the universal cry of motherhood, “You go to your room right now, and you go home, Nanny Goodman.” Sometimes she would let us eat popcorn and tomato soup for dinner on Fridays, but unlike my mother she wouldn’t feed the hobos. Once she gave a hobo who came to her door The Power of Positive Thinking. Hobos still arrived in town when I was a child; they’d get on the trains up north, thinking they’d arrive someplace from which they could go someplace else, but our town was the end of the line. So they would come by our houses looking for chores, chopping wood or raking leaves. My own mother would bring them glasses of cold apple cider while they worked, and send them packing with a brown paper bag of salmon salad sandwiches.
My father went to see a hypnotist a year before he died. He and my mother were visiting friends in New York, and one of them recommended hypnosis to help him quit smoking again. “It was truly something,” he wrote to me. “I was half expecting Lon Chaney, Jr., in Inner Sanctum—‘Luke eento my eyes,’ he would say, and then send me forth on a quest for gopher blood or head cheese. But my man looked like a Great Gray Owl, with agate-hard eyes; there was a picture of him and his wife on the wall and you could see that just as the shutter clicks he is saying, ‘No, I won’t miss you, not any of you.’ This look is what I would have expected to discover in the deepest recesses of my soul, but what I found instead was a soft tranquil pool. Afterwards, I went without smoking for nearly an hour.”
My hypnotist is sixty or so, smiling and kind, John Kenneth Galbraith in L. L. Bean clothes. “How are you?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say, and offer as proof a leering rictus of a smile.
His uncluttered desk and chair and the chair beside it, in which I now sit, are the only furniture in his office. On the wall is a print of a Chinese lion, the only decor. One window looks out on the bay, through trees.
“What are you here to work on?” he asks.
“Oh,” I say, “anxiety, melancholia; fears of loss, rejection, death, humiliation, suicide, madness . . .”
He is nodding at me, kind and thoughtful, “Okay, then,” he says, “tell me what your strengths are.”
Squirming, fidgety, I finally allow as to how I can be sort of kind, sort of funny.
“All right then. You’ll need to remember that later.”
“How long is this going to take?”
“Altogether? Maybe a couple of hours. Let’s begin.” He asks me to close my eyes. “Good. Now take a few deep breaths. All right: now think of a color you really love, a color you find soothing, and breathe that color in and out, over and over.”
I settle on chick yellow, inhale it, exhale it.
“Now, while breathing in your color, say to yourself, over and over and over, ‘I am hearing . . . , I am seeing . . . , I am feeling . . . , but fill in the blanks, ‘I am hearing—my voice, I am seeing—black, I am feeling—skeptical, I am hearing—my heart . . .’”
I am hearing my breath, I am seeing spangly black, I am feeling skeptical, hearing the rustle of leaves, seeing my own face, hearing the hypnotist clearing his throat, seeing the sea, feeling hungry, hearing birdsong, seeing our hillsides in winter, Ireland green, feeling relaxed. “Deeper and deeper,” the hypnotist says, “over and over and over.” After a long while, I am aware of an amniotic silence in my head, and then I am aware that I’m on the verge of drooling.
“Now,” he says. “Beginning with today, I want you to go backwards in time, and ferret out the memories of pain: of despair, rejection, terror, shame. Freeze each memory, study it like a photograph, and then go backwards to the next one. Take as much time as you need.”
The first moving slide appears on the screen in my head. I see myself lurching away from the home in Petaluma that I had shared with two couples in love, a home to which I had fled when my marriage broke up, a home so full of romantic gazes that I felt alternately like the lonely innkeeper and the court jester. Climbing down the porch stairs with two heavy suitcases, bolting for my car, consumed with memories of pain, staggering like Gabriela Andersen-Schiess coming around the track in the final lap of the Olympic marathon, where the pain and exertion are so great that they could have caused brain damage. I study this still with absolutely bemused detachment. I go back several months to the end of the marriage, in the ramshackle house on the Petaluma River. The water was so beautiful at sunset it could make your stomach buckle. We lived there for three years, my husband and I. The hills went from green in the winter and spring to golden yellow, Northern California in her blond phase, and the hay grows taller and taller, until you wake up one morning to the sound of the hay-cutting machines, which leave the hay on the ground in drifts, and then the bales appear, neatly stacked, golden blocks. By the end of our marriage we sound like Harold Pinter characters, clipped and malicious but ever genteel. Scenes from our marriage that even this morning sent a sickness rushing up my spine. But now I am blithely reviewing them as though I’m on nitrous oxide, placidly aware of the pain. I see our eventual aggressive indifference, hear our gratuitous lies, realize the great betrayal was being replaced in his heart by his work. Lacking the courage to live a quiet anonymous life, he chases down fame as an artist, and finds it to be a cold, beautiful woman who makes it clear he doesn’t quite deliver, and I am made to pay, over and over again. Unfolding backwards through the years, I finally arrive at the hardest memories of all, the joy of falling in love.
“Backwards, backwards,” says the hypnotist.
I am on Mount Tamalpais, twenty-four years old. A week or so before, I had finally emerged from the grief of losing my father, poking my head tentatively out into the world like the aged Japanese warrior coming out of the forest, desperate to know if the emperor is still in power. In town, I ran into the love of my life, a man with whom I had broken up around the time my father got sick, six months ago. We started talking and joking around, and he invited me along for the ride to Petaluma for cocktails with the couple who were our best friends. They were so happy to see us that we ended up staying for dinner. My lover had never before been so publicly demonstrative with me, and I mentally ran through the reasons I shouldn’t start up with him again, but it was obvious as the evening progressed that he was falling back in love. When we went to leave, the engine of his car caught fire, and we had to spend the night with our friends. Clearly a case of divine intervention—God meant for us to be lovers again. And so I began to relax, and fell in love again. Our friends drove us home late the next morning, but we were all so relieved that my lover and I were back together that we stopped to buy champagne and take-out Chinese food and drove up the mountain for a picnic.
We are sitting on a knoll at the top of the mountain with what looks to be a view of the entire world. Over to the right is the deep-blue Pacific, and hillsides roll down beneath us everywhere you look, ridges and limitless trees, the bay gray-green and peppered with boats, and San Francisco as lovely as Atlantis. My lover appears to be almost sick with love and has never seemed so devoted, and our friends are singing the first lines of “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” to us, and we’re all looking bashful and goopy. Finally we are walking to the car, and our friends are looking at their watches, and ask us nonchalantly if they can drop both of us off at my lover’s house to save time—they’ve got to get back to Petaluma—and I say Sure, and my lover says No, clearing his throat, and that there’s a bit of a problem, and we all cock our heads nervous-sweetly, and I say, Don’t worry, I won’t stay, I’ll just call a cab from there, and he looks stricken and finally blurts out that a woman is waiting at his house for him. I stand there on the mountain frozen by public disgrace.
I study this slide. Backwards? Backwards then. Except for my father’s illness, I’m mostly seeing a sort of moving police lineup of boyfriends and breakups and the ensuing small breakdowns, and then I see a clip
