Amnesia

by G. H. Ephron

  Maria’s eyes were wide. Her hands were fluttering in her lap.

  “The reason I tell you this is because it sounds like you thought you were going crazy. And I want to reassure you that you weren’t.”

  “That’s just how it was,” Maria said, leaning toward me. “I thought it was my fault. Like I wasn’t trying hard enough or something.”

  “Trying harder can actually make it worse.”

  For the first time, Maria sat completely still. “Dr. Baldridge understood. I knew the minute I met him that he’d be able to help me.” She paused, her eyes shining. “He just radiates so much wisdom and understanding.” Dr. Baldridge’s brand of medicine encouraged just this kind of hero worship — doctor as savior, prophet, and God, all rolled up in one neat package and brought to you, care of your friendly health insurance provider.

  “So you started to see Dr. Baldridge on a regular basis?”

  “Yes, and I told him about the dreams I was having. How I couldn’t sleep. And then I couldn’t stay awake the next day because I wasn’t getting enough sleep. He said the only way for me to free myself was to get to the bottom of it. He said the dream was a repressed memory. And it was trying to tell me something. I was gorging and vomiting because I was trying to vomit up the truth. He said if I could remember the truth about my past, then I wouldn’t need to purge myself anymore.

  “I felt so good during our sessions. Like I was a real person and he understood everything that was going on in my mind. He asked me, had I ever been sexually abused? He told me to open my mind’s gateway. Not to be afraid. I felt so safe with him. I let the memories come.” There was some sadness in her voice as she continued. “He kept saying, ‘The truth will set you free.’ He was so pleased when I started to remember.”

  Now Maria started pulling on the edge of her sweater with one hand and twirling her hair with the other. “There was this dream I kept having. At first it was fuzzy. Dr. Baldridge hypnotized me to help me see it more clearly.

  “In the dream, I’m in the basement of our house. We had a big rumpus room down there with a TV and some beanbag chairs. All I could remember at first was that it felt like I was suffocating in one of those beanbag chairs. It was just closing in around me, cutting off the air.

  “Dr. Baldridge kept asking me, ‘Who else is in the room with you?’ At first I couldn’t see anyone. I thought it was only me. Then I realized, Uncle Nino was down there with me. He was standing at the foot of the stairs, staring at me.”

  The room seemed eerily silent as Maria continued. Her hands came to rest in her lap and bits of tissue fell to the floor. Her eyes were focused in midair in front of her. “Then he came over and sat beside me. He reached inside my shirt and touched my breasts. I was very scared. I remembered hoping that he’d stop and go away. Then he unzipped his pants and made me touch him. Then he took off my shorts and got on top of me. When I struggled, he started to choke me. I can still remember, this bowl of M&Ms somehow ended up wedged into my back —”

  Her story was interrupted by a clanging. Maria gave a startled leap. The bell rang again and continued ringing. Maria clapped her hands over her ears and shook her head.

  At best, fire drills at the Pearce are the ultimate in bureaucratic nonsense. Because we’d run the risk of losing patients if we actually left the building, we dutifully herd everyone into the common area. Then it’s like trying to keep puppies in a basket. And because they never tell us when there’s going to be one, the unexpected interruption can come at just this kind of critical juncture, destroying hours of work.

  I cursed under my breath. Out loud, I said: “Fire drill. I’m afraid we’ll have to take a little unscheduled break. But then we’ll pick up where we left off.”

  I fully expected Maria to be as upset as I was by the interruption. But she wasn’t. She followed me out into the hall, her hands still covering her ears.

  To anyone who didn’t know better, it looked like utter chaos. The alarm bell was still going. Gloria, looking very much like a drill sergeant with an invisible whistle in her mouth, was marching up and down making sure that every patient was attached to a staff member. Kwan was wheeling Mrs. Blum down the hall while coaxing Mr. Kootz along in front. Kootz had an aviator’s hat jammed onto his head and the earflaps now flapped along with his sneaker laces. True to form, Mrs. Blum was in ecstasy, wailing, “Cataldo! Cataldol” in her screechy little voice, as if her ship had finally come in.

  Maria and I wound up shoved into a corner. The room quickly turned warm and pungent, body odor competing with the smell of pine cleaner and bleach. Gloria’s shouted orders cut through the din. Maria stood silent, her eyes unfocused, arms now loose at her sides, immune to it all.

  I checked my watch and fidgeted as stragglers continued to enter the room. The timing couldn’t have been worse. I didn’t want Maria to slip so far away that we’d be unable to resume our talk.

  When the clanging finally died out, twenty-five of us were packed in like sardines, waiting for permission to resume our normal craziness. I checked my watch again. Gloria would be pleased. Although it had seemed like an eternity, our so-called evacuation had been accomplished in record time.

  With the all-clear signal, Maria returned to the dining room with me.

  “I’m really sorry about the interruption,” I said.

  Maria shrugged and settled into her chair. “Um, I was telling you about my dream.”

  “Right,” I said, relieved that she seemed to be willing to pick up right where we’d left off. “You dreamed that you were in the basement of your house —”

  “And Dr. Baldridge helped me to see my uncle in it … raping me.” Maria reached for a tissue and pushed her hair out of her face.

  She settled back and started to recite in a hollow singsong. “It was in the basement of our house. I was in the beanbag chair. He came over and sat beside me. He reached inside my shirt and touched my breasts. I was very scared. I remember hoping that he’d stop and go away. Then he unzipped his pants and made me touch him. Then he took off my shorts and got on top of me. When I struggled, he started to choke me.”

  There was no point in my taking notes because the story she told was almost identical to the one she’d told me earlier. I noticed that Maria was dry-eyed as she recited. I was reminded of how Sylvia Jackson described the night she’d been shot. Like Sylvia, Maria had probably already told this horrific story so many times that it had lost its power. After all, that was the point of telling and retelling. Surely it was healthier than the avoidance at which I’d become expert.

  But something else was going on here. It was as if a phonograph needle had paused, midair, and then reengaged. Apparently, Maria had only one image of this event, and that image was synchronized to a set script. I scratched my head and stored the thought.

  “After I remembered my uncle raping me, Dr. Baldridge helped me recover other memories.”

  “You saw Dr. Baldridge often?” I asked.

  Maria ran her hand down her neck, tugged her sweater hard across one shoulder. “At the beginning, I did. Twice a week. He just blew me away. I’d get to his office and I’d feel closed up — you know, like something all dried up inside a shell. I’d lie down. He’d light candles. It was wonderful. I’d lie there, watching the candles flicker. Then we did relaxation exercises. I could feel the tension leave every part of my body.

  “Then he told me, ‘Clear your mind and focus on the pain.’” Maria sang the words like an incantation. “‘When you’re in the circle, it’s safe. Look at the pain. Feel the pain. Transform it! Find the images.’

  “At first, I didn’t see any images. But I kept trying.” She giggled. “I felt, like, constipated, know what I mean? Like I had to go to the bathroom. I’d sit there and sit there and nothing happened. But I didn’t give up. I kept trying and trying until I saw him — Uncle Nino, standing on the stairs. Then, little by little, I remembered the dream. And finally I remembered that it wasn’t a dream at all. It was real.

&
nbsp; “Then it started to get easier. We worked on another image that I had. An image of someone else. And I realized it wasn’t just Uncle Nino. It was my father, too. He started it. I was two and a half years old. Still in my crib. He put his fingers up inside me.

  “Then, it seemed as if the floodgates opened and I could get at all of these images. I remembered how my father made me shower with him after we played ball. He’d touch me and make me touch him. And one time we went to my grandparents’ house and he raped me in their backyard. Once he threatened to rape me with a fishing pole in the garage. I must have been six or seven years old.” Maria panted for air as if she’d been running.

  “Tell me,” I asked, “besides the terrible memories of abuse, what are your other earliest memories?”

  Maria squeezed her eyes shut. She opened them. “I remember getting a Wonder Woman lunch box. It was something I really really wanted. And my father bought it for me. I remember, he called me his little wonder girl.” Maria’s brow wrinkled and her eyebrows dipped together. “But he just bought it because he was feeling guilty about what he was doing to me. Later, I lost it in the school cafeteria. I think I must have deliberately left it there.”

  “So was that in kindergarten?”

  Maria shook her head. “First grade.”

  “Do you have any earlier memories?” I asked. Maria squeezed her eyes shut and strained forward. Uh-oh. Was this the trap she’d fallen into with Dr. Baldridge? “Don’t worry if they’re not there. Your uncle — have you remained in contact with him?”

  Maria Whitson stared into her lap. “For a long time I wasn’t. I cut myself off from all of them.” She crossed her arms, tilted her head and looked past me, hardened her expression, and then looked directly at me. “But I confronted him before he died.”

  “And when was that?”

  “Earlier this year,” she said. A little bell went off in my head. Hadn’t Maria Whitson’s second suicide attempt been six months ago? “I told him what he’d done to me. Of course, he denied everything. Then he cried and begged me to forgive him. The bastard.”

  Despite the strong language, her face had little expression and her voice held little emotion. And she continued staring at me. I waited for her to go on, but she seemed to have run out of words.

  “I was wondering about something you said at the beginning of our talk — that when you see your parents, some of the images they bring to mind are pleasant. This will be something important for us to understand.”

  “I guess it is weird,” Maria observed, “considering how much I hate them.”

  “Didn’t you call your father when you tried to kill yourself.”

  Her jaw dropped. “You think I called him for help? I called him because I wanted him to know what he’d done to me.”

  “But in fact, he did help you. You would have died.”

  Her voice turned strident. “I wanted to die. And I wanted him to know it was his fault.”

  Not far in the back of my mind I was feeling the pressure of time. With managed care, Maria Whitson’s days with us were numbered. Before we released her, we’d have to put in place the support and protection she needed. So I pressed forward with a question I knew she wasn’t quite ready to tackle. “Have you thought any more about whether your parents can visit you? We’d like to-”

  Maria interrupted with a vehement. “No!”

  “Ms. Whitson, have you started to consider what you’re going to do when you leave here? You’ll need money. A place to stay.” She didn’t answer. “Are there friends you can stay with?”

  She shook her head. “I have no friends.”

  “Relatives?”

  She shook her head harder.

  “Well, we’re thinking about those things, too. Meeting with your parents doesn’t mean you forgive them. It doesn’t mean you accept their help. But it might turn out that they can help you, even indirectly, after you leave here. Or it might turn out that we need to set up an environment that protects you from them. That’s why I want to meet with them here, where it’s safe.” I pressed, “Perhaps there’s someone on the staff you’d like to be with you when you see them?”

  Maria seemed to soften. “Maybe I could handle it if Gloria’s there. She understands.”

  “Gloria, then. Absolutely. I’ll make the arrangements.”

  I left Maria Whitson feeling as if we’d made progress, but convinced there was much more ground yet to be broken. Later that afternoon, I found Gloria sipping an afternoon cup of coffee and dragging on an unlit cigarette in the little kitchen behind the nurses’ station. I pulled up a chair opposite her.

  “Why can’t they at least tell us when they’ve got a fire drill scheduled,” I grumbled.

  “You know as well as I do that would defeat the whole purpose.”

  “I know, I know, but it seems designed to destroy exactly the kind of therapeutic environment we’re trying to build.”

  “Having a tough day?” she asked.

  “Sorry, I’m not criticizing you. You did a great job, as usual. It went off without a hitch.”

  “It took five minutes to get everyone herded together. That’s the best we’ve done.”

  We sat in companionable silence, looking out the window into the dusk that was descending earlier and earlier each afternoon. I cleared my throat. I was nervous about broaching the subject of Maria Whitson’s family meeting.

  Gloria finessed me. “Maria Whitson asked me to be there with her when she sees her parents.”

  “And?”

  “And what? Of course I will.”

  I waited. Gloria crossed her arms in front of her, cocked her head, and pursed her lips. I gazed back at her, letting the silence grow. “This one’s got you tied up like a pretzel, hasn’t it?” I observed.

  Gloria stood up, crossed over to the window, and contemplated the twilight. I shuffled through my appointment book, feigning interest. When I looked up again, her reflected image was staring back at me, chin thrust out. I recognized the stance. On the rare occasion when Gloria is convinced that the rest of us are blind to a patient’s vulnerability, she turns into this block of granite, challenging one and all to take a poke at her or to back off.

  “When it happened to Rachel, there wasn’t anyone to protect her,” she said. Rachel was Gloria’s partner, the woman with whom she shared her life. “She went through this with her family. Her father abused her — sexually, physically, and emotionally. And no one, no one was there to get her through it. She’s very damaged. And the only way she’s been able to heal is by confronting her family, asserting control, and cutting herself off from them completely.” She stared out the window. “So it’s very hard for me to be objective. Of course I realize Maria Whitson is not Rachel. But their situations are so similar.”

  I took off my glasses and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “I think your empathy has been very helpful for Maria. It makes her feel safe. But you’re right, her situation is not at all clear-cut.”

  “Believe me, I see that. Forgetting for twenty years what she now remembers as repeated, violent abuse?”

  “And each time she tells me about what happened, she uses virtually the same words, like she’s reading a movie script,” I added. “And Dr. Baldridge bringing it back through hypnosis. We may never know what did or didn’t happen to Maria Whitson when she was a little girl.”

  Gloria licked her lips. “That’s what I keep telling myself. And it’s not the point, anyway. She’s only here with us for a short time. After that, she hasn’t got a whole lot of options.”

  “She makes all of us feel like protecting her.”

  “Protect her, yes. But she doesn’t need to be infantilized. She deserves to work through her own pain and reach her own decisions. And that’s what I’d like to help her do.”

  Sometimes Gloria made me want to stand up and cheer.

  22

  I HAD a quiet weekend at home while the Head of the Charles Regatta turned my river into a big frat party. Six thousand rowe
rs clogging the river and two hundred thousand spectators occupying every bit of the riverbank—not my scene.

  Monday morning, I didn’t even try to get on the river. With everyone trying to get their boat out of the water at once, it would have been like driving on Beacon Street near Boston University on September 1, National Student Moving Day. Unmitigated chaos. With the start of the trial a week away, I went directly from home to Chip’s office for a strategy session. I parked on Mass Ave in Central Square, fed the meter six quarters, and headed down the street.

  Chip’s office was in one of the only office buildings for miles. A cement tower apparently molded by some immense waffle iron, it had stood alone for decades, a harbinger of someone’s urban renewal nightmare that fizzled on the drawing board. With the demise of rent control, the surrounding blue-collar neighborhood was rapidly turning white, property values were skyrocketing, and the long-awaited makeover of Central Square was finally beginning to happen. A Starbucks across the street was being picketed by a motley array of local characters carrying signs protesting its takeover of the old Harvard Donut Shop.

  Purists aside, change has been good for the area. The best ice cream could now be found down the street at Toscanini’s. With each wave of immigrants, new ethnic restaurants have taken their place alongside Irish pubs. Cambodian, Thai, and Indian restaurants rub shoulders with sub shops. The Falafel Palace sits enthroned on one corner in an oversize chess piece, a white-tiled honest-to-God castle complete with turret. In bygone days a White Tower hamburger stand (or hamburg as they say around here), it epitomizes Central Square’s transition from a white bread to a pita bread neighborhood. The next wave — yuppie coffee and Gap jeans — would be a whole lot less interesting.

  A bank and a downscale Buck a Book occupied the first floor of Chip’s building. I pushed through the double doors. The lobby had a slightly dilapidated air to it, but it was clean and someone had actually dusted the plastic plants that flanked the building directory.