The Uses of Enchantment

by Heidi Julavits

  “Some of them are well beyond the tasteful realm of nonsense,” Mary said.

  “Some of them speak to the soul. They’re not about weakness, they’re about proud survival. They’re about self-definition and human fortitude.”

  “Also known as how-to denial manuals,” Mary said.

  Anne wasn’t listening.

  “I assume, since you know Roz, you’ve read this one?” she asked.

  Anne hastened to a nearby bookshelf, her duck shoes suctioning across the varnished floor. She returned with a paperback copy of Trampled Ivy: How Abusive Marriages Happen to Smart Women.

  Mary regarded it noncommittally.

  “That was published before my time,” Mary said, scanning the familiar cover. She watched as Bettina made her leisurely way from FORGIVE-NESS to the tearoom. She left her purse on a table while she ordered at the bar.

  “You should read it. Your mother should read it. Every woman in your family should read it,” Anne said fervently.

  “That’s quite an endorsement,” Mary said.

  “You’d be amazed how intelligent women put up with, well, with less than ideal situations, simply out of pride. We thought we were immune to that sort of working-class affliction, simply because we’d read Joyce and Proust. I went to Smith. Not technically an ‘Ivy,’ but as Dr. Biedelman explains in her introduction, the Seven Sisters are really considered Ivy League.”

  “I’ve always thought so,” Mary said.

  Mary turned the book over and flinched.

  “Nice picture,” Mary said. “Of course she looks nothing like this in person.”

  “Well,” Anne said defensively, “the photo’s quite old.”

  “In person she has a mole—actually, it’s more like a wart—right here.”

  She pointed to Roz’s nose.

  “And a scar which you can really only see in certain lights. Of course this picture was taken before the cheek implants, which have turned out to be a disaster.”

  “Really?” said Anne. “That’s strange. She just gave a reading here last weekend…”

  “Stay away from silicon injections, that’s my advice to you. They slide, and one of them’s down around her chin now, rounding the horn, maybe coming up the other side for all we know.”

  “Huh!” said Anne.

  Anne’s front teeth, perfectly square and thick, reminded Mary of blank Scrabble tiles. They had been capped, clearly; unless she’d been a Smith College hockey goalie, her attachment to Roz’s book made perfect sense.

  “Well,” Mary said contritely, “you’re a persuasive salesperson. I’ll take two copies.”

  Anne took the compliment hard. She blushed the crimson-red shade of her preholiday turtleneck. This made Mary hate herself all the more.

  “Could you wrap one?” Mary said. “I’m going to give one to my mother for her birthday.”

  Anne offered to ring Mary up so she could continue browsing; Mary handed Anne her credit card.

  “I’ll be in the tearoom,” she said.

  Bettina had since returned to her table with a mug and a white plate on which a single chocolate truffle was centered. She’d taken a handful of greeting cards from the greeting-card section and absently wrote in one with a gold pen.

  Mary sat at a table opposite Bettina. Though she’d never had an articulated plan, she’d loosely intended to introduce herself to Bettina as a reporter who was interested in writing a book about women’s traumatic experiences with male therapists and she recognized Bettina from the papers and did she mind the intrusion and etc., etc. But she’d lost her appetite for pretending to be people she wasn’t. She decided to leave the encounter to chance. Either Bettina would recognize her from Mary’s own ages-ago newspaper photos and they might talk, or she wouldn’t recognize her and nothing more would happen. Bettina would drink her tea and put on her red coat and leave. Mary would go home. In fact, she realized, she was extremely ready to go home. She was exhausted and she was starving in that exhausted starving way—starving but not in the least bit hungry.

  Up close and without her hat, Bettina appeared older than Mary had originally thought—her eyes threatened by the fine concentric creases of skin surrounding them, her hair dyed a uniform chestnut color. She wore a stretchy black tunic over stretchy black pants. Mary watched as Bettina made an extended meal of her dusted truffle, pincering the tiny ball between two copper nails and taking tiny nips from it with her front teeth. Cocoa powder accumulated in the corners of her mouth unattractively like dried blood.

  Mary tried to recall the strange power that Bettina, or rather the spectral story of Bettina, formerly exerted over her. Every study hall found Mary examining Bettina’s yearbook photo in the new library wing, her averagely pretty face framed by her trademark braids and appearing all the more malice-tinged for seeming so unexceptional. Even her list of activities was unexceptional, especially by overachieving Semmering standards. FIELD HOCKEY I, II, III. ART CLUB I, II. The photo promised that Mary, too—another unexceptional girl—might harbor darker impulses beneath her plaid skirt and navy cardigan and iron-on school crest.

  Mary narrowed her eyes, reducing Bettina to a hazy outline. She tried to recapture that shadowy side of Bettina, but couldn’t. It saddened her, in the way the fog-shrouded coastline that used to evoke in her a sense of spooky promise and now left her dull saddened her. She couldn’t even summon the logic that allowed her to view Bettina as a wronged girl, a New England Dora whose stories were dismissed by the authorities as fantasy—or worse, lies. Bettina wasn’t a victim. The shame Mary endured while spinning through the microfiche in the Grove library convinced her that in her quest to avenge, in some misguided and unarticulated way, Bettina Spencer, she’d only wrongly involved more innocent people. So now, appropriately, Mary was unable to discern within Bettina a shred of her former enchantment. Again, the weighty feeling of age dropped over her. She was too old to be piqued by mistaken teenage fervor. She was too old to locate in another flawed being the seeds of her own bewitching potential.

  Despite the increasing level of scrutiny Mary lavished upon her, Bettina remained unwittingly engrossed in her truffle and her greeting cards. Mary coughed. In an attempt to influence chance, she tried to catch Bettina’s attention, but Bettina, when she did glance up, was only interested in tracking the harried trajectories of the interchangeable saleswomen.

  Anne approached Mary with a bag. “Here you are,” she said. She waited while Mary signed her credit card receipt.

  “Thank you,” Mary said loudly. Bettina still had not noticed her.

  “Excuse me for prying,” Mary said. “But didn’t you teach at Semmering Academy?”

  “Me?” Anne said.

  “Semmering Academy,” Mary repeated. “You look so familiar. I used to be a student at Semmering Academy.”

  Bettina glanced up from her greeting cards; she stared intently at Anne’s face.

  “No, I’m sorry, I never had a job until this one,” said Anne.

  Mary watched as Bettina, eyes still locked firmly on Anne, slipped the greeting cards she’d yet to pay for into her purse.

  It was all Mary could do not to laugh. Brilliant, she thought. Add shoplifting to a list that already included arson and perjury. (ARSON I, II. PERJURY III, IV. SHOPLIFTING II.)

  “My mistake,” Mary said. She watched as Bettina donned her gloves with the languidness of a practiced thief. She even possessed the nerviness to pause by the door and ask the cashier for the time.

  She was gone.

  Mary put on her coat and returned Anne’s covertly enthusiastic wave, her hand tucked close to her chest, vibrating more than waving. Out on the street the temperature had dropped to the predicted low, the shock of the unseasonable chill lessened by the fake fir boughs and illuminated plastic berries already strung from the streetlamps, even though it was still seven weeks to Christmas. She walked with a very specific destination, listening to the rhythmic crunching of her boot soles on the salted sidewalk and the crinkle
of the paper bag under her arm. She remained dogged by guilt and could not shake from her head Anne’s blushing face, her capped teeth. Shame wrapped around her heart and squeezed it even smaller than its already paltry size.

  Soon Mary found herself in front of Roz’s office brownstone again. She rang the bell and stated quite firmly and clearly when asked to identify herself: “Mary Veal. It’s Mary Veal, here.”

  Notes

  MARCH 18, 1986

  The statistics on child molestation in the suburbs of Boston are astonishingly high given the area’s comparative per capita wealth, a topic to which many psychiatric papers are dedicated at the annual Massachusetts Association of Mental Health Professionals Convention. The stricter Freudians among my colleagues presume this number to be wildly inflated by the recent influx of feminist psychoanalysts (most, but not all, are women) who insist on giving literal credence to abuse incidents formerly chalked up to sexual fantasy. I sympathized with the feminist psychoanalysts to a point; if ever there were a culture upon which the Freudians would have an unquestioned lock, it would be a repressive culture like New England. However, in a culture of inculcated repression, a backlash of equally distorted proportions must be expected. While a graduate student at BU I found myself caught unawares by exactly this sort of equalizing dynamic. As the resident mental health adviser at Semmering Academy, a position I held from the fall of 1971 until the spring of 1972, my job primarily involved counseling the student body—an intelligent if highly strung collection of adolescent girls, prone to suffering from illnesses rarely more serious that the side effects of overachievement. To say that I was, initially, less than sympathic to their suffering would be an understatement; so unmoved was I by their traumas that I soon warranted a visit from the headmistress, Dorothy Pym, who memorably informed me that girls, like horses, needed apples as much as they needed the crop.

  And so I fed them apples. I considered every B plus a world-threatening tragedy. I was empathic to a saintly degree. Which was possibly why I allowed myself to be duped by the school’s then most infamous student, Bettina Spencer.

  Following my reprimand from Miss Pym, I possibly became lazy in the face of simple plausibility; I became an enabler, and I enabled Bettina Spencer to temporarily derail the life of an innocent man by failing to see that the girl suffered from an easily diagnosable cluster B personality disorder—more precisely, she was a pathological liar and a narcissist who exhibited grandiose tendencies. Bettina, I later came to learn, had been abused by an uncle when she was twelve years old. Always an imaginative girl with a tendency toward exaggeration, Bettina’s accusations were dismissed by her mother as a more malignant strain of her usual tall tales. Thus exaggeration mutated into mendacity, and Bettina, seeking a way to right a wrong she believed she’d suffered at the hands of doubting adults, decided to fabricate a more believable situation of abuse. This did not excuse the burning of the library, nor the accusations directed at Miss Pym, nor various other injustices visited upon the innocent by Bettina’s desire to make a name for herself through the destruction of property and other people. But I take responsibility for failing to diagnose Bettina’s illness in the early stages; had I done so, perhaps the old library would still be intact, as would the lives of her victims. As Plutarch said, “It is worse to be sick in soul than in body, for those afflicted in body only suffer, but those afflicted in soul both suffer and do ill.”

  Which was why Mary’s confession regarding her abuse at the hands of Kurt, and her family’s failure to believe her, seemed of linchpin importance. It also explained why Mary’s diagnosis failed, up to this point, to cohere. If, as I suspected, Mary’s mental status belonged to cluster B, then this would explain her erratic, dramatic, and nongenuine emotional behavior; it would explain the vagueness of her answers and her generally evasive temperament; it would explain her love of open-ended questions and florid, if often contradictory, responses. It would explain her flirtatiousness, which often took the form of hostility or cruelty. And it would explain my general sense of disorientation, for such is the danger of treating grandiose narcissists—they are expert mimics, able to inhabit the disorder profiles of many competing illnesses so that the bewildered doctor finds him- or herself taking wrong turn after wrong turn at the bottom of many pointless rabbit holes.

  Subsequently, my next appointment with Mary felt extremely crucial, the fulcrum meeting upon which the rest of our work together would teeter. I was reminded of a conversation Mary and I had had during the third session, during which I’d claimed that therapy wasn’t a chess game in which tactical errors could be made. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  I began our next session, our fifth, with a game.

  What kind of game, Mary said. She arrived again in a hostile mood. Her complexion had improved, however; she even appeared, to my eye, prettier than I’d ever before given her credit for being. She admitted that she’d been to a tanning booth on a lark with her sister Regina, that she hadn’t worn underwear and thus didn’t have a tan line. She offered to show me this lack of a tan line, and even stood up and began unbuttoning her jeans, expecting me to stop her. She slowed her fingers, watching me intently, waiting for me to object.

  I did not object.

  You’re such a pervert, Beaton, she said, rebuttoning her jeans and dropping back onto the couch. What would your colleagues say? Encouraging a patient to undress in front of you. Next you’ll be begging for a striptease.

  I didn’t encourage you to do anything, I said.

  Not making a decision is a decision, Mary said.

  I was allowing you to act on an impulse that consumed you.

  I wasn’t consumed, she said. What are you writing?

  More notes, I said.

  Who cares about you and your notes? she said. Nobody reads them.

  That’s not true, I said. I’m part of a weekly workshop in which my performance is reviewed and critiqued by colleagues.

  Reviewed how, she said.

  They read my notes. They listen, if there’s a reason to listen, to these tapes. It’s done anonymously, of course. Your name will never be disclosed.

  Mary regarded the tape recorder.

  Huh, she said. So they’ll be listening to my voice?

  I nodded.

  Huh, she said again. Maybe I should tell them how I really feel about you.

  You may say whatever you like, I said.

  An endorsement, she said. You can use it on your book.

  What book, I said.

  Mary smiled. The book you’re going to write about us.

  Mary pulled out her compact, she checked her lips. She dropped the compact into her lap but failed to insert the obsessive swirling finger.

  I need to jot this down, she said. Can I have a piece of paper?

  I tore a sheet of paper from my pad.

  A pencil?

  I handed her a pen.

  I need a pencil, she said.

  I fetched a pencil from my desk drawer. She stared at my face as she passed the pencil back and forth over the sheet of paper.

  What are you doing, I said.

  Sketching you, she said. You have a very high forehead. Have you ever studied phrenology?

  Have you? I asked.

  A high forehead means you are well suited to public speaking and occupations involving water.

  Is that your endorsement of me, I asked.

  No, she said, this is my endorsement of you. “Dr. Hammer is a man endowed with incredible intellectual and physical resources. His obsession with genitals is a source of constant stimulation for both doctor and patient. I feel thoroughly explored by this man, if scarcely understood.”

  Mary smiled. Would you like to see my sketch?

  If you would like to show it to me, I said.

  Mary turned the sheet of notebook paper to face me. She had shaded in the top half with the pencil; in doing so she had revealed the depression caused by my pen as I had written my notes about her.

  Can’t believe
you fell for that old trick, Beaton, she said.

  Maybe I wanted you to know what I thought about you, I said.

  Nice try, she said. What’s faked anterograde memory disturbance?

  Do you know what paramnesia is, I said.

  No, she said.

  Paramnesia is a term for the story a patient creates to explain their lives. They’ve substituted what they’ve forgotten with a new memory, I said.

  Why don’t you just call them liars, she said.

  Because it’s more complicated than lying.

  Lying is complicated, Mary said.

  It can be, I said.

  She pointed to the upper left-hand corner of the paper on which I had written “BS Connection?” and circled it.

  You think I’m bullshitting you, she said.

  That’s your interpretation, I said, relieved that she hadn’t interpreted the notation correctly as “Bettina Spencer.”

  So you think I’m a liar, she said.

  Do you think you’re a liar, I said.

  If I say no and I’m a liar, then I might be a liar; then again I might be telling the truth.

  And if you say yes?

  If I say yes and I’m a liar, then that means I’m not a liar. And yet I’ve lied to you.

  I’m still curious how you’d diagnose yourself, I said. Presuming you would tell the truth in this one instance.

  Never presume. It makes a pre out of sue and me. And besides, she said, I’m not the doctor.

  How would you like to be the doctor, I said.

  What do you mean, she said.

  You’ll be me, and I’ll be you.

  This is the game, she said.

  This is the game, I said.

  She tried to appear skeptical of this suggestion, but I could sense it excited her.

  I think this will be harder for you than it will be for me, she said. I just have to repeat everything you say and ask obvious stupid questions. You need to be creative.