The Children's Crusade (17 page)

It took me a long time to get back to sleep, and I was tired and groggy all the next day, slow with my patients and spent by the time I got home. James was out somewhere, and Walt made dinner for the two of us. I was in bed by nine, and when he woke me at dawn the next morning and suggested we go for a hike, I nearly said no. But I knew I’d be glad if I went. I had wondered if being married would change my medical practice, and it had: thanks to Walt, I’d become the kind of psychiatrist who recommends outdoor exercise to her patients.

The county park was deserted and green, with a dirt road that quickly ascended to a network of trails winding through the trees. When our trail narrowed, Walt took the lead. He was fifty-nine, but his shoulders were bowed after several decades at the microscope and the computer, and he liked to use a walking stick because of an old knee injury, so he appeared older—though not yet an “older adult,” as the saying goes, the noun apparently added for dignity to make up for the potentially damning adjective. (In that way, “older adult” reminded me of “gay American,” and both seemed to be opposites of phrases like “vagina area,” in which the potentially offending noun is neutralized by conversion into an adjective.) Still, watching him up ahead of me, I felt acutely aware of the sixteen-year difference in our ages.

“Sorry about last night,” I said. “All that stuff with my brothers.” Over the course of half a dozen phone calls, Robert and Ryan and I had spent at least an hour talking about James wanting to sell the house. “Is James driving you crazy?”

“I enjoy him,” Walt said with a smile. “I don’t think he’s as much of a puzzle to me as he is to you.”

“He’s not as much of a puzzle? Or you’re less preoccupied with
trying to figure it out?”

“Is a puzzle still a puzzle if no one wants to solve it?”

I loved Walt’s shy playfulness. It was among the first things I noticed about him. His serious, professorial demeanor belied a sweet, merry core. We met at a lecture on the neurobiology of depression; he was an immunologist, and when I asked what had brought him to the event, he said he thought depression could be viewed as an autoimmune disease, in which the mind produced antibodies against the self. “Oh, I like that,” I said, and he said, “I was hoping you would.” This was before my father’s death, but not enough before that I ever introduced them. It’s possible that, had my father lived, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to get close to Walt. Regardless, the timing of our meeting denied all three of us whatever might have come of the two of them getting to know each other.

“The thing about selling,” I said, “is that it’s so final.”

Walt chuckled. “I suppose you could always buy it back someday.”

“No, we either keep it or we sell and it’s over.”

He didn’t respond. We were navigating a place where erupting tree roots had created a staircase effect, and I wondered if he was having trouble with the terrain. Then he said, “What if
we
bought it?”

“The house? We don’t want to buy it. I love our house.”

“We don’t want to buy it or we don’t want to live there?”

“Why buy it if we don’t want to live there?”

“Why
own
it if we don’t want to live there?”

“I own twelve and a half percent. We can’t live in twelve and a half percent of a house.”

“That’s very literal-minded of you.”

“Of course.”

“Rebecca?”

“Mmm?”

“I’d live there if you wanted.”

In response I reached up and touched his back, and he kissed me and pulled me close. My nose was inches from his neck, and I smelled his somewhat odd, idiosyncratic smell, which reminded me of baked squash. At first, when we started getting physically intimate, I had found the smell unpleasant and wondered if it might make the relationship impossible for me. I’d had several lovers though nothing serious, and already I knew this was different. But how could I be with someone whose native smell bothered me? And how could I let something so minor get in the way? Up until that point I’d treated a number of lonely, isolated people whose presenting complaint was that they were single but who then revealed themselves to be unable to get beyond small objections to the people they met. I’d had patients who couldn’t stand a new partner’s laugh or extremely heavy eyebrows. I never failed to interpret a conflict, often regarding how torn my patient felt about the prospect of actually getting what he or she wanted. Walt’s smell made me reconsider. I began to think more about chemistry—not “chemistry” but actual chemistry. I read about attraction and smell and came across a fascinating study in which it was found that women who were given samples of the body odor of a variety of men rated as most appealing the smells of the men who were genetically most different from them—those who would help them reproduce most successfully. Was my reaction to Walt’s smell an indication that we might not be a good match reproductively? We weren’t going to reproduce, so what did it matter? I worked hard to get over my revulsion, and over time, perhaps because of my work and perhaps because Walt in love smelled different from Walt alone, I felt less revulsion, and then no revulsion, more an awareness that I could, most of the time, keep neutral.

Walt released me and smiled mildly. “So you don’t want to be
queen of the manse?”

I shook my head and we started hiking again. I could live in that house only as one of the selves I’d already been: the self-contained little girl, the preternaturally calm adolescent.

He said, “Tell me again what Ryan said?”

“ ‘Whether it happens now or not,’ ” I quoted, “ ‘the question will keep coming up until it does happen.’ ”

“He’s right, you know.”

“I know.”

James was still asleep when we got home. Walt and I showered and dressed and went our separate ways, but it was a lovely start to the day, and when we met again in the kitchen at dusk I thanked him for having woken me. Now James was out. We made dinner together and settled in front of the TV to watch DVDs of some TED talks. We had two by colleagues of Walt’s and a third by a child advocacy expert whose work focused on immigrant children in border states. A couple days earlier, James had teased us about our taste. “And now I’m joining Rebecca Blair and Walt Newhall for a little light entertainment about the neuroplasticity of the brain.”

The phone rang and I saw from the caller ID that it was Lewis Vincent. I answered, thinking he must be calling about his conversation with James, but he said he and his wife wanted to talk to me about their daughter.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t treat acquaintances or their children. I’d be happy to give you a referral.”

“No, no, she doesn’t need therapy. Lisa and I just want to get your perspective.”

“I understand. But I’ve found that even a single consultation changes a social relationship.”

“We don’t have a social relationship, we have a business rela
tionship.”

I kept silent.

“Really? You won’t meet with us once and give us your expertise?
Sell
us your expertise?”

“I have a lot of very experienced colleagues. I’d be happy to give you a name. It was nice seeing you the other day. How’s the wine migration going?”

“I’m getting a couple of guys in to do it. They’re selling me their expertise. Ha, I’m kidding. That was a joke.”

After we hung up I returned to the couch, and a moment later James came in, smiling as he saw us in front of the TV and saying, “Don’t tell me you’re watching this trash again. So how are you guys? I just spent a few hours with Rob. The two of us are talking about funding research on the mood disorders of middle-aged primary care physicians.”

I suppressed a smile. “Did Jen cook?”

“She threw something together. An Indian lamb dish with homemade naan in the wood-fired oven and chutney from mangoes she grew.”

“I don’t think you can grow mangoes here.”

“Metaphorically. She grew them metaphorically. I think she grew the onions literally.”

“How are the boys?”

“I like the boys. I am very much in favor of the boys.”

“That’s a strange way to put it.”

“I’m in favor of children. What did Dad always say? Children deserve care. I’m down with that.”

“You’re in a funny mood.”

“I’m not high.”

“I didn’t think you were high.”

“I haven’t partaken in like five years, in case you care. Isn’t this so reminiscent, though? I walk in late, and my adult keepers are sitting up watching TV? And I have to persuade them that I’m not drunk or stoned?”

“Your adult keepers.”

“You and Dad. Ryan and Dad. It was never Robert and Dad—I don’t think my delinquency really took root until he was gone. Robert,” he added, “is a tad angry about the prospect of selling the house. Are you? I don’t think Ryan is. I saw him today, too.”

“I’m not sure yet, James,” I said, though on some level I was. “It’s so laden.”

“Laden,” he said. “Laden. That’s a strange word if you think about it. It means loaded, right? Or overloaded? But it sounds like the past tense of ‘lade.’ Is there a word ‘lade’? I remember I used to say ‘boughten.’ ‘I wish I’d “boughten” that Matchbox car.’ ‘You could’ve “boughten” it for me.’ ” He shrugged. “Don’t you like the idea of Vince and his wife building a monstrosity, though? I think whatever gets built there has to be completely different. I don’t want to recognize it. I’d like to see a god-awful Mediterranean villa with a red tile roof.”

“You’ve really decided,” I said.

“I’m not sure yet, Rebecca. It’s so laden.”

He said good night and headed off to the guest room, and Walt and I decided to go to bed as well. We went downstairs to the ground-level master suite, almost a thousand square feet dedicated to private space, an architectural possibility only when there aren’t and won’t be children. From the sitting area, sliding doors opened onto a beautifully landscaped yard full of native plants, and we finished the evening by turning on the outside lights and enjoying the view as if we were tiny creatures looking into a terrarium.

• • •

One thing I believed about myself for a long time was that I would go as far as I could academically. I got both a BA and a BS in college, I completed a master’s in psychology while working toward my MD, I did a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry once I’d finished my residency. I began my private practice assuming I’d spend three or four years establishing myself and then begin training to become a psychoanalyst. But I didn’t—not after three or four years and not after eight or ten, either. I saw friends enter into and benefit from analytic training, and I was hovering on the threshold: already reading deeply in the literature, my practice analytically oriented. My resistance seemed to focus, at least superficially, on the indeterminate length of the training. I consulted a former therapist, wanting help with figuring it out, and she related my anxiety to my childhood experience with James: I signed up to watch out for him without knowing I’d end up holding the job for life. “Maybe,” I said, but it didn’t sound right.

Then, as my father began to fail, I reconsidered. My objections disintegrated; I developed an itch. I began a five-day-a-week training analysis (with one of the few Palo Alto psychiatrists I didn’t already know), started my coursework, and at the ripe old age of forty-two reentered supervision. A little over a year later, I had two adult cases in supervision and had recently begun supervision on a child case, a four-year-old girl named Alissa whom I was seeing four times a week.

She was my first session the next morning. Initially referred to treatment for an eating disorder, Alissa ate only certain foods—certain white foods—but unlike most such children, she frequently refused food altogether. She declared certain days “yes” days and other days “no” days and announced over breakfast each morning which kind of day it would be. On “yes” days she ate jicama for breakfast and for lunch and dinner some combination of bread,
pasta, rice, and potatoes; on “no” days she consumed only coconut water. She weighed twenty-eight pounds.

Not surprisingly, most of our play centered around eating. I had bought a bin full of plastic foods—hamburgers the size of egg yolks, apples the size of walnuts. We fed these items to a group of dolls. Beforehand, we “washed” the food in cups of water we’d tinted with drops of white paint. By this point in the treatment it had become clear that white meant clean and stood in contrast to brown, which meant dirty. Food itself stood in contrast to feces. In eating nothing but rice and potatoes, Alissa was doing her best to avoid eating poop. And in skipping food a few times a week, she was doing the only thing she could think of to avoid producing it.

The play area in my office looked out onto the parking lot, and toward the end of the session I happened to glance down and see a woman stepping out of a sleek silver sedan. She had blond hair to her shoulders and was dressed in a light blue polo shirt and what appeared to be a pair of jodhpurs tucked into riding boots.

Alissa sensed the drift of my attention and threw her doll to the floor. “She’s finished.”

“And maybe a little angry.”

“No!”

Anger was a dangerous substance in Alissa’s family. Her parents, when I first met with them, spent a lot of time preemptively disavowing any so-called negative feelings toward their daughter. “You probably think we’re furious at her,” the father declared, “but we’re not.”

“What does she feel?” I asked Alissa about the doll.

“Hungry, but she’s not going to eat anymore.”

“Hungry and angry almost sound the same.”

“I didn’t want you to tell me that again!” With that, Alissa lay on her side and drew her knees to her chest. She wore a short turquoise
dress, and her folded legs looked like kindling.

“You’re curled in a ball. Maybe that will protect you from my words.”

“It’s not a ball, it’s a shell.”

“Shells protect the soft creature inside.”

“Kari is a soft creature.”

Kari was the baby sister whose birth had accelerated Alissa’s eating issues and begun the yearlong health concerns that had led her to my office. When I fetched Alissa from the waiting room, Kari was always in their mother’s arms, while Alissa sat by herself on the floor.