I find myself in tears of rage. I pull my knees up to my chest. “I loved Melanie, and I hated her!” The tears dissolve into long, low sobs. Blumenfeld moves his chair a little forward.
“Little Annie knew what was going on all the time, didn’t she?” he asks. Then he is quiet, but I can hear him breathing more deeply, in rhythm with my crying.
After this session, I sit at my desk, drawing two huge toucans and coloring them in. Galle seems magically joined with “little Annie” and with Blumenfeld’s granddaughter. I hum and color the bright toucans and hope that the story I still want to tell Blumenfeld will come into the room with him, clear and bright as my birds.
49
Sarah picks me up early, coffee and donuts in tow—a custom we’ve created in just a short time—and drives her little green Volkswagen bug from the house where I am living to Blumenfeld’s parking lot. The day is bright, new green, flower-filled, and as I leave her, I feel as if I am moving into any ordinary day. It has been months since I’ve felt the morning opening into an ordinary day. It makes me want to fall down on the sidewalk in gratitude.
Blumenfeld and I settle into our chairs. “The story I keep wanting to find some way to tell you is about what happened to me in early February,” I tell him. “But I don’t know where to begin, how to get there, even into the beginning.”
“The beginning is hiding from you?” His question tickles me.
“No, it’s just in more than one place, I think.” I pause, realizing for the first time how little Blumenfeld actually knows about me. “One beginning has to do with a little boy I was seeing as a therapist.”
I wait for him to respond to this, but Blumenfeld just sits there, waiting for me to go on.
“I was his therapist in a clinical internship.” I wait again, and then decide to tackle my doubts head-on.
“I wonder now if that was a mistake, working with such disturbed children. Somehow, I want to say that I was good with them; not just passably good, but really good with them. But I have been diagnosed as so many things, I don’t know what to think about myself.” I lick my dry lips and continue. “According to my records”—I tell this to Blumenfeld with a mixture of pride and anxiety—“I’ve been ‘schizophrenic’ off and on for years. And then they thought maybe ‘manic-depressive.’ Then they decided I suffered from ‘schizo-affective disorder.’ Oh, and when everyone wanted to believe nothing was terribly wrong, when I was younger, they said I had something called ‘adolescent adjustment reaction.’ Now, if anyone wanted to pin me down, they’d probably guess ‘multiple personality.’ ”
I throw out these diagnoses, daring Blumenfeld to take them away from me, or to confirm them. Finally, I look down at my hands. “I probably should not have worked with those children, is that what you are thinking?”
“Is that what you had been given to think?” His question is a real question. It catches me off guard and I almost begin to answer him. Then I wonder if he is going to avoid answering all questions, on principle.
“Yes, but you didn’t answer my question.”
Blumenfeld laughs a huge belly laugh. Then he is somber. “You have a kind of giftedness, Annie, that probably has always been inseparable from your suffering, and we don’t know very much about that. I am sure that you were very, very good with those children.”
In the three years of my clinical training I heard everything but this, the one thing I needed most to know. Hearing it now from a bona fide analyst, albeit an unconventional one, gives me the courage to talk to him about Ben.
“There was one particular child I loved. Ben is his name. He was neglected and abandoned as a baby. I found that to be with Ben, to play with him and be alive in what we were playing, I had to feel, I had to be with, things inside myself that were, they were ... well, they were finally unbearable.”
“Healing is always two-sided, isn’t it?” Blumenfeld asks.
His simple question rings through the recesses of everything I know about relationships. I know, even as I hear this, that his voice will go on asking that question in me—as long as I live.
“In early February, Ben played out killing the mother who left him, and I followed his feelings, which were also my feelings, into his play. He finally knew it was a wish. He welcomed it. And then there was no shame in his play. Something in me opened up, a wish for someone, Melanie I guess, to be with me like that, the way I was with Ben. But I drew back from it, I didn’t know ... That’s one part of the beginning.”
“Are there other beginnings showing themselves to you?” Blumenfeld asks.
“I don’t know how this fits, but I had just come back from Boston. I don’t know what going to Boston had to do with everything that happened when I came back. Whenever I travel, which isn’t very often, I always get lost—I mean actually lost. Maybe it’s my very bad sense of direction that explains it, but it seems like things on the map just don’t stay where they should be. So, whenever I went anywhere in the past, I felt afraid. Anyway, this time that didn’t happen. I don’t know why. I went the second week in January. It was like a homecoming, going into Cambridge—as if I’d lived there all along or something, in this country village on the side streets, in this city bustle in Harvard Square, with the snow piled up high, and students and professors coming and going, breathing white puffs in the cold. I especially liked walking at night, along the side streets, looking into the houses, clapboard, not brick, right on the sidewalk practically. Sometimes there was the smell of a fire, and lights inside, and welcoming porches, and I could imagine living there, as if this place was just waiting for me to find it. No—it was more as if time changed—and I was living in my future. I didn’t get lost either.”
I pause, remembering, a little astonished that I can talk with such ease today, with such clarity. I do not tell him about the music I heard on the bridge over the river when I was not wearing my headphones.
“As if Cambridge and a whole new life were waiting for you,” Blumenfeld muses.
“Yes, it was uncanny, and exciting. And meeting Dr. Carol Gilligan.” I pause again. “Do you know her?”
“Another therapist?” Blumenfeld asks.
I smile at this. “No. But she’s a rather famous psychologist, and she writes like a poet. Anyway, I wanted to pursue an idea with her about my dissertation. Oh, I guess I didn’t ever tell you: I’m a doctoral student.”
“You chose to show me your inner life first,” Blumenfeld says.
“Yes. So, anyway I went to see what I could find out from Dr. Gilligan, Carol, that is. What I didn’t expect was the thread of kinship I felt with her, and she with me, I think. When I left her, she said, “Write, of course write to me. I would like that very much.” That was shocking to me, but it wasn’t too. Just because of this feeling I had, that we would work together someday, you know.”
I pause, not knowing how to go on.
“And then I came back here, and I felt exuberant. I went to see Melanie and told her about my adventures in Cambridge, feeling this exuberance, and then it was like something was wrong with this, and wanting ... I don’t know what.”
“You really don’t know?” Blumenfeld asks.
“Wanting her to be glad for me, or something.” I look down at the knees of my faded blue jeans. “But that day she talked about how disloyal I was being to the woman who was my advisor and who had worked with me for years. I didn’t agree with that, I said. My advisor gave me money to go to Cambridge and meet with Carol, after all. But Melanie insisted that it was all part of how I ‘acted out repeated patterns of competition,’ how I hurt people ‘without claiming any real responsibility.’ And I believed her about that. I was forever doing things that she and others told me about later. I have never been able to explain that to my own satisfaction.”
I look at Blumenfeld’s clock and see that I only have about fifteen minutes left.
“Then Melanie said that she knew one of my fantasies was to have her at my mercy. She said I wanted to try to kill h
er and watch he beg for her life.” I pause, trying to remember, even as I tell this story, if this was ever true, but I really feel it wasn’t.
“I felt a lot of anger, even rage, toward her, but that had not been one of my fantasies. I told her that she was trying to impose her thoughts on me, and sometimes I didn’t know which thoughts were really my own, and that it wasn’t right. She told me I was ‘hiding behind a facade of confusion’ because I did not want to face my ‘oldest demons—rage and hate.’ I believed her. I felt so evil and I just started to cry. I asked her again and again, ‘How could you go on working with me?’ And then she was really gentle. I don’t remember her words at all, but I looked at her and I didn’t see hate, but I don’t know what I did see.”
“Fear? Fear that you might leave her?” Blumenfeld asks.
His question startles me. It raises a possibility that I am not prepared to believe. I shake my head, feeling irritable, like an animal trying to shake off flies.
“No, it was I who was afraid. When I came to see her next, I was guarded and distant, I guess to cover that much fear. The long silences pounded in my ears. I was drowning, and I fought the silences with words, while revealing very little of myself. My ears started to roar in the silence. I had experienced this before, and it was not uncommon.” I pause, and Blumenfeld nods.
“But this day, in the midst of the roaring I heard a voice say, quite distinctly, ‘You have to kill her.’ I felt evil and ugly and I wanted to leave then. I told Melanie about the fantasy, forcing myself to expose myself, but I did not tell her about the voice. I didn’t want to be accused of disguising my own fantasy as a voice, of not claiming ‘responsibility’ for it, so I said nothing. I remember her words clearly. ‘You need me to help you contain this rage. You need to trust that I wouldn’t let you hurt me.’ I wanted to believe that very badly. But I needed to know more. I said that I wanted to ask her a question, but I didn’t want an answer. ‘What would happen if I really tried to kill you?’ I asked. And she gave me no answer, as I had requested.
“Did you understand that silence as a letter of invitation?” Blumenfeld asks.
I feel suddenly sick, as if I have been hit very hard in the stomach. “No. Absolutely not. No, she didn’t invite anything. No, she wouldn’t have done that. No.”
Blumenfeld is quiet. Then in almost a whisper, he says, “No, because she loved you?”
These words hit me somewhere deeper than irony could go. I cannot breathe.
Breathless, I sit in the fourth-grade classroom, where time is timeless for Galle and Erin learns fluent French. Erin watches the dust motes light up the air, change color, flicker and stream before the blackboard until the blackboard itself disappears.
I cannot catch my breath, sitting in my little desk, newly arrived from nowhere. I don’t know the French lesson we are having, but I do know the language is French. The children themselves are strangers to me-not even one or two look vaguely familiar. I don’t know their names, nor the name of my teacher. I cannot catch my breath. Sometimes, in this timeless present, a few words drop down onto my tongue, like a tart lemon drop, mon merle—and I know the taste of that sound, different from other sounds—in nomine Patre. Asked to answer a question, I sit in silence, or reply quietly, “I don’t know, ” a response so expected that I am now seldom required to answer.
I look up wildly. Blumenfeld’s eyes reflect my pain and confusion, and seeing this, I begin to breathe again.
“What happened then, Annie? Where did you go?” he asks. I pause, bringing myself back from the fourth-grade classroom to his office, knowing that time, even here, does not pass by unnoticed. I go back to the story I am trying to tell to him:
“The next day I found that I could barely sit still. Overnight, there was a whole chorus of voices telling me that I must kill Melanie and myself. My skin tingled as if I had been numbed and the feeling was coming back, an extremely painful sensation. My blood was on fire. I was also curiously detached from my body. I paced and paced, rubbing my arms to get rid of the burning. But the burning would not go away. Finally I called Melanie, and she returned my phone call within minutes. I don’t remember what I said to her, I don’t remember the conversation, just that at the end of it she arranged time in her schedule to see me at three that day. I wanted to tell her about the voices and about my fantasies, to save us, but I did not.”
“Your voices and her fantasies” is Blumenfeld’s editorial comment.
“No,” I say, but I find tears on my face suddenly. “Yes.” Sudden blinding clarity. “They became the same thing.” I look over at Blumenfeld’s desk and see that our time has gone ten minutes over.
Seeing me check the time, Blumenfeld looks too and says, “My next appointment is going to interrupt your story pretty soon.”
I feel the strong press to continue telling him this story, the story I need to tell more than anything else in the world, but I also know that my story is being changed even as I tell it, and that I won’t be able to keep track of the changes if I go any further, any faster.
“That’s probably just as well,” I tell him.
“Would you like to wait and see me in another hour?” he asks, perhaps picking up my ambivalence.
“No, my friend Sarah will be waiting for me. I can’t drive yet, and it might mess up her whole day.”
I leave him, going out into the waiting room to find a young girl there, about twelve, and out into the sunlight where Sarah is waiting for me in her little green bug.
50
Back in the house, on this ordinary day, time pleats up as I walk into the kitchen.
Emily wanders from room to room, followed by the comforting aroma of soup cooking. A tightness gathers within her. In the past she tried to break the tightness by speaking, saying anything at all-but not today. A story had been interrupted in the telling, and she resented it. “No,” she thought, “better to wander silent, a ghost-girl among the people inside.” She knew that her silence could make everyone uncomfortable, and she hoped Blumenfeld would feel uncomfortable too. But, most of all, she feared her unspoken thoughts. She would now draw them back, make herself a stranger to him. She would stop the process of thinking itself—thinking was too perilous. She might bump into some real meanness within her, some violence waiting to pounce out at her. She might form some awkward words of false accusation and inadvertently hurt Melanie, and thereby hurt herself. But it seemed that she would break herself within herself, wandering around the house without words, planning to withdraw all of her thoughts. And the tightness in her grew. It gathered things to itself, like lint in a dryer-it spelled treachery, knew danger, stood condemned already. The tightness sometimes dared to speak itself, saying, “Tell him everything and it will all begin to make sense,” or, “Save yourself. Don’t talk! Disappear! Go up in smoke.” The leaves themselves spoke to her, rearranging themselves in new patterns, new sentences, and Emily loved the speech of leaves. She’d follow this. Coming out onto the front porch, she wondered-Where was she? Oh, yes, here, in this house and not with her own family, here in her gangly tall body, with her straight brown hair and bangs, thirteen years old and older than anyone she knew. What was going to happen to her? She called herself “muffled and dumb,” then decided that the phrase “pensive and a bit depressed” suited her better. But nothing was seriously amiss-she certainly wasn’t ready to throw herself over any bridge into the river; she didn’t want to wander out to sea. And then suddenly she wasn’t there at all.
Sitting on the front porch, I eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an apple, thinking about Blumenfeld, puzzling over him, turning him over like a precious and rare rock plucked from the riverbed of my childhood when I was an avid rock collector. When I described to him how Ben, without shame, played out his wish to kill the mother who had abandoned him, and my own wish to experience this with Melanie, he said, “Healing is always two-sided, isn’t it?” How does he know this? Has he ever been “crazy”? How does he know all the things he know
s? What suffering has given birth to this kind of knowledge? Am I imagining it all, making it up, creating words he never actually said? Maybe he is a jerk who just sits there, and I make up all the rest, everything. But no, that doesn’t seem possible. His “lines” are too unexpected, too good, too far beyond what I could imagine him saying. And, if he is really real, then inside the circle of his trust I can begin to believe that I can travel anywhere—into any question, any feeling, even into the story of my own violence—and come back, somehow whole and intact. I do not want to give up this new hope. In fact, I want to rush into its waiting arms, before I lose every hope of speaking to him.
51
The following morning I see Blumenfeld again, bringing in the last bites of my donut from Sarah, swallowing it down in the first few minutes with him. If I am imagining him, he certainly is an unusual and compelling character! And he looks so ordinary, so conventional. Just by my being in his presence again, the story I was waiting to continue flows from me in a torrent.
“The voices I heard that day, the day I called Melanie and she agreed to see me, were unrelenting,” I begin, swallowing the last of my sugary donut.
I look at Blumenfeld. “Even if you are just a figment of my imagination, I have to finish this story today. I have to know what it is about. I don’t want to leave and have it interrupted. I couldn’t bear that. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I kept interrupting you before, so that I could slow you down, Annie. I wanted to understand everything, but I was really slowing you down a little too much, wasn’t I?” Blumenfeld says, and he sits back and settles himself in.
A Shining Affliction Page 12
