Other Shoes, Other Feet

by David Howells

Wednesday’s Child

  “Joyce, I want you to just lay back, close your eyes, and tell me of any incident that comes to mind that left you feeling angry or hurt at someone or some thing. Don’t think, just let it come as it chooses. Be as cursory or detailed as you feel is important on any event, then move on to the next. Float from one to the other.”

  “Doctor? Is this hypnosis?”

  “No. You are fully aware and in control. This would be a step in hypnosis, which is basically just relaxed thinking. Now, no more questions for the moment. Go forth on your mission.”

  A minute or two passed. “Jack Mathers pushed me off a teeter totter when I was in first grade. I was pretty mad at him for the rest of the year. Turns out he had a crush on me and couldn’t express himself any other way.

  “I saw a driver hit a dog and drive away. I must have been maybe 11 years old. The dog turned out all right, but I was still mad at the driver.

  “Mrs. Kitterick in sixth grade gave me a zero on a paper I actually did turn in, but she lost it. My mom and dad had to come in and affirm I had spent a lot of time on the paper and they’d actually read it. The teacher found my paper later and apologized to me and fixed the grade, but I still felt hurt at her calling me a liar, in so many words.

  “My supervisor Fred Watts made a pass at me by the coffee machine last year. He knew I was newly married. I was pretty mad and told him what I’d do if he tried it again, which he hasn’t. In fact, he transferred to a different department. Guess I was pretty graphic.

  “Would being mad at O. J. Simpson count? Kids have so few role models, and he seemed like such a good one, and then look at what happened. Maybe that’s not a good example since it wasn’t aimed at me personally.

  “Someone scratched my car at Home Depot. Never found out who it was, and insurance took care of it. That was three years ago? No, four.

  “Elomi discontinued my favorite bra style. No, really, those things are very uncomfortable to me and that was the only one that I could wear all day at work. It took me months to find another style I could be comfortable with. Well, you said to say if something hurt me.

  “Steve Rankin broke off his engagement to my sister five years ago. That really hurt her bad, and she still has male trust issues. I’ve never forgiven him, at least not completely. Honestly, Marcia can get kind of hard to live with. She’s got, well, odd personal habits. Nothing that crazy, mind you…”

  “Charles, just go for it. Relax and let it flow. Joyce did a fine work of it, and we learned a lot about her. The two of you may want to share later, but for now, let’s keep it just you and me, and her and me. Now, proceed.”

  “First thing that comes to mind was being passed over for promotion to Senior Assistant because Dave Fuller’s brother coached the Little League team the VP’s kid played on. I mean, the guy had no administrative talent whatsoever. I wound up doing a lot of his job, while he got paid for my efforts. Well, at least I still have a job. That’s something.

  “My sister took my GI Joe and put a tutu on him from one of her dolls. I was, what, maybe six?

  “Nine Eleven comes to mind for hurt and anger on a grand scale, but it wasn’t something that was aimed at just me.

  “Wore a new three piece at the office Christmas party, and Peter Getz came in with the same outfit, right down to the tie color. Geeze, was that stupid of me or what?

  “Marauder, our tabby when I was ten or so, jumped on the table and knocked over my soda onto my calculator I was using for my math homework. Damned cats. I refuse to own one now.

  “Last year the bank made an error and bounced four of my checks. What a mess that was, and trying to make them take responsibility was like pulling teeth. Boy, was I ticked at them. Transferred my account after everything got squared.

  “There was a bully that had it in for me in third grade, but he got transferred out to one of those special schools after he got caught setting a fire in the janitor’s closet. I remember he had me pinned down, trying to get me to say the ‘F’ word, but I never did.

  “Ummm, I went to Y camp and came back to find Mom didn’t feed my goldfish. No, wait, seriously! I had that goldfish for maybe three years. Max meant a lot to me. I was hurt and mad on that one, but Mom took me out for a bigger tank and got three goldfish. Heh. Larry, Moe and Curley. That was Dad’s idea on the names. I thought it was funny…”

  Abigail and Dr. Grossman once again compared notes. They would make it a standard to schedule the Baxters last in the day’s schedule. That would leave the option of lengthening a session if needed and having it fresh for shared analysis afterwards. Greta would just have to cope.

  Abigail felt she was spinning in the mud, and all she could come up with was, “No one couple’s lives are that shallow on the pain and anger questions. Almost everything they said could have been significant at the time, but most of it happened long ago. That was all they could come up with? I said before they were cute enough for a sitcom. Make that a shallow sitcom, now. Also, with all they’ve been through with each other, and with even the mild level of personal pain incidents, both still have a distinct lack of the use of expletives. So make that sitcom a black and white era vintage.”

  “Good points, Abigail. That peach with the shared rotten pit analogy you had Monday would fit into your thought lines. If something deep is hurtful and painful enough, then maybe there isn’t room there for anything else to cut deeply. But that gets back to the synchronicity of the whole thing. Something must have occurred to both of them, whether separately or…or…”

  “Or what, Doctor?”

  “Or something very old; something older than they are.” Dr. Grossman got up and pulled a book from his library shelf. He showed her the cover, and she said she had heard of it but hadn’t read it. Abigail was loaned the book to review for the session on Friday. There was something about how this whole thing was playing out that urged him to consider a non-classical view of causal factors. The session today didn’t reveal squat directly, only indirectly. The journals the couple had shown him were innocuous at best, certainly not revealing, but at least their kinesthetic written recordings matched the patterns exhibited during verbal discourse.

  That the couple talked on the phone with no hint of animosity rearing its head was interesting, suggesting that physical presence and proximity were required trigger components, and the tighter the enclosure, the more likely the nitro and glycerin they carried on board would be to react. There were many keys to the problems suffered by the human psyches, and some keys were rarely used. Yet the rarest key could salvage a mind somewhere.

  Abigail left for her car and placed the book on the seat. “Many Lives, Many Masters”, Brian L Weiss, MD.

  Charles Baxter sat on the couch, watching nothing in particular on the TV screen. Joyce had suggested it was all her fault, but that couldn’t be true. He felt it inside that there was something shared in this behavior, a common event somewhere that had taken root in both their innermost beings. He stopped for a while when he came across that Ghost Hunter program, but it was so cheesy that he couldn’t imagine it being of any help to anyone. Channel surfing wasn’t something he normally did, but Dr. Grossman suggested it as a ‘random idea generator’. Men were visual, the Doctor said. He was a man, so flip around and see if any visual vignettes kicked off a response. It sounded like a reasonable route to try. Certainly didn’t cost him anything. Nice the doctor gave therapy tools that were reasonably priced at free. Considerate of him.

  There was one image that he had to change quickly. Channel 33 had a lot of violent stuff on. There was an old Western, featuring Clint Eastwood, where a bunch of local townsfolk assumed he was a rustler and strung the man up. Hanging; what an awful way to die. He’d heard it was humane if done so where it snapped the neck instantly, but more often in the Old West, the dying process was prolonged and horrific. That got mentioned in the journal. Not much else seemed to h
old his attention other than a brief strike on the shopping channel. There was a display of necklaces and chokers for sale. How could women wear those things? Didn’t they constrict the neck? No, thanks. The office required shirt and tie, but he made sure to keep his own loosely cinched.

  Joyce had received the same recommendation. Her sister Marcia popped some popcorn and opened up a couple of diet sodas. Joyce had to laugh at the caloric opposition of the two refreshments.

  Flipping the channels was driving Marcia buggy, but she kept quiet knowing it was the therapy assigned to her sister. So she picked up her Harlequin romance novel, typical image on the cover, and tuned out the sound of the television. She’d still keep a weather eye and ear out for her sister to gasp, faint, scream, or whatever was supposed to happen.

  Nothing seemed to light up her attention circuits though. She kept flipping through channels, from single to double digit channels. After a while, there would be a kind of pattern that she came to feel familiar with, including the Weather Channel, Nat Geo, CNN, Fox, Comedy Channel, Cartoon Channel, Sci Fi channel, the Food Network. Those were the ones that would grab her more than the others. She’d linger on the Sci Fi channel longer than most as they were having a Twilight Zone marathon.

  She was about to pack it in when she landed one more time to muse upon the works of Rod Serling. “Time Enough to Last.”

  Marcia looked up. “What? What do you mean?”

  “No. It’s one of the most famous Twilight Zone episodes. Time Enough to Last. Burgess Meridith was kind of a Casper Milquetoast. Look, there he is. Oh, I hate this part.” The nagging wife, played by Jaqueline deWitt, was doing a fine job of telling her husband just how disappointed she was in him. She had taken something precious to Burgess and wrecked it; it was a prized book of poetry now scored with the wife’s thoroughly destroying pen marks. The more it dragged on, the more uncomfortable Joyce got, until, something exploded.

  Joyce jumped up and screamed, “YOU DESTROYED IT, YOU SPAWN OF SATAN!” over and over. Marcia was shocked, and was only able to mobilize when she saw Joyce about to strike the screen with her fist. Marcia leapt up and grabbed Joyce by the waist. Fortunately, Marcia had about thirty five pounds on her sister and managed to swing Joyce flying back into the couch. Marcia couldn’t find the remote, and so reached behind the console and yanked the plug.

  Marcia looked back at her sister and saw someone she didn’t know. There was a feral look on her face for a few more moments, and then it began to melt back to the sister she had known for all her life, and yet, not known.

  “Joyce, are you all right?”

  “I…I don’t know.”

  “Sister, what happened, why did you blow up like that?”

  Joyce looked up through the tears. “I don’t know. Marcia, am I crazy?”

  During their evening chat, Charles and Joyce compared their notes. Marcia remained at Joyce’s side, just in case support was needed, or a straight jacket. Husband and wife decided that they’d both fax their experiences to Dr. Grossman first thing in the morning. They also decided not to watch any more television, or undergo any more self-initiated therapy other than talking to each other over the phone. That had been supportive for both of them and, so far, without incident. It was even decided not to discuss Joyce’s blow up between them, lest they trigger another explosion.

  It was very hard to say good night this time, but it was necessary if they were going to be in any shape for work tomorrow. Joyce had Marcia’s shoulder to cry on. There wasn’t any one for Charles, so he took her pillow and held it, making for a respectably sized wet patch.