White Bird in a Blizzard (7 page)

“You could try something else, ma’am. Something different. Shell pink. Or a light blue,” one of them offered.

But she just shook her head.

P
HIL HAS THE NAME OF A SHRINK WRITTEN DOWN ON A PIECE
of yellow paper—

Dr. Maya Phaler: 878–1675.

He hands the piece of paper to me.

“My mom’s been seeing her ever since my father split. She says it helps a lot.” Phil says this as he walks toward the stairs to my bedroom. He says, “You need to get your anger out.”

I follow him, holding my square of yellow.

Phil lies back on my bed, propped up by the pansy-covered pillows, and he looks, worried, at my ceiling. I sit by his feet and rest my hand casually on his ankle. There, the bone feels hard—a sharp rock slipped into his sock—but he moves it away from my hand as if I’ve pinched or tickled him. Then he rolls over and opens the top drawer of my nightstand, where I keep the cigarettes and condoms and contraceptive foam.

That foam is like something a virgin might find in her mouth one summer morning at the seashore. It’s immaculate, and smells like nothing.

But he’s going for the cigarettes, I know—a fresh, soft pack of Marlboro Lights—and he spins the thin cellophane ribbon around the top in one clean movement, like slitting a fish, but he hands it over to me when he can’t get a cigarette out, jammed together as they are, dry and white.

I scratch one out with my nails and pass it to him. When his fingers touch mine, I snag them and pull his hand to my lips. He has to sit up a little for me to kiss the tips.

I look into his eyes, and say, “Want to have sex?”

But Phil glances back at the ceiling quickly and falls again into the pillow, shaking his head. “No,” he says. “I want to talk about this shrink.”

It’s an excuse, I think, not to have sex, but I let him talk.

When it comes to talk, Phil isn’t much. He’ll pause, look soulful, pound a fist on his knee when he really means something, and you can see he means something, but what it is, well, that’s often lost in a fog of generalizations and half-finished sentences. Listening to Phil talk is a bit like watching golf on television. You see he’s got the moves, nice clubs, appropriate outerwear. You can tell when the sun’s in his eyes. You can see the pressure’s finally getting to him. But no matter how carefully you watch, you’ll never see him hit the ball, and you’ll never see it land.

This has never bothered me. Like my father, Phil is simple, and his inarticulateness goes with this like a sprig of parsley on a Salisbury steak. His monologues are full of vivid and amusing misstatements, the mangling of cliches. Once, complaining that his mother tried to do things that blind people should not attempt, like lighting candles at Christmas, he said, “My mother wants to have her blindness and eat it, too.”

I imagined Phil’s mother spooning blindness into her own open mouth like devil’s food cake. But without texture or weight. Bittersweet and rich.

Another time he said, regarding his father’s late support checks, that calling him in Texas wouldn’t help, it would just make the checks even later. “It’s a vicious circus,” Phil said.

When I asked if he thought that perhaps writing a letter, explaining their situation—the mortgage payment late again, the electric company calling—might help, he said, “I’m virtuously certain it wouldn’t,” looking martyred and older than his years.

First Phil bites his lip. Then he smokes. Then he says, “This is too much for you to deal with, you know, alone. This is, your mom taking off. It’s a heavy thing, you know. You need someone to talk to about this load.”

I wait. When he doesn’t say anything else, I say, “Is that all?”

“Yeah,” he says. There is a rope of smoke around his fist. He looks at it.

“Fine,” I say. “I’ll call the shrink. Want to have sex?” I don’t want to talk to Phil about my load. I want his skin to expand and contract like a human sack over mine.

He shakes his head no.

He moves his foot away from my hand completely, and I look down at my own feet, bare on the white carpet, peeking out of footless black tights.

Since I hit 122 pounds last month, I’ve started wearing
Flashdance
clothes. Little, loose skirts. Canvas shoes and bodysuits. A few weeks ago my father looked at me in one of these new outfits. He’d come downstairs while I was making toast for breakfast, the kitchen smelling like smoke and Wonderbread, and my father said, “Kat, you’re not doing anything, you know, to make yourself thin?”

“I jog,” I said. I shrugged, smiled.

But he looked worried, his face as long as a horse’s looking at my ankles, and I realized he must have seen a show about bulimia or anorexia. He must have thought I was gagging up breakfast after he dropped me off at school. Maybe he was worried that I would get thinner and thinner, until I became as unfindable as my mother, and I felt a stab of compassion for him, imagining my father alone in this house with the white shadows of his two invisible women. I remembered how, one summer, he’d taken a whole roll of photographs of my mother and me. “I want to show off my pretty girls at work,” he’d said, and my mother had agreed to pose with me in the backyard.

He had us stand with the sun in our eyes, squinting into his camera, and kept motioning us backward, to get us in the frame, until my mother finally got mad and said, “I’m not moving again.”

He took picture after picture.

But the film came back from the camera store blank.

“I’m sorry,” the clerk in the camera store said, “your photos didn’t turn out, Mr. Connors.” My father didn’t understand why. He insisted on seeing the blanks for himself, though it took the clerk a long time to find them in the wastebasket where they threw the bad prints away.

“Here,” he said finally. “You don’t have to pay for these, of course.”

“Of course,” my father said, but he stood looking at his envelope of blanks—bright, empty squares without us in them.

“All that trouble for nothing,” my mother said.

“Dad,” I said, and squeezed his upper arm, which felt surprisingly muscled under his blue blazer, “I just used to eat too much.”

He nodded. He said, “That’s what your mother always said.”

D
R
. M
AYA
P
HALER LOOKS LIKE AN ACTRESS PLAYING THE
part of a savvy, worldwise shrink, like someone pretending to be an expert on something she doesn’t know one thing about. I think of
Marcus Welby, M.D
.—an interview I saw once in
TV Guide
with the white-haired, grandfatherly guy who played that part, how he’d told the interviewer that people would routinely come up to him on the street and, instead of asking for an autograph, would ask for medical advice.

Dr. Maya Phaler even has a pair of silver spectacles dangling from a silver chain around her neck. Not like an old lady or a librarian, though. Like an actress, as I’ve said—as though the costume people decided she needed a finishing touch. A psychologist’s prop.

Blonde. Maybe fifty years old—but California blonde, like Phil. If it isn’t natural, if it’s a dye job, she’s gone to great trouble and expense to get it right.

Hers is a class act all the way. Even her shoes are dead-on. Psychologist shoes: black, low-heeled, but with tasteful little bows, also black, just above her toes. She’s wearing a two-piece suit the color of key lime pie, and the skirt is well above the knee, revealing slender legs, curvaceous calves—though, just above her right ankle, beneath the beige panty hose, I see a Band-Aid: A bit of recklessness perhaps? A woman in a hurry? This morning she must have slipped in the shower with a razor in her hand.

“Katrina?”

I say, “Kat.”

She’s looking at my insurance card: Although she charges a hundred dollars an hour, I’ll never see a bill. “Anxiety disorder” it says on my paperwork—(Is that what it is when you can’t stop smiling? Didn’t they used to call that joy?)—and it’s covered by the benefits my father gets from the board of education. Full mental health coverage—an attempt, I imagine, to keep underworked and overpaid administrators like my father from going nuts and busting up the place.

Though, as far as I know, my father has never seen a shrink.

Nor has my mother—

Though, clearly, my mother could be anywhere right now, doing anything. She could be visiting a shrink, or at a shrink convention, or studying to be a shrink herself, for all I know. At Harvard. Or Berkeley.

This is the way I’ve begun to think. Every morning I lie in bed and imagine the most absurd place my mother could be.

This morning, the Shrine circus came to mind, which led me to imagine my mother in sequins, brandishing a whip in a cage of yawning tigers. I pictured her going back to a trailer with a clown after the show was over, helping him take off his makeup with a blob of cold cream on a rectangle of Kleenex.

But when the makeup was off—that greasy frown—I couldn’t envision a face for my mother’s new lover. It was as if she’d wiped his face
off
with the makeup, and he was looking in the mirror for it as my mother filed her fingernails behind him. A clownish blank.

“Katrina’s a nice name,” Dr. Phaler says, fingering the chain that holds her spectacles. “You don’t use it?”

“No.” I shake my head too slowly—perhaps I appear despondent. With a lighter tone I add, “My mother wanted to call me Kat. She wanted a cat.”

Dr. Phaler doesn’t laugh.

“So, on the phone you said your boyfriend suggested you see me. How can I help?”

The question throws me. I hadn’t thought of myself as here for
help
. I’d imagined I was here to
defy
analysis, to banter wittily with a professional about my personal life until she managed to wrestle some kernel of truth out of my clenched fist, weasel some secret out of my subconscious mind. Remember
Spellbound
?

Surely I, too, had something extraordinary repressed, something Dr. Phaler was being paid a hundred dollars an hour to find—the way Ingrid Bergman forced Gregory Peck to remember how he’d slid down a banister into his brother’s back as a child and impaled him on a gate.

Gregory Peck held his head a lot during his long psychiatric sessions, trying to keep it in, twisting around in close-up after close-up, looking exquisitely tortured—all that guilt and grief—while Ingrid Bergman kept on needling him. Couldn’t Dr. Phaler do something similar for me, shine her professional flashlight to the bottom of that well, that quiet ice at the center of myself, where
my
guilt, or grief, or anger, or mother still was?

Then, I’d have a good long life fall of healthy relationships and mature responses to life’s inevitable ups and downs—spared all the psychosis and neurosis for which I am otherwise headed:

The frigidity, or nymphomania.

The handwashing.

The hair twirling.

The drive to fail, or the compulsive need to achieve.

Perhaps I could dredge my memory, the way Peck did, and make some room in there so I could
heal
, or
begin the healing process
.

Except that there doesn’t seem to be much dark mystery in there to dredge.

I’ve tried.

Over and over.

Night after night.

There must be
some
reason I feel nothing.

Surely it is not just that
I feel nothing
.

Surely I am suffering some exquisite torture, too. I am sensitive. I am good. Surely I am a victim of something, not nothing. I am not merely devoid of feeling, am I? I must be
troubled
. The troubled are everywhere. There are books and television shows and whole industries devoted to them—magazines for them to read, hot lines for them to call, uplifting magnets to stick on their refrigerators. They surround us, loving too much, crying real tears, confessing their sins and being forgiven.

But there are no twelve-step programs for people who are selfish, or heartless, or shallow, as most people seem to be. There are no Monday night movies about girls who aren’t troubled at all.

Instead, the girls on the Monday night movies are fragile, and big-eyed, and too sensitive for this world, and the bad things that happen to them bother them a lot. Their beauty is the beauty of suffering endured. You can always see their collarbones under the flimsy dresses they wear, and darkness gathers there.

But I have never been able to imagine myself in one of those movies. Until my mother left, my life seemed ordinary, and dull, and untroubled. No “funny” games with uncles. No vague memories of my father torturing my childhood pets. I never had any childhood pets. Just a glimpse here or there of my mother in a bathrobe, looking annoyed. A few dull family outings—my father with a fishing pole, my mother running after a paper napkin that got loose from the picnic basket and flew across the park. There was a trip out West when I was five. I had to get out of the car to pee in the desert and got red dust on my knees. When I climbed back into the car, I asked my father where we were.

“Death Valley,” he said.

I slept all the way to the ocean while a groggy wand of sun moved back and forth across my face.

I remember a beesting at Great Serpent Mound National Park one summer. A twisted ankle at the circus. A Jujube caught in my molar at the movies: I had to go to the rest room to dig it out.

Nothing. Less than nothing. A childhood without trauma. Who ever heard of such a thing?

Even now, I feel just lightness when I consider my life, even more lightness than ever now that my mother’s gone, as if I am carrying a hollow cake with me wherever I go, balancing it on a tray that wants to sail out of my hands like a kite in wind.

What can an analyst possibly analyze out of such a life?

But that’s exactly how it is in the movies: You resist all the lust and tenderness and terror, while your shrink ice-picks at you until your head’s been cracked.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess you helped Mrs. Hillman when her husband left—”