“I’m really very sorry,” said Frank.
But she was walking already, eating up the miles with her long legs, her house on her back, free of filth. His shirt was stuck to his skin. He was furious with himself for not going to the office. Plus, why steal cars? He started backing up along the side of the road, to reach the interchange where he was supposed to have turned. He had backed up nearly a half mile when a police car came over the crown of the hill, then pulled off the road in front of him. In a moment the cop was at Frank’s window, a world-weary veteran with small features and a collection of loose wattles falling from beneath his chin.
“Miss your turn?”
“Yes,” Frank breathed, “I’m afraid I did.”
“You know you aren’t supposed to back up along the interstate like that.”
“I’m sorry,” said Frank, with such feeling the officer gave him a long look. “I know I’m guilty and I’m sorry.”
“Let me see your driver’s license.”
Frank leaned forward to free his wallet and the cop backed around the car with his clipboard to get the number on the license plate. He looked up just as he started writing, and said with considerable annoyance, “There’s one of them college hitchhikers again. That’s been illegal for ten years.” Batting the clipboard against his hip, he strided toward Frank’s window. “I’m going to let you back up and turn off. But you aren’t supposed to and I am not supposed to let you. So don’t do it again.”
Frank left and let the cop drive up and bust Miss Clean.
At Gracie’s request, he had once seen a therapist, a meeting that went very badly from the beginning. There was all sorts of persiflage about his holding or not holding the door as they entered her office, and Frank could feel a kind of electricity coming from between her shoulder blades as she moved around her desk to sit down facing him.
There was a large photograph of a crowd scene over her desk which said underneath it, “How many forms of abuse can you find?” As he looked at her, he thought of the word “pig.” Not, strangely enough, that he thought she was a pig, but he could sense that she had already decided he was one. He knew that that was the totem animal not only of ugly women but of overeaters and men of exaggerated masculinity. He had tried to work up a wussy shuffle for his arrival, but then they had the little showdown about what he was “trying to say” in holding the door for her. Everything about being here was awkward. In a conciliatory way, he told her he couldn’t help acting like a pig because he was the owner of some of the best show pigs in the state. She didn’t react. The gender thing was dialed up to where he couldn’t even figure out how to sit down. They ended up seated across the desk from each other. The window was behind her and he had to squint as he answered her questions.
“Do you drink?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever been drunk?”
“Yes.”
“More than once?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Has it occurred to you that you may be an alcoholic?”
“No.”
“Has it occurred to you that you are in denial?”
“What’s denial?”
“Denying that you are an alcoholic?”
“No. Sometimes I forget to drink for half a year at a time.”
“Are you familiar with the term ‘dry drunk’?”
“Well, just sort of.”
“Often, if we don’t drink and at the same time fail to seek counseling, we become what are called dry drunks.”
“I’m not following. Are you a dry drunk?”
The therapist’s face flared red. “Hardly! Is it the position you are trying to take with me that any little help I may try to be of to you is simply mud you are going to sling back into my face?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I am a mental health therapist and must accept, in the line of duty, a certain amount of punishment. But just so you know, if you were outside the walls of this office, what you just tried to dish out to me is a little verbal abuse. It is virtually diagnostic of denial.”
Frank nodded gamely but he really didn’t get it. “How much this thing gonna come to?”
This gave Mirabelle time for thought. That was her name and she asked to be called Dr. Mirabelle, an odd mixture of formal and informal. In his confusion, he still viewed her as a dry drunk, though he wasn’t sure what it was.
“You’re changing the script, Frank. We’re talking sideways anger, here. Attempts to control me through undermining questions about my financial arrangements with you or any other patient will go, you’ll find, nowhere.”
“You don’t have to stare me down. It was an innocent question.”
“Sixty dollars! I’m not ashamed of being recompensed for my hard work. You can take your control questions elsewhere. That issue fails to appear on my agenda.”
“Everything I say seems to upset you so much,” he said nervously, fishing his checkbook from his shirt pocket.
“It’s not ‘about’ being upset,” she shouted. “I’m not buying into that!”
He wrote frantically. It was like spending sixty dollars to get out of jail. He slid the check across the desk. She made as if she didn’t even see it. Her lips were so pursed, it looked like someone had just stolen her cigar.
“In all honesty,” Frank said, “this sort of thing doesn’t really seem right for me. Crazy as it may seem to you, I feel sort of abused myself, kinda gypped.”
“Welcome to the human race,” she said. “It’s about welcome. It’s about accepting your ordinariness. It’s about finding meaning in the everyday.” Frank sensed she was trying to jam in some advice to make this sixty-dollar bum deal seem more palatable. “It’s about letting go, Frank, and sensing a sharing that takes place for those who know what it is to be human.” Frank left her seated at her desk, knowing that when he was out of sight she would pick up his check and that, painful as it might be, it was somehow “about” cashing the check.
And at the same time, he felt poorly. Most everyone he knew was in a program for recovery. He had felt quite isolated by not joining something, had never really felt anything applied to him, but he got the very strong message that he had not tried hard enough. Gracie really wanted him in a program and he would have been willing to meet her halfway, but somehow they got lost in all the choices, all the initials. Now, in his first skirmish and probably his last, he had failed. It was better to have never tried at all than to have failed a program so abruptly. It was as bad as feeling all right, when it seemed to be plain to everyone that this was a sign of his detachment from his true inner feelings. It was like flunking life. The dialogue dropped away and even his considerate and hopeful fibs about “the child within” sagged pitifully. He felt like some bogus stoop who didn’t actually have a child within. Certainly, Edward Ballantine had one, even as big and hairy as he was. That might have accelerated Gracie’s departure.
Instead of going to his appointment with the therapist, a new one named Bob, Frank drove back toward town, went into the Long Haul Saloon and had a glass of draft beer. He used the pay phone to call the receptionist and cancel his appointment. He told her that he had “this thing that’s been going around.” When he went back outside, squinting into the sunshine, he found the police preparing to tow the station wagon and was impressed by their efficiency in locating the vehicle. He walked over to Powell Street, bought the paper and caught a westbound bus with but three people aboard. Two were girls who seemed to be sisters in their early teens, with similar bangs and anachronistic pageboy haircuts that looked homemade — country girls who averted their eyes, looked at each other and smothered grins by burying their chins on their chests. The other passenger was a trucker with a four-day beard, leather vest and chrome chain leading to his back pocket.