Heads of the Colored People(38)
After the phone conversation with Jessica, Marjorie had made a mental note to be more positive. If Jessica stopped talking to her, too, Marjorie would really look like she had no one, and Coryn would win all over again.
The little boy in the hoodie kept glancing at Marjorie cautiously, but he wasn’t staring anymore. Marjorie heard that Pastor Bevis was going to use footage of the backpack drive in the announcements that played over the jumbo screens in the church this coming Sunday and personally congratulate her for her hard work. Then Coryn would really have something to feel bitter about. Marjorie giggled a little in anticipation of Coryn’s face, then feeling self-conscious, she almost stopped herself. But she remembered, in keeping with her new therapist’s advice, she was supposed to feel her feelings, not suppress them, and she kept laughing, right in the DMV.
? ? ?
LIKE THE DMV on Foothill, the therapy was Jessica’s idea, and Marjorie had started it, reluctantly, only a month ago with one of Jessica’s colleagues, a therapist named Alexandria, Alex for short.
“It might help with some of your trauma—and this whole ongoing issue with Coryn, and your volatility,” Jessica had said over the phone; they rarely met for dinner anymore. “Not that I’m judging you—it’s just that you have some areas you might want to work on now, while you can. And it’s all confidential. I certainly wouldn’t talk to your therapist about you.”
It was true that Marjorie had been reprimanded a few times at her current job and had left her previous one after a blowup with her manager. In addition to Jessica, more than a few former friends had called her volatile. She was tired of that word. She was not a beaker full of combustible chemicals or a volcano looking for an opportunity to expel pent-up heat, leaving ash and damage in her wake. She was a person, just as much as they were, perhaps more complicated, but certainly normal, just as normal as they were.
Marjorie described herself this way to Alex, during their first meeting and on the intake sheet: “pretty normal, generous with a bit of a temper.”
Alex, a petite, brown-skinned black woman, wore her hair pulled tightly in a bun at the top of her head, her glasses olive green and square. She scribbled notes on a pad that she kept next to her on the smaller of two couches, and she never broke eye contact with Marjorie while she wrote.
“That’s what I want to work on, the temper, and people say I’m very negative and that I only see the worst.” Marjorie was specific in stating her goal, her short-term focus; she did not need to dig up her past or heal from trauma to improve her current behavior, as Jessica had so boldly suggested. She did not want to be one of those people who went to therapy for the rest of their lives, blathering on about what “my therapist said” or “what we uncovered in therapy.” It struck Marjorie that those people never got any better; they just used longer and more complicated phrases to say things. Marjorie was tired and spread too thin—that was all—at work, with her volunteering and church duties, with the many dramas of her social life, Coryn. She said as much to Alex, who smiled an ambiguous healthcare professional smile and wrote something down.
“Do you have any examples of what you mean by your temper or your negativity?” Alex asked. When she was not writing, she rubbed her fingers together briskly, in the manner of someone hungry.
Marjorie omitted a few recent incidents with her neighbors and the recent blowup with Coryn and chose her example carefully.
“Last week,” Marjorie said, after a pause, “I flung an entire tub of yogurt across my living room. It was raspberry flavored, and the little seeds still had some pulp on them and left marks all over the wall, and every time I see the traces of the stain, I feel mad at myself all over again.” She fiddled with the sleeves of her shirt and adjusted each so that it covered her wrists.
“What made you want to throw the yogurt?” Alex asked.
“A lot of things,” Marjorie started. Some of the things she didn’t want to tell Alex. “I’d had a bad day at work, then I ran into my foster sister Coryn at Ralphs, my grocery store—I don’t want to talk about her, but we go to the same church—and then Ralphs didn’t have any more of the kind of pickles I like, and when I got home, the yogurt was raspberry instead of strawberry, and somehow I’d picked the wrong kind.” Marjorie felt slightly embarrassed, anticipating a scolding. “It wasn’t very sanctified of me,” she said.
Alex’s face didn’t show any judgment, but she scribbled on her notepad before she said, “It sounds like it was a hard day. Sometimes it feels good to throw something, maybe not so fun to clean it up.”
Marjorie nodded. “There’s still this slight yogurt smell in the carpet.”
“It seems like the anger didn’t just come out of nowhere but had been bubbling for a while. What happened at work before that?”
“I got mad at a customer,” Marjorie hesitated. She did not say that earlier in the day she had scrolled through pictures of herself with Charles and felt a suffocating sadness or that when such feelings came up, she often punished herself by pinching at her own arms and legs, digging her nails into old scar tissue until it hurt again. “I’m an account clerk in the bursar’s office at a university. I didn’t say it loud, but I whispered, ‘Go to hell,’ just as my manager was walking by, and I already have two strikes, spread out over six months. He gave me a warning look but no incident report. It wasn’t nice to say, not a good witness to my church either.”