Alice
Forest Arthur Ormes
It is not easy.
“Alice has put on twenty pounds,” my mother declares this particular night as if I am a third person in the house.
“Alice has been working in that godless Salvation Army and is now talking like the flotsam treated there,” she continues. “Flotsam and jetsam, Alice. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that, if you sleep with lice, you get lice.”
All five foot one and one hundred seven pounds of my mother stands there with her arms folded, reminding me of an elementary school photograph I once saw of Adolph Hitler standing in the middle of the top row of his classmates, his arms folded commandingly. Perhaps the photo was doctored. Perhaps the real ten year old Adolph was slumped in the middle of his classmates, hardly visible, surrounded by bigger and tougher boys. I imagine time-traveling to the elementary school Hitler attended and, coming up from behind, shooting him in the back of the skull. Only it is my mother I am really assassinating.
“I haven’t slept with anyone in my entire fifty four year life, mother,” I say. “I don’t have lice. My speech remains the same. My weight is my business. And I object to your applying “flotsam and jetsam” to the troubled men and women who sit in front of my desk at work, asking for help.”
“A portal for the flotsam and jetsam in our midst,” she says, then pulls out a cigarette and lights it.
I grab a jacket from the hat rack next to the kitchen and flee to our sun porch. Once settled into a cushioned chair, my feet raised upon the stool, I switch on my portable night light and attach it to the first page of the book lying on the small table beside me.
Charles Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities.” It is my fifth reading of it.
I love Dickens. I almost went to England with my advanced literature class for the purpose of touring Dickens’ London. As I begin reading, the words bring me the peace and reassurance of all fairy god mothers, saints and heroines. I can see the image of Sydney Carton pass above me.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the season of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us….”
I sigh as I stop reading. I honestly think he saw into the 21st century, my Dickens.
That’s how I think of him, as my Dickens. I read on until eleven o’clock, then lay the book on the side table and head for my bedroom. I must wake at six for work. Fortunately I have a job where I can escape. Where the insanity cannot reach. The outpatient clinic of the Salvation Army is as much a sanctuary for me as it is for the troubled clients who march in for services.
I have been working full-time for thirty years, ever since I got out of school. When my mother retired as a legal secretary six years ago, she began getting up in the middle of the night, chain-smoking and mumbling sporadically to herself. Some of the time her mumbling wakes me. Some of the time it does not. Tonight, I am particularly annoyed at being awakened from a sound sleep. It is early October. Good sleeping weather.
I ignore my irritation, and focus on rest. When I finally get back to sleep, I have the same two familiar dreams.
The first finds me having grown four times my regular size. I am living alone in my mother’s house. I am searching through boxes of files, looking for old newspaper articles about an interview with the then First Lady Rosalynn Carter. It is the time in my life when I have just graduated from college. I am trying to get a job as a reporter and, in the process, declare to the world who I am. The trouble of course is that – in the dream -- I have gotten too big. I have to bend over so that my head does not hit the ceiling. The boxes of files are the size of cigar boxes and the articles the size of a deck of cards. I continue searching. I remove article after article. I try to read sentences whose words are too minuscule to make out. I can only guess at what the articles might say.
Then my mother’s mumbling wakes me up. When I fall asleep again, I go straight into the second dream. I am Bette Davis and I am doing an interview with First Lady Rosalynn Carter on a nationally televised morning show. I am normal size. I ask her about her years with President Carter. I asked her what it has been like moving from the Georgia governor’s mansion to the white house. Then I freeze. I cannot ask the next question because I have not been able to retrieve the articles I need. I have not been able to do my research. My anxiety skyrockets to panic. I try to contain the meltdown by asking trivial questions about the dignitaries who tramp through the white house. I begin to stutter and lose my train of thought. I lock on the thought that I am on national television with millions of people watching. The First Lady gives me a concerned look, then asks if I am all right. I tell her that I am feeling extremely nervous. I have starred in dozens of movies, but I have never interviewed anyone in my life, especially the wife of the president of the United States. Only I slip and say United Kingdom. The First Lady laughs and I, realizing my slip of tongue, begin laughing with her. I ask her about maintaining a sense of humor in a white house that is seeing economic difficulties and an international crisis. She puts her hand on my arm and declares: “Faith and laughter. Faith and laughter, Alice.”
I become confused because I know that in the dream I am not Alice Brousset. I am Bette Davis and I am interviewing the First Lady.
Suddenly my mother’s words are penetrating the television studio: “Out of here cancerous filth,” I hear.
I am pulled from the dream back into my mother’s house.
“Knock it off mother, please!” I holler from the bedroom.
Without having to get up and look, I picture my mother sitting in the chair beside her bed. I can see the tip of her cigarette illuminate her face as she takes a drag and exhales.
“Faith and laughter,” I say to myself.
“What’s that, dear,” I hear from my mother.
“I said: ‘Faith and laughter,’ mother.”
“What an odd thing to say at two o’clock in the morning,” she responds, and gives a short laugh.
A few hours later, I am pushing myself up and off the bed, trying to make it to work by eight thirty. I manage to park my car in the fenced parking lot for employees, flash my badge as I hurry past the guard window, descend the stairs and fly through the unending hallway toward the reception room. I slip into a scene from Gogol’s, The Overcoat. Running down a long corridor, enduring robbers stealing the coat off my back and then, after I am dead, returning to life to get my revenge by indiscriminately grabbing the coats from people’s backs. It is not the first time in my life where literature and reality have conspired to disorient me.
Once at my desk, I breathe deeply for a few minutes before I return to the reality of the reception office that is my job.
That evening, I pull my old Ford into the parking lot of the grocery store. Half an hour later, when I swipe my card to pay by check, the cashier tells me that I have been listed as having insufficient funds. I am mortified to the level of wishing I could disappear. Quickly, I try to collect myself. With as much grace as I can gather, I apologize to the cashier. I offer up my rarely-used credit card. He swipes it. I scrutinize his face for one hint of disdain.
The bill is covered. I grab my four plastic bags of groceries and walk out from the store as fast as I possibly can walk and drive home.
I have been inexcuseably careless. Between my mother and escape from my mother through reading, I have failed to deposit my last four paychecks. I can tolerate getting old with my mother. I can tolerate dreams. I can tolerate most anything as long as I can continue to practice one responsible thing. You need a balanced checking account in order to navigate life’s nightmares and necessities. I have failed to do that.
I decide to seek help in therapy.
I sit in a bare office with a desk and three wooden chairs. The therapist listens as I present the barest facts of my life. She is tall like me and, unlike me, slim. Not that I am obese. Just not slim. She looks twenty five years younger than I am.
I am an adult child of a mother with whom I have lived my entire life. The house where we live has two ten by ten bedrooms, a master bedroom slightly larger where my mother sleeps, a living room ten and a half by fifteen and an adjoining dining room of precisely the same dimensions plus a kitchen twelve by eleven. I tell her I don’t know the dimensions of the sun porch where my mother reads during the day and I read by a battery-powered night light in the evenings during the spring, summer and autumn months. When she asks me why I think the house where I live is part of my psycho-social history, I silently note her failure to understand the symbolism I have included as a fact in my psycho-social history. I ignore her question by informing her that a house with such small bedrooms is typical of houses built eighty five years ago.
She stares at me. I give her a second chance by informing her that the sun porch is an addition my mother had built for the two of us after she demanded my father leave our home.
“How old were you when your mother demanded he leave?” she asks dryly.
She doesn’t get it, I realize.
“Four,” I respond as dryly.
In our third session of the third week, I tell her that the memories of my father are confused and unclear. She asks me about confused and I inform her that my father worked six nights a week at the city news bureau and slept during the day. I hardly ever saw him. I remember a slim, dark-haired man who wore glasses. Tall, medium or short, she asks. I can’t remember, I answer. She proceeds to interpret my confused childhood memories as repression.
In the fifth session of our fifth week, I apologetically tell her that I cannot remember being sexually abused by my father as she has suggested. Somewhat timidly, I remind her that my father and mother separated and divorced before my fifth birthday, and that I have not seen my father since.
“Yet you told me that your mother demanded that your father leave,” she says.
“Is that the word I used? Demand?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps that is the word my mother used when she told me.”
“It is no accident that your mother chose the word.”
“Perhaps not,” I respond.
“Your mother had a reason for demanding that your father leave. What do you think that reason was?”
“Whatever the reason, it was not because he had sexually abused me.”
“You’ve never asked your mother why?”
Like Joan of Arc standing before her inquisitors, I remain silent.
“You’re afraid to ask your mother why!” she declares.
“I am not afraid of my mother, nor am I afraid of her words. I love my mother in spite of my mother.”
She smiles and interprets what I have just told her as a defense mechanism against a repressed memory of abuse.
“I deeply appreciate the concern behind your interpretation,” I tell her. “But I truly believe your interpretation simply is not true.”
She pauses, then declares: “As long as you remain in denial, any therapeutic progress is impossible.”
I bow my head. For just a moment, I feel like crying. Instead, I raise my head and remark: “I accept your concern. I reject your interpretation.”
I get up and leave.
The next day at work, five minutes into my lunch hour, I sit alone at my receptionist desk. I call the mental health center and ask their receptionist to please give my therapist the message that I will no longer be accepting her or the center’s services.
Perhaps it is my imagination, but my mother’s critical comments resume with a particular penetrating stab when I get home from work that day.
“Alice has a bachelor’s degree and is using it to hold a position calling for no more than a high school diploma.”
“They made the position of office manager especially for me and put me on salary, mother. As you know.”
“That is like hiring an engineer for the position of janitor and calling his new position sanitary engineer.”
“Please mother!”
“I got you a good job at the law office with me. If you had kept it, you would be earning a handsome salary by now.”
This time I create a list of outpatient therapists who accept my insurance minus the ten per cent and deductible. I make up a list of questions to ask over the phone. The first is: “Do you answer questions over the phone?”
This question eliminates half the therapists from my list.
The next questions are routine information: license, years practiced, type and level of degree. As a matter of courtesy, I inquire into their therapeutic approach although I don’t much care about their approach as long as it doesn’t involve rattlesnakes or suffocation. When I ask the remaining eleven therapists if they could shrink me to a size small enough to fit through a door one quarter my current size, only three therapists remain as contenders. The first two, a woman and a man who sound about my age, ask if I have considered medication. I respond to their question by stating that I already have a key to the door, all I need is shrinking.
My response leaves one elderly male by the name of Kay Miatovic.
“I am already in possession of the key,” I say for the third time that afternoon. “I just need to be shrunk to one fourth my current size.”
“Good,” he responds. “One less obstacle.”
Our first session hears me describing to Mr. Miatovic – he does not have a PhD, he has a master’s degree in clinical social work -- one of my earliest memories of my mother.
We are walking toward downtown. My mother is holding my hand. We have just passed a movie theater. I let go of her hand and start to run. I am not yet five years old. My father has been out of the house just a short time. When my mother almost catches up with me, I push harder and take longer strides. I am tall for my age and am able to run beyond her reach for the rest of the block as bystanders stare. Finally, she gets close enough to grab my shirt from behind and pull me to a stop. She grabs me by my shoulders and begins shaking me until my teeth begin clicking like a xylophone.
“Devil child!” she hollers at me.
We turn around and walk straight home. After she calms down, she asks: “What on earth possessed you to run away like that, Alice.”
“I saw my father walking across the next street. I wanted to run up and tell him to come home.”
My mother puts her hands to her face, begins crying and goes into the other room.
“And no,” I say to Mr. Miatovic, “my father did not sexually molest me before my mother told him to leave our home.”
“You are responding to the suggestion that he did? “
“My previous therapist insisted on it before we could progress further.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“What do you think... and feel… about the fact that your mother ‘told’ your father to leave?”
I purse my lips and offer absolutely nothing in response.
After a full minute passes, Mr. Miatovic says: “I’m guessing you’ve asked your mother… why she told him to leave.”
“He worked six nights a week for the city news bureau,” I answer. “Maybe my mother got tired of it. Maybe he got laid off. I’m not sure.”
I pause a few seconds, then say: “Once… I asked her.. why.”
“And?”
“She turned away and walked into the kitchen. I never asked again.”
“How do you feel about this… unanswered question?”
“Nothing. My mother told my father to leave the house. He left. It is a sad fact of the past.”
“You saw your father walking across the street after your mother… told him to leave?”
“Just that one time. I never saw him after that. I’ve never heard from him.”
He seems to be in your thoughts today.”
“Perhaps. Our time is almost up.”
Fifteen minutes later, after we have engaged in meaningless exchanges, I say to him: “To be continued next week.”
Mr. Miatovic smiles and, after confirming out appointment for next week, wishes me well.
“I am aware of the possibility of having a transference relationship with you due to the loss of my father at age four,” I am saying to him at our next session. “Do you think I am having such a transference?”
“Possibly. I am more interested in what you think.”
“Possibly,” I answer.
“Whatever may be the case, I know that you are the best source of information about you. Not the diagnostic textbook. Not me. Not your mother. Not other therapists.”
I stare at Kay Miatovic’s white, wavy hair, his thick-rimmed brown glasses. I think about his extra weight and wonder about the possibility of an unexpected heart attack.
“Perhaps,” I say to him, “I am being cautious at the possibility of your unexpected exit from my life, just like my father.”
“Your father’s exit… unexpected… affects your confidence in my capacity to continue seeing you?”
“I was thinking less about my father and more about your health.”
I stare down at his protruding belly.
“While it would not be deliberate, your sudden retirement due to health problems certainly would cut me short just as we are getting started.”
Kay smiles. “You want a medical report?”
“I just want to make sure this… this therapy we’re starting is not going to suffer an abortion due to the health issues of a man in his seventies.”
“Alice. What do you think about when you are tenaciously inquiring into my health?”
“Your health.”
“I am seventy four. My blood pressure remains under control. My annual check up gave me a clean bill of health. Everything is sound. What do you think this concern about my health reveals?”
“Of course it reveals that one of the few intimate relationships I have known could become highly painful since it is with a male almost a quarter of a century my senior. I don’t want you to get sick, then leave me hanging out to dry, unfinished and… possibly… in pain.”
“What issues do you see us exploring that would make it risky if I were to become ill which my doctor says is not predicted?”
“The human condition.”
“Human condition?”
“Death, Kay.”
I take a deep breath and settle into silence.
“To be continued next week,” I pronounce a short time later.
As I walk the five blocks back to my mother’s house, I ask myself: Do I really want to go forward in therapy with Kay? And if so, what do I want from therapy? Do I want to continue dreaming how I am Bette Davis interviewing Rosalyn Carter, imagining I am an actress who once raised a hand to wipe a tear while millions sobbed? Do I want to slip into an anxiety of having The Overcoat stolen from my back? Do I want to know where these things spring?
At our next session, Kay smiles and says nothing when I tell him: “I have decided to share more of my life history with you tonight.”
It is the second Monday in December. As I graciously remove a handkerchief from my purse and wipe sweat from beneath my chin, Kay asks if he can get me a glass of water. He returns a few moments later from the small lobby in front of his office with a large thick paper cup of water from the cooler.
“Only two floors. No elevator,” he says of the old building where his office is located.
“I need the exercise. My mother says I’ve put on twenty pounds. She’s right.”
Kay breathes deeply, relaxes, stares straight ahead and waits.
“I graduated in the top five per cent of my class in 1973,” I begin.
He smiles.
One of the reasons I have decided to continue accepting therapy from Kay is because he has not made the therapeutic error of making it seem like he approves or disapproves of me. If he had said, “That’s excellent, Alice. Well done,” I would have taken it as approval. I would have been offended and then we would have had an issue to work through. Or I might have quit.
“For financial reasons, I attended the nearby community college. Two years later, I began commuting to one of the city universities downtown, returning north in the evenings where I continued living with my mother. I attended classes, studied and worked twenty eight hours a week stacking books in the local library. Upon graduation, I tried to get a job at the city news bureau. They wouldn’t hire me. I tried to earn a few dollars by writing for the city newspapers. I got one commission in twenty two months – a piece on the demolition of an old ice cream parlor in a neighborhood gutted by the expansion of the expressway. It was a good piece, but no one took notice.
“By now my mother was speculating about the reason for my going to college. ‘Have you attended college and a university to follow the vocation of parasite?’ she asked when I rose from my desk in our third bedroom where I had been trying to follow my vocation as stringer.
“’I think it’s time, Alice,’ she said that summer. I knew what she was referring to.”
I pause, glance at Kay, stare straight ahead and resume.
“I gave it one more… effort. I decided to be present when First Lady Rosalyn Carter visited the city campaigning for her husband. None of the city newspapers would offer me a commission to interview her. Nevertheless, I was determined to step out from the crowd, ask for and arrange an interview. What I planned to do with it, once I got it, would get decided later.
“When the First Lady appeared from the revolving doors of the community development center, she began shaking the hands of the crowd. I had dressed in professional looking slacks and blouse. It was already August. The election was looking bad for her husband. A short black woman stood in front of me. I was able to reach over her. As the First Lady grabbed my hand, I practiced a controlled ecstasy. ‘I’d love to interview you, Mrs. Carter,’ I said as loudly as I could without shouting.
“I don’t think she even heard me. The First Lady got rushed through the rest of the crowd and disappeared into the presidential limousine in less than five minutes. After I arrived back at the house, I sat and stared at the blank page inserted through the roller of my electric typewriter. I finally managed to write something about a decent president and First Lady valiantly struggling to avoid defeat at the hands of a television communicator who was about to offer the American people a feel-good presidency of the banal.”
“I sent it to the Commentary section of the newspapers where there a chance for at least some payment. I thought that, if I could at least earn something from my writing, I would be able to persevere. After four weeks passed without a response, I decided to accept reality. And that reality was: I had no contacts in journalism. My social skills were so poor that I was unlikely to ever make contacts. My mother was right. It was time.
“I interviewed for a job of secretary in the downtown law firm where my mother worked. I got a job serving half a dozen junior partners largely on her recommendation. I stayed there eight years until I got sick.”
After saying this last word, I stop and wait to see if Kay pounces on the word “sick” like many therapists would no doubt pounce. If he does, I am ready to pounce on him.
He shows a proper look of concern, but says nothing.
“I used my insurance to enter a psychiatric facility where all the meals were scheduled. They allowed no snacks in between. We could not go outside unless accompanied by an attendant. I could not make a phone call except on the one pay phone which was always occupied. When I told one of the staff that another patient had threatened me, he told me: deal with it. I threatened to leave. My primary counselor warned me that, if I did, the insurance might not cover the cost of treatment. She told me I would be liable for the hospital bill. That’s how I was coerced to stay.”
“I got out after twenty three days because my insurance coverage would not stretch payments into the fourth week. I stuck it out at the law firm another six months. Then I interviewed for and got the job as receptionist at the outpatient clinic of the Salvation Army. I used to get paid by the hour and had to punch the clock. After four years, they changed my position to office manager and put me on salary. Then I was allowed to sign in. Although the first clients do not arrive until nine o’clock, it is my job to get to work early and prepare the coffee and check the facility, making sure file cabinets are locked, office doors are unlocked and no mess has been left from the of After Care and 12 step groups the night before. The director of the clinic dresses quite elegantly. Her clients keep coming back to see her – some of them for years. I believe she is a skilled and caring therapist. The neighborhood where the clinic is located has changed over the years from run down to gentrified.”
“Sounds like you like your job.”
“I always treat the clients with respect whatever their condition. That’s more than I got at Streamwood.”
“That’s the treatment program you were in?”
I say nothing.
“I’ve never heard of Streamwood. Is that the real name of the facility?”
“No.”
Kay says nothing.
“You and I both know about diagnostic labels. Helpful… at times. And all too frequently misleading. When you consult with your colleagues, instead of referring to me as Alice, or Ms. Brousset, or Ms. X, you refer to me as your bi-bipolar. Or: ‘My Borderline.’ Does the world see Alice Brousset through a looking glass of labels? Or is Alice allowed to present her own identity to the world?”
“You seem certain that I refer to you with a diagnostic label when I consult with colleagues.”
“You must submit a diagnosis for insurance purposes. I know that for a fact.”
“True.”
“I do not wish to know the diagnosis you have imposed upon me.”
“You believe a diagnosis prevents you from growing? Already you have made major changes in your life. It is no accident that you left the law firm after you got out of the psychiatric facility.”
“As soon as I got out of the facility….”
“Streamwood?”
“…. I immediately stopped taking the medication they had begun administering to me. Before you ask, I don’t remember the medication name – brand or generic. It was a mood stabilizer if that makes you feel better. “
“As long as you are not currently taking any medication…”
“Are you paranoid about liability!” I snap.
“Alice….”
“That’s my name. Not Ms. Bi-polar. Not Mrs. Borderline. Not poor Ms. Victim-of-sexual abuse. Alice. Alice Brousset.”
Kay waits half a minute and when I have said nothing, he says to me:
“You have held a job in a sensitive position for twenty years. Whatever mood issues they opined you had at… the facility where you were at … those issues appear not to have interfered with your doing such a good job that they created a new position for you and put you on salary. I have no doubt that you are as skilled and intelligent as any of the therapists who work there.”
““Therapists with advanced degrees who leave once they have enough experience to put it down on their resume and move onto something… better paying. Their presence is more unstable than the unstable clients they are supposed to serve. The director and I are the only stable employees there.”
“Stability is important? Professionally and personally?”
“Stop being a shrink for a minute, please. Mental health clients need predictability in their lives. I give it to them, sitting at my desk every day, welcoming them into the clinic before they see young, inexperienced therapists who may be gone in nine months.”
“Your questions regarding my health…. I understand more fully … now.”
“Good. And please do not ask whether I have thought of going back to school to get a graduate degree in psychology. Or a PhD which you don’t possess. Position isn’t everything.”
“Others have asked about it? Or perhaps… you have thought about it yourself?”
“You don’t employ a receptionist, I see.”
“No,” Kay replies.
*
“Have you read Charles Dickens?” I ask at our next session.
He waits, then replies: “A few of the many he wrote. A Tale of Two Cities, Nicholas Nickleby, Great Expectations, David Copperfield.”
I pause a few seconds to recall a passage: “’To go with you – anywhere – everywhere – to the world’s end – to the churchyard grave,” I recite. “You are my home – my kind friend….”
To my surprise, Kay replies: “’I am a friend who can do little for you. How came you here?’”
“All I want,” I say, “is to do a good job at work, balance my check book, come home, learn how to keep my sanity around my mother and, finally, read and enjoy some of the great stories of literature. That is all.”
“I confess my appreciation of Dickens – and for Nicholas Nickleby in particular -- came from a class I took. I don’t suppose you have thought….
I pounce immediately on Kay’s therapeutic mistake.
“I just said: ‘All I want is to do a good job at work, balance my check book, come home, learn how to keep my sanity around my mother and, finally, read and enjoy some of the great stories of literature.’ Why would I want to witness some instructor de-construct works I love and maybe destroy that love in the process? Why!”
“I was inquiring if you had thought of sharing your love of literature with other people by taking a class.”
“Defense,” I pronounce.
“Yes, it was. You seem to be certain that any class in literature would see the instructor ruin literature. I wonder where that certainty comes from?”
“From a college experience where instructors fail to teach literature out of love of literature!”
“I hear you answering me as if the failure by a college instructor who once taught a course you had is an unending, unavoidable experience.”
I stare back at him. He stares at me, smiles, bows his head and says: “I’d like to ask – if I may – what are your favorite works of literature?”
I maintain my silent stare, knowing how uncomfortable it likely makes him.
“Two works? Even one? “
“Testing me?” I finally say.
“It might tell you something about yourself… if you were to consider the question.”
I keep silent.
“That is our mission here, after all. To explore – if and as you wish -- the self. Yourself. That is the reason…behind my question.”
He stutters at the end of his sentence, bows his head and raises it again.
For a moment I feel sorry for Kay. I focus on the fact that he is getting money from my insurance and twelve dollars and fifty cents in deductible from me.
“I prefer to explore the human condition, not the psychological state of Alice Brousset.”
I wait for him to utter his exasperation. Instead he says:
“Absolutely if and as you wish, Alice. No sooner, no later and not at all if that is what you want.”
I stare at him, thinking of Joan of Arc and her inquisitors.
“You never told me if your last name is Serbian. I know what some of them did over there and how the United State military bombed them. Don’t worry, I won’t judge you if you are Serbian.”
“If I pushed too much, I apologize.”
I sit in absolute silence for the remainder of the therapeutic hour. At precisely fifty minutes, I rise from my chair.
Kay rises with me.
“To be continued,” I pronounce.
“See you next week,” he says, hesitating.
My nod of the head represents a silent confirmation that our therapeutic relationship has remained in tact in spite of his push into unexplored and forbidden territory.
“’I’d like to ask -- if I may – what are your favorite works of literature?’ ‘Two works? Even one? It might tell you something about yourself… if you were to consider the question.’ These are your words from our last session.”
I pause.
“I’m going to give you what you want. Here are some of my favorites, as you wish.”
Kay responds with a slight, uncomfortable smile.
“I have hidden in a cave with Toni Morrison’s fugitives, fearing what life would be like to be hunted.”
“Have you recently felt persecuted?”
“Are you accusing me of delusions?”
“I am wondering at the meaning behind what you just said to me.”
“I have had a real sense of having the coat stolen from my back.”
“When your mother has woken you up the night before and you are rushing to work the next day?”
“Nikolas Gogol, Kay! Russian literature. Nineteenth century.”
“Smike? Charles Dickens? ‘You are my home…’ What does the word-- home -- mean to you, Alice?”
“Beauty. Kindness. Reading in my sun porch,” I murmur.
“Reading in the sun porch is a safe, even soothing spot within your house?”
I collect myself and shoot back: “The greatest perpetrators of evil are the victims of evil. W.H. Auden.”
“I do not believe you really think you have perpetrated evil?”
I remain silent.
“What about the word, kindness? Can you tell me about that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You quoted Auden on evil. Can I ask why?”
“Part of me thinks I have done bad things.”
“And the other part. Can you let that other part… have its say?”
“Give me a second to…”
I take a very deep breath.
“My response to your question about these parts…. You’re not accusing me of multiple personalities?”
“Certainly not.”
“Loren Eiseley,” I pronounce. “He describes a species of homo sapiens with the largest brains ever discovered. They were a blip on the evolutionary ladder. And then… extinction..”
I take another breath.
“It is dangerous to be too smart in this world, Kay.”
“And where did you learn that?”
“All I want is to do a good job at work, balance my check book, come home, learn how to keep my sanity around my mother and, finally, read and enjoy some of the great stories of literature. That is all.”
“How are you feeling at this moment, Alice? If you could share it… even in just one word.”
I stare straight into his face and respond: “I will continue living in my mother’s house after my mother dies. I will continue living in my mother’s house until I die.”
“Psychologically as well as literally?”
“You were the one who asked me about my favorite works of literature. It might tell me something about myself, you said.”
I take a short, shallow breath.
“In the summer evenings, sitting in my sun porch with my feet propped up, I have enjoyed reading the works of Albert Camus and Carson McCullers.”
“May I respond with another question?”
“I don’t mind your questions.”
“If you could create your own future, all of it, what would it look like? What would it feel like?”
“Are you asking me about destiny? The human condition? Those are good questions. Very good questions.”
I watch a wisp of sadness pass across his face, and then his slight, sad smile.
“Absolutely if and as you wish, Alice.”
“To be continued,” I respond to him.
As I am walking home after the session, breathing in December’s frozen air, I ask myself why I have bothered with therapy. The question changes its texture when I ask why do I continue therapy with Kay? He certainly can help me feel less anxious when I fail to balance my check book. I know it doesn’t hurt to talk to someone who, by training or nature, listens without the judgment that I am destined to endure in my mother’s house.
I pass beneath the street lamp which, in its subdued dimness, I find soothing. I admit that I do not mind entering Kay’s office where it is safe to defy probing questions. I ask myself if I want to experience what it might have been like to have had a kind and accepting father. Or mother. I watch moist breath from my nostrils evaporate as it hits the air. Who knows?
“Alice has put on twenty pounds,” my mother declares this particular night as if I am a third person in the house.
“Alice has been working in that godless Salvation Army and is now talking like the flotsam treated there,” she continues. “Flotsam and jetsam, Alice. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that, if you sleep with lice, you get lice.”
All five foot one and one hundred seven pounds of my mother stands there with her arms folded, reminding me of an elementary school photograph I once saw of Adolph Hitler standing in the middle of the top row of his classmates, his arms folded commandingly. Perhaps the photo was doctored. Perhaps the real ten year old Adolph was slumped in the middle of his classmates, hardly visible, surrounded by bigger and tougher boys. I imagine time-traveling to the elementary school Hitler attended and, coming up from behind, shooting him in the back of the skull. Only it is my mother I am really assassinating.
“I haven’t slept with anyone in my entire fifty four year life, mother,” I say. “I don’t have lice. My speech remains the same. My weight is my business. And I object to your applying “flotsam and jetsam” to the troubled men and women who sit in front of my desk at work, asking for help.”
“A portal for the flotsam and jetsam in our midst,” she says, then pulls out a cigarette and lights it.
I grab a jacket from the hat rack next to the kitchen and flee to our sun porch. Once settled into a cushioned chair, my feet raised upon the stool, I switch on my portable night light and attach it to the first page of the book lying on the small table beside me.
Charles Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities.” It is my fifth reading of it.
I love Dickens. I almost went to England with my advanced literature class for the purpose of touring Dickens’ London. As I begin reading, the words bring me the peace and reassurance of all fairy god mothers, saints and heroines. I can see the image of Sydney Carton pass above me.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the season of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us….”
I sigh as I stop reading. I honestly think he saw into the 21st century, my Dickens.
That’s how I think of him, as my Dickens. I read on until eleven o’clock, then lay the book on the side table and head for my bedroom. I must wake at six for work. Fortunately I have a job where I can escape. Where the insanity cannot reach. The outpatient clinic of the Salvation Army is as much a sanctuary for me as it is for the troubled clients who march in for services.
I have been working full-time for thirty years, ever since I got out of school. When my mother retired as a legal secretary six years ago, she began getting up in the middle of the night, chain-smoking and mumbling sporadically to herself. Some of the time her mumbling wakes me. Some of the time it does not. Tonight, I am particularly annoyed at being awakened from a sound sleep. It is early October. Good sleeping weather.
I ignore my irritation, and focus on rest. When I finally get back to sleep, I have the same two familiar dreams.
The first finds me having grown four times my regular size. I am living alone in my mother’s house. I am searching through boxes of files, looking for old newspaper articles about an interview with the then First Lady Rosalynn Carter. It is the time in my life when I have just graduated from college. I am trying to get a job as a reporter and, in the process, declare to the world who I am. The trouble of course is that – in the dream -- I have gotten too big. I have to bend over so that my head does not hit the ceiling. The boxes of files are the size of cigar boxes and the articles the size of a deck of cards. I continue searching. I remove article after article. I try to read sentences whose words are too minuscule to make out. I can only guess at what the articles might say.
Then my mother’s mumbling wakes me up. When I fall asleep again, I go straight into the second dream. I am Bette Davis and I am doing an interview with First Lady Rosalynn Carter on a nationally televised morning show. I am normal size. I ask her about her years with President Carter. I asked her what it has been like moving from the Georgia governor’s mansion to the white house. Then I freeze. I cannot ask the next question because I have not been able to retrieve the articles I need. I have not been able to do my research. My anxiety skyrockets to panic. I try to contain the meltdown by asking trivial questions about the dignitaries who tramp through the white house. I begin to stutter and lose my train of thought. I lock on the thought that I am on national television with millions of people watching. The First Lady gives me a concerned look, then asks if I am all right. I tell her that I am feeling extremely nervous. I have starred in dozens of movies, but I have never interviewed anyone in my life, especially the wife of the president of the United States. Only I slip and say United Kingdom. The First Lady laughs and I, realizing my slip of tongue, begin laughing with her. I ask her about maintaining a sense of humor in a white house that is seeing economic difficulties and an international crisis. She puts her hand on my arm and declares: “Faith and laughter. Faith and laughter, Alice.”
I become confused because I know that in the dream I am not Alice Brousset. I am Bette Davis and I am interviewing the First Lady.
Suddenly my mother’s words are penetrating the television studio: “Out of here cancerous filth,” I hear.
I am pulled from the dream back into my mother’s house.
“Knock it off mother, please!” I holler from the bedroom.
Without having to get up and look, I picture my mother sitting in the chair beside her bed. I can see the tip of her cigarette illuminate her face as she takes a drag and exhales.
“Faith and laughter,” I say to myself.
“What’s that, dear,” I hear from my mother.
“I said: ‘Faith and laughter,’ mother.”
“What an odd thing to say at two o’clock in the morning,” she responds, and gives a short laugh.
A few hours later, I am pushing myself up and off the bed, trying to make it to work by eight thirty. I manage to park my car in the fenced parking lot for employees, flash my badge as I hurry past the guard window, descend the stairs and fly through the unending hallway toward the reception room. I slip into a scene from Gogol’s, The Overcoat. Running down a long corridor, enduring robbers stealing the coat off my back and then, after I am dead, returning to life to get my revenge by indiscriminately grabbing the coats from people’s backs. It is not the first time in my life where literature and reality have conspired to disorient me.
Once at my desk, I breathe deeply for a few minutes before I return to the reality of the reception office that is my job.
That evening, I pull my old Ford into the parking lot of the grocery store. Half an hour later, when I swipe my card to pay by check, the cashier tells me that I have been listed as having insufficient funds. I am mortified to the level of wishing I could disappear. Quickly, I try to collect myself. With as much grace as I can gather, I apologize to the cashier. I offer up my rarely-used credit card. He swipes it. I scrutinize his face for one hint of disdain.
The bill is covered. I grab my four plastic bags of groceries and walk out from the store as fast as I possibly can walk and drive home.
I have been inexcuseably careless. Between my mother and escape from my mother through reading, I have failed to deposit my last four paychecks. I can tolerate getting old with my mother. I can tolerate dreams. I can tolerate most anything as long as I can continue to practice one responsible thing. You need a balanced checking account in order to navigate life’s nightmares and necessities. I have failed to do that.
I decide to seek help in therapy.
I sit in a bare office with a desk and three wooden chairs. The therapist listens as I present the barest facts of my life. She is tall like me and, unlike me, slim. Not that I am obese. Just not slim. She looks twenty five years younger than I am.
I am an adult child of a mother with whom I have lived my entire life. The house where we live has two ten by ten bedrooms, a master bedroom slightly larger where my mother sleeps, a living room ten and a half by fifteen and an adjoining dining room of precisely the same dimensions plus a kitchen twelve by eleven. I tell her I don’t know the dimensions of the sun porch where my mother reads during the day and I read by a battery-powered night light in the evenings during the spring, summer and autumn months. When she asks me why I think the house where I live is part of my psycho-social history, I silently note her failure to understand the symbolism I have included as a fact in my psycho-social history. I ignore her question by informing her that a house with such small bedrooms is typical of houses built eighty five years ago.
She stares at me. I give her a second chance by informing her that the sun porch is an addition my mother had built for the two of us after she demanded my father leave our home.
“How old were you when your mother demanded he leave?” she asks dryly.
She doesn’t get it, I realize.
“Four,” I respond as dryly.
In our third session of the third week, I tell her that the memories of my father are confused and unclear. She asks me about confused and I inform her that my father worked six nights a week at the city news bureau and slept during the day. I hardly ever saw him. I remember a slim, dark-haired man who wore glasses. Tall, medium or short, she asks. I can’t remember, I answer. She proceeds to interpret my confused childhood memories as repression.
In the fifth session of our fifth week, I apologetically tell her that I cannot remember being sexually abused by my father as she has suggested. Somewhat timidly, I remind her that my father and mother separated and divorced before my fifth birthday, and that I have not seen my father since.
“Yet you told me that your mother demanded that your father leave,” she says.
“Is that the word I used? Demand?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps that is the word my mother used when she told me.”
“It is no accident that your mother chose the word.”
“Perhaps not,” I respond.
“Your mother had a reason for demanding that your father leave. What do you think that reason was?”
“Whatever the reason, it was not because he had sexually abused me.”
“You’ve never asked your mother why?”
Like Joan of Arc standing before her inquisitors, I remain silent.
“You’re afraid to ask your mother why!” she declares.
“I am not afraid of my mother, nor am I afraid of her words. I love my mother in spite of my mother.”
She smiles and interprets what I have just told her as a defense mechanism against a repressed memory of abuse.
“I deeply appreciate the concern behind your interpretation,” I tell her. “But I truly believe your interpretation simply is not true.”
She pauses, then declares: “As long as you remain in denial, any therapeutic progress is impossible.”
I bow my head. For just a moment, I feel like crying. Instead, I raise my head and remark: “I accept your concern. I reject your interpretation.”
I get up and leave.
The next day at work, five minutes into my lunch hour, I sit alone at my receptionist desk. I call the mental health center and ask their receptionist to please give my therapist the message that I will no longer be accepting her or the center’s services.
Perhaps it is my imagination, but my mother’s critical comments resume with a particular penetrating stab when I get home from work that day.
“Alice has a bachelor’s degree and is using it to hold a position calling for no more than a high school diploma.”
“They made the position of office manager especially for me and put me on salary, mother. As you know.”
“That is like hiring an engineer for the position of janitor and calling his new position sanitary engineer.”
“Please mother!”
“I got you a good job at the law office with me. If you had kept it, you would be earning a handsome salary by now.”
This time I create a list of outpatient therapists who accept my insurance minus the ten per cent and deductible. I make up a list of questions to ask over the phone. The first is: “Do you answer questions over the phone?”
This question eliminates half the therapists from my list.
The next questions are routine information: license, years practiced, type and level of degree. As a matter of courtesy, I inquire into their therapeutic approach although I don’t much care about their approach as long as it doesn’t involve rattlesnakes or suffocation. When I ask the remaining eleven therapists if they could shrink me to a size small enough to fit through a door one quarter my current size, only three therapists remain as contenders. The first two, a woman and a man who sound about my age, ask if I have considered medication. I respond to their question by stating that I already have a key to the door, all I need is shrinking.
My response leaves one elderly male by the name of Kay Miatovic.
“I am already in possession of the key,” I say for the third time that afternoon. “I just need to be shrunk to one fourth my current size.”
“Good,” he responds. “One less obstacle.”
Our first session hears me describing to Mr. Miatovic – he does not have a PhD, he has a master’s degree in clinical social work -- one of my earliest memories of my mother.
We are walking toward downtown. My mother is holding my hand. We have just passed a movie theater. I let go of her hand and start to run. I am not yet five years old. My father has been out of the house just a short time. When my mother almost catches up with me, I push harder and take longer strides. I am tall for my age and am able to run beyond her reach for the rest of the block as bystanders stare. Finally, she gets close enough to grab my shirt from behind and pull me to a stop. She grabs me by my shoulders and begins shaking me until my teeth begin clicking like a xylophone.
“Devil child!” she hollers at me.
We turn around and walk straight home. After she calms down, she asks: “What on earth possessed you to run away like that, Alice.”
“I saw my father walking across the next street. I wanted to run up and tell him to come home.”
My mother puts her hands to her face, begins crying and goes into the other room.
“And no,” I say to Mr. Miatovic, “my father did not sexually molest me before my mother told him to leave our home.”
“You are responding to the suggestion that he did? “
“My previous therapist insisted on it before we could progress further.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“What do you think... and feel… about the fact that your mother ‘told’ your father to leave?”
I purse my lips and offer absolutely nothing in response.
After a full minute passes, Mr. Miatovic says: “I’m guessing you’ve asked your mother… why she told him to leave.”
“He worked six nights a week for the city news bureau,” I answer. “Maybe my mother got tired of it. Maybe he got laid off. I’m not sure.”
I pause a few seconds, then say: “Once… I asked her.. why.”
“And?”
“She turned away and walked into the kitchen. I never asked again.”
“How do you feel about this… unanswered question?”
“Nothing. My mother told my father to leave the house. He left. It is a sad fact of the past.”
“You saw your father walking across the street after your mother… told him to leave?”
“Just that one time. I never saw him after that. I’ve never heard from him.”
He seems to be in your thoughts today.”
“Perhaps. Our time is almost up.”
Fifteen minutes later, after we have engaged in meaningless exchanges, I say to him: “To be continued next week.”
Mr. Miatovic smiles and, after confirming out appointment for next week, wishes me well.
“I am aware of the possibility of having a transference relationship with you due to the loss of my father at age four,” I am saying to him at our next session. “Do you think I am having such a transference?”
“Possibly. I am more interested in what you think.”
“Possibly,” I answer.
“Whatever may be the case, I know that you are the best source of information about you. Not the diagnostic textbook. Not me. Not your mother. Not other therapists.”
I stare at Kay Miatovic’s white, wavy hair, his thick-rimmed brown glasses. I think about his extra weight and wonder about the possibility of an unexpected heart attack.
“Perhaps,” I say to him, “I am being cautious at the possibility of your unexpected exit from my life, just like my father.”
“Your father’s exit… unexpected… affects your confidence in my capacity to continue seeing you?”
“I was thinking less about my father and more about your health.”
I stare down at his protruding belly.
“While it would not be deliberate, your sudden retirement due to health problems certainly would cut me short just as we are getting started.”
Kay smiles. “You want a medical report?”
“I just want to make sure this… this therapy we’re starting is not going to suffer an abortion due to the health issues of a man in his seventies.”
“Alice. What do you think about when you are tenaciously inquiring into my health?”
“Your health.”
“I am seventy four. My blood pressure remains under control. My annual check up gave me a clean bill of health. Everything is sound. What do you think this concern about my health reveals?”
“Of course it reveals that one of the few intimate relationships I have known could become highly painful since it is with a male almost a quarter of a century my senior. I don’t want you to get sick, then leave me hanging out to dry, unfinished and… possibly… in pain.”
“What issues do you see us exploring that would make it risky if I were to become ill which my doctor says is not predicted?”
“The human condition.”
“Human condition?”
“Death, Kay.”
I take a deep breath and settle into silence.
“To be continued next week,” I pronounce a short time later.
As I walk the five blocks back to my mother’s house, I ask myself: Do I really want to go forward in therapy with Kay? And if so, what do I want from therapy? Do I want to continue dreaming how I am Bette Davis interviewing Rosalyn Carter, imagining I am an actress who once raised a hand to wipe a tear while millions sobbed? Do I want to slip into an anxiety of having The Overcoat stolen from my back? Do I want to know where these things spring?
At our next session, Kay smiles and says nothing when I tell him: “I have decided to share more of my life history with you tonight.”
It is the second Monday in December. As I graciously remove a handkerchief from my purse and wipe sweat from beneath my chin, Kay asks if he can get me a glass of water. He returns a few moments later from the small lobby in front of his office with a large thick paper cup of water from the cooler.
“Only two floors. No elevator,” he says of the old building where his office is located.
“I need the exercise. My mother says I’ve put on twenty pounds. She’s right.”
Kay breathes deeply, relaxes, stares straight ahead and waits.
“I graduated in the top five per cent of my class in 1973,” I begin.
He smiles.
One of the reasons I have decided to continue accepting therapy from Kay is because he has not made the therapeutic error of making it seem like he approves or disapproves of me. If he had said, “That’s excellent, Alice. Well done,” I would have taken it as approval. I would have been offended and then we would have had an issue to work through. Or I might have quit.
“For financial reasons, I attended the nearby community college. Two years later, I began commuting to one of the city universities downtown, returning north in the evenings where I continued living with my mother. I attended classes, studied and worked twenty eight hours a week stacking books in the local library. Upon graduation, I tried to get a job at the city news bureau. They wouldn’t hire me. I tried to earn a few dollars by writing for the city newspapers. I got one commission in twenty two months – a piece on the demolition of an old ice cream parlor in a neighborhood gutted by the expansion of the expressway. It was a good piece, but no one took notice.
“By now my mother was speculating about the reason for my going to college. ‘Have you attended college and a university to follow the vocation of parasite?’ she asked when I rose from my desk in our third bedroom where I had been trying to follow my vocation as stringer.
“’I think it’s time, Alice,’ she said that summer. I knew what she was referring to.”
I pause, glance at Kay, stare straight ahead and resume.
“I gave it one more… effort. I decided to be present when First Lady Rosalyn Carter visited the city campaigning for her husband. None of the city newspapers would offer me a commission to interview her. Nevertheless, I was determined to step out from the crowd, ask for and arrange an interview. What I planned to do with it, once I got it, would get decided later.
“When the First Lady appeared from the revolving doors of the community development center, she began shaking the hands of the crowd. I had dressed in professional looking slacks and blouse. It was already August. The election was looking bad for her husband. A short black woman stood in front of me. I was able to reach over her. As the First Lady grabbed my hand, I practiced a controlled ecstasy. ‘I’d love to interview you, Mrs. Carter,’ I said as loudly as I could without shouting.
“I don’t think she even heard me. The First Lady got rushed through the rest of the crowd and disappeared into the presidential limousine in less than five minutes. After I arrived back at the house, I sat and stared at the blank page inserted through the roller of my electric typewriter. I finally managed to write something about a decent president and First Lady valiantly struggling to avoid defeat at the hands of a television communicator who was about to offer the American people a feel-good presidency of the banal.”
“I sent it to the Commentary section of the newspapers where there a chance for at least some payment. I thought that, if I could at least earn something from my writing, I would be able to persevere. After four weeks passed without a response, I decided to accept reality. And that reality was: I had no contacts in journalism. My social skills were so poor that I was unlikely to ever make contacts. My mother was right. It was time.
“I interviewed for a job of secretary in the downtown law firm where my mother worked. I got a job serving half a dozen junior partners largely on her recommendation. I stayed there eight years until I got sick.”
After saying this last word, I stop and wait to see if Kay pounces on the word “sick” like many therapists would no doubt pounce. If he does, I am ready to pounce on him.
He shows a proper look of concern, but says nothing.
“I used my insurance to enter a psychiatric facility where all the meals were scheduled. They allowed no snacks in between. We could not go outside unless accompanied by an attendant. I could not make a phone call except on the one pay phone which was always occupied. When I told one of the staff that another patient had threatened me, he told me: deal with it. I threatened to leave. My primary counselor warned me that, if I did, the insurance might not cover the cost of treatment. She told me I would be liable for the hospital bill. That’s how I was coerced to stay.”
“I got out after twenty three days because my insurance coverage would not stretch payments into the fourth week. I stuck it out at the law firm another six months. Then I interviewed for and got the job as receptionist at the outpatient clinic of the Salvation Army. I used to get paid by the hour and had to punch the clock. After four years, they changed my position to office manager and put me on salary. Then I was allowed to sign in. Although the first clients do not arrive until nine o’clock, it is my job to get to work early and prepare the coffee and check the facility, making sure file cabinets are locked, office doors are unlocked and no mess has been left from the of After Care and 12 step groups the night before. The director of the clinic dresses quite elegantly. Her clients keep coming back to see her – some of them for years. I believe she is a skilled and caring therapist. The neighborhood where the clinic is located has changed over the years from run down to gentrified.”
“Sounds like you like your job.”
“I always treat the clients with respect whatever their condition. That’s more than I got at Streamwood.”
“That’s the treatment program you were in?”
I say nothing.
“I’ve never heard of Streamwood. Is that the real name of the facility?”
“No.”
Kay says nothing.
“You and I both know about diagnostic labels. Helpful… at times. And all too frequently misleading. When you consult with your colleagues, instead of referring to me as Alice, or Ms. Brousset, or Ms. X, you refer to me as your bi-bipolar. Or: ‘My Borderline.’ Does the world see Alice Brousset through a looking glass of labels? Or is Alice allowed to present her own identity to the world?”
“You seem certain that I refer to you with a diagnostic label when I consult with colleagues.”
“You must submit a diagnosis for insurance purposes. I know that for a fact.”
“True.”
“I do not wish to know the diagnosis you have imposed upon me.”
“You believe a diagnosis prevents you from growing? Already you have made major changes in your life. It is no accident that you left the law firm after you got out of the psychiatric facility.”
“As soon as I got out of the facility….”
“Streamwood?”
“…. I immediately stopped taking the medication they had begun administering to me. Before you ask, I don’t remember the medication name – brand or generic. It was a mood stabilizer if that makes you feel better. “
“As long as you are not currently taking any medication…”
“Are you paranoid about liability!” I snap.
“Alice….”
“That’s my name. Not Ms. Bi-polar. Not Mrs. Borderline. Not poor Ms. Victim-of-sexual abuse. Alice. Alice Brousset.”
Kay waits half a minute and when I have said nothing, he says to me:
“You have held a job in a sensitive position for twenty years. Whatever mood issues they opined you had at… the facility where you were at … those issues appear not to have interfered with your doing such a good job that they created a new position for you and put you on salary. I have no doubt that you are as skilled and intelligent as any of the therapists who work there.”
““Therapists with advanced degrees who leave once they have enough experience to put it down on their resume and move onto something… better paying. Their presence is more unstable than the unstable clients they are supposed to serve. The director and I are the only stable employees there.”
“Stability is important? Professionally and personally?”
“Stop being a shrink for a minute, please. Mental health clients need predictability in their lives. I give it to them, sitting at my desk every day, welcoming them into the clinic before they see young, inexperienced therapists who may be gone in nine months.”
“Your questions regarding my health…. I understand more fully … now.”
“Good. And please do not ask whether I have thought of going back to school to get a graduate degree in psychology. Or a PhD which you don’t possess. Position isn’t everything.”
“Others have asked about it? Or perhaps… you have thought about it yourself?”
“You don’t employ a receptionist, I see.”
“No,” Kay replies.
*
“Have you read Charles Dickens?” I ask at our next session.
He waits, then replies: “A few of the many he wrote. A Tale of Two Cities, Nicholas Nickleby, Great Expectations, David Copperfield.”
I pause a few seconds to recall a passage: “’To go with you – anywhere – everywhere – to the world’s end – to the churchyard grave,” I recite. “You are my home – my kind friend….”
To my surprise, Kay replies: “’I am a friend who can do little for you. How came you here?’”
“All I want,” I say, “is to do a good job at work, balance my check book, come home, learn how to keep my sanity around my mother and, finally, read and enjoy some of the great stories of literature. That is all.”
“I confess my appreciation of Dickens – and for Nicholas Nickleby in particular -- came from a class I took. I don’t suppose you have thought….
I pounce immediately on Kay’s therapeutic mistake.
“I just said: ‘All I want is to do a good job at work, balance my check book, come home, learn how to keep my sanity around my mother and, finally, read and enjoy some of the great stories of literature.’ Why would I want to witness some instructor de-construct works I love and maybe destroy that love in the process? Why!”
“I was inquiring if you had thought of sharing your love of literature with other people by taking a class.”
“Defense,” I pronounce.
“Yes, it was. You seem to be certain that any class in literature would see the instructor ruin literature. I wonder where that certainty comes from?”
“From a college experience where instructors fail to teach literature out of love of literature!”
“I hear you answering me as if the failure by a college instructor who once taught a course you had is an unending, unavoidable experience.”
I stare back at him. He stares at me, smiles, bows his head and says: “I’d like to ask – if I may – what are your favorite works of literature?”
I maintain my silent stare, knowing how uncomfortable it likely makes him.
“Two works? Even one? “
“Testing me?” I finally say.
“It might tell you something about yourself… if you were to consider the question.”
I keep silent.
“That is our mission here, after all. To explore – if and as you wish -- the self. Yourself. That is the reason…behind my question.”
He stutters at the end of his sentence, bows his head and raises it again.
For a moment I feel sorry for Kay. I focus on the fact that he is getting money from my insurance and twelve dollars and fifty cents in deductible from me.
“I prefer to explore the human condition, not the psychological state of Alice Brousset.”
I wait for him to utter his exasperation. Instead he says:
“Absolutely if and as you wish, Alice. No sooner, no later and not at all if that is what you want.”
I stare at him, thinking of Joan of Arc and her inquisitors.
“You never told me if your last name is Serbian. I know what some of them did over there and how the United State military bombed them. Don’t worry, I won’t judge you if you are Serbian.”
“If I pushed too much, I apologize.”
I sit in absolute silence for the remainder of the therapeutic hour. At precisely fifty minutes, I rise from my chair.
Kay rises with me.
“To be continued,” I pronounce.
“See you next week,” he says, hesitating.
My nod of the head represents a silent confirmation that our therapeutic relationship has remained in tact in spite of his push into unexplored and forbidden territory.
“’I’d like to ask -- if I may – what are your favorite works of literature?’ ‘Two works? Even one? It might tell you something about yourself… if you were to consider the question.’ These are your words from our last session.”
I pause.
“I’m going to give you what you want. Here are some of my favorites, as you wish.”
Kay responds with a slight, uncomfortable smile.
“I have hidden in a cave with Toni Morrison’s fugitives, fearing what life would be like to be hunted.”
“Have you recently felt persecuted?”
“Are you accusing me of delusions?”
“I am wondering at the meaning behind what you just said to me.”
“I have had a real sense of having the coat stolen from my back.”
“When your mother has woken you up the night before and you are rushing to work the next day?”
“Nikolas Gogol, Kay! Russian literature. Nineteenth century.”
“Smike? Charles Dickens? ‘You are my home…’ What does the word-- home -- mean to you, Alice?”
“Beauty. Kindness. Reading in my sun porch,” I murmur.
“Reading in the sun porch is a safe, even soothing spot within your house?”
I collect myself and shoot back: “The greatest perpetrators of evil are the victims of evil. W.H. Auden.”
“I do not believe you really think you have perpetrated evil?”
I remain silent.
“What about the word, kindness? Can you tell me about that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You quoted Auden on evil. Can I ask why?”
“Part of me thinks I have done bad things.”
“And the other part. Can you let that other part… have its say?”
“Give me a second to…”
I take a very deep breath.
“My response to your question about these parts…. You’re not accusing me of multiple personalities?”
“Certainly not.”
“Loren Eiseley,” I pronounce. “He describes a species of homo sapiens with the largest brains ever discovered. They were a blip on the evolutionary ladder. And then… extinction..”
I take another breath.
“It is dangerous to be too smart in this world, Kay.”
“And where did you learn that?”
“All I want is to do a good job at work, balance my check book, come home, learn how to keep my sanity around my mother and, finally, read and enjoy some of the great stories of literature. That is all.”
“How are you feeling at this moment, Alice? If you could share it… even in just one word.”
I stare straight into his face and respond: “I will continue living in my mother’s house after my mother dies. I will continue living in my mother’s house until I die.”
“Psychologically as well as literally?”
“You were the one who asked me about my favorite works of literature. It might tell me something about myself, you said.”
I take a short, shallow breath.
“In the summer evenings, sitting in my sun porch with my feet propped up, I have enjoyed reading the works of Albert Camus and Carson McCullers.”
“May I respond with another question?”
“I don’t mind your questions.”
“If you could create your own future, all of it, what would it look like? What would it feel like?”
“Are you asking me about destiny? The human condition? Those are good questions. Very good questions.”
I watch a wisp of sadness pass across his face, and then his slight, sad smile.
“Absolutely if and as you wish, Alice.”
“To be continued,” I respond to him.
As I am walking home after the session, breathing in December’s frozen air, I ask myself why I have bothered with therapy. The question changes its texture when I ask why do I continue therapy with Kay? He certainly can help me feel less anxious when I fail to balance my check book. I know it doesn’t hurt to talk to someone who, by training or nature, listens without the judgment that I am destined to endure in my mother’s house.
I pass beneath the street lamp which, in its subdued dimness, I find soothing. I admit that I do not mind entering Kay’s office where it is safe to defy probing questions. I ask myself if I want to experience what it might have been like to have had a kind and accepting father. Or mother. I watch moist breath from my nostrils evaporate as it hits the air. Who knows?
