by Lisa Alther
“I guess it does.” Caroline rubbed the bridge of her nose.
“Do you know why?”
“I guess I want you all to have it all together. I want someone to.”
“Why not yourself?”
“I’m working on it,” said Caroline.
“Yes, you are. You’re working hard. You listen, and you hear, and you apply what you hear. It’s impressive.”
“Thanks,” said Caroline, smiling faintly, wondering what wrecks other clients must be if she herself was impressive with all her fear, anger, and longing. She studied that damn photo over the bookcase. She simply couldn’t find the Virgin Mary. Maybe she wasn’t there. Maybe it was a ruse to check clients’ honesty, like the emperor’s new clothes.
“What shall we talk about today?” Hannah propped her feet up on the stool and settled back in her chair.
“I’d like to talk about Diana.”
Hannah refrained from commenting on Caroline’s previous reluctance to talk about Diana to a heterosexual. Now that Caroline had accepted herself more fully, maybe she didn’t need to pin her own lack of acceptance on other people. “What about her?”
“We had a bad fight a couple of weeks ago. And we got so scared of losing each other that we started trying to outpamper each other again. So last night at the mall buying cards and candy and stuff, I suddenly got fed up. I thought, fuck it, if me as I am isn’t enough, then it’s no good anyway. So I dumped everything I’d just bought into the garbage can.”
Hannah laughed. “That was courageous.” Also extravagant. This woman ought to meet Arthur.
Caroline hesitated. “At first I felt as though I’d been let out of a cage. But the closer I got to home, the more frightened I became. Because maybe she really won’t stick around if I don’t do nice things for her.”
“I trust by now you see where that feeling comes from?”
Caroline nodded. “But maybe she won’t.” She wanted to be assured that she would.
“Maybe she won’t. That’s the risk you take if you change: that the people you’ve been involved with won’t like the new you. But other people who do will come along.”
Caroline’s hand trembled as she stroked the tweed sofa cover with her fingertips. She didn’t want other people. She wanted Diana.
“What did you fight about?”
“We’d just made love. I was feeling peaceful and happy, as though maybe we’d make it after all.” Caroline blushed and studied her fingernails. Could you really say these things to Mother? “Uh, I told her I loved her. And she asked me not to sleep with Brian Stone at our house, so I flipped out.”
“I thought you ended it with him?”
“I have. It was the principle of the thing. I pay half the mortgage. I can do as I like there.”
Hannah studied Caroline’s indignant face, wondering if it was really so difficult just to hug Diana and tell her Brian was out of the picture. The games everyone played were exhausting. “Principles start wars.”
Caroline said nothing. Hannah had just betrayed her.
“So you told her you cared for her, and she let you have it,” said Hannah. “Just as you thought I’d do last week because you told me I’m important to you?”
Startled, Caroline said nothing, looking out the window to the moving van in the parking lot. “I guess so,” she finally said. “Oh yeah, I did that assignment. Thought about what happened when I told people I cared about them.”
“Oh yes? What have you remembered?”
As Caroline described her routs on the battlefield of affection, Hannah recalled her own experiences. The one time she told her father she loved him, he laughed with embarrassment and returned to Trinidad on the next plane. When she told Colin she loved him, he threw her walnut clock to the floor and chopped it up. But with Arthur it was the other way round. When he told her he loved her, she kicked him out of bed. And whenever the men she used to flirt with at parties proclaimed their devotion, that was her cue to get rid of them. What was everyone so afraid of?
When Caroline stopped talking, Hannah asked, “Do you see why they reacted like that?”
Caroline shook her head no, her glance sullen. “I guess I’m too intense. Just like Jackson always said.”
“No, you’re not too intense. You’re not too anything. You are who you are. But other people don’t want to hear what doesn’t fit with their own view of themselves. If Diana is accustomed to feeling unloved, she won’t want to hear that you love her, and she’ll try to reinstate her unlovableness. It’s like a heart transplant: A body often rejects the very thing that would keep it alive because the immune system won’t accept it. I didn’t have to flee when I heard I was important to you, because I’m important to me too.”
Laughing, Caroline said, “But I don’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to hear she’s loved.”
“Ask yourself that. How come last session you seized on my request that we leave early as proof I didn’t care about you? When I told you the previous week I do.”
Caroline could scarcely hear Hannah. She saw her mouth moving, but she couldn’t pick up the words.
Hannah tried to think of a different way to make the same point. If she could come up with five or six versions, sometimes later in the week it would fall into place for clients. Or later in their lives. “Caroline, someone important to you is telling you she cares about you. Do you know why you aren’t hearing me?”
Caroline sat in confused silence.
“You can’t hear me because you’ve had no experience of an authority figure who wasn’t aloof and rejecting. Either you have to classify me with the refugee maids and your little brothers, who were nice to you because they had no choice. Or you have to see me as rejecting. But I’m neither. Can you face that?”
Caroline didn’t even understand what she was supposed to be facing. She studied one of the men in green work clothes and ski patrol parkas, who was hefting a cardboard box into the van. If Hannah killed herself, Caroline would kill her.
“Look, the people you really wanted—your parents—were absent or aloof. So you yearn for affection from such a person now. But if such a person gives you affection, he or she ceases to be unattainable. So you try to get the person to withdraw. Or you start looking around for a new unattainable. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“Uh, I don’t think so.”
“The point is,” Hannah said with urgency, “most of us have had difficult childhoods, and we have to learn to accept acceptance.”
Caroline noted the “us.” “Did you have a difficult childhood?”
“My mother died of typhoid when I was four, and my father deserted me when I was five.”
Caroline studied Hannah. A dead mother, dead children, a rejecting father. You think you’ve got problems? How come Hannah was so cheerful most of the time?
The movers were stomping down the hallway slamming doors. “All right, think about Jackson,” said Hannah, pursuing another tack, the way Nigel used to when landing his sailboat against the north wind. “What did he say when you told him you loved him?”
“He asked me what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
“That I loved him.”
“What do you mean by love?”
Caroline studied her. “Uh, that I liked being with him. Thought he was a nice person. I don’t know.”
“When some people say, ‘I love you,’ what they really mean is, I want to go to bed with you. Or I want you to support me financially. Or please don’t leave me all alone.”
Caroline was remembering the songs on the car radio when she necked with Kevin behind the Stop ’n Shop—“Young Love First Love,” “When Will I Be Loved,” “When I Fall in Love,” “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love with You.” The songs took for granted that everyone knew what love was. “What is love?”
Hannah laughed. “I asked you first.”
“Well, you just said what it isn’t. So what’s left?”
“Why d
on’t you figure that out for next week?” Hannah smiled, since most people spent their entire lives trying, and failing, to figure it out. Because they assumed love was something that had to do with other people.
“Nothing’s left, as far as I can see.”
“Maybe love is whatever’s left once you’ve eliminated everything else.”
“What?”
As Caroline walked out, Hannah lit a cigarette and reviewed Caroline’s dilemma as a child. If she expressed need, she got taken to the Salvation Army. If she expressed anger, her mother took to bed with depression. If she expressed love, everyone got up and left. What remained except to stay as still as possible and hope her mere existence wouldn’t offend? A suicide of the emotions.
Watching a moving man pass her open door with a box of books, Hannah reflected that Caroline was in the most difficult phase of therapy. The dependency, anger, and sexuality Hannah could handle fine, but the alternative was so nebulous it defied description. Either a person felt it or she didn’t. If she didn’t, no amount of discussion would help. Besides, love wasn’t something a client could experience in any depth with a therapist. The unequal nature of the relationship precluded it.
In the parking lot the van revved up, spewing black exhaust, and rolled away. Farewell, Mary Beth, thought Hannah. May you finally find some peace. Though she suspected suicide wasn’t a long-term solution. Mary Beth would probably have to come back as a barber, until she learned the proper use for razors.
As she tapped her cigarette into Nigel’s stone, a stick of incense to ward off evil spirits from next door, Hannah thought about her first lunch with Maggie after ending her own therapy. They met at a restaurant overlooking the lake and sat in the sun at a table on a wooden deck.
“I’m afraid I’m in a rush,” said Maggie, studying the menu, which had drawings of nautical knots all over it. “I have a two o—clock appointment.”
Hannah was miffed. She was also relieved. Never at a loss for words in Maggie’s office, outside it she felt like a teenager on her first blind date.
After they placed their order, Hannah took a deep breath and said, “You remember that fight Arthur and I had over whether to go to Maine or the Cape for our vacation?”
Maggie nodded without enthusiasm.
“We decided to go to the Cape.”
Maggie said nothing, lips pressed tightly together.
“I discovered once Arthur agreed to go to Maine, I didn’t really care anymore.”
Maggie put on her thick-lensed glasses. Hannah couldn’t see her eyes.
“I guess what I really wanted was for Arthur to defer to me?”
Maggie continued to sit in silence.
“What do you think?” asked Hannah, feeling anxious and irritated by Maggie’s sphinx imitation.
Maggie pursed her lips, put an elbow on the table, and rested her chin on her fist. “I think it’s a pity I can’t just order you to treat me as an equal.”
“What?”
Maggie turned her head and appeared to look across the lake, where white sails dipped and swooped like gulls.
It began to dawn on Hannah that there was a difference between being Maggie’s client and being her friend. For the rest of the lunch, Hannah confined her conversation to jokes, gossip, and summaries of movie plots, to convey to Maggie that she no longer wanted Mummy, or free therapy. Though she felt sudden anxiety: Not only could she no longer run to Maggie with all her problems, Maggie might even want to run to her.
Over the months, each relaxed into a new way of interacting, until they eventually became real friends. But then Maggie went and died.
On the whole friendships with clients weren’t worth the effort, although, thought Hannah, she’d done it a few times herself. She had enough people in her life as it was. In fact she wanted to let go of the old friends who were left, before they could be snatched away like all the others. Some days her heart felt like Flanders Field. She lacked the energy to add new names to her address book.
Putting out her cigarette, she glanced out the window and discovered a sunset in progress. She studied the bare white wall above the couch. If she hung Caroline’s shawl there, she could lie in her recliner and watch the sunset out the window, seeing it reflected in the shawl. But was it psychotherapy?
She was suddenly confused. She thought she didn’t like sunsets anymore.
Diana cut the broccoli quiche she’d made for St. Patrick’s Day and put pieces on everyone’s plate.
“Quiche! Yuck!” said Jason. Caroline glared at him. He met her glare with a look of defiance.
That afternoon Caroline had had a meeting with the guidance counselor at his school, who informed her Jason was throwing erasers in class and getting the shit beaten out of him on the playground.
“What’s going on at home?” asked the burly young man. His desk was cluttered with color photos of his own no doubt well-behaved children.
His mother has been trying to get her head together, she thought. It couldn’t be easy for a kid to have his mother in the same developmental stage as himself. “Nothing much.”
“Try to give him some extra special attention right now,” he suggested in a voice copied from Mr. Rogers.
The important thing was to get out of that office without revealing anything of significance, so she nodded. Thinking, have you ever tried to cuddle up to Darth Vader, young man?
“Don’t you think John Travolta’s gorgeous?” sighed Sharon, prodding her quiche with her fork.
“That fag?” said Jackie.
Diana and Caroline glanced at each other, trying to decide whether to wreck the dinner hour with a lecture on the term “faggot.”
“Don’t you think he’s yummy, Caroline?”
Caroline opened her mouth to say she wasn’t into men, but managed not to. “I like Mick Jagger better.”
“He’s cute,” said Sharon. “But he’s so old.”
Laughing, Diana asked, “Hey, how come you took all my Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin albums?”
“Mother, that’s not your kind of music.”
Diana and Caroline smiled at each other.
“Jackie has a girlfriend,” said Sharon, using the backs of both hands to flip the sides of her hair into the sleek wings fashionable with her set.
Jackie glared at her, fork poised and ready to plunge into her recently formed breast. “That’s a lie.”
“He sits next to her on the bus.”
“As least I don’t tongue kiss her in the woods at lunchtime,” said Jackie.
Diana and Caroline glanced at each other, trying to figure out what role to play in the nascent love lives of their heterosexual offspring. Caroline recalled what sweet little children the three had been, prancing through the woods and fields playing elaborate games about being members of a circus troupe. Soon they’d be sweating with lust and suffering over loss just like their parents.
“I don’t have to listen to this,” said Sharon, getting up and floundering down the hall in her tight orange-tag Levi’s.
“Sit down and finish your supper, Sharon,” called Diana.
“Forget it!” Sharon slammed her door.
Diana sighed. “She’ll do anything to avoid eating vegetables.”
“If Sharon doesn’t have to eat this shit,” said Jason, “neither do I.”
“Jason!” said Caroline. “That’s not very polite when Diana’s cooked you this nice supper.”
“I hate quiche, Mom!”
“Shove it up your ass then,” suggested Jackie.
Jason held up his middle finger. “Rotate, Jackie.”
“Just go downstairs, you two,” said Caroline. “But don’t ask me to fix you something later.”
As they clomped downstairs, Caroline said to Diana, “I think the quiche is marvelous.”
“I’ve long since ceased to care what those three think about anything.”
“You’d slit your throat if you did.”
“Can you imagine what our parents would ha
ve done if we’d behaved like that?” Diana put Sharon’s plate atop her own and started in on Sharon’s quiche.
Caroline chuckled. “Instant death.”
“Secredy I like it. They must feel well loved if they think they can afford to be so obnoxious.”
“Agreed,” said Caroline, eating Jason’s quiche. “I always felt I was walking on eggs around my house.”
“Me too. And even so, my mother was never happy with me.”
“You realize we do that with each other?” When she got home from work, Caroline found a St. Patrick’s Day card and a pair of lacy green underpants on her bed. She felt a stab of panic, like a junkie without a syringe: She had nothing to give Diana.
“What?”
“All the gifts and favors. It’s how we behaved with our mothers, and we still do it with each other. I think it’s time to stop.”
“Stay out of my head,” said Diana, putting down her fork.
“Sorry.” They sat in silence. Caroline began absently pulling petals off one of the shasta daisies she’d given Diana, which sat in an earthenware vase between two gold candles.
“Thanks, by the way,” said Diana, “for not having Brian here.”
“It’s required no special effort. I broke up with him several weeks ago.”
Diana looked up, candlelight glancing off her red hair. “What was that fight about then? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was the principle of the thing.”
“Oh, Jesus, Caroline. What do you think this is—High Noon?”
“Well, it’s lucky someone around here has some principles.” Don’t say that, she said to herself too late.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” Caroline had just pulled all the petals off the daisy, coming out with a “loves me not.”
“You mean Suzanne?”
“Never mind.”
“What’s unprincipled about that?”
“Other than the fact that she’s nearly Sharon’s age.” Shut up, Caroline, she pleaded.
Diana’s green eyes blazed in the candlelight. “And Hannah’s your mother’s age. So what?”
