clothes are sticking to my body like leeches in the most unfortunate places. Too damp to sit, I’m standing by the waiting-room chairs, wondering how I’m going to make myself presentable for work, when the door to Wendell’s inner office opens and out comes the pretty woman I’ve seen before. Again, she’s wiping her tears. She lowers her head and rushes past the paper screen, and I hear the click-clack of her boots echoing down the building’s corridor.
Margo?
No—it’s coincidence enough that she’s also seeing Wendell, but to have our weekly appointments back to back? I’m being paranoid. Then again, as the writer Philip K. Dick put it, “Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.”
I stand there shivering like a wet puppy until Wendell’s door opens again, this time to let me in.
I drag myself to the sofa and settle into position B, arranging the familiar mismatched pillows behind my back in the way I’ve become accustomed. Wendell quietly closes the office door, walks across the room, lowers his tall body into his spot, and crosses his legs when he lands. We begin our opening ritual: our wordless hello.
But today I’m getting his sofa wet.
“Would you like a towel?” he asks.
“You have towels?”
Wendell smiles, walks over to his armoire, and tosses me a couple of hand towels. I dry my hair with one and sit down on the other.
“Thanks,” I say.
“You’re welcome,” he says.
“Why do you have towels here?”
“People get wet,” Wendell replies with a shrug, as if towels are an office staple. How strange, I think—and yet I feel so taken care of, like when he tossed me the tissues. I make a mental note to store towels in my office.
We look at each other in silent greeting again.
I don’t know where to start. Lately I’ve been anxious about pretty much everything. Even little things like making small commitments have left me paralyzed. I’ve become cautious, afraid of taking risks and making mistakes because I’ve made so many already and I fear I won’t have time to clean up the mistakes anymore.
The night before, as I tried to relax in bed with a novel, I came across a character who described his constant worry as “a relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.” Exactly, I thought. For the past few weeks, every second has been linked to the next by worry. I know the anxiety is front and center because of what Wendell said at the end of our last session. I’d had to cancel my next appointment to go to an event at my son’s school, then Wendell was away the following week, so I’ve been sitting with Wendell’s words for three weeks now. Me: What fight? Him: Your fight with death.
The skies opening up on me on my way in today felt appropriate. I take a deep breath and tell Wendell about my wandering uterus.
Until today, I’ve never told this story from beginning to end. If before I’d been embarrassed by it, now, as I say it aloud, I realize how truly terrified I’ve been. Layered on top of the grief Wendell had mentioned early on—that half my life is over—has been the fear that I, like Julie, might be dying much sooner than expected. There’s nothing scarier to a single mom than contemplating leaving her young child on this earth without her. What if the doctors are missing something that could be treated if found promptly? What if they find the cause but it can’t be treated?
Or what if this is all in my head? What if the person who can cure my physical symptoms is none other than the person I am sitting with right now, Wendell?
“That’s quite a story,” Wendell says when I’m done, shaking his head and blowing out some air.
“You think it’s a story?” Et tu, Brute?
“I do,” Wendell says. “It’s a story about something frightening that’s been happening to you over the past couple of years. But it’s also a story about something else.”
I anticipate what Wendell will say: It’s a story about avoidance. Everything I’ve told him since coming to therapy has been about avoidance, and we both know that avoidance is almost always about fear. Avoidance of seeing the clues that Boyfriend and I had irreconcilable differences. Avoidance of writing the happiness book. Avoidance of talking about not writing the happiness book. Avoidance of thinking about my parents getting older. Avoidance of the fact that my son is growing up. Avoidance of my mysterious