Chapter Seventeen

Flora sat in her parked car in the street, too early as usual. The day was warm and she smelled a horse chestnut tree somewhere nearby in the verdant enclave of Dr. Simmons’s neighborhood. She closed her eyes and leaned against the headrest, trying not to think about anything. Grace’s Trudy had tried to explain meditation to Flora, and this apparently was one of the tenets. It seemed appealing and ridiculous at once. Flora felt foolish trying it on her own, but she had, and she had failed utterly. A door slam stirred her just as she reached the edge of drifting off, and she looked toward the sound to see someone leaving Dr. Simmons’s home. From a distance, the woman had the contours of Jan Levy, a scarf of blues and purples on her head tied at the back, another scarf around her neck—too much coverage for such a warm day. She looked to be about the same age as Flora, though she was often far off base in such guestimates. It was not Jan, of course, but it momentarily panicked Flora to be reminded that someone she knew could be a patient, too. But because of the appropriate comportment of all the parties involved, she would only ever be found out if they met in the driveway, in a moment just like this.

Did this woman find Dr. Simmons in the phone book, too, in a fugue state? Was she, too, surreptitiously seeking some unknown something from a psychologist? What did she talk about when she sat in that auburn-hued sanctuary? What did she reveal and what did she quite consciously not? As the scarved woman walked further down the driveway in Flora’s direction, she could see how thin and pale she was, and not due to fad dieting as in Jan Levy’s case. The scarf was covering a bare scalp. Flora recognized the exhausted but resolute look on the woman’s face as the same one her mother wore in the last year of her life.

As she sat down in her usual spot in Dr. Simmons’s office, she recalled the mixture of warmth and envy she had felt upon her first visit, two months earlier. The envy had nearly disappeared. While the warmth remained—she did look forward to something about her visits and still admired Dr. Simmons—it was tempered. By what, Flora couldn’t discern. But there was a sense of going through the motions, like an assignment. She had witnessed this with her social work patients, when they grew impatient during their requisite visits and didn’t want to be there. And even though they might equivocate when pressed, saying they felt fine and didn’t need any more help, she knew that a point of resistance had been reached. That’s why they stopped showing up. Flora anticipated Dr. Simmons detecting this in her and instinctively tried to avoid the probing “You seem distracted.”

Flora had been wise to her clients when they tried to outsmart her like this, but she usually let them off the hook. They weren’t there to self-actualize, though maybe Flora was selling them short. They had a right to aspire to more than just survival. But even Flora, who had every advantage available to her, wasn’t willing or capable of exerting herself in order to climb up the pyramid of self-fulfillment. Was that what she sought? Why was she here? Had she been sufficiently harassed by the Psychology Today and Redbook cover lines shouting out their provocations on the checkout line? It would be easier if she had a clear-cut ailment, not one of Will’s verdicts but one like the characters on The Bob Newhart Show, Mrs. Bakerman and Mr. Carlin with their explicit phobias. Or the woman she had just seen in the driveway, facing her mortality at close range. She knew these thoughts were exactly what she should be saying aloud for Dr. Simmons to feast on. Instead, Dr. Simmons patiently waited for Flora to begin while Flora ostensibly said nothing. Finally, to preempt the inquisition, she chose a piece of low-hanging fruit.

“I’m fairly certain my husband has been unfaithful. Cheating.”

This, too, seemed to spring from the pages of the women’s magazines, from Flora’s head rather than any of her more tender organs, and she almost laughed after she said it. Cheating, unfaithful, betraying—the words were all too sensational and felt wrong. Wronged. That felt wrong as well. “Your trouble is that your husband is a philanderer, an adulterer, rendering you a cuckquean,” Will would say. But her announcement worked. Dr. Simmons shifted in her chair, the leather squeaking as if it, too, were eager to get into a project.

“Go ahead and say more about that, Flora.”

And so Flora did. She reported every detail of that morning she was alone in the office, presumably looking for the stereo. She admitted to snooping, but only the innocent puttering that any wife would engage in when given the opportunity. Not the other snooping. She described the two photos and even dropped in the Oedipal morsel about how for a split second she thought the other woman in the photo might have been Abby.

She resourcefully preempted even further by answering Dr. Simmons’s certain next question before being asked. “It makes me angry when I think about it,” she offered. “But I rarely think about it.”

Flora knew that “But how do you feel?” would be the follow-up question. And it was. She could not land on any fitting vocabulary to answer that one, and now she regretted confessing her husband’s alleged sin. What she thought had been a clever red herring for her time with Dr. Simmons, she had to acknowledge, she knew full well, was a whale. It might be true that she rarely thought about the potential, likely affair, but it was taking up a great space in all of her tender organs.

“Angry. Betrayed. Duped. Embarrassed.” She tried out a hackneyed litany on Dr. Simmons. And while those descriptors were not wholly inaccurate, they did not get to the center. She found that with her friend Dawn she was more able to articulate the inchoate feelings that swirled in her gut. While she had yet to share the fact of the photograph with Dawn—something she was not sure she would—she did use words that while also prosaic did feel a bit closer to true feelings, words she couldn’t recall ever applying to herself, about her occasional moods in general and about the hypothetical idea of Will’s not loving her enough. “Hurt. Lonely. Sad,” she imagined saying aloud to Dawn.

Lying awake that night, the window air conditioner creating a continuous, soothing racket that nevertheless failed to lull her to sleep, Flora lay staring at the red numbers on the ceiling. Maybe she had mistaken what was in her arteries. Or maybe anger and sadness shared a genetic composition so that their expression was indistinguishable, even to the possessor. For Flora, they were equally taboo. Bea had told Flora, by way of sharing what she had just learned from Mister Rogers, though Flora wondered if she was motivated by perception, that it was okay to be sad. When Flora was growing up, it had not been so. Any complaining or whining or self-pity displayed by her or her sisters was met with a stern lecture about inner strength and optimism and the requisite gratitude for their good fortune. Her indeterminate emotions might explain why Will couldn’t accurately read her and why he stuck to a script he commanded, things that could be coded with three-digit numbers and decimals. They were both, in fact, stymied.

She humored herself in her wakefulness by inventing an imaginary compendium as an alternative to the DSM. It would be one that was unique to her, a descriptive manual for her various mental states. It would have no purpose other than for Flora to log and track and keep order. Nothing would come of the data. In her corpus, there would be no jargon like “differential diagnosis” or the dreadful “comorbidity,” though both concepts would be implied because of course she did occasionally need to differentiate between the beast and dehydration or sleep deprivation. And she would like to reassure herself that making up her mind might be a sign not that she was on the edge of a nervous breakdown but that she had a lot of errands to do. She already had some evidence that crying jags came on in the morning and in combination with a TV screen. She was keen to discover what might trigger the onset of those rare and precious split seconds of existential transcendence. This 2:38 a.m. lark, this twisted version of Dr. Simmons’s suggestion, would not serve to diagnose or to ascertain treatments or unpronounceable medications or justify insurance reimbursements, nor was it designed for dislodging emotions. But it might be an interesting experiment. And maybe she could decide what was sadness and what was anger and which was a mask for the other. Though after thinking this whole thing through and registering the time—3:04—she decided it didn’t matter which was which.

This elaborate alternative manual, which she continued to hone and develop for a few nights running, was a meaningless exercise, but no less so, she mentally wrote in an eloquent and bold introduction to the first edition, than the real one created by a tiny handful of people who decided on what constituted a standard personality.