The Broom of the System (17 page)

“Fnoof.”

“That’s better.”

“Holy cow!”

“Fnoof fnoof.”

“What the hell!”

“Fnoof. What?”

“Rick, I don’t own a walker.”

“What?”

“I don’t own a walker. I especially don’t own Mrs. Yingst’s walker, with that Lawrence Welk guy’s picture on it. What was it doing in my room?”

“What walker?”

“And what did Vlad the Impaler mean special-wecial food, who’s got the book?”

“What? That bird should be killed, Lenore. I’ll kill it for you.”

“Nobody’s in Corfu, at all. I’m being messed with.”

“Fnoof.”

“Jesus.”

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF RAP SESSION, THURSDAY, 26 AUGUST 1990, IN THE OFFICE OF DR. CURTIS JAY, PH.D. PARTICIPANTS: DR. CURTIS JAY AND MS. LENORE BEADSMAN, AGE 24, FILE NUMBER 770-01-4266.

 

DR. JAY: So it would be safe to characterize yesterday as just not a good day at all, then.

MS. LENORE BEADSMAN: I think that would be a safe assessment, yes.

JAY: And how does that make you feel?

LENORE: Well, I think sort of by definition a day that isn’t good at all makes you feel pretty shitty, right?

JAY: Do you feel pressured into feeling shitty?

LENORE: What?

JAY: If a bad day is by definition one that makes you feel shitty, do you feel pressured to feel shitty about a bad day, or do you feel natural about it?

LENORE: What the hell does that have to do with anything?

JAY: The question makes you uncomfortable.

LENORE: No, it makes me feel like I just listened to a pretty meaningless and dumb question, which I’m afraid I think that was.

JAY: I don’t think it’s dumb at all. Aren’t you the one who complains of feeling pressured and coerced into feeling and doing the things you feel and do? Or do I have you confused with some other long/time client and friend?

LENORE: Look, maybe it’s just safe to say that I feel shitty because bad things are happening, OK? Lenore acts incredibly weird and melodramatic for about a month, then just decides to leave the place where she’s supposed to live as a cold-blooded semi-invalid, and to take people with her, even though she’s ninety-two, and she doesn’t bother to call to say what’s going on, even though they’re obviously still in Cleveland, see for instance Mrs. Yingst’s walker, which could only have gotten in my room at about six-thirty last night, and my father clearly knows what’s up, see for instance having Karl Rummage tell Mr. Bloemker all this stuff yesterday morning before anybody knew, and he doesn’t bother to let me know either, and takes off for Corfu, and I think someone may have given my bird Vlad the Impaler LSD because he’s now blabbering all the time, which he never did before, and it’s conveniently mostly obscene stuff that Mrs. Tissaw’s going to flip about and evict me for if she hears it, and my job really bites the big kielbasa right now because there are like massive mess-ups in the phone lines and we don’t have our number anymore and people keep calling for all sorts of bizarre other things, and of course no sign of anybody from Interactive Cable today, this morning, and then at the switchboard I get a lot of flowers and some supposedly humorously nearly empty boxes of candy, and it turns out they’re from Mr. Bombardini ...

JAY: Norman Bombardini?

LENORE: ... Yes, who’s our landlord, at Frequent and Vigorous, and who’s unbelievably fat and hostile, and as a fringe benefit also clearly insane, and thinks he’s doing me a huge favor, pardon the pun, by promising me a comer of a soon-to-be-full universe all for myself, and he claims he’s infatuated with me.

JAY: And then there is of course Rick.

LENORE: Rick is Rick. Rick is a constant in every equation. Let’s leave Rick out of this.

JAY: You feel uncomfortable talking about Rick in this context.

LENORE: What context? There’s no context. A context implies something that hangs together. All that’s happening now is that a thoroughly screwed-up life that’s barely hung together is now even less well hung together.

JAY: So the woman is worried that her life is not “well hung.”

LENORE: Go suck a rock.

JAY: Interesting, though.

LENORE: What?

JAY: Don’t you think? Don’t you think it’s rather an interesting situation? Set of situations?

LENORE: Meaning what?

JAY: Meaning very little. Only that if one is going to feel shitty, to continue your use of the adjective, about not having enough “control” over things, and we of course admit freely that we still haven’t been able satisfactorily to articulate what we mean by that, yet, have we ... ?

LENORE: God, the plural tense, now.

JAY: ... that it’s at least comparatively desirable to be impotently involved in an interesting situation, rather than a dull one, is that not so?

LENORE: Interesting to whom?

JAY: Ah. That matters to you.

LENORE: It matters to me a lot.

JAY: I smell breakthrough, I don’t mind telling you. There’s a scent of breakthrough in the air.

LENORE: I think it’s my armpit. I think I need a shower.

JAY: Hiding behind symptomatic skirts is not fair. If I say I smell breakthrough, I smell breakthrough.

LENORE: You always say you smell breakthrough. You say you smell breakthrough almost every time I’m here. I think you must coat your nostrils with breakthrough first thing every morning. What does that mean, anyway, “breakthrough”?

JAY: You tell me.

LENORE: These seat belts on the chair aren’t really for the patients’ safety on the track, are they? They’re to keep your jugular from being lunged for about thirty times a day, right?

JAY: You feel anger.

LENORE: I feel shitty. Pure, uncoerced shitty. Interesting for whom? JAY: Whom might there be to interest?

LENORE: Now what the hell does that mean?

JAY: The smell of breakthrough is getting weaker.

LENORE: Well, look.

JAY: Yes?

LENORE: Suppose Gramma tells me really convincingly that all that really exists of my life is what can be said about it?

JAY: What the hell does that mean?

LENORE: You feel anger.

JAY: I have an ejection button, you know. I can press a button on the underside of this drawer, here, and send you screaming out into the lake.

LENORE: You must be about the worst psychologist of all time. Why won’t you ever let me go with my thoughts?

JAY: I’m sorry.

LENORE: That’s why I’m here, right? That’s why I pay you roughly two-thirds of everything I make, right?

JAY: I’m honored and ashamed, all at once. Back to the Grandmother, and a life that’s told, not lived.

LENORE: Right.

JAY: Right.

LENORE: So what would that mean?

JAY: In all earnestness I say you tell me.

LENORE: Well see, it seems like it’s not really like a life that’s told, not lived; it’s just that the living is the telling, that there’s nothing going on with me that isn’t either told or tellable, and if so, what’s the difference, why live at all?

JAY: I really don’t understand.

LENORE: Maybe it just makes no sense. Maybe it’s just completely irrational and dumb.

JAY: But obviously it bothers you.

LENORE: Pretty keen perception. If there’s nothing about me but what can be said about me, what separates me from this lady in this story Rick got who eats junk food and gains weight and squashes her child in her sleep? She’s exactly what’s said about her, right? Nothing more at all. And same with me, seems like. Gramma says she’s going to show me how a life is words and nothing else. Gramma says words can kill and create. Everything.

JAY: Sounds like Gramma is maybe half a bubble off plumb, to me. LENORE: Well, just no. She’s not crazy and she’s sure not stupid. You should know that. And see, the thing is, if she can do all this to me with words, if she can make me feel this way, and perceive my life as screwed way up and not hung together, and question whether I’m really even me, if there is a me, crazy as that sounds, if she can do all that just by talking to me, with just words, then what does that say about words?

JAY: “... she said, using words.”

LENORE: Well exactly. There it is. Lenore would totally agree. Which is why it sometimes just drives me nuts that Rick wants to
talk
all the time. Talk talk talk. Tell tell tell. At least when he tells me stories, it’s up-front and clear what’s story and what isn‘t, right?

JAY: I’m getting a scent.

LENORE: I don’t think the armpit theory should be rejected out of hand.

JAY: Why is a story more up-front than a life?

LENORE: It just seems more honest, somehow.

JAY: Honest meaning closer to the truth?

LENORE: I smell trap.

JAY: I smell breakthrough. The truth is that there’s no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be something more? But it really isn’t more?

LENORE: I would kill for a shower.

JAY: What have I said? What have I said? I’ve said that hygiene anxiety is what?

LENORE: According to whom?

JAY: Ejection remains an option. Don’t misdirect so transparently. According to me and to my truly great teacher, Olaf Blentner, the pioneer of hygiene anxiety research....

LENORE: Hygiene anxiety is identity anxiety.

JAY: I am gagging on the stench of breakthrough.

LENORE: I’ve been having digestive trouble, too, really, so don’t.... JAY: Shut up. So comparisons between real life and story make you feel hygiene anxiety, a.k.a. identity anxiety. Plus the fact that delightfully nice and helpful Lenore Senior, whose temporary little junket I must say does not exactly fill me with grief, indoctrinates you on the subject of words and their extra-linguistic efficacy. Do some math for me, here, Lenore.

LENORE: Wrongo. First of all, Gramma’s whole thing is that there’s no such thing as extra-linguistic efficacy, extra-linguistic
anything.
And also, what’s with this throwing around words like “indoctrinates” and “efficacy”? Which Rick uses on me all the time, too? How come you and Rick not only always say the same things to me, but the same words? Are you a team? Do you fill him in on this stuff? Is this why he’s so completely uncharacteristically cool about not asking me what goes on in here? Are you an unethical psychologist? Do you tell?

JAY: Listen to this will you. Aside from the me-being-terribly-hurt issue, why this obsession with whether people are
telling
all the time? Why is telling robbing control?

LENORE: I don’t know. What time is it?

JAY: Don’t you feel a difference between your life and a telling? LENORE: Maybe just a little water out of that pitcher, there, in either armpit....

JAY: Well?

LENORE: No, I guess not really.

JAY: How come? How come?

JAY: How come?

LENORE: What would the difference be?

JAY: Speak up, please.

LENORE: What would the difference be?

JAY: What?

LENORE: What would the difference be?

JAY: I don’t believe this. Blentner would twirl. You don’t feel a difference?

LENORE: OK, exactly, but what’s “feeling,” then?

JAY: The smell is overpowering. I can’t stand it. Just let me tie this hankie over my nose, here.

LENORE: Flake.

JAY:
(muffled)
Who cares about defining it? Can’t you feel it? You can
feel
the way your life is; who can feel the life of the junk-food lady in Rick’s story?

LENORE:
She
can!
She
can!

JAY: Are you nuts?

LENORE: She can if it’s in the story that she can. Right? It says she feels such incredible grief over squashing her baby that she lapses into a coma, so she does and does.

JAY: But that’s not real.

LENORE: It seems to be exactly as real as it’s said to be.

JAY: Maybe it is your armpit, after all.

LENORE: I’m outta here.

JAY: Wait.

LENORE: Hit the chair-start button, Dr. Jay.

JAY: Jesus.

LENORE: The lady’s life is the story, and if the story says, “The fat pretty woman was convinced her life was real,” then she is. Except what she doesn’t know is that her life isn’t hers. It’s there for a reason. To make a point or give a smile, whatever. She’s not even produced, she’s educed. She’s there for a reason.

JAY: Whose reasons? Reason as in a person’s reason? She owes her existence to whoever tells?

LENORE: But not necessarily even a person, is the thing. The telling makes its own reasons. Gramma says any telling automatically becomes a kind of system, that controls everybody involved.

JAY: And how is that?

LENORE: By simple definition. Every telling creates and limits and defines.

JAY: Bullshit has its own unique scent, have you noticed?

LENORE: The fat lady’s not really real, and to the extent that she’s real she’s just used, and if she thinks she’s real and not being used, it’s only because the system that educes her and uses her makes her by definition feel real and non-educed and non-used.

JAY: And you’re telling me that’s the way you feel?

LENORE: You’re dumb. Is that really a Harvard diploma? I have to leave. Let me leave, please. I have to go to the ladies’ room.

JAY: Come see me tomorrow.

LENORE: I don’t have any money left.

JAY: Come see me the minute you have money. I’m here for you. Get Rick to give you money.

LENORE: Set my chair in motion, please.

JAY: We’ve made enormous strides, today.