A Shining Affliction

by Annie G. Rogers

  63

  Returning to Ben, however, awakens an intense and overwhelming wish to see Melanie.

  This wish, an unbearable wanting, surfaces and follows me everywhere, including into Blumenfeld’s office.

  I sit in my chair and pull myself inside myself, closing my eyes. I try to imagine Blumenfeld as a woman, as Melanie herself. I imagine his next words will be hers, and wait for the sound of her voice. But Blumenfeld is strangely quiet this morning.

  I open my eyes and tell him, “I miss Melanie. I was sitting here trying to make you into her. It didn’t work very well.”

  “I guess I’m not growing my breasts yet,” he replies, flattening his maroon-and-gray-striped tie over his chest.

  Suddenly, he irritates me. I say, “No. I don’t want you with breasts. What I want is to see her.”

  “I want you to see her too, Annie,” Blumenfeld replies. “But I want you not to be blind when you do see her.”

  “What do you mean? Do you think she would agree to see me again?” I ask, hopeful.

  “That’s not clear to me yet, but it seems doubtful.”

  “Has she already decided not to see me again?” I ask. I don’t want to know the answer to this, but feel forced to ask it.

  “No, but it seems likely she will. She wants to find a better way to say goodbye to you,” Blumenfeld says.

  “Goodbye? Not see me?” I ask, my throat constricting.

  “Are you wondering, Annie, how someone who doesn’t see you, really doesn’t recognize you, could possibly say goodbye to you?”

  Blumenfeld asks this last question very slowly. Word by word, it gathers into a storm within me. In the eye of the storm, where I am not, I find myself coming out of my chair, moving fast across space, and kicking Blumenfeld hard in the shins. I also begin to hit myself in the face, in a frenzy. He holds my arms fast against my sides, and pulls me into his lap. I squirm and slide to the floor. He leans over and crosses my arms, and holds them braced against me. His striped tie hangs down in front of my face. In this position, against his chair and knees, I can’t go anywhere. I struggle and then begin to cry.

  “Use words, Annie,” he says gently.

  I cry and struggle.

  “Use your words, Annie. What is it?”

  But there are no words. Rage and fear break within me and upon me wordlessly. I see a man going away from me, very tall, gray. Blumenfeld is mostly brown, not all gray, and he’s behind me, still holding me fast.

  I find myself lying on the couch. Blumenfeld is by my side in his chair, one foot up on the couch. I am crying. Slowly, he places his hand, palm down, over my forehead. I close my eyes and sob harder. His hand grows warm, a little blanket of warmth over me. Gradually, my sobs subside and turn into hiccups. He takes his hand away. I lie still for several minutes, then slowly swing my feet to the floor. I can’t look at him directly. I glance at the clock and see it is time to leave. I don’t know what happened for most of the hour, however.

  “I’m sorry I kicked you,” I tell him, flushing with embarrassment.

  “You were actually very gentle with me, Annie,” he says.

  I get up to leave, stuffing my rabbit back in its gym bag. I steal a little glance at Blumenfeld. He smiles at me.

  “Next time, wear your hiking boots,” he says.

  “What?” I ask, confused.

  “You were very, very gentle with me,” he replies. “So next time, wear your hiking boots.”

  64

  After this session, I feel a little dizzy. I drive to a nearby McDonald’s and buy myself a Coke and sit outside in the sunlight watching the light play on the chrome of passing cars. I remember Ben’s loss of control with me in November the day he tore his paper wings, and in his classroom the other day he kicked and struggled, rather more deliberately. And this was not the first time I found myself, wordless, out of control either. As an adolescent, listening to the voices of the students reciting in Latin class and listening to the voices within me, I threw my books off my desk and screamed, “Shut up!” I pounded my head against the desk top, ending that day’s class. The following year, in the hospital, I kicked the one therapist I felt I might be able to trust. I also remember listening to Telesporus, then being thrown violently (by no one, nothing) against the walls of the “quiet room.” In each instance, others’ words came into me, but I had no words of my own.

  Blumenfeld’s words were: “Are you wondering, Annie, how someone who doesn’t see you, really doesn’t recognize you, could possibly say goodbye to you?”

  “Are you wondering?” Blumenfeld’s phrase goes through my mind like a chant. With his words, I touch my fury again, and it puzzles me. While kicking Blumenfeld in the shins I felt violent—wild thing, unable to stop myself or contain myself—but Blumenfeld himself experienced my kicking as “gentle.” Now I see that when his words came into me, carrying some unbearable truth, they conveyed more than a message about Melanie recognizing or not recognizing me as she said goodbye. They must be larger than that. I hold his words beside my need to recognize and be recognized by Ben when I returned to him. A return without such recognition, after all, would not be a return at all. And I remember now, in the session with Blumenfeld, the image of a man with gray hair retreating.

  My father’s hair was gray. He committed suicide by jumping from the fifth-story window of a psychiatric hospital when I was five years old. I was told, months after his death, that he died of a heart attack, and did not know what really happened until I was fourteen.

  I drive back to my apartment to study for my end-of-the-summer examination. I try to copy summaries of research articles onto index cards, but I cannot concentrate. I sit at my desk, close my eyes and enter a scene as if dreaming while awake.

  Walking through a dark basement, I know I have never been in this place before. The basement goes on and on and I have no idea how to get out. Windows too high for me to see out. I walk slowly, afraid of the basement smell—musty concrete, damp dirt, wet wood. In one room, washers come up to the top of my head. In another, a huge furnace hisses and thrums. Behind the furnace room, I come upon long lengths of clothesline weighed down by wet clothes and towels that almost brush the floor. Behind the clothes, a door. I turn the knob, push the door open, leaning into the knob with my shoulder. A cold knob in the roundness of my shoulder. The door opens to a flight of cement stairs. I go up the stairs into the stark daylight, out onto a sidewalk by a red brick apartment building. The air is hot, humid and summer hot, I am wearing blue shorts and a sleeveless blue shirt, The apartment building is right by the walk, and just a few feet from the walk there’s a metal fence. But this was not where I live. I recognize nothing. I see my mother talking to another woman, someone who apparently knows me, because she waves and calls me by name. My mother seems relieved to have “found” me. She takes me through a screened back door into a dingy kitchen. There is the little yellow table I remember from our kitchen at home, with our little red chairs. I ask my mother where my father is. My mother says, somewhat crossly, “You know Daddy died.” That night my sister crawls under our twin bed (it seems we will sleep in one bed now) and kicks the floor, crying because she “misses Daddy. ” I sit by the side of the bed and watch her in wonder. Daddy is gone, to wherever the people who are “dead” go. Wherever it is, he isn’t coming back, and it seems that we live now in this dark, small apartment. For my part, I am relieved that Daddy will not be coming home tonight.

  I open my eyes, recollecting myself, drawing myself back to my desk and my index cards, and say to myself again and again, “Write. Put this into words!” But, instead of writing, I walk through my apartment to my bed, pull my blue quilt over me, and drift into the oblivion of sleep.

  I dream of myself as many, in pieces. When I waken, I want to call Blumenfeld, but the phone is gone. It has completely disappeared!

  When I waken from this dream of waking, I am fearful that I am still dreaming. I pull back the blue quilt, climb out of bed and try to call Blume
nfeld. During the daytime, the only access I have to him is through his answering service, and now it is late afternoon. When someone crisply rattles off the names of the doctors she serves, I find that I can’t say anything. I try to speak and can’t get one word out. I start to cough and choke. I put the phone down.

  I tell myself sternly, “This is silly, this is all in your head. Of course you can talk.” But I am afraid that I will open something up I can’t bear to know or to reveal, and then get caught, tied up, locked up, even put in the hospital again. I unplug my phone, creating the isolation I dread. I sit at my table in the heat of the summer and shiver.

  I make a cup of hot tea and crawl back. into bed.

  The wind picks up outside, blows the white paper shade against the window sash. It snaps against the wood, white on white.

  I see a man holding a small girl up against his shoulder.

  The wind dies down a little, and rain begins to fall. The rain smells like wet pennies—sharp, metallic.

  I feel myself held up in my father’s arms, throwing pennies into a fountain.

  A lump rises in my throat. It is hard to swallow my tea, now getting cold. I could cry, but crying would make this worse, I know. I remember the sound of my sister crying under the bed among the clumps of dust and the thumping of her feet as she kicked the bare wood floor. Her cry is a poetry older than speech. It runs over my whole skin, and I want to cry out for her to stop.

  I slouch down against the pillows, pull up the quilt. I fall asleep and dream again.

  I am taken by the Nazis as a child-to be burned, hanged. But worse than that, a man wearing a uniform jabs at my stomach and vagina with his finger. He lifts up my dress, and he laughs, I am held from behind. I begin to cry, but already know that my crying won’t matter, The person who is holding me says something gentle, and I realize she is a woman. I turn abruptly and bury my face against her, terrified. Someone behind me pulls down my underpants. Cold air and eyes upon me. Exposed, ashamed, I want to disappear. Someone gives me a shot while the woman holds me. I scream, struggling and wondering if she, too, is one of the Nazis.

  Suddenly I am sitting at a dinner table. My legs dangle above the floor. I can’t choke down the food, but know that I must eat or face some punishment. Someone asks me where I have been, and this question makes no sense. I ask, “What?” to buy myself a little time, to cover the knowledge that I don’t know.

  I am awake or asleep and dreaming again, I can’t tell which. I am lying in a bed on my stomach, not sleeping, or sleeping lightly, or dreaming, I can’t tell.

  A man comes into the room and sits on my bed. He runs his hands under the covers along my back and bottom, I am paralyzed, powerless. I hear the sound of a zipper opening, I cry out my sister’s name and startle myself awake.

  I am lying facedown in my own bed, bathed in sweat. The night air stirs on my skin, chills me. I lie in bed shivering, and wonder if I am awake or sleeping. My beloved rabbit “sleeps” next to me, her soft belly against the sheet.

  I see myself taking her into the kitchen and ripping into her belly with a knife. I see her bleeding all over the linoleum.

  I take her into the kitchen, open my drawer with utensils, and realize then that my only knife is in the box I put in Blumenfeld’s closet. Sobbing, I realize that I do not want to “kill” my rabbit. I look at the clock and see that it is 3:00 A.M. I go to the phone and call Blumenfeld.

  “Hello. This is Dr. Blumenfeld,” he says, sounding fully awake.

  “Were you asleep?” I ask, choking back my tears.

  “Yes, but now I will be able to go to sleep twice,” he replies, instantly recognizing my voice.

  “Huh?” I ask, surprised. I am ready with my apology for waking him up.

  “Don’t you remember, Annie? I told you that if you called me in the middle of the night, I would get to fall asleep twice, and I love going to sleep.”

  “Now I remember,” and I smile despite my fear and the circumstances of this phone call. “I tried to call your answering service earlier, but I couldn’t talk,” I explain. “I’ve had a nightmare. I’m not sure what are waking dreams and what are dreams. Just now, I wanted to rip my rabbit into pieces. Then I realized you have my only knife in that box in your closet.”

  “Yes, I have your knife, and all the other things in that box, and the missing things too. But, Annie, you could tear your rabbit apart in many other ways, and you have called me instead. So you must know that she is already in pieces.”

  “The little pieces?” I ask.

  “Yes. Did you dream about them?”

  I tell Blumenfeld my dream about being taken by the Nazis and my dream about a man coming into my room at night.

  I listen to Blumenfeld’s breathing, steady and even. His breath is a heartbeat in my ear. He could be holding me close as I tell him these dreams, he is so near me. He does not interrupt my telling, so I go on and tell him about entering, earlier that day, the scene of being in the basement when I was five years old, and also about the man with gray hair moving away from me in his office.

  “Do you remember when he was there in the office?” Blumenfeld asks.

  “When I was on the floor and you said, ‘Use your words,’ or something like that.”

  “You saw a man going away, moving toward the door?”

  “Yes. And he wasn’t you. Your hair isn’t so gray, and you were behind me.”

  “Like the woman in your dream?”

  “Yes. But when I turned around in my dream, you weren’t like that.”

  “I didn’t allow someone to attack you from behind. But, Annie, you started to scream in my office as if I had done something just as terrible to you.”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “Don’t you remember? When I said, ‘Use your words,’ you screamed and really fought me.”

  “I don’t remember,” I say, and the stupidity and shame of it wash over me.

  “The little pieces remember,” Blumenfeld comments.

  “I’m confused,” I tell him. “I can’t tell in what dreams I’m sleeping and in what dreams I’m awake. I can’t tell what is real.”

  Blumenfeld laughs. “Annie, you are trying to make some funny distinctions here. Everything you dream is real. What is confusing you?”

  “I don’t know. Something about words.”

  “What was most real in your life, Annie, perhaps most real of all, was the injunction not to use words, not to speak.”

  “Yes, as if, as if, if what?” I ask, struggling to know.

  “If to speak is to risk irrevocably hurting someone, hurting someone so much that they will be lost to you forever, then you had better not use words.”

  I am crying. “How do you know that?” I ask him.

  “When I said, ‘Use words,’ your father left the room.”

  “And then I remember lying on the couch crying. And you put your hand on my forehead, right?”

  “Yes. And now I see how that might have confused you. Which father was which? Was this the father who put his hands under the covers? Was this the one who paid no heed to your cries and jabbed at you from the front and from the back? Or was this the father who held you while you threw pennies into a fountain? Your dreams are all about what was real, all about this very real confusion. Which father was which?”

  As Blumenfeld asks me these questions, he asks them slowly, pausing between each one. What has been wordless now is coming into words. The room tilts, then holds steady. I reach for greater clarity.

  “I don’t understand why I would want to rip up my rabbit. I didn’t imagine stuffing coming out either; I imagined blood and guts.”

  “Your beloved rabbit,” Blumenfeld says.

  “When I woke up the last time, I was lying on my stomach and my rabbit was lying next to me, sleeping in the same position,” I offer. “I felt suddenly as if the rabbit was in the, wrong position. And that made me feel terrible, terribly wrong.”

  “That does make sense to me,” Blumenfeld
says. “You dreamed that your father came into your bedroom at night and touched you on your bottom and unzipped his pants. You were lying on your stomach then, yes?”

  “Yes,” I say in a whisper.

  “Annie, it is so much worse for a little child, well, really for anyone, to feel helpless terror than to feel that he or she is at fault, somehow wrong. Especially if that child feels helpless terror with someone she loves and has to go on loving, it is so much easier to bear a terrible guilt than to feel helpless terror.”

  I move from my chair to the floor and brace myself against the wall. What Blumenfeld is saying makes so much sense that it turns my inner world upside down. It makes me dizzy to listen.

  He continues: “So you had to hurt the rabbit, who was at fault for sleeping in the wrong position.”

  “Yes. But just for a moment I wanted to cut my own stomach.”

  “But you didn’t do that?” Blumenfeld asks.

  “No. I have cut myself other times, my stomach, and my arms and legs, but I didn’t tonight. I was in the rabbit. I was the rabbit.”

  “Yes, when you were very young, you were the rabbit. You were in pieces and the rabbit wasn’t in pieces. And, when you were very young, you couldn’t figure out which father was which. You must have felt that your life depended on figuring that out.”

  “My life,” I say, stretching out my bare feet on the floor where I have been sitting.

  “And in all your short, little life with your father, he did not really recognize you, Annie,” Blumenfeld says. I start to protest, but he continues, “He did not really see you, or he could never have hurt you as he did. And then he left you.”

  I sit and cry for a long time and Blumenfeld is quiet, except for the sound of his soft breathing. Suddenly I am limp with relief and very sleepy. It is almost four in the morning. I thank Blumenfeld for talking to me and say goodnight to him.