“Perhaps I’ll play some music to soothe my baby.” That was where the tape recorder came in. I cocked my head out of the water and watched as he snaked out the extension cords, plugging one into another until the wires reached across the room to an outlet.
“Maybe some Dvořák. Or Mozart, perhaps.”
Ma called this “hotsy-totsy” music. Her own tastes ran more to the Ink Spots and Teresa Brewer.
“Music soothes the savage breast,” Dr. Shaw announced, then crouched to make the last of his electrical connections.
I was trying to visualize savage breasts when I both heard and saw the sizzle. Dr. Shaw was down on his knees, twitching and jerking. Then he curled up on himself and was still.
I got out and ran dripping past the arc and crackle of the extension cord that had landed in the puddle I’d made on the side of the pool. If he was dead, I’d killed him.
I wrapped my sweatshirt and jeans around my wrist and gave the cord a yank that sent it flying out of the socket. Then I inched over to him, still dripping, my hands clamped to the sides of my face. “Dr. Shaw? Dr. Shaw!” I turned his name into a scream.
Down on all fours, I slapped his face. Hesitantly at first—more of a tap than a slap. Then harder. Then hard enough to sting, to bring him back to life.
He blinked.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
He stared at me as if trying to recall who I was, then reached for my hand. I hoisted him up and led him over to the cement bleachers.
The pool water quivered before us. We sat holding hands, me wet and naked still. Shivering passed between us like electricity.
18
Dr. Shaw was the first parent who hadn’t left me.
Or, rather, the first parent who had left me and then come back from the dead. His near electrocution opened up the floodgates and made him, truly, my mother. From the recliner in his office, I guided him around my parents’ troubled marriage. From the edge of the pool, he guided me—swimsuited, after that first session—through my prenatal and toddler stages. “My little guppy,” he nicknamed me affectionately as I swam beneath his proud gaze. He saw me daily.
Early and middle childhood were my easiest phases. After a while, I asked Dr. Shaw to come down into the water with me. He declined my request the first several times, then one day gave in to my pleading. Seeing Dr. Shaw in his baggy plaid bathing suit wasn’t the thrill it would have been earlier. I had come to regard him in a maternal way. We chatted and treaded water or glided together in underwater silence, swimming the length of the pool like mother and daughter sea creatures: a seal and her pup, a whale and her calf. I was happy.
“Tomorrow is your tenth birthday, Dolores,” Dr. Shaw announced one evening as we breaststroked side by side. “My little girl is growing up. What do you say we take a trip to the store tomorrow and you can pick yourself a birthday present to celebrate your progress?”
“Excuse me,” I said, “but is this going to be an imaginary trip—one of those symbolic jobs?”
He laughed his mulish laugh. “A real trip! A real present!”
“Suits me, Mommy,” I said.
In the toy department the next day, the clerk, a middle-aged woman wearing a scowl and a smile button, watched suspiciously from her register as I pranced from aisle to aisle, ruling out Barbies and board games and the ant farm Dr. Shaw was pushing. Then I saw what I wanted.
“An Etch-a-Sketch?” Dr. Shaw laughed. “Okay. Why not?” He reached in his billfold and handed me a ten-dollar bill.
“Who gets the change?” the clerk asked. “You or . . . your fella?”
“Oh, he’s not my boyfriend,” I said. “He’s my mother.”
Her hand tightened into a fist around the money. “Dolores—” Dr. Shaw began.
“Oh, it’s all right. See, I’m kind of wacked out. He’s really my shrink but . . .” I could tell I was the only one of the three of us who wasn’t having a bird. “Oh, just forget it,” I told her. “It’s a long story. You don’t look like the kind of person who would get it, anyway.”
I began twisting the Etch-a-Sketch knobs during the drive back to Gracewood, even before I’d gotten the thing out of its cardboard packaging. “You know, Dolores,” Dr. Shaw began, “in the greater arena, in the world outside the hospital—”
“I know, I know,” I said, cutting him off. I was too busy watching the Etch-a-Sketch staircase I was creating with the flicking of thumbs and fingers.
At first, Dr. Shaw saw my Etch-a-Sketching as something deeply and wonderfully symbolic: my attempt to move forward linearly into a new and better life. I’d bring the toy to our office sessions, half listening to him as I twisted the knobs simultaneously; I was perfecting my curves. By the end of the second week, cursive writing had stopped being a challenge and I’d begun a series of seascapes: tropical fish, underwater plants, and mermaids, all bubbling together in harmony.
But Dr. Shaw began to lose patience. “I’d like you to put that thing down now so we can talk,” he requested on more than one occasion. One time he snatched it away from me and slid it under his recliner so that I’d speak. Another time he noted that the Etch-a-Sketch screen looked suspiciously like a television set to him and wondered aloud if it wasn’t some sort of crutch.
“Whatever you say,” I told him, twisting the knobs, not looking up. I enjoyed his disapproval. I was Etch-a-Sketching my way toward adolescence.
* * *
In the summer of 1973, I moved into Project Outreach House, Gracewood’s halfway home for the half crazy. Six of us lived there, not counting counselors and case aides. Anita, Fred Burden, and Mrs. Shea had jobs out in the “greater arena”; the other three of us got stuck cooking and grocery shopping and cleaning the house. I’d whiz through dishes and vacuuming each morning and then Etch-a-Sketch in front of the television all afternoon. Dr. Shaw and I were down to three sessions a week: Tuesday morning group, Wednesday morning one-to-one, and our Thursday evening swims. Chronologically, I was twenty-one years old; in the pool, I was twelve, a year away from being raped.
That was the summer Watergate preempted all the afternoon soaps and then became a soap itself. At first I was indignant about not getting my daily fix of “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” and “Search for Tomorrow,” but gradually I got sucked into the pull of those Senate hearings: the play of good guys against bad guys, truth against lies. My favorites were grandfatherly Sam Ervin and Mo Dean, John’s wife, whose platinum-tinted bun reminded me of Geneva Sweet’s.
My sessions with Dr. Shaw that summer were not going well: he kept wanting to talk about sex and I kept wanting to talk about Watergate. I’d start each hour with rambling speeches about Nixon and Haldeman and liars in general and he’d guide me back to the subjects of menstruation and masturbation and what I was feeling sexually that summer nine years earlier, when Jack and Rita moved into Grandma’s third-floor apartment.
One morning I entered Dr. Shaw’s office sputtering about Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary. “She has some nerve,” I railed, “expecting the entire country to swallow her bullshit about accidentally erasing those tapes. What’s she keeping his secrets for?”
Dr. Shaw steepled his fingers and smiled at me.
“What?” I said. “What’s so funny?”
“Oh, nothing. It’s just that I find your indignation interesting. Ironic, really.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I was sorry as soon as I’d asked.
“Well, you’re very hostile toward Nixon’s secretary. You perceive her as dishonest. And yet, whenever we get on the subject of your mother, you swerve in another direction. Blank out your own tape, if you will.”
“I do not.”
“You do, too. You’ve even set it up as a condition of your therapy—we’re not to criticize her. When it comes to the subject of Bernice Price, you’re a regular Rose Mary Woods.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“Uh-oh. There’s that angry word. Why are you angry, Dolores?”
/>
“I’m not angry. There’s a difference between lying to a whole country and having a little respect for the dead.”
“Oh?” he said. “Tell me about that.”
“Just forget it.”
“No, tell me.”
I stood up. “Don’t give me that know-it-all look of yours. I don’t have to listen to any of this.”
“Of course you don’t. You’re entirely free to—”
One of the most annoying things about Dr. Shaw was the air-controlled closer on his office door. It was impossible to slam your way out of there; the best you ever got was a cushioned hiss.
* * *
I considered standing him up at the pool the next evening, but decided against it. Dr. Shaw had ways of getting back at you. “What about Dolores?” he’d ask during Tuesday group at the outreach house. “Does anyone have any observations to make about her?” It was always Mrs. DePolito who led off, bulgy-eyed and yipping some accusation or another.
He was already in the water doing crawls when I got there.
“Hello,” he said, swimming over to me as I eased in.
“Hi,” I answered, barely audibly.
“I’d like to apologize for making you angry yesterday.”
I pushed off and turned over, floating on my back. In the quiet, I tried to recall any other time when he had apologized to me. For over three years it had been the other way around.
He floated up alongside me. “Ah,” he said. “This is nice, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you accept my apology?”
“I guess so.”
“Good. Because even when we argue, I love you very much. Do you know that, Dolores? Disagreements don’t alter a mother’s love for her daughter. Nothing does. Nothing alters that.”
“I know,” I said.
“I love you, Dolores.”
“I love you, too, Mommy.”
We swam for a while without speaking. Then, unexpectedly, he came up from an underwater somersault and said, “Now that you’re menstruating, it’s nice, because I can love you as a friend, too—as an equal. Not just as a little girl anymore, someone I always have to protect. We can talk more honestly now. Share womanly things.”
I looked at him but didn’t speak. I backstroked a little away.
I recalled what Jeanette Nord had told me long ago about the day she got her period: how her mother had taken her out to lunch to celebrate. Recalled, too, the night I got mine—that night Ma called Daddy a whore and he beat her up for it, slammed open the back door and sent Petey flying away. Sometimes it had seemed like she loved that stupid bird more than she loved me. Or that she couldn’t even notice me, could only notice Petey. When I came back from my wild bike ride that night, I’d wanted only to hold Ma, to help her, but I’d made it worse. Now I swam beneath the surface, eyes closed, and again saw her face as she noticed the bloodstain on my pink shorts—noticed my period even before I had. My bleeding had made her angry, had made her cry.
When I broke the surface, Dr. Shaw was there beside me. “You know what I want to talk about?” he said.
“What?”
“I want to talk about Jack.”
“Yeah, well I don’t.” I swam hard, half the length of the pool away.
“Oh, come on,” he said, treading behind me. “Don’t be such a fuddy-duddy. Admit it. Jack is gorgeous. His body is—”
“Shut up!” I said.
“Look, Dolores, I may be your mother but that doesn’t mean I can’t look at men and feel certain things.”
“Stop it, will you? Why are you doing this?”
“Because I’m a sexual person.”
I turned and faced her. “You’re a slut,” I said. “That’s what you are.”
“I am not.”
“Yes you are.”
“I am not. What makes you say that?”
“Because you are! You called him a whore and then . . .”
“Who? Who did I call—”
“Nobody. Just forget it,” I said, plunging down toward the bottom. But the trouble with going underwater was that you had to come back up.
“Why am I a slut, Dolores? Is it because after I got out of the hospital, I dated other men? I don’t think that makes me—”
“Who cared about your stupid dates? I told you to just forget it.”
“I don’t want to forget it. You can’t call someone a slut and then say ‘just forget it.’ Was it because of Jack? Because I liked to look at him? Fantasize sometimes?”
I willed myself not to answer.
“Dolores, I had absolutely no way of knowing he was going to—” She reached out for my arm but I yanked it away.
“Bullshit! You’re a fucking whore of a liar and I’m sick of it.”
“Why am I a liar? I can’t see why—”
“Because I figured it out, that’s why! Because I’m not as stupid as you think I am.”
“Figured out what?”
“I know what you two were doing up there while she was at work.”
“While who was?”
“Rita!”
“What were we doing?”
“Don’t play innocent with me. I could hear you.”
“What were we doing?”
“Dancing. Laughing. Fucking! Don’t bother denying it. I could hear the bedsprings. You let him fuck you whenever he . . . and then—”
“And then what, Dolores?”
“And then he— My feet! He kept touching my feet . . . and then he drove me out to those woods and he just . . . those dogs . . . How was I supposed to—I didn’t even . . . and it hurt and he just kept hurting me and hurting me. I was so scared and he just . . . and you!”
My arms, my fists, flew with anger let finally free. I lashed out at her, walloped her, smashed at her with the truth.
“All those things you used to buy me to eat and I’d eat them, sit up there in my room and eat them, swallow the truth, eat your dirty secret. ‘You’re too goddamned fat’ that old fuck of a doctor says to me while you sat out there—Get fat! Get fat! Get fat on your lies and I’m sick of it! I’m sick, Mommy! I’m sick!” My voice was a moan outside of me. “. . . Try and get rid of me. Make me take that physical and send me off to college the way I was and get rid of me so that you could . . . And then you just die, you just die and how am I supposed—well, I hate your fucking guts! So what if you died? So what? I’m not keeping your fucking secret anymore! I’m sick. . . . He hurt me, Mommy! He kept hurting me and hurting me, Mommy, and I’m not eating any more of your—”
I saw Dr. Shaw then. Saw him wet and shaken in the Gracewood pool. Blood dripped from his nose. A ribbon of blood floated in the water. He wrapped me in his arms.
I cried against his neck and he hugged me and took my shaking. I don’t know how long we rocked there like that, but my sobbing and trembling was gradually overtaken by a profound exhaustion. I felt more tired than I’d ever felt in my life.
“How are you doing?” he whispered, finally. “Are you okay?”
“When I came here, I was this fat . . . And now—”
“And now what, Dolores?”
“I’m empty.”
He hugged me, cradling my head. “You’re triumphant!” he said.
19
In the wake of my self-disclosure about Ma and Jack—during the year or so that followed my discovery—Dr. Shaw and I turned over and studied who my mother really had been: a fragile woman, a victim in many ways—of her mother, her husband. Of herself. She’d been wrong to aid and abet me in the way she had after the rape, to feed her own and my guilt, overindulging and tolerating overindulgence. But I came to realize that she’d done what she’d done out of fear and limited understanding. She’d been neither a saint nor a whore, but a fallible, sexual woman.
“You’ve made some remarkable strides thus far,” Dr. Shaw told me at the end of our session one clear morning. “How does that make you feel?”
My answer, a smile, had nothing to do wi
th happiness.
We tackled Daddy next. In those sessions that centered around my father, I began to notice a curious pattern: I’d be talking calmly about Daddy—or sobbing something or whispering it—then suddenly veer off into a memory of Jack.
“There’s a connection between the two of them,” I said abruptly one day. “Isn’t there?”
Dr. Shaw leaned forward in his recliner.
“Isn’t there?”
“That’s not my decision,” he said. “That’s your decision.”
For the next several months, he sat and listened as I wove an entire network of those connections, a kind of visualized rope ladder over the gorge of the two people in my life I still feared and hated most: Jack Speight and Tony Price. I told Dr. Shaw about the ladder and he kept leading me to the edge, coaxing me to step out cautiously. “How much do you weigh now?” he’d ask. “One-sixty? One sixty-five? The ladder can hold you. Go on.”
Eventually, I reached the other side of the chasm and understood the differences between the two men. I no longer hated Daddy: he had been a shitty father and a shitty husband—a man who’d made bad choices based on lust and coveting and then been too weak either to live with them or undo them. But he had not been a rapist.
* * *
In the spring of 1975, Dr. Shaw introduced the idea of outside work. “It’s a mail-order photo-developing company,” he told me. “You’d be developing people’s snapshots from all over the country.”
I was resistant at first, afraid of what was coming: the end of childhood, the end of his mothering. “I’d have to keep going over that bridge,” I reminded him. “Ride past the exact place where my mother died. Have that pushed in my face, twice a day.”
“We could work through that with hypnosis. I feel it’s time for you to engage outwardly. You can’t stay on this island forever.”
“You’re rushing me,” I said. “I’m only fifteen years old in the pool. How many kids my age have to work full-time?”
A van drove us from Project Outreach House to the photo lab, two towns over, one street away from the ocean. To my surprise, I only needed to close my eyes and do cleansing breaths over the Newport Bridge for the first week or so.