He talked about his divorce. His wife, he told me, said being married to a psychoanalyst was about as much fun as playing poker with a computer. “She said she didn’t have as many emotions as I had answers for them. She said she had fallen in love with me because she thought there was some sort of spiritual connection. She tells me now that she thinks I’m a fraud.”
I thought to myself that she must have responded in the beginning to the charisma he exuded. The very quality that had made me initially mistrust him. “You do have something about you, though.”
“I think I know what you mean,” he said. “I think I put on mysterious airs. I give people this sense that I have secrets that would be valuable to them. You have that same air yourself,” he said.
“I don’t feel I have any secrets,” I said.
“But wouldn’t you like to have them?” he asked, with a knowing look that I found irritating. “I mean, we put in a good many years working toward our doctorates, immersing ourselves in the study of the human experience. After all that, didn’t you expect to earn a certain wisdom?”
“I expected nothing more than to become well versed in my field. The whole idea of psychologist as shaman was repugnant to me before I even entered graduate school.”
“It was a popular image at the time.”
“I know. I was involved with a spiritualist of sorts—we married, in fact. We finished our undergraduate studies and left, of course, immediately for Mexico. David really thought we were going to find answers—walking across the desert in search of a little, wrinkled teacher named Miguel.
“Did you find him?”
“Yes, the little monster. After a few weeks we found that we had much less money than we came with and that Miguel had come to have very much more. He was very smooth.”
“Did you learn anything at all?”
“I learned that two people should not marry until they are each fully grown up.”
“And when is that?”
“Well, for one thing, it is when one stops reaching into unreachable places for reassurance and meaning. And for another, it’s when one stops relishing one’s ability to make a fool of oneself.”
“I can’t imagine you having been guilty of either of those maladies.”
“I wasn’t, but David was. He insisted on staying with this fraud. Even when I told him I had to leave. He reasoned that feeling taken was probably just one of the tests the old guy was putting us through. That maybe the teacher thought feeling like a fool was a good place to begin.”
“Did you divorce David?” I nodded. “And you haven’t married again.”
“No.”
“This doesn’t have to do with maturity anymore.”
“No, I suppose it has to do with being very careful.”
On some impulse my friend leaned forward and put his face very tenderly against mine. “Why is it that we are both so lonely?” he whispered.
I was afraid he was wanting to be physical again. “That’s not something we need to get to the bottom of tonight,” I said awkwardly. “Let’s take a vacation from the deeper concerns, a little workman’s holiday.”
I think he was sadly relieved. Both of us have sat listening to countless stories of loneliness. There are only so many words to describe it. They get used up, and you find you can no longer use them for yourself. Instead, we drank more and got into the subject of fishing—something we have both always wanted to do. We talked about the patience it would take to coax the bass from underneath their rocks, about the elusive trout, and we decided at first that the bass fishing wouldn’t be as hard as the other, but concluded that we just didn’t know enough about it.
Two or three days later Tiffany called me again. “I’ve thought about it and decided I’d like you to be my Big Sister.”
“How does that work?”
“You know, you would relate to me, be a good example, and take me out to experience things.”
“I don’t think it’s common for a girl to recruit her own Big Sister. I’m not sure it’s even appropriate. Doesn’t one usually go through the organization?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Tiffany, I feel like you haven’t been completely consistent in telling me about yourself. There must be at least one adult that is responsible for you. If you could have that person call me, maybe we could start from there.”
“What do you mean consistent? What kind of a word is that? How consistent are you?”
“But, Tiffany, it’s you that’s asking me to get involved.”
“Forget it,” she said.
I was angry after she hung up. It wasn’t guilt. I’d like to think that doesn’t bog me down much anymore. But to use a phrase one of my clients likes, she “got to me.” There was something about her very nature that seemed to challenge my own. Even when she didn’t say a word. When I was around her I felt square, flat in comparison to her; I felt like I needed to prove something.
Two days later Tobey Johnson, the director of her group home, called me.
“Is she really dying?” I asked him.
“Oh, of cancer?” he said.
“No, cystic fybrosis.”
“I’m afraid not,” he said. “Not of MS or lupus either. The first time she lied about an illness was an attempt to make her mother respond to her. Even when it stopped working, she continued to do it. It’s become kind of a habit. She’s not really a bother about it. It’s just like a middle name that changes once in a while. One day you learn that it’s something else.”
“She changes her last name from time to time as well.”
“The real one is Hale.”
“She wants me to be her Big Sister.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. One minute I’m drawn to her, and the next I think she’s too disturbed.”
“She is disturbed,” he said, “and understandably so. She was raised by a manic depressive. You should meet her sometime—she’s a beautiful woman, the same as Tiffany. But if it had been her sole goal in life, she couldn’t have given Tiffany a more unreliable sense of the world. Mrs. Hale’s an extreme case, no middle ground. One month they would be sailing around the Apostle Islands with one of her boyfriends, everything would be ‘heavenly,’ and the next month she couldn’t face leaving their apartment, wouldn’t answer the phone, wouldn’t eat.”
“I sense a kind of religious obsession.”
“Oh, I don’t know if I’d call it that. Her mother converted when Tiffany was only a baby, sent her to mostly parochial schools. I doubt if Mrs. Hale is even very involved anymore, but I think at least for now it’s a source of stability for Tiffany.”
I was quiet and for a moment there was some throat-clearing, which would indicate we were not agreeing with each other.
“She told me you were a psychologist,” he said. “I can understand how you might see this as just another extension of your practice. She doesn’t need that. She’s had all kinds of therapists. She’s a challenge; I think many of them have found her simply beyond their reach. She can be confounding in ways the professionals find hard to diagnose.”
“What does she need then?”
“I think she’s already told you. She needs an older woman, something positive.”
“I think she’s manipulative.”
“Ruthless,” he said. “She gets what she wants. If you don’t work out, she’ll find someone else like you.”
“Now you’re being manipulative,” I said. But it worked, I wasn’t willing to commit myself, but on the other hand, I didn’t like the idea of being replaced so easily either.
So we arranged a trial outing. If it worked out, there would be another, but still on a trial basis. The plan was for us to have lunch at the new exhibition center downtown. But when I pulled in front of the stucco house, Tiffany was waiting on the step with another girl from the home. “This is Leslie,” she said. Leslie wore very clean white tennis shoes and, in contrast to Tiffany’s darkness, her hair and eyel
ashes were blond. Tiffany was wearing a cub scout shirt, a red skirt, and toeless sandals. “We’re just going to give her a lift to the mall.” I felt this was presumptuous on her part and things were already off to a bad start. I didn’t want to be Big Sister to Tiffany’s entire group home.
After we’d entered the mall, I caught Tiffany’s eye. “It’s just that Leslie needs some help with the escalator,” she said. And sure enough, Leslie, who had not said a word in the car, hung back with a little moan as we came to the center of the mezzanine near the approach to the long, open escalator which led to the upper deck. “Maybe not today, Tiffany,” she said. But Tiffany put her arm around her friend’s shoulders and brought her to the entrance. The escalator was all glass. In fact, the whole high rise of the court was a collaboration of many glass panels, reflecting the city outside and the sky itself. It wasn’t exactly an escalator to be taken for granted, and Leslie’s inhibition caused me to hesitate myself. It actually did appear to be a free-floating stairway with no solid foundation.
“This is really hard for you,” I said to Leslie, who seemed even afraid to touch the moving railing. “Tiffany, maybe a different escalator at another time would be better.” I imagined any minute there would be a hysterical scene echoing in the middle of the enormous mall.
“No, this is the one that the two of us talked about last night. And you said you wanted to try this one, Leslie. You told me this one might be worth it.”
“But, Tiffany,” Leslie began to cry, and I felt sorry that I had interfered, caused her to lose whatever resolve she must have accumulated over the night.
“It’s just the first one that’s hard,” Tiffany said. “Remember, we talked about that.”
Leslie stood for an interminable amount of time watching this first step roll out from the entry platform, flat until a seam appeared and then a new first step would rise.
“Just do it,” Tiffany said.
Leslie leaned forward, looking for a sure place to get on, but it was always moving. Her shoulders were shuddering, too much time was passing, a crowd was forming behind her. The people were beginning to murmur, “Excuse me, can we…” They were moving closer—a kind of waving impatience swelling up to the escalator but waiting just that last second that Tiffany needed to put her arm around Leslie and effortlessly bring her on. There was a moment that Leslie swayed, then she was okay.
“We’ll be helping Leslie go back down again?” I posed the question as we waited in line for a Shawirma sandwich basket at the Lebanese deli.
“It wouldn’t be nice not to.” She smiled.
“I’m into being a savior,” she said later, as we sat on a wooden bench under palm fronds on the balcony overlooking the mezzanine.
“You’re talking about the escalator?”
Tiffany was picking pieces of onion out of her pocket sandwich, setting them in her cardboard tray. “Small things add up,” she said. “St. Theresa, The Little Flower, didn’t actually do anything spectacular—she just stuck with it, made it her vocation.”
Problems with grandiosity—I could see it already. “How would you describe your vocation?” I asked.
“Okay, not exactly a savior, but a guide to faith.”
My therapeutic voice was rising—I couldn’t really subdue it. “Such deep concerns are unusual for someone your age.”
“Maybe not.” She was looking at the small pile of onions in her empty tray.
“Who else do you think is like you in these concerns?”
“My mother, for one.”
“Do you see her?”
“I saw her in the hospital at Easter time. She’d gotten ahold of some matches, and she’d been wandering the halls looking for vigil lamps. She had told the night staff that she couldn’t go to sleep without a vigil. She told me the next day that when she is asleep, she spins like a turbine engine. That it’s too much for her, and one night she will just shake apart.”
“She sounds like a frightened person.” I wanted to be careful how I spoke about her mother.
She didn’t answer me. She looked into her lap and spent some time smoothing out the cheap napkin that had come with our takeout.
“Sometimes we feel like we need to save our parents,” I said.
“Sometimes they need saving,” she replied.
It didn’t take long to recognize Tiffany’s three major obsessions: her mother, her clothes, and Catholicism. And from the start, I think I was determined to diminish at least some of the stock she invested in each of them. I tried to impress upon her the need to discriminate between her mother’s world and what was a livable one. “You grew up not being able to know what to expect,” I would tell her.
“Maybe that’s why I got into the Lives of the Saints,” she told me one day, as we walked our rented bicycles up East River Road. “The saints didn’t have to depend on the world being a certain way. And it’s a good thing, considering how wicked everyone was to them. They overcame the game,” she said, as if reading a T-shirt slogan from somewhere. “I mean, when there’s something bigger out there to care about, everyday things don’t hurt as much.”
My bike had a flat, and we had a good distance left to walk. “But there have certainly been some painful aspects in saintliness,” I said. “I’m going to dissuade you from boiling in oil, burning at the stake, and having your tongue cut out.”
“I’m not into martyrdom,” she said.
“Why do you say you’re dying then?” This was the first time I had brought the subject up.
But she didn’t appear to be taken aback. She had a small fluff of cottonwood in her dark eyelashes that she wiped away, then we resumed walking. “Sometimes I think if I don’t die real soon, or at least think that I will, I’ll live in a worse way. I would be like one of those zombies in the movie Night of the Living Dead. Sometimes I just look out of my eyes, and I can tell I only have a little of what I need left—that I’m almost out of it, and when it’s gone, I’ll change into a piece of wood.”
This was said with utter sincerity. All the time she had been talking she had been looking at her feet, as if watching them walk. And even after she had stopped talking, I was aware of the sound of her footsteps and found myself watching her put one tennis shoe in front of the other. Finally she looked up. Her face with the sun on it looked vulnerable and white except for a few freckles on her nose.
“But, I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I said.
“Don’t you ever think about the fact that you’re eventually going to die?” She was exasperated. “Don’t you think that’s natural, Doctor Psychology? Tobey does; he says I just speed up the time in my mind to keep me on my toes. That’s kind of strange, I suppose, but not as strange as all the people walking around who act like they don’t expect ever to die.”
After a few weeks the trial period had ended, and a system of equality was established between us. It was Tiffany’s idea that we should take turns planning our outings. She called it “designer of the day.” The other one was the “client.” It wasn’t simply the event the leader controlled, but the experience itself. The client had no say whatsover. I’d felt caught off guard when she had first made her proposal. It didn’t seem prudent for me to go along with just whatever she might fancy doing, considering her capable imagination and the energy of her obsessions. But I found I couldn’t quite object either. It was a challenge. I agreed on the condition that we could leave religion out of it.
I took her to the races once, Shakespeare-in-the-Park, and on a city canoe trip through the channel of lakes. Tiffany took me to the first established church of Minneapolis, located on the river, where we ate meat pies distributed by the French Canadian sisters. (She insisted, and I had to agree, this was not a religious experience.) Initially, our designer days were mild.
But one rare weekend evening I found myself across a cocktail table from her in “glamorous dress,” as she had requested. She had made herself up quite successfully as an older woman. Through some miraculous treatment
, her hair was swept back and smooth. Her dress was a black strapless, not unlike the kind Audrey Hepburn wore in the sixties. A light pink lipstick and fine black eyeliner completed the effect.
“Marvelous!” she panned, looking out at the view of the city. We were in the Orion Room, a revolving restaurant and cocktail lounge on the sixty-seventh floor of the IDS tower. The tilt of her head, the line of her neck—a “just so” pose—caused me to cross my legs in an elegant way. I felt an excitement that I could only associate at the time with a kind of espionage. “Two champagnes,” she said to the waiter, “and tell me”—she beckoned him closer—“if there is a peach to be had—we would both adore a sliver in our glass.”
All I could think about, while we waited for our drinks, was the consequences for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. But once the champagne was served, each with a slice of peach, I was happy again. “My mother could dress like this,” she said, “like a jewel in a box, even while we were so poor. It was a way to make me proud of her.” After we finished our wine, she set the glass down and smiled. “This was easy, wasn’t it?”
And it occurred to me later that the whole evening had been both a tribute and a parody of the kind of romantic magic her mother was capable of. Perhaps by being able to imitate it, Tiffany was dismantling the power it had always had for her.
I found myself spending more and more time with Tiffany. At first I set fairly strict limits—seeing her every other weekend. But my limits expanded almost unnoticeably until one day in August I looked up from my gardening and watched her adjusting the position of the sprinkler on my lawn.
I realized she’d gotten more than a toehold in my life. And I realized that I didn’t mind. I minded a little that she would drop by when I had guests. Always, there was an initial consternation regarding her unique ability to control a conversation—any conversation. My friends would look askance, wondering when I was going to take the reins in hand. But I knew she would draw them in soon enough. They would be comparing computer technology to waffle irons and the possibilities of telephones for dolphins, and there wouldn’t be a shred of banality left in the room.
House of Heroes Page 24
