plunge.
I had no choice but to stick with routine. Lock up. Walk the three blocks to pick up the kids from their San Antonio Academy classes: Throw Me a Curve for Alex, My Secret Journal for Tamar. They raced at me from the summer camp holding pen, the smell of dried sweat and dirt slamming into me seconds before they did.
“I get to tell Mom!” Tamar shouted, giving her brother a two-handed shove. “It’s about my friend.” She pulled me down and whispered in my ear, her breath reeking of Gatorade. “That girl named Abigail in my class? Her mom jumped off a building. A big one.” She gasped for air. “She’s dead. Abigail had to leave before snack.”
Small world.
Alex stood with his arms crossed. “She committed suicide. Just use the real word.”
“She needed a psychiatrist,” Tamar said. “Right, Mom?”
Small world.
“She had one, Baby.”
I didn’t have to say that, but the look on my face would have revealed me anyway. My physiology allows no secrets. I blush. I blanch. My mouth twitches. My pupils dilate.
“Mom! That’s two patients in a week,” Alex said. “You’re going to get sued and sent to jail, and we’ll have to go live with Dad. He’ll never let us keep the dogs in his stupid apartment.”
He took off through the parking lot, but not before I’d seen the tears cutting channels through the dust on his cheeks. He darted in and out between the cars, his red baseball cap a bobbing marker. I ran after him as fast I could with a ten-year-old girl by the arm and a pair of Claudia Cuti mules on my feet. Did you overlook the terror that accompanies the possibility of happiness? The voice was so vivid that I stopped and turned to look for the source. But it was in my head. Not Freud this time, but the voice of Dr. Nathan Bernstein, my former analyst.
By the time the kids and I got home that afternoon, my mind was crazed. I should have known just how crazed by virtue of the fact that calling Bernstein seemed to be a reasonable option. I didn’t know where else to turn. A drowning person grabs for a floating board, even if it’s full of nails.
“Dr. Bernstein,” he said, answering the phone with the same vaguely irritated, nasal voice that broadcast his once-daily piece of wisdom over my shoulder as I lay on the hard leather daybed. Those few words, always spoken just at session end, were my cue to vacate.
“This is Nora Goodman,” I said.
He did hesitate, but to his credit and my surprise, he remembered me. “I haven’t heard from you in some time,” he said.
Dr. Nathan Bernstein had been my assigned Training Analyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Every analyst-in-training is required to undergo a personal psychoanalysis and for good reason. We all see the world through the constraints of our own psyches. There’s no way you can begin to understand where someone else’s psyche starts if you don’t know where yours ends. Bernstein wasn’t on my wish list for a Training Analyst, but I was too intimidated back then to buck the system with a special request.
Officially, I’d terminated with him fifteen years before all this happened—terminate being the curious word we psychoanalysts use to designate the ending of an analysis. In my case, escape would have been more apt. Freud recommended that analysts get re-analyzed every five years, like a mental tune-up. But in Freud’s time, most analyses lasted only a few months. My analysis with Bernstein went on for eight years. Even then, he wasn’t satisfied. Not all analysts adhere to Freud’s guideline for mental maintenance, but I venture that most do stay in touch with their former analysts to let them know about life events or to discuss problems that pop up. Once the door clicked behind me after my last session, I swore I’d never speak to him again.
“Something strange is happening in my life,” I said into the receiver, flooded by a familiar shamed, needful feeling. “I’d like to make an appointment to speak to you.”
“If you’re able, we could talk some now. I happen to be free.”
“I do want to pay you for your time.”
“Is it your wish that I’d not expect to be paid?” he said. “Rather narcissistic, wouldn’t you say? I do hope you’ve called about your inability to cut the tie with the impossible man you insisted upon marrying. Roger, was it?”
“Richard,” I said. For the briefest moment, I felt like defending my husband and the choice I’d made. I saw Richard as I’d seen him when we met our first day at Northwestern Medical School. My head was spinning from my last minute, off-the-waiting-list admission. And there he was. Brilliant. Exotic. A Jew from Texas, no less. Sophisticated and funny. The kind of guy who could joke about MD being stamped on his birth certificate. I’d been scared witless a few weeks later when he pulled me aside after Anatomy lecture. I was certain I’d made some grand faux paux, and that he, as class president, had been assigned to tell me I wasn’t making the grade. Instead he asked if I’d like to attend that evening’s meeting of the Shrink-Lits, the journal club he’d organized for medical students interested in Psychiatry, and perhaps grab a drink afterward at Billy Goat’s Tavern.
Dr. Bernstein went on. “It’s one of the disappointments of my life that so much of what analysis has to offer remains potential.”
“I’m not calling about Richard. Right now I’m worried about something in my practice,” I said. “I have seven analytic patients…”
“Admirable.” His tone was grudging. Analysts keep score by how many patients they have in a full four-to-five-time-per-week analysis. It occurred to me that he might be thinking I was lying, upping my numbers to make an impression.
“In the past eight days,” I said, “two of my patients have died. The first death is considered accidental. The police are calling the other a suicide. My intuition tells me there’s some connection.”
“Your analysis is coming back to me more clearly. I’ll be direct. I’m too close to death to beat around the bush. I suspect your old Oedipal problem is the culprit.” He sounded bored. “You must believe that only you can save your insane father. To be Daddy’s special girl, little Nora must be the all-powerful rescuer, ignoring all of Daddy’s nasty faults to keep his love.”
I’d forgotten about the condescending singsong he used when he said something he considered obvious.
“You carry this maladaptive character defense everywhere you go,” he went on. “Even into your work as an analyst. You fear hurting your patients’ feelings. You try to save them with your sweet love and neglect to confront the repressed aggression—yours and theirs—that will, of necessity, if not brought to consciousness by interpretation, lead to destruction. Voila—the bad marriage, the accident, the suicide.”
In about sixty seconds, he’d managed to dredge up the message of my entire analysis with him: You, Nora Goodman, are to blame. I in turn was thrown right back into the struck-dumb state of my years on his couch.
“You see why I opposed your interrupting your treatment. Perhaps Freud’s idea of the death instinct is truer than I’d like to think.” His signature sigh indicated our time was up. “I recommend you do some further analysis. We could work
