have it strategically placed up on the shelf behind my head, so that when you look at it to see how much time we have left, I’ll think you’re looking at me. And it’s a big clock. I guess you wouldn’t want people to go a second over.”
“It’s not entirely selfish,” he says. “If a patient runs over the time, it backs up all my other patients.”
“I always kind of wondered what you do if someone’s in the middle of a big important story about himself, and his time’s up,” I say. “Do you suddenly say, ‘Hold that suicidal thought until next week?’”
“I try not to get into anything too heavy in the last few minutes of the session.”
“Oh, well, that’s cheating. If only forty minutes of a forty-five-minute session can be dedicated to serious talk, you’re gypping people out of five minutes.”
“Carrie,” Petrov says, “we’re here to talk about you.”
“Well, if I talk about you, it brings me out of my shell.”
“Ah,” Petrov says. “It does?”
“No. I just figured you’d like that. Some self-analysis. Deflecting things to you helps me. I thought you’d like the hypothesis.”
Petrov sighs. “Did you bring your list of ten things you love?”
I pull it out and hand it to him. “Yes, but it’s a top-eight list.”
“You always have to be the contrarian.”
“No, I don’t. Ha ha. Get it?”
1 Cherry soda
2 Street sounds
3 My bed
4 The green-blue hue of an indoor pool
5 Starfish
6 The Victorians
7 Rainbow sprinkles
8 Rain during the day (makes it easier to sleep)
“Tell me,” he says. “When’s the last time you had a cherry soda?”
I think. “Not since I was little.”
“What about rainbow sprinkles? When was the last time you had them?”
By the shore, maybe. Dad and I used to get vanilla soft-serve ice cream in those airy flat-bottomed beige cones. “Not since I was a kid, again.”
“But they’re in your top eight favorite things.”
“I guess I just haven’t made them a priority.”
“I think,” Petrov says, “that part of the reason for your depression is that you deny yourself things, or you don’t seek out the things that make you truly happy. Not everything has to have analysis behind it. Why not just enjoy yourself without thinking sometimes?”
“So when did we decide that I was depressed? Neither of us has ever mentioned the term. We’ve talked about how the world is full of hypocrites, how a lot of people aren’t that smart or don’t talk about things that actually matter, and last time, you said you understood that I was younger than everyone else in college and that might have made things harder for me. But now all of a sudden I’m depressed. Did your friend Eli Lilly just ship you a free eight ball of Prozac?”
He looks beaten. “I shouldn’t be so quick to label. But I think you’d be happier, and more at peace with the world, if you sought out things you enjoyed. Sitting home all the time can’t make you too happy. When you were in school, you moved ahead by taking tests and getting good grades, and you certainly could feel yourself progressing that way. But now that you’re out of school, I think you’re in a bit of a holding pattern. If you did more activities related to things you loved, you probably would meet like-minded people and move forward with meaningful friendships and relationships. That’s why I thought it would be good for you to join an organization.”
“Should I go find a cherry-soda club?”
“Let’s add a Part B to the first part of your assignment,” Petrov says. “The first part was to write a list of things you love. Now, for 1B, go out and do some of them. Get an ice-cream cone with rainbow sprinkles. Go to the store and buy cherry soda.”
“Okay.”
He looks at my list again.
“You also mention sleep, and you mention rain.”
“Sleeping in the rain,” I say. “I’ll get on that right away.”
“Good.”
He is so oblivious.
When I get home, my hand immediately shoots into my mailbox, which I love almost as much as my bed. I subscribe to fourteen magazines, and just seeing the cavalcade of colors in my box fills me with joy. But what’s more, each day brings the potential for new surprises. This is the kind of hope that keeps me going when nothing else does. Maybe the MacArthur Genius Grant notice will come in the mail.
But today there’s only something white and thin inside.
It’s an actual letter—rare these days, in our e-mail driven society. It’s in a fine white wove envelope, and my name and address are typed neatly in 10 pica that looks like it came from a typewriter and not a printer. It’s from the dean’s office at Harvard. I’ve finally gotten him to respond to my request, the rogue.
Dear Carrie:
Hope this finds you well and I am sorry it has taken me so long to respond to your letter. As always, I appreciate your concerns. However, as I mentioned during our conversation at your father’s function last year, I don’t see, as I didn’t see then, a need for an honors program at Harvard. Even though you maintained in your letter that it is important to allow “the best of the best” at our school to interact, we believe that every student at Harvard is already the best of the best….
Bull. That’s what I had thought before I’d arrived there. I thought everyone would be a genius and wouldn’t look at me funny when, for example, I wanted to talk about philosophy or current events at a party or in the dorm lounge. Some of the kids were okay, but some would go “whoosh” and cut their hands above their heads when I said something they deemed too intellectual. I also met people whose test scores were much lower than mine, and some of them had rich alumni parents or played lacrosse or dived really well and that’s probably why they got in. There were also plenty of beer-chuggers and bubbleheads and people who talked nonstop about sex, which one would think is odd for a school that everyone had to study like hell to get into, but I guess that’s why their gonads exploded as soon as they got fifty miles from home. I thought that by having an honors program, the students at Harvard who were actually smart could be together.
On rare occasions, I did encounter smart people in school. Once in a while, I’d end up at a mixer with the other prodigies, and we’d discuss the difficulties of being fifteen in a sea of twenty-one-year-old drinkers and Lotharios. I felt a kinship with the others, but they soon grew to love seeing how much they could get away with, while I didn’t.
That
