Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,143
and leave a message (to say what, I’m not sure. Hi, it’s Lori. I’m sitting in your waiting room. Are you in there, on the other side of the door, writing chart notes? Eating a snack? Have you forgotten me? Or are you dying?). And just as I was thinking about how I’d need to find a new therapist, in no small part to process my old therapist’s death, the door to Wendell’s office opened. Out walked a middle-aged couple, the man saying “Thank you” to Wendell and the woman smiling tightly. A first session, I speculated. Or the disclosure of an affair. Those sessions tend to run over.
I breezed past Wendell and took my place perpendicular to him.
“It’s fine,” I said when he apologized for the delay. “Really,” I continued, “my sessions go over sometimes too. It’s fine.”
Wendell looked at me, his right eyebrow raised. I raised my eyebrows back, trying to preserve my dignity. Me, get all worked up because my therapist was late? C’mon. I burst out laughing, and then some tears escaped. We both knew how relieved I was to see him and how important he had become to me. Those ten minutes of waiting and wondering were definitely not “fine.”
And now—with a forced smile on her face, her leg jerking like she’s having a seizure—Charlotte is reiterating how fine it was to wait for me.
I ask Charlotte what she thought had happened when I wasn’t there.
“I wasn’t worried,” she says, even though I said nothing about worry. Then something catches my eye through the large wall-to-wall window.
Flying in dizzyingly fast circles a few feet behind the right side of Charlotte’s head are a couple of very kinetic bumblebees. I’ve never seen bees out my window, several stories high, and these two look like they’re hopped up on amphetamines. Maybe it’s a bee mating dance, I think. But then a few more fly into view, and within seconds, I see a swarm of bees buzzing in circles, the only thing separating us from them being a huge sheet of glass. Some are starting to land on the window and crawl around.
“So, you’re going to kill me,” Charlotte begins, apparently unaware of the bees. “But, um, I’m going to take a break from therapy.”
I look away from the bees and back to Charlotte. I’m not expecting this today, and it takes a moment for what she just said to register, especially because there’s so much movement in my peripheral vision and I can’t help but follow it. Now there are hundreds of bees, so many that my office has become darker, the bees pressed up against the windowpanes and blocking out the light like a cloud. Where are they coming from?
The room is so dark that Charlotte now notices. She turns her head in the direction of the window and we sit there, saying nothing, staring at the bees. I wonder if she’ll be upset by the sight of them, but instead she seems mesmerized.
My colleague Mike used to see a family with a teenage girl at the same time I saw a couple. Every week about twenty minutes in, this couple and I would hear an eruption from Mike’s office, the teenager screaming at her parents, storming out, slamming the door; the couple yelling after her to come back; her yelling “No!” and then Mike coaxing her back, calming everyone down. The first few times this happened, I thought it would be upsetting for the couple in my office, but it turned out it made them feel better. At least that’s not us, they thought.
I’d hated the disturbance, though—it always broke my focus. And in the same way, I’m hating these bees. I think about my dad in the hospital, ten blocks away. Are these bees a sign, an omen?
“I once thought about becoming a beekeeper,” Charlotte says, breaking the silence, and this is less surprising to me than her sudden wish to leave. She finds terrifying situations thrilling—bungee jumping, skydiving, swimming with sharks. As she tells me about her beekeeper fantasy, I think that the metaphor is almost too neat: this job that would require her to wear head-to-toe protective clothing so she wouldn’t get stung and would allow her to master the very creatures that might hurt her, harvesting their sweetness in the end. I can see the appeal of having that kind of control over danger, especially if you grew up feeling like you had none.