The spring I turned eighteen I took child psych at the local college. The course was my second in psychology, taught late in the afternoon by a real-world psychologist named Norval Dirksen. He wore ill-fitting suits and white stay-press shirts that floated on his two-pack-a-day frame. Between classes, while my friends shuffled data-processing cards and crunched differential equations—focusing on the hard stuff—I applied myself to my imagined future.
I memorized lists of defense mechanisms, outlined chapters in the textbook, and read Dibs in Search of Self, the story of an emotionally disturbed youngster who, with the help of a compassionate therapist, knits together a unified personality.
“Dibs,” Dr. Dirkson said, “got better.”
Around this time, we were having a situation at home. One night I woke to a heavy scratching sound on the roof. Something was up there. The sound of its claws and the hollow thump of the creature’s slow footfalls just above my head filled me with the kind of primordial dread you feel only in the dead of night. I tossed the covers back, reached for pants and a shirt, and padded to the utility room, where I found my father, also partially dressed, standing in the dark testing a flashlight. “Raccoon,” he said.
We opened the back door, stepped out into the muggy night, and stood in the wet grass in our bare feet. When he aimed the light at the roof, I saw he was right. A dark form huddled in one of the valleys of the roof. We took a step closer, the light jiggled, and then we stopped. The thing was looking directly at us. Its yellow eyes glowed. I knew there was no chance of it leaping from the roof and locking its teeth on my throat, but at the moment, it seemed like a real possibility. My father said he could shoot it. I pictured him aiming a rifle while I held the light. But I imagined him missing, or worse, wounding it, and the enraged animal attacking—by mistake—the guy who was holding the light. We settled on a trap, which we put next to the chimney the following morning. The next nights those yellow eyes glowed in my long-term memory. I strained to hear those terrible claws, and every morning I woke up hoping there would be nothing in the trap. I didn’t want to confront it. I just wanted it to go away.
One day a week that term, I drove to a shuttered school in Saginaw, where a back room had been opened, painted cheerful colors, and dedicated to the care of emotionally disturbed children. This was what the college called “practical experience.” You went to a place where a particular kind of work was done to find out if you really wanted to do it. I was watched over by a woman named Mrs. Wheeler, who told me she was actually a social worker.
She rolled her eyes. “Same thing as a psychologist,” she said, “sort of.”
I saw myself eventually doing couch and notebook work with “clients,” but I knew I needed to start somewhere. I would have to peel a few potatoes, my father said, before I could make a soufflé.
My job was to observe. There were ten children. I watched Stephen, a round little guy with a red face who sat for hours at one of the tables swinging a wooden mallet, hammering wooden pegs into a block. And Emily, a little girl who drew black crayon swirls on tablets of paper. And Tina, who sat in a yellow beanbag chair with a doll pressed to her chest. The room was noisy. The kids cried a lot.
“Stephen says he’s hot,” I said one morning to Mrs. Wheeler.
“He’s working,” she said. She mimed his hammering motion and smiled.
“But he is hot,” I said. “I touched him. He’s hot.”
She swung her imaginary hammer again.
The kids didn’t play together much. They just collided with each other. There were frequent low-level assaults and thefts. Then they had juice.
I asked Mrs. Wheeler, “Does Tina ever leave that chair?”
Mrs. Wheeler shrugged and gave me her you’ll-find-out smile.
The third week I visited there was a new boy. I assumed my point of observation and took out my notebook. This new boy, dressed in blue overalls, lay under one of the tables the whole morning. Every so often, he got up on his hands and knees, turned in circles like he was chasing his tail, and then lay back down. Surrounded by racket and chaos, he seemed nothing if not bored, taking luxurious sucks on his left thumb and stirring the hair on the back of his head with his right index finger. I ran through my list of defense mechanisms and decided to take a stab at sounding clinical.
I pointed him out to Mrs. Wheeler. “That one,” I said, “seems to exhibit reaction formation.”
“What?” She pushed her glasses up her nose and looked.
“Reaction formation?” I said. “His defense mechanism?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head.
I was in it. I thought I might as well formulate a complete psychological thought, put it on the table. “An exaggerated response to his surroundings, the direct opposite . . .”
“That’s Patrick,” she said. “He’s my son.”
He lay under the table on his side, his back to his mother.
“Is he . . . ?”
One look at her, and I didn’t finish my psychological thought. No, young Frankenstein, he’s just visiting today. She didn’t have to say it. I gave her a tight smile and tapped my pencil a few times on my notebook.
Three more Fridays I went for this practicum. Each observation was long, loud, and uneasy. I never saw Patrick again. Mrs. Wheeler treated me with equal parts respect and newfound skepticism. Those long mornings, I think she heard what I heard—the sound of claws scratching above us, the slow progress of a creature on the roof, a beast we didn’t want to catch but simply hoped would go away.