“Fine,” I say. “I’ll call the shrink. Want to have sex?” I don’t want to talk to Phil about my load. I want his skin to expand and contract like a human sack over mine.
He shakes his head no.
He moves his foot away from my hand completely, and I look down at my own feet, bare on the white carpet, peeking out of footless black tights.
Since I hit 122 pounds last month, I’ve started wearing Flashdance clothes. Little, loose skirts. Canvas shoes and bodysuits. A few weeks ago my father looked at me in one of these new outfits. He’d come downstairs while I was making toast for breakfast, the kitchen smelling like smoke and Wonderbread, and my father said, “Kat, you’re not doing anything, you know, to make yourself thin?”
“I jog,” I said. I shrugged, smiled.
But he looked worried, his face as long as a horse’s looking at my ankles, and I realized he must have seen a show about bulimia or anorexia. He must have thought I was gagging up breakfast after he dropped me off at school. Maybe he was worried that I would get thinner and thinner, until I became as unfindable as my mother, and I felt a stab of compassion for him, imagining my father alone in this house with the white shadows of his two invisible women. I remembered how, one summer, he’d taken a whole roll of photographs of my mother and me. “I want to show off my pretty girls at work,” he’d said, and my mother had agreed to pose with me in the backyard.
He had us stand with the sun in our eyes, squinting into his camera, and kept motioning us backward, to get us in the frame, until my mother finally got mad and said, “I’m not moving again.”
He took picture after picture.
But the film came back from the camera store blank.
“I’m sorry,” the clerk in the camera store said, “your photos didn’t turn out, Mr. Connors.” My father didn’t understand why. He insisted on seeing the blanks for himself, though it took the clerk a long time to find them in the wastebasket where they threw the bad prints away.
“Here,” he said finally. “You don’t have to pay for these, of course.”
“Of course,” my father said, but he stood looking at his envelope of blanks—bright, empty squares without us in them.
“All that trouble for nothing,” my mother said.
“Dad,” I said, and squeezed his upper arm, which felt surprisingly muscled under his blue blazer, “I just used to eat too much.”
He nodded. He said, “That’s what your mother always said.”
DR. MAYA PHALER LOOKS LIKE AN ACTRESS PLAYING THE part of a savvy, worldwise shrink, like someone pretending to be an expert on something she doesn’t know one thing about. I think of Marcus Welby, M.D.—an interview I saw once in TV Guide with the white-haired, grandfatherly guy who played that part, how he’d told the interviewer that people would routinely come up to him on the street and, instead of asking for an autograph, would ask for medical advice.
Dr. Maya Phaler even has a pair of silver spectacles dangling from a silver chain around her neck. Not like an old lady or a librarian, though. Like an actress, as I’ve said—as though the costume people decided she needed a finishing touch. A psychologist’s prop.
Blonde. Maybe fifty years old—but California blonde, like Phil. If it isn’t natural, if it’s a dye job, she’s gone to great trouble and expense to get it right.
Hers is a class act all the way. Even her shoes are dead-on. Psychologist shoes: black, low-heeled, but with tasteful little bows, also black, just above her toes. She’s wearing a two-piece suit the color of key lime pie, and the skirt is well above the knee, revealing slender legs, curvaceous calves—though, just above her right ankle, beneath the beige panty hose, I see a Band-Aid: A bit of recklessness perhaps? A woman in a hurry? This morning she must have slipped in the shower with a razor in her hand.
“Katrina?”
I say, “Kat.”
She’s looking at my insurance card: Although she charges a hundred dollars an hour, I’ll never see a bill. “Anxiety disorder” it says on my paperwork—(Is that what it is when you can’t stop smiling? Didn’t they used to call that joy?)—and it’s covered by the benefits my father gets from the board of education. Full mental health coverage—an attempt, I imagine, to keep underworked and overpaid administrators like my father from going nuts and busting up the place.
Though, as far as I know, my father has never seen a shrink.
Nor has my mother—
Though, clearly, my mother could be anywhere right now, doing anything. She could be visiting a shrink, or at a shrink convention, or studying to be a shrink herself, for all I know. At Harvard. Or Berkeley.
This is the way I’ve begun to think. Every morning I lie in bed and imagine the most absurd place my mother could be.
This morning, the Shrine circus came to mind, which led me to imagine my mother in sequins, brandishing a whip in a cage of yawning tigers. I pictured her going back to a trailer with a clown after the show was over, helping him take off his makeup with a blob of cold cream on a rectangle of Kleenex.
But when the makeup was off—that greasy frown—I couldn’t envision a face for my mother’s new lover. It was as if she’d wiped his face off with the makeup, and he was looking in the mirror for it as my mother filed her fingernails behind him. A clownish blank.
“Katrina’s a nice name,” Dr. Phaler says, fingering the chain that holds her spectacles. “You don’t use it?”
“No.” I shake my head too slowly—perhaps I appear despondent. With a lighter tone I add, “My mother wanted to call me Kat. She wanted a cat.”
Dr. Phaler doesn’t laugh.
“So, on the phone you said your boyfriend suggested you see me. How can I help?”
The question throws me. I hadn’t thought of myself as here for help. I’d imagined I was here to defy analysis, to banter wittily with a professional about my personal life until she managed to wrestle some kernel of truth out of my clenched fist, weasel some secret out of my subconscious mind. Remember Spellbound?
Surely I, too, had something extraordinary repressed, something Dr. Phaler was being paid a hundred dollars an hour to find—the way Ingrid Bergman forced Gregory Peck to remember how he’d slid down a banister into his brother’s back as a child and impaled him on a gate.
Gregory Peck held his head a lot during his long psychiatric sessions, trying to keep it in, twisting around in close-up after close-up, looking exquisitely tortured—all that guilt and grief—while Ingrid Bergman kept on needling him. Couldn’t Dr. Phaler do something similar for me, shine her professional flashlight to the bottom of that well, that quiet ice at the center of myself, where my guilt, or grief, or anger, or mother still was?
Then, I’d have a good long life fall of healthy relationships and mature responses to life’s inevitable ups and downs—spared all the psychosis and neurosis for which I am otherwise headed:
The frigidity, or nymphomania.
The handwashing.
The hair twirling.
The drive to fail, or the compulsive need to achieve.
Perhaps I could dredge my memory, the way Peck did, and make some room in there so I could heal, or begin the healing process.
Except that there doesn’t seem to be much dark mystery in there to dredge.
I’ve tried.
Over and over.
Night after night.
There must be some reason I feel nothing.
Surely it is not just that I feel nothing.