something you want to buy and feel guilty that you’re getting it for yourself. Especially women; we think it’s selfish if—”
“But it was more than that. It was this feeling that . . . it was the feeling that the world is not for me. Life. It’s not for me.”
I stared out across her backyard, watched two yellow butterflies chasing each other in circles. Look at that, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Of course I didn’t. Inside, I could hear my child voice saying, “Come on. Let’s go.”
“I kept feeling worse and worse—I couldn’t work, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t read—I’d just look at the same sentence over and over. Things were terrible with Bill, and finally he’d just had it. He couldn’t help me and he couldn’t listen to me anymore, and frankly I don’t blame him. He said he wanted to be apart for a while, that then maybe I’d get some help. He’d been asking me to go and see someone for a long time, but I couldn’t.
“When he left, though, I finally did call a shrink. One of the things she told me to do was to find something to do with my evenings, to make sure I went out at least once a week. I signed up for a free class, memoir writing—something they were offering at the library. And it was the oddest thing. I found I couldn’t write my real life. I could only make things up. I felt afraid of telling a single fact, as though I couldn’t be depended on to get it right. Finally, I thought, Well, you know where you lived, for God’s sake. You know what the house where you grew up was like. And I’d start to write about it, but then I’d stop and I’d think, Wait. Were there trees along the boulevard in front? Was my bedspread blue? I talked to my therapist about this, week after week, and suddenly I realized where it was all coming from, all this self-doubt, all this censorship.
“We’d talked one day about the concept of shame, and I told her that every time I heard that word, I had a visceral reaction to it: I could feel my stomach clench, my heart start to race. She said, ‘Well, let’s explore that.’ And I sat there on her couch and I all of a sudden felt this rush of something awful coming, this freight train of emotion. I just came completely apart, started bawling. And then I began remembering things that happened to me. Triggered memories, they call it. They just kept popping up.”
I was quiet for a long time, thinking. Then I said, “I wish, for your sake, that I could remember her doing something like that. But I can’t think of one time she ever behaved that way. Which is not to say I don’t believe you, Caroline. I just don’t remember anything.”
“She didn’t do the worst stuff in front of you,” Caroline said. “I know that. But what I wanted to know from you and Steve is if you remember . . . smaller things. General things. If you can, it will help me to keep going. I just want to know that you saw something too. Do you understand? I don’t doubt what happened, but I seem to need something else to help me do something about it.”
I leaned back on my elbows and stared up at the sky. It was getting dark out. Clouds were stretched thin as gossamer, and stars were appearing behind them. Whole galaxies above us, whole galaxies within us.
I thought back to our growing-up years, trying to remember a time when Caroline was purposefully slighted by my mother. But I really couldn’t. I’d been aware of the fact that, after a certain point, Caroline’s attitude toward my mother switched from idolatry to contempt. But that had happened with all of us when we went through adolescence; with Caroline, it had just been more dramatic—no surprise there. Finally, I said, “I guess I didn’t pay much attention, Caroline.”
Saying that, I suddenly wondered what it really meant. Why was I so firmly entrenched in my own world? What went on in our house that made me look so determinedly away from everything but my own fantasies? Was it possible the shrink I saw in college was at least partially right, that something wrong in my family made me seek comfort elsewhere? But couldn’t everyone look back at life as a child and