A thirteen-year-old girl should not have a job, not even if her talent has bloomed early and she has acting in her blood. But the price of stepping on my daughter’s dream wasn’t something I was willing to pay. And so, more intently than I surveyed the strangers on the train, more doggedly than I observed my patients, I watched my daughter. Carefully. Always monitoring. Maybe too closely sometimes. But if the anxiety or pressure of performing weighed on her too heavily, I wanted to be prepared to step in.
Since she had been chosen for the part back in June, Dulcie was thriving, doing better than she had at her private school where too many label-obsessed kids had goals no more complicated than getting the next Prada bag. The Bartlett School, even with its emphasis on the arts and its high number of scholarships, still had its share of kids with limitless gold credit cards and limos at the ready.
The train doors opened. A middle-aged businessman entered and sat in the seat on the other side of me, despite the empty seats across the aisle. I reached into my bag, pulled out a peppermint, unwrapped it and popped it in my mouth.
As I’m overly sensitive to smells, public places are sensory nightmares for me. I bit down. The intense flavor burned as the cool blue-green scent rose up and insulated me against any possible assault.
I felt his glance.
A dark-haired woman in narrow black slacks, a longsleeved white shirt and a black leather blazer, sitting next to her lithe thirteen-year-old daughter, who was wearing jeans, a pink T-shirt, a jeans jacket and a wristful of purple and light green beads, listening to a CD, was not a threat.
When I turned a minute later and he looked at me, I didn’t turn away. I don’t do that.
No, that’s not true. I look away from myself all too often, especially in the four months since my divorce. I ignore what is not in my life anymore and shy away from facing the one issue I spend my days helping other people deal with: sexuality. Dr. Morgan Snow, in denial. It isn’t something I’m proud of. But it is how I cope.
Once more the lights went out and the train came to a dead stop. It didn’t bother me, but I wasn’t certain about Dulcie. I didn’t have to search for my daughter’s hand. I just reached out, instinctively knowing where it would be, even in the dark.
“You okay?” I asked her.
“Yeah. It’s kind of creepy, though. How long do you think we’re going to be stopped here?”
“Hopefully not long.” I squeezed her hand.
She squeezed back and then pulled away to switch on her CD player again.
The lights flickered on but the train still didn’t move.
Down the aisle, a man in a ripped jacket streaked with grime turned and ogled my daughter’s legs. Dulcie didn’t notice him, but I did and stared him down.
Why was his jacket dirty? What had broken his spirit? What had cracked his self-esteem?
Occupational hazard #1: Reading the body language of strangers. Like judging a book by its cover, it is tempting to make a diagnosis based on insufficient information.
A woman with downcast eyes opposite us kept flexing her fingers in a habitual way that suggested she was slightly compulsive. About what? It would take hours on my couch to find out, but I could guess at the darkness that bound her mind like barbed wire.
The lights went off again, suddenly, and we returned to stuffy blackness.
You will be on a dark street and he will jump out at you, his knife gleaming in the lamplight. Or you will be on the sidewalk below a fifty-floor office building and the noise will take you by surprise, as will the glass that rains down and slices your skin. There are so many possibilities of catastrophe that sometimes you do not know how you stay sane.
You manage because you have a child. You accomplish it because you still have hope, which, most therapists agree, is the hardest emotion to give up.
We started moving again and the lights came back on. Another five minutes passed and we were at the stop before ours.
“Hon.” I touched Dulcie’s hand.
Dulcie hit the stop button and turned, cornflower-blue eyes wide and waiting.
“Yeah?”
“Next stop.”
“Really?”
She was always surprised the rides between our apartment on the Upper East Side and the rehearsal studio in SoHo were over so quickly. As she listened to her music, her sense of time deserted her.
Peering out the slimy windows into the blackness, Dulcie looked for a marker, not trusting how much time had passed.
“Mom?” Her face was still focused on the hollow tunnel. “Did you get nervous when the lights went out?”
“A little. I bet a lot of people did.”
“Will I get that kind of nervous if I’m onstage and just forget the words? Will I get sick from it? What will being nervous do to me?”
“I don’t know. But it’s not a bad thing to feel anxiety. We can talk about how you can overcome the feeling and learn from it.”
My job wasn’t to protect this budding teenager from the darkness as much as it was to teach her how to find the switches so she could always turn on the lights.
But I would have preferred to protect her. To wrap her in my arms the same way I had when she was only months old, to keep her away from the open windows, from the cold and the poisons.
Three
The telephone was ringing as we walked into the apartment.
“Do you want me to get it?” Dulcie asked as she raced ahead of me.
“No, I’ve got it. You get ready for dinner.”
While I picked up the receiver, Dulcie threw her backpack on the floor and immediately opened the refrigerator. Pulling out a bottle of carrot-apple juice, she drank almost half of it without stopping.
I watched my daughter’s delicate throat as she swallowed, drank again and swallowed once more. It was eight o’clock in the evening and she was starving. Between working on the play, the tutoring that interrupted the rehearsals, and homework, she was burning energy. I didn’t like her having to wait this late for dinner as it was.
“Dr. Morgan Snow, please.”
“Yes, this is Dr. Snow.”
The last thing I wanted to do was get stuck on the phone and delay it even longer.
“I’m sorry for bothering you at home, Dr. Snow. Dr. Butterfield gave me your number. My name is Gail Danzig. I’m a producer for the Today show. I was hoping you’d agree to do a segment on Friday morning.”
While my name and involvement had made it into the news last June, when I’d been pulled into a hunt for a serial killer after one of my patients had disappeared, I’d refused to be interviewed. Dr. Nina Butterfield, my mentor, my closest friend and owner of the Butterfield Institute- the sex therapy clinic where I work-had supported my decision not to comment in the press. But lately she had been pushing me to become more visible in the psychoanalytical community. This obviously was one of those shoves. As with the paper she’d asked me to deliver on women’s aggressive sexual tendencies at an upcoming conference, Nina wanted me to get out there. Success as a therapist was something that mattered to me. But notoriety? It had never been on my list.
“Dr. Butterfield didn’t mention it to me.”
“Oh, damn. She said she was going to call you-she felt this was something you would be interested in. First, let me tell you we’re very sensitive to what you do, and don’t want to exploit your profession at all.”
From the refrigerator and the cabinets, I took what I needed for dinner and put it on the countertop. “I’m sure the Today show is a big draw and that there are a lot of therapists who would jump at the chance, but I really don’t think that television is something I want to-”
Dulcie spun around from leafing through the mail and walked over to me, standing so close I could feel her breath on my neck as she whispered, “They want you on television? On the Today show?” Her eyes shone with admiration.