by Sara Levine
5) Brenda Pickens: fluffy-haired, fluffy-sweatered, said all “her girls” were hindered by terrible self-esteem
A haze descends when I try to recall the others’ names. I ran through every therapist available in that long college hall of Harris Center known as PERSONAL COUNSELING. You could have six free sessions with anyone, and then if dissatisfied, pick a new person and start counting towards your six free sessions again. I never paid for a seventh session with any of them.
In my twenty-fifth year, I was happier and stronger than ever, done with therapists—finis!—and yet occasionally I craved a pill to calm my nerves. Where was I in this story proper? Oh yes, I was living with Lars. Notice how closely that sounds like living with lies. It sounds exactly like it, if you imagine yourself saying it with some kind of Eastern European accent. And I was living with lies when I was living with Lars. For reasons already apparent, I found myself happy to be rid of The Pet Library but unsteadied by the new arrangements. Now that Lars had gotten tight-fisted, we went to fewer restaurants, and rather than go shopping on weekdays, I spent long lugubrious hours at home, the vapors of which could be dispelled only by picking quarrels. Sometimes I fought lucidly, poignantly, my complaints so beautifully orchestrated I wished I could fight Lars for a living. Other times the quarrels left me confused rather than ennobled; that time I stood in my bathrobe with zit cream on my face and hollered, “Lars, I didn’t marry you so you could work at the computer support desk your whole life,” especially comes to mind.
“What?” Lars said. “What? You didn’t marry me at all!”
“I know. But what exactly are we doing here every night, cuddling up on the couch with a box of General Tsao’s chicken?”
The truth was I felt as though I had married him. I’d forgotten that I had strong-armed my way into his apartment because I needed a place to live while I pursued the insights of Treasure Island.
Did he want me to leave?
“Maybe I do. Maybe I want a divorce,” he said ironically.
Not long after that conversation, I dropped by my mother’s internist to get a prescription for a calming pill. My mother’s doctor, a half-retired guy named Dr. Rattner, refused to see me, but the secretary said she could squeeze me in to see his partner, Dr. Klug. I don’t know why, but when the rap came on the examination door, I was expecting Dr. Rattner’s wizened twin to walk in. Instead a chisel-cheeked, healthy, blonde woman, ten years my senior, stood at the foot of the table, ordering me to swing up my feet. I swung them (gladly).
Chest, lung, nose, ears, throat. She smelled like rubbing alcohol and verbena. Why was she examining me, I wondered.
“What do you want pills for?”
“Anxious. Can’t sleep.”
“You look well-rested. Something bothering you?”
“Yes, no.”
“Lie back, please. I don’t like to throw a person pills until they’ve tried other options. Lie back, please. Have you talked to anyone about why you’re anxious?”
This was just the opening I needed—and although it was a pretty narrow gap, I shot through it like a winged termite. Rooting Treasure Island out of my bag, I told Dr. Klug my theory that there are basically two kinds of people in this world—“those who sail the ship—and that includes sailors, pirates, and cabin boys—and those who cling fearfully to the ship’s base. That would be the barnacles.”
“Marine biology. It’s been a while . . . ”
“Never mind, it’s a metaphor.” Surprisingly, steering the conversation away from that metaphor led me to explain a night in college when I found myself in the student union, pretending to know what veni, vidi, vici meant, and to a longer explanation of why I felt hampered by my family, unable to imagine myself casting any shadow in this world at all, except by their lanterns. “The thing is if I am going to become a Latin teacher I would have to go back to school, in my late twenties, and get a lot of Latin down.” I explained one of my favorite parts of Treasure Island, the bit where Jim Hawkins kisses his mother goodbye, and how, stumbling upon that sequin, I’d realized that, if you talk to your mother every other day, chances are you’re not going to have an adventure; you have to get away from your cove and open yourself up to strangers. Then, without wanting to go into the whole rationale about why I went to college only fifteen miles from home and after graduation settled in the same town as my parents, I managed to impart a certain amount of personal history and bring the conversation back to the barnacle, by saying my primary goal right now was to peel myself off my ship’s bottom—but here I broke off. Lars’s mother, when she used to bathe the children, called his sister’s butt her “bottom” and her vulva her “front bottom,” a euphemism that appalled me, as did the fact that, even though in my family we had struck strictly to clinical terms, my recent intimacy with Lars, who calls his penis his “Johnson,” had allowed his family language to insinuate itself into my consciousness. This is the best way I can explain why the blood rushed to my face as I heard myself saying “my ship’s bottom,” and I felt obscurely, but acutely, as though I had just asked Dr. Klug to think about what Lars would call my “nether lips.” (He thinks he’s worldly because his vocabulary evolved away from “front bottom.” But the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.)
Dr. Klug nodded. “You do seem anxious. You shredded your gown.”
“Well, it takes an awful lot of energy to give birth to oneself. It’s not as though you do one bold thing and then you are bold. The thing about adventure is that you have to keep on doing it, day in and day out. I don’t know, can it ever be definitively accomplished? I hardly rest, I hardly can!”
Dr. Klug nodded slowly. I had a very good feeling about her; I liked her so much I thought I might come talk to her now and then, the way Jim Hawkins strikes up a friendship with Dr. Livesey, whose bright black eyes and pleasant manners contrast with “the coltish folk” around him, though in my case, I might better say “doltish.” Dr. Klug replied that she was a doctor of internal medicine, that the best doctor for me to talk to would be a therapist, that there were many qualified therapists in town, that it was kind of me to be concerned but it wasn’t a question of her not having the courage to be a therapist, she had always wanted to be an internist, and that I should ask her a different question because she had already told me she wasn’t a therapist; and when I said I had no other questions, she left, abruptly, the room.
In the waiting room, the receptionist asked me, with a frankness I found off-putting, how I wanted to pay.
“You have my mom’s address. Did the doctor leave me a prescription?”
She hadn’t. Had there been a mistake? No. Then there would be no pills? No, the receptionist said, but Dr. Klug would be happy to refer me to a psychiatrist. I didn’t want a psychiatrist, I explained, I wanted a sample.
“You guys are supposed to be giving it away like candy. Come on, I bet you have a closet full of starter packages. Please don’t pretend Dr. Klug is the only doctor in America not in the drug companies’ pocket!”
“I beg your pardon?” the receptionist said, as if my pardon were an ugly damp thing and the only possession I had.
“You heard what I said” (after I walked out).
For a few moments I stood quaking in the elevator, unsure of which button to press. Eventually a stoop-shouldered old lady stepped in and pressed “L.” Why were the simplest encounters complicated for me? I had trusted Dr. Klug with my personal history and she had repulsed me like she would have any other patient. It was enough to make a person feel . . . generic. I worked myself up to a high level of disgust as the elevator worked its way down to the low level of the lobby. When the doors chortled open, the sun-struck, airy atrium broke the elevator’s gloomy ambience. My elderly companion hustled out before I could even make a show of letting her go first.
“I got a doctor’s bill for you from Rattner’s office,” my mother said. “I hadn’t known you were sick.”
“No, I wasn’t,” I said carelessly. “I just wan
ted to go for a check-up.”
“Well, next time, let’s talk about it first. You’re not on Daddy’s insurance. When you get a job—”
“I’m fine now. Actually, I’m exploring alternative kinds of medicine.”
For my mother the phrase “alternative medicine” registered only as some kind of youth-culture slang. “Really? Well, good for you. It’s so important to have a hobby.”
Lars hardly understood it either. “Why are you going for a healing?” he said. At this point we no longer spoke openly about our schedules, but I had left a portrait of my new friend, crisply drawn, on a doodle pad, under which I’d written, absent-mindedly, in a fine cursive sprawl, Beverly Flowers Personal Healer Beverly Flowers Personal Healer Beverly Flowers Personal Healer. Also I had used the page to blot up some spilled coffee, and now, a few days later, Lars was finally getting around to cleaning up the mess.
“She’s a remarkable woman, if you have to know.”
I had known this the first time I set foot in her office. Bev Flowers looked to be in her early fifties, and her rooms were elegantly furnished in a grey and green color scheme, as if to suggest the mossy underside of a stone. She greeted me honorably, as if I were a soldier just back from the war, and as we faced each other on matching Indonesian chairs, she was so attentive I thought I might weep. So this is what it was like to be around a spiritual person. I fished Treasure Island out of my bag and laid it on my knees.
“Every hour alone with this book helps fortify me. I’m cast away, like Ben Gunn on the island, only I’m in our apartment, and instead of powder and shot . . . ”
“Maybe”—Bev pressed her hand against the book and cocked her head—“Maybe this book has a higher vibration.”
“Exactly! Yes!” My relief was so intense, I wanted to stand up and punch a hole through the rice paper screen that divided the room. Instead I signed up for Beverly Flowers’s package deal, six one-hour healing sessions and three long-distance attunements.
“But are you sick?”
“You don’t have to be ‘sick’ to undergo a healing,” I told Lars. “You just have to be open to a life-source of positive energy.”
“It’s big, it’s hot, it’s back!” Richard shrieked.
Lars threaded his way through the apartment, collecting dirty plates and crumpled-up napkins.
“Shut up!” I hurled an empty tuna can at Richard. It missed widely, but the way he carried on, you would have thought I punctured his crop, and Lars, who never threw anything at Richard, looked ready to reprimand me. Instead he turned around, picked up the can and tossed it into the garbage.
“Stupid bird!” I said as the parrot pecked his dirty feathers.
Lars gave a sort of sigh.
“Idiotic non-stop-talking feather duster!”
“Did you notice he’s not talking? You scared him.”
I found this information hard to digest—and weirdly exciting, too. I had spent so much time being afraid of Richard. All these weeks he had seemed stolid and indifferent—capable of antagonizing me, but not capable of being hurt. Was it possible the tables were beginning to turn and he, in fact, was cowed by me? If a bird can be cowed, I mean.
“Who knows?” Lars said. “Why don’t you run it by the healer?”
I might have—despite his sarcasm, I truly might have—but the next time I saw Bev Flowers she didn’t want to chat.
“Lie down on the table,” Bev said. “I want to check your energy fields right away.”
Fieldwork promised great things. I’d been told how another client smelled burnt tapioca all over the room when Bev checked her energy fields; another woman gasped as an umber aura shuddered down her torso; a third client swore she heard frogs. I hadn’t sensed anything yet, but today might be different, I thought as I closed my eyes; given Bev’s urgency, today might be the day I . . .
I fell asleep.
When I woke up, the rice paper screen had been moved and Bev was arranging a tea tray. She gestured for me to join her and folded her hands in her lap.
“How am I?” I asked after a moment.
“Your anchor has been dropped,” Bev said. “The boat is going nowhere. I realigned your energy fields but I’m concerned you’re not progressing.” She poured the tea, which was deep yellow and smelled of grass. “The book,” she began.
Bev had a strong streak of renunciation. The last session she had pressed me to give up coffee, sugar, and wheat. I pushed back my chair.
“I won’t give it up.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to. I just want you to imagine that you’re obsessed, not with a book—but with a man. You wouldn’t tense to enjoy him; you would soften.” Bev tipped her head back and offered her neck to an imaginary lover. It was disturbing since I’d never seen her in any remotely sexual posture. Usually we talked about the spirit in nautical terms.
“A man? Oh, no. No, no . . . ”
“I once read Treasure Island. This didn’t seem relevant to your healing when you first came in. In fact, it was years ago, I was reading it to my son. Well, there are many things about me . . . ” She waved her hand, as if to disperse information she had momentarily thought of sharing. “Back then he was a boy, and like you, very interested in pirates.”
I suppressed a flicker of irritation.
“Did he like it?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“And you liked it?”
“Yes.”
I pulled my chair closer in.
“But I don’t remember the Johns Hopkins you focus on in your meditations.”
“Jim Hawkins.”
“I don’t remember a bold, resolute, independent boy.”
“HORN-BLOWING. I wrote this down for you. The fourth one is HORN-BLOWING.”
“Who is the charismatic sea cook, the great betrayer, the guy with a wooden leg?”
I spoke dully: “Long John Silver?”
“Yes! Now there’s the center of your novel. Charismatic personality, repellent morally speaking, and it’s amazing how he gets around on that one leg. Remember? Jim knows he should be wary of Silver, but he’s drawn to him for good reasons.”
“Lars is all right,” I said after a pause. “He’s got no prosthetics and there’s nothing deadly attractive about him. I always wish he’d pluck those nose hairs.”
Bev exhaled and looked like a glass that somebody had picked up and drained. I wanted to ask her more, but knew my cue to go. We hugged; she was a spiritual mother, only thinner and better smelling than I ever expected a spiritual mother to be. But as I walked home, her remarks about Treasure Island hung like a dark cloud over my mind. I have never cared at all for Long John Silver; to me he is like the annoying uncle at a family party to whom one talks for a few minutes and then, if one has any sense, claps one’s eye on Aunt Boothie in the middle distance and squeezes past. Could Bev really think Treasure Island was about him? It was because I liked Bev so much that I wanted us to agree. Also because I was paying her a hunk of money for the healings.
I lay on the sofa and gloomed.
What if I was paying the wrong person to heal me? Surely it was wrong to let a person enamored with Long John Silver realign my energy fields when Jim Hawkins was the one who carried the mother-lode. The day wore on and in my mind’s dispassionate eye I saw myself on the massage table, wrestling Beverly Flowers for control of my soul. For weeks I had gloated about the power of her touch, the dignity of her bearing, the feminine fit of her suede shirt—and now I thought, I am a fool, a fool, to sail unwittingly into such a dangerous cove. If Beverly Flowers bent my spirit out of whack, how would I even know it? I can’t check my energy fields any more than I can check the fuse box in Lars’s apartment.
“Don’t worry,” Lars said when the lights went out. “Though that’s the third time this month.”
“Did you pay the bill?”
“Of course I paid the bill. It’s just the fuse.”
Darkness fell like a shroud on the apartment. If Beverly Flowers and my vis
ions were incompatible, what would I do? “He was a boy, and like you, very interested in pirates.” I had never said I was interested in pirates! Pirates were beside the point! Mere accessories!
The lights snapped on again.
“All right, I’m going to bed,” said Lars.
“You just got the lights back on.”
“I have to work tomorrow.”
That night I tossed and turned so much that Lars sat up and asked what was the matter with me, but before I could refine the point he said I had to talk to someone who had read the thing. That’s what he called the book: “the thing,” as if it were not a masterpiece but a B-grade monster crawling out of a swamp. Then he took the best wool blanket and slept on the couch.
CHAPTER 11
Listen,” Rena said in the coffee shop. “There’s something I wanted to tell you.”
As she tore her napkin into long thin strips, I began to worry she would make some complaint. Of course, I too had felt dissatisfactions about our friendship, ones I could trace back to the dorm when she used to borrow my hairdryer without asking, but at the moment I had no desire—none at all—to analyze our relationship. The very prospect filled me with dread. What if she dragged my character into it? A crust of grilled cheese stuck in my throat.
“I’d better just blurt it out,” Rena said. “Nancy called and asked if I would work at The Pet Library, and I said yes. I’ve been working there for a few weeks.”
I put down my sandwich and laughed. “I thought you were going to tell me something horrible! I mean, for me.”
“I’m still freelancing, of course, but the Library gives me a steady paycheck.”
“Not much of a paycheck. But good for you.”
“You don’t mind?”
I swept her little strips of napkin into a tidy pile. “Why would I?”
“I didn’t know if you were still hoping to patch things up over there, or—”
