Anyhow, there I sat, waiting for Donna and making little paper P-51s and sailing them into the sparrows flocking at the martin house. I have had enough practice and gotten good enough with the control surfaces so that the little planes generally made a climbing turn, a chandelle, and came back.
Here comes Donna, swinging along under the oaks. A stray shaft of yellow sunlight touches fire to her coppery hair.
I watch her. She’s a big girl but not fat anymore. Not even stout or “heavy,” as one might say hereabouts. But certainly not fat in the sense that once it was the only word for her, even though physicians, who have an unerring knack for the wrong word, would describe her on her chart as a “young obese white female.”
Then she was plain and simply fat. She was also, or so it seemed, jolly and funny, the sort described by her friends as nice as she could be. If she were put up for a sorority in college, she would be recommended as a “darling girl.” And if one of her sisters wanted to fix her up with a blind date, the word would be: She has a wonderful sense of humor. She was the sort of girl you’d have gotten stuck with at a dance and you’d have known it and she’d have known that you knew it and you’d have both felt rotten. Girls still have a rotten time of it, worse than boys, even fat boys.
I used to see her alone at Big Mac’s: in midafternoon, I because I had forgotten to eat lunch, she because she had eaten lunch and was already hungry again; at four in the afternoon with a halfpounder, a large chocolate shake, and three paper boats of french fries lined up in front of her. Pigging out, as she called it.
She was referred to me by more successful physicians who’d finally thrown up their hands — What do I want with her, they’d tell me, the only trouble with her is she eats too damn much, I’ve got people in real trouble, and so on — as a surgeon might refer a low-back pain to a chiropractor: He may be a quack but he can’t do you any harm. Maybe she’s got a psychiatric problem, Doc.
Actually I helped her and ended up liking her and she me. Yes, she had always been “nice.” “Nice” in her case had a quite definite meaning. It meant always doing what one was supposed to do, what her mamma and papa wanted her to do, what her teacher wanted her to do, what her boss wanted her to do. Surely if you do what you’re supposed to do, things will turn out well for you, won’t they? Not necessarily. In her case they didn’t. She felt defrauded by the world, by God. So what did she do? She got fat.
She started out being nice as pie with me. She listened intently, spoke intelligently, read books on the psychiatry of fatness, used more psychiatric words than I did. She was the perfect patient, mistress of the couch, dreamer of perfect dreams, confirmer of all theories. All the more reason why she was startled when I asked her why she was so angry. She was, of course, and of course it came out. She couldn’t stand her mother or father or herself or God — or me. For one thing, she had been sexually molested by her father, then blamed by her mother for doing the very thing her mother had told her to do: Be nice. So she couldn’t stand the double bind of it, being nice to Daddy, doing what Daddy wanted, and believing him and liking it, oh yes, did she ever (yes, that’s the worst of it, the part you don’t read about), and then being called bad by Mamma and believing her too. A no-win game, for sure. So what to do? Eat. Why eat? To cover up the bad beautiful little girl in layers of fat so Daddy wouldn’t want her? To make herself ugly for boys so nobody but Daddy would want her?
I couldn’t say, nor could she, but I was getting somewhere with her. First, by giving her permission to give herself permission to turn loose her anger, not on them at first, but on me and here where she felt safe. She didn’t know she was angry. There is a great difference between being angry and knowing that you are angry. We made progress. One day she turned over on the couch and looked at me with an expression of pure malevolence. Her lips moved. “Eh?” I said. “I said you’re a son of a bitch too,” she said. “Is that right? Why is that?” I asked. “You look a lot like him.” “Is that so?” “That’s so. A seedy but kindly gentle wise Atticus Finch who messed with Scout. Wouldn’t Scout love that?” she asked me. “Would she?” I asked her. She told me.
She lost her taste for french fries, lost weight, took up aerobic dancing, began to have dates. She discovered she was a romantic. At first she talked tough, in what she took to be a liberated style. “I know what you people think — it all comes down to getting laid, doesn’t it? — well, I’ve been laid like you wouldn’t dream of,” she said with, yes, a sneer. “You people?” I asked her mildly. “Who are you people?” “You shrinks,” she said. “Don’t think I don’t know what you think and probably want.” “All right,” I said. But what she really believed in was nineteenth-century romantic love — perhaps even thirteenth-century. She believed in — what? — a knight? Yes. Or rather a certain someone she would meet by chance. It was her secret hope that in the ordinary round of life there would occur a meeting of eyes across a room, a touch of hands, then a word or two from him. “Look, Donna,” he would say, “it’s very simple. I have to see you again”—the rich commerce of looks and words. It would occur inevitably, yet by chance. The very music of her heart told her so. She believed in love. Isn’t it possible, she asked me, to meet someone like that — and I would know immediately by his eyes — who loved you and whom you loved? Well yes, I said. I agreed with her and suggested only that she might not leave it all to chance. In chance the arithmetic is bad. After all, there is no law against looking for a certain someone.
After hating me, her surrogate seedy Atticus Finch, she loved me, of course. I was the one who understood her and gave her leave. Our eyes met in love. It was a good transference. She came to understand it as such. She did well. She was working on her guilt and terror, the terror of suspecting it was her fault that Daddy had laid hands on her and that they’d had such a good time. She got a good job at a doctor’s office — as a receptionist, did well — and got engaged.
I didn’t share her faith in the inevitability of meeting a certain someone by chance, but I do have my beliefs about people. Otherwise I couldn’t stand the terrible trouble people get themselves into and the little I can do for them. My science I got from Dr. Freud, a genius and a champion of the psyche—Seele, he called it, yes, soul — even though he spent his life pretending there was no such thing. I am one of the few left, yes, a psyche-iatrist, an old-fashioned physician of the soul, one of the last survivors in a horde of Texas brain mechanics, M.I.T. neurone circuitrists.
My psychiatric faith I got in the old days from Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan, perhaps this country’s best psychiatrist, who, if not a genius, had a certain secret belief which he himself could not account for. Nor could it be scientifically proven. Yet he transmitted it to his residents. It seemed to him to be an article of faith, and to me it is as valuable as Freud’s genius. “Here’s the secret,” he used to tell us, his residents. “You take that last patient we saw. Offhand, what would you say about him? A loser, right? A loser by all counts. You know what you’re all thinking to yourself? You’re thinking, No wonder that guy is depressed. He’s entitled to be depressed. If I were he, I’d be depressed too. Right? Wrong. You’re thinking the most we can do for him is make him feel a little better, give him a pill or two, a little pat or two. Right? Wrong. Here’s the peculiar thing and I’ll never understand why this is so: Each patient this side of psychosis, and even some psychotics, has the means of obtaining what he needs, she needs, with a little help from you.”