The Sisters Montclair (32 page)

S
tella had been to Professor Dillard’s house once before for a departmental party.

It was in North Chattanooga, in a neighborhood of small, charming nineteen-twenty bungalows. On the morning after she found the odd scrap of paper in
Anna Karenina
, Stella parked in the street in front of Professor Dillard’s house and walked across the lawn. She stumbled once in the neatly-mown grass, catching her toe on a barely-submerged tree root. She had slept poorly the night before, awakened several times by a series of menacing dreams that left her groggy and irritable.

She followed a bricked path around the side of the house to a large wooden gate set in a tall hedge. A sign on the gate read,
Please Come In.

The back yard was shady and pleasant, a small patch of lawn surrounded by shrubs and trees of varying heights and shades of green. Across the lawn was a small carriage house painted yellow, like the house, with dark green shutters. Professor Dillard’s office was on the bottom floor, Stella remembered. An outdoor stairway ran up the side of the carriage house to the floor above.
Luke Morgan’s apartment
. Professor Dillard had told her Luke was away, spending the summer in New York with his parents.

She knocked on the door of the office and a voice called loudly, “Come in.”

Professor Dillard was standing with her back to the door, going through a large gray filing cabinet. “Hello,” she said to Stella, turning and indicating two chairs in front of the narrow desk. “Would you like some tea?”

“No. Thanks.” Stella was nervous; she could hear it in her voice which had a slight tremor and a touch of hoarseness.

The desk was very sleek and modern. It looked like a door laid over a pair of black trestles, open and small in scale. The two chairs facing the desk were closest to the door, Stella noted, a classic clinical setting. Subtly implying to the patient that should she or he have a freak-out and need to escape, the flight path was clear. A series of built in bookcases covered three walls of the office and on the fourth was a sofa with an Edward Hopper print hanging on the wall above.

“
Morning Sun,
” Stella said.

“Oh?” Professor Dillard said, closing the filing cabinet with her hip. “Do you like Hopper?”

“I think it’s interesting that so many of his women seem to be gazing wistfully out an opened window, as if they’re looking at something only they can see.”

“An interesting observation.”

Stella colored, aware that everything she said in this office would be construed in psychological terms. “Have we started already?”

Professor Dillard laughed. “Are you sure I can’t get you anything to drink? Water? Coke?”

“No. Thank you.” Stella sat down in one of the chairs facing the desk.

Professor Dillard smiled, letting her eyes rest on Stella. She sat down, leaning forward with her arms resting on the desk, her hands clasped in front of her. “I want to reiterate what I said earlier, Stella. If you’re not comfortable talking to me, I’m happy to recommend a colleague.”

“I’d rather not talk to anyone,” Stella said quickly. Professor Dillard continued to smile but said nothing. Stella sighed. “I know. A deal’s a deal. And I’d rather talk to you than anyone else.”

Professor Dillard opened a file on her desk and made a few notes on a notepad. Outside the window a hummingbird hung motionless above a box of red geraniums.

“You were very courageous to agree to this, Stella,” she said. “You seem to be a very confident, self-assured person. Tell me, have you ever seen a counselor before?”

“No.”

“We spoke briefly yesterday about you failing some of your classes. You’ve been a good student up until now. Can you tell me, from your point of view, what the problem might be?”

“You mean, why my grades have slipped?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t have any money. I have to work to put myself through school.”

“And how many hours do you work?”

“I don’t know. Twenty-four or so a week.”

“And where do you work? What kind of work do you do?”

Stella told her, embellishing the details of caring for Alice so that it sounded like a more demanding job.

“I see,” Professor Dillard said. “So you work one job?” She looked at Stella, who nodded in agreement. She glanced down at the file which Stella realized now was her school file. “And last semester you worked for awhile at a work study job and also at a coffee shop, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And how many hours a week did those two jobs total?”

“I don’t know. Thirty or forty, I guess.”

“So you actually worked more hours last semester and still managed to keep your grades up.”

“I didn’t work two jobs the whole semester. I had to drop the coffee shop job.” Stella shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Look, I’m under a lot of pressure,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like always having to worry whether you’ll have enough money to pay the rent or buy groceries.”

Professor Dillard glanced up at her and then back down at the file. “Actually I do know,” she said. She made a few notes on the pad. “But you’ve always had to work. It’s been like that for you from the beginning, hasn’t it?”

Stella stared at her. “Yes, I see what you’re implying. I’ve done it all in the past so I should be able to do it all now. I guess I’m just a fuck up.”

Again that slight, evasive smile. The professor put the pen down and looked up. “How would you describe yourself, Stella? Would you say you were an optimist or a pessimist?”

“A realist.”

Professor Dillard continued to lean forward, still smiling.

“A pessimist,” Stella said.

“So, when an unexpected problem crops up, how do you handle it? What are your coping mechanisms?”

“You mean, besides vodka?”

Professor Dillard picked up her pen and made a few notes. “Yes,” she said. “Besides vodka.”

“I don’t know that I have any coping mechanisms,” Stella said warily.

“So, the problem that has cropped up between last semester and this semester. The problem that has caused your grades to slip. Can you put your finger on it?”

“No.” Stella splayed her fingers, observing them carefully, waiting for Professor Dillard to fill the silence that spread out between them and, when she didn’t, Stella said, “I guess I’m just overly anxious. I guess all this time I’ve been keeping it under wraps and now I’m beginning to feel like I’m losing it.”

Outside the window, the hummingbird dipped its beak in the geraniums and then darted away. Sunlight fell in bright squares against the dhurrie rug on the floor.

“So, if you had to put it into words, do you think your problem might be a feeling that you’re losing control of your life?”

“I don’t know. I guess so. I guess there’s some of that.”

She scribbled more notes. “Well, you know there’s no such thing as a bad feeling or a good feeling. Feelings are just feelings. But I wonder if you can tell me how this problem – this sense that you’re losing control – makes you feel?”

“It makes me feel like shit. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep.”

“So, anxious? Depressed? Stuck?”

“Yes. I suppose so.”

“How about anger? Do you feel anger?”

“No.”

More notes. Stella began to feel like she was being skillfully manipulated, and there was a part of her that looked on and admired Professor Dillard for this. If she disengaged, she could see the professor’s handling of this session in purely clinical terms, like watching a training video. From time to time the little voice in her head would trumpet,
So that’s how it’s done
, as Professor Dillard circled back and smoothly elicited an unexpected response from her. After awhile Stella began to feel dizzy, as if she was being spun around too quickly. She found it harder and harder to muzzle herself. Professor Dillard asked her about her job, whether or not she looked forward to going to work every morning. She asked her about her fleeting moods, if she had ever read self-help books to try and lift her depression (Stella had read countless books but she downplayed this, embarrassed.) She asked Stella how she felt about change, did she set goals for herself? If she had a magic wand what positive changes would she make in her life? She asked Stella what she hoped to gain from counseling and Stella said,
To get out of having to take final exams
, and Professor Dillard laughed. Stella relaxed at this point, grinning.

And then swiftly, and without warning, she touched again on Stella’s job with Alice.

“You could probably make more money waitressing or bartending,” she said.

“I suppose so.”

“Then why do you stay?”

“She needs me.”

“So you have an emotional attachment to this woman?”

Stella hesitated. “I suppose so.”

“Do you see her as a mother figure? Someone who nurtures you and cares for your emotional needs?”

“No. I take care of her.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s old and infirm and she’s too proud to ask for help.”

“Why else?”

“Because she’s wounded.”

“Like you?”

Stella turned her head and stared out the window.

“All right,” Professor Dillard said, closing the file on her desk. “That’s enough for today. But I want you back here tomorrow morning at ten.”

“Tomorrow is Saturday.”

“Do you work Saturday?”

“No.”

“Then according to my calendar, you should be able to come every morning at ten except for Wednesdays and Thursdays.”

Stella gave her a long, slightly apprehensive look. “I thought this was going to be a once a week thing,” she said.

“We have a lot of work to do in a very short period of time,” Professor Dillard said, rising. “I’ll see you tomorrow at ten.”

It wasn’t until her third session that Dr. Dillard asked her about cutting herself. By then Stella had admitted that she was angry sometimes but that she rarely expressed it. She had told Dr. Dillard about living with Josh and her nomadic early life with Candy.

“In our last session we talked quite a bit about unexpressed anger,” Dr. Dillard said.

As she talked to Dr. Dillard, Stella could feel a slight shift occurring inside her. It was as if parts of her had been frozen, and were coming forcefully, and painfully, back to life. She felt dizzy at times, almost sick with the emotions that pushed through her. The denial was still there but she was becoming accustomed to touching it like she might worry a bad tooth.

“Why are you angry?” Professor Dillard asked her repeatedly.

“Because life is unfair,” Stella said stoutly. “You can’t control what happens to you.”

“True. But you can control your response to what happens. Don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. No. If I’m hit by a car and I’m lying in a hospital bed paralyzed from the neck down, what control do I have over anything?”

“Well, it seems to me you have two choices. You can lie there and abdicate your responsibility to yourself, or you can make a conscious decision to get on with your life in whatever way you can.”

“But I’m still paralyzed.”

“Bad things happen to people every day, Stella. How we respond to those bad things is entirely within our own control.”

Stella shook her head stubbornly. She felt irritated with Professor Dillard, her impartial, casual way of looking at things. Her insistence that life could be explained in a rational manner. A bit like Alice in that way, in her calm belief that everything would turn out as it should in the end, as if there was some kind of benign master force at work in the universe. “But sometimes you get worn down by all the shit. Bad luck just seems to follow some people around.”

“Do you really believe that? Or do you think some people’s perception is merely skewed? I think I’m cursed, therefore I am.”

“We’re back to that glass half-full, glass half-empty argument again.”

“Why are you so angry?”

No matter how many times she answered this question, Professor Dillard found a way to circle back to it, like a hound on the trail of elusive game.

“We’ve done that one to death, haven’t we? I’m angry that I have to work so hard when so many don’t. I’m angry that I keep choosing men who aren’t worthy of me.”

“What about your mother?”

“What about her?” Stella said warily.

“Aren’t you angry with her? You told me you were sixteen years old when she drove you to Birmingham and dropped you off.”

“She gave me $100,” Stella said. “Which is more than most kids get.”

Professor Dillard gave her a long, deliberate look. “But that’s not the point, is it? How did you feel when she did that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. Scared I guess.”

“Angry?”

“I don’t remember.”

Dr. Dillard made several notes. “And why did she do this?”

“We weren’t getting along. I wanted to go.”

“But do you think that’s something a parent should do? Abandon a child like that?”

“I wasn’t a child.”

“Emotionally, and legally, you were.”

Stella’s stomach bounced beneath her ribs like an acrobat. There was a bitter taste in her mouth, sharp and metallic. “She did the best she could. She had two other children at home to take care of.”

“But that doesn’t excuse her abandoning you, does it?”

“She didn’t abandon me.”

“When was the last time you talked to her?”

“I don’t know. A couple of months, I guess.”

“And did you call her or did she call you?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What about your stepfather?”

“What about him?”

“You don’t ever speak of him.”

“We were never close.”

“How old were you when he married your mother?”

“I don’t know. Nine or ten.”

“And how did you feel about your mother marrying?”

“I don’t remember. I was happy, I guess, that she’d found someone.”

Dr. Dillard switched tactics again and asked Stella how she would rate her happiness on a scale of 0-10.

“What? No negative scale?” Stella quipped.

This brought a flurry of note-taking from Dr. Dillard. She asked Stella,
What wrongs have been done to you that haven’t been forgiven?
She asked,
What relationship have you been in that you deem to be a failure?
She asked,
Would you rate your communication skills as negative, neutral, or positive?