Break It Down

Therapy

I moved into the city just before Christmas. I was alone, and this was a new thing for me. Where had my husband gone? He was living in a small room across the river, in a district of warehouses.

I moved here from the country, where the pale, slow people all looked on me as a stranger anyway, and where it was not much use trying to talk.

After Christmas snow covered the sidewalks. Then the snow melted. Even so, I found it hard to walk, then for a few days it was easier. My husband moved into my neighborhood so that he could see our son more often.

Here in the city I had no friends either, for a long time. At first, I would only sit in a chair picking hair and dust off my clothes, and then get up and stretch and sit down again. In the morning I drank coffee and smoked. In the evening I drank tea and smoked and went to the window and back and from one room into the next room.

Sometimes, for a moment, I thought I would be able to do something. Then that moment would pass and I would want to move and not be able to move.

In the country, one day, I had not been able to move. First I had dragged myself around the house and then from the porch to the yard, and then into the garage, where finally my brain spun like a fly. There I stood, over an oil slick. I offered myself reasons for leaving the garage, but no reason was good enough.

Night came, the birds quieted down, the cars stopped going by, everything withdrew into the darkness, and then I moved.

All I retrieved from this day was the decision not to tell certain people what had happened to me. I did tell someone, of course, and right away. But he was not interested. He was not very interested in anything about me by then, and certainly not my troubles.

In the city, I thought I might begin to read again. I was tired of embarrassing myself. Then, when I began to read, it was not just one book but many at once — a life of Mozart, a study of the changing sea, and others I can’t remember now.

My husband was encouraged by these signs of activity, and he would sit down and talk to me, breathing into my face until I was exhausted. I wanted to hide from him how difficult my life was.

Because I did not immediately forget what I read, I thought my mind was getting stronger. I wrote down facts that struck me as facts I should not forget. I read for six weeks and then I stopped reading.

In the middle of the summer, I lost my courage again. I began to see a doctor. Right away I was not happy with him and I made an appointment with a different doctor, a woman, though I didn’t give up the first doctor.

The woman’s office was in an expensive street near Gramercy Park. I rang her doorbell. To my surprise, the door was opened not by her but by a man in a bow tie. The man was very angry because I had rung his doorbell.

Now the woman came out of her office and the two doctors began to argue. The man was angry because the woman’s patients were always ringing his doorbell. I stood there between them. After that visit I did not go back.

For weeks I did not tell my doctor that I had tried someone else. I thought this might hurt his feelings. I was wrong. In those days it bothered me that he allowed himself to be endlessly abused and insulted as long as I continued to pay his fee. He protested: “I only allow myself to be insulted up to a certain point.”

After every session with him, I thought I would not go back. There were several reasons for this. His office was in an old house hidden from the street by other buildings and set in a garden full of little paths and gates and flower beds. Now and then, as I entered or left the house, I glimpsed a strange figure descending the stairs or disappearing through a doorway. He was a short, stout man with a shock of dark hair on his head, tightly buttoned up to the neck in a white shirt. As he passed me he would look at me, but his face revealed nothing, even though I was certainly there, coming up the stairs. This man disturbed me all the more because I did not understand what his relationship with my doctor might be. Halfway through every session I would hear a male voice call one word down the stairway: “Gordon.”

Another reason I did not want to continue seeing my doctor was that he did not take notes. I thought he should take notes and remember the facts about my family: that my brother lived by himself in one room in the city, that my sister was a widow with two daughters, that my father was high-strung, demanding, and easily offended, and that my mother criticized me even more than my father. I thought my doctor should study his notes after each session. Instead, he came running down the stairs behind me to make a cup of coffee in the kitchen. I thought this behavior showed a lack of seriousness on his part.

He laughed at certain things I told him, and this outraged me. But when I told him other things that I thought were funny, he did not even smile. He said rude things about my mother, and this made me want to cry for her sake and for the sake of some happy times in my childhood. Worst of all, he often slumped down in his armchair, sighed, and seemed distracted.

Remarkably, every time I told him how uneasy and how unhappy he made me feel, I liked him better. After a few months, I did not have to tell him this anymore.

I thought a very long time went by between visits, and then I would see him again. It was only a week, but many things always happened in a week. For instance, I would have a bad fight with my son one day, my landlady would serve me an eviction notice the next morning, and that afternoon my husband and I would have a long talk full of hopelessness and decide that we could never be reconciled.

I had too little time, now, to say what I wanted to, in each session. I wanted to tell my doctor that I thought my life was funny. I told him about how my landlady tricked me, how my husband had two girlfriends and how these women were jealous of each other but not of me, how my in-laws insulted me over the phone, how my husband’s friends ignored me, and then how I kept tripping on the street and walking into walls. Everything I said made me want to laugh. But near the end of the hour I was also telling him how face to face with another person I couldn’t speak. There was always a wall. “Is there a wall between you and me now?” he would ask. No, there was no wall there anymore.

My doctor saw me and looked past me. He heard my words and at the same time he heard other words. He took me apart and put me together in another pattern and showed me this. There was what I did, and there was why he thought I did it. The truth was not clear anymore. Because of him, I did not know what my feelings were. A swarm of reasons flew around my head, buzzing. They deafened me, and I was always confused.

Late in the fall I slowed down and stopped speaking, and early in the new year I lost most of my ability to reason. I slowed down still further, until I hardly moved. My doctor listened to the hollow clatter of my footsteps on the stairs and told me he had wondered if I would have the strength to climb all the way up.

In those days I saw only the dark side of everything. I hated rich people and I was disgusted by the poor. The noise of children playing irritated me and the silence of old people made me uneasy. Hating the world, I longed for the protection of money, but I had no money. All around me women shrieked. I dreamed of some peaceful asylum in the country.

I continued to observe the world. I had a pair of eyes, but no longer much understanding, and no longer any speech. Little by little my capacity to feel was going. There was no more excitement in me, and no more love.

Then spring came. I had become so used to the winter that I was surprised to see leaves on the trees.

Because of my doctor, things began to change for me. I was more unassailable. I did not always feel that certain people were going to humiliate me.

I started laughing at funny things again. I would laugh and then I would stop and think: True, all winter I did not laugh. In fact, for a whole year I did not laugh. For a whole year I spoke so quietly that no one understood what I said. Now people I knew seemed less unhappy to hear my voice on the telephone.

I was still afraid, knowing that one wrong move could expose me. But I began to be excited now. I would spend the afternoon alone. I was reading books again and writing down certain facts. After dark, I would go out on the street and stop to look in shop windows, and then I would turn away from the windows, and in my excitement I would bump into the people standing next to me, always other women looking at clothes. Walking again, I would stumble over the curbstone.

I thought that since I was better, my therapy should end soon. I was impatient, and I wondered: How did therapy come to an end? I had other questions too: for instance, How much longer would I continue to need all my strength just to take myself from one day to the next? There was no answer to that one. There would be no end to therapy, either, or I would not be the one who chose to end it.