Too Close to the Falls (15 page)

As my mother and I drove to Dr. Small's — I was as reassured by his name as I was impressed by Roy's amazing knowledge of how the world worked — she said, “Now just be yourself.” I nodded my red-bowed, pigtailed head as I sat next to my mother in her crisp linen suit, white eyelet gloves, and navy hat. I looked down at what felt like a foreign body decked out in my red plaid pleated
skirt, red tights, patent leather Mary Janes, and a white blouse with smocking and puff sleeves. My mother rarely took a stand on anything; however, this particular morning she refused to let me wear my cowboy suit, my holster, and my ten-gallon hat or my boots with spurs. I'd worn them every other day, and all I usually had to do was make a little fuss and my mother would relent on the dress and the matching socks she had so carefully laid out on my black rocking chair. Often the outfit was accompanied by what she vainly hoped was the ultimate enticement — a matching hair band. However, today she stuck to her guns and made me don this “Heidi goes to the psychiatrist” ensemble.

As we drove past Hooker Chemical Company we quickly rolled up the windows or else we knew our eyes would start smarting by the time we hit the Grand Island Bridge. While I was baking in the car, my mother chose this airtight moment to drone on: “Dr. Laughton has written a referring letter to Dr. Small, but if I were you I'd be sure to tell him that you never
meant
for Anthony to be hospitalized, and he fainted from the sight of blood and hit his head.”

I nodded. Trying to add a tad of levity, I said, “If Anthony McDougall turns out to be brain-damaged from the fall, who could tell?”

My mother said, “Well, for heaven's sake, don't say
that
. . . .” She shook her head as though she were only beginning to realize what a genetic mutant she had produced. I could see her apprehension heating up until she finally managed to spill out, “Also . . . I don't think it's worth mentioning the whole episode where you thought the RCA Victor television was talking to you. I don't think everyone needs to know all our business.” As she paid the parking lot
attendant, my mother's hand shook, and she dabbed little tears from the inner corners of her sunglasses, saying her allergies were bothering her.

The waiting room had no receptionist or nurse and I wondered what kind of show this Small guy was running. We each picked up our respective
Life
magazines; my mother chose “What To Do About Germ Warfare?” and I chose an issue with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis splayed on the cover — they were jumping in the air with their hands covering their ears and their mouths were frozen in donut o's in terrified screams as though someone was sending electric currents through their brains. As I began browsing the article entitled “America's Most Successful Comedy Team,” I snuck glances at the motley crew around me. I made the mistake of catching the unblinking eye of some kid who looked as though he was raised in an incubator, and still looked half-baked. He wore his corduroy pants high up on his chest in a kind of princess waistline with a big belt. He caught what I thought was one of my most extremely furtive glances and said, “What's your name?” sounding like a 78 record playing at 33. As soon as I said, “Cathy,” he said, “Cathy, what's your name?” Not having a long fuse, I repeated my name with some irritation, and then he said it twice: “Cathy, Cathy, what's your name? Cathy, Cathy, what's your name?” His mother just kept looking at her
Life
magazine cover with a cheerful teenage girl and boy sailing entitled “Discovering the Fun of Being Pretty.” My mother kept looking at her magazine as well, so I said, “Forget it.” He continued in his staccato blast, “Cathy, what's your name? Forget it, forget it.” And on it went.

Another boy sat there picking tiny pieces of invisible lint off his pants. His lips were all dry and peeling. Eventually we all ignored
the parrot boy who wouldn't stop. There was another boy about thirteen years old who looked more normal than the other two. His mother had her hair done in one of those teased French twists coated with multi layers of hairspray that looked as though it housed spiders who burrowed and laid eggs in her brain before she ever washed it. She was furiously ripping out something from a magazine with Jack Paar on the cover. Her son spoke only once and that was to tell his mother that he had to use the washroom. She replied, “Well, you should have thought of that at home, shouldn't you,” and continued ripping from her
Saturday Evening Post
. My mother and I exchanged glances over that one.

Finally Dr. Small, holding a manila folder, poked his head out of the door and called me in. He was fairly short with dark curly hair and glasses, but he didn't have a foreign accent. He folded his hands on his desk in front of his minuscule clock and didn't say anything for some time. I guess he was
looking
to see if I was sane. I wanted to be careful not to pick at any lint or repeat what he said. Finally, I began to wonder if I was supposed to talk on my own and tell him what had happened, but I didn't want to display any insanity. Since I wanted to make up to my mother for dragging her on this torturous excursion, I decided to follow her advice to the letter. The first thing I did was to tell Dr. Small that I never meant to hospitalize Anthony with a concussion, that he fainted from the sight of blood. Then I told him there was no point in going into the RCA Victor talking-television episode. Now that I'd cleared the decks, I could relax.

Dr. Small never alluded to the “Anthony episode” but began asking about my family. I told him the truth, that I didn't really have a family, just a mother and father. When he asked if they ever
fought, I told him they never once raised their voices. He said that was very “unusual.” The way he said the word
unusual
, I felt he was hinting that it might be insane. Then he wanted to know how my parents punished me. I wondered what he meant by
punishment
. If they never got angry, how could they punish me — for what? Then he suggested that possibly I'd forgotten it. He said that maybe when my parents got mad at me it was too frightening to remember. I couldn't argue with that.

Then he switched tactics and said it must be nice to live in such a pleasant home, and I assured him that it was. He then asked me what I did with my free time and I told him that I worked sixty hours a week in the summer and twenty hours during the school year. He seemed to think this was unusual, which he indicated by lifting one eyebrow and nodding slightly, so I told him it was doctor's orders. I then assured him that he would be receiving a letter from Dr. Laughton telling him I had a different metronome from other people and I needed to keep busy. When he said he had received the letter, I just stared at him — why was he asking me, then?

Then he asked me what my mother and I did together, and I told him that we watched
Queen for a Day
on television, and then we went to Schoonmaker's Restaurant together. He said, as though I had trouble following his simple question, “I don't mean what do you do on
special
days, what do you do on
most
days?” I told him we went to Schoonmaker's most days except for Ed Sullivan night and then we ate leftover food from the brunch at Schneider's after twelve-o'clock mass. He asked why we ate at a restaurant and I told him we enjoyed ourselves. Clearly not finding this a fruitful line of questioning for uncovering insanity,
he moved on. When he asked if I helped my mother clean, I said she didn't clean because Dolores did it, and besides my mother had to work on her emerging African nations papers. He asked me if anything frightening ever happened to me, and I decided to leave Roy out of the entire conversation in case Dr. Small put two and two together and figured out that Roy had masterminded “the Anthony episode.” I didn't tell about the death of the baby at Mad Bear's, the ice storm, or the time Trent McMaster lost his fingers when we dared him to sled on the whirlpools. I didn't tell about Franky Schmidt, who made us do daring feats to be members of the Bloods. I had learned “remorse” was the key issue, and I didn't want to look as though I was woefully lacking in it. Since I actually had no idea which one of these events showed lack of remorse, I steered clear of them all.

Then he asked me, if there was one thing about myself or my life that I could change what would it be. I was stumped. I felt my life was just great. I thought long and hard and finally just to fill the silence I said that I wished that I could be better and that I wished I had no sins to confess in confession and that I really wished Mother Agnese and Sister Immaculata would appreciate me in the same way people from my home and the drugstore cared for me. I was surprised when I heard myself saying this. As I heard the words coming out of my mouth they sounded a little shaky, as though they'd come from someone who lived inside my heart, but rarely made an appearance. You could have knocked me over with a feather as stinging tears started to pool in my eyes but, thank God, they didn't spill over.

Dr. Small said in a quiet voice that maybe my mother and father never corrected me because they were afraid of me. I asked
him if he really thought that God, who designed a whole universe to work perfectly, would give children to parents who didn't know how to take care of them. Usually bringing God up was a perfect shield, but Dr. Small didn't seem fazed, and then came at me with the following curve ball: Did I ever wonder if other employees at work never corrected me because I was the boss's daughter? After all, they'd had to look after me since I was four. This was the most hurtful thing anyone had ever said to me. I had grown up with people at work, and felt I had always carried my own weight and they were like a family to me. It had never occurred to me that they had ulterior motives for liking me, or that Roy had been babysitting me instead of working with me, until horrible Dr. Small planted that seed. I looked right at him and said that I guessed he believed that if I was really bad or
insane
(at this point I decided to let it all hang out), my parents, who for some reason had no idea how to be parents, would be the last to notice bad behaviour, and the other workers at the store wouldn't correct me because I was the boss's daughter. So I guess the only people who were able to tell me
the truth
about me would be Mother Agnese or Sister Immaculata.

Dr. Small looked surprised that I had interpreted him this way, and he said that he was just trying to tell me that he saw my dilemma. He said I wasn't a child at home or at work and I had no rules in either place. It must have been hard at school for the teachers to impose childhood rules on me, and hard for me to accept them when I felt they didn't apply to me. He said he was only trying to sympathize with me and see things from my point of view. (Yeah, right, Buddy. I didn't usually feel this bad with so much sympathy.) That was the end of my cooperation with him.
Even Mother Agnese didn't come up with this kind of below-the-belt stuff. I simply stared at him steely-eyed until the end of the session.

He tried to weasel back into my good graces, but I'd permanently decamped. When he said it was time to go, I just sat there waiting for him to write my “sane certificate.” To my shock he booked another appointment for “testing.” I had no idea there was a “sanity test.” He called my mother in and I remember what he said verbatim, since I was already in shock that I was not leaving with my sane certificate. I felt like leaping over his wide desk with his hideous family picture (his wife wore her hair piled on top of her head and looked like Bullwinkle) and stabbing him in the heart with an oversize compass — just in case he thought the only dangers were on the streets of New York. He said that he was sure my mother had been worried about me and he could certainly see that I had “a temper” which could lead to “complications.” He continued, “Both Catherine and I believe that she needs more limits at home and some more time with female playmates.”

What a liar! I began swinging my patent leather feet in rage while my mother looked totally nonplussed. She never said that I had a
job
with
responsibilities
and people
counted
on me to get things done, or that I had no desire to make tiny hard cakes from the Betty Crocker junior baking set with Judy and Susie Baker. Instead, she acted like this guy was the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost wrapped up in one. Stunned, I sat there like a lump of petrified wood as I heard my mother, the blue-linen turncoat, say, “Oh yes, Doctor, that is something my husband and I discussed, and we agreed on both of these suggestions.” She lowered her voice and continued, “After the Anthony episode happened. It is
just that she seemed so independent and happy that we left things too much alone.”

The next two weeks of my life were unremittingly hellish. When not at work my mother arranged to have my neighbours, the Baker sisters, come over to “play” nearly every day. The first day they brought their Lennon Sisters paper-doll set. Although it was a beautiful morning with the river running, the lilacs in bloom, the magnolia buds strewn on the lawn like giant confetti, I was a prisoner in my own home.