She's Come Undone (37 page)

When what you said excited him, his hair boinged a little. “How should I know? It was like you just said . . . it freed me or something.”

Dr. Shaw took both my hands in his. “Let's suppose,” he said, “that we're at some crucial place right now, right at this second. I want you to visualize it for me. Let's say for example's sake that it has to do with the ocean. With swimming. With our work together. Picture it for us, Dolores. Are we about to break the surface, crash through to the daylight? Or are we about to take the plunge—to go under and explore the depths? Which do you see us doing, right here, right now?”

He waited. He wouldn't look away.

I figured it was safer to give him whatever answer he
wasn't
looking for, but I miscalculated—thought he wanted sunlight and breakthroughs.

“We're going under,” I said.

“You're sure?”

“Yup. We're taking the plunge.”

He closed his eyes and smiled. “Do you feel what I feel?”

His pleasure made me twitch. “How should I know? What do you feel?”

“That we're at the beginning of our real work together?”

“The
beginning?
What's all this other stuff been—jumping jacks?”

But sarcasm was a broken tool when Dr. Shaw got hopped up like that. “Do you know, Dolores, why you felt the urge to swim underwater—why that came first to mind just now when I asked about feeling good?”

“It didn't come first. I thought about the doughnuts first.” He looked disapproving. “Well, technically, I mean.”

“The water, your submergence: weren't you perhaps recreating . . . ?”

I shrugged.

“The womb?”

“The womb?”

He smiled and nodded. “Trying, perhaps, to reenter the safety of your mother—to return to the warm, wet protection of the person who hadn't yet failed you.”

“Failed me how?”

“By leaving you those times she was sick? By dying?”

“The womb?”

“It was instinctive.”

“It was?”

“Primal, really. Atavistic.”

He looked so satisfied with me.

“Look, just leave my mother out of it, okay? Besides, it
wasn't
warm. It was fucking freezing. When I got out of the water, I turned blue. I was
crying
it was so cold!”

“Exactly!” he said, slapping the arm of his recliner. “Why does a baby cry at birth?” Now he was up and pacing.

“I don't know. Because the doctor smacks it?”

“The baby cries because of the drop in temperature. From ninety-eight point six to room temp, a good twenty-five degrees colder. It's a shock. The shock of becoming! The chill of the life force. On a symbolic level, we could say you were midwifing yourself out in that water, couldn't we?”

I shrugged my fake indifference. “You're the boss,” I said.

“I'm
not
the boss.
You're
the boss. The incredible thing we just learned here is that you didn't begin your recovery here at Gracewood. You began it that morning out there in the ocean—long before I entered the picture. I'm just along with you for the ride.”

“For the swim, you mean.”

Dr. Shaw's infrequent laughter was an alarming snort of cheer that distorted his handsome face, turned him into Francis the Talking Mule. “For the swim,” he repeated with a hearty guffaw. “Yes,
that's right. The swim! Let's close now, Dolores. There are some calls I want to make—there's a doctor on the West Coast I want very much to talk to. I think we've covered some valuable ground here today. I think we've found some real direction. Don't you?”

“Perhaps,” I said. He didn't get the joke.

*   *   *

The next day he told me he was going to take his cue from me and reparent me—start from scratch because of all the inadvertent damage my real parents had done. “Together,” he said, closing his eyes to visualize it, “together, we are going to rewind your childhood and record over it.” He was always doing that: making my life seem like electronic equipment.

“Look, I told you before. Whatever this has to do with my mother, I'd just as soon we keep her out of it,” I said. “My mother was a
saint!”

He cocked his head to the side, slightly. “A saint?”

One of the things I'd withheld from him was Ma's flying-leg painting. That lost picture was the closest I came to believing in anything like heaven—in some kind of world that was calm and right. I didn't want him going anywhere near my mother.

“She's dead, okay?” I said. “Just leave her alone.”

“In my opinion, it's a mistake to keep playing hide-and-seek with this, Dolores. It's counterproductive.”

“Last time you said
I
was the boss. What was that happy horseshit about?”

He sighed and nodded. “All right,” he said, “all right, I'll try as best I can to respect your ground rules until you're ready to step over them yourself. Now I want you to go back to your room and relax. Tomorrow we're going on a rather amazing trip together.”

“Yeah, well, if it's Mystic Seaport again, forget it. I spent that whole last field trip bored out of my skull.”

“It's not the seaport, no. But it
will
be one of the most mystic experiences of your life. That much I promise you. Tomorrow
I
become your surrogate mother. You and I are going back to the womb.”

“Maybe
you
are,” I said. “Send me a postcard.”

He leaned toward me, close enough so that our knees touched. “I know it sounds a bit unconventional, Dolores, but I spent much of yesterday afternoon on the phone with a doctor in California who's had very good results with this approach. And I've spent half this morning battling the Freudians at this staid institution to gain permission . . . well, that's not the point. The point is that I believe what I'm proposing can really help you. But if you have misgivings—if you don't trust me enough to let me take you to where I think we need to go—then stop me now. Let me know right away and we'll travel a different path.”

He waited, his eyes pleading in some eerily familiar way. His face looked flushed with fever. “Okay, okay,” I said. “Fine. Don't have a bird over it.”

*   *   *

His excitement that session—the aroma of his mouthwash, the kiss of his knees as we sat recliner to recliner—made me catch a kind of fever, too. But in the dark of my room that night, I wasn't exactly thinking of Dr. Shaw as my mother. It suddenly occurred to me why his expression—that look in his eyes—had seemed familiar. It was that same vulnerable, pleading look of Dante's in the Polaroid pictures. (Another of my secrets.) Dr. Shaw had spent all yesterday afternoon, half that morning, on
my
case, on
me.
I lay awake, transferring his head to Dante's body . . . I must have been groaning when I came because Evelyn, the night supervisor, was there with her flashlight in my face before I was even through.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing. I just had a dream. About my mother.”

I smiled hard at her. Under the blanket I was still bucking.

*   *   *

You had to give Dr. Shaw credit for enthusiasm. The next night at the pool in Building B he almost killed himself on my behalf.

He came for me in the ward just before lights out, like it was a
date (that really rattled old DePolito!), and drove us to the other end of the grounds. I had to unlock and open all the gymnasium doors with Dr. Shaw's keys while he lugged a big reel-to-reel tape recorder and a jumble of extension cords.

He told me his plan as we sat at the pool's edge. I was going to start over pretty much as a fetus, he said, and grow up all over again, this time getting my life right. It might take six months; it might take six years. The process would be unpredictable; the rhythm would be more or less up to me.

As he spoke, I dipped my finger in the water and traced my initial on the pool apron. I kept doing it. By the time he was through, all the
D
's I'd made had become a puddle.

“Any questions?” Dr. Shaw asked.

I stared at the shiny water in front of us, scared of whatever might emerge. “Nope,” I said.

“All right then. Let's go.”

He hypnotized me first. “You are on an elevator, traveling down to the level of your subconscious,” he said. “I'll call out the floors and when I get to the basement, you'll quietly slip off your clothes and get into the water.”

We were somewhere around the fourth floor when I told him to hold it. “Can't we just do this with my clothes
on?”
I asked.

At Gracewood, nakedness wasn't such a big deal. You were always seeing somebody's ugly body or vice versa. Still, parading my flab and broken capillaries in front of Dr. Shaw wasn't exactly the same as having DePolito or Mrs. Ropiek check me out.

Dr. Shaw gave me one of his disappointed looks. “Do you not understand this, after all we've gone over? What are you, Dolores?”

“I'm a fetus.”

“And what's this?” His arm extended out to the pool.

“The womb.”

“And who am I?”

I was too embarrassed to look him in the face. “My mother,” I said.

“Right. Mother, womb, fetus. Do you trust me?”

I looked out at the still water. “Do you trust me?” he repeated.

I nodded.

“And does a fetus have an aversion to her own body? Does a fetus have any expectations whatsoever?”

I shook my head.

“Does a fetus wear clothes?”

I shook it again.

“Our elevator has reached the basement floor, an environment of trust. Take your clothes off, please.”

I eased bare-assed into the shallow end and waded out.

The bathwater temperature matched Dr. Shaw's tone of voice. When I was over my head, I closed my eyes and began floating.

It sort of half worked, for a while. I didn't seem to be in quite the same dingy pool with the missing wall tiles where they forced us to do calisthenics every Wednesday and Saturday morning. With my ears under water, with Dr. Shaw's voice blurring away, I
did
mislay my expectations. Fell back. Felt fetal.

It was his enthusiasm that wrecked it. “Ah, I'm quickening,” he called down to me. “My baby must be testing her little arm buds.” I would have preferred him to keep quiet. I was under two hundred pounds by then, but not that much under. My arms were still twin hams, not “little buds.”

“I wonder what my baby is thinking at this moment,” he called, rubbing his stomach with his hands. What I was thinking about was whether or not his being my mother was going to wreck my nightly friction ritual.

“There's something very special about the bond between a mother and her baby,” Dr. Shaw called out over the water. All this stuff about mothers made me think suddenly of Grandma. I imagined her walking in on Dr. Shaw and me. “It's not what you think, Grandma,” I'd explain. “I'm a fetus. He's Ma.” I knew just how she'd react: her jaw would unhinge itself; she'd clutch that purse of hers. Getting caught by Grandma made me slosh the water.

“My baby is very active this evening,” Dr. Shaw called down. “She's flailing inside me.”

He'd flail, too, if she was
his
grandmother. Now I was strictly myself again: fat Dolores floating in chlorine.

“Perhaps I'll play some music to soothe my baby.” That was where the tape recorder came in. I cocked my head out of the water and watched as he snaked out the extension cords, plugging one into another until the wires reached across the room to an outlet.

“Maybe some Dvořák. Or Mozart, perhaps.”

Ma called this “hotsy-totsy” music. Her own tastes ran more to the Ink Spots and Teresa Brewer.

“Music soothes the savage breast,” Dr. Shaw announced, then crouched to make the last of his electrical connections.

I was trying to visualize savage breasts when I both heard and saw the sizzle. Dr. Shaw was down on his knees, twitching and jerking. Then he curled up on himself and was still.

I got out and ran dripping past the arc and crackle of the extension cord that had landed in the puddle I'd made on the side of the pool. If he was dead, I'd killed him.

I wrapped my sweatshirt and jeans around my wrist and gave the cord a yank that sent it flying out of the socket. Then I inched over to him, still dripping, my hands clamped to the sides of my face. “Dr. Shaw? Dr. Shaw!” I turned his name into a scream.

Down on all fours, I slapped his face. Hesitantly at first—more of a tap than a slap. Then harder. Then hard enough to sting, to bring him back to life.

He blinked.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

He stared at me as if trying to recall who I was, then reached for my hand. I hoisted him up and led him over to the cement bleachers.

The pool water quivered before us. We sat holding hands, me wet and naked still. Shivering passed between us like electricity.

D
r. Shaw was the first parent who hadn't left me.

Or, rather, the first parent who had left me and then come back from the dead. His near electrocution opened up the floodgates and made him, truly, my mother. From the recliner in his office, I guided him around my parents' troubled marriage. From the edge of the pool, he guided me—swimsuited, after that first session—through my prenatal and toddler stages. “My little guppy,” he nicknamed me affectionately as I swam beneath his proud gaze. He saw me daily.

Early and middle childhood were my easiest phases. After a while, I asked Dr. Shaw to come down into the water with me. He declined my request the first several times, then one day gave in to my pleading. Seeing Dr. Shaw in his baggy plaid bathing suit wasn't the thrill it would have been earlier. I
had
come to regard him in a maternal way. We chatted and treaded water or glided together in underwater silence, swimming the length of the pool like mother and daughter sea creatures: a seal and her pup, a whale and her calf. I was happy.