much of the surface differences. I know we’ve talked about it, but maybe the problems aren’t insurmountable. It’s just that she’s so steeped in the politics of lesbianism, the radical idea of it, she can’t exactly think for herself, react for herself. It’s as if her body belongs to some community, not to herself. She’s forever coming home from a meeting of one collective or another, and she has this struggle model in her head. Everything must be fought for; an action must always be planned. The personal is political, she never stops saying. I keep trying to tell her the reverse is not true! But then she says to me, Everything worthwhile requires a fight. Honey, don’t you want to struggle?
Now the patient burst out laughing, as did the therapist, and it was all I could do not to laugh myself. The women’s liberation movement was in a period of great militancy; the streets of the university were often filled with short-haired women marching with their fists in the air. And it was absurd to imagine these stalwarts going home to struggle over the correct way to arrange a refrigerator. (I preferred to imagine them otherwise, as I have said.) But the therapist did not permit this diversion for long, as she was clearly intent upon drawing her patient into deeper waters.
Yes, said Dr. Schussler pointedly. All that is true. But remember what you said not long ago: Charlotte chose you. You are not sure that you would have chosen her in return. The doctor’s voice then softened: And this does bring us back to the subject we were discussing before the break. Remember how we talked about the ways this mirrors your relationship with your mother, this profound sense of otherness?
The client snorted her impatience. She loudly drummed on the arm of her seat with her fingers and turned herself this way and that amidst much creaking of leather. I told you, she said finally. I don’t want to go into this again. I like not knowing where I’ve come from. I like it. Every child thinks it must have been switched at birth, these can’t possibly be my real parents, it’s all a big mistake. Well, I just happened to have more evidence than they do. Mine really aren’t my parents. I told you this a hundred times: I am not adopted! I have mysterious origins!
Dr. Schussler took in a breath and then released it. For several seconds, neither client nor therapist moved. They had arrived at last at the heart of the matter. But alas the hour was too far advanced. What came next were the softly murmured words with which every therapy session inevitably ends: Our time is up, the doctor said.
4.
So this was the mystery the patient wished to keep hidden: She was adopted! Improbable as this may seem, it was her adopted status, not her lesbianism, that produced in me the keener excitement. For my best friend while growing up, Paul Beleiter, had been adopted, a fact he had worn as a badge of identity. I was overjoyed to think of him! When we were fifteen, Paul escaped from our meager town. His parents had threatened to withdraw financial support if he did not prepare for a course of engineering; he shrugged them off as one would shed so many ill-fitting clothes. He moved into the rooming house of an old widower, then on to an existence all his own: Manhattan, a scholarship to a special high school of art, Greenwich Village, friends who smoked Gitanes, Jewish girlfriends with haloes of frizzy hair.
How I had longed to follow him! It was the time in my life when my ancestors had already put their damp hands on me. Any hope that I would not emulate my father was dashed (or nearly so) when I followed not his example (alcohol and pills) but the more elegant method of Virginia Woolf: into the river with stones in my pockets. I was appointed with my first mental health practitioner (she of the ivy trembling at the window). And there was Paul, already a man on his own terms, graceful and full of laughter, freed from the strict, brittle people who had raised him.
I was certain it was the adoption that had given him the courage. Paul was not adopted as one would say “I am Protestant” or “I am from Michigan,” but as a quiddity, an indwelling trait that set him apart from we poor, owned, claimed