eight

The patient had said she was allergic to cats. So Dr. Berman had picked Lily up and brought her to the kitchen and told the housekeeper to keep her there. Lily, blue-gray with green eyes, with long silken fur, a languid walk and a manner of sleeping, constantly sleeping, that made it clear that her dreams were comfortably primal.

Also she was incapable of breaking confidentiality, so she could stretch out on the windowsill across from the couch and never blush, or wince or weep.

The patient had the two o’clock hour three times a week. Before the bell rang, Dr. Berman removed the blue velvet cushion she kept on the patient’s chair. This patient required the entire space for her body. In fact it would be fair to say that the patient required an even wider chair than could be found in any showroom, any catalogue in the known universe.

The patient, Edith Forman, had been born with large bones and wide hands and feet and eyes the color of the Caribbean Sea at sunrise. She had tended toward plumpness as a child, a small tire of fat had encircled her midriff, but she was always in the middle of games, jump rope, tag, hide-and-seek and her smile was wide and winning even through the years when her teeth made appearances and disappearances, crashed into each other, and spread too far apart. Her father spoke of her as a beauty. Her mother brushed and braided her hair each morning before she left for work.

Edith had no explanation for it, the hunger that had come on her with her first period, the hunger that brought weight to her thighs and broadness to her waist, and ruined her face as her eyes seemed to shrink and her features thickened and coarsened. The first diet worked for a while but then it didn’t. The diet camp for overweight teenagers brought about a miracle loss of twenty pounds regained before Halloween. It wasn’t even hunger anymore that prompted Edith to store under her bed packages of cookies and boxes of chocolate candy shaped like the shells of the sea. Perhaps it had never been hunger, but rather an intolerable vacancy, an emergency of hollowness. Could the body confuse itself with a sinkhole in a desolate swamp?

She loved to cook, she appreciated the smells of warm butter, the different olive oils, the spices cardamom and cinnamon and garlic and pepper and the stirring and the boiling. She made meals for her friends but often was too embarrassed to join them as they ate. She would spoon a small portion onto her plate and then push it around from side to side. Later when she was cleaning up, later when the plates waited in the sink, she would scrape everything left over, bitten into, mashed, sliced, stained, into a bowl and eat it all, in happy privacy, in tormented gluttony, in fear of what monster lived within her and sometimes would not rest until she had eaten everything in the cabinet, and the refrigerator and the pistachio nuts she kept in a bin on a top shelf in the hall closet.

Sweating, panting, tearful, she would go to bed, her large form tossing and turning, her stomach stretched, her bowels tight, her shame covering her, inflaming the sores between her legs that came from the chafed flesh that surrounded her vagina.

She was not yet thirty although it would have been hard to tell her age. Why had this happened to her? Could she ever be different? Should she have an operation? Could a knot in her intestines bring her happiness? These were the questions she wanted to explore with Dr. Berman. She was afraid of dying on the operating table. It was a small statistical possibility but not one she had invented. She had a dream in which she lay stretched out on an operating table, her hair under a blue nylon cap, her mouth filled with tubes, her arms stuck with needles and the doctors around the table still as statues under the stark light above and there was no sound in the room, only the beginning of bacterial decay, an audible tinkling of many tiny mouths, a feast beginning for the creatures of the coffin, who were multiplying in her extended lifeless gut.

Dr. Berman herself thought she would rather be dead than look like Edith, than feel like Edith, but then she knew herself well, vanity was not one of her more attractive qualities and vanity had its own problems which should all be put aside to help Edith, but Dr. Berman knew the odds were not with her, and God, the girl was frightfully huge, like something from a fairy tale written by the Brothers Grimm centuries ago.

Maybe a small tilt of a dented molecule in a gene that should have stood upright next to its neighbors had fallen just a fraction away so that Edith’s appetite lost its regulator and a hole was created in the DNA that would spoil the blue-green eyes, the brain that could remember whole stanzas of Paradise Lost and the large-boned feet that if not for that tilting gene might have danced in the arms of a beloved night after night.

Had biology done Edith dirt or was it the unintended harm that is passed on generation to generation, mothers that ignore a baby when it cries, fathers that do not admire the miracle of life they have created, nannies that do their jobs with their minds on the rent they owe or the men or children who claim their own right to comfort against the pains of the stomach or the ear or the fear of the dark.

Was she abused by a father or an uncle? Dr. Berman favored the abuse theory. She saw incest as the Jack who would, menacing clown face and all, jump up on his rusty coiled wire if you just keep winding the little arm on the side of his tin box long enough. More usually, incest was only a wish, a wish as common as dandruff and tooth decay. But in addition to a wish it was sometimes an act, committed in the dark, under the sheets, a violation of the natural order, a thumb in the eye of morality, a stone thrown at the dignity and grace of the human family.

But Edith kept insisting her father would never harm her. He was not as willing as she would have liked to play Monopoly with her on Saturday afternoons. He was attached to his golf bag as if it were a third arm. Fifteen-inch yellow lined pads often emerged from his briefcase and he shut his study door and no one was allowed to disturb him when he worked after dinner, but he didn’t, and Dr. Berman probed very gently, never had, touched Edith, in a way a father shouldn’t. Nor had anyone else.

Or so Edith insisted. Provisionally Dr. Berman had accepted that Edith was not violated literally. But then what?

Sooner or later Edith would be able to tell her. First would come trust, and then would come passion and Edith would grow afraid that Dr. Berman might disappear from her life and she needed Dr. Berman who had promised nothing but in the act of accepting her as a patient had promised everything. She required Dr. Berman to answer her bell and sit opposite her again and again: no, not an imaginary Dr. Berman but the real one in the chair opposite her. Only if she were there, could Edith speak whatever it was she needed to speak, when she was ready, if she could.

Edith had a high voice, girlish, lovely especially if you didn’t look at her as she spoke. She was immaculately clean, her nails were bright red and perfectly oval and she smelled of pine soap and oil that you purchased in health food stores. She had trouble rising from her chair at the sessions’ end and she would hang on to the arm for support and her knee joints, burdened by folds of fat, creaked and strained.

Dr. Berman thought about Edith’s heart beating underneath the pounds of breast tissue, muscle, fat from the abdomen pushing upwards. She thought about how hard it would be to do an autopsy on Edith. She forced the image out of her mind because it made her anxious. Edith was dying. But so is everyone alive, she told herself, including me: a fact so unbelievable she didn’t even try to believe it.

Edith’s dreams were nightmares and they often took place in the belly of a whale. She had explained to Dr. Berman that she had seen Pinocchio at a friend’s birthday party when she was just starting school. She would never tell a lie, she said. She was a child with perhaps an exaggerated sense of honor. Did you want to be a real boy? asked Dr. Berman, who knew the answer to her question.

No, said Edith, I wanted to be a whale. And then she sat there, glaring, her jaw that folded into her neck set in a rigid line.

Dr. Berman wished she liked Edith better. She wished she could find something in her that made her try harder, push further.

In her nightmares Edith was sometimes very small, so small she could disappear down the sink drain if she fell over the edge. In her nightmares Edith sometimes opened her legs and swarms of herring flowed out over her thighs.

Without herring, millions of herring, all the other fish in the sea would die, the food chain would be completely destroyed, Edith told that fact to Dr. Berman who had never liked herring, too salty.

Edith had a recipe she had invented herself for fettuccine and capers. She printed it out and gave it to Dr. Berman. Dr. Berman would only eat pasta on rare occasions and she never cooked herself.

Does she want me to get fat? thought Dr. Berman.

Narcissism, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disturbance, all these nasty conditions were possible in the matter of Edith, but none of them fit exactly. That was because the slippery soul was very good at evading the doctor’s diagnostic kit. Dr. Berman considered that Edith suffered from several pathologies at once, like a patchwork quilt she had once had as a child, made up of all the fabrics of old discarded dresses.

And then she considered the Sleeping Beauty theory, the one she would never have presented to her students at the institute or mentioned to a colleague. Objective proof, scientific testing was impossible. No grant would be forthcoming to test this theory. Nevertheless Dr. Berman considered that the wicked fairy was the culprit. This was the wicked fairy that had not been invited to the christening party. What mother or father, king or queen would invite the dark fairy of the forest to celebrate their daughter’s birth? But the uninvited, the shunned fairy came anyway and cursed the infant in its blanket and said that she would die when she was twenty-one, poisoned by a needle from a spindle. Sometimes Dr. Berman thought the only reasonable explanation for the grief before her was the dark fairy, who hadn’t been invited because she was the dark fairy, who came anyway and cursed on and on until it was a wonder any infant was sheltered from her ire.

And when Edith couldn’t sleep at night, when the last of the nature programs went off the air, when the lights in the buildings opposite her apartment were all dark and there were no sounds of cars on the avenue and only the changing red and green traffic lights promised the return of the world outside, Edith would often go to the window seat and sit there looking up into the sky, where she could catch the flash of a plane with its lights blinking in the darkness as it crossed the park headed for LaGuardia Airport or going the other way to places Edith would never go. She might write a few lines in her notebook . . . She would think of the passengers on those planes, sitting side by side, husbands, wives, children, heads resting on shoulders, knees touching, and the reality of her life, the singleness of it, would run through her, leaving her breathless, awake, and waves of anger would lap at the edge of her consciousness, and then recede.

Sometimes she sang out the window, show tunes, operetta, country music, her mood would change and she might fall asleep on her sofa. She imagined a man listening, a man who would fall in love with her voice, who would never see her, but long for her always: a man who spent his nights waiting for her to sing and his days waiting for night.

Edith wrote poetry. Edith read poetry. Those two acts do not always go together but in Edith they did. She had small black notebooks on her desk, poems titled and dated. She had a stack of books on a table that she reached for again and again. There was Sylvia Plath whom she admired for turning on the gas and not staying her hand. There was Emily Dickinson who knew everything that Edith knew and had not obscured the truth, and made out of defeat a victory no one could question.

There was Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. Eccentric ladies, ladies who loved women, ladies who knew what it was like to believe that the clock might be lying, and time standing still while they looked at their lovers sleeping beside them. There was The Aeneid and The Iliad and The Faerie Queene and Leaves of Grass, and when Edith’s mind seem ready to fly apart she could recite to herself Coleridge’s “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree,” or Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windhover,” I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding . . . Ezra Pound, petals on a wet, black bough, and the words would restore her, like ammonia on a handkerchief under the nose of a fainting girl.

There was H. D., who had a vision of cannons and soldiers and death that appeared in silhouette on her wall when she was living in Vienna while undergoing analysis with Freud. Her vision came before the war that came before the war that followed the war and caused everyone to believe that the Enlightenment was no more than one of Houdini’s master illusions, a fraud in other words.

Edith wrote short poems, thin poems, graceful poems, airy poems, but they each contained a moment that trembled in the air the way a fallen leaf might shift in the currents of a brook. She copied the final versions of her poems into a small thin notebook with a glossy purple cover. There were three notebooks now on her bookshelf. There was also a bin, a laundry bin, holding the many drafts of each poem. She kept the bin in a corner of her room and covered it with a shawl she had bought at a street fair.

The notebooks were numbered and ordered. She knew the contents of each. She kept them near her bed on her night table so she could read them before falling asleep but she didn’t need to open her notebooks. She could and did recite all her poems to herself whenever she wanted.

The time came when she told Dr. Berman about the poems. This was her darkest or was it her brightest secret. Some patients revealed fantasies of being whipped or thoughts of murdering their siblings or fears of sexual inadequacy or reported cruel deeds done in childhood. Edith’s revelation concerned her poetry, which unlike her physical self could be hidden, kept private, away from prying eyes, mocking eyes, unloving eyes.

Ah, thought Dr. Berman, now I have you.

She waited for Edith to offer her the poems, to ask her to read them, but Edith hesitated. No one had seen her undressed since she was a child. It was true Dr. Berman was a doctor but nevertheless the poems were too personal, too secret, something she would never expose. She could not give them to Dr. Berman.

Dr. Z. said, as the two men sat in Starbucks before a lecture at their institute by a French analyst known for speaking very fast and lisping, I think I may need an audio aid for this one.

Dr. Z. said, Why did we come? I’d rather be home watching the Giants game.

Dr. H. said, I’d rather be fishing.

Dr. Z. said, At night?

Dr. H. said, That was a metaphor.

Dr. Z. said, We’re like poets. We write for each other.

And posterity, said Dr. H.

And the tooth fairy, said Dr. Z.

And then she would give them to Dr. Berman. If Homer could be blind, then she could be fat. Edith thought it through. If she never let anyone see her poems no one would ever know how it was in her country: the land of those whose bodies had betrayed them, or was it better to say those who had betrayed their bodies. Also if no one ever read her poems and no one knew she even wrote them, then she would remain hidden and if she were hidden she would be alone forever and if she were alone, this lonely, days without end, she would extinguish herself the way you put out a candle with a quick rubbing of your thumb and forefinger, or a swift breath serving as the wind of God terminating the light, preventing morning from coming up over the horizon.

Rimbaud was bipolar.

Ezra Pound was manic.

Simone Weil was anorexic and masochistic.

Emily, well Emily was an isolate with interpersonal terrors and talked to God too often for her own good.

Dylan Thomas was alcoholic and depressed.

Robert Lowell was lucky they found lithium. It kept him out of the hospital.

John Berryman jumped off a bridge when depression put its arm around his neck.

Allen Ginsberg wrote to keep his mother’s schizophrenia at bay but he needed drugs to do it, as well as religious hypnosis, hocus-pocus, lotus positions, and chants.

Robert Frost was mean as a snake.

Ted Hughes was twice the husband of defeated wives.

Sylvia Plath put her head in the oven, while two little children slept in the next room.

Anne Sexton didn’t make it. Her analyst failed her.

Edith was a fat poet: a very fat poet who was at the moment alive.

And then there was something else. Dr. Berman had sat opposite Edith quietly for many months. She had leaned forward to hear her when her voice had been almost inaudible. She had listened to her talk of diets and her shame at the gluttony she only partially disclosed. She had given Edith her full attention and as a result the predictable had happened. A small space had opened in Edith’s mind where she sometimes thought of things to tell Dr. Berman. And in that small space something new was growing, was it a small bud, a small new tender shoot of affection: was the word for it love and what did that love contain? Edith didn’t know but it brought her hope, this feeling, and it belonged to her and was the gift she wished to give to Dr. Berman and this new feeling made her bring her poems, in their three full small purple notebooks to her session, each time for two months, that was twenty sessions before she actually opened her bag and produced the notebooks, just seconds before her hour was up.

Dr. Berman was about as fond of poetry as the next person. She had taken a course on the Romantics in college, a change of pace from pre-med chemistry that had been welcome. She admired poets, and the idea of poetry, but she didn’t have the patience to let the words wash across her brain and sink in here and there. She was basically attracted to facts. They were mysterious enough. But she understood that Edith was opening a door, a door Dr. Berman had every intention of walking through. She put the poems on her desk, on top of a paper, “The Defensive Position in Melanie Klein,” that had been submitted to the Psychoanalytic Quarterly and was awaiting a positive or negative reaction. Dr. Berman had been selected by the editorial board as a reader whose opinion would be given great weight.

Edith’s three notebooks were slim, as slim as Edith was not.

Over the weekend Dr. Berman went to dinner with a friend. She forgot the name of her friend’s daughter. She forgot how old the child was and if she was married or not. It was possible to carry on a conversation about that daughter, picking up clues as she went along. The effort however tired her and she did not go to the movies with her friend as planned but instead went back to her apartment and directly to bed.

She admitted to herself that her mind was a blackboard on which the questions for the exam, an important exam, had been written but a hand with an eraser had appeared and wiped away the questions and all possibility of answering them before she had a chance to open the blue book in front of her.

Edith spent the weekend as she spent every weekend, watering her plants, ordering food online, boxes of food that would arrive in clear plastic wrap. She would also go to the grocery store, early in the morning before most people were about, and there she would purchase only healthy food, apples and whole grain cereals and skim milk and packages of low-calorie diet bars.

Later if the sun was drifting across Central Park and the day was warm enough Edith would sit on a bench in the park and watch the young mothers pushing their strollers. She would watch the tiny silver scooters, the bikes with training wheels, she would stare at the pockets in the back of the stroller, stuffed with sweaters, diapers, a book, a baby bottle, a bag of cookies. What kind of cookies? She would guess.

Sometimes while she watched she would see a flash of anger cross a mother’s face. She would see the tired eyes, the limp hair, the signs of sorrow or exhaustion in the midst of joy. Edith appreciated those sightings. And sometimes a line of a poem would float into her mind. And she would repeat the line over and over again, shutting out all sounds around her, all sights. She believed that these inward journeys saved her life and were her life.

Sometimes sitting on a park bench noticing that passersby saw her size and looked away as if embarrassed she would get angry. It is not your park, she would think. Cancer cells are in your breasts, she would think, you will die, she would think, and I will live. And she thought worse things than that, things that included pulling of nails and shaving of heads and blinding of eyes. These were not nice thoughts but if she had told Dr. Berman about them, Dr. Berman would have said they were just thoughts.

And then she would get up and go back to her apartment and write down the line that had come to her in the park and maybe add another.

Dr. Z. said to his friend as they were waiting for an education committee meeting at their institute to begin, I should have been a GP in rural Nebraska.

Dr. H. said, I should have been a Scientologist.

You’re in a bad mood, said Dr. Z.

Dr. H. said, I don’t think Scientologists have as many evening meetings as we do.

Dr. Z. said, You could practice voodoo and you wouldn’t have any meetings at all.

Dr. H. said, Scientologists get to climb to higher spheres.

Dr. Z. said, Psychoanalysts get to tumble into the abyss.

The doors to the meeting room opened, the chair of the committee walked in.

Tuesday morning: Edith had her usual 2 p.m. appointment to look forward to later in the day. She put on her best smock over her jeans, jeans she had bought online where no one would see her, or ask her size.

Tuesday morning: Before the sun rose, pink and hopeful, over the East Side, on the other side of the reservoir, before the joggers and the walkers had begun their exercise, Dr. Berman woke up and for a moment wasn’t sure if she was traveling. Had she come to another city, was she in a hotel? Soon it came back to her, the way a room settles down after a dizzy spell. She went into her office and saw the clutter on her desk. The paper she should be reading and the three notebooks that contained Edith’s poems. She had not read them.

Lily walked over the desk gingerly, looked for a place to curl up and finding none went over to the couch and sat on the patient’s pillow, yellow eyes staring and blinking at nothing in particular.

Dr. Berman had her coffee cup in her hand. She wanted to put it down. There were too many papers on her desk. She was upset. It was too much to have to clean her own desk. She had hired people to keep order in her house and they were not doing their job. She had to do everything herself. Bitterness came over her, the loss of her husband ate at her marrow. The terrible thing she knew about herself, but never thought of, never said in words to herself or anyone, hung at the edge of her thoughts, coming closer than it had ever dared before.

She picked up everything she saw on her desk and carried it, three trips in all to complete the act, into the kitchen. She opened the back door and threw it all into the cans that waited in the hallway. She threw her coffee cup into the sink, breaking the porcelain and startling the housekeeper who knew better than to say anything at all.

Now her desktop was clear. There was a framed photo of her husband on one corner that faced her. There was a laptop computer opened before her although she only checked her email communications from her institute or the publisher of her two books who was waiting and would wait for her third. Her appointment book was placed on one side. There was the large vase with dried flowers in it on the far end of the desk and other than that the space was clear, geometric. The golden wood on the desk was polished to a smooth honey color, glistening in the sunlight from the park. Dr. Berman felt settled, clearer. She would focus on her patient, whoever it was, who would ring the bell momentarily.

And in the early afternoon it was Edith. Edith with a pale rose lipstick and her size twelve oxford shoes. It was Edith with her hair washed and makeup covering the acne that had made a permanent home on her chin. It was Edith with hope in her heart. Dr. Berman would have read her poems over the weekend, a weekend which had seemed longer than usual to Edith, a weekend in which no matter how often she looked at her kitchen clock, the hours were moving at a geologic pace, eon after eon, layer upon layer, until Edith thought she might be a fossil, frozen in limestone.

As she approached Dr. Berman’s apartment house, she had been grabbed by a familiar need, a desperate famine came upon her, not exactly a call for food by an empty stomach, not exactly a cry for nourishment by the cells and veins and muscles of her body, but more as if a creature within were howling in desperation, in need of rescue, as if it had been pinned down on the bottom of a well and the rainwater was beginning to pour in. It was a trapped feeling, as if there were no way out of the well. Her need was so great she could only pacify it with calorie after calorie, icing and bread, candy and potatoes. Edith had not been able to describe this panic to Dr. Berman yet, because she was ashamed. But it was in the poems and now Dr. Berman would know, would understand.

But when Edith sat down in the chair she saw immediately that her poems were not on the desk. She waited for Dr. Berman to mention them. She told Dr. Berman it had been a long weekend and she told her that her mother had asked her to go to a movie with her, a French film, but she had decided to stay home. She did not like going to the movies. She could feel the judging eyes of others on her as she walked to her seat and attempted to fit herself into its confines. She waited. Dr. Berman said nothing.

Of course, thought Edith, she wants me to ask her. And so she did. Did you read my poems? asked Edith. Dr. Berman was puzzled. She was silent. Edith said, I was wondering what you thought of my poems.

Dr. Berman wondered if Edith had a poem published in the paper or in a weekly magazine. She said nothing.

Edith said, You said you would read my poems. Edith thought this must be a test of her ability to assert herself, to own her work.

Dr. Berman said, I will read them when you give them to me.

Edith was silent. She looked all around the office for her three notebooks. They were not on the table behind the couch. They were not on the windowsill.

I gave you my poems, she said in her smallest voice.

I have no poems of yours, said Dr. Berman, quite certain.