by Jane Heller
“How…did…that…make…you…feel?” Louise asked, looking pleased that we were getting right to the meat of things.
“Angry,” I said.
“Tell…me…about…the…anger.”
So I did. I told her how I’d been angry and resentful toward Mitchell for most of our marriage but had never expressed it. I told her that he had always been critical of me, judgmental, unwilling to accept me as I was. I told her that I hadn’t really loved him but had stayed with him because I was afraid to displease him and, in the end, had displeased him so much he left me for another woman.
“Tell…me…about…your…parents,” said Louise, seemingly out of the blue. Then I remembered that she was a shrink and shrinks always traced your problems back to your parents.
I told her about Ira and Estelle Greenberg. All about them. How my father’s allergy to ragweed and my mother’s allergy to snow had motivated them to move to Florida from New Jersey when my brother and I were babies. How my father, a stockbroker, had gone to work at the newly opened Banyan Beach office of Merrill Lynch. How my mother, a social climber, had gotten herself on committees to renovate historic buildings, support local artists, beautify the public parks, etc. How their lives had been defined by their relentless pursuit of acceptance, their overriding need to fit in. Whether it was because they were new in town and desperate to make friends, whether it was because they were Jewish and felt they already had two strikes against them, or whether it was because they were just hopelessly insecure, they were always following the crowd, always fearing ostracism, always obsessing over the ubiquitous “they.” My mother, especially. “They aren’t wearing brown this year,” she would announce. Or: “They say those people aren’t worth getting to know.” Or: “They wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like that.” My brother and I used to joke that it wasn’t our parents who raised us; it was “they” who dictated what we ate, wore, read, watched on television.
“So…you…married…your…parents,” Louise said.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“You chose to marry a man who made you feel as weak and insignificant as your parents did.”
“I suppose so,” I conceded.
Louise asked me about my parents’ deaths, which I rarely discussed with anyone.
“They were killed in a car accident,” I said.
“How…did…that…make…you…feel?” she asked.
God, that question again. The woman was a broken record.
“How do you think it made me feel?” I said, becoming uncomfortable. I hated the subject of my parents’ accident. It was too painful, too complicated.
“Tell…me…about…the…accident,” said Louise.
After some false starts, I told her how my parents were on their way to Palm Beach to have lunch with a man my father hoped to snare as a client. They were traveling south on I-95 when a mattress came loose from the roof of some guy’s van and landed smack in the center lane, where my parents were cruising along in their silver Cadillac Seville at fifty-five miles per hour. My father swerved to get out of the way of the flying mattress, shot into the right lane and collided with a tractor trailer that was on its way into the center lane. My brother got the call from the police and came over to the house to tell me that our parents were dead.
“How…did…you…feel…when…he…told…you?” said Louise.
I didn’t answer right away. I couldn’t. The little lump that had formed in my throat when she first started asking about the accident had grown to the size of a grapefruit.
“Guilty,” I said finally.
“Guilty? Why? You weren’t driving your parents’ car, were you?”
“No.”
“You weren’t driving the tractor trailer, were you?”
“No.”
“And you weren’t driving the van with the mattress on it, were you?”
“No.”
“Then why did you feel guilty? You didn’t cause your parents’ accident.”
“Yes, I did.” My throat closed again, and this time I began to cry—big, heavy, wrenching sobs. Louise leaned over to hand me a box of tissues.
“How?” she asked.
“I…They…called me from their car phone a few minutes before the accident,” I managed between sobs.
“What about?”
“It was a silly thing. Really. A silly, nothing thing that turned into—” I started to cry again.
“Take your time,” said Louise.
“I’m okay,” I said, trying to pull myself together. Dr. Schaffran’s fifty-minute sessions didn’t come cheap. I wanted to be sure I got my money’s worth.
“Tell…me…what…happened,” Louise urged.
I took a deep breath. “My parents called me from the car to say they were having a dinner party that Saturday night and expected Mitchell and me to come. I said I wasn’t sure if we could make it. I mean, I had no desire to sit around with my parents’ friends and perform like a circus act, just because I was expected to. I had a life of my own—or at least I tried to. But my parents insisted that Mitchell and I show up. Insisted! I was a grown woman, yet they were still ordering me to do things I didn’t want to do—and I let them do it. I couldn’t stand up for myself. Not to them. Not to anyone.”
“But the day of the accident you did stand up for yourself?” asked Louise.
I shook my head. “I said, ‘Of course Mitchell and I will come to your party.’ In the end, I always caved in. And I always hated myself for it. I loved my parents, I really did, but I resented them for making me feel so helpless, so impotent.”
Louise didn’t say anything. I guess she was waiting for me to continue, so I did.
“I hung up the phone and worked myself up into a rage, not about the dinner party, but about the power my parents had over me. Mitchell wasn’t home at the time so I just let my emotions rip. I took a photograph of them off the fireplace mantel and shouted at it. At one point I said, ‘I wish you both were dead!’ But I was just angry and frustrated, the way a kid gets during a tantrum. I was being childish. Irrational. I didn’t mean it. I really didn’t mean it.”
I hung my head and started to cry again.
“Of course you didn’t mean it,” she said, her voice soothing.
“But I said it,” I countered. “I wished they were dead and then the accident happened. Probably at the very second I said the words. My parents’ deaths were my fault, don’t you see? I had wanted to cause them harm and it came true, just like it was my fault that Mitchell and Chrissy got burned by the cappuccino, that Jeremy’s tire went flat and all the rest.”
I couldn’t go on. I was worn-out.
Louise nodded and wrote things down and waited for me to blow my nose before resuming our conversation.
“Barbara,” she said with compassion, “stop punishing yourself. You didn’t kill your parents and you didn’t cause all the other things to happen. You’ve set up this scenario as a fantasy.”
“Some fantasy.”
“What I’m saying is, by imagining that you bring about these calamities, that you’re the one who causes them, you give yourself power—power you never believed you had. But you didn’t cause any of it, Barbara. You didn’t.”
“I didn’t?”
“No. You’re suffering from the delusion that you caused these people harm. There’s something in it for you to do that. In psychotherapeutic terms, there’s a ‘secondary gain’ for you to believe you’re harming others.”
I shrugged. It was all psychobabble to me.
“There are healthier ways to feel powerful,” she said. “And once we’ve done more work together, you’ll begin to see that.”
“More work together?” I said.
“Yes,” said Louise. “Your problems are serious, Barbara. I’ll want to see you three or four times a week.”
“But I can’t afford to come three or four times a week,” I protested.
“You can’t afford not to,” she said gravely.
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nbsp; I didn’t go home after my session with Dr. Schaffran. I didn’t want to be alone. Not after she insinuated that I was a lunatic. Who knows what I might do if left to my own devices? So I drove to the pier that overlooked the St. Lucie River, parked the car, and sat there, staring out over the water until the sun went down. I had hoped the tranquil scene would ease my anxiety, but it hadn’t. The session with Dr. Schaffran had stirred up too many memories, too many feelings I had tried hard to bury.
Once it got dark, I decided to drive over to Ben’s cabin. I wanted to confide in him, to tell him what I’d been going through, to lean on him. He was family. He had lived under the same roof with my parents. He would understand.
When I pulled up to the cabin I noticed that there were cars in the driveway, including Ben’s beat-up old Volkswagen Beetle, but no lights on inside the house. Could they all be asleep? I wondered. It was only eight o’clock.
I walked up to the front door and knocked. No answer. I knocked again. Still no answer. I peered inside a window and saw a flickering of light but couldn’t tell where it was coming from. I went back to the front door and knocked again. No one responded. Then I heard something: There was music coming from inside the house. Obviously, somebody was home.
God, they’re probably having an orgy, I thought suddenly. They’re all piled on top of each other, committing lewd and illegal acts. With Ben, anything was possible.
Still, I did want to talk to him, so I tried the door and discovered that it was open. Tentatively, I stepped inside and attempted to get my bearings. It was dark in the small living room where I stood, and yet even in the daylight it was hard to figure the place out. Ben had built the cabin himself and it looked it. It had absolutely no “architectural integrity,” as we say in the real estate trade. No curb appeal whatsoever. It was just a series of unmemorable rooms that meandered one into the other with no color scheme or decor or flow. Ben wanted it to be primitive and it was. In other words, if you’re picturing one of those charmingly rustic cabins in the Adirondacks, forget it. Ben’s place was more trailer park than Relais et Châteaux.
“Hello?” I called out. “Anybody home?”
All I could hear were the sounds of a musical instrument which, after a few seconds, I recognized as a sitar. I laughed. Ben was probably listening to his Ravi Shankar records again.
“Ben? It’s Barbara,” I called out as I walked toward the back of the cabin, in the direction of the music.
There was no answer so I kept going. When I got to the screened porch, I found Ben and his friends and discovered why they had been too preoccupied to come to the door: they were in the middle of another séance. A half dozen people were sitting around a table on which there were several candles flickering in the light breeze, complementing the moonlight. Everyone appeared to be in a state of deep concentration; their eyes were closed and they were perfectly still. Of course, there was always the possibility that they were asleep. Too much Ravi Shankar music could do that to a person.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” I said.
They all opened their eyes and stared at me.
“Barbara. I didn’t hear you come in,” Ben smiled. “Pull up a chair and join us.”
Without asking me why I had arrived at his house uninvited or showing even a hint of surprise that I was there, he held open his arms. I went over to him and gave him a hug. I had almost forgotten how warmhearted and kind he was, how loving, no matter how long it was since we had seen each other. He really did buy into the peace, love, and happiness thing. It wasn’t an act with him and never had been.
I had also forgotten how much we looked alike—at least, before my transformation. He had gray hair and blue eyes and strong features and was on the pudgy side, like I used to be. He reminded me of a mad scientist, the way his hair stuck out in all directions. An Einstein in a tie-dyed shirt and love beads.
“Is it the candlelight or do you look amazing?” he said as he held me at arm’s length. “Jeremy said you’d had some kind of makeover, but I didn’t believe him.”
“Oh, I just lost a few pounds and colored my hair,” I said nonchalantly. I wasn’t about to unburden myself to Ben in front of a bunch of strangers.
“Well, whatever you did, you’re a knockout,” he said. “Everybody, meet my knockout of a sister.”
Ben introduced me to his new girlfriend, Janice, and her older sister, Denise, and to two other women, whose names were Wendy and Gail. By way of describing them, I’ll simply say that, like Ben, they were wearing tie-dyed shirts and love beads. I felt as if I’d stepped into a dinner-theater production of Hair.
“And this is Constance,” he said proudly, pointing to the woman at the head of the table. “She’s a medium.”
“How nice,” I said. Constance was in her seventies, I guessed. She had white hair down to her shoulders and wore a black dress and black hat. All that was missing was her broomstick.
I sat down in the empty chair next to Ben. “Please go on with whatever you were doing,” I told everybody. I could talk to Ben some other time, I figured. What I really needed was a distraction. Something to take my mind off my own problems. I assumed the séance would do just that.
“We’re trying to contact Janice and Denise’s grandmother,” Ben explained.
“Again? I thought you already did that,” I said.
“We didn’t have any luck the other night,” he said. “That’s why we called Constance and asked her to help us this time. She communicates with the spirit world on a regular basis.”
I glanced over at Constance, who had closed her eyes once again and appeared to be in a trance.
“Just focus your energies on Grandma Patrice,” Ben whispered to me.
“I never knew Grandma Patrice,” I reminded him.
“Shhhh,” Janice hissed. “Constance can’t work if there are negative vibrations in the room.”
“Sorry,” I said.
I closed my eyes and tried to picture a grandmotherly sort of woman who made great meat loaf. The mental image that came to me was a cross between Julia Child and Aunt Jemima.
“Oh!” cried Constance, breaking her silence. “Oh, my!”
“Is it Grandma Patrice?” asked Denise. “Have you contacted her spirit?”
“Oh! Oh! The spirits are telling me to be careful,” Constance shouted. “Very careful.”
“Of what?” asked Janice. “Grandma Patrice was a sweetheart.”
Constance shook her head vehemently. “They’re not giving me…I can’t read their…Oh! Oh!…I’m not sure I can go on…not sure I can stay here…”
Here we go, I thought, wondering how much Ben and the others were paying Constance for this performance.
“What is it, Constance?” asked Gail. “Please tell us.”
“The spirits are saying I…we…are in terrible danger,” she said, turning the drama up a notch.
“What kind of danger?” Ben asked. We had all opened our eyes by this time and were hanging on Constance’s every word.
She clutched her hands to her bosom, furrowed her brow and said very theatrically, “They have warned me that there’s a powerful negative entity in this room. A force of great darkness.”
“In this room?” said Ben.
Constance nodded.
I tried not to laugh or even smirk, but it seemed to me that Constance had a great racket going, getting paid to show up at people’s houses and scare them to death. I was about to ask her if her spirits could be more specific about the “powerful negative entity” when the candles on the table blew out.
“Hey. What was that?” said Ben.
“Must have been a gust of wind,” I said.
“I didn’t feel any gust of wind,” said Gail.
“Neither did I,” said Wendy.
“The negative entity is showing itself,” Constance said with authority.
“Wow,” said Ben. “I’ve never—”
He was interrupted by an abrupt halt in the music. For no apparent reason, the
Ravi Shankar record ceased to play.
Ben got up and checked the stereo system to see if there had been a power failure.
“The juice is still there, but the music stopped,” he said, looking mystified. “I mean, the turntable is still moving, but there’s no sound coming out.”
“Maybe you need a new needle,” I suggested.
“Maybe,” he said, sitting back down next to me.
“It’s not the needle,” said Constance resolutely. “It’s the force of darkness.”
Nobody said anything for several seconds. Then Janice started making sniffing noises.
“What’s wrong?” Ben asked her.
“I smell something. Something really gross,” she said, holding her nose.
“Oh, God. I smell it too,” said Denise. “It’s foul.”
I sniffed but didn’t smell anything.
“It’s putrid,” Wendy chimed in.
“It’s…It’s…” Gail was groping for her own description of the odor that seemed to be offending everyone but me. “It’s like—”
“BRUSSELS SPROUTS!” the four women shouted in unison. “IT SMELLS LIKE BRUSSELS SPROUTS!”
I felt a chill pass through me as I recalled that Jeremy and Suzanne had commented on my breath, on the fact that it smelled like Brussels sprouts.
“The force of darkness often reveals himself through his foul odor,” Constance explained.
The force of darkness? A negative entity? What did all this New Age mumbo jumbo have to do with me and my breath?
“Do you smell it, Ben?” I asked him with bewilderment.
“No, but my septum’s really deviated. I can’t smell anything.”
Suddenly, there was a blinding flash of lightning, followed by a loud clap of thunder.
“Looks like we’re about to have some rain,” Ben said.
But no rain came. The moon disappeared behind a dark cloud, plunging us into almost-total darkness, and the thunder and lightning grew fierce and unrelenting. Yet the threatening weather did not produce a single drop of moisture.