Blood Sugar(25)

CHAPTER 16


    WITCH



When I started with Dr. Don, I noticed the lighting in his office was off-center, creating a gloomy feel. I think I picked up a little of the symmetry bug from Ameena because I felt there should be two big lamps, one on each side of the couch. He didn’t care one way or the other, so I brought in a giant ceramic gold-painted 1970s-style table lamp that I had had since childhood. I had looked at it so often for so long, it never occurred to me that it was hideous. It just was what it was. My mother was happy to dole out my old bedroom belongings since they no longer fit her needs or decor. So I took the lamp to Dr. Don’s office. The very lamp that gave me reason to park at a meter right out front instead of around back, therefore leading me to find Mr. Cat in the garbage. So the lamp took on a great deal of importance to me. A sign of destiny.

After a few years of my happy internship, Dr. Don got a new client, or patient (I had noticed different psychologists preferred one term to the other), named Evelyn W. I had not yet decided if I liked calling the people I met with in session clients or patients. It seemed the word client made them in charge, and the word patient made me in charge. And each individual case warranted a different title. In the case of Evelyn W., she was so awful I called her neither and instead called her the Witch.

The Witch was forced into therapy because of a court-ordered mandate. She never would have sought out self-reflection and personal betterment on her own. She slapped a crying child in line at the grocery store to make her “shut the fuck up.” The mother of the child pressed charges, and since the Witch had no kids of her own to take away because of possible abuse and she had no priors, the judge sentenced her to pay a fine and seek help for her anger-management issues. No jail time. So Evelyn W. booked her twenty mandated sessions.

The Witch was in her mid-thirties, tall, and rail thin. Her bony elbows and knees looked like weapons. Her nose was long and pointy and so ugly it shocked me that she had never had it fixed, since she seemed so vain otherwise. Her hair was dull brown and flat, hanging lankily around her long face. She was mean. I could hear her on her cell phone, always on her cell phone, berating her employees. Calling them stupid and lazy. Screaming. Throwing fits. The sessions didn’t seem to be helping with her anger problem because she wasn’t really present; she wasn’t meeting Dr. Don halfway, if at all. She just sat there staring at her cell, scrolling through emails, typing and clicking and swiping and pushing. If she showed up for the fifty minutes, she got credit for the session, even though she didn’t investigate her behavior or feelings or learn anything about herself or why she was such a wretched person.

Since she was a lost cause and had exactly zero rapport with Dr. Don, he had me take over her last seven sessions. She usually paced around the room, staring at her phone. The only time she spoke was to mutter to herself and sort of to me about her “idiot employees” and “waste-of-space maid who forgot to lock the side door again” and “libtard dermatologist who didn’t call in her retinol prescription.” During one session, as I continued to desperately try to dig out a kernel of good in the Witch, she got some sort of email. She flew into a rage. It was from her ex-husband. How she ever got anyone to marry her in the first place was a mystery to me.

“Motherfucking asshole!” She started to kick the side table near the couch.

“Evelyn, take a deep breath.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, cunt!”

Cunt? I had been nothing but nice to this Witch. She then kicked the side table again, this time hard enough for my giant, heavy gold lamp to tip over and crash onto the floor. The shade crumpled, the light bulb shattered, the metal neck bent, and worst of all, the ceramic base cracked.

The crash of the lamp snapped her out of her rage. She turned and faced me, curious to see what would happen next. I looked at her, a hate growing inside me. I wanted to snap off her bony arm like a twig from a tree, and then shove it down her throat, silencing her malignance. It was the most horrific thought I had ever had, but I couldn’t stop the image from cycling in my brain. It made me momentarily happy to replay in my mind.

“Get out,” I said coolly.

“Fine by me. And that lamp was ugly anyway.”

Before I picked up the pieces of my beloved possession, I seethed and watched the Witch from the office window. She walked to the corner, staring at her phone, as always, waiting for the light to change.

Forty-First Street is a busy thoroughfare because it turns into the I-195, one of the three major causeways that connect Miami Beach to Miami. Incidentally, it’s the causeway that Amy, Erika, Sharon, Hannah, and I always used to get to Coconut Grove, where Club Rox lived. Because it connected Miami to the beach, large trucks, big rigs, school buses, and delivery vans traveled on the street constantly.

A group of other people joined the Witch, waiting for the light to change. A young mother holding her little boy’s squirming hand, two teenagers on skateboards, a businessman looking dapper but too warm in a suit, and two bikini-clad beachgoers. The light changed, the cars and trucks rumbled to a stop, and the motley group crossed the street. The Witch joined them, never even looking up from her cell phone, simply following the movement of the crowd. It was a wonder she wasn’t hit by a truck.

Later I told Alisha about my arm-snapping fantasy. It was troubling me that I could think about something so atrocious, and I had to get it off my chest and talk it through. “Am I a monster?” I asked. Alisha put her little notepad down and looked at me. “Ruby, you are not a monster. The mere fact that you are concerned with being a monster means you’re not one, and you’ll never be one. You are a good person.” As she said this, a similar phrase, You are an angel, spoken by Duncan’s mom and the friendly traffic cop, quietly echoed through my head.