A Shining Affliction

by Annie G. Rogers

  Ben begins to take more than a casual interest in the Glenwood staff, using his time with me to extend those contacts, even to the gardener. And he begins also to extend himself in gift-giving, first to Tea Bags. He returns in the next several sessions to paint pictures for his teacher, his mother, and for a little boy in his class, an autistic child who is far less social than he is now, as well as for himself.

  While Ben is preparing to say goodbye to me, he is also preparing to make a transition into the Glenwood residential program. His psychiatrist, the Glenwood staff and I all agree that he needs a more consistent therapeutic milieu than we can offer six hours a day. Ben has made enormous gains this year, especially in his capacity to form new relationships. But he has regressed at times too, and his adoptive parents still feel often overwhelmed by his behavior. This is a period of waiting for all of us—waiting for a confirmation of admission and for an open bed.

  One rainy day late in July, as I walk from the cafeteria back to my office, I see Ben outside by the cottages, bent over something, tugging at it. I go to him and see it is a child’s jacket, muddy and wet.

  “Hello, Ben. What have you found?” I begin.

  “A jacket. Can I keep it? We could wash it and dry it,” he says, still tugging at it and lifting it slightly off the ground.

  “I think it belongs to a child who lives here, Ben, and he has left it out there in the rain.”

  “I will live here. Then it can belong to me,” Ben insists.

  “Perhaps you will live here. But then you will bring your own jacket,” I tell him.

  “No. I know.”

  “What do you know?” I ask.

  “I will live here.”

  As he says this, he releases the jacket and takes my hand and we walk back to the school building together. I sense that he knows he needs Glenwood, but something is still troubling him.

  Later that day, Ben asks Mary Louise to wash something for him—not the jacket—and she takes him to a washing machine in one of the children’s cottages. There Ben spots a suitcase in a child’s room. He asks what it is for, and she tells him the children who live at Glenwood put their clothes and toothbrush in it when they go home to visit and take the clothes out again when they come back. Ben is fascinated. He pulls Mary Louise into the room and plays with putting things in and out of the suitcase. He carries it around. Mary Louise tells him about weekend visits and coming back. She describes a daily schedule of waking, dressing, getting breakfast, a school day, playtime, supper, study or play time, a nighttime story read and lights out. She gives him a grand tour.

  Hearing Mary Louise’s simple description of the daily agenda and exploring the suitcase, the sinks, toilets, bathtub, and recreation area, Ben rehearses the experience of living among the children. He discovers that each child has his or her own bed, clothes, stuffed animal and cubby of toys. The suitcase is a concrete, visible piece of evidence that he can still see his family. The unspoken fears of owning nothing, and hence of anonymity, and of losing his home, are allayed in that sensitive, spontaneous tour of the cottage with Mary Louise.

  Mary Louise tells me about this the next day, and I put it away in my store of ideas of how to help young children make difficult transitions. I also realize that Ben tried, first with me, and more successfully with Mary Louise, to go into a cottage to wash something. Without knowing why, he set the stage for that dramatic rehearsal. And I wonder how to make my leaving more concrete and more real for him.

  78

  I sit under bright lights on a hard wooden bench in an ice-cream parlor where they have homemade ice cream of all flavors. I wonder what it would be like to find Ben in such a place, after I am no longer seeing him. Heartbreak to see him again and not to go on seeing him.

  At night, the light reflects everything within as if it were outside, and I wonder if history will record this bit of trivia about late-twentieth-century America—this obsession so many of us had with ice cream.

  In my dream two women walk, one behind the other and far apart, across a lake that is only partly frozen. Melanie and I, walking. We wear bright orange vests to protect us from the men, the hunters, and stay carefully apart. If we walk too close together, we will break the ice and go down into the dark water. What is the ice I walk with Melanie? Blumenfeld tells me nothing of their talks these days. Into that nothingness, I invent the rehearsed responses to my fear that she is not coming back to me after all. We walk the ice, glancing at one another, inventing and reinventing one another. We find each other’s eyes, keep the distance, knowing we might sink and freeze, lost to time and love. But already we are lost, rehearsing our far-reaching fear (what you fear most has already happened) and inventing, each by herself, her own memory. Soft green feathers of ducks and soft white feathers of geese drift over to us, carried by the wind to tell us that once these birds walked here. We walk in their three-pronged footprints, keeping carefully apart. How hard it is to read one another’s eyes. We read the world we remember there, and this invention stamps something like hopelessness, a remembered despair, into the body’s cells. If we could turn away from this, whisper across the distance, listen without words, in pure communion with one another, our despair might be redeemed. This I know from Ben.

  79

  The last time I see Melanie, she is wearing a navy-blue suit and matching blue high-heel shoes. In this outfit, with her long auburn hair drawn back, I hardly recognize her.

  Melanie has agreed to meet with me in Blumenfeld’s office after meeting with him alone for weeks. She is afraid and does not want to be alone with me in the waiting room, she’s told Blumenfeld, so she will come a few minutes later than I. I might have guessed that the line between myself, Annie, and her fear of me, has not faded with time. I should have guessed this, but I didn’t.

  As she walks into the office, I wonder where she will choose to sit. I sit on the couch, leaving “my” chair at the head of the couch open, near me, hoping she will want to sit there. She does not. She chooses a chair next to Blumenfeld’s desk, across the room from me. Blumenfeld is ensconced in the same chair he always sits in, by the lamp, nearer to me.

  I have waited for nearly five months, since late February, to see Melanie, hoping to see her, unsure that I would ever see her again. Yet, once in her presence, I cannot connect this Melanie with the therapist I have loved. The silence between us grows, and Blumenfeld is quiet too. This silence has a dangerous tremor.

  Finally, he speaks to Melanie, saying, “Annie has some questions about what to expect from you now. Probably her biggest question is about her hope that you will be able to see her again.”

  “No,” Melanie says, “I will not see her again. I came to say goodbye.”

  Blumenfeld looks startled, but she is perfectly clear. There is something in this unflinching clarity that chills me. I sense how much it has cost her to be able to say this. She seems not entirely alive, as if this line has been memorized or rehearsed. I see that there will be no shortening of the distance we have been walking; it will become infinitely wider.

  And since Blumenfeld and Melanie have begun to talk about me in the third person, as if I were not there, I leave them to it.

  Most of the time Emily was used to disappointment. Still, when the stars fell from the sky, it startled her. She schooled herself against all expectations, but went right on wildly jumping into the arms of hope, then jumping back into herself—rocking herself alone in the night while the leaves spoke summer words and cars went by. Their tires made a splashing sound on the empty street and little bugs splashed on the screen. Emily was used to bitter disappointment, and knew already, even before her wish was formed into words, it was no use to wish for what she wanted. Emily remembered walking in her bare feet in the park one day. The wet grass under her feet hid a shard of broken glass, well no, not really, she saw it before she stepped on it, and then, pain, of course, but also her wish—that someone would look a look of kindness upon her today, because of the glass—an accident. But she
knew better, and bandaged the foot by herself, then huddled over the pain, savored it for herself. It was of no use, to wish, forget it! she was used to it, before her wish shaped itself, the leaves whispered, stars fell, little bugs splashed—rocking, she sought the wish itself—no, it was not going to happen.

  I come back into a silent room. Perhaps they, either one, have asked me something and are patiently waiting for my response. I want to say something suddenly. It is a grasping gesture, this speech I want to make. A lump rises in my throat, a sudden yearning to deceive. I would tell Melanie that I have betrayed her, that I was “sick” and “wrong,” that it has all been my fault. Through this “confession,” perhaps she would be able to find me again, to forgive me. I have done this before. The very words come up into my throat, but not out into the room. To say them would mean to sacrifice everything, every part of myself, the Annie who held the gun and the others behind her, including the voices, the ones I never met directly. They had been trying, as Blumenfeld said, to heal Melanie so that I could be free to love her again.

  I fight for words, but the words that come out into the room to Melanie are not the words I have planned:

  “You know, I could make a confession now, I know how to do it, I’ve done it many times in the past with you. But what’s the use? It would be a lie. What happened between us was not entirely my fault.” In each moment in every life, there is a gesture hovering, to move toward or away from a truth.

  Melanie doesn’t answer me. We sit in silence again.

  Emily’s words bleed into her own body. She’d rather not speak. She fingers her own pulse against her child’s soul (at thirteen she still thinks of herself as a child), feeling the strength of her pulse beat against the smooth eye of her terror. Her mind empties out like a sieve—nothing stays, no words, just the intense look of pain on their faces when they found her bleeding, her wrists cut horizontally, because she didn’t know how to do it properly. It was her fault, this pain she’d caused her mother. She couldn’t forget that.

  Melanie looks at me, and then at Blumenfeld. “I had a dream two nights ago,” she says, “and in the dream it was clear to me that I had, in some way, I’m not sure how, preempted the gun and the knife.” I sense the possibility of an opening.

  “That does make sense to me,” Blumenfeld says. “Can you tell Annie more about what was clear to you?”

  But Melanie does not want to talk about her dream, after all. “This session,” she tells Blumenfeld, “I assumed, was supposed to be about Annie, not about me.”

  And I feel, once again, the promise of an opening, the promise of a place to really begin a conversation with her, closed off to me, as she retreats from revealing herself any further. We walk the ice, farther and farther apart.

  Emily stands apart. Despite all her promises to herself, the wish creates itself—not just within her, but in the real world that she shares with me. Melanie, Emily knows, will actually hear herself and stand up at any moment. Melanie’s going to see it all—the way she opens up a wish and then closes it off—she’ll stand there fully within her own despair, and hold out her arms, and take Emily and me into her arms.

  But that’s not what happens, of course. Emily’s wish does reach me, at least enough for me to wonder if Melanie could ever know again what she knew from the beginning: that she’d come to learn from me, and that I knew, better than she knew, exactly what I needed. I see suddenly, very clearly, that her trust in me changed as she acquired more and more clinical training and experience, until I felt, in the last year we met, that what I said to her hardly mattered. She had her interpretations all ready, and my words were fitted to them. Anything that did not fit could be attributed to my “denial” or “resistance.”

  In Blumenfeld’s presence, however, and with Emily’s wish vivid in the room with me, I insist that I know the details of my experience more fully than Melanie has ever known.

  I speak angrily to Melanie, in a last-ditch hope: “I knew, from the beginning of our relationship, more clearly than you knew, what I needed. You thought so too, once. Don’t you remember how you wanted to learn from me, how you wanted even to write with me?”

  Again, she does not answer. But looking briefly into her eyes, I know that she knew this once. One can see such a recognition. But she looks toward Blumenfeld and away from me.

  Once Emily sat with Melanie in the park nearby the Art Institute. It was a Saturday, time off, free time, endless time, and she was happy. Melanie bought them gyros and Emily chose a grape soda as her drink. She told Melanie about her writing. Someday, maybe, they would write a book together. But Melanie said, “No, you’ll write your own book, and I, and a lot of other people, will learn from you. ”

  Blumenfeld is asking Melanie a question. He is taking a while to get it formulated, and I wonder what else has happened. He has it: “I think that Annie needs to know if you think that you know what she needs better than she knows.”

  Under his question, the ice trembles beneath us.

  Melanie, looking completely composed, answers his question: “Yes, I do think that. I was her therapist. I had to know.”

  Emily feels the cold pull of water gripping her legs and arms. She’s drowning, going under, once, twice... Telesporus pulls her up and swims with her, tucked under his white wing. She wonders why he does not fly with her, then realizes that he wants her to feel the distance she has swum, to feel the danger she has put herself in. On the shore, he looks into her face, holding her face in his big hands.

  “Have you ever—listen to me, Emily! Have you ever betrayed anyone yourself?” Emily nods, stupidly. She looks up from the sand to the waves to his face. “You,” she says. “You, when I told them about you that time in the hospital, you know that.” She sees the kindness in his eyes behind the white heat of his anger and fear, for her, mostly for her, not for himself this time. The darkness comes nearer, it’s closing over her head, and he sees it coming. “I knew you didn’t mean to endanger yourself and all of us,” he says. “I knew you were trying to make a bargain with them, to get out, and you didn’t mean to betray us. But now, you have to get this now, Emily.” Against her wish (Mother and Father—they have to know what they have done to me. Melanie has to know too), the wish that also allows her to live, Telesporus goes on talking. His words keep pouring over her. “Listen to me! Melanie isn’t going to be able to save you now, she doesn’t even want to extend this torture any longer, she can’t bear to watch you go under again and again. Let her go this time, Emily, let her go, without her knowing what she is doing to you. ”

  And at that point, hearing the plea of the great guardian angel of my childhood, hearing his words right alongside Emily’s, I watch Melanie go from the room—without any idea of whether or not I’ll ever see her again. I know now that I can never have a relationship with her, not one I’d want anyway, since any relationship would mean having to know less than she knows, less about myself than I know already. So powerful is this knowing that I feel my life pulled in a new direction.

  Not a voice was raised. In fact, a great deal of the time in this fifty-minute hour passed in silence. Things were said that I was not present to hear, of course. But no one knew that, not even Blumenfeld, in all probability. As for Melanie, I knew then that while she knew the facts of my abuse (it was she who introduced me to an incest survivors’ group), she did not understand the inner life of the child who had lived that abuse. I discovered nothing I did not know in some sense already. I feel an endless chill descending.

  I sit on the couch, very still, unable to cry. Blumenfeld comes to me of his own accord and sits beside me. He, too, is quiet. He reminds me a little of Telesporus, but older, and not so big—and then there are the black shoes, the gray suit, no wings. Nevertheless, something in his demeanor reminds me of Telesporus with Emily, as he sits with me.

  “Like your father,” he says quietly, “Melanie is really blind to you. She left you without ever recognizing you. That’s not a goodbye, Annie; it’s just
leaving.”

  What can I add? Only that I must have been terrified that Blumenfeld would gang up on me with Melanie, join her in her version of our relationship, and forget everything he knew about me. I refer to him as if he has joined with her already, as a “them.” Yet he is still himself, and is very distinct from Melanie. He keeps asking the key questions which, I think, he hopes will allow me to see who Melanie has become.

  And Melanie herself? Blumenfeld never told me anything about their talks together. Those were confidential. I doubt that he ever loved her, certainly not in the ways that I did. And without loving her, what could he ever know about her? No, I don’t think he ever knew her very well. And during this session, I couldn’t step into her soul, I didn’t know what she knew, and she told me so little that it would be rash to speculate, worse to judge her. I trust my dream of her walking with me on the lake, more than anything I might know about her from this session.

  And Emily and Telesporus, what can I say about them? Very little, but something. I know them, you might say, intimately. But they also have their own existence, and their own relationship with one another, which they choose to let me in on at times like this—when I might have been pushed back into madness without their presence and clarity.

  Emily is a musician, a talented cellist with long red hair, a thirteen-year-old girl whose whole being is finely tuned to sounds. She came to me when I was an adolescent, when I was just a little older than she. She embodies my wish to kill myself—ironically in order to be missed, wanted, loved, and she brings to that wish the capacity to act on it. She’s aware of hypocrisy, the treachery of words, in the way that perhaps only adolescents are—with the hope that someone can be and will be always truthful with her, will meet her in her own truths. When she cannot speak truthfully herself, she withholds speech, she stops thinking altogether, she stops all sound in the world. Yet she, more than anyone I have ever known, is attuned to all sound, all speech, including the speech of leaves, the different languages of the universe very few can hear. Her nemesis, if I can name just one, is her tendency to wish for things that can’t ever be. In this session, she saves me from unbearable longing by forming a wish like this—for something apparently impossible—and then she saves me again by wanting to die as she takes in Melanie’s response. Who is Emily really? It would be tempting to say that she is I, or that she is not, but neither is quite true. She’s still alive, that much I know.