The Resurrection of Tess Blessing (3 page)

“Good morning!” an elderly volunteer says to Tess as she dawdles into the hospital lobby.

The greeter is wearing a white blouse with a bow and gold button earrings. The shiny label on her chest says—
I’m Vivian
. Now, some folks might find her overly arched penciled eyebrows and caked pancake makeup pathetic, but Tess thinks Vivian looks valiant, and nothing like Betty Davis in
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Though if her arm was twisted, she’d have to admit there
are
some similarities around the lips.

Since she has had prior mammograms at the sister hospital of one of the biggest and best in Milwaukee, she knows where she’s going, but she steps up to the desk and asks, “The Women’s Center?” because she doesn’t want anybody to feel as unneeded as she does.

“Down there, dear,” Vivian says as she points to a hall on the left with a knobby-knuckled finger. “Have a nice day!”

Tess wants to wish her the same, but the cinnamon toast she’d gulped down for breakfast had begun to ball up in her throat when Vivian’s hair spray hit her nose. It was Aqua Net.

Sense memories are the strongest, so even though Tess puts up her dukes, it’s more out of habit than hope. If she successfully overpowers the feelings that are barging into her brain, it’d be the first time she’s won the battle against the enemy that has attacked her thousands of times since the third of June, 1968, the day it first jumped out of the shadows of her mind to have its way with her.

Barely nineteen years old at the time and already a year out of the house and on her own, Tess had picked up a pack of Juicy Fruit from the corner drugstore and was returning back to her efficiency apartment on Milwaukee’s Lower East Side when out of the blue, she broke into a shiny sweat. Her heart began beating like a war drum, and her breathing came in staggered, fast bursts. For no apparent reason—a madman wasn’t charging at her with a knife, nor had a car jumped a curb and come careening her way—she was experiencing the kind of gut-wrenching fear she’d only feel if both the above were true.

When she tried to run from the invisible enemy, she found her legs were no longer able to do their job. She slid down Pizza Man’s front window onto the hot sidewalk where she sat immobilized physically and mentally, unsure if, or when, whatever was happening to her would stop. Passersby took her for just another stoned hippie grooving on the day and gave her the peace sign. She should’ve found this highly amusing, but it appeared that whatever had her in its grip had also snatched away her strongest coping device, her sense of humor, and that riled her up even more.

When the panic eventually lessened its hold, Tess made it back to her tiny apartment above the bike shop terrified that whatever it was that had struck her down had followed her home. She spent the next two days rolled in a ball on the apartment floor convinced that she was losing her mind. As her mother and stepfather were not what one would call helpful, and she had no friends other than her equally emotionally unbalanced younger sister, Birdie, and the hairy strangers she smoked pot and listened to Jimi Hendrix with every so often in the alley behind the bike shop, she had nowhere to turn but inward, so she pulled herself together and did what she often did to find answers to life’s perplexing questions.

Cautiously, she proceeded to the neighborhood library.

She bypassed the medical books because she’d only briefly considered that what she was experiencing was physical in origin. The shortness of breath, the weakness, the cramps, and the sweating had dissipated once the attack was over. She was convinced that her problems had to be in her head, the same way they were in Birdie’s, so she made a beeline to the library’s self-improvement section. Nowadays it’s jammed with books about her condition, but it was slim pickings back then. All Tess could find in the stacks was a diet bestseller that mentioned how coffee put people on edge and sardines might give people nightmares, so she switched to a bland diet that consisted primarily of dry cereal and toast points.

But after changing her eating habits failed to keep three more attacks at bay, she decided that
where
she had experienced the fear must’ve been the trigger, and she composed one of the many lists she’s made throughout her life to keep her on track:

1. The sidewalk in front of Pizza Man.
   
2. The Melting Spoon.
   
3. Baker’s Drugs.
   
4. The laundromat.
   
5. The library.
   

1. Walk on the other side of the street.
   
2. I never liked the bossy waitresses at the Melting Spoon all that much.
   
3. Stand out front of the drugstore and ask people with nice faces to buy Maalox for me.
   
4. Wash my clothes in the bathtub.
   
5. Read
   To Kill a Mockingbird
   for the fifty-first, fifty-second, fifty-third time, etc.
   

Tess followed her instructions and was making do, until an insidious wave of terror swept her out of her balcony seat at the Oriental Theatre during a showing of
Easy Rider
. She stumbled down the darkened aisle with the realization that on top of everything else she’d given up to protect herself, she’d no longer be able to go to the beloved movies that had been one of her only means of escape since her sister’s and her Saturday matinee days. Almost penniless, alone, and suffering from an agonizing mental illness, she almost threw in the towel that night. If that sweet old lady hadn’t pulled alongside her on her frantic dash down the East Side streets and told her, “It’s awfully late for a girl to be out on her own. Can I give you a lift home, dear?” Tess might’ve jumped off the North Avenue Bridge.

(A friend in need is a friend indeed.)

Since Tess spent most of her time and energy coping with her out-of-control fear, holding down a job had become almost impossible. She’d had to quit answering the phones at Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics when she developed claustrophobia and could no longer stand being cooped up in a bus or an office. Waitressing at Vince’s Grill didn’t work out either. She was overwhelmed by happy chatter. Thank goodness for the HELP WANTED sign she spotted in the window of an Arthur Murray Dance Studio. (I might’ve had something to do with a position opening up.) She applied and got the job.

A lover of musicals since childhood—the ones starring Shirley Temple and Ginger Rogers were her favorites—she picked up the dances quickly, especially loved the tango, and really took to the place. After a few months of working all the hours she could and saving most of her paycheck, she enrolled in two classes at nearby University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Along with a singing class—Tess had long ago set aside her desire to win the talent portion of Miss America, but dreamed of performing off Broadway—she also signed up for Psychology 101—Tess desperately wanted to be sane, and would be thrilled to not end up in an institution.

Her quest for higher learning started out with a bang, but during the course of the semester, she was forced to come to terms with a few heartbreaking realities. Her desire to sing didn’t match her God-given abilities, so appearing in musical comedies two blocks over from The Great White Way was out. And by the fifth psych class, she had to admit to herself that she had more in common with the “abnormal” cases the professor shared with the class then she’d ever imagined.

Since there wasn’t much she could do about her propensity to sing flat, she vowed to put what little energy she had into solving her emotional problems. She called for an appointment at the university’s counseling center. That took enormous courage on her part, because the first time she’d paid a visit to a professional years ago didn’t work out so hot.

After the accident that claimed her father’s life, young Tess was unable to eat sloppy joes, her daddy’s favorite. She acted up at school. Got mouthy with Father Ted during catechism class. Told him that
if
it was true that God was all-powerful, he was also a flaming asshole. “Or maybe that’s the Holy Spirit,” she cracked to her fifth-grade class.

Even her mother, who had her delusions-of-grandeur nose stuck up so far in the air that she was barely aware of any life growing below her waist, noticed that something was off with her firstborn. She told Tess, like she was doing her a big favor, “I scheduled a series of meetings with Father Ted to save your soul, and I met a psychologist tonight at Lonnigan’s—that’s someone who deals with head cases. We’ve got an appointment with him tomorrow.”

On the drive to the doctor’s office, the widow Finley reminded once again, “Remember to call me Louise, and not
Mom
or
Mother
or
Mommy
. Like I keep tellin’ you and your sister, unless we want to end up in the poor house, I need another husband. No man wants to take on another man’s children. I gotta catch one, reel him in,
then
break the bad news about the two of you.” She instructed Tess to take the wheel of the old woody station wagon with the broken muffler, undid another button on the beige blouse she’d bought for the occasion, and checked her Aqua Net-sprayed hair in the rearview mirror. “So don’t act stupid or shocked when you meet the doctor. He’s not from around here. He’s an Indian.”

Tess had always admired Indians, and not knowing there was any other kind other than Tonto, she was sorely let down when Dr. Mukhar Rajagee—not a psychologist the way her mother thought he’d mentioned over drinks in the noisy bar, but a podiatrist—greeted them in his waiting room wearing Hush Puppies without beads, and smelling not like maize, but some other food that made her eyes water.

After the doctor inspected Tess’s little feet and gave her a pair of ill-fitting insoles, he said something about “karma” and “a past life,” but she thought he’d said something different because he had a foreign way of talking. She spent a lot of time that summer wondering exactly how many “caramels” she’d need to consume to get back her “passed life,” which, while not perfect, was a whole lot better than the one she had now.

And here she was almost nine years later to the day, showing up almost an hour early for the appointment with Dr. Glenn Ganges, a balding, fisherman-knit-sweater-wearing psychologist at the university’s counseling center. A man so extraordinarily ordinary-looking that she thought she’d have a hard time picking him out of a lineup unless he was smoking his pipe, which was one of those meerschaums.

Dr. Ganges asked about her childhood and proved to be a good listener, but she needed more than a shoulder to cry on. She needed him to diagnose and treat the unbearable feelings that she was experiencing ASAP!

“Am I crazy?” she asked him at the onset of the third session.

The shrink, who Tess had begun to envision as a sea captain, leaned back in his swivel chair with a confident, snaggle-toothed smile. “No, no, of course not,” he replied in his preternaturally calm voice. “You just need to relax.”

“I’m sorry.” She was sure she’d heard him wrong. “Did you say I just need to
relax
?”

When he nodded, her laugh had all the conviction of a sit-com soundtrack. “Could you please be a little more specific? I mean…what’s wrong with me? Does it have a name?”

Ganges preferred not diagnosing this early in the process, but his client’s desperation
was
compelling. He drew deeply on his carved white pipe and released a cloud of swarthy-smelling smoke—unbeknownst to Tess, he saw himself as a sea captain too. One who hunted down mental illness. With a vengeance—and asked her, “Are you familiar with the term
shell-shocked
?”

She bowed her head like she was considering his question, but what she was really doing was checking for his degree out of the tops of her eyes. She wanted to make sure he’d graduated from a school of
psychology
and not
podiatry
. (Momentarily reassured when she discovered his diploma, that soon changed when she realized it was hanging next to a painting of a red sailboat getting tossed about by storm waves without a safe harbor in sight.)

Tess asked, “Don’t only ex-soldiers get shell-shocked?” She’d seen plenty of John Wayne and Audie Murphy war movies during her growing-up years. And there was the caretaker at the cemetery, her friend, Mr. McGinty, who had a difficult time being around the living after he came back from bayoneting Nazis. “Like the crew-cut guys around campus who scream ‘
incoming’
and dive to the ground when they hear a car backfire?” She didn’t admit that she jumped out of her skin around sudden loud noises as well, but Dr. Glenn somehow picked up on that. She could see it in his wise sea-faring eyes.

“The symptoms aren’t always combat-related,” he explained. “Any life-shattering event, such as physical or emotional abuse, or death of a significant loved one can trigger…,” he sounded like he was reading out of the most recent edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
“depression, panic attacks, paranoia, hypervigilance, phobias, and flashbacks.”

Being more than familiar with the list that he’d rattled off, Tess wasn’t alarmed, she was filled with a beautiful, horrible relief. If he knew what she had…what was that famous saying? “Half the battle of fixing a problem is identifying it?”

“So…you can…um…cure this, right?” she asked.

Ganges didn’t say he could, or he couldn’t; he passed her a box of Kleenex, settled back into his swivel chair, and said, “Why don’t you tell me more about your relationship with your father and sister today?”

Not wanting to appear uncooperative, she dabbed at her tears, curled her legs up beneath her, and proceeded to tell the note-taking doctor how on a lovely August afternoon a few weeks short of her tenth birthday, her father, Edward “Eddie” Finley, borrowed a motorboat from a pal at Lonnigan’s where he worked tending bar. Tess’s younger-by-a-year sister, Robin Jean, who’d been nicknamed Birdie due to her low birth weight, large eyes, and tiny-boned frame, had made it clear early on that she didn’t care for fishing, so she wasn’t out on Lake Michigan with them that day. (Non-swimmer Tess was terrified of deep water, so she shouldn’t have been bobbing around in that boat that afternoon either, but she adored her daddy and would do anything to spend time with him.)