“No it wasn’t,” I say as if she is an idiot, or lying. And she says yes it was; she had been on duty. The world drops out from underneath me because suddenly I remember standing up in my crib, it is pitch dark and perfectly silent and I am completely disembodied and think I am in outer space, and I scream and scream for my parents. There is a rush of humiliation, a sickening aloneness as my parents try to mollify the agitated nurse.
I stay with this frame for a while. I haven’t thought of it in nearly thirty years. But I’m stuck, can’t go any earlier, and so return to the hospital.
“Are you thinking that you’re there?” asks the hypnotist. I nod. “Are your parents in the memory with you?” Yes. “All right then. We’re going to do a little visualization. I want the adult in you to enter the scene. The adult in you can be funny and kind, you said so before we started. Now go to your parents and thank them for raising you, and explain that you are old enough now to assume responsibility for the child.”
Even in the trance I am filled with derision. This is precisely the sort of thing that gives California a bad name. But I swallow my reservations and walk up to my parents. We do not hug. I stand there shuffling. They look concerned, kind. I am the same age now that they are in this moment. It is too painful to see my father. “Go on,” the hypnotist says.
“All right,” I say out loud. In the dreamy trance I stare at my feet and tell them I won’t need them anymore, that I am going to try to raise this child of theirs. I look up to see that they are nodding and it makes me feel shy and stupid and homesick. “Go to the kid now,” the hypnotist says. “Give her a hand.”
So I walk to the crib and stand beside it and look at the miserable child. Her sad face is screwed up with shame and I want to bolt. It is more than I can stand. Finally, though, I lift her out of the crib and sit down on a nearby chair and hold her in my lap. We sit there rocking. A long time passes; we rock.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I say finally, not out loud.
I try to think of things to say that are funny and kind, but all I can do is rock her and stare off into space. “That nurse was a shithead,” I say. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Now,” the hypnotist says. “Play all of your memories forward, all the ones you’ve looked at today, and each time step in to give the younger you a hand.”
So the adult me stepped into my own history, to help, and I went toward the memory of Lynnie and me in the basement doing our nudie revue, and the adult me was funny and kind, snappy, compassionate, there with the kid, saying, “You didn’t do anything wrong,” holding her, teasing her, getting her to relax. Then I went into the lake at Girl Scout camp with all those shrieking girls streaming and splashing out of the water, and I was there standing beside my seven-year-old in the water, making her laugh as I flailed about in mock panic, gaping and gasping at floating pine needles and twigs. And I was there with my eleven-year-old when she felt like a Russian hunchback at the junior high dances, me pointing out a boy whose fly was down and a popular girl dancing with toilet paper stuck to the heel of her shoe; and I was there in high school parties and classrooms, there the day I was caught plagiarizing the Monarch Notes for my paper on Moby Dick. “Hey, babe,” I say to the fifteen-year-old who is cradling her head in her arms, crying soundlessly, alone in the classroom except for the mortified male teacher, “babe, I think maybe this guy didn’t handle this all that well. And what was he doing, big UC Berkeley grad, using Monarch Notes to prepare for his classes?” And I was there with the younger me in bed with all those men, some cold, unfaithful, married, impotent (“Oh dear,” I say to the twenty-year-old when a nearly impotent young lawyer is on top of her, frantically pumping at her, “it’s sort of like he’s doing his push-ups, isn’t it?”). And then I’m there the year my marriage ended in the ramshackle house with cows on the hillsides around us, not able to help very much, just there in the room while she packs, letting her see that I am there, because the worst of it all, time after time, was the utter, abject aloneness. And then the adult me even slipped ghostily into the person sitting there in the hypnotist’s office, like when a double vision slides together into one image, and I sat there for a while feeling sort of old and full of vague yearnings.
I opened my eyes a crack and smiled toward my lap, and suddenly remembered what it feels like to climb the stairs of a New York City subway station, about to go up and outside alone, maybe not knowing exactly where I am, only that I am not completely lost.
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