Tuesday Night Miracles (26 page)

“Happiness is a choice,” she explains, leaning forward for emphasis. “It’s right out there waving its hand in the air, and it’s always going to be up to you whether you accept happiness or turn your back on it. And, in the end, it’s totally your decision.”

Even as she speaks, Dr. Bayer can see that the women are all puzzled by this great truth. Puzzled, but it also looks as if they might be thinking about it, and she hopes they’re thinking past the single moment that brought them to this room.

“So when you jump into happiness, when you allow yourself to be open and to stop living in fear, that’s when all the good stuff happens,” she explains. “No matter what happens—how you’re feeling, what mood has captured your attention
—you
are the one in control. I say it’s much, much easier to be happy than to go to the end of the line.”

That, she tells them, is why the writing assignment is so important. “It should help you track your moods and what triggers your moods. It is also like a personal retreat, a place you can go to be honest, alive, and real. Sometimes it’s easier to write it down than to say it out loud. Sometimes late at night when the fears and burdens of the day have finally been set aside, the emotional truth rises and writing it down in a log, a journal, whatever you want to call it, is a very sane way to travel through some sensitive territory.”

Dr. Bayer takes a breath and looks at her girls. They are either thinking about the great subject of anger or they’re hopelessly lost and bored.

“Any questions?” she asks, hopeful that eight ears have been listening.

“I guess happiness is just as personal and individual as everything else,” Grace suggests, looking at Dr. Bayer.

“Meaning?”

“Like what makes me happy or even angry won’t be the same for you or, say, Leah.”

“Correct.”

“I had a friend in college who always got furious when someone pushed her.” Kit is talking as if she is the only one in the room. “One day I finally sat her down and asked her to think about it. It took about three minutes, and she told me that her father pushed her all the time.”

“So …” Dr. Bayer holds on to the “so” as if it is a long question.

Surprisingly, Jane is the one to speak next.

“So, yes, we must think about what triggers our emotions and then we must try to change our thought patterns so that we can all behave in a civilized manner,” Jane says, gesturing, with her hands as if she is now the professor.

Good Lord.

Dr. Bayer is thankful she isn’t wearing high heels herself, although she isn’t quite sure she has ever worn shoes like that. So now what? Jane is obviously the most precarious member of the group, unless Dr. Bayer has totally lost her touch. Should she risk losing Jane by calling her on her brazenly sarcastic remark? Does she let it pass and hope that the other three women already know what an ass Jane is making of herself?

“Do you think you’re behaving in a civilized manner?” Dr. Bayer asks her, leaning from the waist and focusing her attention totally on Jane.

This forces Leah, Grace, and Kit to look at Jane, too. Dr. Bayer isn’t the only one who’s confused. Bowling was so much fun, and now Jane is, well, back to her old pissy self. Everyone wants to hear Jane’s answer.

Jane is smart enough not to jump up and shout at Dr. Bayer, but not smart enough to keep her face from turning red, her shoulder from dipping back and forth, and her mouth from opening.

“I am a professional and I come from a dignified family and yes, I am civilized,” Jane all but snorts, crossing her arms and looking directly at Dr. Bayer. Jane would love to tell them right now what’s happening in the rest of her life. How dignified it was when she didn’t say a word to Derrick about her suspicions. How dignified when she remained calm all those days between this class and the last one. Jane does not have the courage to say that Derrick is all that she has left and that she may now be drowning.

“Jane, what I’ve been trying to get everyone to understand is that we need to define the triggers that anger us and then file those triggers down so they’re no longer visible,” Dr. Bayer explains. “If you don’t do that, nothing changes and your anger wins.”

“Everyone makes mistakes,” Jane fires back. “That doesn’t mean we’re bad people who need to be treated like infants.”

“I didn’t say you were bad people,” Dr. Bayer insists, realizing that she’s getting nowhere. Does she have to start over?

Grace can’t take the pounding in her head and the sound of Jane’s voice at the same time. Maybe it’s because of her recent foot injury on top of the other foot injury. Thank you very much, Jane. Or the discovery of her daughter’s packed suitcase. This happiness stuff isn’t that easy but it sure beats what came before it.

“For the love of God, Jane, don’t you get it? It’s like we are all stripped naked in here and we have to start over,” Grace says. “Listening to the person in charge, who obviously knows what she’s talking about, is a great way to start.”

Jane looks appalled. This department-store-dressed tart who needs a makeover is telling
her
how to behave and the purpose of the class? Enough is enough.

“Don’t talk to me like that!”

“I’m simply telling the truth, Jane. You don’t have to get angry about that.”

Kit and Leah are moving their heads back and forth as the conversation rolls from one woman to the next. Where did this come from?

Dr. Bayer has already decided to let the dice roll on this one. After all, group means group, and this group has been way too silent.

“I’m not angry,” Jane all but shouts.

“You
sound
angry.”

Leah takes a deep breath, her chest rises, she lets out the same breath, and says, “Sometimes it’s hard to change and to look at yourself in a new way.”

Now everyone turns to look at her.

“What do you mean?” Kit asks, finally looking at Leah.

“Behavior becomes a pattern. Pretty soon you fall into that pattern and you don’t even remember what it was like before you got that way. That’s what makes change so hard.”

Dr. Bayer wants to throw her hands in the air and shout, “Alleluia!” But she also knows it’s way too early for that.

Leah closes her eyes. Everyone is silent.

“Don’t you remember what it was like before all of this sometimes?” Leah asks quietly. “Before the class, before what brought us here, before we became the women we are right now? I feel new and changed because of this class. I’m never going back. I even liked bowling.”

There is quiet again. The ancient furnace kicks in, a series of vehicles drive past the building on the street below; there is much shifting of feet.

Dr. Bayer can clearly see that Leah has exposed a nerve that is terribly inflamed.

“I don’t get us,” Kit says, once again looking at the floor to avoid eye contact. “At first glance we all seem so, well, normal but here we are and we’re all afraid to be honest. Leah, you’re right. You are the most sane and open woman in this room. We had so much fun bowling. I’m really struggling to understand what we’re even arguing about.”

Grace and Jane are a bit taken aback, but perhaps not as taken aback as Kit, who can’t believe she just spoke so honestly.

Dr. Bayer senses a pending explosion. She’s struggling to understand what’s going on. Bowling was fun. Leah and Kit are positive and open. Clearly, Jane and Grace have brought excess baggage to the class.

So much is not being said that it feels as if the room temperature has risen twenty degrees in the last few minutes. Leah is also looking at the floor, and feels exposed for having revealing something so personal. She was hoping that a discussion would follow, that the other women would open up and share something—
anything
. She has secrets in her, too, she’s not perfect, but why are Grace and Jane so afraid tonight?

Before Leah can take a step backward, which is not the direction Dr. Bayer wants any of these women to go, the good doctor slaps her hands on her knees and in the silence the crack sounds almost exactly like the rifles they were using recently.

Thank God there isn’t a rifle handy right now.

“Listen, ladies, a few of us can’t do all the talking here. You must—and I cannot say the word
must
with enough urgency—open your hearts and minds as wide as possible,” Dr. Bayer explains slowly, and with utter confidence.

Then she has an idea.

“You obviously had a great time on Saturday,” she says. “Maybe you need me to leave the room. So hand over your journals and I’ll leave you alone for a bit.”

The women all look as if they’ve been told they have to stay after school and sit in the detention room. They hand over their writings one at a time, and Dr. Bayer gathers them up and then stands.

Leah, Kit, Jane, and Grace look up at her with eyes that have grown wide with surprise.

“Now,” Dr. Bayer says, loving the look of growing fear in their eyes, “I’m going to leave the room for twenty minutes and you’re going to talk.”

“Talk?” Grace questions.

“Yes, you will talk about who you are and what you have in common and how easy it is to be happy. And remember how well you got along the other day.”

The women are stunned. Dr. Bayer isn’t finished.

“I am raising the bar,” she explains. “Find your common denominators, and then tell me what you’re going to do with what you discover.”

Then she turns and walks out of the uncommonly bleak room; the women hear her clogs slapping down the hall, and then the sound disappears.

And they are alone.

32

A Slight Explosion in the Happy Land

T
he women can hear each other breathing and that sound, the soft swish of air moving in and out of lungs, noses, and throats, quickly becomes the sound of dread. How and why did this happen?

Dr. Bayer’s footsteps have vanished, and the women know what they have to do; Olivia’s instructions were quite specific. But who is going to speak first? Who is going to take control?

Leah wants to speak up, but she’s afraid of how the others might react. It was hard enough to walk in with new clothes on and to have to explain where they came from. If these women knew her whole story, more of who she is, where she came from and what she has been through, would that really change anything? Would they stop looking at her as if she is different from them? Do any of them really care about anything but their own silent heartaches? Is she the only one who has moved forward?

Leah feels that if she speaks first it will change everything for her, and not in a good way, so she sits quietly wondering who will take the first step.

Jane is seething. Tonight she can’t imagine one thing that she would have in common with these women beyond the fact that they’re in this class together. Dr. Bayer and her psychology crap can kiss her ass. Even though she knows she has to get out of the class in order to move forward with her new life plan—a plan she would
never
share with this group—Jane is not about to play games as if she is at one of those damn home culinary parties. Let one of the other three know-it-alls start the lovefest. She can’t get her mind off Derrick. She should never have opened up and acted like part of this gang. Bowling and hiking be damned!

Grace is doing some yoga breathing she learned during the last hospital in-service. Her new blood-pressure medicine has barely had time to kick in, and this is the last place she wants to be right now. She knows if she speaks first she’s going to go after Jane. Talk about a room filled with secrets. She thought everyone, even Jane, was being open. Why did she lie to them? Grace has been doing some exceptionally sneaky detective work, and she’s onto Jane.

Jane is such a fake. A lying fake! At least Leah is being honest and Kit seems to be halfway human. Grace is afraid if she speaks she’s going to first lean over and take a chunk out of Jane’s lovely white neck with her teeth. She’s trying to remember when she has felt this much distaste for someone—ex-husbands excluded, mothers excluded, daughters excluded, and maybe even herself excluded. Just when she was feeling so great about everything.

Kit is glancing sideways at Leah, who looks as if she wants to say something but absolutely will not. Kit hopes to God Jane doesn’t start yapping, and Grace looks as if she’s trying to create a miracle and vanish into thin air.

Why is this so hard? Do they all have so much baggage that they don’t know which trunk to drop first so they can open a damn door? And when did Kit become so reserved, so quiet, so not like the rest of her family, who all seem to have an aversion to letting anyone else speak first?

While the women are rolling around inside their minds, Dr. Bayer has opened the door to a room around the corner, turned on the light, closed the door, and is sitting on top of a metal desk that looks as if it has been in the room since the beginning of time.

Right now she doesn’t even care if the women strangle one another. This would be a good lesson for them if they would only listen to her. Sometimes it’s simply better to get up and leave and give everyone a chance to slip back into the proper gear. Happiness, girls! It’s about happiness!

Her short legs are dangling off the desk and she lets her clogs drop to the floor. No one has ever called Dr. Olivia Bayer anything but determined. There is no way she’s going to let these women slip away from her, even if it means she has to step away from them for a few moments to let them slog through their own emotions.

She sets the logs down next to her and then picks up the first one off the top. It’s Grace’s. Dr. Bayer guesses that Grace grabbed it and filled in pages here and there between the five thousand other things she must accomplish every single day. There are several pages of writing, a few doodles—circles that start out small and get bigger until they disappear off the pages. Clearly, Grace spent some time sitting in front of this little book and thinking.

Dr. Bayer runs her eyes down the pages and doesn’t see anything unusual or especially revealing until she gets to the bottom of the last page. Grace wrote the word
Monday
and then some scribbles and then one sentence that stands out as if it were written in huge block letters:

 … so tonight I feel absolutely positive because I am remembering how life used to be before I turned into a crazy woman. I’m that person again and going beyond. Very, very positive. My girls need me. I may even take them bowling!

The writing stops and then picks up again, but this time it’s in bold letters, and with a different-colored pen:

I know Kelli would never really leave
.

Clearly, something was going on, but the writing seems honest at least. Not bad. Dr. Bayer would love to take the doodles and show them to one of her associates, who could give an hour-long lecture on what they might mean. But that would be a breach of confidentiality. Grace is thinking and feeling, and that is absolutely wonderful news.

She sets down Grace’s book and notices that her dark mood is starting to fade. Maybe all hope is not lost. It’s not just this class. These women have lives that don’t just stop when they have an assignment. She listens for a moment, and doesn’t hear any sounds of distress from the room down the hall. That’s also a good sign.

Leah’s book is tiny. It’s a cheap spiral notebook with a yellow cover. The kind you can get for under a dollar at any drugstore. Leah has already filled up over half of the notebook. If all those pages are anything like the page she’s reading now, Dr. Bayer may need a full box of tissue when she reads the entire book:

Tonight I am tired, and yet I am so hopeful. I am finally going to catch those dreams that keep floating around, taunting me, and then disappearing when I get so close I can almost feel their hot breath on my neck. I’m going to do everything I have always wanted to do, and knowing that it’s all possible makes me very happy! I don’t know why I am in this particular group, with those women, but it doesn’t matter anymore. We are all equal. And now I am too tired to keep writing. Goodnight little log
.

Then there’s a P.S.:

I so want to be more honest. To tell everything. This class is such a chance for me
.

Dr. Bayer sees so much of herself in Leah. She also knows that she must not linger on one client, even as she admits to herself that of the four women she is pulling the most for Leah to triumph, and not just because she has so much less than everyone else; it’s because she has so much more right this moment.

She hesitates before deciding which log to read next. Tonight, for some reason, it’s like choosing hot tar over boiling water. Not one to hesitate too long or live in fear, Olivia grabs Jane’s log. She expects the worst and hopes for the best. She’s on a roll that’s made her pull her legs up onto the table and cross them so that she’s more comfortable. In the midst of a near-meltdown, Dr. Bayer has just been given a whiff of fresh air. Hot tar be damned!

Jane’s log appears to be a discarded and very lovely appointment book. The thin, lined, soft pages of snow-white paper are filled with one-line sentences. Even though she considers herself very brave, Dr. Bayer skips quickly to the last page. She’s brave, not stupid.

I haven’t thought about babies for so long. I thought this was all over, but the trip to the YWCA and Derrick’s old questions about being a father keep rising up. Maybe I have been looking for happiness in the wrong places
.

Holy cow!

Dr. Bayer lets her feet drop back down and begins moving them back and forth. Jane is struggling with some serious stuff.

Dr. Bayer flips to the next page in Jane’s log and sees that several lines have been inked out. What was there? What secrets did Jane erase?

Jane, oh Jane! Can’t you let go just a little bit? Is it so hard to embrace your humanness? Can you not lie down, open up your heart, and let it all go?

Easier said than done, Dr. Bayer knows, as she gently sets down Jane’s notebook and picks up Kit’s. Olivia tries not to laugh as she picks up the log. It looks as if it has recently been dragged behind a tractor during harvesting season. The book must have been nice once, a real journal, but it looks like since Kit’s been using it it’s also doubled as a coaster and maybe a hot pad. That’s a good thing; it means she gets it!

Kit’s got secrets, too—Dr. Bayer realizes this—but she has also changed so much. Her notes from her personal assignments were totally filled with joy. Kit seems as if she’s touching the golden egg already. The last page in her book is written in pencil and not pen. The words are also printed, unlike the cursive on all the other pages, and Dr. Bayer quickly realizes that she’s reading a poem:

my heart flips west and east and north

but i cannot get it to move south …

i saw the bright sky of tomorrow

warm and alive and true

it triggered an avalanche of remembering …

i can’t stop my heart

beating so fast

urging me to remember

to try harder

to go forward …

to erase what i do not want to keep …

and yet

and yet

sometimes

i know

there is one thing …

unfinished

and i cannot move

and i want to

so much

so damn damn damn damn much …

Dr. Bayer steadies herself by dropping Kit’s log and placing both hands on the end of the desk. Kit wrote this? Olivia feels as if she might tumble off the table. Is the poem finished? She picks it up again and reads it slowly, line by line. She realizes that something is hurting Kit that she hasn’t yet shared.

She wants to be gladdened by everything she has just read. Surely it proves her point. These women need her; they need to reach out and open up their hearts, expose their fears, lean into one another. The journals work. Yes, they do.

She swings her feet back up onto the table, crossing her legs as if she is sitting next to a campfire, and decides to read the last pages of the logs one more time before she walks back down the hall. There are clues everywhere in the words on the pages she is holding in her hands. Absolutely everywhere.

While she shuffles through the logs again the women down the hall appear to be at an impasse. It’s a miracle their brain waves haven’t ignited an electrical fire.

Finally, Kit can’t stand the silence any longer. She stops moving her leg up and down, drops both heels to the floor, claps her hands, and says, “Okay, I’m going to let ’er rip, ladies.” She has absolutely no idea what that means now. Now, when her world is hanging off the side of a cliff and the wind has just picked up considerably. Let ’er rip used to mean “I’m going to let go and you should, too, and I’m thinking what’s going to happen when we do this is magnificent.”

Let ’er rip used to mean her father had dipped into the Irish whiskey, again, and was urging her mother to take a sip, and someone was about to burst into song. Let ’er rip sometimes meant that one of her brothers had dared one of the others to a backyard fight and someone needed to get Band-Aids and towels. It sometimes meant a party was about to start and they should all run around and make sure their bedrooms were picked up and no one had left his underwear on the bathroom floor.

When Kit was raising her own baby, let ’er rip meant begin, start, get into it, and also that something significant had happened.

Once when her daughter, Sarah, had finished a high-school essay that was beyond “knock your socks off” perfect and she had asked Kit to proof it, Kit wasn’t just shocked but honored. And then when she read it, and discovered that her daughter was probably much more emotionally mature than she was, she said, “You let ’er rip on this one sweetheart.”