My Beautiful Failure (7 page)

“People are stupid, aren’t they, Mr. Morrison?” Jodie asked.

“Not stupid, exactly,” Dad said. He chewed on his lip before speaking again. “They just can’t recognize something good if it’s not like a hundred things they haven’t seen before.”

“That’s really frustrating, Mr. Morrison,” Jodie said.

Mom was flipping through the mail and checking the answering machine. “Oh well, honey,” she said. “If you’re going to keep pushing the envelope, you have to expect a paper cut.”

“Cute,” Dad said. He folded his arms over his chest. He looked furled, like an umbrella.

I had just started researching the history of the Hohner Special 20 harmonica. I dropped my work and went into the studio, where Dad’s finished and half-finished paintings were turned toward the wall. I hoped I could say something to make him relax. To unfurl him.

“I’m doing my homework,” I said. “I just want you to know that.”

“I’m glad,” he said. He didn’t look glad. He pressed a fist into his mouth and chewed his lip harder.

I stretched up and rested a hand on the molding above the doorway. “Answer a question for me,” I said. “Are you having a good time with your painting?”

“Up till now I was. Until the world conspired to teach me that art is unnecessary.”

“See what’s happening? One little disappointment and
you’re not enjoying it anymore. That’s what I was worried about. I wish you would be happy that you have something you enjoy doing and not worry about status and recognition. Live in the moment. No success, no failure.” I let go of the molding and sort of fell into his room, but gracefully, like a trapeze artist.

“That’s not good enough, though,” Dad said. “I want more. I always thought . . .”

“Yes?” I asked, using my Listeners techniques.

Dad’s body softened. With one hand he picked through the brushes on the table, lifting and dropping them like they were so much kindling.

“I thought I was going to have a
big
life. Be different from other people. You and Linda and your mom are great, but—”

I balked at this, but I talked myself through it:
It’s not up to you to judge. You’re living on the Dad Planet now.

“You wanted to be different,” I echoed.

Dad nodded to himself. He had made some kind of decision. “I’m going to have the big life,” he said. “I’ll make the opportunities for myself if no one will make them for me.”

D
ad’s first antidepressant has given him what Dad’s psychiatrist, Dr. Gupta, calls an “atypical dermatological reaction.” That means that Dad is covered with blisters—red lumps that merge to make ridges, with yellow pus forming streams in between. Some of the blisters look like numbers or letters: D or 8. He keeps discovering more, and Linda and I pantomime gagging every time his back is turned. Mom tells him not to look at his skin and to keep his sleeves rolled down. Soon the rash disturbs him more than anything else that is wrong. We cover up all the mirrors.

M
argaret and Richie were both on calls. Margaret smiled and nodded even though the Incoming couldn’t see her. Funny how the visual signals humans developed face-to-face persisted when we were separated.

She asked her caller something about a fiancé in Iraq. A gold cross sparkled against Margaret’s plaid uniform. She zinged the cross from side to side on its chain while she talked. Mom often did something like that too. She touched her necklace when she was nervous, as if it held magical powers. Richie’s arm partly blocked my view and my hearing, but I heard him say “amputation” and “prosthesis.” I had to give him props: He could handle more than I thought.

I waited in pregame mode, thinking about that last conversation with Dad. What had he been trying to tell me?

I thought I was going to have a big life. Be different from other people. You and Linda and your mom are great, but—

What would he have said if I hadn’t interrupted him?

I’m going to have the big life. I’ll make the opportunities.

Maybe he’d been about to ask for my help:
I’ll make the opportunities. And I want the three of you to be part of it.
Or maybe he was saying we were in his way. Maybe he was saying he was going to leave us.

I knew what he meant by a “big life.” He and Mom and Linda and even Jodie were great, but they weren’t enough for me, either. When I became a psychologist, I wanted a big life too.

Line 3 rang, and I rested my hand on the receiver for a second before answering. The heck with my CFM. I wasn’t doing this for him. I was doing it for me.

L
isteners. Can I help you?”

I don’t feel safe.

“Why are you not feeling safe, ma’am?”

You better whisper. They’ll hear us.

“Who’ll hear us?”

The CIA.

“The CIA is bugging your phone?”

Richie glanced over and nodded. He’d had this Incoming before.

No, my bathtub.

“That sounds really upsetting. My name is Billy. Would you like to tell me your first name?”

Debra. Last week I couldn’t take a bath because they were in there.

“And you say this started a week ago?”

Approximately.

“How did they get in?”

Through the water pipes.

“You sound pretty calm about what’s going on.”

Oh, well. That’s life. Can’t fight City Hall, right?

“You’re a very brave person, Debra.” I stretched the cord and twirled it around my finger.

What else can I do? I have to live with it.

“Do you have any idea why the CIA would do this to you?”

Am I being recorded?

“Absolutely not. This line is confidential.”

I’ll tell you, then:
Because my parents were spies.

“How did you find out?”

When they died I found a book about Cuba. Something inside the cover was erased.

“That must have been a shock.”

No one knows but the CIA. I barely talk to my neighbors.

“It must be hard to trust people when you have a secret like that.”

I asked Debra, since she rarely left the house, if she was buying food, if she was eating okay. I tried to focus on Debra’s well-being. It wasn’t my job to separate fact from fiction. I could let go and surf on the untruth of everything she said.

A
fter Debra, I got two nearly identical calls from teenagers who had been dumped, and one from an elderly man who seemed to be drunk.

It’s my birthday,
he kept saying.

“Happy birthday,” I said three times.

He asked me to sing, but I didn’t. With hardly a bobble, I made all three Incomings feel a little better. None was suicidal.

L
isteners. Can I help you?”

It’s me. I’m having a really bad night.

Jenney. I remembered her, but I couldn’t say so.

“I’m sorry to hear that. Do you want to tell me your first name?”

You don’t know who I am?

“No, I don’t. My name’s Billy. Would you like to tell me your name?”

It’s Jenney. Don’t you remember? We talked a few nights ago.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

It’s okay, Billy. I know you have to do that.

“You said you’re having a bad night. What’s going on?”

I just came from a really rough session with Melinda.

“Melinda?” Start from scratch. Clean slate. Every time.

My therapist. She’s helping me to go back into my childhood and dig stuff up.

“Are you feeling suicidal?”

No.

“How does your therapist dig this stuff up? And what kind of stuff do you mean?”

One night, during the summer I graduated from high school, I woke up to this feeling of something pressing into my neck. It seemed so real, as if it were actually happening. But I woke up and I saw that I was alone in my room as usual. I’m an only child, see—I didn’t share my room with anyone. Then I walked down the hall and stuck my head in the door of my parents’ room, and they were both sound asleep. No one had broken into the house; no one had touched me. So, though it felt real, I figured it was just a nightmare.

“That seems really upsetting. What was that feeling?”

It started to happen more often—waking up at night with the distinct feeling that something was pressing around my neck. I came to expect it, that I would wake up every night in a panic and not be able to get back to sleep. I wasn’t sleeping all that well. Maybe three hours a night.

“You must have been exhausted.”

Yeah, I was. The tiredness didn’t hit me all at once, but after a week or so it started taking a toll on me. And I didn’t feel like staying out late anymore, and my friends stopped calling me. You assume that people like you for yourself, but then something changes and you see that they only liked you for some other reason. Like that you have a car and can drive them around. Or what you look like. Or who your parents are. You know?

“Uh-huh.” No one had ever liked me for those reasons. But I could relate.

I’m supposed to be in school right now, you know, a really
good school. I already told you that last time, but you probably don’t remember.

I remembered. That really good selective school in New Hampshire. “Do you want to be in school?”

Yes and no. Anyway, I tried to drag myself along at that level, living day to day, but I had this weird feeling, like dread, that was building up inside me, and on one of the rare occasions when I discussed anything important with my mom she sent me to a counselor who specialized in anxiety disorders. That doctor, who I saw only once, said it looked like I needed to see someone who deals with repressed memories. And that was how I found Melinda.

“Did she help you?”

She changed my whole life. The first time I went into her office she asked if there was any possibility that I’d been abused as a kid and didn’t remember. I got really quiet—it was like time was standing still—and then I felt this huge sadness come up from somewhere inside me that I hadn’t even known was there, and I couldn’t talk for about ten minutes . . . and then Melinda said, not in an accusing way, but in a kind of gentle, all-accepting way, because she’s a very gentle person, she said, “Why are you protecting them, Jenney?”

Margaret and Richie whispered about her last call, but I was barely aware of them. “‘Why are you protecting them?’” I asked Jenney. “Meaning who?”

Meaning my parents.

The parents were abusive. “She meant that your parents had hurt you in some way. Had abused you.”

Exactly.

Mirror. Reflect. “I’m so sorry, Jenney. It must have been really awful to find that out.”

Believe me, it was. My parents were having a dinner that night for two couples they had known since college, and I almost didn’t want to go home. After I left Melinda’s I called my parents and made an excuse about needing to go to the library, and I didn’t go home until after nine when the library closed, and I shut myself in my room and shut out the laughter and the dishes clinking and the music and everything else from the dinner party, and I just emptied myself out and allowed myself to feel nothing, just the way I did at Melinda’s. Because it was easier to feel nothing than to feel the pain of what had really happened, the pain of the betrayal. And then something else happened.

“What was that?”

After the whole neck thing, I started getting another feeling that seemed real. On my face. The feeling of something cold and hard on my cheek. Like stone. And I worked really hard in my sessions with Melinda. She regressed me and took me back through all the years and all the pain—oh, God, I nearly turned myself inside out—and we figured out what it meant.

“The feeling on your face? What was it?”

Melinda kept saying, “Where are you, Jenney? Where are you when your face feels so cold?” It was the floor of the basement of our house. We figured out that when I misbehaved my parents would take me to the basement and choke me with a cord until I passed out. And that my body had never forgotten that feeling. The pressure of the cord around my neck and the coldness of the floor under my face. And then she
said it again: “Why are you protecting them, Jenney?”

“Why were you protecting them?”

Jenney’s clicking started again. My own throat tightened when I heard it.

Because I was a child, and every child needs her parents.

Get her to pull back. To look at the big picture.

“With everything you have going on, Jenney, what do you think bothers you most about your situation?”

Not being in school. Seeing other kids at school and knowing that’s supposed to be me. Knowing that I’m not moving forward in my life. It bothered my mom, too, maybe even more. When I started having my meltdown, she hardly cared about me as a person. She would watch me sleeping too much and eating too much and coming out of my room with my eyes red from crying and she would say, “What’s going to happen with St. Angus’s?” The two of them—all they care about is status.

But Melinda says I need to delay college for a while and keep working on the abuse. Yes, I should be in school, but that has to wait until I get myself straightened out. I mean, what kind of shape am I in to be starting anything new? How could I study? How could I concentrate? How could I meet people?

“I don’t think you would have any trouble making friends.” Find traits to compliment.

My friends don’t want to be around me anymore. I invited my two friends to the movies and they said they were busy. That’s what I really miss, you know?

“What do you miss?” Exact words.