Resistance, page 10
On that first day in the Pilates studio, she spent most of the hour on her back while her instructor, Courtney, a lithe young woman with gleaming pulled-back hair, guided her through the exercises. Melita felt herself gliding—recalibrating the angle of her spine, core and ribs, so that her body parts had never before seemed so deconstructed—as the bed springs made a low, reverberating sound, like the gurgling call of a strange bird, or a conversation underwater. The overhead lights were dimmed to a subterranean glow and the air was spiced with citrus from the oil burner on the corner shelf. Courtney’s voice—gentle, encouraging and, most admirably of all, without the tiniest hint of condescension—reached out to her through the gloaming, and she wondered if we therapists might do better to stop our talking and instead to dim the lights and install rocking chairs in every room. ‘It’s always the most mindful time of my week,’ Melita said, ‘and the only waking hour when I feel no need to look at a clock.’
She dropped the last carrot stick onto the plate and checked her phone. Goodness, she exclaimed, she should have been in a Zoom meeting two minutes ago. She hastily closed the container of hummus and tossed it into her lunchbox, then tilted her plate to such an angle that the remaining balls of food rolled neatly alongside the dip. She tucked the lunchbox under her arm and with a preoccupied wave in my direction she bustled away.
My first session after lunch was with Lisa and Claude Agostino. They’d asked to come alone. The children didn’t want to miss any more school, Lisa had told me when I’d phoned her to confirm their appointment.
The children would have to be seen again, I’d said: the court order mandated at least four sessions with the children.
She was well aware of that, Lisa had replied. But they wouldn’t be coming this time.
They entered the waiting room at fifteen minutes past the hour. Neither of them appeared perturbed by their lateness when I came to collect them, nor did they mention it as I walked with them upstairs to my room. Once inside, I asked them how they were, and they both brushed off my question with a shrug.
I told them I’d read the court transcripts about the phone call Claude had received, the day they left the farm. I knew, I said, that they’d refused to discuss the details of that phone call in court. I wasn’t going to push them for more information: what we did in this session wasn’t contingent on that, I said, although if they wanted to talk about it now I was most interested to hear.
‘No way,’ Lisa said.
I asked Claude if that was how he felt, too. ‘Absolutely,’ he replied.
They’d mentioned in court that the phone call was the catalyst for their sudden departure from home, I continued. I was interested in the hour or so between the phone call and the time they drove away. What was going on for them all in that hour?
‘What a strange question,’ Lisa said. ‘We were packing bags.’
Was there ever a question they wouldn’t leave, I asked. Did they discuss that?
‘You seem to think it was a decision about whether to leave or to stay,’ Lisa said. ‘That was never the case. It was only a question of when we would need to go. And where.’
I asked if the phone call had made that clear.
Claude stirred and leaned forward in his chair. Did these questions have to be answered? Weren’t they here to talk about the children?
Could I speak frankly? I asked. Did they appreciate that leaving home in a tearing hurry, in the middle of school term, without a word to the children’s school, might be seen as not acting in the children’s best interests?
Claude’s eyes narrowed. ‘We don’t care about other people’s perception,’ he said. ‘We know what we did was right. We would have notified the school at some stage. It wasn’t our priority.’
What was their priority?
‘Family,’ Claude said.
I asked if he could tell me more.
‘Does it need to be explained?’
Something had to be explained, I said, after a pause to collect my thoughts. Perhaps I’d been asking about the wrong things: if so, I’d appreciate his help in setting me on the right path. My role was to work with them, not against them. Should I leave the room for a minute and let them talk things over? I asked, rising from my chair. Then, when I returned, they might have something to say.
I stepped into the corridor, closing the door behind me. At the same time Nalini emerged from her room across the hall. Her cheeks were flushed. We tiptoed to the upstairs kitchen, where we grimaced and gave each other the thumbs down. ‘Some days I wonder why I bother,’ Nalini whispered. ‘I would’ve been better off staying home and cleaning the bathroom.’ We laughed softly and sighed, and sipped at our water.
A minute later, I knocked on the door to my room. ‘Come,’ I heard Lisa say, imperious as a queen. She and Claude were hand in hand, fingers interlaced, heads bent together. An intensity radiated from them like heat.
I took my seat and waited.
‘You want to know about the phone call,’ Lisa began. She glanced at Claude, tentatively, as if waiting for a sign from him to stop speaking. ‘Claude took the call outside. He’d just started work for the day. I was still having breakfast with the children.’ She paused. ‘He came in through the kitchen door and as soon as I saw his face I knew that something important had happened.’ She placed her left hand over her right, still interlaced with Claude’s, so that she twisted in her chair towards him. It was, she went on, as if he was changed physically in some fundamental way, as if every cell in his body was altered. She knew immediately that he was different, and that this difference had made him more of himself.
I asked her what she meant by more of himself.
She’d always had the feeling that there was something unfocused about Claude, she replied. She looked at me as she spoke, her eyes as clear as the tropical water in which she had once dived for pearls, or so I imagined. ‘You’ve probably misunderstood me,’ she said quickly. ‘I don’t mean he can’t focus his concentration or energy. He has no problem with that.’ It was just that she’d always seen in him a malleability in his concept of self. She saw it in Poppy too, Lisa said, now that she was about to reach puberty. There was, in both of them, a sense of something as yet unwoken.
Claude removed his hand from Lisa’s and curled both into fists on his thighs. ‘Claude knows all this,’ Lisa continued, glancing at him as she spoke. ‘We’ve talked about it a lot in recent weeks. What I’m saying is that it’s gone, this blurriness around the edges. He now knows who he is, and that knowledge has firmed him up.’
So this phone call was very important, I paraphrased. Life-changing, for Claude, in terms of identity.
‘Enough,’ Claude said quietly.
Lisa shook her head at me, like a parent admonishing a child for breaking the rules. No, she said. There was nothing more they could tell me.
‘And you got that sinking feeling then?’ Erin asked. ‘Like the hour would never end and you’d be subject to their imperiousness forever?’
We’d been discussing my last session with the Agostinos. I couldn’t seem to break though, I said. They still regarded me as the enemy.
‘Don’t blame yourself,’ Erin said breezily. ‘They sound like pains.’ She placed her fingertips on either side of her head and massaged her scalp. Her collar-length hair was a triumph of curls, the recalcitrant type that would have plagued her as a young woman. Now, instead of attempting to coax them into an asset, it seemed she ignored them completely. Her hair tended to frizz at the ends, a development of her later years, I presumed, when one’s follicles shrink and desiccate, so my mother had told me. Over the weeks I had noted the creeping march of grey from the crown, that ever-invading line, but today it was gone. She’d been to the hairdresser: her hair was a uniform chestnut-brown and all the frizz was cut away.
‘I’m still thinking about your school excursion to Marville,’ Erin said, her fingertips remaining on either side of her head, as if to demonstrate that she was reading my mind.
I was surprised to hear that, I said.
She gave me a mischievous smile. ‘Are you really?’ It seemed to her, she continued, that I’d found myself that day on the cusp of some monumental change. Was I ready to talk about it now?
I was neither ready nor ill prepared, I told her.
‘That sounds very mysterious.’ Erin folded her hands in her lap and looked at me with a teacher’s expectant authority. Down the hall a toilet flushed, and the pipes outside our room murmured their protest as the water ran.
‘My father had vanished the week before,’ I said.
‘Vanished?’
‘Never to be seen again by my mother, my brother or me. That obviously would have been on my mind.’
‘Oh, Nina,’ Erin said. ‘How awful. How absolutely awful. What do you think happened to him?’
‘He reinvented himself,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he became a concert pianist.’
‘Your mother would have looked into his disappearance?’
‘The police were involved, if that’s what you mean. There was no evidence of foul play.’
‘Did you get help at the time?’
‘Not in any formal sense. I became friendly with a girl whose parents had divorced. And one of my teachers was kind.’
‘Oh, Nina,’ Erin said again. ‘How hard it must have been.’
As a twelve-year-old you’re a little beyond magic tricks, so the idea of vanishing into thin air doesn’t quite stick, I told Erin. I was aware that my father’s leaving was the last step in what had been a long line of steps. I still wasn’t sure where the first step began. But at the time I could see some of the steps for myself, and still saw them, I said, small visual tics of memory: the way my mother bit her lip when he spoke; the way he laughed at her, tipping his head back and baring his teeth like a horse. When they were together in a room it always felt as if one of them was searching for an exit. My father joined a bushwalking club, which occupied his weekends. My mother joined a book club and learned to play cards. She bought a camp bed for my brother’s room, just so he could have friends for sleepovers, she said, but towards the end she slept on that bed most nights. These were the increments, the whittling away to nothing. At twelve I could see this. But my brother was seven. He still believed in magic.
‘Go on,’ Erin said.
‘I remember the fights between my father and me. Not the particulars, so much—’
Erin laughed. ‘You were a child. You’d have been wanting your own way about something.’
That wasn’t it, I said. Not at all.
I wanted to say more but found I could not.
‘I’m sorry,’ Erin said, after a while. ‘I made light of something that’s serious to you. I’ve hurt you without meaning to, but that still counts as hurt.’
Her dismissiveness had taken me by surprise, I told her.
‘And you’re angry with me, understandably so. I was insensitive, especially given the fact you were talking about your father.’
‘What I’d been going to say,’ I began, ‘was that we were never closer than when we fought.’ That’s my girl, he’d say as my fists hammered his thigh. That’s my Nina. He rarely used my name otherwise. It was as if we were best known to each other in conflict. He laughed as he ducked my wild punches, and he prodded his finger in my chest or stomach as I ran at him again. That prodding drove me to madness, I said. Then all at once the mood would pivot: he’d catch my wrists and wouldn’t let go. I’m sick of you now, he hissed against my ear. His grip on my wrists was unnecessarily tight, as if to prove his strength—he often did push-ups on the lounge-room floor—but his fingers were cool and smooth, another contradiction to add to the list. Later I learned that other fathers didn’t rub their hands with scented cream every night.
‘Scented cream,’ Erin repeated, scribbling on her notepad. ‘Uh-huh.’
His hands were the key to everything, his favourite means of expression, I went on. It seemed he was never happier than when his fingers stretched an octave or mastered a trill at the piano. When I was a small child and he read to me at bedtime, he rested his fingers against the open page. I closed my eyes and saw again the neat half-moon of his nails. There was something staged about his hands against the book, I said with closed eyes. It was as if he placed them there so I could see and admire them.
I opened my eyes to see Erin chewing on her pen, the notepad on her lap. She took the pen from her mouth to ask me if I’d wondered about the significance of what I’d just told her.
I said that I had. Whatever significance it might or might not have, it didn’t explain why he left us without a trace.
‘Does it not?’ Erin asked. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it’s occurred to you that, for a long while, your father might have been pretending to be someone other than who he was, and that at some point this pretence became too difficult to sustain. What might not have occurred to you—but occurs to me, as an outsider—is that his mistake was in thinking his choice was a binary one. Either he stayed with you, in denial, or he left you in order to become himself. Stay or go, deny or proclaim. He didn’t understand there was a third way—to leave the marriage but not his children.’
‘How could he not have understood that?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Erin said softly. She didn’t want to make excuses for the pain he caused. It was wrong of him to leave, she told me. She imagined it haunted him still. She regarded me as the ends of her mouth curved upwards, her brow softened and her eyes grew wide: in short, her features rearranged themselves into an expression that I read to be her kindest, most considerate therapy face. I sat higher in my chair. I braced myself. What would I want to say to him if he were here in this room, right now? Erin asked.
I couldn’t help laughing. After twenty-three years of deafening silence I would be hard pressed to find anything to say, I told her. While I understood the purpose of her question—it was a systemic therapy 101 ploy, the empty chair that represented the family member with whom your client was in conflict—the truth was I had long outgrown him.
Erin nodded and said nothing. We sat for several minutes, grave, inert and unyielding. The front door of the clinic squeaked open and footsteps padded down the corridor. The burble of voices reached me from somewhere—the adjoining therapy room, or the kitchen—while my stomach clenched and my mouth grew dry.
I wanted to stop now, I told Erin. I didn’t believe it was useful to continue.
Erin suggested I drink some water. She waited while I downed the whole glass. Did I mean I wanted to end just this session, or all future sessions? she asked. She could completely understand that I might want to finish early today, but she hoped she would see me again. I didn’t have to decide right this minute, she added.
I said I would let her know. I was about to gather my belongings and leave, but Erin gestured me to stay. Would I mind if she told me something before I left? By way of answer I sat back in my chair.
‘I was a great reader when I was young,’ Erin began. Of course, she said, that was well before the days of mobile phones and social media, so she wasn’t trying to be self-congratulatory when she told me that she spent many hours of the week with her nose in a book. She was a somewhat anxious young person—that she already knew about herself, even though she might not have put the word anxiety to what she felt. In those days young people were more likely to view their tentativeness in social situations as a defect of character, something to chastise themselves for. She smiled at me and inclined her head, as if inviting me to respond but, having nothing to say, I remained silent. She had sense enough to recognise that reading helped her condition, Erin continued. Condition might seem like a grandiose word for her adolescent shyness, but she used the word in its multiple senses. After all, wasn’t anxiety a significant part of the general human condition? Her anxiety was in part due to her temperament—that old chestnut, Erin said, with a playful shrug—and in part a response to the particular requirements of her life; that she be a good girl in a patriarchal society. In short, her anxiety was a condition of her place in the world. She sighed. What was the alternative? To become, in society’s eyes, a bad girl—a spirited and unconventional young woman, prepared to fight the patriarchy on every front? Imagine what that would have done for her anxiety!
Erin lifted her hands to her hair, grabbing the ends in two fistfuls and lifting them away from her neck. ‘I should wear my hair up,’ she said. ‘It’s so cooling.’
She often suggested to clients that they read more fiction or poetry, but they rarely took her advice, especially these days. It was a no-brainer, though, didn’t I agree? The act of reading could be so mindful—it was the essence of mindfulness, in fact, for didn’t a writer create a work of fiction with the intention of keeping their readers riveted to the page? One could lose oneself in the here and now of a good book: the texture of the paper against one’s fingers; the comforting feel of the pillow against one’s back—she liked to read in bed, Erin said; the mesmerising quality of black print against a white page; all those thousands of signifiers that we decode, effortlessly and expertly, into the thoughts and deeds and scenes of the real world. A rhythmic sentence could be very meditative: one tapped out the beat in one’s head, so that the act of reading became one of listening, too, or at least an awareness of a soundless beat, a mental vibration.
