The Uses of Enchantment Read online

“You’re accusing her.”

  “You just accused her of stealing your hat,” Mary said.

  “I don’t know why you’d want that book anyway,” Regina said. “Mum despised that book. Hyper radiance,” she said. “What is ‘hyper radiance’ anyway?”

  “It’s a theory about—”

  “I know what it is,” Regina said. “I’m not stupid, I’m saying the theory is.”

  “These feel like little embalmed eyeballs,” Gaby said, gazing at the onion she held between her thumb and forefinger.

  “I just wish—” Mary began.

  “What,” snapped Regina.

  “I just wish we could be a little warmer with one another,” Mary said. “Don’t you think that would make this easier?”

  “Sorry to be such a disappointment to you,” Regina said.

  “I’m only suggesting that—”

  “I wasn’t the one who made a fool of herself in front of everybody at the wake yesterday. ‘Strike!’ You can’t even be unironic about your own mother’s death. How sad, Mary. No, really. I find it sad.”

  “It was your own mother’s death too,” Mary said quietly.

  “And so what—you’re accusing me of not grieving properly?” Regina said.

  Gaby chucked another onion in her mouth.

  “That’s hilarious. That really is. I wrote a poem specifically for her funeral and you’re accusing me of…forget it.”

  “Leave Mary alone,” Gaby said.

  Regina ballooned full of indignation.

  “You,” Regina warned, “you should stay out of this.”

  Gaby chewed, swallowed, winced, coughed.

  “Mum hated your poems,” Gaby said. “Your poems suck. Save your poems for someone who gives a shit.”

  “Hey,” Mary said.

  “Don’t stick up for me,” Regina snapped. She turned to Gaby. “You’re right. Mum doesn’t give a shit about my poems. She gave a shit. She’s dead.”

  Gaby’s mouth twinged. She chewed furiously on another pickled onion. Her eyes watered. Regina and Mary diverted their attentions to distant quadrants of the kitchen. Gaby never cried, and when she did they knew it was wise to pretend she wasn’t.

  The telephone rang, its repeated peals echoing through the cardboard boxes and the bare walls and the ever emptier house.

  Mary reached for the kitchen wall extension.

  “Don’t,” Regina cautioned. “It’s Aunt Helen.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know,” she said.

  The phone continued to ring until the kitchen felt like the inside of a bell, maddening and claustrophobic.

  Finally, it stopped.

  “I’m sorry,” Regina said.

  “You don’t have to be sorry,” Mary said.

  “You’re right. We should try to be nicer to one another.”

  “Wonderful,” Mary said. “I’d like that. Really.”

  Gaby nodded.

  Regina nodded.

  The three of them stared at the linoleum.

  “Did you clean out Mum’s study?” Regina finally asked.

  “I did,” Mary said,

  “Find any checks?”

  “Checks for what?”

  “Dad said he thought Mum had been squirreling away her insurance reimbursement checks.”

  “I didn’t find any checks,” Mary said. Then: “Do you remember Roz Biedelman?”

  “Dr. Roz,” Gaby said. “The school shrink. We got high once. In her office.”

  “You were involved with Dr. Biedelman?” Mary asked.

  “I always suspected she was a lesbian,” Regina said.

  “She thought it made her seem cool to get high with me,” Gaby said. “It kind of did.”

  “Dr. Biedelman never mentioned that you were her patient,” Mary said.

  “Lesbian-lesbian confidentiality,” Regina said.

  “It was medical marijuana,” Gaby said.

  “Right,” Mary said, wondering if perhaps her mother had also been Roz’s patient. Unlikely, given her mother’s position on therapists, but who knew what other whims possessed her toward the end? The nonreligious seek out the priests. The fascistically mentally sound seek out the shrinks. It would be unlikely, yes. But inconceivable?

  Yes. No. The fact that she couldn’t soundly gauge the level of inconceivability only underscored how formal and unrevealing her relationship with her mother had been for the past fourteen years.

  “Did Mum have anything more to do with Dr. Biedelman that you know?” Mary asked. “I mean, after we were out of high school?”

  If so, Regina hadn’t heard of it; neither had Gaby.

  “Why do you ask?” Regina said.

  Mary considered telling them about the letter, the cigarette case, the antique store receipt—Regina, after all, could be helpful sometimes. Regina could be sympathetic and even wise, and besides she might know something. The chances of this occurring were probably less than one in one thousand, but it was that slim possibility that continually fooled Mary into trying.

  “Actually—” Mary began.

  “You look tired,” Regina interrupted. “Doesn’t she look tired, Gaby?”

  Gaby shrugged.

  “I am a little tired,” Mary admitted. Regina rarely observed that a person outside herself might be suffering. She appreciated that Regina was trying to be nicer.

  “I mean you did clean out her desk this morning, while Gaby and I were wasting time in Boston. Isn’t that what you did?”

  “That’s what I did,” Mary confirmed. “She sure has some stuff.”

  “Huh,” Regina said. “No doubt she does. You must be exhausted.”

  “Mentally, yes.”

  “But also physically.”

  “Not so much—”

  “Have you been exercising?” Regina interrupted.

  “Me?”

  “I mean today.”

  “Exercising? No.”

  “Just wondering,” Regina said. “Because did you notice that somebody recently rode my bike?”

  She scrutinized Mary with a familiar look of victory.

  “I hadn’t noticed,” Mary said, retreating up the back stairs with her tea.

  Roz’s Boston address was easy enough to find. A mode of transportation less so. Regina claimed that she could not be stranded without a car, it was absolutely not a possibility even though she had no plans and nowhere to go, even though Dad had promised to be home by five so they could have dinner together, probably terrible pizza ordered from the pizza place in the West Salem minimall, another historic anachronism that Mum had fought against and lost.

  Gaby agreed to drive Mary to the train. She didn’t ask Mary why she was going to Boston, not because she respected Mary’s privacy but because she truly did not care enough about Mary’s plans to ask her. The train, the 3:56, was empty save for three aggressively exuberant Semmering Academy students and a despondent domestic day worker. Clearly the Semmering girls saw their friendship as a sport where points are scored by making the spectators feel excluded and shitty. They laughed riotously and often, shedding their boots in the train aisle and giving one another foot massages, feeding one another orange sections, hitting one another with rolled-up magazines. After one artificially loud outburst, Mary and the domestic day worker exchanged a look of exasperation, but when Mary returned to the newspaper she was fake-reading she felt less exasperated than joyless and old.

  The train arrived into North Station at just before rush hour. She hopped the T, emerging at ten minutes to five. Roz’s office was still housed in a converted brownstone on a side street northwest of the commons, in the middle of a two-block concentration of mental health professionals whose tasteful black shingles covertly hung inside the first set of doors, below the buzzers and above the umbrella stands. The first time she’d met Roz at her new office she’d forgotten the business card Roz had given her and had wandered from building to building, each foyer identical to the next as though regulated by a mental heal
th architectural board seeking to enforce a soothing, anonymous experience for its sheepish clientele. Implicit in the discreet placement of these shingles, of course, was the shame still associated in Boston with seeing a therapist. No one saw which bell you rang, no one, save those people already seeing a mental health professional, knew of the extremely high odds that anyone entering a brownstone on these two blocks was also en route to see a mental health professional. That explained the skulking quality to the pedestrians on this block, hats low and chins tucked, eyes tight to the bricks. They looked cold and put-upon, these people, as if walking headlong into an icy wind.

  She checked her watch—5 p.m. to the minute. She assumed that the bulk of Roz’s patients scheduled appointments at the end of the workday, since Roz’s career focus remained educated women, an ever more-afflicted segment of the population according to an interview she’d read with Roz in The Oregonian last year. Roz toured the West Coast to promote her follow-up to Trampled Ivy, a book having to do with a seasonal depressive disorder that occurred among educated women during the holidays. It was called The Tarnished Trivet or The Trivet Trigger, at any rate something to do with trivets because according to the interview she’d read, Roz’s own mother was institutionalized after the Thanksgiving dinner preparations one year when Roz was a teenager, the domestic detail that tweaked her mother for good being the last-minute need to polish an old trivet for a chafing dish of yams. Roz gave a reading at the northwest headquarters of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and Mary had been tempted to sit in the crowd or maybe even buy a book and wait in the signing line to see if Roz recognized her. But in the end, she hadn’t gone to the reading. That was something the younger Mary would have done, and she was no longer the younger Mary.

  The younger Mary had arrived at Roz’s office that first time—the spring of 1987—without an appointment nor any clear sense of why she’d come. In the intervening two weeks since Roz called the meeting with her mother and Dr. Flood in her family’s living room, another associate of Roz’s had stopped by the house on Rumney Marsh. A mole-haired graduate student, he spoke of a lie detector test, he mentioned further therapy, he suggested Mary be deposed before a panel of psychiatric experts and her mother agreed to it. You are not to say one word to these people. But no longer. Now her mother was throwing her to the wolves.

  And so this younger Mary rang the bell of Roz’s new office and, partially to her relief, nobody answered. Thirty seconds later she heard the grinding honk-buzz-snap of the interior door’s lock releasing. She stepped into the foyer’s gloom, the door locking definitively behind her. Mary walked up the canted and depressingly gray-carpeted staircase to Roz’s office on the third floor. She rang the buzzer and was admitted by a higher-pitched buzz. She walked down the narrow hallway (so narrow that the sides of her backpack rubbed against the walls), past a small bathroom, and into a waiting room furnished with a wicker couch and two matching chairs, all painted dark red, all decorated with generically ethnic-looking throw pillows. A white-noise machine fogged away beneath the scarred side table that abutted what she presumed to be Roz’s office door. A framed photograph of a black woman pinning colorfully striped sheets to a laundry line hung on one wall, a poster from a primitives exhibit featuring a scary or miserable-looking wood mask hung on the opposite wall. She removed her backpack but not her anorak, sat on the wicker couch, and waited.

  Thirty-five minutes later the door next to the scarred side table opened. A woman emerged, avoiding Mary’s eyes as she struggled to don her coat in the narrow hall, her elbows thudding dully against the walls as she wrapped her head in a scarf.

  “Come in,” she heard Roz say.

  Mary sat on the orange corduroy couch. A radiator sizzled in the corner; the neighboring windows were cracked open and Mary could see the waves of heat shimmying past the gap. She still didn’t remove her anorak, even though the steam heat made her feel like her body was swelling to twice its normal size, a feeling of general discomfort unaided by the ceiling’s track lighting, trained directly on the couch.

  Roz’s earrings, long silver-tentacled things, reached nearly to her shoulders. One was tangled in her hair like a helpless sea creature suspended in a tuna net.

  “Hello,” Roz said.

  The radiator clanked in a distressed way. Mary shifted sweatily on the couch, her tights glued to her inner thighs.

  “You’ve had a chance to think about our last meeting,” Roz said. “I can see you’ve been thinking.”

  Mary wondered how the act of thinking made itself visible on a person.

  “I appreciate that. I appreciate it, Mary.” Roz placed a hand flat between her breasts, her cloisonné bangles making a tooth-clacking sound. “And I’m assuming, because you’ve come all this way to see me, that you’ve decided the best way out of this situation—for all involved—is to finally tell the truth.”

  Mary didn’t respond.

  “Mary?” she prodded.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Mary said.

  “You’re protecting Dr. Hammer, I know this, and while I admire your loyalty I want you to know that Dr. Hammer doesn’t need your protection. He’s an adult, and like many adults he’s suffered an extremely misguided error in judgment. Nothing bad will happen to him—unless, of course, he’s done something terrible to you that you want to tell me about. Did he do something terrible to you, Mary, that you’d like to tell me about?”

  Mary shook her head.

  “Well,” Roz said. “Regardless I’m all ears.”

  What a strange saying, Mary thought. All ears. Roz’s office felt like an interrogation room, with its overactive radiator and its track lights and its woman who was all ears. Worse than one of the Greek sirens Mary had been reading about with her tutor, Roz wasn’t a person who would sing you to death—no no, Roz would listen you to death. She’d suck every thought and memory you’d ever had right out of your mouth, leaving you empty-headed, dry-tongued, identity-free, a husk.

  A person might simply confess to untrue things just to be released from the situation with some of their actual person intact.

  “I lied to Dr. Hammer,” Mary said.

  “You lied to protect yourself from him,” Roz said. “Of course you did.”

  “I allowed him to believe things,” Mary said.

  “He put words in your mouth,” Roz said. “He put ideas in your head.”

  Mary stared at Roz, flicking an octopus earring with her stout forefinger. For a so-called feminist, she was strangely quick to assign to women the most helpless of roles. Who’s to say, she wanted to say, that I didn’t put ideas in his head?

  “He was not completely wrong in his assessment of me,” Mary said evasively.

  “But he was not completely right, either. An important distinction. Ultimately, he suppressed your own story with his theory.”

  “My story wasn’t suppressed,” Mary said. “My story was—in process.”

  “Of course it’s in process. It’s still in process. Given the subpar treatment you’ve received, you couldn’t possibly claim to know what happened to you in any accurate way. Your past, you believe, could as easily be a product of your imagination. It’s going to take some work, Mary, but together I know we can ‘adhere,’ as we say, your so-called fantasy life with your actual life. This is the only way that healing can begin, the only way that you can become the author of your own narrative. By accepting that the fantasy is not, in fact, a fantasy. In the meantime, however, you’ll need to testify to how Dr. Hammer’s…enthusiasm…for his theory posed, shall we say, a conflict to your own best interests as his patient.”

  Mary fiddled with the expired ski passes on her anorak’s zipper.

  Roz spun around in her armchair and opened her desk drawer, withdrawing what looked to Mary like a college catalog, with a glossy cover and a picture of a squat pillared building, a library or judicial court, flanked by two autumnal-leafed trees.

  She handed it to Mary.

  “The Ma
ssachusetts Mental Health Governing Board was founded in 1973 to protect people like you,” Roz said. “People who have sought the help of a mental health professional and who have received subpar care. Most psychiatric licensing boards allow their members to re-up without checking their records or inspecting their performance. Many doctors and therapists don’t even bother to renew their licenses in a timely manner. Dr. Hammer, during the months he saw you, was working with an expired license. Of course, Dr. Hammer isn’t an actual doctor. He dropped out of his Ph.D. program. He isn’t a trained psychiatrist. He studied therapeutic social work at Boston University and received his certificate by the skin of his teeth. He’s been long associated with an experimental and uncertified school of therapy that borrows randomly from pop psychology and elementary psychoanalysis. Finally, though he was never officially indicted, while in graduate school he was brought up on dubious practice charges because of his mishandling of a sociopathic patient named Bettina Spencer. I presume you’ve heard of her. I’ve written a letter to your parents to this effect. I’m hoping your mother will now be able to direct her outrage toward the more deserving target.”

  Mary opened the brochure and was confronted with a blank white page and a Voltaire quote: Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

  “Of course I’m not underestimating what parents go through in these situations. True, it cannot compare to what you, the victim, experienced. But parents are especially hard hit by the limits of their own power—of their ability to effectively protect their children from harm. It’s only natural that they should reject those who have their best interests at heart.”

  “Why did you share an office with him?” Mary said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “If you think Dr. Hammer’s so dangerous. Why did you share an office with him?”

  Roz smiled. “Would it predispose you toward me to know that I, too, have my weaknesses?”

  “I doubt it,” Mary said.

  “Weak men are my weakness. I cannot help myself from helping pathetic men. But even I have my limits.”

  Mary closed the brochure. Also like a college catalog, it made her queasy about her future.