Easy Street, page 12
Standing in the Theater Department bathroom, I knew I was no longer that child, pinioned helplessly in the loving bosom of her family, but my scalp is still burning, burning and freezing in a terrifyingly familiar way in which the two sensations become the same.
The hell fear was back. The word blasphemy seemed to shoot up my spine like an angry serpent into my skull.
And then—its strange linguistic corollary—the word blastoff began coiling into cyclones that whipped through my head, tearing up the terrain.
Blastoff. Blastoff. Blastoff.
I haven’t noticed the microwave’s ding this time, but when it beeps three times to remind me there’s something in the oven, I release the exhale I have been holding and let air flood my lungs. I open the microwave and look into the cooker. The two white ceramic cups, with egg-yellow circles drawn around their rims, shine prettily in the interior oven light, but the egg yolks within appear to be two pus-bloated blisters. My stomach bucks up toward my throat.
This is not normal.
I swallow hard, carry my as-seen-on-TV, Egg-Tastic Ceramic Microwave Egg Cooker for Fast, Flavorful & Fluffy Eggs over to the garbage, and dump the contents.
My therapist Lucy’s waiting room is more a cubbyhole than a room. The walls are not much further apart than the length of my arms, but I love this little room with its one narrow side table supporting an only slightly outdated selection of magazines, its one soft waiting chair, wide enough for me to sit cross-legged and gaze at the painting on the narrow width of the opposite wall, and nothing more.
I want this to be like any other Tuesday at 10:00 a.m., me sitting here awaiting comforting and thought-provoking conversation, but as soon as I sit down and cross my legs, I feel prickles tearing up my elbows to my neck while Auschwitz Auschwitz Auschwitz runs through my head. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. I push back.
The woman in the painting in front of me keeps calm while everything around her seems to melt. The three forms in the composition—the woman, the bed on which she sits, and a dresser—appear loosed from the laws of matter. They slip down toward the horizontal line formed by the rough wooden frame bounding the canvas, the proportions warping strangely. The woman’s legs extend absurdly compared to her average-sized torso, the bed bends and snakes out in the middle as if she were lazing on the back of a fat python, and the dresser splats outward at the bottom like a wide Christmas tree.
You would think a melting world might be disturbing to the woman sitting on the bed, but the artist has portrayed her face in conventional proportions and her expression remains serene. Despite the woman’s solid world becoming slippery, as if the air around her has been greased, she doesn’t show distress. She doesn’t grasp at the mattress; she doesn’t brace an arm against the headboard; she doesn’t try to prevent her legs or the rest of her body from oozing past the wooden border of the painting to the unknowable space beneath.
The door to the office opens.
Lovely Lucy’s eyes always appear heartbreakingly sad to me until she smiles. When I first met her, I felt instinctively worried about the difficult life she must have lived. Then she smiled, and the little wrinkles gathered at her temples, and the light collected in her gray-green irises expressed such a friendly serenity I wondered why I had ever been concerned for her in the first place. I also find Lucy to be astonishingly beautiful. Few people probably watch this particular sixty-year-old woman walk down the sidewalk on Larchmont Boulevard on her way to work with admiration, but that’s just because there are so few poets.
Since my first session with Lucy two years ago, I have loved coming to this little office perched here above the boulevard’s magnolia trees. Since I have not been suffering from “it” during that time, I have had the luxury of talking with Lucy about simple, everyday disappointments and anxieties. I’ve shared my fear of being a dilettante and never finding an honorable calling. I’ve discussed the indignities of aging. I’ve investigated the envy I feel when my peers succeed, and I’ve confessed my growing regret over not having had children.
I don’t want to talk about my distressing mental cyclones today. I’m clinging to the hope that an ordinary Maggie-feels-rueful therapy session with Lucy might snap everything back to normal so I can enjoy my eggs Benedict at Eggslut this Sunday, just like before. This is also why I haven’t and don’t want to tell Jim about the threat looming in the shadows of my psyche. As if by naming it, I might call it forth.
Lucy stands aside and lets me lead the way into her office, as she does every week. Then, as always, she asks how I’m feeling about the temperature in the room with such grave consideration that it would seem that a degree too high or too low might cause a person to either develop hypothermia or spontaneously combust and flash out of existence. The room at the moment is entirely comfortable, but Lucy nevertheless shoots me a concerned squint, glances over to her small, window-mounted air conditioning unit, then looks back at me.
“Too cold?”
“No. Fine,” I say like I do every time, settling into her slender green couch.
“Too warm?”
“Nope. Just right.”
“You sure?”
“Totally.”
I’ve always appreciated the attention Lucy gives to such a seemingly irrelevant detail. She feels like a mother tucking in the corners of a blanket and fluffing a pillow, because if she can fix nothing else for me, at least she can fix this.
Lucy consults her notes. “Last week you were talking about pangs you feel when you see mothers walking with their children on Larchmont, and then you edited yourself and changed the word ‘pangs’ to ‘contractions.’”
“Right,” I say with a laugh. “I was being a tad dramatic. I was thinking about birth pangs to begin with, but then upped the metaphor to contractions.”
“You’re allowed to be dramatic.”
I flash to being on stage as Kate Keller and my dramatic wail when I discover, by waving a fake oil lamp over a naked, plastic-faced doll in a bassinet (which constantly threatened to roll down the entrance ramp unless I jammed my left foot under its back wheels), that my daughter had been struck deaf, dumb, and blind. Since I was regularly having panic attacks by the time The Miracle Worker opened, I had easy access to feelings of terror and consider the guttural animal wail I let loose every night in that black box theater to be the best acting work I’ve done to date.
I tell Lucy about the woman and her ladybug daughter on their way to Salt & Straw and explain how I imagined their backstory, how the mother had given the daughter the helmet for her birthday and how the little girl was so happy and asked, “How did you know I liked ladybugs so much?”
Lucy’s smile brings out the dark green in her eyes.
“Even though of course the little girl had mentioned ladybugs constantly and had drawn pictures of ladybugs everywhere and dressed as a ladybug for Halloween, but still it was baffling and wonderful to her that her mother knew her so deeply.”
“Ah,” said Lucy, instantly perceiving the moment’s significance to me.
“Also,” I continue, pushing the deeper concern down, “ice cream without a child misses the point of ice cream altogether. I mean, I certainly like ice cream. Who doesn’t? It’s cold and it’s sweet and it tastes good. But then it’s over and I immediately regret the calories I just took in and there’s the lactose thing and I’ll feel my stomach rumbling and think I should probably take one of those Lactaid pills which I may or may not have in the medicine cabinet back home, and then on top of everything, I have to find a trash can to throw away the empty ice cream cup I’m holding and the stupid pink spoon.
“But for a little girl in a ladybug helmet? You take her for ice cream? Whew. Oh, man. Magic in a cone. I haven’t had ice cream in a cone in years. Why would I? A cup makes much more sense. Why would I use my tongue like a dog? I don’t lick hummus off of pita bread and then eat the pita.”
As I talk, I find myself wishing these ordinary, everyday bouts of unhappiness could be my real problem. Unhappiness is different from illness. You can write into Reader’s Digest about unhappiness and someone named Pam or Amanda from Pittsburgh might have an answer for you with a link to a helpful website. Illness is repeating Auschwitz over and over and carrying the fear that my mind is not my own and my identity is under siege and that some infection lies in wait inside me to riddle my whole self with disease.
Lucy notices something about my manner or my expression and her face changes subtly. “Maggie,” she says, studying the bunched muscles of my jaw, perhaps, or the protective hunch of my shoulders, or an absence in my eyes, “I see that you’re thinking about something. Do you want to tell me about it?”
No, I think. Don’t talk about it here.
I want to, though, especially here. I want Lucy, specifically, to tuck the blanket of her warmth and understanding around my shoulders and fluff a pillow for my tormented head. She will ask me if the temperature is good, and I will say, “No, it isn’t,” and she will adjust the thermostat just as much as is needed and not more, and everything will be all right.
No. Don’t tell her what’s going on, don’t make it solid. Don’t name it.
“Oh, I was just thinking about this, this other mother, not ladybug mother, another mother I saw on Larchmont, this one with a teenage daughter. The teenage daughter was wearing a school uniform, white shirt, plaid skirt and had these long legs—crazy long legs—that she clearly hadn’t learned how to manage yet. The mom and the girl walked with Frappuccinos in their hands, and I figured the mother had recently decided her daughter was old enough to have caffeine and that this had probably made the long-legged girl feel all grown up, and I pictured the daughter ordering her mocha Frappuccino from a barista not much older than herself, proudly, like a woman, and adding, ‘with extra whipped cream,’ because she was still a little girl.”
Lucy doesn’t say anything. She waits, listening.
“. . . I guess it just seemed so wonderful to have a daughter and also, well, we’ve talked about this, this woman had another ship, besides her own, to set her hopes upon. I’m not saying the only ships out there are children or even people. But having a kid definitely gives you a ship. From day one, you get a ship.”
Lucy nods for me to continue.
“So then I noticed the teen, she was walking quite closely alongside her mother, I saw her see a chalkboard propped on the sidewalk outside Bellacures advertising a ‘Pumpkin Spice Pedicure’ in burnt-orange cursive letters.”
“Oh, I saw that chalkboard.”
“I’d noticed it, too! I’d thought ‘Wow, pumpkin spice pedicure! That sounds amazing!’”
Lucy nods with a wisp of smile.
“But then, because I’m forty-four years old, I know that a pumpkin spice pedicure will only give me a whiff of something vaguely sweet that will soon be slightly nauseating and will be no different than any other pedicure I’ve ever had, and so I just go about my errands.”
Lucy smiles ruefully as I continue, “But the long-limbed girl was all enchanted by the magic of the pumpkin spice pedicure and she pleaded with this look that was like, ‘Can we, Mommy? Can we?’ And the mother smiled. ‘Why not?’ And the two of them walked into Bellacures along with a perfect little ring-a-ling of ye olde fashioned doorbell.”
I can tell Lucy feels how such a thing could prick me and, appreciating feeling known, I keep talking, puzzling it out for myself. “Then it occurred to me that this woman had had many daughters already before this particular incarnation of this particular teenage daughter, this almost grown-ish girl proudly sucking her caffeinated, whipped-cream coffee drink and picking out a color for her toenails. That woman might have had a daughter, same name of course, she dressed in tiny socks and carried in her arms, and another who learned to feed the dog all by herself, and one who ran in circles around and around the fountain in the courtyard of the medical plaza, and many others before this nail-salon daughter, who in a previous incarnation might have worn a ladybug helmet and ridden one of those scooter things and licked ice cream on a cone from Salt & Straw, and now was so happy to be getting maybe even her first pedicure with her person, this same person who witnessed all those other selves and knew their secrets and miraculously bought that ladybug helmet for the girl she used to be, all those years ago.”
Lucy frowns in sympathy, a frown I know does not make her face traditionally beautiful, a frown that emphasizes the heaviness and inelasticity of her skin, but a frown that seems poignantly graceful to me.
“What do you feel when you see this mother with her girl?” she asks.
“Loss, I guess.”
“Loss?”
“Yes, loss and, I guess, frustration, or maybe anger at myself, because why did I not do this thing women since the dawn of time have known they needed to do?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And barren. That word barren has been haunting me. It’s such an ugly word. I’ve never identified with that word, but now it keeps coming to mind.”
“But you’ve told me you are not barren, as far as you know. You have said that you made a choice.”
“No, that’s right, but the fact remains that—my fields, so to speak, are barren—you know?—unproductive, infertile. The choice part is somewhat irrelevant.”
“Is it?”
“Well, I’ve not borne a child. Regardless of choice, that’s still infertile, right?”
“Is that what you feel you’re being told?”
I know what Lucy is doing. Lucy, as a narrative therapist, is suggesting it’s my culture that tells me taking a girl on a scooter for an ice cream or a teenager in her school uniform for an autumn pedicure is what I need to be happy. She’s inviting me to think about how our society instructs females on all sides that we are not women if we never become mothers. Narrative therapy, I’ve come to learn, is about recognizing the stories your culture has told you about who you are or should be and asking if they work for you or if you can discard them and get on with living out your life.
“I bet you had good reasons for not having children.” Lucy prompts.
“I don’t know about that. I mean, in my late twenties I didn’t want to worry about a child of mine going to hell. I didn’t believe in hell anymore, but it still haunted me. How could I bring a child into the world if there was a possibility, however remote, that it is run by that kind of God? People say they don’t want to bring children into the world with this or that politician . . . but a politician, who cares? What about God with eternal vindictiveness?”
Lucy’s eyes narrow slightly. I’ve talked about a lot in the auspices of Lucy’s office, but not about these old hauntings that have not troubled me for many years. These are the concerns of a Maggie she has not yet met.
“Whenever I hear Christians say, ‘Well, we just don’t focus on God’s wrath,’ I think, Really? I want to say, ‘You don’t get any points for ignoring the atrocities of your leaders.’ We can all spend our time focusing on how much Hitler loved his dog. And he did, by all accounts; Hitler loved his dog, Blondi, but that doesn’t mean we can shift our focus from the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust to how loyal Hitler was to his dog or how many dog treats or runs around the bunker beloved Blondi got.”
“Hitler’s dog’s name was really . . .”
“Yep, Blondi.”
Lucy laughs with a grimace.
“Anyway, so the hell thing and then later, I was just trying to get my career going in Hollywood and doing that with a baby just seemed impossible and I was afraid of the anxiety a baby would bring. I remember thinking of the phrase ‘hostage to fortune’ and how a child immediately gives you something for fate, for the wheel of fortune to spin away, and I didn’t want to be a hostage to anything, and then time happened, little by little so I didn’t notice . . .”
I think it must be the end of our session by now, but Lucy doesn’t say anything, so I keep going. “I mean, Jimmy asked me at least once every year for fifteen years, ‘Do you want to have a baby, Maggie?’ And ‘God, no!’ was my answer every year, and now I feel like, I don’t know, I’ve messed everything up.”
Truthfully, though, I know I can deal with this kind of mess-up.
I promise, Dispenser of Demons, I bargain in my head, if you let me be an ordinary disappointed career woman whose womb has dried up without bearing fruit, not to complain. I’ll come to therapy every week. I’ll talk about my sadness and confess my envy. I’ll read articles in The New York Times about perimenopausal journeys of discovery. I’ll write spoken-word essays that find wry laughter in my loss. I’ll take my lashes and call it kindness. Just don’t let me be crazy. Don’t let me be ill.
Lucy’s steady gaze flinches. What has she noticed?
Ah. My arms have stolen across my chest again, like a shield. They’re wrapped tightly. I find myself rocking.
I drop my arms, become still.
Lovely Lucy understands, and asks nothing.
“We’re going to have to stop for now,” she says kindly. “Let’s pick this up next week.”
Walking home I notice, beneath the sounds of traffic on Larchmont Boulevard, the opening and closing of car doors at the parking meters, people talking across the tables at the bistros along the sidewalk, and the sound of my sandals falling on the pavement, thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack.
Strange, I think. I wonder why I noticed that.
Then I become aware of my purse strap pulling against my shoulder, and the feeling of my heart thumping in my throat, and a prickling sensation gathering at the nape of my neck and spreading over my scalp.
