A whiteboard is mounted on the wall, which is otherwise decorated with neutral lithographs by the usual suspects. What possibly distinguishes my office from most other therapy offices is the old video camera sitting on its tripod. I record the majority of my sessions. Sometimes so the patient can take a copy of the session tape home, sometimes for my own sake.
The tapes are part of the case records and are stored, locked, in a heavy green fireproof cabinet in the reception area. Aina claims that my tapes are further evidence of my need for control and complains that there is less and less space in the cabinet for her own records. I reply that she mustn’t worry, since she never writes notes longer than two lines.
She leaves me alone.
I had to make her understand. That was how it all started. I had to make her understand what she had done to me. But how could I explain? That at night the pain twisted like a thousand knives in my guts, knives that work their way up through my belly and chest. As if a ravenous predator were eating me up from inside, a massive parasite with razor-sharp teeth and cold, smooth lightning-fast limbs from which it is impossible to free myself.
Would I be able to describe the emptiness and the loss? That every sunrise announced that yet another meaningless day was approaching. Meaningless hours filled with equally meaningless activities awaiting nothing. And with every day the distance increased. The distance from Her.
Would I be able to explain that my dreams were so intense and real that I wept with disappointment when I woke up, bathed in sweat like in a fever?
Can you get someone else to understand something like that anyway? And even if I succeeded, what good would it do?
Really?
Date: August 16
Time: 1:00 p.m.
Place: Green Room, the practice
Patient: Charlotte Mimer
“Charlotte, I think we should start by looking at how things have been going for you over the summer. It’s been a long summer break.”
“I think the summer was just fine. I’ll be happy to show you my entries.”
Charlotte Mimer bends over her briefcase and pulls out a folder where the pages of her food diary are in perfect order. I note that as usual she has made all her entries with the same pen and in her signature tidy handwriting. Charlotte hands over the folder to me as she pushes her well-coiffed brown hair behind one ear. I see that she is expectant and proud, and I feel happy for her sake.
“Let’s start by looking at the entries from June.”
This summer I had asked Charlotte to take notes about every meal: where she was, what she ate, and how much. And at the end of each meal she would assess her uneasiness and distress. For an individual with a serious eating disorder, ordinary mealtimes often give rise to strong anxiety; food is associated with fat. To avoid this feeling, certain destructive behaviors develop and may last for years: starvation, vomiting, and excessive exercise. The patient may not even be aware that all this leads to renewed bingeing, and yet the anxiety is so strong and painful that for the moment it doesn’t matter. It’s a vicious cycle.
I pick up Charlotte’s meticulous food diary and look through the entries for June. Regular mealtimes, no high-anxiety estimates after finished meals, no overeating, no vomiting.
“Can you tell me about it?” I ask.
“I don’t know . . . it just went fine. Suddenly it was . . . easy.”
Charlotte is about forty years old and successful in business. She works as a marketing manager at a large international company. She has struggled with eating disorders in silence for almost twenty-five years. It was only when her dentist confronted her about the corrosion damage to her teeth that she sought help. She has been in treatment since the end of April and is something of a model patient. Just as she is a perfect marketing manager, she is also the perfect psychotherapy patient. Her major problems seem to stem from the incredibly high demands she places on herself. Charlotte is scared to death of failing. So far we have touched on this only peripherally, working on reducing her bingeing and vomiting. In contrast to Sara Matteus, Charlotte seems to spread energy around her. Her fear of being incompetent or inadequate makes me feel accomplished and capable.
We continue to study Charlotte’s notes. July, August: low anxiety, no vomiting. We find ourselves laughing together, and Charlotte finally gets the praise she so desires, and that she also deserves.
“There was something else, too.”
Charlotte looks hesitant. She squirms in the 1950s-style Lamino chair and, as always when she is worried, she starts wiggling one foot, today clad in a Tod’s loafer. I suspect this is a type of shoe I could never afford.
“Tell me!”
“I don’t know . . .”
Charlotte suddenly looks as if she is keeping a secret. A secret that she will soon tell me. You see, that’s the way it works: They tell me all their secrets in the little green room.
“I don’t know if it has to do with therapy exactly. I’ve been thinking, you know, about life.”
Charlotte stops herself and a blush creeps up her neck. I realize that it takes a lot of courage for her to bring up what she now wants to say.
“I’ve spent . . . how many years is it really—good Lord, twenty-five, maybe?—devoting all my time to thinking about food. And about my body. And about my stomach. And about my thighs. And about going to the gym. When I wasn’t doing that, I was working. Work. Body. Food. I’m the youngest, most successful marketing manager at the whole company, but I have no life. No real life. No friends. No close friends, anyway. No husband. No children. I’ve been so preoccupied with making myself perfect that I’ve forgotten why I wanted to be perfect. I wanted . . . to be . . . loved. I want to be loved. And now it’s too late.”
The tears have burst forth and are running down Charlotte’s blushing cheeks like little streams. She sniffs and takes several tissues from the box. Blows her nose, dries her tears, and cries some more. I push the box across the table toward her and place my hand lightly on her arm.
“Charlotte.” I catch her gaze. “It’s not unusual to feel this way when you’re going through what you are right now . . . You’ve been handicapped, held back by a severe illness, and now you’re starting to get healthy. Of course there will be insight into the years you’ve missed. It’s not strange. It’s good. What I want to know is why you say it’s too late now.”
She sits silently while inspecting the wall above my head before answering in a cracked voice.
“Old, I’m getting old. And it’s as if I can’t understand it, can’t take it in. It’s like I’m just waiting to . . . that I’ll be young again.”
“Young again?”
“Well, by spring maybe?” she says and smiles—a crooked, melancholy smile, filled with pain.
I smile back. The thought sounds familiar somehow, as if time were a channel, where it was possible to travel in both directions under controlled circumstances, instead of a waterfall. She shrugs slowly and fixes me with a dejected look.
“Who will want me now . . . I am . . . maybe I can’t even have children now.”
Charlotte’s sorrow. Charlotte’s fear. So close to my own. No children. Too late. No husband. No idea. Never again.
I try to collect Charlotte’s thoughts and do something with them. Get her to look at them from outside. Objectively. Assess the level of truth in these assertions. We agree on an assignment for Charlotte to work on, and then her forty-five minutes are over and she takes out a brush, pulls it through her hair, and somehow manages to collect herself. When she shakes my hand and says good-bye, the sobbing little girl Charlotte Mimer is no longer there. Out of the room walks marketing manager Charlotte Mimer and I, psychotherapist Siri Bergman, stay behind.
I go to the window and look down at the street. Far below me, on the stone pavement of Medborgarplatsen, a group of preschool children walks by. The August sun is shining like
it doesn’t have the sense not to. No noise penetrates my office, but when I close my eyes I can imagine how the children’s voices sound down there. A quiet feeling that I cannot identify fills my chest. Maybe it’s sorrow, maybe it’s only calm and emptiness.
Evening.
There is a ritual I have to perform every evening. Almost without exception, I bring work home with me. When it’s finished, I go for a swim in the sea. When it’s summer I try to take the opportunity to swim a little. Then I prepare dinner.
Dinner for one.
It’s never elaborate or nutritious: spaghetti with canned tomato sauce, frozen pancakes, Frödinge brand quiche, grilled chicken from the ICA supermarket in Gustavsberg. I don’t even own a cookbook. I drink wine with dinner, carefully clean up after my meal, and then go outside and walk the short stretch between the rosebushes to the bathroom in the shed; I don’t want to risk needing to go outside after the onset of darkness. I call for Ziggy. Sometimes that works. Certain nights he wants to go his own way instead of warming my bed. When I’ve returned to the house, I go through all the rooms and turn on the lights. All the lights: ceiling lamps, bed lamp, desk lamp, even the stove light in the kitchen. I check that the big flashlight is strategically located next to my nightstand. Power outages are not unusual where I live. Then I look out into the darkness through the big windows, which at this time of evening are like empty, black holes.
I fall asleep, deeply and dreamlessly, with the help of a little more wine.
One of my earliest memories from childhood is when my sister locked me in the closet in her room because I had smeared Nutella in the hair of her Cindy doll. I hadn’t planned to transform the doll’s flowing locks into a poop-brown cake of oily, rancid Nutella. The idea was to make Cindy better looking. My mom and my sisters all used face masks and hair packs when they wanted to look really good.
I clearly remember how I begged and pleaded for her to let me out as she roughly and mercilessly shoved me deeper into her closet. “You brat! I’ll kill you if you touch my Cindy again!”
It was dark and stuffy in the closet, the heavy air felt like it was pressing against my face and my thin limbs, forcing me farther and farther back against my will. I remember a faint odor of wool and dust and something else, like rubber.
Haltingly, I made my way in the darkness with my hands stretched out in front of me. Clothes that had been stored away for the summer brushed against my cheeks and the steel edges of a pair of old skis struck me on the shoulder.
My heart was beating faster and faster, and a strange pressure was growing in my chest. My first feeling was surprise rather than fear; it was as if my body became afraid before my intellect understood what was happening, as if I could clearly feel and register all the physiological expressions of fear before I actually realized I was afraid. I heard the hangers screeching against the rod above and instinctively starting waving my arms. Down jackets, cardigans, and old ski clothes tumbled down with dull thuds around me on the floor, and to my own surprise I heard a peculiar shrill sound emerge from my throat. It sounded just like the pigs we had seen when my class went on a field trip to the farm in Flen.
“Aaauuaa,” I screamed.
I then fainted, among the woolen mittens, tracksuits, and neat bundles of My Life’s Story magazine.
Date: August 21
Time: 3:00 p.m.
Place: Green Room, the practice
Patient: Sara Matteus
“I have to tell you something!”
Sara is eagerly picking at a scab on her forearm with a long, green fingernail. Picks, scrapes, lifts up the scab until pus comes out.
“Of course,” I say encouragingly, studying Sara more closely for the first time since our conversation began. She seems exhilarated and energetic. Manic. Drumming the lighter faster and faster against her pack of cigarettes, she opens her eyes wide. She evidently is having a hard time sitting still. My cynical brain immediately thinks uppers, but I know that’s wrong. Sara is clean.
“I met a guy!”
I look discreetly down at my notebook so that my eyes will not reveal what I’m thinking, but Sara sees through me.
“I know what you’re thinking, but this time it’s different! And I know that now you’re thinking that I say that every time, but this time it’s true. Promise! He’s much older. He has a real job, he’s supersmart. Makes an awful lot of money. But that’s not what matters,” she adds, as if to downplay the fact that the man she has met possesses all the right conventional attributes.
She lowers her voice and whispers dramatically. “He sees me and understands me like no one else has. Don’t be offended, but I can talk with him about the kinds of things I can’t say to anyone else, not even to you. He listens to me for hours. Listens to my harping, you know.”
Sara smiles, lights a cigarette, and slowly shakes her head, making her golden curls dance over her shoulders.
“He wants me to move in with him.”
She says this slowly and in a contemplative tone, but there is also something triumphant in her voice.
I gather my papers together and try not to stare at her flushed cheeks and defiant expression.
“I’m happy for your sake, Sara. Truly. How long have you known this . . . man?”
Sara looks down at the carpet, resting her upper body against her knees and rocking slowly back and forth.
“Oh, a few weeks. But we’ve been seeing each other a lot. He gave me this bag,” she adds, and as if to prove the legitimacy of the relationship, she holds up an oversized, monogram-patterned Gucci bag.
“He takes me out for dinner.”
I say nothing.
“He’s nice to me.”
Sara shrugs and looks questioningly at me, waiting for validation.
“Sara, you’re a grown-up and hardly need my approval before you start a relationship,” I say, but my tone of voice reveals how worried I really am.
It doesn’t seem right. A middle-aged, successful man courts a young girl with bright green nail polish, a charming borderline personality, and arms and legs zebra-striped with scars from razor blades and knives. I realize to my own surprise that I’m afraid he will exploit Sara.
After the session, I stay sitting for a long time in my green office, looking out the window. During the entire time I’ve been her therapist, Sara has been with one guy after another. Most often they have been her age, usually with problems that resemble hers. Rootless, beat-up young guys with scars from syringes and God knows what else. And other, much worse scars, carved into their very souls. Every time, Sara has been just as enthusiastic, just as infatuated as she is now, and every time it ended the same way: in bottomless, dark despair.
I wish I could prevent this from happening again.
Turn the page for a sneak preview
of Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff’s
More Bitter Than Death
The second thriller in the Siri Bergman series
It’s a rainy evening in a Stockholm suburb, and five-year-old Tilda is hiding under the kitchen table playing with her crayons when a man enters her apartment and beats her mother to death. The only witness, Tilda can’t quite see the murderer or figure out who he is. But she’s still a witness.
Across town, Siri Bergman and her best friend, Aina, are assisting their old friend Vijay with a research project on domestic abuse. They host a weekly self-help group for survivors, and over the course of several dark, rainy evenings, these women share their stories of impossible love, violence, and humiliation. When the boyfriend of one of the women turns out to be a prime suspect in a high-profile murder case, it isn’t long before Siri finds herself embroiled in the investigation. But even as she draws closer to finding the murderer, unexpected developments in her own life force her to ask herself: Can she learn to trust a man again, in spite of being surrounded by women who have been so deeply betrayed
by love?
“Sisters Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff dig deep into the cold climes of the human heart.”
—Perri O’Shaughnessy, bestselling author of Unlucky in Law and Show No Fear
Available June 2013 from Simon & Schuster.
GUSTAVSBERG
a suburb of Stockholm
the afternoon of October 22
Everything looks different from below.
The massive legs of the enormous dining table, the oak tabletop with the distinct grain, and the crayon drawing underneath—the one Mama hasn’t discovered yet. The tablecloth draping down around her in heavy, creamy white folds.
Mama also looks different from below.
Cautiously she sticks her head out of her tent, glances over at her mother as she stands at the stove. She is pushing down with one hand the spaghetti that’s poking out of the big, gray pot like pick-up sticks, smoking with the other.
There’s a snapping sound as the spaghetti breaks under the fork’s pressure.
Mama’s worn jeans are hanging so low over her rear end that Tilda can see the tattoo on her backside and those pink panties she wears.
Mama’s bottom looks enormous from below, and Tilda wonders if she should tell her so. Mama is always wondering if her bottom looks big or small. And she often forces Henrik to answer that question even though he doesn’t want to. He’d rather watch the horses running round and round on TV and drink his beer.
That’s called a hobby.
Mama puts out her cigarette in her coffee cup, then picks up a little spaghetti that landed next to the pot with those long fingernails and stuffs it into her mouth as if it were candy.
Strangers: An Exclusive Short Story Page 4
