sylvia’s mother listened carefully to Sylvia’s uncharacteristic condemnation of affluent, educated Maya with her Indian doctor parents, listened to Sylvia say “this patient” in an irritated tone of voice. Listened to her complain about how offensive it was to have cash dumped on the table every session. About how Maya must think of Sylvia as being a black cleaning lady, to pay her that way.

  “But what is it about the poor child that bothers you this much?” she’d wanted to know, the last time Sylvia vented—prompting Sylvia to refrain from telling Mother anything else about Maya.

  You can’t become a therapist by being nice, Sylvia would have said, if she were still sixteen, or twenty-two, and not age forty-seven, and therefore past debating with her mother. But Mother’s empathy rankled. Fine to have empathy, if you didn’t have patients seeking to devour you. Fine to have kindness, if you couldn’t be ruined.

  Any decent therapist knew that being too empathic got in the way of being a therapist. You couldn’t be soft. You had to fend for yourself.

  Sylvia had wasted enough time, earlier in her career, on rumination and compassion for difficult patients. In her ridiculously detailed care for others, she had missed out on her own life.

  Acknowledged or not, in psychoanalysis there usually was the smell of blood—people were brutal when exposed and vulnerable. People could hurt, especially when they were trying to take from the therapist what their own parents had not given them. They’d strike out if you didn’t watch. Keeping up your guard while smiling warmly—that was the ticket.

  Sylvia’s mother had never had to keep up much of a guard, Sylvia’s father always said. Eugenia resembled her little white grandmother, for one thing, with very soft stick-straight hair. She had the hair of a Sicilian girl who had been fed well, treated kindly, led to expect a comfortable life. Sylvia herself hadn’t inherited hair that both black and white strangers referred to as “good.” And Sylvia’s mother, in addition to having a near-encyclopedic knowledge of French wines, early American furniture, and antebellum history, was, unlike Sylvia, a poet. Not an analyst of any kind.

  “These are my other children,” Sylvia’s mother would say, gesturing at her eleven published books, each of which had mostly been written (she would admit, but only after Sylvia grew up) during long afternoons and entire weekends spent alone, instead of being a mother.

  In addition to the slim, prize-winning volumes of poetry that were proudly displayed in a mahogany bookcase, built by Sylvia’s father, that sat behind the antique Shaker rocking chair in her parents’ living room, Sylvia’s mother had quietly pulled off another accomplishment: she was known in Boston for her annual seminar, one for which she accepted only three poets. The culmination of the seminar was an evening at which her annointed young poets were invited to read the best poem they’d ever written while seated on the Shaker chair, fashioned for someone hardworking to rest in late at night. Everyone held their breath while each poet squeezed in. Praying their weight wouldn’t break the wood. Savoring that seat of distinction while they recited lines from memory.

  Sylvia’s mother inherited the chair from ancestors who had been taken in, more or less rescued, by the splinter group, the serious men running a Shaker homestead on the Underground Railroad. Blueeyed men like Sylvia’s old supervisor, wearing heavy black shoes, had once smoked pipes and stroked their beards while discussing the fates of fugitive slaves huddled in their Hancock barns.

  While her mother entertained young college acolytes, the students and audience sitting in lotus position on the floor of their living room— nobody daring to touch the Shaker chair, of course—Sylvia’s father was a silent, skeptical presence, moving in and out of earshot, nodding politely, keeping his own secrets, some of which Sylvia knew but wouldn’t tell.

  During these special events, Sylvia the child was relegated to her room. Told to take her milk and cake upstairs. Told above all not to make a disturbance, to stay at the periphery.

  Her father would always come upstairs to her, whispering family stories. Sylvia’s daddy was a banker whose own father had come to America as an engineering graduate student from Kampala, Uganda. Soon after taking his degree, Sylvia’s paternal grandfather quietly married a white woman from Kentucky whose family had once included Klansmen. The couple settled in suburban New Jersey.

  Efraim Nuwagaba, Sylvia’s father, who’d met Sylvia’s mother in Cambridge when both were at Harvard, had grown into a man who wore the mask that grinned and lied in all social and professional settings, except his house. A man whose anger was simple, and often effective. Wise anger he said he learned from his father, whose Lugbara family supported the Amin regime. Whose family acquired fabric stores formerly owned by Indians, when in the early 1970s, around when Sylvia was born, thousands of those smelly dukawallas were kicked out of Uganda for good, their properties seized. A move cheered by black nationalists in the U.S., her father always reminded Sylvia, for whom Idi Amin was like the second coming of Marcus Garvey.

  Sylvia would have felt ashamed of the Ugandans’ pride in killing and exiling Indians, except that the Indian men she’d met in college, even the ones with whom she’d listened to music far into the night, confessed they’d never be allowed to date a black woman. Told her that she was beautiful, sexy, but that they didn’t want to lead her on. They wanted to find a woman they could realistically have children with.

  Her parents’ neighbors in Lexington, Asians for the most part, Indians and Chinese and Koreans, kept their distance. They couldn’t fail to notice her father’s scowl. Sylvia’s might have been the only black family in the neighborhood, but there was never any garbage placed on their lawn, no messages in egg yolks or shaving cream, no stomach-turning graffiti.

  The Lexington neighbors also kept their distance from Sylvia and her mother. With their sweater sets, designer suits, and creative ambitions, Sylvia and Eugenia never had much to say to the Asian women drones who worked for big pharma and always looked harried, shuttling kids to soccer games. The stay-at-home Asian women in their tight-fitting designer sweats were usually the wives of rich white executives, the women in lumpy pantsuits much better educated immigrants. Like those who
’d come from India. Like Sylvia’s patient Maya.

  “It’s a matter of getting respect from Indians. You see, they’ve never really had respect for their black counterparts, Eugenia. They’ve never even seen us as equals,” her father told her mother, after the first and only time Sylvia complained about Maya, and Sylvia nodded with relief at being understood, being allowed her revulsion—thinking of Maya’s nonchalance, her strange ways of communicating, her dirt, her lank hair and unwashed smell. A smell of dark earth. Intoxicating, in a way. But sickening too.

  With only seconds left before the therapy session was due to start, Sylvia shuddered in the refuge of her office, finally hearing Maya’s step. Revulsion, Sylvia thought again. But maybe the patient, like other patients, would improve. Maybe there would be a transformation in the weeks and months ahead, and Maya would come to a session smelling clean, face scrubbed, hair pinned up sleekly, wearing the high-quality pressed skirt suit she wore for her job and taking a cool, discreet credit card out of a designer wallet. A wallet good enough for Sylvia herself to carry. Smiling at Sylvia without an intention to provoke. Taking for granted that both she and Sylvia belonged. That they could support each other. Brown girl, brown woman solidarity. A dream.

  And maybe then Maya would get real. Would show herself, instead of one of any number of pretenders who, like the faces of Eve, could show up on any given day—the torn-up little girl, a helpless and huge-eyed waif asking for Sylvia to please please please rescue her; or Maya the shrewd-eyed seductress; or, worst of all, the fake Maya who got herself up like an unkempt, pathetic Third World whore, without sense or respect. Standing there on garish rickety heels as a humiliation to all women of color, the bad smell of Maya’s body magnified by glaringly cheap clothes that were ill-ftting, too short and tight. Her makeup smeared-on, her hair matted.

  Today Maya arrived for the appointment in subdued, almost neutral garb. She wore an androgynous black ninja hood, loose pants like the white boy skaters around the Harvard T—but when she lifted the hood, an ugly metal piercing linked her nostrils, as if she were a yoked animal, and in her tangled, wavy hair was a wide streak of pinkish-red. Maya as punk. Statue of a Hindu goddess defiled.

  “You like?” Maya asked Sylvia, smiling her gorgeous smile, dumping cash from her pockets onto Sylvia’s orderly antique desk, then slumping onto the edge of the analysand couch, saying nothing and refusing, as usual, to lie down.

  Sylvia nodded, also saying nothing. Let her be the one to begin, her trained internal directive. Let the patient tell you where to go.

  But the silence went on, broken a full minute later by Maya’s rough laugh. Maya’s voice was pitched lower than her age and looks made one expect.

  Sylvia persisted, not saying a word.

  Maya sighed and blew a raspberry, scratching herself under one armpit, snorting as if her nose ring itched.

  All dyke again. Sylvia herself wasn’t gay—just sort of a secular Buddhist meditating on a round silk pillow in a hushed candlelit room in western Mass, going on weeklong retreats followed by spa treatments in the Back Bay, disdaining public and excessive gatherings, like the People of Color sitting in Cambridge that gave black and Latina Buddhist lesbians an easy way to find each other.

  Sylvia was more curious about those lesbians than she ever let on. But her parents, her father in particular, was always saying he was afraid she would be swept away by some alpha male banker or international lawyer—some former fraternity president—and move out of Boston suddenly. Away from her parents. Far from her daddy.

  “Don’t worry about your parents, they’ll be fine if you leave Boston,” her most recent boyfriend (though she was too old for boyfriends) had told Sylvia, after listening to her complain about her father, how exhausted she became from worrying about him. The boyfriend’s name had been Ken, like the doll, and he was white. He’d admired her tiny but tasteful Back Bay apartment, her Benz. He’d shared her taste in furniture.

  Ken was too kind to ever mock or judge Sylvia for how many weekends and evenings she still spent at her parents’ house, as if she were a child, letting them do her laundry, being cared for, never contradicting her father though now she was nearly fifty, and soon she would have to think of hiring nurses for them, of maybe even selecting a nursing home.

  “Just think of it: Santa Fe, New Mexico. While I work on the rez, you set up a community mental health clinic. They need that too, Sylvia. They’d make you director. Psychology, all comers. You’ll have a flourishing clinic in a week. It would be important work. We could even adopt a couple of kids, if you wanted.”

  A couple of Latino or Native American kids, Ken meant, or even black if there were any in New Mexico foster care.

  Ken would never intentionally be selfish about race. He was sincere. He’d never think of Maya as “that smelly Indian,” like Sylvia did. Conceding that she herself was nothing like Ken, Sylvia conjured up Maya all the time, hoping for revulsion.

  In bed, on their final night, Sylvia had kissed Ken on his bare, dark blond hair-covered chest. But that had been six weeks ago, and she’d said no to coming with him, knowing he’d leave Boston anyway. He hadn’t consulted her before accepting the New Mexico job, after all. She couldn’t imagine leaving serious psychoanalysis—because that was what it would mean, leaving her entire world—to go and live in godforsaken Santa Fe. And the isolation of it all, how Sylvia would feel being a black woman in New Mexico, so far, way too close to a border for her to ever wear her hair relaxed or walk around in less than formal clothes for fear she’d be mistaken for a kinky-haired, illegal Mexican—well.

  At L’Espalier, Sylvia and Ken acted like parting roommates, resigned and openly happy to be moving on. “Remember me,” Ken sang out once he was drunk, a baritone version of Sylvia’s favorite aria from the Purcell opera. Then Ken kissed her sweetly, patting her neat dreads as awkwardly as usual. Added, “I shouldn’t have asked you to leave your parents. They’re getting old. You wouldn’t have left them. Especially your dad, you’re so attached. And all your work in the community. You have transformed so many lives. You’re an incredibly engaging and committed therapist.”

  But here was Maya, hardly engaged in treatment, not yet committed.

  Still hoping Maya would talk freely in today’s session, Sylvia pictured the girl walking outdoors in New Mexico. Maya offended at being mistaken for a Latina cleaning lady. Maya looking like she did right now—a drugged-out rebellious little girl of indeterminate brown ethnicity.

  What if Sylvia had run away with Ken to Santa Fe, without telling her dad? That same day, her father would’ve been on a plane to bring her back—to rescue her from “useless Ken,” a white stranger. To save her brilliant academic career. Daddy would have offered her a lavish trip to spend some time with great-aunts and great-uncles in northern Uganda, so Sylvia could better understand how hard her ancestors had worked to create her. How much Daddy had sacrificed to make sure that even the concept of Sylvia—Harvard psychologist, nearly tenured analyst and scholar, antiques collector—would eventually be feasible.

  Maya was staring at her, starting to look amused. “Do you ever find it hard to be with me?” Maya asked. “I mean, does all that money not seem like enough?”

  Waiting a beat, Sylvia said, “I’m interested—and wonder if you also are interested—in why you bring up money now.”

  Maya laughed again. “Well, it’s a lot, and I spend a lot of hours earning it. Who could forget?”

  Sylvia nodded, trying not to look overeager.

  “And I dunno, I could buy shoes with it.”

  “You could,” Sylvia said, in an even voice.

  “It reminds me each time,” Maya paused, watching Sylvia carefully.

  Silence again.

  “Yes?” Sylvia half whispered.

  “It reminds me that I don’t have to come here. That it’s money in the end, money that pays your rent and buys your boots and whatever, money that drives you, just like it drives everyone. You don’t care abou
t me as a human being. I could jump off a building and it wouldn’t change a thing, except you’d have to fill my spot somehow, with someone else who’d pay.”

  Sylvia tensed. In all her sessions, Maya had never once referred to suicide. What had changed now, for her to up the ante in this more primitive way? She swallowed, making an effort to relax and sound merely interested, instead of alarmed. She told herself that at least their real work had begun.

  “Jump off a building,” Sylvia said, her voice neutral. “Why don’t you tell me what you mean.”

  Some of Sylvia’s former supervisors, old women she now saw at the invitation-only soirees of various professional societies, might have leapt more quickly to the type of “combat with certain borderlines” they greatly enjoyed. “Is that a threat?” they would’ve asked, sounding like threateners themselves—working-class fixers, teamsters, the most senior of Whitey Bulger’s boys.

  It wasn’t that Sylvia thought calling Maya’s bluff could make her go and hurt herself. If Maya were like other borderlines—if Sylvia were even confident of the diagnosis. But she wasn’t. There was no proof that she’d experienced abuse, only the odd phrase here and there—“always watching me,” “too close,” “I didn’t like the way it felt when my father hugged me”—and then Maya would sit silent, and not cry or even seem angry.

  The likelihood that the girl had been abused made Sylvia regret her impatience. But Sylvia wouldn’t confide her feelings of guilt to anyone. Being immune to emotional manipulation, for a psychiatrist, was like being fearless about blood, for a surgeon. “The shrinks with too much loving-kindness are the ones who face the board,” Sylvia’s classmate, who was now on the board of psychology, had said. “The ones who can’t draw boundaries, who take the world’s suffering straight onto themselves.”