2015-08-21
967“At first I thought it was me… but now I know for sure: My husband’s trying to drive me crazy.”
Dr. Harry Bernstein nodded and, after a moment’s pause, dutifully noted his patient’s words on the steno pad resting on his lap.
“I don’t mean he’s irritating me, driving me crazy that way – I mean he’s making me question my sanity. And he’s doing it on purpose.”
Patsy Randolph, facing away from Harry on his leather couch, turned to look at her psychiatrist. Even though he kept his Park Avenue office quite dark during his sessions, he could see that there were tears in her eyes.
“You’re very upset,” he said in a kind tone.
“Sure, I’m upset,” she said. “And I’m scared.”
This woman, in her late forties, had been his patient for two months. She’d been close to tears several times during their sessions but had never actually cried. Tears are important barometers of emotional weather. Some patients go for years without crying in front of the doctors, and when the eyes begin to water, any competent therapist sits up and takes notice.
Harry studied Patsy closely as she turned away again and picked a button on the cushion beside her thigh.
“Go on,” he encouraged. “Tell me about it.”
She snagged a Kleenex from the box beside the couch, dabbed at het eyes. But she did so carefully; as always, she wore impeccable makeup.
“Please,” Harry said in a soft voice.
“It’s happened a couple of times now,” she began reluctantly. “Last night was the worst. I was lying in bed and I heard this voice. I couldn’t really hear it clearly at first. Then it said…”
She hesitated. “It said it was my father’s ghost.”
Motifs in therapy didn’t get any better than this, and Harry paid close attention.
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“You weren’t dreaming?”
“No, I was awake. I couldn’t sleep and I’d gotten up for a glass of water. Then I started walking around the apartment. Just pacing. I felt frantic. I lay back in bed. And the voice – I mean, Pete’s voice – said that it was my father’s ghost.”
“What did he say?”
“He just rambled on and on. Telling me about all kinds of things from my past. Incidents from when I was a girl. I’m not sure. It was hard to hear.”
“And these were things your husband knew?”
“Not all of them.” Her voice cracked. “But he could’ve found them out. Looking through my letters and my yearbooks.”
“You’re sure he was the one talking?”
“The voice sounded sort of like Peter’s. Anyway, who else would it be?” She laughed, her voice nearly a cackle. “I mean, it could hardly be my father’s ghost, now, could it?”
“Maybe he was just talking in his sleep.”
She didn’t respond for a minute. “See, that’s the thing… He wasn’t in bed. He was in the den, playing some video game.”
Harry continued to take his notes.
“And you heard him from the den?”
“He must have been at the door… Oh, Doctor, it sounds ridiculous. I know it does. But I think he was kneeling at the door – it’s right next to the bedroom – and was whispering.”
“Did you go into the den? Ask him about it?”
“I walked to the door real fast, but by the time I opened it he was back at the desk.” She looked at her hands and found she’d shredded the Kleenex. She glanced at Harry to see if he’d noticed the compulsive behaviour, which of course he had, and then stuffed the tissue into the pocket of her expensive beige slacks.
“And then?”
“I asked him if he’d heard anything, any voices. And he looked at me like I was nuts and went back to his game.”
“And that night you didn’t hear any more voices?”
“No.”
Harry studied his patient. She’d been a pretty girl in her youth, Harry supposed, because she was a pretty woman now. Her face was sleek and she had the slightly upturn nose of a Connecticut socialite who debates long and hard about having rhinoplasty but never does. He recalled that Patsy’d told him her weight was never a problem; she’d hire a personal trainer whenever she gained five pounds. She’d said – with irritation masking secret pride – that men often tried to pick her up in bars and coffee shops.
He asked, “You say this’s happened before? Hearing the voice?”
Another hesitation. “Maybe two or three times. All within the past couple of weeks.”
“But why would Harry want to drive you crazy?”
Patsy, who’d come to Harry presenting with the classic symptoms of a routine midlife crisis, hadn’t discussed her husband much yet. Harry knew he was good-looking, a few years younger than Patsy, not particularly ambitious. They’d been married for three years – second marriages for both of them – and they’d seem to have many interests in common. But of course, that was just Patsy’s version. The “facts” that are revealed in a therapist’s office can be very fishy. Harry Bernstein worked very hard to be a human lie detector and his impression of the marriage was that there was much unspoken conflict between husband and wife.
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Patsy considered his question. “I don’t know. I was talking to Sally…” Harry remembered her mentioning Sally, her best friend. She was another Upper East Side matron – one of the ladies who lunch – and was married to the president of one of the biggest banks in New York. “She said that maybe Peter’s jealous of me. I mean, look at us – I’m the one with the social life, I have the friends, I have the money…” He noticed a manic edge to her voice. She did, too, and controlled it. “I just don’t know why he’s doing it. But he is.”
“Have you talked to him about this?”
“I tried. But naturally he denies everything.” She shook her head and tears swelled in her eyes again. “And then… the birds.”
“Birds?”
Anotheer Kleenex was snagged, used, and shredded. She didn’t hide the evidence this time. “I have this collection of ceramic birds. Made by Boehm. Do you know about the company?”
“No.”
“They’re very expensive. They’re German. Beautifully made. They were my parents’. When our father died, Steve and I split the inheritance, but he got most of the personal family heirlooms. That really hurt me. But I did get the birds.”
Harry knew that her mother had died ten years ago and her father about three years ago. The man had been very stern and had favoured Patsy’s older brother, Stephen. he was patronizing to her all her life.
“I have four of them. There used to be five, but when I was twelve I broke one. I ran inside – I was very excited about something and I wanted to tell my father about it – and I bumped into the table and knocked one off. It broke. My father spanked me with a willow switch and sent me to bed without dinner.”
Ah, an Important Event. Harry made a note but didn’t pursue the incident any further at the moment.
“And?”
“The morning after I heard my father’s ghost for the first time…” Her voice grew harsh. “I mean, the morning after Peter started whispering to me … I found one of the birds broken. It was lying on the living room floor. I asked Peter why he’d done it – he knows how important they were to me – and he denied it. He said I must have been sleepwalking and did it myself. But I know I didn’t. Peter had to’ve been the one.” She’d slipped into her raw, irrational voice again.
Harry glanced at the clock. He hated the legacy of the psychoanalysts: the perfectly timed fifty-minute hour. There was so much more he wanted to delve into. But patients need consistency and, according to the old school, discipline. He said, “I’m sorry but I see our time’s up.”
Dutifully, Patsy rose. Harry observed how disheveled she looked. Yes, her makeup had been very carefully applied, but the buttons on her blouse weren’t done properly. Either she’d dressed in a hurry or hadn’t paid attention. One of the straps on her expensive tan shoes wasn’t hooked.
She rose. “Thank you, Doctor… It’s good just to be able to tell someone about this.”
“We’ll get everything worked out. I’ll see next week.”
After Patsy had left the office, Harry Bernstein sat down at his desk. He spun slowly in his chair, gazing at his books – the DSM-IV, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the APA Handbook of Neuroses, volumes by Freud, Adler, Jung, Karen Horney, hundreds of others. Then out the window again, watching the late afternoon sunlight fall on the cars and taxis speeding north on Park Avenue.
A bird flew past.
He thought about the shattered ceramic sparrow from Patsy’s childhood: What a significant session this had been.
Not only for his patient. But for him too.
Patsy Randolph – who had, until today, been just another mildly discontented middle-aged patients - represented a watershed event for Dr. Harold David Bernstein. He was in a position to change her life completely.
And in doing so, he could redeem his own.
Harry laughed out loud, spun again in the chair, like a child on a playground. Once, twice, three times.
A figure appeared in the doorway. “Doctor?” Miriam, his secretary, cocked her head, which was covered with fussy white hair. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Why’re you asking?”
“Well, it’s just … I don’t think I’ve heard you laugh for a long time. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you laugh in your office.”
Which was another reason to laugh. And he did.
She frowned, concern in her eyes.
Harry stopped smiling. He looked at her gravely. “Listen, I want you to take the rest of the day off.”
She looked mystified. “But … it’s quitting time, Doctor. I was going to -”
“Joke,” he explained. “It was a joke. See you tomorrow.”
Miriam eyed him cautiously, unable, it seemed, to shake the quizzical expression from her face. “You’re sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. Good night.”
“Night, Doctor.”
A moment later he heard the front door to the office click shut.
He spun around in his chair once more, reflecting: Patsy Randolph… I can save you can save me.
And Harry Bernstein was a man badly in need of saving.
Because he hated what he did for a living.
Not the business of helping patients with their mental and emotional problems – oh, he was a natural-born therapist. None better. What he hated was practicing Upper East Side psychiatry out of a study office. It had been the last thing he’d ever wanted to do. But in his second year of Columbia Medical School, the tall, handsome student met the tall, beautiful assistant development director of the Museum of Modern Art. Harry and Linda were married before he started the internship. He moved out of his fifth-floor walkup near Harlem and into her townhouse on East Eighty-First. Within weeks she’d begun changing his life. Linda was a woman who had aspirations for her man (very similar to Patsy, in whose offhand comment several weeks ago about her husband’s lack of ambition Harry had seen reams of anger). Linda wanted money, she wanted to be on the regulars list to benefits at the Met, she wanted to be pampered at four-star restaurants in Eze and Monaco and Paris.
A studious, easy-going man from a modest suburb of New York, Harry knew that by listening to Linda he was headed the wrong direction. But he was in love with her so he did listen. They bought a co-op in a high-rise on Madison Avenue and he hung up his shingle (well, a heavy brass plaque) outside this three-thousand-dollar-a-month office on Park and Seventy-Eight Street.
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At first Harry had worried about the astronomical bills they were amassing. But soon the money was flowing in. He had no trouble getting business; there’s no lack of neuroses among the rich, and the insured, on the isle of Manhattan. He was also very god at what he did. His patients came and they liked him and returned weekly.
“Nobody understands me, sure we’ve got money but money isn’t everything and the other day my housekeeper looks at me like I’m from outer space and it’s not my fault and I get so angry when my mother wants to go shopping on my one day off and I think Samuel’s seeing someone and I think my son’s gay and I just cannot lose these fifteen pounds…”
Their troubles may have been plebeian, even laughably minor at times, but his oath, as well as his character, wouldn’t let Harry minimize them. He worked hard to help his patients.
And all the while he neglected what he really wanted to do. Which was to treat severe mental cases. People who were paranoid schizophrenics, people with bipolar depression and borderline personalities – people who led sorrowful lives and couldn’t hide from that sorrow with the money that Harry’s patients had.
From time to time he volunteered at various clinics – particularly small one in Brooklyn that treated homeless men and women – but with his Park Avenue caseload and his wife’s regimen of social obligations there was no way he could devote much time to the practice. He’d wrestled with thw thought of just chucking his practice and working at the clinic full-time. Of course, if he’d done that, his income would have dropped by ninety percent. He and Linda had had two children a couple of years after they’d gotten married – two sweet daughters whom Harry loved very much – and their needs, very expensive needs, private school sorts of needs, took priority over his personal contentment. Besides, as idealistic as he was in many ways, Harry knew that Linda would have left him in a flash if he’d quit his practice and started working full-time in Brooklyn.
But the irony was that even Linda did leave him – for someone she’d met at one of the society benefits that Harry couldn’t bear to attend – he hadn’t been able to spend any more time at the clinic than he had when he’d been married. The debts Linda had run up while they were married were excruciating. His older daughter was in an expensive college, and his younger was on her way to Vassar next year.
Yet, out of dozens of patients who whined about minor dissatisfactions, here came Patsy Randolph, a truly desperate patient… a woman telling him about ghosts, about her husband trying to drive her insane, a woman clearly on the brink.
A patient, at last, who would give Harry a chance to redeem his life.
That night he didn’t bother with dinner. He came home and went straight into his den, where sat stacked in high piles a year’s worth of professional journals that he’d never bothered to read since they dealt with serious psychiatric issues and didn’t much affect the patients in his practice.
He kicked his shoes off and began sifting through them, taking notes. He found Internet sites devoted to psychotic behaviour and he spent hours on-line, downloading articles that could help him with Patsy’s situation.
Harry was rereading an obscure article in the Journal of Psychoses, which he’d been thrilled to find – it was the key to dealing with her case – when he sat up, hearing a shrill whistle. He’d been so preoccupied that he’d forgotten he’d put on the tea kettle for coffee… But then he glanced out of the window and realized that it wasn’t the kettle at all. The sound was from a bird sitting on a branch nearby, singing. The hour was well past dawn.
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At her next session Patsy looked worse than she had the week before. Her clothes weren’t pressed. Her hair was matted and hadn’t been shampooed for days, it seemed. Her white blouse was streaked with dirt and the collar was torn. Her skirt was rumpled, too, and there were runs in her stockings. Only her makeup was carefully done.
“Hello, Doctor,” she said in a soft voice. She sounded timid.
“Hi, Patsy, come on in… No, not the couch today. Sit across from me.”
She hesitated. “Why?”
“I think we’ll postpone our usual work and deal with this crisis. About the voices. I’d like to see you face-to-face.”
“Crisis.” She repeated the word warily as she sat in the comfortable armchair across from his desk. She crossed her arms, looked out the window – these were all body-language messages that Harry recognized well. They meant she was nervous and defensive.
“Now, what’s been happening since I saw you last?” he asked.
She told him. There’d been more voices – her husband kept pretending to be the ghost of her father, whispering terrible things to her. What, Harry asked, had the ghost said? She answered: What a bad daughter she’d been, what a terrible wife she was now, what a shallow friend. Why didn’t she just kill herself and quit bringing pain to everyone’s life?
Harry jotted a note. “It was your father’s voice?”
“Not my father,” she said, her voice cracking with anger. “It was my husband, pretending to be my father. I told you that.”
“Where was Peter when you heard him?”
She studied a bookshelf. “He wasn’t exactly home.”
“He wasn’t?”
“No. He went out for cigarettes. But I figured out how he did it. He must’ve rigged up some kind of a speaker and tape recorder. Or maybe one of those walkie-talkie things.” Her voice faded. “Peter’s also a good mimic. You know, doing impersonations. So he could do all the voices.”
“All of them?”
She cleared her throat. “There were more ghosts this time.” Her voice rising again, manically. “My grandfather. My mother. Others. I don’t even know who.” Patsy stared at him for a moment, then looked down. She clicked her purse latch compulsively, then looked inside, took out her compact lipstick. She stared at the makeup then put it away. Her hands were shaking.
Harry waited a long moment then asked, “Patsy… I want to ask you something.”
“You can ask me anything, Doctor.”
“Just assume – for the sake of argument – that Peter wasn’t pretending to be the ghosts. Where else could they be coming from?”
She snapped, “You don’t believe a word of this, do you?”
The most difficult part of being a therapist is making sure your patients know you’re on their side while pursuing the truth. He said evenly, “It’s certainly possible what you’re saying. But I think you should consider that there’s another possibility.”
“Which is?”
“That you did hear something – maybe your husband on the phone, maybe the TV, maybe the radio, but whatever it was had nothing to do with your father’s ghost. You projected your own thoughts on what you heard.”
“You’re saying it’s all my head.”
“I’m saying that maybe the words themselves are originating in your subconscious. What do you think about that?”
She considered this for a moment. “I don’t know… It could be. I suppose that makes some sense.”
Harry smiled. “That’s good, Patsy. That’s a good first step, admitting that.”
She seemed pleased, a student who’d been given a gold star by a teacher.
Then the psychiatrist grew serious. “Now, one thing – when the voices talk about hurting yourself… you’re not going to listen to them, are you?”
“No, I won’t.” She offered a brave smile. “Of course not.”
“Good.” He glanced at the clock. “I see our time’s just about up, Patsy. I want you to do something. I want you to keep a diary of what the voices say to you.”
“A diary? All right.”
“Write down everything they say and un a month or so we’ll go through it together.”
She rose. She turned to him. “Maybe I should ask one of the ghosts to come along to a session… But then you’d have to charge me double, wouldn’t you?”
He laughed. “See you next week.”
At three o’clock next morning, Harry was wakened by a phone call.
“Dr. Bernstein?”
“Yes?”
“I’m officer Kavanaugh, with the police department.”
Sitting up, trying to shake off his drowsiness, he thought immediately of Herb, a patient at the clinic in Brooklyn. The poor man, a mild schizophrenic who was completely harmless, was forever getting beat up because of his gruff, threatening manner.
But that wasn’t the reason for the call.
“You’re Mrs. Patricia Randolph’s psychiatrist. Is that correct?” the officer continued.
His heart thudded hard. “Yes, I am. Is she all right?”
“We’ve had call… We found her in the street outside her apartment. No one’s hurt, but she’s a bit hysterical.”
“I’ll be there.”
When he arrived at the Randolph’s apartment building, ten blocks away, Harry found Patsy and her husband in the front lobby. A uniformed policeman stood next to them.
Harry knew that the Randolphs were wealthy, but the building was much nicer than he’d expected. It was one of the luxurious high-rises that Donald Trump had built in the eighties. There were penthouse triplexes selling for twenty million, Harry had read in the Times.
“Doctor,” Patsy cried when she saw Harry. She ran to him. Harry was careful about physical contact with his patients. He knew all about transference and countertransference – the perfectly normal attraction between patients and their therapists – but contact had to be handled carefully. Harry took Patsy by the shoulders so that she couldn’t hug him and led her back to the lobby couch.
“Mr.Randolph?” Harry asked, turning to him.
“That’s right.”
“I’m Harry Bernstein.”
The men shook hands. Peter Randolph was very much what Harry was expecting. He was a trim, athletic man of about forty. Handsome. His eyes were angry and bewildered. He reminded Harry of a patient he’d treated briefly – a man whose sole complaint was that he was having trouble maintaining a life with a wife and two mistresses. Peter wore a burgundy silk bathrobe and supple leather slippers.
“Would you mind if I spoke to Patsy alone?” Harry asked him.
“No. I’ll be upstairs if you need me.” He said this to both Harry and the police officer.
Harry glanced at the cop, too, who also stepped away and let the doctor talk to his patient.
“What happened?” Harry asked Patsy.
“The bird,” she said, chocking back tears.
“One of the ceramic birds?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “He broke it.”
Harry studied her carefully. She was in bad shape tonight. hair stringy, robe filthy, fingernails unclean. As in her session the other day, only her makeup was normal.
“Tell me about what happened.”
“I was asleep and then I heard this voice say, ‘Run! You have to get out. They’re almost here. They’re going to hurt you.’ And I jumped out of bed and ran into the living room and there – there was the Boehm bird. It was broken. the robin. It was shattered and scattered all over the floor. I started screaming – because I knew they were after me.” Her voice rose. “The ghosts… They… I mean, Peter was after me. I just threw on my robe and ran.”
“And what did Peter do?”
“He ran after me.”
“But he didn’t hurt you?”
She hesitated. “No.” She looked around the cold, marble lobby with paranoid eyes. “Well, what he did was, he called the police… But don’t you see? Peter didn’t have any choice. He had to call the police. Isn’t that what somebody would normally do if their wife ran out of the apartment screaming? He had to shift suspicion away from him.” Her voice faded.
Harry looked for signs of overmedication or drinking. He could see none. She looked around the lobby once more.
“Are you feeling better now?”
She nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Making you come all the way over here tonight.”
“That’s what I’m here for... Tell me: You don’t hear any voices now, do you?”
“No.”
“And the bird? Could it have been an accident?”
She thought about this for a moment. “Well, Peter was asleep... Maybe I was looking at it earlier and left it on the edge of the table.” She sounded perfectly reasonable. “Maybe the housekeeper did it.”
The policeman looked at his watch and then ambled over. He asked, “Can I talk to you, Doctor?”
They stepped into a corner of the lobby.
“I’m thinking I oughta take her downtown,” the cop said in a Queens drawl. “She was pretty outta control before. But it’s your call. You think she’s E.D.?”
Emotionally disturbed. That was the trigger diagnosis for involuntary commitment. If he said yes, Patsy would be taken off and hospitalized.
This was the critical moment. Harry debated.
I can help you and you can help me...
He said to the cop, “Give me a minute.”
He returned to Patsy, sat down next to her. “We have a problem. The police want to take you away. And if you claim that Peter’s trying to drive you crazy or hurt you, the fact is, the judge just isn’t going to believe you. And they’re going to put you into custody.”
“Me? I’m not doing anything! It’s the voices! It’s them... I mean, it’s Peter.”
“But they’re not going to believe you. That’s just the way it is. Now, you can go back upstairs and carry on with your life or they can take you downtown to the city hospital. And you don’t want that. Believe me. Can you stay in control?”
She lowered her head to her hands. Finally she said, “Yes, Doctor, I can.”
“Good... Patsy, I want to ask you something else. I want to see your husband alone. Can I call him, have him come in?”
“Why?” she asked, her face dark with suspicion. “Because I’m your doctor and I want to get to the bottom of what’s bothering you.”
She glanced at the cop. Gave him a dark look. Then she said to Harry, “Sure.”
“Good.”
After Patsy’d disappeared into the elevator car the cop said, “I don’t know, Doctor. She seems like a nut case to me. Things like this... they can get real ugly. I’ve seen it a million times.”
“She’s got some problems, but she’s not dangerous.”
“You’re willing to take that chance?”
After a moment he said, “Yes, I’m willing to take that chance.”
“How was she last night, after I left?” Harry asked Peter Randolph the next morning. The two men sat in Harry’s office.
“She seemed all right. Calmer.” Peter sipped the coffee that Miriam had brought him. “What exactly is going on with her?”
“I’m sorry,” Harry said, “I can’t discuss the specifics of your wife’s condition with you. Confidentiality.”
Peter’s eyes flared angrily for a moment. “Then why did you ask me here?”
“Because I need you to help me treat her. You do want her to get better, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. I love her very much.” He sat forward in the chair. “But I don’t understand what’s going on. She was fine until a couple of months ago – when she started seeing you, if you have to know the truth. Then things started to go bad.”
“When people see therapists they sometimes confront things that they never had to deal with. I think that’s Patsy’s situation. She’s getting close to some important issues. And that can be very disorienting.”
“She claims I'm pretending to be a ghost,” Peter said sarcastically. “That seems a little worse than just disoriented.”
“She’s in a downward spiral. I can pull her out of it... but it’ll be hard. And I’ll need your help.”
Peter shrugged. “What can I do?”
Harry explained, “First of all, you can be honest with me.”
“Of course.”
“For some reason she’s come to associate you with her father. She has a lot of resentment toward him, and she’s projecting that on you. Do you know why she’s mad at you?”
There was silence for a moment.
“Go on, tell me. Anything you say here is confidential – between you and me.”
“She might have this stupid idea that I’ve cheated on her.”
“Have you?”
“Where the hell do you get off, asking a question like that?”
Harry said reasonably, “I’m just trying to get to the truth.”
Randolph calmed down. “No, I haven’t cheated on her. She’s paranoid.”
“And you haven’t said or done anything that might trouble her or affect her sense of reality.”
“No,” Peter said.
“How much is she worth?” Harry asked bluntly.
Peter blinked. “You mean, her portfolio?”
“Net worth.”
“I don’t know exactly. About eleven million.”
Harry nodded. “And the money’s all hers, isn’t it?”
A frown crossed Peter Randolph’s face. “What’re you asking?”
“I’m asking, if Patsy were to go insane or to kill herself, would you get her money?”
“Go to hell!” Randolph shouted, standing up quickly. For a moment Harry thought the man was going to hit him. But he pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and took out a card. Tossed it onto Harry’s desk. “That’s our lawyer. Call him and ask him about the prenuptial agreement. If Patricia’s declared insane, or if she were to die, the money goes into a trust. I don’t get a penny.”
Harry pushed the card back. “That won’t be necessary... I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings,” Harry said. “My patient’s care comes before everything else.”
Randolph adjusted his cuffs and buttoned his jacket. “Accepted.”
“So you’re not whispering to her, pretending to be her father. You’re not breaking those birds of hers.”
“Of course not.”
Harry nodded and looked over Peter Randolph carefully. A prerequisite for being a therapist is the ability to judge character quickly. He now sized up this man and came to a decision. “I want to try something radical with Patsy and I want you to help me.”
“Radical? You mean, commit her?”
“No, that’d be the worst thing for her. When patients are going through times like this you can’t coddle them. You have to be tough. And force them to be tough.”
“Meaning?”
“Don’t be antagonistic, but force her to stay involved in life. She’s going to want to withdraw – to be pampered. But don’t spoil her. If she says she’s too upset to go shopping or go out to dinner, don’t let her get away with it. Insist that she does what she’s supposed to do.” “You’re sure that’s best?”
Sure? Harry asked himself. No, he wasn’t the least bit sure. But he’d made his decision. He had to push Patsy hard. He told Peter, “We don’t have any choice.”
But as the man left the office Harry happened to recall an expression one of his medical school professors used frequently. He said you have to attack disease head-on. “You have to kill or cure.”
Harry hadn’t thought of that expression in years. He wished he hadn’t today.
The next day Patsy walked into his office without an appointment.
In Brooklyn, at the clinic, this was standard procedure and nobody thought anything of it. But in a Park Avenue shank’s office, impromptu sessions were taboo. Still, Harry could see from her face that she was very upset and he didn’t make an issue of her unexpected appearance.
She collapsed on the couch and hugged herself closely as he rose and closed the door.
“Patsy, what’s the matter?” he asked.
He noticed that her clothes were more disheveled than he’d ever seen. They were stained and torn. Hair bedraggled. Fingernails dirty.
“Everything was going so well,” she sobbed, “then I was sitting in the den and I heard my father’s ghost again. He said, ‘They’re almost here. You don’t have much time left...” And I asked, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Look in the living room.’ And I did, and there was another one of my birds! It was shattered!” She opened her purse and showed Harry the broken pieces of ceramic. “Now there’s only one left! I'm going to die when it breaks. I know I am. Peter’s going to break it tonight! And then he’ll kill me.”
“He’s not going to kill you, Patsy,” Harry said calmly, patiently ignoring her hysteria.
“I think I should go to the hospital for a while, Doctor.”
Harry got up and sat on the couch next to her. He took her hand. “No.”
“What?”
“It would be a mistake,” Harry said.
“Why?” she cried.
“Because you can’t hide from these issues. You have to confront them.”
“I’d feel safer in a hospital. Nobody’d try to kill me in the hospital.”
“Nobody’s going to kill you, Patsy. You have to believe me.”
“No! Peter–”
“But Peter’s never tried to hurt you, has he?”
A pause. “No.”
“Okay, here’s what I want you to do. Listen to me. Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“You know that whether Peter was pretending to say those words to you or you were imagining them, they weren’t real. Repeat that.”
“I...”
“Repeat it!”
“They weren’t real.”
“Now say, ‘There was no ghost. My father’s dead.’”
“There was no ghost. My father’s dead.”
“Good!” Harry laughed out loud. “Again.”
She repeated this mantra several times, calming each time she did. Finally, a faint smile crossed her lips.
Harry squeezed her hand.
Then she frowned. “But the bird...” She opened her purse and took out a dozen pieces of shattered ceramic.
“Whatever happened to the bird doesn’t matter. It’s only a piece of porcelain.”
“But...” She looked down at the broken shards.
Harry leaned forward. “Listen to me, Patsy. Listen carefully.” Passionately, Harry Bernstein said, “I want you to go home, take that last bird, and smash the hell out of it.”
“You want me to...”
“Take a hammer and crush it.”
She started to protest but then she smiled. “Can I do that?”
“You bet you can. Just give yourself permission to. Go home, have a nice glass of wine, find a hammer, and smash it.” He reached under his desk and picked up the wastebasket. He held it out for her. “They’re just pieces of china, Patsy.”
After a moment she tossed the pieces of the statue into the container.
“Good, Patsy.” And – thinking, To hell with transference – the doctor gave his patient a huge hug.
An hour later Patsy Randolph returned home and found Peter sitting in front of the television.
“You’re late,” Peter said. “Where’ve you been?”
“Out shopping. I got a bottle of wine.”
“We’re supposed to go to Jack and Louise’s tonight. Don’t tell me you forgot.”
“I don’t feel like it,” she said. “I don’t feel well. I–”
“No. We’re going. You’re not getting out of it.” He spoke in that abrupt tone he’d been using recently.
“Well, can I at least take care of a few things first?”
“Sure. But I don’t want to be late.”
Patsy walked into the kitchen, opened the bottle, and poured a large glass of the expensive merlot. Just like Dr. Bernstein had told her. She sipped it. She felt good. Very good. “Where’s the hammer?” she called.
“Hammer? What do you need the hammer for?”
“I have to fix something.”
“I think it’s in the drawer beside the refrigerator.”
She found it. Carried it into the living room.
Peter glanced at it, then back to the TV. “What do you have to fix?”
“You,” she answered and brought the heavy tool down on the top of his head with all her strength.
It took another dozen blows to kill him, and when she’d finished she stood back and gazed at the remarkable patterns the blood made on the carpet and couch. Then she went into the bedroom and took her diary from the bedside table – the one Dr. Bernstein had suggested she keep. Back in the living room, Patsy sat down beside her husband’s corpse and in her diary she wrote a rambling passage about how, at last, she’d gotten the ghosts to stop speaking to her. She was finally at peace. She didn’t add as much as she wanted to; it was very time-consuming to write using your finger for a pen and blood for ink.
When Patsy’d finished, she picked up the hammer and smashed the Boehm ceramic owl into dust. Then she began screaming as loudly as she could, “The ghosts are dead, the ghosts are dead, the ghosts are dead!”
Long before she was hoarse the police and medics arrived. When they took her away she was wearing a straightjacket.
A week later Harry Bernstein sat in the prison hospital waiting room. He knew he was a sight – he hadn’t shaved in several days and was wearing wrinkled clothes – which, in fact, he’d slept in last night. But he didn’t care. He stared at the filthy floor.
“You all right?” This question came from a tall, thin man with a perfect beard. He wore a gorgeous suit and Armani-framed glasses. He was Patsy’s lead defense lawyer.
“I never thought she’d do it,” Harry said to him. “I knew there was risk. I knew something was wrong. But I thought I had everything under control.”
The lawyer looked at him sympathetically. “I heard you’ve been having some trouble, too. Your patients...”
Harry laughed bitterly. “Are quitting in droves. Well, wouldn’t you? Hell, Park Avenue shrinks are a dime a dozen. Why should they risk seeing me? I might get them killed or committed.”
The jailor opened the door. “Dr. Bernstein, you can see the prisoner now.”
He stood slowly, supporting himself on the door frame.
The lawyer looked him over and said, “You and I can meet in the next couple of days to decide how to handle the case. The insanity defense is tough in New York, but with you on board I can make it work. We’ll keep her out of jail… Say, Doctor, you going to be okay?”
Harry gave a shallow nod.
The lawyer said kindly, “I can arrange for a little cash for you. A couple thousand – for an expert-witness fee.”
“Thanks,” Harry said. But he instantly forgot about the money. His mind was already on his patient.
The room was as bleak as he’d expected.
Face white, eyes shrunken, Patsy lay in bed, looking out the window. She glanced at Harry, didn’t seem to recognize him.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Who are you?” She frowned.
He didn’t answer her question either. “You’re not looking too bad, Patsy.”
“I think I know you. Yes, you’re... Wait, are you a ghost?”
“No, I’m not a ghost.” Harry set his attache case on the table. Her eyes slipped to the case as he opened it.
“I can't stay long, Patsy. I’m closing my practice. There’s a lot to take care of. But I wanted to bring you a few things.”
“Things?” she asked, sounding like a child. “For me? Like Christmas. Like my birthday.”
“Uh-hum.” Harry rummaged in the case. “Here’s the first thing.” He took out a photocopy. “It’s an article in the Journal of Psychoses. I found it the night after the session when you first told me about the ghosts. You should read it.”
“I can’t read,” she said. “I don’t know how.” She gave a crazy laugh. “I’m afraid of the food here. I think there are spies around. They’re going to put things in the food. Disgusting things. And poison. Or broken glass.” Another cackle.
Harry set the article on the bed next to her. He walked to the window. No trees here. No birds. Just gray, downtown Manhattan.
He said, glancing back at her, “It’s all about ghosts. The article.”
Her eyes narrowed and then fear consumed her face.
“Ghosts,” she whispered. “Are there ghosts here?”
Harry laughed hard. “See, Patsy, ghosts were the first clue. After you mentioned them in that session – claiming that your husband was driving you crazy – I thought something didn’t sound quite right. So I went home and started to research your case.”
She gazed at him silently.
“That article’s about the importance of diagnosis in mental-health cases. See, sometimes it works to somebody’s advantage to appear to be mentally unstable – so they can avoid responsibility. Say, soldiers who don’t want to fight. People faking insurance claims. People who’ve committed crimes.” He turned back. “Or who’re about to commit a crime.”
“I’m afraid of ghosts,” Patsy said, her voice rising. “I’m afraid of ghosts. I don’t want any ghosts here! I'm afraid of–”
Harry continued like a lecturing professor. “And ghosts are one of the classic hallucinations that sane people use to try to convince other people that they’re insane.”
She stopped speaking.
“Fascinating article,” Harry continued, nodding toward it. “See, ghosts and spirits seem like the products of delusional minds. But, in fact, they’re complex metaphysical concepts that someone who’s really insane wouldn’t understand at all. No, true psychotics believe that the actual person is there speaking to them. They think that Napoleon or Hitler or Marilyn Monroe is really in the room with them. You wouldn’t have claimed to’ve heard your father’s ghost. You would actually have heard him.”
Harry enjoyed the utterly shocked expression on his patient’s face. He said, “Then, a few weeks ago, you admitted that maybe the voices were in your head. A true psychotic would never admit that. They’d swear they were completely sane.” He paced slowly. “There were some other things, too. You must’ve read somewhere that sloppy physical appearance is a sign of mental illness. Your clothes were torn and dirty, you’d forgotten to do straps…. but your makeup was always perfect – even on the night the police called me over to your apartment. In genuine mental-health cases, makeup is the first thing to go. Patients just smear their faces with it. Has to do with issues of masking their identity, if you’re interested.
“Oh, and remember, you asked if a ghost could come to one of our sessions? That was very funny. But the psychiatric literature defines humor as ironic juxtaposition of concepts based on common experience. Of course, that’s contrary to the mental processes of psychotics.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Patsy spat out.
“That crazy people don’t make jokes,’ he summarized. “That cinched it for me that you were sane as could be.” Harry looked through the attache case once more. “Item number two.” He looked up, smiling. “After I read that article and decided you were faking your diagnosis – and listening to what your subconscious was telling me about your marriage – I figured you were using me for some reason having to do with your husband. So I hired a private eye.”
“Jesus Christ, you did what?”
“Here’s his report.” He dropped the folder on the bed. “It says, basically, that your husband was having an affair and was forging checks on your main investment account. You knew about his mistress and the money and you’d talked to a lawyer about divorcing him. But Peter knew that you were having an affair too – with your friend Sally’s husband. Peter used that to blackmail you into not divorcing him.”
Patsy stared at him, frozen.
He nodded at the report. “Oh, you may as well look at it. Pretending you can’t read? Doesn’t fly. Reading has nothing to do with psychotic behavior; it’s a developmental and IQ issue.”
She opened the report, read through it, then tossed it aside disgustedly. “Son of a bitch.”
Harry said, “You wanted to kill Peter and you wanted me to establish that you were insane – for your defense. You’d go into a private hospital. There’d be a mandatory rehearing in a year and, bang, you’d pass the tests and be released.”
She shook her head. “But you knew my goal was to kill Peter? And you let me do it! Hell, you encouraged me to do it.”
“And when I saw Peter I encouraged him to antagonize you... It was time to move things along. I was getting tired of our sessions.” Then Harry’s face darkened with genuine regret. “I never thought you’d actually kill. I thought you’d try – maybe hit him a few times with the hammer. Then you’d get off on the insanity defense and he’d run for the hills – and agree to the divorce – because he didn’t want to be married to a crazy woman. But I got it wrong. What can I say? Psychiatry’s an inexact science.”
“But why didn’t you go to the police?”
“Ah, that has to do with the third thing I brought for you.”
I can help you and you can help me...
He lifted an envelope out of his briefcase. He handed it to her.
“What is this?”
“My bill.”
She opened it. Took out the sheet of paper.
At the top was written: For Services Rendered. And below that: $10 million.
“Are you crazy?” Patsy gasped.
Harry had to laugh at her choice of words. “Peter was nice enough to tell me exactly what you were worth. I’m leaving you a million... which you’ll probably need to pay that slick lawyer of yours. He looks expensive. Now, I’ll need cash or a certified check before I testify at your trial. Otherwise I’ll have to share with the court my honest diagnosis about your condition.”
“You’re blackmailing me!”
“I guess I am.”
“Why?”
“Because with this money I can afford to do some good. And help people who really need helping.” He nodded at the bill. “I’d write that check pretty soon – they have the death penalty in New York now. Oh, and by the way, I’d lose that bit about the food being poisoned. Around here, if you make a stink about meals, they’ll just put you on a tube.” He picked up his attache case.
“Wait,” she begged. “Don’t leave! Let’s talk about this!”
“Sorry.” Harry nodded at a wall clock. “I see our time is up.”
Makeover (by B. Callahan)
On our first wedding anniversary thirteen years ago, Todd gave me a diamond tennis bracelet to mark the occasion. A firm believer in romantic rituals, I insisted that Todd slip the bracelet on my wrist and clasp it firmly shut on every subsequent anniversary as a symbol of our unbroken marital bond. In the years one to ten, the bracelet slid on as smoothly as the glass slipper onto Cinderella’s foot.
On our eleventh anniversary, Todd raised his eyebrows tolerantly as he squeezed my wrist to make the bracelet fit. On our twelfth, he grimaced along with me as he squeezed harder to circle it around my wrist. On our thirteenth, an anniversary that should be skipped on the basis of numerical toxicity, Todd gritted his teeth as he forced the clasp shut and sent the diamonds skittering across the carpet on our bedroom floor.
“Maybe we ought to have the bracelet made into dangling earrings, Emily. Your earlobes seem to have escaped the padding you’ve systematically applied to the rest of your body courtesy of every fast-food chain in town.”
Taking more care not to trample on the diamonds than he did on my heart, he neatly arranged his workout clothes in his duffel bag and left for the gym.
Addressing each diamond as if it were a daisy petal, I choked out the words, “He loves me, he loves me not” until reaching the final glittering traitor – an “He loves me not.”
Of course he loved me not. How stupid of me not to recognize it sooner. If Todd had loved me, he wouldn’t have insisted on his fortieth birthday, three years ago, that I cook him those dreadful meals. He claimed that a Spartan diet of brown rice, tofu, and veggies would fend off the “forties fifteen”, the inevitable weight gain attested to by his friends who had lumbered into that decade before him. And if Todd had truly loved me, he would not have insisted that I enroll in that exercise class led by a bouncy anorexic dedicated to eradicating the “forties flab”. Unlike Todd, whose workouts energized him, mine propelled me home to the restorative comfort of the living room sofa.
No wonder that I supplemented my diet with Taco Toros, Pizza Parnassian, and Seriously Sinful Shakes. No wonder that I skipped exercise class so often that my fellow sufferers awarded me a fake Olimpic gold medal for truancy. And no wonder that after Todd’s cruel remark I headed immediately out to Le Barbeque d’Andre to buy Le Grand Burgaire and a side of the Fries of France.
En route, to distract myself from my own pain, I turned on the car radio to listen to the problems of strangers. Monty Malaise, the talk-show host of Misery Loves Company, was inviting a tearful young woman to “share your own misery and whine to your heart’s content because we’re here for you, Buttercup”. Monty addressed all his women callers as Buttercup and the men as Hydrangea, a technique that invariably made the callers divulge their first names.
“My name’s not Buttercup, Monty, it’s Stephanie.”
“Okay, Stephanie, now tell Uncle Monty and all those audio voyeurs out there in their kitchens and cars what’s making you miserable.”
“I’m in love with a married man,” she wailed.
“Poor baby,” yawned Monty.
“And he loves me too,” she sniffed.
“So what’s the problem?” asked Monty in the interested tone of one who is busily buffing his nails.
“He won’t ask his wife for a divorce.”
“Why not?”
“She inherited a lot of money three years ago and controls all their finances. If he leaves her, we’ll have to make do with his salary as a junior accountant and mine as a secretary, and that’s barely enough to keep up the payments on the twin Ferraris we must have.”
Interrupting her in mid sob, Monty said, “Hold on there, Steph. Gotta pay our bills. Time for a commercial.”
Musing on Stephanie’s problems as Monty waxed eloquent about a laxative, I silently agreed that a junior accountant’s salary plus a secretary’s salary didn’t add up to even one Ferrari. On that subject, I was an expert, having many times turned down Todd’s request for a Ferrari when he was a junior accountant and I was a secretary. Of course, since Aunt Gertrude’s death three years ago, which allowed me to quit my job, we could buy a fleet of Ferraris, as Todd repeatedly points out; but I believe expensive cars invite carjackers.
“Why, I’d be afraid to stop at a red light in a car like that, Todd,” I told him. “That’s when carjackers smash the driver’s window, unlock the doors, and jump inside.”
“The odds of that happening are five million to one,” he snapped, drawing on his unlimited stock of imaginary numbers.
Ignoring his math, I added, “And heaven knows what a car-jacker would do to me once he got inside.”
I shivered. Todd smiled.
Affectionately, I patted the dashboard of my solid Buick – Todd has one too – as Monty returned to the saga of Stephanie.
“So what I hear you saying, Stephie, is that your married lover’s wife is downright cheap.”
“Yes,” agreed Stephanie, “and she’s downright frumpy.”
“Frumpy?” asked Monty. “I don’t know ‘frumpy.’”
“It’s sort of an old-fashioned word that older people in their forties use.”
“Older people in their forties!” echoed Monty in dismay. “How old are you, Buttercup?”
“Twenty-four,” she answered and proceeded to define frumpy. “The frumpies are women who wear unstylish clothes like lime-green polyester pantsuits and carry plastic tote bags with daisies on them. And they still get their hair permed into retro curly styles.”
“Horrors,” sniggered Monty. “Dial nine-one-one for the fashion police.”
“Exactly,” said Stephanie. “And there’s something else about her, too.”
“Something more offensive than the retro hair?”
“Yes,” breathed Stephanie.
“Goody. Tell Uncle Monty all.”
A pause.
“Come now, Stephanie. You’ve taken a huge chunk out of our time so you owe me and our listeners big time.”
“Okay,” she sighed. “Here goes. She’s so overweight her jewelry doesn’t fit anymore.”
“That’s it?” shrieked Monty. “You make us think you’ve got a bombshell like a crime or an interesting perversion and then you give us that bit of non-titillating fluff! You’re wasting our time. Sorry, listeners. As for you, Stephanie, we’ll personally volunteer your name as a suspect if ever a woman in a lime-green polyester pantsuit is found murdered. Next caller, please.”
Murdered! I shuddered. Why would Stephanie and her married lover want to murder a woman just for being frumpy, cheap, and unable to wear her jewelry anymore? Bonding with the maligned wife, I rubbed my wrist, which still bore the imprint of the tennis bracelet that no longer fit. Overflowing with empathy, I reached into my plastic tote bag to retrieve tissues to mop the tears that plopped onto my chartreuse slacks.
“Mother Nature should have equipped us with retractable windshield wipers for our eyelids,” I murmured in solidarity with the woman who couldn’t wear her tennis bracelet anymore.
Tennis bracelet! Who said anything about a tennis bracelet?
“You did,” said that little inner voice that cuts into my interior monologues like an intrusive call-waiting signal.
Tires squealing, I made a U-turn into the opposite direction of Le Barbeque d’Andre. I had to get home to check our Christmas-card list, which would include the name of Todd’s secretary. I had forgotten her name because Todd had stopped talking about the office during the past few months. In fact, he had stopped talking about anything during the past few months. The memories of silent meals forced me to pull over to the curb to tend to my tears. Had Todd been plotting to murder me as he stabbed at his seaweed salad?
When I was able to resume driving, I saw flashing lights in my rearview mirror, a signal to pull over. I turned off the ignition as a police officer tapped on my window. After checking my license and registration, he cited me for erratic driving.
“But officer,” I sobbed, “my husband is going to kill me.”
“Think about that the next time you’re planning a U-turn and roaring up to a curb without signaling,” he said, believing I was just exaggerating my husband’s reaction to my ticket.
“No, I mean, he’s really going to kill me. Him and his secretary – I think her name is Stephanie. Just ask Monty.”
“Ma’am, in this job we hear a lot of far-fetched stories that are concocted to make us tear up tickets. Yours ranks right up there with the best. But here’s the ticket and tell it to the judge. Take Monty along with you.”
Tipping his cap, he added, “Have a nice day.”
The image of his badge being ripped off his uniform by his superior after a woman in a lime-green pantsuit was found murdered sustained me during the ride home. Adding dialogue to this fantasy helped me even more.
Officer: “But Captain, I thought she was making it up about her husband and Stephanie just to get out of the ticket.
Captain: It’s not our job to make assumptions. You should have checked with Monty.
Officer: It will never happen again.
Captain: That’s for sure. You’re off the force.
Officer: Oh no!
Captain: Have a nice day.
Shaking, I ran into the house and opened the top drawer in Todd’s desk and studied the Christmas-card list. Beside the name Stephanie Nesbit he had written: “My secretary. Send to home address, not office.”
So it was Todd’s secretary who’d called Monty. Angrily, I shoved the list into the drawer and dislodged a photo under some writing paper. It was me, but a younger and very different me superimposed onto a card decorated with holly leaves. A Santa Claus hat perched jauntily on my unpermed hair, which caressed my shoulders. My slender arms hugged a stuffed Rudolph. The brightness of my smile could have nudged that reindeer out of the running for those foggy-night heroics.
When had I ever been that young, slender, and happy? Perhaps there was a date on the back of the card. I turned it over and read. “Christmas 1997. Thanks so much for Rudolph, Toddy-Woddy. Maybe next year I’ll have something better to snuggle up to on Christmas Eve. Love, Stephanie.”
Incredible! Toddy-Woddy had fallen in love with someone who could be a clone of me fourteen years ago, confirming a theory espoused by my friend Lisa that we follow a pattern of falling in love with the same physical types. “My dad,” she told me, “married Dorothy Lamour three times. My mom and each of my stepmothers could have played in a ‘Road’ movie.”
As for me, pre-Todd I fell in love with two Todd look-alikes – two tall, thin men with pinched lips who resembled the schoolmasters in English movies who were adept at caning, as Lisa described them.
This revelation that Stephanie was a years-ago Emily look-alike cheered me considerably. I smiled at Stephanie and patted Rudolph on the nose before sliding them back into the drawer. Humming, I removed the lime-green pantsuit and tossed it into the trash. No more Ms. Victim. No more silly worrying about getting murdered. Stephanie never said anything about murder; Monty did.
At that time I was a mere palimpsest of the original Emily whom Stephanie resembled, but I intended to resurface. After I changed into my workout clothes, I hopped into the car and turned on the car radio. “The solution, Monty, is simple,” I said aloud as I headed toward the Down With Flab Health Club, avoiding any maneuvers that would reattract the heartless young officer. Raising my voice over the shrill chastisement Monty was leveling at a caller who had failed to deliver a salacious misery as promised to the call screener, I stated my game plan in two words: a makeover. Purposefully, I strode into the health club, like a pro intent on making a comeback.
“Why, Emily,” gushed the receptionist, “it’s so good to see you back. It’s been four months, hasn’t it, since you told us you had to go on a secret mission for the CIA and couldn’t complete the aerobics course.”
She winked at someone standing behind me. I turned and faced Lisa, who gleamed with good health. We squealed each other’s names happily and hugged until I had to free myself from being impaled on her collarbones. “You look wonderful,” I said.
“And why not,” she stated. “I not only count calories and work out every single day, but I change husbands every three-point-five years.”
“But your first husband looked like Kevin Costner,” I said. “How could you give him up?”
“Easily. Husbands two and three look like him too. Remember the look-alike pattern.”
Losing my resolve, I burst into tears. “Todd is following the look-alike pattern, too,” I sobbed. “He’s in love with someone who looks like me.”
Lisa frowned. “You mean he’s in love with someone who’s overwe– well, um, let’s say, someone who doesn’t work out nearly enough?”
“No, someone who looks like I did fourteen years ago.” “I see,” she answered absently as she patted my shoulders and then held on to them to balance herself for a stretching exercise. After curving her left leg backward until it almost rested on her shoulder, she sighed, not from exertion, but from the strain of what she was about to say.
“Listen, Emily, let your look-alike have Todd. I never did understand what you saw in a man who looks like every actor who ever terrorized Oliver Twist in the orphanage.” “But I love him,” I wailed.
“Oh, good grief,” groaned the receptionist and Lisa in unison. “Let me tell you my game plan,” I begged. “I’m going to lose twenty-five pounds, have my hair styled to caress my shoulders, as they say in the shampoo ads, have my eyebrows waxed, learn about cosmetics, and buy a new wardrobe. In other words, I’m going to have a makeover. Then Todd will forget the sham Emily and love me, the real me, again. Will you help me, Lisa?”
“Okay,” she said, “but not because I want to help you win back Todd, who looks like the time-study expert feared by all the widows in the workhouse. I’ll participate in this makeover because it will make you healthier and help you to feel better about yourself. First stop, the treadmill. I hope you’re up for it.”
“Child’s play,” I laughed as I hopped aboard. After only a few minutes, I remembered that the treadmill used to figure prominently in prisons as an instrument of punishment. After five minutes, I believed I had atoned sufficiently for my crimes and begged Lisa to commute my sentence. Instead, she switched the machine to an elevated plane and I was no longer walking to nowhere, but climbing to nowhere.
Up, up Mount Everest I climb, bearing several bundles of supplies on my back, destined for the climbers stranded there who are waiting for me, Emily, to lead them back to safety. As I struggle upward, I hear singing, not the sounds of angels ready to bear me to paradise, but the infantile cooing of Stephanie echoing through the comfort of the base camp as she sings silly songs to Toddy-Woddy and Rudolph. My resolve strengthened, I reach the summit, accept the gratitude of the stranded, and tumble down the hill into the grasp of my own rescuer, Lisa, who hoists me off the machine.
“Good girl,” she said before chipping at my resolve with, “ten minutes today, twenty tomorrow.”
“Uh, listen, Lisa, I have a really important appointment tomorrow, with, uh, my decorator. Yes, that’s it. We’re going to redo the, um, laundry room.”
“Cancel,” she barked and steered me toward an exercise bike. For a few seconds, I was pleasantly reminded of the days when I rode leisurely in the park during my engagement to Todd, and I pedaled dreamily. Contentment, however, offends Lisa.
“Enough of this slow-pokiness,” she pronounced as she turned the tension knob to its highest position. “Let’s show some attitude!”
Hot, hot, terribly hot. Sweat pours down my forehead, into my eyes, onto my chin, but what else can I expect after volunteering to cycle up Mount St. Helens, which has entered into the early stages of eruption. Driblets of lava force me to cycle serpentine style to reach the injured eagle perched precariously on the rim of the caldera. When I reach the eagle and place him carefully in my knapsack, the crowd below cheers, except for the young officer in its midst who scribbles my name on ticket after ticket because I failed to signal my serpentine intentions. The crowd boos him soundly, and Monty turns to Stephanie and says, “Sorry, Buttercup, Emily has it all over you. She looks great in that lime-green spandex cycling outfit.”
Fortified by those images, I managed to complete five miles before Lisa pointed to the racquetball court and mouthed, “Meet me there in five minutes.” Grimacing, I slid off the machine. Apologizing to my limbs, I promised them only one more workout and entered the chamber of horrors where my body twisted and ducked but failed to elude the hard black ball that ricocheted off the walls and ceiling, pummeling me like vicious hailstones.
“You did good,” Lisa said as she piggybacked me into the locker room and tossed me into the shower. “But I wish you were working out simply for the joy of well-being and not for that husband who looks like he’d derive his greatest pleasure from evicting peasants from their thatched-roof cottages. Now let’s celebrate your first day back at Down With Flab with a really good dinner.”
She took me to the Vibrant Veggie, a health-food restaurant that championed the nutrients of its fare with alliterative blurbs on the menu like “our broccoli is too bashful to boast about its bountiful benefits so we’ll do it...” and “our coquettish cauliflower can coax you into cavorting at a cotillion devoid of carnivorous crashers.” After reading the anthropomorphic descriptions of each vegetable, I felt that eating them would be tantamount to feasting on friends. I settled for Tempestuous Tempeh, which the menu assured me unalliteratively would flamenco through my body and stomp vitamins into every cell.
At home, I supplemented my dinner with brown rice, water chestnuts, and eggplant, the meal that I had prepared for Todd. When he saw me ladle the food onto two plates, he said, “Why, Emily, you’re not eating your usual fried and fatty poison. What’s going on?”
“I thought I’d try eating like you, Todd. Actually, this is delicious,” I lied.
“But I hope this doesn’t mean that you’ve stopped eating desserts,” he said, reaching under the table for a box from Bitter-mann’s Bakery. “Black Forest cake, your favorite.”
In an obvious effort to make amends for his cruel comments of the morning, he had bought me
