A Shining Affliction

by Annie G. Rogers

  16

  Ben peeks around the door.

  “Snow burns!” he declares.

  “It’s so cold it feels hot?”

  “I stuck out my tongue and it burned!” he says, shutting the door behind him.

  “Do not bother us, it says. Leave us alone.”

  He walks once around the room, inspecting the toys, then sits down on the floor and pulls off his shoes. He leans over and sifts through the box of Tinkertoys, pulling out a long red stick. Walking around the playroom, he waves it about in the air. “I’m putting magic back in here!” he tells me.

  “Did it go out of here?” I ask.

  Ben ignores me and continues waving his stick. At last, satisfied with his task, he comes up to me, looking straight into my eyes.

  “Make me into a clown.”

  “Is a clown magic, Ben?”

  He nods.

  “Oh, you want magic in this room, and you want magic in here, too,” I tell him, tapping his heart.

  He nods, his eyes round and serious.

  “Make a clown hat, shoes, and buttons and a nose. Can we use that glitter?” he asks, growing visibly excited.

  I cut out a red circle and put a piece of tape on it, then hand it to Ben. “Here’s your nose.”

  “And buttons? Black buttons. I’ll cut them out,” he announces.

  They come out in various shapes and sizes, but Ben is happy. “You tape them on,” he tells me.

  We add a hat, shoes, and a large collar. He turns around for me to tie the collar on. It flaps over his shoulders. As I tie the string, Ben turns slightly. “Will it hurt?” he asks, over his shoulder.

  “No, I’ll make it loose for you.”

  When the collar is tied, Ben steps back from me. “Nothing hurts ever. I’m strong.”

  “I don’t believe that nothing hurts ever,” I counter.

  “Let’s make a tree ornament!” he says, ignoring me, and eyeing the container of glitter.

  “I don’t believe that nothing hurts ever,” I repeat.

  He frowns at me and hands me his red stick. “Point this at me,” he commands.

  “Make you magic? A magic happy clown who doesn’t ever hurt?”

  “Yeah.”

  He spends the remainder of the session kneeling on my desk chair and gleefully dumping huge quantities of glue over several cut-out circles, then pouring on mounds of glitter. I watch him, a little boy with scratches on his arms, the stubby fingers of his child’s hands covered with glue and red-and-green glitter. I see a baby in a crib surrounded by darkness and smoke, fire in the rooms all around him. A smell like the odor of the paper-whites, but stronger. My throat closes and I swallow over and over to keep back my tears.

  Ben is talking to me. “Annie, Annie,” he says, impatient, as if he has worked hard to get my attention. “What one do you want? What one of my ornaments do you want for keeps?”

  I pick out a red one. I try to give Ben a smile, but my tears still swim in my eyes.

  He hands it to me. “It’s magic,” he tells me. “It’s magic and it will make you happy again,” he assures me.

  I don’t think that Ben remembers what happened to him at eighteen months. He doesn’t remember how he was once in danger, so he places himself in danger over and over again. Nor does he remember the ways he was hurt, but I wonder about what happened, since he declares again and again that he is never hurt. The need to put himself in situations of danger, coupled with a dangerous oblivion to real possibilities of being hurt, worries me—and the rest of the Glenwood staff, too. Ben runs out in front of cars, daring them to run him down. He picks up sharp objects and gouges his skin, always surprised if he bleeds. He scratches himself. He continues to pick fights with the older boys, who could seriously hurt him but choose not to. I watch him as he is removed from dangers of one sort or another. He cries and struggles, wrestles away from—what?—a memory he doesn’t remember?

  When I confront him with my disbelief that he can never get hurt, Ben simply ignores me, and when I repeat my disbelief, he retreats into magic. Yet I also sense a readiness to acknowledge small hurts. When I tie his clown collar on, he turns and asks, “Will it hurt?” He was standing with his back to me, and perhaps, without being able to watch me, he felt compelled to ask.

  The magic of making costumes is more than a cutting, gluing, stringing-together process for Ben. He tries to come to terms with his fears of being hurt in at least two ways in this session. First, by becoming a magic clown he also becomes free of unhappiness and human pain; and second, when he asks if putting the costume on will hurt, he allows me to see that he can be hurt, and that this sometimes crosses his mind. It is a small acknowledgment with huge implications.

  That night I carry home his red glitter ornament, remembering that Ben saw my pain for a moment, and gave me a bit of his magic. I put his ornament on my desk, but I have to throw away the paper-whites—I can’t live with that smell for one more night.

  17

  Mary Louise waves me into the conference room early in the morning. “Annie, I’ve got a letter about you,” she says, laughing. “Go get your cup.” She and several other staff members are waiting by the coffee-maker for their morning brew. I retrieve my cup from my office, wondering who has written what to her, completely mystified. I see that the letter is addressed to the director and has already been opened. She shows me the return address, Dr. Michael Connelly and Associates. My heart races, and I want to run from the room, but she is taking the letter out of its envelope. I occupy myself with pouring coffee, shaking slightly. “This is great, Annie. They love your test reports.” I turn, spilling my coffee. “They do?” She signals me into her office and reads me the letter, signed by all the members of this group practice.

  In addition to seeing children individually, I have been testing children at Glenwood I don’t see in treatment. In fact, I have a third supervisor just for this purpose, Dr. Helen Hoeltzman, and I meet with her each week. She is exacting and expert, an intimidating combination, but she is also patient as I score and bring her my reports after administering the Children’s Apperception Test (CAT), the Wechsler Children’s Intelligence Scale-Revised (WISC-R), the Kaufman Intelligence Test, and the Rorschach. I now take to psychological testing the way I once took to rock collecting as a child—with a sense of curiosity and pleasure bordering on the obsessive. I fall in love with the testing materials: the little red-and-white cubes that belong to the intelligence tests; the storytelling tests of pictures and drawings from another era; and, most of all, the inkblot cards, their sweet cardboard smell and weight in my hands, the blots themselves endlessly interesting. I spend hours doing horizontal thematic analyses on the CAT, transcribing tapes of a child’s responses to the inkblots, scoring these responses for form, color, and content. I pore over the intelligence test scoring manuals, and the books and articles about how one interprets the subtests and final test scores.

  And then I sit down to write, knowing that this report is about a living child, knowing too that others will use these results to make decisions about this child’s life. I give the details and references for the scoring systems I am using, and illustrate my interpretations carefully, as Dr. Hoeltzman teaches me to do. But I also go further: I tape my testing sessions and write dramatically about the testing session itself, bringing the child and myself with the child to life, as I do with my clinical sessions. Then, based on my experience with the child, I raise alternative explanations for various responses to the tests. If a child scores low on one or both intelligence tests but is distracted throughout, I wonder if she or he was anxious, or upset about something alluded to later in the testing period, or afraid of what being tested might mean to important people in her or his life. In my written reports I do make recommendations, but they are offered lightly, in the context in which I know the child, stating clear limits about what I do and do not know about this little person. With Mary Louise’s encouragement, I have begun to meet with the children themselves (usu
ally with their own therapist present) to talk about their tests. This, too, is unorthodox.

  So I am pleased to know that all my work is being noticed—and by professionals who see test reports all the time. But what Mary Louise does not know, and what I cannot say in this context, is that Dr. Connelly knows me already. He treated me as an adolescent. I was his patient, and now he is reading my test reports. I take my coffee to the playroom and close the door, leaning against it, without turning on the lights. Relief washes over me, making my knees weak. I was afraid he was writing to say I should not be working with these children, something awful, incriminating. I let out a sigh: adolescence isn’t so far behind me.

  18

  When Ben comes to see me, he carries a small stick he found outside. “This is my magic stick!”

  He walks into the playroom and waves it around. “I’m putting magic back in here.” He seems very tense.

  “I want to make something today. Make me a clown. A hat, and buttons, and nose and shoes?”

  “Just like the last time, hmm?”

  He turns and catches sight of a new game in the room and says, “Let’s play that game.” He moves toward the toy shelves, and bends over to pick up a small spring lying on the rug. He retrieves the game, a Care Bears game, and sets up the board quickly and accurately. Then he sits back, his feet tucked neatly under him.

  “Me be a bear,” he says in a small voice. “You want to call me bear?” he asks.

  “OK, bear.”

  Surveying the game board, Ben leans over and gives me some of his stars. I take his cue and in turn give him some of mine. This sets the tone for the game, an arbitrary act of swapping stars that has no part in the rules.

  Ben makes bear noises, little grunts, whines, squeals, and growls to communicate his feelings as he spins the spinner. I comment on his feelings each time: “Well, that made the bear happy, didn’t it?” or, “Oh, poor bear, you can’t move this time.” I match his facial expressions as closely as possible. He reaches over and spins the spinner for me at my turn. When it is his turn again, I spin for him. He begins to make a range of noises for my side of the game, too, and again I name these feelings aloud: “The mama bear is pretty disappointed about that one,” etc.

  As I lean over to spin for Ben, he whispers, “Ow!” I look up to see that he has taken the spring and punctured the tip of his finger with it. He sucks on his finger for a moment. Then he looks at me, extending his finger for me to see.

  “I poked my finger?” he asks.

  I look at his finger, which is not bleeding, and agree with him. He bends over the game again, but does not return to his bear noises. He plays until he wins the game, without much interest, following the conventional rules. He carefully puts the game on the shelf, almost subdued. He goes to my desk and picks up a piece of white paper, folding it quickly into an airplane. He flies it around the room, almost as if it doesn’t much interest him—just something to do. He throws it suddenly on the rug, and reaching down into his pocket, pulls out the little metal spring.

  “I want to keep this spring,” he says provocatively.

  “You’d like that, but it can hurt you,” I respond, finally getting my cue.

  He picks up the airplane on the rug. “Here, Annie, this is a gift, a Christmas gift from me to you,” he says, transparently trying to distract me.

  I hold out my hand for the spring. Ben folds a new airplane, more carefully this time, and offers it to me.

  I accept it, and wait. There is a tension between us, an energy now.

  “Can I have this little box?” he asks, holding a discarded animal-cracker box.

  I nod and he deftly drops the little spring into it. Clever.

  I make my move and take the box from him. “No, you can get hurt with this,” I tell him, and remove the spring, giving the box back.

  Ben frowns, then opens his empty box. I tuck an animal cracker inside it. “Oh,” he says, rolling his eyes, not in the least satisfied. But neither is he very upset with me. He picks up his magic stick and waves it around with a flourish, aims it at me, and trots out of the room, down the hall to rejoin his class.

  I watch him go down the hall, then return to the playroom.

  I note down today’s discoveries: Ben comes in with one reddened ear and scratches on his hands. Not surprisingly, the work of the session has to do with pain. He begins as if no time has passed between the previous session and this one, restoring magic and safety to the playroom with his magic stick. In his playing of the Care Bears game, he sets up much the same process we evolved through making costumes: a pattern of sharing and cooperation. His assortment of bear noises reminds me of his early puppy-dog play, and I name his feelings for him, as I have before. I also match, in my facial expressions and tone of voice, the feelings embodied in his series of growls, whines and squeals, to highlight the feelings themselves, rather than simply comment on them.

  All this comes to a sudden end when Ben hurts himself with the sharp end of the spring. The timing of and context for this action are exquisite. Ben sets up a game within a game with his bear noises, and when he sees that I am able to understand his feelings, he punctures his finger. He acknowledges that it hurts by sucking it, and calls it to my attention, asking me to affirm that it is indeed hurt. Then the game within the game seems no longer important and Ben finishes the Care Bears game with little interest in it. Yet something about the real issue of the session, his pain, is left unfinished. Without really thinking about it, I allowed him to keep the spring. He cannot point out my mistake by saying, “Annie, you forgot to take it away from me. Don’t you know I could hurt myself again? Don’t you know this is pretty important to me right now?” So again he calls it to my attention, pulling it out of his pants pocket, and finally I catch my cue and ask for it. His attempt to bribe me with the gift of a paper airplane is interesting; it is a test, I think, an attempt to see if I am serious about keeping the spring. Though he tries to put it in a box, and frowns when I take it away, and though he is not satisfied with my substitute of the animal cracker, he really does not protest. To allow him to leave with it would have been a betrayal of his trust in me.

  Later that day, when I see Rachael, I tell her that I am tremendously relieved to see that some children really do point out mistakes to their therapists. She wants to hear the details, of course, so I tell her the story of my session with Ben. When she finishes laughing, she comments, “It’s too bad so few therapists notice these opportunities.”

  We leave her office together, and in the elevator she introduces me to a gray-suited man. “This is my young colleague, Annie Rogers,” she says. I go down the slushy marble steps with the sound of her words singing in my ears.

  I sit at a Formica table in a diner a few blocks away, drinking a chocolate malt at five in the evening. This, with a baked potato, is what I call dinner tonight. The woman who serves me knew me in braids. I grew up in this neighborhood. She knows my mother and sister and asks about them. She brings me meatloaf and overcooked mixed vegetables, though I didn’t ask for them and can’t pay for them. I protest and she says, “Compliments of the kitchen.” The manager knows me too. I pick at this food to please them and suck on the straw of my malt, savoring Rachael’s comment and Mary Louise’s enthusiasm about the letter this morning.

  I watch the snow begin to fall under the streetlight outside the window. I push aside the subtle but ominous feeling that my life is not whole, the increasing sense that the pieces simply don’t fit together. I push aside the knowledge that I am leading a double life of sorts: as a promising young woman without a past, or with a past made up to fit a life she wants for herself so badly that anything invented is bound to be a better choice than the actual past. I push aside too the impression that although many people feel close to me, no one has a whole picture of me, and this is bound to catch up with me sooner or later.

  19

  I sit with my own therapist, Melanie, rubbing a fingertip over the soft sofa’s arm, tra
cing the floral pattern against the dark-green background, going over and over the same pattern. We’ve been working together for nearly six years, so Melanie is familiar to me. Tall, with auburn hair and high cheekbones, she reminds me a bit of Katharine Hepburn. But today she seems distant to me and we sit through long silences now, pauses that stretch well beyond comfort.

  We are talking, ironically enough, about a lack of intimacy: my incapacity to be in the room with her, intact, with all my feelings. We are talking as if I have never been able to be intimate in this way—not with her, nor with anyone else in my life. I know this is not true, but don’t know how to convey this without sounding defensive.

  I make an attempt to be honest with her: “I feel we’re not talking about me—as I know myself.” She does not respond. I go on: “When I say something really important to me, it doesn’t seem to matter to you.” As I speak, her face is closed. My words go out into the air and dissolve, as if I’ve said nothing—or worse, they hang in the room as if I’ve said the wrong thing. I keep trying, as if I can find something that will interest Melanie and compel a response. Then I give up, and we sit in silence again. I gaze at the arm of the sofa, stony-faced, tracing my pattern, not beyond such diversions.

  “Whether you work to hold in all your feelings, or explode with them and dump them on me, you aren’t really ever in contact with me,” she says.

  I shift in my chair, accused, and search for a way to go on. Over the past months I’ve learned something new. After she says something like this, if I make up dreams, if I make up events and feelings that fit her impressions of me, then for a few moments something opens up between us, something I think she feels is real, and it moves us forward—into “intimacy.” But whatever I make up must contain enough reality so as not to feel utterly false to me. I am becoming a practiced liar.