A Shining Affliction

by Annie G. Rogers

  “I know I am not all here, not really in contact with you. I don’t know how to live with this emptiness any longer,” I offer.

  “To be in the same room with me, that is what is so hard,” she says gently. “You are afraid I won’t value your feelings.”

  I nod, confused—because this last part is true.

  “You use my feelings to make yours all right, don’t you?”

  I nod, wondering if maybe this is accurate, if she is on to me.

  “You don’t want to need me. And now you are afraid because you do need me and your feelings may not matter to me.”

  My finger is still. I fight back my tears, successfully. In the past she might have moved toward me, even touched me, to comfort me. Over the past several months she has taken a new tack—no touching and lots of silence for me to struggle around in. So I don’t expect a response most of the time. Two lines fly through my mind, as if they are spoken to me, but not aloud:

  Then, if you speak, you must not show your face,

  Or, if you show your face, you must not speak.

  These words are Shakespeare’s. I make my own translation quickly: “Speak the truth and hide your feelings in response to her nonresponse; or make up what you think she wants to hear, but shut up about what you really feel.”

  “Where did you go?” Melanie asks after a long silence.

  “I was remembering that feeling with my mother, needing her and not wanting to need her,” I say, thinking that this will be what she wants me to say, but that it also contains a kind of truth.

  For the first time, she leans toward me. “Yes, what do you remember, Annie?”

  I describe standing with my head against my mother’s leg, not wanting her to go someplace. I fill in the details—how empty it makes me feel, her going away, how sad I am, how much I don’t want her to leave me. Is it a real memory? I don’t know ... It interests Melanie, I can see that, and this fills me with relief.

  But I am afraid of my capacity to make things up, of my own treachery. And keeping up with my own deceptions is not easy.

  I appear to have a life with Ben and the children that is more or less continuous with the one I have with Rachael and Helen and Mary Louise. I have another life with my friends who are learning a clinical language and a rule-bound practice that I resist with everything in me. And I have this life, here with Melanie. I have another life of painting and writing, apart from all the others. And there is also the life of my past, the most disconnected one of all. I don’t want to make the connections between them.

  I gather .my coat and briefcase to leave. It doesn’t even cross my mind to tell Melanie that the past is becoming increasingly discontinuous, as if someone keeps showing me slides in a carousel that contains frames I recognize, as well as blanks and frames I don’t recognize. I have no clear idea of myself in relation to most of these slides. Yet the images fill me with anxiety—or, rather, more accurately, these images, disconnected from me and my life, emanate anxiety from within themselves.

  Outside, in the early evening, the wind picks up, rattling ice in the tree at the edge of the parking lot. I rush to my car. This office building is too near school; I am suddenly afraid of being seen. Some locations have become hazardous. I may be seen here—in the wrong light.

  20

  At Glenwood, with the children, my watchfulness and my fears drop away. I am alive and whole with them. I wave my mittened hand to several of the older girls as I come in the door in the early afternoon, pushing against the wind to get it closed.

  I see Ben sitting in the hallway outside his classroom. This will be our final session before Christmas vacation. As I drop off a testing report in the main office, Mary Louise fills me in: Ben spent the morning wrapping presents, he participated in the school Christmas program and spoke to Santa, and then he picked a fight during lunch. As we talk, Ben sits outside on the hall bench, having a short “time out” from his class to regain control. He shouts obscenities and half heartedly kicks out at any child or adult who goes by, but the after-lunch crowd is thinning out, and he is calming down despite himself. The tears are already dried on his cheeks, I see, leaving little smudges and smears. As I sit down beside him, he stands up and pulls his pants leg up over his knee to show me a Band-Aid.

  “Look where I hurt my knee. And that big boy, Rudy, he kicked me right there.”

  “You must be awfully mad,” I say.

  He pulls his pants leg down. “I’m littler and he oughta not kick me!” I wonder what led up to the kicking, but do not pursue it. It is a big step for Ben to acknowledge that he is smaller and someone can hurt him. I offer my hand and take him down to the playroom. In the playroom, he turns toward me.

  “Make me a Santa Claus hat and a beard,” he says.

  I have brought a cupcake and some stickers as a Christmas treat, and Ben now catches sight of them. “For me?” he says, his eyebrows arched high. I nod and he dives into the cupcake, eating the icing first. He comes up with his nose and chin covered with red icing and crumbs. I have to laugh, which makes him laugh. He licks most of the icing off, wipes some on his shirt, and finishes the job with the wet paper towel I hand him. The cupcake finished, he comes back to his first objective. “A hat? A beard?” he asks, already reaching for the red paper. He tears off a sheet and I help him roll it into a cone and tape it together. He puts it on his head and, reaching to feel it, raises his hands above his head.

  “It don’t droop like Santa’s,” he says, obviously disappointed.

  “No, it really doesn’t, but it’s beautiful and we can pretend,” I tell him.

  “You got any cotton? Santa has a big white beard.”

  “No, I don’t have cotton here today. But we could go to the nurse and see if she has some,” I suggest.

  Ben’s eyes light up. “No. I know what. Cut up this white paper into strips. Hurry up, Annie, help me!”

  We cut the paper together and Ben tapes the strips together, then tapes the entire thing to his chin. He snatches up the hat and pulls it down over his ears. He looks exactly like a small gnome with an oversized red hat on.

  “Now this is what we do. You lay down over there and go to sleep,” he directs me.

  “Oh. Then what will happen?”

  “You’ll see, little boy!” he says, giving me my part.

  I close my eyes and hear him running around the room, shouting, “On Dasher, giddyup! Whoa, Rudolph!” I stifle a snicker. Then a quiet little voice near me is saying:

  “Open your eyes, little boy.”

  Ben has arranged a box of crayons, the can of glitter, and a cowboy hat near my feet.

  I yawn and stretch, then notice them. “For me? For me?” I ask, just as Ben might say.

  I revel in my gifts, but Ben is distracted and withdrawn suddenly. Picking up toy after toy, he asks, “Can I have this?” without looking at me.

  “No, all the toys in this room stay here.” I don’t know why I am saying that, I realize. I don’t know what Ben is really asking me. He picks up toys haphazardly and seems not to hear me.

  Lifting a baby doll, he asks, “How ‘bout this?”

  I reach out and turn him toward me, lift his chin so he sees me.

  “You want something from me. What is it, bear?” I ask him.

  “Make me something. Make me an airplane. Write Happy Christmas Ben on it. Make me a jet. No, a sled! Put I Love You on it.”

  He turns away and begins to look at the toys again. He walks over to the toy shelves and picks up the big furry yellow puppet.

  “I could take Tea Bags home with me,” he suggests.

  I consider this, then think of the other children who play with Tea Bags, and of how much I use that puppet in my work.

  “Something from this room. Something to remind you that you’re coming back?” I ask.

  He nods, placing Tea Bags back on the shelf.

  I reach up and take down my calendar. I hold him close and show him the pictures of all the months he has been with
me. Fortunately, this calendar includes the first two weeks of January of the next year. I circle the day he will come back to see me. His body relaxes.

  “Now make me a airplane, Annie,” he says with real enthusiasm. “Write Happy Christmas Ben, I Love You,” he says as I fold the paper. I write exactly what he wishes. Ben stands and looks at me, his dark eyes so clear I feel my heart bound. How quickly I have come to love him.

  He leaves me and goes slowly down the hall, back to his class.

  It is the last time I will see Rachael before Christmas too. I have barely settled myself in the tiny waiting room when she is at the door, inviting me in, ahead of her own schedule.

  I follow her into her office, red-cheeked and glad to see her, awake from the cold. Today she makes us tea. She pours water into an electric kettle and asks me if I will kindly crawl behind her desk to plug it in. I find the socket and crawl out again. She opens the bottom drawer and pulls out cookies instead of the hard candy. Placing them on a little paper plate edged with holly, she offers them to me. I feel as if I’m with my grandmother.

  She asks me about the children, and I begin to read my notes, as usual. When I finish reading a summary of my session with Ben, she interrupts, “How long has it been, Annie?”

  “You mean how long have I been working with him?” She nods. I worry about her memory when she asks questions like these. “A little less than five months,” I remind her.

  “You have clearly become an expected part of his life,” she says. “If Ben doesn’t understand time clearly, then he won’t understand this break, much less that you will return to him. Yet you managed to get him to understand both these things,” she says, smiling.

  I tell her how much I felt myself fumbling to understand what was at stake for him in this session. His Santa play brought up the wish for a tangible gift from me. He had eaten the cupcake I gave him, so that was gone, and he had ignored the stickers. I suspect, I tell Rachael, they did not meet his need for continuity—because they were novel, not part of our relationship. She nods. Any of the toys he randomly picked up and asked for were part of our playing together, I explain.

  “Would it have been a mistake to give him a toy?” I ask.

  “Sometimes that’s a mistake, sometimes it isn’t,” Rachael says. “What do you think?”

  I tell her that in that moment I had no understanding of his need, nor of my need to say no to him. It would have been more consistent to continue saying no, but hopelessly obtuse from his point of view. And I didn’t want him to take Tea Bags home. That large puppet, made for me personally, had become a cotherapist of sorts, with Ben and with other children as well.

  “I don’t know if it would have been a mistake. Maybe, if I didn’t know what he was trying to ask me, maybe it would have been,” I say.

  Rachael nods. “Because that would be avoiding his anxiety,” she continues. “What made you think of the calendar?”

  “Nothing in particular, it was just an inspiration. When I looked up at it, I thought I could let Ben know I was coming back.”

  Rachael elaborates on what is still inarticulate within me. Ben, especially with his history of abandonment, needs a tangible way to understand time, and the calendar serves both as a concrete way to make time clear and as a bridge of continuity. It has the pictures of the seasons and the months Ben has known me as visible proof of our relationship. It also has a clear starting date. Ben has no real idea of when that will be, but there it is, circled clearly.

  Rachael pauses. “You know, you have good instincts, you are good at this,” she says quietly.

  I know? I don’t know. For a moment, I want to cry. I want to cry and fall apart completely with her and then really try to fit all the pieces of my life together again. The very thought frightens me. But Rachael is not my grandmother, and she’s not my therapist either.

  “This is the child who doesn’t get attached?” I ask aloud.

  “Well, he is certainly attached to you!” Rachael says. “And all sorts of new experiences can happen within him now.”

  I take the promise of her prediction into my three-week break.

  21

  After Mass at midnight, my sister Mary and I drive through the darkened city streets to see the lights. I complain that I am sleepy, but she insists on this ritual, waking me with her wonder and joy. We sing the songs of our childhood and drive slowly up and down the streets. When I finally crawl into bed and close my eyes, the Christmas lights continue to wink and move past me in the dark. I think of Ben lying in his bed. I hope, if he is awake, that he is listening for the sound of reindeer on the roof.

  A few days after Christmas, I leave for Boston to attend a research workshop at Harvard, in preparation for my dissertation work. I have spent the last several weeks arranging to go, and now can hardly believe I am going.

  In the evening, after my first day in Cambridge, I sit at a desk in the Cronkhite Graduate Center, in a rather musty, hot little room, writing a poem to Ben. I am aware strangely of having lost time throughout the day, so that I can only account for part of the workshop. The poem to Ben comes to me now whole and formed, as if it were written by someone else:

  What you fear most has already happened.

  Come out of your nightmare world, Ben,

  for the trees have a thousand leaves

  flashing golden and green.

  Smell hope on the wind, little boy,

  dig out of the black earth

  with your small, strong hands

  rocks and twigs and magical acorns.

  Play for me your forgotten drama -

  and look, Ben, outside the glass:

  five blooming irises stand tall,

  one for each year of your life.

  “What you fear most has already happened,” I read aloud, thinking of the mystery of this—how the present moves into the future to repeat the past. I open my window a crack and cold air blows in. Outside, high snowbanks light up the darkness. It is now after 10:00 P.M., but the streets are still filled with people. I put on my coat and boots and go out among them. I can’t take my eyes off the women, women of all ages stomping along in long coats, making little white puffs of clouds in the muffled air. Each one seems so alive, riveting in her aliveness. I go along the snowy sidewalks, cleared here and there, treacherous with ice-coated uneven bricks. Clapboard houses perch on the edges of the streets, their porches and windows lit up. I am drawn into their interiors, and I slip into the notion that I actually live here. I live here and I’m walking down to the French bakery to get coffee and a croissant this evening. Time pleats up and suddenly everything looks familiar. I have walked into another life that is my life, as simply as turning a corner. It’s an odd feeling I can’t shake off.

  I go into Harvard Square and think about Carol Gilligan, the writer and researcher I have come here to meet. Her brown eyes light up as she speaks; she tilts her head and looks at me, taking me into some recess within herself, each time I speak.

  I go along the sidewalk and down to the river, wearing my headphones and listening to Pachelbel’s Canon and Mozart’s Requiem. I take them off to listen to the soft shirr of snow as I walk over the bridge above the river and look down to the boathouses, and across the bridge to the Harvard houses, little squares of yellow light against the snow and dark sky. As I walk back, I look into the dark water. I hear faraway music, a sound of voices singing, close in my ears, in stereo. Disconcerted, I look down and see that I am not wearing my headphones.

  22

  In the second week in January I see Ben again. I thought of him often while I was away, wondering if he would be able to remember that I was actually coming back to him.

  As he walks into the playroom, he wants to transform himself immediately.

  “Can I be a horse? A clown? No, let’s do something different today!”

  “Something new on the first day back, hmm?” I ask.

  Ben comes and stands by my desk, but he faces away from me. He begins to roll a sma
ll train car back and forth, looking all around the room. Back and forth, back and forth goes the train, faster and faster. Then Ben releases it and it veers through the air, crashing on the floor over by the door. He moves away to the toy shelves and pulls several toys down, assorted puppets and games, and they fall to the floor. He does not examine them further. This reminds me of his distracted play in our very first session. Then he pulls down the ringtoss game and plops himself at my feet. He yanks off the top and throws it aside, his motions tense, clumsy.

  “Are you angry with me, Ben?” I wonder aloud.

  He sets up the game, ignoring my question. I wait.

  “I get the first turn. Move outta the way!” he shouts. Then he looks at me for the first time. “Please,” he adds, as if to placate me. I move my chair back slightly.

  He stands a few feet from his mark and throws a red ring, misses, and moves closer. He throws more rings and misses. Then he stands right by the peg and hooks the next ring by holding it directly over the peg and carefully releasing it. He gathers up the rings.

  “Now you go,” he says, handing them to me.

  “You want me to play, too?” I ask, wondering where he is leading us. I repeat his positions and toss the rings easily on the peg.

  Ben scowls and stamps his foot. “You cheat! That’s not fair to stand right there!” he shouts.

  “I am playing by your rules and you don’t like it,” I say slowly.

  He glares at me.

  “It wasn’t fair that I came back from vacation a week later than you did,” I say softly. “Did you think I wasn’t coming back?”

  He kneels on the rug and rolls the train back and forth, back and forth, faster and faster, and releases it. It misses my foot by inches. He looks up and smiles.