about high oil prices, lines at gas stations, the fear, the sense of the economic world as we know it coming to an end.
And what do you feel about all this? asked the therapist.
Come on. What do you think I feel?
Tell me.
Despair!
Do you think this has anything to do with what you learned from your mother?
A snort. Silence. Another run for the door.
Still she returned. Week after week she made her way to Room 804, the lodging of her psyche, where she successfully avoided any surgery to remove the knife she herself had thrust into her heart. At the next session she instead turned back to her problems with Charlotte, who kept calling the patient “a bourgeois” each time she tried to talk about her work, its difficulties, its challenging appeal.
(At least say “bourgeoise,” I thought, the female form, hating this Charlotte all the more by the second, if only for her ignorance of foreign languages.)
Do you ask yourself, interjected the therapist, why you stay with someone who so clearly does not accept who you are?
Yes, yes, the patient said with sighs. All the time.
But yet you stay.
Yes. I stay.
So I must bring this up again. Do you see how this mirrors your relationship with your mother? Did you not say that you brought up the subject of adoption—wanted to hurt her—because she will not accept who you are?
Right, said the patient. I did. Mother.
Suddenly an ambulance came wailing, its cry echoing between the buildings on our narrow street. Patient and doctor waited while the siren quavered away toward a distant corner.
Wonder what’s going on out there, said the patient.
Hmm, said the doctor. And in here?
You mean this room?
No. (A rustle of fabric.) Here.
Ah! The patient laughed. You mean inside.
She paused.
Inside me.
Once again she fell silent.
Horns blared in the street. The last seconds drifted away.
Until next week, the doctor softly said.
20.
But next week, the patient was late yet again. And as before, the minutes crept by, my anxiety rising all the while. Silence reigned in Dr. Schussler’s office. She had turned off the sound machine, then sat, waiting for her patient.
At exactly twenty past eleven (according to my watch), Dr. Schussler lit a cigarette and turned on the sound machine. What was she doing—giving up on the patient? Was she just sitting there with her Viceroys, enjoying a smoke, glad to have a free hour on the day before Thanksgiving?
For we had arrived at that time of year, the last week in November, and I longed to hear my dear patient’s voice one more time before the assault of the holiday. She had mentioned, buried amidst the evasions of the past weeks, that she was doing something she never did: going home for Thanksgiving. Surely, then, she would need fortification from her therapist before facing the question of her origins—for how could she not raise the issue, there, in the presence of her adoptive family, of her father, the man at the head of the table with the carving knives who will think “Catholic!” (she believes) each time he looks at her?
Why did she not come? And what time signature was Dr. Schussler following that twenty-after should signal the end of the patient’s allotted period? Would she be turned away if she should come now, or in ten minutes? I dared not leave the office for fear that Dr. Schussler might do the same at any moment, and I had not given up entirely my hopes for the patient’s arrival. So I was forced into a simmering uncertainty and sat immobile in my chair, afraid for myself and for the patient, for I felt we should not be cast alone into the madness of the holidays.
I am not certain what came upon me, but I was suddenly racked by what seemed to be hiccups, silent hiccups; tears welled up in my eyes; I began to shake all over, as if in the grip of a seizure. I panicked—was I ill? I looked at my wet hands and could barely comprehend why they should be so—such was my long divorce from the experience of crying. My nervous condition had always draped the world in too bleak a bunting to allow for tears, since true sorrow is impossible without the hope of happiness. And here I was—crying! I was so glad at the return of this simple human expression that my eyes immediately dried and my sobs vanished; and then I was desperate for the tears to come again!
In the midst of