Repeat After Me (9 page)

“Do you read books?” I asked.

“Yes. Why?”

I didn’t answer. “When you read them,” I said, “do you have lots of preconceived notions before you start about what you’ll find and analyze in them?”

He smiled. “Is this a metaphor?”

I tried another line of questioning, equally immature and unproductive. “Before I delve into the deep recesses of my mind, I’m curious how you feel about your patients.”

“Well,” he said, “my patients are regular people with individual needs and issues. I have specific relationships with each of them.”

“Do you think they’re stupid and pathetic and weak?”

He was nonplussed by this. “No.”

“Do you ever fall in love with your patients?”

“No,” he said. “But therapy is, in large part, about the relationship between the therapist and the client, so sometimes I spend time with patients discussing the ways they feel about me or our sessions.” He paused. “Why are you here?” he asked gently.

I looked around the office, noticing it for the first time. A photograph hid the spines of five books, probably self-help, on the shelf. In the picture, his wife had a sporty body and sailboating ponytail. Her smile was sly and squinty in the sun; tan kids grinned from under her rippling arms. I
imagined objects not pictured: play equipment in the backyard, the plaid or paisley beds they maybe slept in, shafts of light on plush rugs, lotion, likely Clinique, on her bathroom counter. Somewhere a yacht bobbed, waiting for weekends when he, finally away from the despair of others, was allowed to be happy with his family. I felt a jolt of resentment, as if injected into my arm.

“My bossy boyfriend thought I needed therapy,” I said.

Dr. Holderstein nodded. “Did you think so, too?”

“I don’t know. Relative to what?”

“Why did you agree to come and see me?”

“Mainly to get Adam off my back, but I also thought it might be interesting.”

“I hope it will be. Do you want to tell me about what’s going on in your life?”

Pouring out your dark secrets to a professional has some of the same allure as having an emotional or online affair. The space between you and the doctor fills with information, and in the flash of your first confession (if it’s true), you’re cheating on the people you’re talking about, back -spacing your lovers into ghosts as soon as your bond with the shrink exceeds your intimacy with them. The doctor becomes your confidant and boyfriend, the new one with whom you analyze and thus disparage the old.

Maybe that’s why I was so worried about what Dr. Holderstein thought of me. I was consumed by the possibility that he would find me pathetic. Or insane. Anxious to demonstrate a normalcy I couldn’t even have identified, let alone embodied, I talked about Columbia, my classes, Adam. I thought Dr. Holderstein would be dazzled by how normal and together and smart these anecdotes made me. But I chose the wrong details: the pigeon nesting behind the chalkboard instead of my coursework, the blinding white of certain Mondays, Adam’s candle-scented way of
speaking. Dr. Holderstein told me he hoped I’d come weekly.

And I did, for the first semester of my senior year. I enjoyed the habit of our meetings, even when I despised their content. I told him about my Eliot, Joyce, and Pound seminar, about the course called “Riot and Rebellion.” I described counting my letters, which Dr. Holderstein called obsessive-compulsive behavior, a term I liked. He said if it wasn’t getting in the way of my living a productive life, it wasn’t a problem.

“It makes me feel happy,” I said. Even as I said it, I added “really,” so it would fit: i-t m-a-k-e-s m-e r-e-a-l-l-y h-a-p-p-y. Somewhere deep, a small alarm sounded, suggesting this was not true, even if it fit on twenty fingers.

I told Dr. Holderstein that Mondays were white, Tuesdays were blue, Wednesdays were yellow, Thursdays brown, and Fridays red. He said people with colors for days have “synesthesia,” and I was less surprised to know he had a word for everything than I was to learn that not everyone had colors for the days. I could not imagine there were those who did have colors, but that theirs differed from mine. I longed to set the record straight.

In fact, the life in my mind was itself increasingly colorful, cluttered, difficult. When I admitted that I had stopped sleeping, Dr. Holderstein was concerned. I said I didn’t need sleep, and for the first time, he objected forcefully. He threw the word “mania,” onto the desk between us, where it writhed and struggled for air. I said nothing, watched the blue, slippery word, hoped it would suffocate. He said there was the possibility, in someone who was “racing” the way I was, of an “episode.” I was unhappy when he suggested I take some lithium.

“Why?” I asked. It was, I thought, confirmation that he was judging me after all.

“It will even you out a bit; you seem hypomanic.”

“Hippo what?”

He smiled. “Hypomania is mania without psychosis, but it can sometimes turn into more serious mania, and I just want to make sure you don’t spiral.”

“You do know that my father cheated on my mother and I saw him and told her about it, and then he never spoke to me again, right?”

“I know only what you’ve told me.”

“My brother Benj forgave him. They’re still in touch.”

“But you and he are not?”

“You have very good grammar,” I said.

Dr. Holderstein smiled kindly. “Have you tried to contact him?”

I nodded.

“And how has he responded?”

“He hasn’t.” Every year after my father left, I wrote him a letter. He never wrote back, even though he and my mother continued to speak sometimes about Benj and maybe me and certainly other administrative matters. When I was finishing high school, stunned under the cloud of my parents’ breakup, I predictably considered the whole thing to be my fault. Of course my father didn’t want to have anything to do with me ever again—I had ratted him out, after all. But maybe he just wasn’t an adult, still isn’t. Maybe my mere presence was such a breathtaking reminder of what a villain he’d been that he couldn’t endure it. So he chose ways to blame me, shedding his guilty skin and suffocating me under it. I stopped writing the letters when I moved to China.

Dr. Holderstein, to his credit, cut right to the question at the center of things: “Do you and your mom ever talk about what happened with your father?”

“Not really.”

“Why not?”

I considered this. “That’s a good question.”

The minute my father left us, my mother and I became colleagues in the office of our house. We protected each other by not talking about him, and as a result, she stopped being my parent and started being a person, a disturbing development. I shrugged.

“I don’t want to hurt my mother’s feelings. And anyway, now it’s been years. Bringing it up would be weird. I turned out fine. She did a good job—it’s not like she was insufficient after he left.”

Even as I said this, I knew what an overcompensation it was.

“Isn’t any single parent insufficient in some ways?” Dr. Holderstein asked.

I didn’t respond at all to this, although now that I’ve been a single parent for a decade, I have a few thousand answers. I know what he meant, anyway. Maybe Dr. Holder -stein was just eerily prescient, since his question turned out to be the primary focus of my adult life.

I told Dr. Holderstein what I knew then and could bear to hear myself say: I wanted to escape. If I’d had one wish, I said, it would be to go somewhere safe, where nothing excruciating had ever happened to my family. Where no one knew who I was.

He thought I meant denial, but it turns out I meant China. I got my wish, even if Dr. Holderstein never got his, which was to help me avoid a manic episode. He tried valiantly. Before we were out of time, he gave me a detailed rundown of the potential side effects of lithium and said repeatedly that while he wasn’t a big prescriber of either antidepressants or mood stabilizers, he thought this might prevent worse medications for me down the line. And maybe it would have, but I threw the prescription out on my way to the subway and never went to another appointment.

On the train home that day, I peered out at everyone, furious. I must have looked like Da Ge, a defiant teenager glaring up from under my eyelids. A woman walked into the subway car yanking at her tangled hair and kicking something invisible in front of her, turning me into a portrait of stability and balance. Insanity is relative, that’s the funny thing. Who was I to be spending thousands of dollars on therapy when there were people with actual problems? Rows of the less insane ran their eyes along the lines of newspapers and magazines while the kicking woman growled out, “So fuck that, just fuck that. You think that, fuck that. You die alone. You die alone! Fuck that.” She pushed sideways through the door to the next car.

A couple of teenagers giggled. We were all, of course, both connected to, and implicated, by the woman. Everyone has at least one nutcase in the family, and in most families, no one can even agree on who it is.

If I saw Dr. Holderstein now, I wouldn’t know whether to apologize, thank him, or gloat. He warned me, and if I had listened, it might have spared me (and my mom) some genuine suffering. On the other hand, I survived, am maybe a better person for having gone under water that deep. I won the silver lining of a lifetime in Julia Too. So I guess I could tell Dr. Holderstein that he was right and so was I: it’s all relative. I didn’t need a shrink after all, because all it took was loving Da Ge, and I was never the crazy one again. He stole that thunder, turned me sane.

Julia Too and I spent Thanksgiving of 2002 in the suburb of Shunyi at my friend Shannon’s house. Shannon is my closest American friend in Beijing and the mother of one of Julia Too’s classmates, a firecracker of a kid named Sophie. Sophie broke a window at the school last
year, painted a naked man for her final art project, and filled condoms with water on “water balloon” day. As a teacher and role model at Global Beijing, I’m supposed to find her behavior abhorrent, but she’s a twinkly, charming girl, and I rather like her troublemaking. Of course, it wasn’t my window or my condoms. And she’s not my kid.

Shannon is something of a rebel herself; when she arrived in Beijing at age twenty-two, she was a radical leftist. She dressed in Communist Party kitsch, wore her hair in Mao-girl peasant pigtails, and dated Chinese intellectuals. She still has a CPC star tattooed on her right hip. But to hear her tell it, she got so tired of soapboxing and being soap-boxed that she has cast herself, mostly for entertainment’s sake, as America’s advocate. So now she runs a media consulting company and fights flirtily with her husband Zhang Sun, pretending to be more patriotic than she is. Partially, this is because living in China for decades at a time will make you feel an occasional stab of patriotism and nostalgia no matter how critical of the United States you may be, but mainly it’s a staple of her and Zhang Sun’s romance. He likes the idea that she’s an untamable, wild American girl, even if it’s basically untrue.

I love Zhang Sun because he’s charming and unflappable, looks like a young Mao, and loves to tell dirty jokes. He likes me because I’m the only one who laughs. The funny thing is, I barely even get what he’s saying, but I find Zhang Sun’s delivery hilarious. He has an unusually expressive face. My favorite of his jokes is the one I’m sure I do get, about a peasant named “Old Wang,” who is famous for his huge “second brother.” When Old Wang dies, a doctor cuts off the “second brother” and is studying it by the light of a desk lamp when his wife intrudes. Surprised, the doctor drops the specimen, and his wife, upon seeing it “roll across the floor,” cries out, “Oh no! Old Wang is dead?!” Zhang Sun always
looks devastated when he gets to that line. Sometimes he even tears up. I love it.

Shannon hates the Old Wang joke, but she enjoys setting me up on dates. No one who is happily married can tolerate a single friend in her thirties. Shannon doesn’t mean for the dates to be monotonous and mortifying. But I hate them. I say awkward and inappropriate things, and then I can’t stop the sarcastic parentheticals from running through my mind like ticker tape about whatever the guy says to try to rescue or amuse us both. It always feels like bad TV.

On occasion, Shannon’s candidates have ended up being my boyfriends, but even those liaisons have usually ended in embarrassment so profound it only narrowly escapes classification as tragedy. She sets me up with any new Westerner who comes to town, creating and replicating a dynamic so predictable and tedious I almost fall over in the first five minutes of conversation: “You’ve lived here how long!? Wow! Your Chinese must be great! Where can I get (fill in the blank: a lava lamp, a SIM card, a Chinese tutor, a bike helmet)?”

The embarrassing, fetishist truth is that I prefer Chinese guys. Maybe they just remind me of Da Ge, a racist and tacky possibility. But more likely, it’s because Chinese men ask fewer questions than Westerners do, and I’m grateful for the privacy. Clichés about girls have always surprised me—that we love relationship maintenance, would rather cuddle than have sex, want to talk about our feelings and “work things out.” Maybe I’m a guy, but I prefer sex and breaking up.