I readied my hand for a dive toward the tissue box. Stacy straightened, placed her feet on the floor, sat up straight.
“The whole thing’s an incredible pity, Dr. Delaware.” Back to the clinical detachment of the first session. “Yes, it is.”
“She was brilliant, two PhDs, she could’ve won the Nobel Prize if she’d wanted to. That’s where Eric got his smarts. My father’s a bright man, but she was a genius. Her parents were brilliant, too. Librarians, they never made much money, but they were brilliant. Both died young. Cancer. Maybe my mother was afraid of dying young. Of cancer, I don’t know. She brought Becky Manitow from a D to a B in algebra. When Becky stopped seeing her, she dropped down to a D again.”
“Becky stopped because your mother was ill?”
“I suppose.”
Long silence. A minute to go.
She said, “Our time’s up, isn’t it.”
“In a moment,” I said.
“No. Rules are rules. Thanks for all your help, I’m dealing with stuff pretty well. All things considered.” She picked up her books.
“All things considered?”
“One never knows,” she said. Then she laughed. “Oh, don’t worry about me. I’m fine. What’s the choice?”
During the last few sessions, she entered ready to talk about her grief. Dry-eyed, solemn, no changes of subject or digressions to trivia or laughing dance-aways.
Trying.
Yearning to understand why her mother had left her without saying good-bye. Knowing some questions could never be answered.
Asking them anyway. Why her family? Why her?
Had her mother even been sick? Had it all been psychosomatic, the way Dr. Manitow said it was—she’d heard him say so to Judge Manitow when the two of them didn’t know she was in earshot. Judge Manitow saying, Oh, I don’t know, Bob. He replying, Trust me, Judy, there’s nothing physically wrong with her—it’s slow suicide.
Stacy, listening from the bathroom next to the kitchen, had been angry at him, really furious, what a bastard, how could he say something like that.
But then she started wondering herself. Because the doctors never did find anything. Her father kept saying
doctors don’t know everything, they’re not as smart as they think. Then he stopped taking her for tests, so didn’t that prove that even he thought it might be in Mom’s head? You’d think something would show up on some test….
During the eleventh session, she talked about Mate.
Not angry at him, the way Dad was. The way Eric was. That’s all the two of them could do when faced with something they couldn’t control. Get angry at it. Big male thing, get pissed off, want to crush it.
I said, “Your father wants to crush Mate?”
“Rhetorically. He says that about anything he doesn’t like—some guy trying to cheat him in a business deal, he jokes about pulverizing him, wiping him off the planet, that kind of macho BS.”
“What do you think of Mate?”
“Pathetic. A loser. With or without him, Mom would have stopped being.”
At the beginning of the twelfth session she announced that there was nothing left to say about her mother, she’d better start paying attention to her future. Because she’d finally decided she just might want one.
“Maybe architecture, still.” Smile. “I’ve eliminated everything else. I’m forging straight ahead, Dr. Delaware. Setting my sights on architecture at Stanford. Everyone will be happy.”
“Including you?”
“Definitely including me. No point doing anything if it doesn’t bring me satisfaction. Thanks for getting me to see that.”
She was ready to terminate, but I encouraged her to make another appointment. She came in the next week with brochures and the course catalog from Stanford.
Going over the architecture curriculum with me. Telling me she was pretty sure she’d made the right choice.
“If you don’t mind,” she said, “I’d like to come in when I apply next year. Maybe you can give me some pointers—if you do that kind of thing.”
“Sure. My pleasure. And call any time something’s on your mind.”
“You’re very nice,” she said. “It was instructive to meet you.”
I didn’t have to ask what she meant. I was a male who wasn’t her father, wasn’t her brother.