White Dancing Elephants

by Chaya Bhuvaneswar

  The psychology board of overseers, the girl’s long, provocative silences, her cash, her hair, her smell—these thoughts exhausted Sylvia. She decided, just for one session, to depart from active listening as her main strategy.

  “Maya, if you’re thinking about hurting yourself, I need to know immediately,” Sylvia said, making her voice firm. “Stop playing games. Just tell me straight out. Do you need to be admitted? Do you need to be put somewhere safe starting tonight? Do I need to send you to an ER? Is that why you’ve suddenly brought this up to me?”

  Maya looked by turns stunned, afraid, then mad. “You’d fucking lock me up?” she said. “Just for saying ‘jump off the roof’ one single time? That’s it?”

  “You used a phrase that connotes suicide, and you won’t tell me anything more,” Sylvia said. “I could get someone to lock you in, yes.”

  “But you couldn’t lock me in if I left now,” Maya said, standing up.

  Sylvia shook her head. “I still could. In fact, your leaving suddenly would make it more likely. I’d have to tell the police I couldn’t keep you safe because you wouldn’t talk to me and fled. And then they’d take you to the Mount Auburn ED. If I called them right now— ” Sylvia said, hating the way her gut twisted at the sight of Maya’s frozen expression, “—yes, Maya, if I called them right now, they’d come for you.”

  “But I didn’t make a threat,” said Maya, sounding serious and hurt. “I was just saying how I felt. That I felt you didn’t care for me.”

  “But I do care,” Sylvia said, too fast.

  Maya, still standing, closer now to Sylvia than usual, stared at her with a perplexed smile.

  “You mean—you never told me. Not married. No kids. Holy mackerel, Dr. Uwagaba. Girls?”

  Sylvia shook her head. “Don’t take a step back when you’ve taken steps forward today. Don’t start acting out. You’re doing excellent work today.”

  “I knew it, you don’t care,” Maya said. “You aren’t attached to me at all, not even as my therapist. You just don’t want to be perceived as not caring. That was why you answered so quickly.”

  Sylvia didn’t move, sensing more to come.

  Maya laughed. “You’re basically disgusted by me, aren’t you?” Sylvia raised her eyebrows but didn’t speak. Some impulse or habit made her check the clock at that moment. It didn’t lie.

  “The session’s up,” Sylvia said, “but I need to know something.”

  Maya sat down again. “You’re keeping me over?” she asked. Sylvia winced at the bare hope in her voice. “And you’re not charging me for extra minutes? Wow. You’re like a really generous hooker.” At Sylvia’s silence, Maya laughed. “It must mean I’m your regular.”

  Sylvia stayed focused, not breaking eye contact. “I want you to check in with me by phone once a day for the next couple of days.”

  “Check in about what?”

  “I want to know if you have any thoughts of suicide. Do you, Maya?”

  “Well, it’s not like I’d tell you now. Knowing that you’d call the police.”

  “Telling me decreases the likelihood that we would need to go that far. But I have an obligation, you know. Since you said that. To have another doctor examine you.”

  “Examine me, like a corpse,” Maya said. “Morbid.”

  Sylvia leaned forward, sustaining eye contact.

  Maya spoke first. “Okay, fine. I’ll play your game. I do think about being dead sometimes. Not killing myself or hurting myself in any way. Just having everything be done so I can’t fail—like I would be exempt from being judged.”

  Sylvia nodded, listening.

  “So now your turn. Do you ever feel like that?” Maya asked Sylvia, moistening her lips.

  “Fail at what, Maya?” Sylvia asked, sidestepping the question. “Fail in what way?”

  “Fail at everything,” Maya whispered. “Fail at being married off in time to the right rich, good-looking Indian guy. Fail at maintaining the one or two friendships I have with good-enough guys who aren’t the right ones and I could never marry—but might someday, if I had to. Fail by losing even my good-enough backup Indian guys. The ones who come off as...durable.”

  “But why do you have to get married at all,” Sylvia almost asked, but stopped herself, not wanting to betray the irrelevant feeling of panic that came over her at the suggestion of Maya marrying someone. She settled on saying absolutely nothing, remembering her technique. Let her open the next door, she thought. Don’t assume you know which one it is.

  “There’s no way I’ll ever escape my parents if I don’t get married,” Maya said. “It’s that simple.”

  This time Sylvia didn’t hold back. “What is it about them that you want to escape?”

  Maya stood up. “Isn’t the session over? Don’t you want me to go?”

  A loud knock made both of them turn toward the door.

  “Next patient,” Maya said, starting to go. “I get it. I’m out.” Flipping her hood up, she skulked toward the door. “And by the way, I’d never kill myself. Too proud. Too young to die. Also—I would miss sex.”

  Sylvia didn’t move from her seat as quickly as she normally would, to jot down her progress note before the next patient. There was no time. Patient after patient came in, each one in general admiring and respectful of Sylvia, with only one other patient, the one whose session began late, just slightly irreverent, probing for some sign of weakness, asking when Sylvia was “going to get married, have kids, be normal, or else what’s the point of even being a therapist, seeing as you can’t fix yourself.”

  The patient who’d said that last bit, an Italian man in his sixties, someone whose affluent adult children were paying his bills, paying quite a lot, had always been challenging, but until today, Sylvia had felt invulnerable to those moments when his working-class assumptions—that a woman needed a husband and children to be “normal”—came out. The minute she closed the door behind him, Sylvia wondered, really deeply examined, why she hadn’t called the police as soon as Maya left the room. Why she had stood there bargaining with the girl. If Maya betrayed her by hurting herself—if something terrible happened—

  She left a message for Maya, reminding her to check in before noon the next day with a brief call. “Hope you are well,” Sylvia said, wincing at how stiff and formal she sounded. But at least she didn’t sound intimate.

  It didn’t occur to her until nearly six, when there was a two-hour gap between her day patients and the few who came to her sessions at night: How could any patient—not just Maya, but other patients, know for a fact that Sylvia was unmarried, without kids? Sylvia popped open her laptop and Googled herself, looking forward to seeing the listing of accomplishments, degrees and articles, that would appear under her name.

  Sylvia Uwagaba PhD, Behavioral Partners. A long list of articles, the prize-winning essay she’d written for a journal years ago. Nothing about children, family, marital status—but there it was, the deed to Sylvia’s parents’ house on the Mass Registry, and listed next to her name was “No Spouse” and also “Dependents None.” The fact that she slept alone at night, after her various boyfriends had sexed her and then gone home, was knowledge anyone could get, along with precisely where her parents lived in Lexington.

  Using Google Earth, strangers could look inside their bay windows. Could even see Sylvia, and Sylvia’s father, though he’d always been fiercely private.

  Sylvia closed her laptop, feeling sick. How many times had she walked semi-nude and careless behind those windows? How many patients had looked through those windows and seen her?

  Before leaving her office that night, Sylvia documented in the clinical chart religiously. Risk and so on. The respectable and recognized steps she’d taken and would take as a therapist, to lessen the risk of Maya committing suicide. But nowhere did she write the truth about how she felt—how, when she was by herself, Sylvia recognized her revulsion as desire plus fear, and relived dreams, with exquisite detail, in which she and Maya were
naked in bed.

  Sylvia didn’t really want the dreams to go away or be explained. She’d never told her former supervisor she’d been having them. They came to mind sometimes when she was waiting for the start of Maya’s sessions, twice a week. Instead she determined that she would never see Maya again, not in this lifetime, except in the presence of a second therapist in the room with them, and not just any therapist. A trainee to witness how Sylvia behaved with Maya. A trainee who’d never read Sylvia’s thoughts.

  2.

  Asking someone to tag team the treatment ended Maya’s interest in being treated, but Sylvia was too relieved to care. Now they were nearly six months along, well into the spring.

  Initially, Maya had made some comments here and there.

  “How the fuck can you live with yourself?” Maya had hissed, refusing to make eye contact with Abner, the trainee Sylvia had selected, refusing even to acknowledge he was in the room at first. The girl had come in and barely glanced at him. Maya even, on one occasion, reached out to touch Sylvia on the knee—only to pull her brown hand back, looking ashamed, when Abner’s high, surprised, refined voice intruded, cheerily asking her if “you as the patient have any questions, any questions at all, about how therapy works and what we’re all about.” At that question, Sylvia looked at him askance, wondering if the young man realized what he was implying—that Sylvia, an analyst with thirty more years of experience than he had, had somehow failed to educate Maya in the basics of therapy.

  Sylvia marveled at how quickly he said it, how confident he was. That he could so readily believe he knew something, some clinically essential and salient detail, that Sylvia, though she had four degrees and he had one, hadn’t thought of.

  A week later, after that first, seemingly impossible session, Maya had made a cryptic threat. Used words that worried Sylvia. Later, Abner insisted it was all benign.

  “What if I had a way to burn it all?” Maya had said, staring at Sylvia, flicking her lighter on and off for a few clicks, till Abner, polite, asked if she minded him holding it for the session. She’d laughed while passing it to him, still looking at Sylvia, chuckling and saying, “You know that white boy’s keeping it to light his weed. You know it, right?” Abner smiled back.

  “A way to burn it all,” Sylvia repeated slowly, interested, alert to what this meant.

  But Abner, cutting off Sylvia without seeming to notice, turned to Maya, saying, “You’re referencing Fear Factory, aren’t you?” he asked, chipper for what Sylvia assumed was talk about a horror film, but then learned was a punk or metal band, the type of music for which Maya’s nose ring did make perfect sense. “Burn It All” a new album title. Their following banter—friendly, casual—made Sylvia relax just a little. Maya had never burned herself. She had no history of arson.

  Perhaps the instinct had been right, to find a young trainee, a younger therapist in the peer group of the patient. After all, with only a few sessions of being permitted to see Sylvia only with Abner, Maya stopped dropping any hints of suicide.

  To make sure Maya would never guess the truth, Sylvia also took to wearing rings, multiple, eye-catching, two or three chunky things flanking a wedding ring. Different ones on each finger—Lucite, silver, a turquoise one Ken sent from Phoenix—but always the same one on the ring finger, a classy platinum wedding band. With Abner sitting there so vigilant, taking notes, scarcely breaking eye contact with Maya, the girl never asked Sylvia about the single ring, though she stared at it in every session. Not that Sylvia was engaged to be married. Sylvia wasn’t planning on a husband and kids—not when she was younger, and not now, with tenure so near.

  Frightfully near, and she was still so young. The first woman of color to make tenure at the academic hospital only half-jokingly known as Man’s Greatest Hospital, and before age fifty, no less. The same hospital where she had once been the first black woman psychology intern, object of obvious scrutiny and condescending warmth—like her father when he’d integrated the bank where he’d been hired out of business school, Sylvia remembered, moved. Daddy’s girl. Sylvia now also knew what it was like to be courted by the higher-ups, with several months of meetings, smiles and promises, and rich dinners in clubs, after having been slighted in subtle (and not so subtle) ways for many years.

  Sylvia’s trainee, the technologically adept Dr. Abner Stein was a very nice, allergy-prone, skinny white man who’d recently been assigned to Sylvia through his number-one-ranked internship. His enthusiasm for social media, and for his smartphone even during therapy didactic meetings, Sylvia had been meaning to talk to him about, but he was otherwise a terrific young clinician by all accounts, and maybe someone (Sylvia hoped!) with whom Maya could build alliance.

  In one session, the one that ended up being their next to last, Maya put a hand up, so Abner wouldn’t talk, and then asked Sylvia: “Do you think you might have already forgotten me?”

  Her voice was so plaintive, so direct, that in that moment Sylvia almost was transparent. If they had been alone she would have disclosed, she realized then. Told Maya, no, that she expected she’d never forget. Confessed to Maya that she would always think of her.

  It was a blessing, Sylvia thought afterward, a blessing, really, that Abner, true to form, had prevented Sylvia from answering. “I’m interested, and wondering if you’re also interested, in this notion of what forgetting means,” he’d launched in, ignoring Maya’s hand in his face, and starting a canned talk on trauma, memory, and the media that Sylvia didn’t listen to. Was glad she didn’t have to listen to. It was the tone he cultivated—friendly, professional, and just a tiny shade condescending—that diverted Maya. That made her look at her lap in what Sylvia could have sworn was shame. That made her, in fact, never, in session, look directly at Sylvia again.

  Yes, between Abner being as friendly as a well-meaning Quaker town hall leader even when Maya ignored him, and Maya’s inexplicable cleanliness nowadays, hair neat and combed, clothes fresh, even her shoes professional, and Sylvia’s own pleasant absorption in matters of career, of her true heart—life was all right.

  During the last week of April, right before the big departmental meeting on tenure, Maya stopped coming in at all, just leaving one voice message: “I’m done with therapy. I’ll see my PCP for meds if I need them. Don’t try to call me. Don’t bother.” Of course, Abner’s documentation of his follow-up, his phone calls and messages to Maya, his coordination with her primary care doctor, were all impeccable, reflective of the impeccable training Sylvia provided him. Everything had been tied up.

  This warm spring day, the clear and exciting Monday of the critical tenure meeting, when the weekend hadn’t brought any ominous news, not about Maya, not about any patient, Sylvia was driving home in fine spirits, waiting and not minding the wait.

  Vivaldi was on her sound system, turned low so she could easily Bluetooth to her phone when The Call came. Deer raced safely in the woods next to her road, away from cars; Lexington was lush but well controlled, Minute Man Park as lovely as ever, and Wilson Farms had an especially large shipment of Sylvia’s favorite red plums. She’d bought a whole crate.

  They were so sweet and so cold, she was thinking, trying to recall the exact words of the William Carlos Williams poem, the one Maya had recited in a session once, without Sylvia commenting, at the time.

  At 4:25 p.m. that afternoon, when she was only half a mile from home, an unexpected call came to her cell—but it was fine, her favorite senior faculty ally at the medical school, not on the tenure committee and therefore free to talk to her.

  But maybe something had happened. Stopping the music, Sylvia panicked. “A patient?” Sylvia asked, praying it was not. “A suicide?” Instantly, she feared for Maya.

  Her friend paused. “No Sylvia, dear, not a suicide. Just a weird incident. They’re looking into it, okay, it’s nothing yet, but I wanted you to know, in case. The meeting that they’d planned to have, to do the vote, has been indefinitely postponed. You know, in case there’s anythi
ng…” Sylvia’s old friend repeated this word, “anything” again.

  “Anything like what? More papers?” Sylvia asked. “More evidence of my scholarship? What do they want? What else?”

  “No, no, Sylvia. No one doubts you as a clinician and scholar. It’s just this young woman—”

  “Maya.” The name came out before she could help it.

  “Oh, so you know?”

  “I only guessed,” said Sylvia, grim.

  “The girl has posted an obscene video on the Internet, and she’s saying that somehow you sponsored it, and knew about it. Good heavens. That you orchestrated it. That you gave her keys and all sorts of access to your things and even to your family? That you gave her a credit card, somehow? It’s quite obscure. Abner Stein was the one who brought it to my attention. He came across a link or something on YouTube? MeTube? Some kind of Tube I’ve known about only for the past hour, so forgive me. A video, and not just an image—”

  “Image of what?”

  “Not just a—well.” Her old mentor paused, clearing her throat. “You’d better see it for yourself.”

  “Do you think I should? Isn’t it better to—”

  “Sylvia, you need to decide if lawyers are warranted. The girl looks like she went into your house. And the man with her. Whoever it is. An older African American man. He could have been intoxicated and a burglar too, for all I know. They’re saying—ah, but I don’t know who he really is. You can fight this. She’s saying you knew and set this up. That you and she were intimate. All defamation, we expect. But still, your case records—could there have even been some small impropriety, explaining how on earth she gained access?”

  “No.”

  “This young woman seems to have gone inside your parents’ house—I’ve been there, it really does look like the house, it’s so distinctive, is the thing. The antique chairs, the lovely furniture.”