Trust Exercise(59)
“Home sweet home.”
“You’re living there?” Sarah’s high-gear voice dropped an octave. She’d finally forgotten herself, and that sardonic quality of knowing—not necessarily caring, but knowing—that Karen remembered so clearly, returned. Sarah had always seemed to know. Not you, but something you wanted to know. Now she seemed to see their town, dumped over a neighboring table like so many dirty guacamole bowls. “I never imagined you’d live there. I’d sooner imagine I’d live there, and I never imagined I’d live there. How is it?”
“It’s great. It’s not the same place we lived when we were kids. I mean, that place is still there, but I don’t spend much time there.”
“I hated living there so much. I always felt so powerless.”
“We were kids. We weren’t supposed to have power.”
“You had power. You had that car.”
How Karen’s crappy high-school car loomed for Sarah! It was one of the things that fascinated Karen about Sarah’s book, this grievance about Karen’s car. It was one of the things that kept Karen curious about Sarah, and not just enraged. If Karen wandered off in Freudian directions, a guilty pleasure, she might conclude there was, in addition to the obvious penis envy (phallus-envy? Karen’s Freud is pretty rusty, please remember she majored in dance), also some obvious father envy going on, Karen’s car representing Karen’s father’s role in her life, which while minuscule was larger than Sarah’s father’s role in Sarah’s life, since Sarah never saw her father and didn’t even know where he lived. Here we might understand “father” as meaning any form of masculine care. See, for example, Sarah’s special friendship with the man we call Mr. Kingsley, and that friendship’s mysterious end. See, for another example, Sarah’s thing for David’s car. That phone he failed to answer, that mess in his passenger seat. That orgasm Sarah gives herself, masturbating, because David’s not there. Everything about the car represented David’s broken promise to take care of Sarah, as if David was more—or should have been more—than just another fucked-up teenage kid. Why was David responsible for her? What about the adults in their lives? As if on cue, Sarah said, “Do you see anyone?”
And by “anyone” Karen knew Sarah meant David, and felt the satisfaction of the night arriving just where she’d intended, like a train pulling in right on time.
“I see David a lot. In fact, we’re working on something together.”
Another of Karen’s observations about people who drink is that their drunkenness doesn’t steadily accumulate like snow building up. It has valleys and peaks, of confusion and relative clearness. Although the confusion gets steadily worse, and the relative clearness gets steadily cloudy, there keep being these moments of reaching a peak, where the drunk person thinks she can see. She feels certain she isn’t that drunk. That’s where Sarah was, as the subject of David came up. Sarah was no longer high-pitched and hyper, she was no longer churning out fake excitement, she was tenderized down to her bones. She must have felt steady and safe in her own fortress walls. If it’s possible to see a person’s self-absorption clash against her curiosity, to see her inwardness and outwardness collide, then I saw it in Sarah. I saw her craving to talk about David meet her craving to learn a new David, from me. Before, she’d forgotten herself. Now, for him, she set herself aside.
“Tell me about him,” she said.
* * *
ONE OF THE challenges I’ve faced in therapy is my total recall. All my life I’ve had a flawless memory. All my life people have noticed, no one more than my mother. When I was very young, my mother paraded my memory. There was the lighthearted way she’d use me grocery shopping instead of a list. Imagine me at four or five years old, Kevin a fat toddler stuck in the shopping-cart seat. Aisle by aisle I’d rattle off our kitchen shortages down to the teaspoon. We were out of milk and bread, we had three eggs, we had a frozen chicken breast in the freezer, the baking soda box was empty, there was only one sleeve of saltines. She’d ask me questions about the sugar bowl’s level or the state of the lettuce when other people were in earshot, always hoping they’d make some comment, and when they did she was off to the races. “Believe me—she also knows how long it’s been since I vacuumed the carpet.” [Appreciative laughter.] “Believe me—it’s no fun when your kid won’t forget that you promised her ice cream—last summer!” [More appreciative laughter.] There was the less lighthearted way she deployed me in wars with my father or, later, her boyfriends. “Are you sure you want to say that to me? Karen’s listening.” “Karen, please remind Paul what he promised to do.” As I got older, though, my mother stopped parading my memory. She stopped bragging about it or hitting her enemies with it. Instead, she started running it down. My memory had been the ultimate proof of any points that she wanted to make, but it strangely disproved any points of my own. I might remember some incident, sure, but I did not understand it. Anybody whose brain was so cluttered with dull trivia like the approximate number of ounces of toothpaste left in the tube didn’t actually know what things meant. My mother first exploited my memory, and then insulted it, but the conclusion I reached didn’t change. My memory was my innermost self and I had to protect it.