I do not tell Blumenfeld about Galle, not then, not ever. Though I do not name her, I must have brought her to him in some way—because with no formal introduction he recognizes her sometime during those first days and begins to call her “little Annie.”
He interrupts the silence between us rarely, but when he does, he invariably asks, “What is little Annie wondering about?” Or, “What is little Annie feeling?” Unsure of whom he is addressing, I do not answer.
When I get home, I make whatever little notes I can about my sessions with Blumenfeld, just as I did with Ben and the other children. I need my own words, as one needs to breathe. Sometimes these are just a few words. Still, they are a trace of my inner life and capture a sense of our sessions. In moments of clarity, I fill in what details I can remember.
During those days of silence, I want to tell Blumenfeld an incomprehensible story, the story of my relationship with my therapist. Often, I feel myself just at the edge of a torrent of words, almost at the bursting point, but I draw back, wondering how I can possibly make myself coherent or credible enough to tell the story I want to tell. I notice what I have not noticed in the preceding weeks and months. I can get lost at times. Whenever I draw, things are not in the proper perspective, or quite in the right places. Whenever I read, there are some sentences I cannot grasp, no matter how hard I try. Yet at other times I seem fully able to draw in perspective, to speak about complex ideas, to read my own and others’ words with relative ease. But I do not know how to predict when I will move abruptly in or out of a shared world of “reality,” the kind of shared reality that makes telling a story possible.
47
Then suddenly, after a week-long silence, the story I want to tell Blumenfeld presses harder against my ears and comes into my own hearing, and I begin to talk as if I have been talking to him all along.
“In the beginning, when I first met her, Melanie was a student,” I tell him, thinking that I should begin at the beginning of that complicated relationship.
“Melanie was your therapist?” Blumenfeld asks.
“Yes, Melanie Sherman.” I pause, confused about whether or not he knows her too. “Do you know her?”
“No, I don’t know her.”
“When I first came to see her, I sat in a wooden chair. She was a student and I sat in a wooden chair in her little office high up in a tower. I wore white shorts, a plaid shirt, and a baseball cap that hid my eyes.”
“Oh, do you like baseball?” is his next startling question. I don’t know yet that I am in the presence of a baseball wizard, a man who coaches a Little League team in his spare time.
“Yes, I do like baseball. But I wore the cap to protect my eyes, so that I didn’t have to look or be looked at. I relied on my peripheral vision to guide my impressions of her. I can follow feelings more accurately that way. I can find out more. Do you know what I mean?”
“It’s a way of looking that’s less susceptible to deceits?” Blumenfeld asks.
“Yes.” I am happy for a moment not to have to explain things, to have to go on and on in some vague hope of being understood.
“Melanie was a student, but she was older, she was, I think, forty-nine.”
“And you?”
“Age has always confused me because I am older than I appear, and I am younger and older than my chronological age,” I reply.
Blumenfeld laughs. “When you first came into the office, I thought, ‘Oh, she is very young, maybe eighteen,’ and then when you started to talk, I thought, ‘Oh, she could be forty!’ and as I started listening to you, I suddenly knew you could be much older and much younger than I first imagined.”
“Yes, I was kind of ageless when I came to see Melanie too.”
“Don’t you mean full of ages?” Blumenfeld asks, laughing.
“Yes, ageful. Like that. But Melanie was older—to me. She was so magical to me. She listened to every word, as you do now. She was such a presence. She wanted so much to learn from me-not just about me, from me.”
“So she was really a student. In the very best sense. And then something changed, she stopped wanting to learn from you?” Blumenfeld asks.
“Yes, but how do you know that already?” I ask, not sure what I may have told him.
“Because of the gun and the knife,” Blumenfeld says.
“Oh, that.” I pause, not wanting to tell that part of the story just yet.
“I loved her so much. I think she loved me. I’m not sure now. Not knowing makes me wonder about everything. Sometimes, when it gets really bad, I wonder if I am imagining you, making you up as I go. I’m still in the hospital and I’m making you up.”
My hospital memories are like a dream. I realize now that Dr. Connelly could not have been an adolescent boy and a patient with me. I must have invented him. I am also thinking of Galle and the others I have been told I “made up,” and they are as real as Blumenfeld.
“Of course you are making me up as you go, Annie,” Blumenfeld says, as if this was some proof of my sanity. He pauses and adds, “I’m making you up as I go too.” He pauses again. “But when you are confused about love, everything, everyone, gets caught up in that confusion, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. Everyone. In the beginning I was so sure of Melanie’s love.” I pause, wondering if this is true. “I also tried to warn her not to work with me, as if I knew, maybe I knew already, that she would leave me. But I didn’t really know that; we called that particular fear ‘transference.’ ”
“Big words confuse little Annie, don’t they?” Blumenfeld asks. I nod, wondering what he is driving at. “Let me say it to you another way,” he continues. “Partial truths can be devastating, Annie, and I think you stumbled onto a partial truth and called it transference. And then you could ignore the possibility that you’d discovered some real vulnerability in Melanie.”
I am stunned by this response. Little lights flicker off and on in the room. I rush from clarity into confusion.
“Little lights going off and on, faster than fireflies,” I comment, half wishing that they would take me to another place, anything and anywhere but here, where truths I can’t bear might. suddenly overtake me.
Blumenfeld waits for me. Somewhere, outside, a siren goes off, it grows loud and then dim as it moves away into silence.
I glance at Blumenfeld, who is looking off into space.
“What are you thinking?” I ask him.
“I am thinking about the last time I went to a clinical conference. I remember hearing all those big words and thinking that no one was making any sense. I had nothing to say to them. I was thinking about what it was like to look out at a roomful of people at a cocktail hour and not have a thing to say, just looking and listening for someone who might speak my language.”
“Did you find someone?” I ask.
“No. I was looking in the wrong place. After that I decided to stop going to clinical conferences,” he says, laughing.
I find myself nearer to tears. “I’m afraid to hope. I have a word for it in my language, leinoch. Fear-hope. I’m afraid to hope that I am not in a clinical conference with you,” and as I finish this last sentence, the tears spill over.
“If you are, Annie, then I’ve just looked out and I’ve just this very moment found the one person with whom I can speak,” Blumenfeld says softly.
I did not expect this from him. I do not know how to continue for a few moments.
“I am so afraid, because when I first met Melanie, I felt that way about her. She saw my hunger for a mother, my longing and need for a real relationship, and she saw my confusion about love. The first time she touched me—” and here I stop, overwhelmed by the hunger that overtakes me.
“You knew she didn’t have any of those ridiculous rules about never touching a patient?” Blumenfeld asks.
I nod, knowing all at once that he, Blumenfeld, doesn’t either.
“Yes, I knew that. She brushed a little ant off my collar, and I wanted to run from the room in my hope.�
��
“You were hopeful that she could speak to you like a mother, knowing how to touch you, and when and how not to touch you?”
“Yes. The briefest touch was full of hope. But it felt dangerous, too, to wish for anything by then. Even in the beginning, when she—” and again I stop.
I feel Blumenfeld waiting.
“When she touched me, I knew that she was going to bring herself to me as a mother first, and then as someone learning to be a therapist. Even in the beginning, touch was so full of danger. And I don’t know why.”
“You really have no idea, Annie?”
“After she touched me that first time, leaving at the end of each session was impossibly hard, because I kept wondering if she would be the same person when I came back.”
“Oh, that does help us, doesn’t it?” Blumenfeld asks.
“It does?” I ask.
“It helps me, Annie. She was a student. She was learning how to be a therapist. What would she learn that might stop her from speaking to you like a mother and kill your hope in her? If that happened, then she wouldn’t be the same person, would she?”
“No, she wouldn’t. That is exactly what I was feeling. I didn’t know it. Even now, I don’t know what to believe. What was real. Will I ever know what was real with Melanie? Will I ever trust myself again?” I pelt him with my questions, and look at him and hold the gaze for the first time, as if searching for something. “I wonder if I will ever be able to trust you.”
Then I glance at his desk and see that our time is up. I get up to leave rather suddenly, but turn back at the door. Blumenfeld smiles and tilts his head to one side. “Annie, there are probably reasons not to trust me entirely, and we will find them out as we go, right? Once you find them, then you’ll know exactly how much to trust me.”
Imagine what it was like for me, coming out of the hospital, unsure of my footing in the world of “reality,” to begin to speak to this man, this analyst who had stopped going to clinical conferences because he could not speak to anyone there. In his presence I found words, or rather, words found me. Words that I hoped would unlock an incomprehensible story pressed against my ears and came out into the room. As Blumenfeld spoke to me, my own words made more and more sense. And so, the story I wanted to tell him pressed harder against the limits of what I could know and say.
48
When I come back to see Blumenfeld two days later, I take up my story, as if uninterrupted. I sit down in my black leather chair and look at him and just go on.
“Even in the beginning, I guess I didn’t quite trust Melanie. I was terribly anxious. I was always wondering if she would be the same person the next time I returned.”
“Sometimes she was not,” Blumenfeld comments.
“Sometimes she sort of drew back, into some other relationship with me. I didn’t know what was happening. In my fear that she would leave me, I didn’t want her to know, I suppose I didn’t want to know myself, how much she mattered to me.” I look down at Blumenfeld’s shoes and past him, at the lamp, trying to find words for what I mean.
“When you doubted her and didn’t want to know how much she mattered, then what?” Blumenfeld asks.
“I would do something to see if the relationship would hold.”
Blumenfeld laughs. “What would you do, Annie?” he asks.
“Sometimes small things, like coming in wet from swimming and dripping on the floor. Once, I hid under her desk and didn’t come out when she called me. That confused her and made her angry. Once I even tried to break one of her windows, when I was really mad at her.”
“And did your relationship hold?” Blumenfeld asks.
“I think it did. In the early months, yes it did. She would get upset or get mad, or whatever, and then she’d yell, and later she’d hug me or hold me. I thought that meant that ... I don’t know.”
“You thought it meant that she loved you, Annie?” Blumenfeld asks.
I sit shaking my head in disbelief.
“I don’t know. I don’t know how to tell you,” I whisper. Blumenfeld waits, and the story gathers force again within me, and I begin it again:
“On a hot night in August of that first year, one week before Melanie was to go away for two weeks, I sat in my apartment and shivered with a cold that came from within. Do you know the kind of cold I mean?”
Blumenfeld nods.
“My body grew numb piece by piece. Everything I looked at had an eerie sheen of brightness. My ears were filled with a distant roaring, like a train coming from very far away. Whenever I moved, the floor shifted. I got dizzy, and, as the world tilted, I felt more and more unreal. I curled up inside myself. Melanie came to me. I don’t know the details of how she found me, only the memory of being pulled away from a small space by a wall and of being held, of gentle words, of rocking, and the smell of a soft shirt. Gradually, I came to life, and as I did, I remember trying to say things, name things ... that happened to me when I was a little girl. That night Melanie put me to bed and sat beside me until I was nearly asleep. It is a night etched into my memory. If this was not love, I will never know what love is.”
The tears course down my face. My hands are numb in my lap. I pause in my story.
Blumenfeld leans forward, into the story. “You do know what love is, Annie,” he says.
“I don’t know how to tell you what happened after that,” I say. “I don’t know what went so wrong that everything could end this way.”
“This way?” Blumenfeld asks.
“This way, the gun and the knife. Not ever seeing her again. Without any hope of knowing what happened,” I tell him.
“Does this ending remind you of anything from the beginning?” Blumenfeld asks.
This is not the question I expected. My mind jumps to the time after Melanie came back from her first vacation—running down a hill in the early autumn, the leaves turning, the light on the leaves and on my skin, the feeling of coming to life, falling deeply in love, with Melanie, with myself, and then the terror of losing all this—of losing life itself.
I look up at Blumenfeld. He says, “What did little Annie know from the beginning?”
“She tried to break Melanie’s window and got into a lot of trouble about it. Melanie threatened to stop seeing me.”
“Little Annie was mad about that, I bet,” Blumenfeld comments. “What did she want from Melanie?”
“Honesty. That’s what she wanted. She wanted to be able to be, and to be met in her truths. She was mad at Melanie because Melanie invited us to go to her house, to have dinner and meet her daughter and everything. Melanie was thinking about having us, I mean me, live with her for a while. But she didn’t like having me there in her house, she wasn’t comfortable, and later, in the very next session, she said that I’d ‘seduced’ her into letting me come. That made little Annie really mad, because she was lying; it was Melanie’s idea. Little Annie tried to break the window. I guess I got confused and started to agree with Melanie and—” I stop. “Oh this sounds so crazy.”
“No, you are making fine sense to me,” Blumenfeld says. “Did little Annie actually break the window?”
“No, Melanie stopped her. She stopped her and slapped her across the face and said, ‘You wanted to get a rise out of me, and you did,’ or something like that. And later, Melanie said she was sorry about slapping me, and that I couldn’t come to see her, I couldn’t come to her office if I ever did that again.”
“Little Annie was trying to break out of an impossible trap, wasn’t she?” Blumenfeld asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Little Annie wanted a mother all her life, and it looked as if she could have one, and then she was told in effect that she couldn’t. What’s worse, what she wanted was suddenly all wrong, and she was responsible for it because she somehow ‘seduced’ ”—Blumenfeld’s tone is absolutely derisive—“her therapist into giving her the wrong thing.” He pauses, as if to let this sink in. “And then you believed Melanie’s explana
tion; you didn’t trust little Annie’s truths, or her anger, am I right?”
“Yes, you are right. I didn’t. After Melanie threatened to stop seeing me, I just wanted to shut her up, so that I could stay.”
“Little Annie must have wanted to break a lot of windows after that,” Blumenfeld comments wryly.
“She did, but I wouldn’t let that happen. Which, I suppose, wasn’t the right thing to do, but it seemed like the only thing to do. You can’t just go around crashing windows.”
I find myself suddenly defensive, as if I am in an argument with him. “I mean, you wouldn’t want little Annie breaking your window, would you?”
“Have at!” Blumenfeld says, laughing, and then seeing my fear, he adds, “How will she ever know that she’s welcome here, now that she knows how unwelcome she is for wanting to break a window?”
“What do you mean by that?” I ask.
Blumenfeld begins to laugh again, and then stops himself. I sit, rather embarrassed and peeved, looking away from him.
“I’m sorry, Annie. I am enjoying little Annie right now. I’m not laughing at you. Let me try to tell you another way. I have a little granddaughter, and little Annie reminds me of her. The other day my granddaughter wanted to climb up the ladder to the slide alone but she’s just too small to manage it by herself, so we had quite a tussle about it. She was right to be so mad at me because of course she wanted to do it alone, but I was also right not to let her go up alone, something she could not possibly grasp. What if I then turned on her and said, ‘If you are going to throw a temper tantrum about this matter, then I won’t see you again’? She and little Annie would find that outrageous and absurd.”
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