Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind (12 page)

 

 

eight

The patient had said she was allergic to cats. So Dr. Berman had picked Lily up and brought her to the kitchen and told the housekeeper to keep her there. Lily, blue-gray with green eyes, with long silken fur, a languid walk and a manner of sleeping, constantly sleeping, that made it clear that her dreams were comfortably primal.

Also she was incapable of breaking confidentiality, so she could stretch out on the windowsill across from the couch and never blush, or wince or weep.

The patient had the two o'clock hour three times a week. Before the bell rang, Dr. Berman removed the blue velvet cushion she kept on the patient's chair. This patient required the entire space for her body. In fact it would be fair to say that the patient required an even wider chair than could be found in any showroom, any catalogue in the known universe.

The patient, Edith Forman, had been born with large bones and wide hands and feet and eyes the color of the Caribbean Sea at sunrise. She had tended toward plumpness as a child, a small tire of fat had encircled her midriff, but she was always in the middle of games, jump rope, tag, hide-and-seek and her smile was wide and winning even through the years when her teeth made appearances and disappearances, crashed into each other, and spread too far apart. Her father spoke of her as a beauty. Her mother brushed and braided her hair each morning before she left for work.

Edith had no explanation for it, the hunger that had come on her with her first period, the hunger that brought weight to her thighs and broadness to her waist, and ruined her face as her eyes seemed to shrink and her features thickened and coarsened. The first diet worked for a while but then it didn't. The diet camp for overweight teenagers brought about a miracle loss of twenty pounds regained before Halloween. It wasn't even hunger anymore that prompted Edith to store under her bed packages of cookies and boxes of chocolate candy shaped like the shells of the sea. Perhaps it had never been hunger, but rather an intolerable vacancy, an emergency of hollowness. Could the body confuse itself with a sinkhole in a desolate swamp?

She loved to cook, she appreciated the smells of warm butter, the different olive oils, the spices cardamom and cinnamon and garlic and pepper and the stirring and the boiling. She made meals for her friends but often was too embarrassed to join them as they ate. She would spoon a small portion onto her plate and then push it around from side to side. Later when she was cleaning up, later when the plates waited in the sink, she would scrape everything left over, bitten into, mashed, sliced, stained, into a bowl and eat it all, in happy privacy, in tormented gluttony, in fear of what monster lived within her and sometimes would not rest until she had eaten everything in the cabinet, and the refrigerator and the pistachio nuts she kept in a bin on a top shelf in the hall closet.

Sweating, panting, tearful, she would go to bed, her large form tossing and turning, her stomach stretched, her bowels tight, her shame covering her, inflaming the sores between her legs that came from the chafed flesh that surrounded her vagina.

She was not yet thirty although it would have been hard to tell her age. Why had this happened to her? Could she ever be different? Should she have an operation? Could a knot in her intestines bring her happiness? These were the questions she wanted to explore with Dr. Berman. She was afraid of dying on the operating table. It was a small statistical possibility but not one she had invented. She had a dream in which she lay stretched out on an operating table, her hair under a blue nylon cap, her mouth filled with tubes, her arms stuck with needles and the doctors around the table still as statues under the stark light above and there was no sound in the room, only the beginning of bacterial decay, an audible tinkling of many tiny mouths, a feast beginning for the creatures of the coffin, who were multiplying in her extended lifeless gut.

Dr. Berman herself thought she would rather be dead than look like Edith, than feel like Edith, but then she knew herself well, vanity was not one of her more attractive qualities and vanity had its own problems which should all be put aside to help Edith, but Dr. Berman knew the odds were not with her, and God, the girl was frightfully huge, like something from a fairy tale written by the Brothers Grimm centuries ago.

Maybe a small tilt of a dented molecule in a gene that should have stood upright next to its neighbors had fallen just a fraction away so that Edith's appetite lost its regulator and a hole was created in the DNA that would spoil the blue-green eyes, the brain that could remember whole stanzas of
Paradise Lost
and the large-boned feet that if not for that tilting gene might have danced in the arms of a beloved night after night.

Had biology done Edith dirt or was it the unintended harm that is passed on generation to generation, mothers that ignore a baby when it cries, fathers that do not admire the miracle of life they have created, nannies that do their jobs with their minds on the rent they owe or the men or children who claim their own right to comfort against the pains of the stomach or the ear or the fear of the dark.

Was she abused by a father or an uncle? Dr. Berman favored the abuse theory. She saw incest as the Jack who would, menacing clown face and all, jump up on his rusty coiled wire if you just keep winding the little arm on the side of his tin box long enough. More usually, incest was only a wish, a wish as common as dandruff and tooth decay. But in addition to a wish it was sometimes an act, committed in the dark, under the sheets, a violation of the natural order, a thumb in the eye of morality, a stone thrown at the dignity and grace of the human family.

But Edith kept insisting her father would never harm her. He was not as willing as she would have liked to play Monopoly with her on Saturday afternoons. He was attached to his golf bag as if it were a third arm. Fifteen-inch yellow lined pads often emerged from his briefcase and he shut his study door and no one was allowed to disturb him when he worked after dinner, but he didn't, and Dr. Berman probed very gently, never had, touched Edith, in a way a father shouldn't. Nor had anyone else.

Or so Edith insisted. Provisionally Dr. Berman had accepted that Edith was not violated literally. But then what?

Sooner or later Edith would be able to tell her. First would come trust, and then would come passion and Edith would grow afraid that Dr. Berman might disappear from her life and she needed Dr. Berman who had promised nothing but in the act of accepting her as a patient had promised everything. She required Dr. Berman to answer her bell and sit opposite her again and again: no, not an imaginary Dr. Berman but the real one in the chair opposite her. Only if she were there, could Edith speak whatever it was she needed to speak, when she was ready, if she could.

Edith had a high voice, girlish, lovely especially if you didn't look at her as she spoke. She was immaculately clean, her nails were bright red and perfectly oval and she smelled of pine soap and oil that you purchased in health food stores. She had trouble rising from her chair at the sessions' end and she would hang on to the arm for support and her knee joints, burdened by folds of fat, creaked and strained.

Dr. Berman thought about Edith's heart beating underneath the pounds of breast tissue, muscle, fat from the abdomen pushing upwards. She thought about how hard it would be to do an autopsy on Edith. She forced the image out of her mind because it made her anxious. Edith was dying. But so is everyone alive, she told herself, including me: a fact so unbelievable she didn't even try to believe it.

Edith's dreams were nightmares and they often took place in the belly of a whale. She had explained to Dr. Berman that she had seen
Pinocchio
at a friend's birthday party when she was just starting school. She would never tell a lie, she said. She was a child with perhaps an exaggerated sense of honor. Did you want to be a real boy? asked Dr. Berman, who knew the answer to her question.

No, said Edith, I wanted to be a whale. And then she sat there, glaring, her jaw that folded into her neck set in a rigid line.

Dr. Berman wished she liked Edith better. She wished she could find something in her that made her try harder, push further.

In her nightmares Edith was sometimes very small, so small she could disappear down the sink drain if she fell over the edge. In her nightmares Edith sometimes opened her legs and swarms of herring flowed out over her thighs.

Without herring, millions of herring, all the other fish in the sea would die, the food chain would be completely destroyed, Edith told that fact to Dr. Berman who had never liked herring, too salty.

Edith had a recipe she had invented herself for fettuccine and capers. She printed it out and gave it to Dr. Berman. Dr. Berman would only eat pasta on rare occasions and she never cooked herself.

Does she want me to get fat? thought Dr. Berman.

Narcissism, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disturbance, all these nasty conditions were possible in the matter of Edith, but none of them fit exactly. That was because the slippery soul was very good at evading the doctor's diagnostic kit. Dr. Berman considered that Edith suffered from several pathologies at once, like a patchwork quilt she had once had as a child, made up of all the fabrics of old discarded dresses.

And then she considered the Sleeping Beauty theory, the one she would never have presented to her students at the institute or mentioned to a colleague. Objective proof, scientific testing was impossible. No grant would be forthcoming to test this theory. Nevertheless Dr. Berman considered that the wicked fairy was the culprit. This was the wicked fairy that had not been invited to the christening party. What mother or father, king or queen would invite the dark fairy of the forest to celebrate their daughter's birth? But the uninvited, the shunned fairy came anyway and cursed the infant in its blanket and said that she would die when she was twenty-one, poisoned by a needle from a spindle. Sometimes Dr. Berman thought the only reasonable explanation for the grief before her was the dark fairy, who hadn't been invited because she was the dark fairy, who came anyway and cursed on and on until it was a wonder any infant was sheltered from her ire.

And when Edith couldn't sleep at night, when the last of the nature programs went off the air, when the lights in the buildings opposite her apartment were all dark and there were no sounds of cars on the avenue and only the changing red and green traffic lights promised the return of the world outside, Edith would often go to the window seat and sit there looking up into the sky, where she could catch the flash of a plane with its lights blinking in the darkness as it crossed the park headed for LaGuardia Airport or going the other way to places Edith would never go. She might write a few lines in her notebook . . . She would think of the passengers on those planes, sitting side by side, husbands, wives, children, heads resting on shoulders, knees touching, and the reality of her life, the singleness of it, would run through her, leaving her breathless, awake, and waves of anger would lap at the edge of her consciousness, and then recede.

Sometimes she sang out the window, show tunes, operetta, country music, her mood would change and she might fall asleep on her sofa. She imagined a man listening, a man who would fall in love with her voice, who would never see her, but long for her always: a man who spent his nights waiting for her to sing and his days waiting for night.

Edith wrote poetry. Edith read poetry. Those two acts do not always go together but in Edith they did. She had small black notebooks on her desk, poems titled and dated. She had a stack of books on a table that she reached for again and again. There was Sylvia Plath whom she admired for turning on the gas and not staying her hand. There was Emily Dickinson who knew everything that Edith knew and had not obscured the truth, and made out of defeat a victory no one could question.

There was Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. Eccentric ladies, ladies who loved women, ladies who knew what it was like to believe that the clock might be lying, and time standing still while they looked at their lovers sleeping beside them. There was
The
Aeneid
and
The Iliad
and
The Faerie Queene
and
Leaves of Grass
, and when Edith's mind seem ready to fly apart she could recite to herself Coleridge's “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree,” or Gerard Manley Hopkins' “The Windhover,”
I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
. . . Ezra Pound,
petals on a wet, black bough
, and the words would restore her, like ammonia on a handkerchief under the nose of a fainting girl.

There was H. D., who had a vision of cannons and soldiers and death that appeared in silhouette on her wall when she was living in Vienna while undergoing analysis with Freud. Her vision came before the war that came before the war that followed the war and caused everyone to believe that the Enlightenment was no more than one of Houdini's master illusions, a fraud in other words.

Edith wrote short poems, thin poems, graceful poems, airy poems, but they each contained a moment that trembled in the air the way a fallen leaf might shift in the currents of a brook. She copied the final versions of her poems into a small thin notebook with a glossy purple cover. There were three notebooks now on her bookshelf. There was also a bin, a laundry bin, holding the many drafts of each poem. She kept the bin in a corner of her room and covered it with a shawl she had bought at a street fair.

The notebooks were numbered and ordered. She knew the contents of each. She kept them near her bed on her night table so she could read them before falling asleep but she didn't need to open her notebooks. She could and did recite all her poems to herself whenever she wanted.

The time came when she told Dr. Berman about the poems. This was her darkest or was it her brightest secret. Some patients revealed fantasies of being whipped or thoughts of murdering their siblings or fears of sexual inadequacy or reported cruel deeds done in childhood. Edith's revelation concerned her poetry, which unlike her physical self could be hidden, kept private, away from prying eyes, mocking eyes, unloving eyes.