She

by Shireen Jeejeebhoy

chapter eight

  READING IS A BITCH

  ONE YEAR, THREE days. That’s how long it’s been since that wind blew into her life. She can’t believe it’s been a year and counting, that her life has not yet returned to normal, that her hard work at recovery hasn’t borne fruit. Really hard work, she thinks, sitting, waiting at TARC, staring at the now-familiar white-painted concrete block. She hadn’t signed that prick’s letter, but she still doesn’t know what to do about a lawyer. Through sheer inertia and desperation to go back to her old self, she’s continuing her treatments while paradoxically shoving her troubles into the back of her mind. She has her regular weekly back-to-back physio and acupuncture at Haoma Therapy at the beginning of the week, Dr. Jones in the middle of the week, and sessions at TARC at the end of the week. Jim is still driving her to Haoma, but he emanates resentment. Somehow, someway she has to find the energy to go it alone. This is her goal. He’s going away next week, on a business trip he says, some new consulting job. He’s going to be gone for two weeks — or is it three? Regardless, she doesn’t miss him anymore — hasn’t really since early that windy morning last June — and she loses track of how long he’s gone. It’s sinking in that this lack of caring is not normal, not who she used to be, the person who’d miss him so much she counted the days and hours until his return. Well, it doesn’t matter anymore. He’s going to be gone, and she’s going to practice travelling on her own so that when he returns she won’t need him to drive her anywhere. After all, he’s always complaining she’s too dependent. Well, she’ll show him, the —

  “… are you?” Oops, she’d missed hearing Zenobia walk up to her.

  She smiles, “I’m fine.” Really, she is, considering the physio and acupuncture were particularly taxing this week, and then the session with Dr. Jones was troubling instead of the normal restorative forty-five minutes. He hadn’t used that gizmo she’d grown to like. Instead he’d taught her visualization techniques after using kinesiology techniques to gauge her fear of success. She isn’t afraid of success, he’d discovered. Quite the opposite. Failure was not allowed in Grandmother’s house. Success was tantamount to breathing. She’d told him this, yet he’d looked so surprised when his tests told him that she was not afraid of success. He’d decided then to teach her how to visualize the onion layers covering her fears and to peel them back. Fears she has. She doesn’t want to think about them.

  Two days of drowsing on the couch and television watching helped her recover, but now she’s facing over two hours of rehab. She’s not looking forward to the fatigue and the worsening weight on her chest, like an elephant is sitting on it for some extended snoozing.

  She follows Zenobia down the halls and through the doors to that faux mahogany table. Her chest being on her mind, she blurts, “My chest hurts all the time. I worry that, that I won’t know if I was having a heart attack. Because it’d f-f-feel the way it does now. How would I tell the difference?”

  “Many of my clients complain of chest pain. You’re not alone, and eventually it goes away.”

  “What about the other stuff?”

  “Other stuff?”

  “The, um, the physio and acupuncture. They should help too? So, so, so how come there’s no change yet?”

  “They should. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time. They know best how to manage the physical aspects of your symptoms. Unfortunately, we don’t do that here.”

  “Oh.” After a year of becoming used to her mind’s slower than frozen molasses processing of information, she expects she’ll absorb and have a response to that in forty-eight hours. Sunday. She can look forward to a good cry then; that’s normally her first response.

  “So tell me about good things that have happened to you this week. Name one thing.”

  “One?”

  “Yes, one. I’m sure one good thing has happened. It’s a beautiful June day, the sky is blue. That’s one good thing, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “How about another?”

  She stares out the window behind Zenobia and ponders the blue sky. Well, that is one good thing. She loves Canadian blue skies, so intense, so happy, so, well, so blue.

  Zenobia’s voice interrupts her thoughts, “How about dinner? Or your cat?”

  “My cat? Oh yeah, my cat.” She smiles as she thinks of her cat. “Smokey’s become more of a dog these days. She plays with her claws in now. It’s great not to be s-s-scratched so often. My skin gets all red and itchy for some, some weird reason when she does.”

  “Well, that is good news. I’m really happy for you. Yay you.”

  This is a bit over the top, but then she likes Zenobia’s cheerleading. It’s the one thing she looks forward to all week. No matter how hard her days have been, like this week, or how much others doubt her, she’ll have forty-five minutes with a person who’s cheering for her, who believes her and in her.

  “Today, we’re going to discuss reading strategies. I know how important reading is to you. Remember we discussed that one of your goals would be to return to reading a fantasy novel a day?”

  “Yes. But my reading isn’t all that bad …”

  “Remember how testing showed that you don’t retain new material that you’ve read and you’re self-reporting that you read the same page over and over again and forget who the characters are and what they’re doing? And I’ve noticed you no longer have a book with you when you come.”

  “But I’ve been reading all my life.”

  “We don’t know why reading has become so difficult for you. But we know that here, today, it is. And we need to deal with that, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Great. I’m going to go over a number of reading strategies with you. You can experiment with all of them and see which ones work best for you. Sometimes they’ll all work, sometimes only one or two will work. You’ll be the best judge of which ones work for you.” Zenobia picks up a stapled pile of papers and hands them to her. “These explain the different strategies. Take these home to remind you of what we’ll talk about here.”

  She glances at the top page filled with photocopied black text on whitish paper. Her eyes bounce off the letters like they have force fields protecting them from her. She pushes the pile to her left and refocuses on Zenobia.

  “As we discussed before about any task, the first thing we’ll do is set a SMART goal. Tell me again what a SMART goal is?”

  “It’s specific … measurable, um … attainable, relevant, and,” she pauses and looks up to her right then back at Zenobia. “Timely!”

  “Right! That’s great. So we’ll set a SMART goal for your reading. Tell me about a book you read before you developed AS.”

  “I was reading that biography on Sue Rodriguez, the woman who wanted to have s-s-someone kill her because she’d developed that, that thing.” She pauses. “ALS.”

  “Okay. Let’s read that book. The reason we’re choosing that one is because you read it before, so you’re familiar with it. It’ll be easier for you to read it, and we want you to succeed. This will increase your chances of success.”

  She nods.

  “But we’re not going to have you read it all at once. We’ll set a SMART goal for your daily reading, something specific. How about a page?”

  “A page?” she replies disbelievingly. A page? Who reads just a page in a whole day?

  “A page is specific and measurable and most importantly it’s attainable. Remember we want you to succeed, right?”

  She sighs, “Right.”

  “To help you with this, I’ll go over a number of strategies we’ve found successful. The first one is to use Post-its or those little Post-it flags. Put one at the end of a line you want to remember. You can use different coloured ones. For example, pink is for a character or blue is for a specific situation. The second idea is to highlight. Highlight words or phrases that you want to remember and retain. Again you can use different coloured highlighters for different concepts. But at this moment, let’s stick to one
colour. It’ll be easier for you to follow. The next strategy is to underline. If you don’t have a highlighter or you find it too distracting, underline the important words or phrases. Alternatively, you can use both underlining and highlighting. Maybe underline names only, and highlight concepts or facts. Next write notes in the margins next to the paragraphs that you want to remember. And also take notes in a notebook.”

  Geez, this is starting to sound like university. She’s supposed to do this for everything she reads? She can’t believe it.

  “… are?”

  “What?”

  “Tell me what those strategies are I went over?”

  “First I highlight. I also underline character names.”

  “What else?”

  She stares at her for a moment as Zenobia waits. University, what did she do in university? She chews her lip. Oh right. “Write notes in the margins, and stick, stick Post-its on the pages to reinforce what I want to remember.”

  “Good! One last one we find particularly useful is to cover off what you’re not reading. Take a blank piece of paper or piece of cardboard, and use it to cover the text that you’re not reading. Rona will go over this again with you and will show you specific examples with a book or magazine or newspaper. What I want to do is to alert you to these strategies, and then when Rona discusses them with you today, you’ll remember them better.

  “I want you to experiment with these strategies when you read the book we discussed until you find which ones work best for you, okay?”

  She nods and grasps her lower lip with her upper teeth.

  “And lastly when you get to the end of the first page, go over in your mind, without looking at the page, what you’ve read. Even better, write down what you remember. Tell me again what book it is you’ll be reading?”

  Good question. Something she’d been reading before, before all this happened. Oh yeah. “That Sue Rodriguez biography.”

  “And what’s the SMART goal?”

  “To read one page per day.”

  “Is that goal specific?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s to read a particular book and only one page.”

  “Is it measurable?”

  “Yes. Because I can see if I’ve read a whole page or not.”

  “In what way is it relevant?”

  “I want to read properly,” she pauses. “This will help me get there?”

  “That’s right! And is it timely?”

  “I’m not sure. I guess it’s timely because I want to read now.”

  Zenobia smiles from ear to ear, revealing her even white teeth. “That’s so great! You have it down. I want you to start practicing tomorrow, and next week we’ll talk about your progress. I’ll take you to Sunny now.”

  She schleps after Zenobia to Sunny’s office.

  The next day while Jim is shopping for groceries with the Saturday hordes, she sits on her couch that faces the large front window that looks through her sun room to the sunny day outside. The Sue Rodriguez book lies on her lap closed; Smokey is curled up beside her; and the manual of strategies sits on the coffee table in front of her. She glances at the top page, but all those words are too much. She knows what Zenobia told her. She remembers the covering-off part because it was so novel to her, but then realizes she doesn’t have a blank piece of paper. She sets the book down on the dark green brocade of the couch and goes to the desk in the dining room to take one out of the printer. She walks back, sits down, picks up her book, flips to the first page, folds the piece of paper in half, and sticks it in the fold of the book. She has her tape of little Post-its on the table in front of her and a highlighter and pen in her lap. And then she remembers Rona telling her to time herself, to begin with setting a timer for five minutes. It seems like an awful long time, and she doesn’t have a timer with her. Sighing, she gets up again, setting everything on her lap back on the couch; Smokey finally fed up with her jumps down to the floor and trots to the sun room and her favourite chair. The western sun isn’t directly on it yet, but the chair is still warm.

  Back with the kitchen timer, she doesn’t notice Smokey has gone. She resettles herself on the couch, opens the book, sets the timer to five minutes, and starts reading page one. It’s familiar, yet she reads the first sentence three times before she gets going as if she hadn’t read it before. Her reading is like a stuttering engine that needs some warm-up time before it can roar to life. She underlines the character names as they appear. She sticks a Post-it next to the first paragraph. She highlights a fact and writes a short note in the margin. She picks up her notebook and jots down the main point of the first paragraph. The timer dings, and she closes the book with relief. She’d made it to the bottom of the first page, and she’s exhausted. Her forehead has that headache, the one that comes on whenever she uses her brain, and she wants a nap badly. The headache should go away now she’s stopped reading, but the fatigue will be with her the rest of the day. There’s no quick recovery from that. Zenobia was right to set one page as a goal. She exhales loudly.

  She looks at her watch, at the timer. Five minutes. It took her five minutes to read one page? How can that be? She hasn’t taken five minutes to read a full page, never mind the short first page of a book, since, well, since forever. She picks up her notebook to see one word written: “Sue.” She stares at it. She’d written more. She’s sure she had written more. She drops it back on the table and throws herself against the back of the couch.

  Smokey snorts in her chair; a car door slams outside.

  Sighing, she sits up. She’s supposed to recall what she’d read. This should be easy. She looks inward, searching her thoughts, her memories. There’s that guy sweeping the empty cavern of her mind, nothing but blank walls and floor, and a poor view of all the ideas and thoughts hovering outside, beyond reach. She ponders this empty space for a while, hoping the page will pop up into view, the way pages used to. She’s got nothing.

  Fury rises like a hot tide in her chest and face and blasts out her arms as she picks up the book with both hands and slams it against the table, once, twice, thrice. She hurls the book with her right arm, and it lands with a soft thump in the big armchair. Damn. Her shoulder, her bad shoulder. She massages it, then suddenly gets up and screams. She yells and yells and yells. She strides across the floor to the dining room, her anger energizing her, then back past the couch to the front door. The floor space is not big enough for her frustration. How can this happen? She’s been reading all her life for God’s sake. Why did this happen? It can’t be; it’s just so silly, so melodramatic, so ridiculous. Why did Jim drive along that road? Why did he not turn around like she’d asked? What had gotten into him? It’s all that stupid camping trip’s fault, those stupid buddies with their stupid anti-female attitudes. This cannot be happening! She’s supposed to be writing songs, supposed to be publishing, supposed to be working with that manager she’s now had to put on hold, not sitting here doing these stupid strategies that don’t work. She doesn’t remember a thing. Not. A. Thing.

  Tears spring into her eyes; breath catches in her throat. How can she not remember? She leans over, clutching her legs, fighting against the sobs. She’d read the stupid book before. She’d never forgotten a book she’d read before. That had been her problem: she couldn’t reread books because she had always remembered them from the moment she’d read the first sentence. She’d always remembered them. She sinks to the floor and hugs her legs to her chest. And now she can’t remember one page seconds after reading it. One page. She pulls her body up and then slowly back till she’s stretched out on the oak wood floor, staring up at the white ceiling, arms flung out, legs straight. One page. She closes her eyes. One page. And she doesn’t remember it.

  ~~~*~~~