He was beginning to sound almost frantic, as if the right word were just out of reach and he couldn’t quite find it. So Step offered a finish for this impossible thought. “You’re saying that they apprehend it with their eyes, but you comprehend it.”
“With my soul,” said Lee, “yes, just like that! That’s got to be the Spirit of God, making the connection between us so you know what I’m saying even before I say it!”
Brother Freebody might have warned Step a little better about what he meant by Lee Weeks having some weird ideas about doctrine. Or maybe Lee hadn’t been this extreme about it when Freebody talked to him. Or maybe Freebody hadn’t believed that he was hearing what he was actually hearing when Lee said it.
“And sometimes I know that I’m the only real person in the world. No offense,” Lee added quickly.
“No, that’s not an uncommon feeling,” said Step. “It’s called solipsism. The idea that nothing is real except the self.”
“No, I don’t just mean a feeling, like anybody can get. I mean I know that God sees me and recognizes me as his kindred spirit, like a lost twin. Nobody but me ever feels like that. Only I can’t tell that to anybody but the Mormons, because you understand! You’ve known about it all along.”
Patiently Step tried to explain the fact that the gospel of Jesus Christ was mostly about how we treat other people, and not at all about becoming the most powerful being in the universe and getting into a first-name relationship with God. That was for the bozos on TV who talked about Jeeee-zuz as if he was their old high-school chum or something. Lee listened to everything that Step was saying, nodding wisely and agreeing to all of it. But Step was sure that Lee was missing the whole point of everything.
When they got to Lee’s house, his mother was waiting at the door. She seemed to size them up as they came from the car, and by the time Step got up to the house, she was beaming. Only on the porch did it occur to Step that there was no reason for him to have walked Lee to the door. That was what Step did with thirteen-year-old babysitters, to make sure they got in safely. Home teaching companions over the age of eighteen you could just let out of the car. But for some reason Step had just expected himself to come to the door.
“Please come in,” she said warmly. Her whole demeanor was different. This was the woman on the telephone. What had happened since eight o’clock?
“I can’t stay,” said Step. “Got to get home. I don’t see my family half enough as it is.”
“Oh,” she said, looking disappointed. “Perhaps some other time.”
“Well, in fact you’ll probably see me a couple of times a month. We home teach four families, and we do it every month.”
She raised her eyebrows, but she seemed to be pleased all the same. “How nice,” she said. “What a very social church you have.”
“I suppose so,” said Step, thinking how wearing that sociability could sometimes be.
“And how was Lee?” she asked.
Lee was standing right there. It was so outrageous, to ask about him as if he were a small child in another room, and not an adult, a man, standing right beside her. Yet Lee beamed. He seemed to expect a good report card, and so Step delivered one. “Lee was great,” he said. “He spoke right up and we had a good visit.”
No need to tell Mommy that Lee got a bit weird about doctrine. To explain that, he’d have to explain the doctrine, and it always sounded deeply weird to non-members. Or it should, anyway—it wasn’t quite natural, the way Lee had taken right to it, and all the wrong way. You had to build up to understanding it, and it was a sure thing that Let had neither the buildup nor the understanding.
But there was plenty of time, if he stayed in the Church. A lot of people came into the Church with serious misconceptions about the gospel—no matter how clear the missionaries were, people were going to filter ideas through their own preconceptions and come out with something skewed at least a little bit off plumb, and sometimes a lot more than a little bit. If they stuck with it, though, and realized that correct opinions about doctrine weren’t anywhere near as important as learning to serve other people, to accept and fulfill responsibility, then eventually they’d loosen up enough to come around and change their beliefs, too, or at least not be upset that most Mormons didn’t see things the same way.
Outsiders usually seemed to think of Mormons as automatons, obeying a charismatic prophet the way Jim Jones’s followers obeyed him in Guyana The reality was almost the opposite—stubborn, self-willed people going off every which way, with bishops and other ward leaders barely able to hold them all together, all the while tolerating a wide range of doctrinal diversity as long as people would just accept their callings and then be dependable. There was room even for Lee Weeks, who seemed to be obsessed with a rather inflated view of his own divine potential; given that the 1st Ward already had Dolores LeSueur, Lee’s ambitions could certainly be taken in stride.
“I’m so glad,” she said. Step was relieved to see Mrs. Weeks smile.
But no, it was Dr. Weeks, wasn’t it? “Lee says you’re a psychologist,” said Step. The idea of her being a psychologist seemed somehow very important. Then he realized why—Stevie. Stevie and DeAnne’s idea of what they ought to do for him. Suddenly Step looked at Dr. Weeks in a different light.
“Not a psychologist,” she was saying. “A psychiatrist. The M.D. isn’t much—just years of medical school and internship and residency.” She chuckled.
“I’m sorry,” said Step. He almost added, What Lee actually said was, She’s a shrink. But he decided that he shouldn’t get on her bad side because maybe she was the one who could bring Stevie back from the company of Scotty and Jack.
“Oh, I’m used to people getting the different branches of our profession confused,” said Dr. Weeks. “I’m called a psychoanalyst just as often, and of course that’s wrong, too. That’s more of a priesthood than a profession, anyway.”
She spoke with a light, amused tone, but Step took the words as a very good sign. He liked this woman, this shrink.
“Well,” Step said. “Till next time, OK?”
“Right!” said Lee.
When Step got home, DeAnne was in the kitchen, waiting for him. Everything was cleaned up, and she was reading a book. It was the Anne Tyler novel he had bought her more than a month ago. “You just getting around to that?” he asked.
“No, I started it back when you first gave it to me,” she said. “But then I didn’t like her for a little while.”
“Oh,” said Step. “And now you’ve kissed and made up?”
She made a face at him. “It was just something that the character said in the beginning. This old woman is in bed, probably dying, and she thinks how her children ought to have had an extra parent instead of just her. The husband ran off.”
“And that made you mad?”
“No, it was that she had decided to have her second and third child for just that reason. So she could have extras. When the first one almost died of croup. I thought it was the most awful idea, to have your later children as spares in case you lost the early ones.”
“It’s not really so awful,” said Step. “People thought that way for thousands of years. What does it say in Proverbs about a man having lots of sons? Blessed is he who has a quiverful, or something like that.”
“A quiver,” said DeAnne. “How phallic.”
“Actually, it’s the arrow that’s phallic. A very confused sexual image.”
“Anyway,” said DeAnne, “I just couldn’t believe Tyler really meant that. So I just reread that opening again and I realized that that was just what the character had thought, not Tyler herself. And in fact the character realized right away that each child had become an irreplaceable person and not just a spare in case one of the earlier ones didn’t work out.”
“So now you can read it.”
“Oh, who has time? But I thought I’d just check it out to make sure I liked it well enough to take it into the hospital with me.”
�
��You’ve got two months till the end of July,” said Step.
“I like to plan ahead. What if I got stuck in there with just People magazine?”
“If you like I can bring you the Enquirer as soon as the baby’s delivered.”
“I thought you had enough of me throwing up already.”
Truth was, she hadn’t thrown up that much with this baby. The best morning-sickness period of all four pregnancies. Maybe that was a good sign. Maybe this baby was going to be no trouble. Maybe Step wouldn’t have to lie beside his bed every night for the first three years of his life, humming “Away in a Manger” over and over again. Maybe this one wouldn’t wake up with screaming nightmares. Maybe this one wouldn’t periodically decide to hit a sibling over the head with something heavy.
Then it occurred to him that DeAnne was not waiting up at the kitchen table to read a book—she could have done that in bed. She was waiting up to talk to him at the opposite end of the house from the children.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “How did it go?”
“Fine. Lee’s a little weird, but Sister Highsmith was fine. A nice old lady who likes to talk but then she’s never boring, so it’s OK. Not a lot of woes and troubles, either. Most of what she talks about is bragging about her late husband or her wonderful children or her even more wonderful grandchildren who are being spoiled or overprotected by her very stupid children.”
“I thought her children were wonderful.”
“Only when they were children,” said Step. “Now they’re parents and so they’ve become stupid. Hey, it happened to our parents, didn’t it? And it’s happened to us, too.”
“Are we really stupid parents, Step?”
“By definition,” said Step. “I was a brilliant parent till Robbie was born. Then all the things I’d learned about parenting went right out the window. Robbie was completely different from Stevie and so nothing that worked with Stevie worked with Robbie. I think that’s why second-child syndrome develops. You know, nice cooperative first child, rebellious and troublesome second child. The first child was raised by confident parents. The second child was raised by parents who were nervous wrecks, trying to apply first-child methods to second-child problems. No wonder second kids want to spend most of their teenage years screaming at their parents.”
“Poor Robbie. And what explains Elizabeth’s temper?’
“I haven’t analyzed third-child syndrome yet,” said Step. “Give me time. She’s still very, very short.”
They sat in silence for a few moments.
“Did you meet Lee’s mother?” asked DeAnne.
“Sure,” said Step. “It’s kind of impossible not to. She guards Lee like a tigress. I felt like I was going through a job interview just to get her to call Lee into the room so we could go.”
“I can understand being protective.”
“Yeah, well, especially with Lee. The kid’s got a twisted sense of what it means to be Mormon.”
“Oh really?”
“It’s not so much that he can hardly wait for God to retire so he can move into the job, like Sister LeSueur. It’s more like he thinks that he already is God, or at least a god, and he thinks Mormonism is cool because we seem to be the only ones who understand that a divine person like him is possible.”
“How strange,” said DeAnne.
“But he’s young. Young people fantasize about a lot of things.” Step had been thinking about his own youthful thought that maybe someday he would be president, or a great conquering general like Frederick the Great, or a doctor who discovered the cure for cancer. But now, when the words came out of his mouth, he instantly thought of Stevie. Of what Stevie was fantasizing. Not some grandiose megalomania. Just having a friend, that was all. A couple of friends. Did that make him crazy? It was Lee Weeks who was crazy if anybody’s child was, and his mother was a psychiatrist, for heaven’s sake.
“She’s a shrink, too,” said Step, following his own thought and not the thread of the conversation.
“Who is?” asked DeAnne.
“Lee’s mother,” said Step. “She’s a shrink. That’s what he called it. He said. She’s a shrink. But she’s nice, though.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“No, I mean, that’s what he said. That she was nice though. As if to be nice was sort of a contradiction to being a shrink.”
“So now we actually know a psychiatrist,” said DeAnne.
“Well, not like we’re intimate friends.”
“But at least we wouldn’t be sending Stevie to a stranger.”
It came to him all at once. DeAnne knew perfectly well that Dr. Weeks was a shrink. And it wasn’t just that. DeAnne had set up the home teaching appointment, had pushed him into doing his church calling, which she had never done before, just so that he’d meet a psychiatrist. In fact, Dr. Weeks might well be one of the shrinks on the list she got from Jenny’s pediatrician. There couldn’t be that many shrinks in town. DeAnne had manipulated him. It made him feel sick and angry, and he wanted to say something really cruel and walk out of the room.
Instead he just sat there, thinking. What had she done, really? Just helped him to do his home teaching. Just helped get him into a position where he’d meet a psychiatrist. What was so bad about that?
She didn’t tell me, that’s what was so bad. She maneuvered me to this position instead of persuading me to it.
But Step hadn’t left her much room to think that he’d be open to changing his mind. And so if she really felt strongly about getting help for Stevie, maybe she thought there was no other way. So it isn’t that she manipulated me. No, I feel angry and sick because I’m ashamed that I’m the kind of husband whose wife thinks she has to do this kind of manipulation in order to get from her husband what she thinks her child needs.
I must be a really terrible husband, in her view, that she has to fool me. Like the giant’s wife in Jack and the Beanstalk. Doing her best to save the life of the small person in her care by keeping him out of the way of the cruel, awful, tyrannical husband.
When the silence had grown very long, he said, “Maybe you could find out her office number and set up an appointment for Stevie. If she takes children.”
“Do you think she’d be good for him?”
No, Step thought. I don’t think any more of psychiatrists now than I did before. Less, in fact, because she’s so weirdly protective of her own son. Treating him like a child at this age. No wonder he has power fantasies, with her shepherding him through life as if he were incompetent to zip his own fly after peeing. What’s she going to do for my child when her own is Lee Weeks?
That wasn’t fair. Just because she couldn’t see the problems in her own family didn’t mean she couldn’t see clearly the problems in others’. When Step had been elders quorum president, he had seen a lot of things clearly about other people’s lives, but his own was just as murky to him as ever.
“She might be,” said Step. “As good a chance as anybody else. And like you said, we know her.”
“You know her,” said DeAnne.
“Well, anyway,” said Step. “Make the appointment. And then we have to figure out how to break it to Stevie that we’re taking him to a shrink.”
“It will help if you don’t call her a shrink in front of him.”
Oh, you’ve already thought this all through, I’m sure. “Well don’t call her a psychiatrist, either,” said Step. “Call her a therapist.”
“Why? A psychiatrist is a doctor, and a therapist isn’t. Sheila is a therapist.”
“In contemporary American culture,” said Step, “going to a psychiatrist means you’re crazy. But going to a therapist means you’re rich and stylishly uptight.”
“I hate it when you talk about ‘contemporary American culture’ this and ‘contemporary American culture’ that.”
Well, I hate it when you treat me like a puppet you can maneuver however you want. I didn’t know how much I hated it till now, be
cause up till now you had never done it.
“Can I get you anything to eat?” asked DeAnne.
“I’ve already gained about fifteen pounds working at Eight Bits Inc.,” said Step. “The candy machines are killing me. The last thing I need is a snack.”
“Just asking,” said DeAnne. “Are you upset about something?”
Yes. “No. I’m just tired. I wasn’t planning on spending tonight home teaching.”
“I’m sorry,” said DeAnne. “I told you, I wasn’t trying to set it up for tonight, I just figured you wouldn’t mind if I tried to establish contact with your companion. Are you coming to bed soon?”
“I suppose,” said Step. “Is there anything good on Thursday nights?”
“We have forty channels,” said DeAnne.
“Yeah,” said Step, “but thirty-three of them are Jimmy Swaggart clones trying to heal hemophiliacs with the hemoglobin of the Holy Spirit. Or was that Ernest Ainglee?”
“It was that weird crewcut guy with the crazy eyes,” said DeAnne. “Don’t stay up too late. You have work in the morning, you know.”
DeAnne left before she could see how Step tensed up at those words. Yes, I have work in the morning. I don’t have to have work in the morning, though. I could walk in and give notice tomorrow and tell Keene where to stick his Dicky. I could let them fire me and collect unemployment. But no, you won’t let me get out from under Dicky’s thumb, because you don’t trust me to make enough money to pay for the baby, you don’t even trust me enough to talk to me rationally about getting a psychiatrist for Stevie. You have to trick me into it.
Step hated feeling such rage toward the person he loved most. And it wasn’t the yearning love of young romance, but rather the kind of love that made her feel like part of his own self, so that he couldn’t imagine a future without her beside him. To be so savagely angry at her was terrible.
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