Only Flesh and Bones

by Sarah Andrews

  “I was about to ask you.”

  “For a diagnosis? Why, I haven’t examined her yet, but I’d say we’re talking about an hysteric personality here. Probably borderline, as well.”

  “What’s a borderline personality?” I asked, feeling like I’d just been fed a shit sandwich.

  “They’re annoying to deal with. You have to corner them, even pick a fight to clinch the diagnosis. If they come back fighting, you know you’re dealing with a borderline. Children who are raised in abusive, deprivational situations often have deep trust issues, never fully form as a personality. Empty people, just as you describe. She won’t respond to the authority of her current therapist. Wants to hide.”

  “I don’t think Cecelia’s been abused,” I replied, feeling tempted to hide from this authority myself.

  Jane Hooker looked at me out of the corners of her eyes, took another drag. “How do you know? Abuse often occurs when no one’s looking. It happens in even the nicest families. And it can happen without anyone even laying a hand on her. Perhaps mommy chewed her out a lot, called her names. She have a temper?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Or she ignored her. Or daddy was always gone. Or there was some deep sexual dysfunction that no one wanted to talk about.”

  There was nothing I cared to say in reply. Slinging labels at the ingrained pains and difficulties of the Menken family seemed more a part of the problem than part of the solution. So I just sat still and tried to look serene, as if a smooth exterior could protect my friends.

  Jane Hooker stubbed out her cigarette. “Now about you—what’s your involvement in all of this? Why haven’t you brought her in here to talk to me herself? You playing surrogate mother or something?”

  I was so angry so fast that I couldn’t control my tongue. “No, ma’am,” I said. “I’m just another busybody like yourself, who can’t keep her nose out of the family melodrama.”

  She pointed the coal of her cigarette at me. “Touché. But I ask again: what’s your connection?”

  “I used to work for her daddy, and yes, I still have trouble telling the old boy no.”

  “So you’re everybody’s pushover.”

  “Must be.”

  Ms. Hooker worked her brows up and down a few times more to see if I’d budge. When I didn’t, she said, “Smart kid, huh.”

  “I hope so, because this one’s a good old-fashioned mess, and I’m in it up past my neckerchief. Gonna need all the smarts I can get.”

  “Why do you care?”

  I smiled. What was the alternative? To not give a shit? “Why? Here’s a common garden-variety housewife, college-educated, well-off, who’s got a healthy-sized appetite for sex and a husband who keeps her on short rations. Back in college, she was date-raped by—” I tried to think of an economical way to describe what I knew of Chandler “—by a sexual predator. At forty-something, she has a fling with the same guy. Then she disappears. Then she comes back. Then she gets killed. Sorry, ma’am, but I can’t quite put the novel down.”

  Jane Hooker M.S.W. squinted her steely eyes at me. “Women feel ashamed of their desires.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “They get to fearing them. She married the man who’d regulate her appetites for her, then got herself seduced, telling herself she wasn’t responsible.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “She’s frigid.”

  “Like hell,” I said, no longer able to avoid curling a lip at her.

  Jane Hooker lit another cigarette. “The woman couldn’t relax. You asked my interpretation.”

  “So you don’t think she was raped.”

  “I think she participated in the rape, made herself available,” she asserted, moving her cigarette in a tight arc.

  “Oh. Then you don’t hold him responsible for his actions?” I checked myself again, furious to hear the timbre of my voice rising.

  “Yes, of course. But let’s also look at what her need to reenact the victim archetype got her.”

  Now she had totally lost me. “But this man might be the one who killed her. Are you saying she asked for that?”

  Jane Hooker squinted at me as she considered my question, much as a chess player might do before a particularly complex move. “No, I don’t think he would kill her,” she said at last, “any more than a cat would miss the chance to play with the mouse it catches.”

  The next psychotherapist I visited at least seemed possible. Her name was Ernestine Schwartz (“Call me Tina”), and she was kind enough to take my part in the proceedings at face value. “Let’s get a cup of tea while we talk,” she said, and, putting on her coat, led me down the street to a small café. “I like this place because it has a nice courtyard out back, and hey! it’s open today. Let’s take our drinks out there.”

  So we sat in the balmy sunlight of a Colorado spring morning, and I laid out my tale for the umpteenth time. When I was done, all Tina had to say was, “I’ve never dealt with anyone who’s been traumatized in this way.”

  “But do you think you can help her?” I asked, trying to keep the anxiety out of my voice. This was the first halfway human therapist I’d talked to, and I didn’t want her bowing out without a trial.

  Tina raised her shoulders a notch as she sipped at her cup of Orange Zinger. “Don’t know ’til I try,” she said matter-of-factly. “I have an intake opening available tomorrow afternoon. Why don’t you bring her by then, and see if she feels comfortable with me?”

  I stopped into an electronics store to buy an answering machine for Betty’s house, then killed the next hour in at a stockbroker’s office reading up on Boomer Oil in Standard and Poor’s. I found that Boomer had been nearly busted before the Dutch bailed it out.

  Next, I met with the final psychotherapist on the list. She was a very plain woman about my age who was kitted out in aviator glasses, a loosely-fitting man’s oxford button-down shirt, and chino pants. Her shoes had heavy-lugged soles, her hair was cut in a short, shapeless, wash-and-wear butch, and she was about thirty pounds overweight. Her name was Mary Pinetree, although from her gray eyes and dishwater blond hair I sensed not a drop of Indian blood in her. She gave me her card, which read: “New Dawn Rape Crisis Center, Mary Pinetree, Assistant.”

  “This explains why I don’t remember getting your name out of the telephone book,” I said. “You’re somebody’s assistant. And why am I not speaking with that somebody?”

  “I am the designated assistant assigned to screen you,” was all she said in reply. She sat down on one of the battered sofas that crowded the bare wooden floor of the front room of the old Victorian house that comprised the New Dawn Rape Crisis Center and picked up a clipboard. On it, I could see a long form with lots of blanks to be filled in. She indicated another sofa on which I should sit.

  I sat. “So what kind of a program do you have for kids with memory blanks?”

  “We’ll get to that later,” Mary Pinetree said, flipping down two or three sheets on her clipboard and making a quick notation. “Now, when did the rape occur?” the woman asked.

  “Rape? There was no rape.”

  Mary Pinetree looked up at me and smiled knowingly.

  I took a deep breath and counted to ten, or at least to five. “I reiterate, I am here on an errand for a friend. She has no memory of a very traumatic event, but that event, to the best of my knowledge, did not include rape. I took the name of one of your psychologists out of the phone book because she listed a specialty in helping adolescents in crisis.”

  Mary Pinetree scribbled something, gave me another look, this one slightly superior. “All right, then when did this ‘traumatic event’ occur?”

  “Last summer. Her mother was murdered.”

  Mary Pinetree scribbled diligently. I stared across the room, through a double-hung French door, into what looked like the central office of the center. Two women dressed almost identically to Mary Pinetree moved about with martial bearing, collating papers and smacking them together with a stapler
. “Ms. Pinetree,” I said, “I suppose you weren’t fully advised before I came in here regarding the nature of my errand, but we need to get something straight. With all respect, I have no interest in speaking with you further until you start to give me a little bit of information—like whether you have a certified professional here with adequate grounding in assisting a teenager with a memory block.”

  Mary Pinetree managed to come out with one more knowing look. “I have three years’ experience here, the best hands-on training. And yes, I deal with women all day long who can’t remember whole years of their lives, even whole decades. Rape does that to women.”

  But not to men, is that what you’re saying? “Are you telling me that you do some of the counseling here, too?”

  Mary Pinetree’s expression remained smugly opaque, except that her eyes seemed to narrow a bit back there beyond the reflections in her Gloria Steinem glasses. “Yes, I do group therapy. Under the guidance of an M.S.W., of course.”

  “Is that M.S.W. present during your sessions?”

  “No.” As in, Why should she be? She looked back at her clipboard. “Now—”

  “And how long do you usually grill your prospective clients with that form of yours before you offer them any help?”

  “Sometimes it takes two sessions. Sometimes more. We like to be thorough.”

  “And let me guess: you charge them for this time.”

  “On a sliding scale, of course. And then, if the rape is prosecuted, the victim can apply for assistance through the county.”

  “Then you expect me to pay for this screening session.”

  “Yes.”

  “How much?” I asked, pulling my checkbook out of my jacket pocket.

  “I’m sixty dollars an hour, unless you can verify that you are a low-income—”

  “Don’t worry,” I told her hotly, “daddy has deep pockets. But I’m writing this check for thirty, because I won’t be staying.” I handed her the check, said, “You can keep the change,” got up, and turned my back on Mary Pinetree as I left the room. I said nothing further to her, figuring she hadn’t let us get well enough acquainted that I owed her the basic civilities. But as I headed down the sidewalk through the warming spring air, I said out loud, “That one was for you, Miriam. We don’t pay no one to have control over your baby.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE sky was wide and clear, and the high mountains glistened with a late mantle of snow. The voice in my headphones said, “Seven seven bravo, cleared for takeoff.” I taxied the final ten yards, lined up on the runway, came in with the power. The propeller spun into a pale blur, gobbling up the air, pulling the little airplane faster and faster down the runway. I pulled back the yoke. The little plane lifted, and we were away.

  “Give me a standard turn to the left as soon as you’ve got your thousand,” Peggy barked through the headphones as she tapped the altimeter. “Then take us up to Tri-County Airport for a couple touch-and-gos.”

  “Right.”

  One thousand feet above the elevation of the runway, I rolled the yoke to the left and applied left rudder, pushing on the left pedal, coordinating the turn, luxuriating in the pleasure of skills remembered. The little airplane climbed smoothly, now passing 7,000 feet, now 7,500. The foothills began to shrink, and the towering flatirons of Lyons Sandstone that flanked the rampart beyond Boulder became but a necklace as the wide vista of the Rocky Mountains opened up. Cars on the Denver-Boulder turnpike dwindled into ants scurrying to and fro, ephemeral specks on a landscape sculpted over tens of millions of years by wind and ice and water as billion-year-old rocks rose to greet the heavens. At eight thousand feet, the bottom of a clear wave of air off the mountain front grabbed us and gave us a good bump. We were but a bubble of humanity, a mite in the eye of an enormous God of grandeur. All the psychologists, potential employers, suffering teenagers, and lost lovers in the universe were as waves on a sea of infinite power and grace.

  At Tri-County Airport, I made three landings; the first pretty ragged, the second somewhat better, and the third smooth as silk. Then we rose again, taking to the high air over the cornfields east of Longmont, and practiced stalls and spins and approaches to a soft-field landing. Returning an hour and a half after our takeoff to Jeffco, Peggy called for current runway information, then tried to make a call to the tower. She got no answer. Giving the radio a good thump, she growled, “Damned thing, worked on the ATIS frequency just then, so what’s this shit it won’t get me the tower?” She switched the dial back and forth, trying to catch a signal. Finally, we heard a call from the tower, ushering a twin-engined Cessna into the pattern. Peggy called our location and intentions, got us cleared, and then switched back to the intercom. “Em, what I tell you about relying on radios?”

  “That you can’t.”

  “Right. What’s the jingle?”

  “Aviate, navigate, then worry about trying to communicate.”

  “That’s my girl. And always believe the seat of your own pants before you let some yahoo in the tower tell you how to fly. Got it? Some of them think they can fly, but most of ’em can’t. They’ll ask you to do all sorts of things your plane can’t abide with.”

  “Right.”

  “So, where you want to take this bucket for your cross-countries?”

  “I was thinking of Converse County Airport up in Wyoming for the first leg.”

  “Up there by Douglas? Why so far?”

  “I got someone I want to visit.”

  “You know you can’t carry passengers until you get your license. And you can’t charge money for flying until you get a commercial rating past that.”

  “No, but I can fly to somewhere where I got some work to do, right?”

  Peggy shrugged. “Your nickel. Then where? How about Scottsbluff?”

  “No, I was thinking about Saratoga.”

  “Shively Field? You nuts? You can’t go over the Laramie Range between Douglas and Shively, much less over the Medicine Bows between Shively and here. Ain’t I taught you no respect for mountain flying?”

  “Yeah, you didn’t spare the rod on that one. I know, it’s not for beginners. I was thinking of running doglegs around the mountains. It’ll work.”

  “And tire you out. There’s a reason they don’t make you fly to hell and gone for these student cross-countries. You need more experience before you start putting in that many hours in one day.”

  “I mean to spend the night in Douglas.”

  “What, curled up in the seat of this backbreaker?”

  “No, in the local hotel. It ain’t fancy, but it’s clean.”

  “Long time since you’ve had any?” Peggy snorted.

  Blushing, I pressed the radio switch on the control wheel and called in my approach to Jeffco Tower, then switched back to the internal intercom to answer Peggy. “You ask too many questions,” I said simply. “So you going to sign me off or not?”

  “Not to Saratoga I’m not.”

  “To Douglas, then.”

  “Is that where this buck is?”

  “Peggy, there’s no buck!”

  “So you say. I got two teenaged daughters. I know a ‘There’s this guy I gotta see’ when I smell one.”

  My knuckles turned white around the control wheel. I just needed to find Chandler to find out what—but of course, on some level, she was exactly right. “Okay, I’m looking for a lead on this guy, see, but he’s not my boyfriend. He’s—”

  “Sure, ace, it’s your nickel. Just so long as you’re willing to find an airport if you get tired or the weather goes bad on you.”

  I nodded and said, “Don’t worry,” foolishly thinking that the weather would be the least of my problems.

  TWENTY-NINE

  THAT evening, I phoned Cecelia to let her know about our appointment with Tina Schwartz. “She seems nice,” I told her. “I think you’ll like her.”

  To this, Cecelia didn’t reply.

  “Really,” I urged, turning on the old pep-rally spirit. “I l
iked her, and I don’t like shrinks. Not that I’d ever even spoken to one before last week,” I added, unconsciously assuring her that a date with a psychologist was indeed something over which to be embarrassed.

  A heavy sigh came over the line.

  “What is it, Celie? I’ll be there with you. It’ll be okay.”

  Finally, on the verge of tears, she spoke. “Em, can’t it be just you? I mean, we’ve always gotten along pretty well, right?”

  The frailty and longing in her tone etched slowly and deeply into my heart. “Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, you know I care. But Celie—”

  “Then why can’t I just, like, hang out with you?”

  “Well, you can,” I replied, immediately weighed down by the obviousness of this lie. “Okay, you’re right, I haven’t been around much for you in ages. I—” I what? I can’t seem to get my life sorted out? I can’t handle being that close? I miss the little girl you were and don’t know what to say to the young woman you are becoming?

  “Please,” she whimpered.

  Tears stung the edges of my closed eyelids. “I’m trying to find you a good person to help you.”

  Her voice came as a faint breath: “I’ll try, Em. But I can’t talk to anyone like I talk to you.”

  I spent Thursday morning getting my ducks in a row for the crosscountry flight. I had to figure time and distance, rate of fuel consumption, airspeed at various presumed wind speeds, adjusting for the crosswind I expected, and factor in allowances for extra time and fuel should I have to land somewhere other than planned. I was, after all, limited to VFR—visual flight rules—planning, in which I could fly only under skies clear enough to see where the hell I was going.

  I worked with air charts and flight computer, checking my route for obstacles such as mountains and mesas over which my Piper could not fly. Saratoga looked like it would be a little complicated, as it sat in a wide notch between two mountain ranges, but there appeared to be safe passage in and out, with plenty of room for turning.

  At noon, I broke for lunch. I found Betty downstairs speaking into the telephone at full roar, instructing Boulder’s city planners where to put their fencing setback regulations. “Such foolish people,” she said sweetly as she hung up the phone. “They think I shouldn’t be allowed the basic privacy and noise abatement afforded by a good old six-foot-tall fence along the Baseline Road side of my property. When I bought this place, it had a prim little three-foot picket job along the sidewalk, as quaint as a chipmunk’s tonsils. Now, I was so foolish as to check with the Planning Department before tearing it down and replacing it with a proper six-footer, and they had the temerity to inform me that I could not tear down and replace taller, as I must in such cases observe a greater setback from the sidewalk. ‘Oh,’ quoth I, ‘but may I instead repair the existing fence?’ ‘Certainly,’ they said, ‘thy fence is thine to repair.’ Repair it I did. Six feet tall. Now it seems someone has registered a complaint regarding its sculptural qualities. Heavens, their taste must be in their mouth.”