“You had fun.”
Ed’s matter-of-fact statement brought a giggle from Sarah. “Well, yes, I had a ball. In class — when I was there — I was still quiet and amenable. I didn’t go the way Marty had, giving hell to the teachers. My retaliation was more sneaky, like writing dirty things on walls. It was a long time before they got wise to me, and then they found it hard to believe. I denied everything, swore to God I was innocent. I was a coward, you see, as well as a sneak. But my delinquent friends squealed on me. After that we had the showdown. My parents were called in and it came out that I was bed-wetting and sleepwalking and generally keeping my house-proud mother in despair. So it was over to the child-guidance people. All those tests and interviews — you know the drill.”
“Did it help you?”
“I guess it frightened me into conforming more. All these adults moving in on my life was pretty scary.”
“How about your parents? Did it change them at all?”
“Sure. I gather it was spelled out to them that I was manifesting symptoms of neglect. My antisocial behavior was a way of seeking attention. Maybe that was right. Anyway, my mother came away from the child-guidance conference with the idea that I needed regular kissing and embracing, while it seems my father was told he should show me he cared by bringing some discipline into my life.”
Ed shook his head and sighed. “It sounds only too likely, and totally disastrous in a case like yours.”
Sarah gave a shrug. “I don’t know. It put a brake on my bad behavior. When I got to high school, there was no trouble. I worked hard and got good grades.”
“What about your home life?”
She shrugged again. “It went on. I learned to put up with my mother slobbering over me and giving me bear hugs. I knew what happened when I told her to cool it, or something stronger: my father showed me he cared by locking me in the spare room. There was no light in there.”
“That’s real cruelty. Did you scream to be let out?”
“I didn’t give them that satisfaction. I just waited till they came back. It could be a long wait.”
“What did you think about all that time?”
“What my father had said before he turned the key — that I was wicked and deserved to be punished.”
Ed stopped eating and pushed his plate aside. “You really believed that?”
She was saying things she had admitted only to herself. “It’s not easy to explain. I had a strong sense of guilt. Those bad things I did at school had made me feel ugly, really ugly, and that was something different in my life. It was a change from being dressed in cute little jumpers and lace petticoats and frilly white parties and living in a house where every surface was dusted and polished before breakfast. Ugliness was exciting; it was wicked and forbidden. You had to get a grip on yourself to face it, but that was worth it every time. That was how I got to overcome my thing about spiders. I was brought up to be terrified of them. If one was seen in the house, there was panic. It wasn’t just the sight of the thing, or its speed across the floor. It was the knowledge that something vile and ugly had violated the cleanliness of the place.”
“You really felt this antipathy yourself?”
“Ed, as a kid I wouldn’t get into my bed before checking every inch of the room. Some kids say their prayers before turning in; I searched for spiders. But after all those heavy things in my life I just told you about, I got to thinking about spiders in a different way. I went out looking for them because they were ugly and I had a plan. When I found a small one on a web in our backyard, I forced myself to watch it. A few seconds the first time, then longer. I went and played for an hour and then came back to see if it was still there. I kept coming back. The next day I found I could watch it longer; I was still scared, but I was fascinated. When it moved, I nearly had heart failure the first time, but I even got used to that. I studied every movement it made. For a week I kept this up, and the spider became so familiar it ceased to be a threat. Then one evening I screwed up my courage and scooped the spider and some of its web into a glass jar I had brought with me. I screwed the lid on and smuggled my spider indoors and up to my room.”
“Your bedroom — the place you checked each night?”
“You find it hard to believe? It really happened. I kept it there two or three days. They can live a long time in a jar if you put in a drop of water and punch holes in the lid. Well, I waited for the right time to put my plan into action. This is going to sound weird, Ed. One Sunday afternoon my parents went out for a drive and I was alone in the house. I collected the jar from my room and took it into theirs. Then I tipped the spider out onto my father’s bed and watched it walk across the white sheet my mother had changed that morning. It really did something for me, letting that small, ugly thing take its exercise there. My mouth went dry and my skin prickled like it had when I wrote things on walls.”
“Did you leave the spider there?”
“No, I didn’t do that. Scaring my parents wasn’t in my plan. It was enough to know the spider had been in their room. And I didn’t want it killed. So after I had let it walk on both their beds I helped it back into the jar and returned it to my room.”
“That was enough?”
“Sure.”
“I mean, did you do it another time?”
“You bet.” She laughed, and wished it sounded more natural. “Kids!”
“The same thing?”
This was starting to be embarrassing. “Well, not exactly. You don’t want to know what a little monster I was as a juvenile.”
“But I do.” Now he laughed. “I’ll rephrase that. From what you have told me, it’s not at all surprising that you behaved as you did. That was no monster: it was one small girl deprived of an emotional relationship and traumatized into various retaliatory actions. There’s no reason to feel guilty or ashamed.”
“I don’t.”
The directness of Sarah’s response seemed to catch Ed off guard. He frowned slightly. “You don’t? Well, that’s great. So, what else did you do with this spider of yours?”
“That one died soon after, but I found others. Bigger ones, and uglier. I used to let them walk over my mother’s clothes. Her white bathrobe. Her precious pink underwear.” Sarah gave a low laugh. “To this day she doesn’t know. In time, the game got to be more sophisticated. I would hide my spider in my parents’ room, someplace I was sure they wouldn’t look when they went to bed, like the bottom drawer in the bedside table. Then I would think of it close to them while they slept.” “That is a little scary. How old were you by this time?”
“Thirteen, I guess. And I got more ingenious as I went on. I unscrewed the earpiece of the telephone and put one in there. It survived, too. Am I giving you the creeps? I grew out of it. Do you know how? I took a more positive interest in spiders as I got older — I mean in their behavior. I asked questions at school. I read everything I could, but there really wasn’t much. Compared to other creatures, spiders have been shamefully neglected by naturalists. Yet they are so fascinating! They survive without trouble in places as varied in climate as Greenland and equatorial Africa. They were found twenty thousand feet up Mount Everest, which made them the highest permanent inhabitants in the world. If we had time, I could tell you so much, but I don’t want to bore you.”
“You won’t do that, Sarah. Listen, I have a, uh, proposition that may appeal to you.”
She was pretty sure from his tone of voice that it would not be the sexual overture she half wanted, half feared. “Go ahead.”
“I told you I have some patients suffering from phobias. This has become a specialty of mine. Eve had a degree of success with certain forms of therapy, and I’m writing a book. One of my contentions is that even the most extreme phobias can be treated if you win the patients’ confidence. You may not remove the fear entirely, but you can definitely put it into a better perspective. If you can get them to accept that a phobia is not so much a wall in their way as a flight of steps, positive progress is possible. I have three patients right now who are at that primary stage. Getting them receptive to therapy may take just a few sessions more — or a month, or a year. What I have in mind, Sarah, is that your experience as you just described it — the way you surmounted your fear of spiders — would give tremendous encouragement to these patients if they heard it from you.”