Heads of the Colored People(40)
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“THE POINT IS that we want to calm you down with the pause, so you feel the anger and then proceed wisely,” Alex said.
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MARJORIE TRIED WAIT at the grocery store and felt a little like a robot, acting from a program instead of her emotions, but she didn’t cuss anyone out, even under her breath. Alex’s worksheets were not altogether unlike the scripts Marjorie used at work to de-escalate conflict with angry customers, and there was something comforting in the canned process, the shortcuts.
Yet—and—in anticipation of the weekly appointments, Marjorie found herself thinking about what she did not want to say to her therapist, rehearsing safe topics to replace the troubling memories that had begun to resurface, thoughts of Mother Lydia and Coryn, and of the many scars on her arms and their corresponding internal wounds. Marjorie did not want Alex—nonjudgmental or not—to know that some of her volatility was because so many people did not like or respect her and that some of her volunteer work was perhaps penance for sins she had committed. She did not want Alex to know that her drama with her foster sister Coryn resulted partly from Coryn’s lingering anger about something Marjorie did. She did not want Alex to know that she had slept with Coryn’s husband, Charles Stampton, for years after he married Coryn, and that sometimes, even this morning on the way to the DMV, Marjorie still, albeit briefly, missed him.
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MARJORIE’S BLOOD SUGAR was running low and her adrenaline high in anticipation of the continued wait. She yawned in her chair, cold from the overcompensating air conditioner, mildly angry at the discomfort. The AC’s assault on her body temperature irritated her. She fished around inside her purse for a peppermint or butterscotch candy and found none. Everything was setting out to steal her joy. “Not today, Satan,” she whispered. She hadn’t slept well as it was; that was part of the problem. The neighbors, as usual, had hosted a loud party, to which they failed to invite her—perhaps out of racism, perhaps sexism, perhaps out of some anti-Christian sentiment, or perhaps because of Marjorie’s yelling match with them seven weeks ago about another party—and she spent the night tossing in bed, listening to the percussive bass line of their music, trying to guess what song it was. It all sounded like New Order or possibly Depeche Mode, but it could have been something new that she’d never heard, since she’d stopped listening to secular music in 1999, except for when she was with Charles.
There were so many people trying to do music now, music that you could barely understand, let alone tolerate. Sometimes the students at the university played their music so loudly you could hear it through their headphones. Marjorie was known for calling right out from her counter in the bursar’s office, “Any music that I can hear from your personal device will prevent you from moving through this line.” The ones who could hear her would turn it right down, and the ones who couldn’t hear her initial threat heard her once she got on the PA system.
Just this morning on Marjorie’s way to the DMV, a black twentysomething drove up next to her in a tiny Honda Civic, blaring loud rap music in the new whiny style with his windows down. Even in the unbearable August heat, Marjorie kept her car windows rolled partially down to cut through the condensation of the air conditioner, which made the car too cold. Marjorie was forced to roll her own windows back up because of the invasive music, and she did so with a glare at the young man, who laughed and bobbed his head as the bass still blared but more faintly. It all reminded her of a sounding brass, clanging cymbals. Later in the ride, two other cars cut her off, preventing her from switching into the left lane for an important turn. A stop sign reminded her of her acronym, WAIT, but she was already fuming by then and had to repent for her aggressive use of both middle fingers.
Marjorie was only thirty-seven, but she felt older than her peers; some of them would say she felt better than them, too. But that wasn’t true. If anything, she felt inferior for all the many ways she failed at keeping herself unspotted from the world. Marjorie had said the sinner’s prayer at age four and rededicated her life to Christ again and again along the way: at fourteen, when she took up smoking; at seventeen, when she lost her virginity; at twenty-two, after a four-year “wild” bender at college; and at thirty-five, when she repented for her six-year affair with Charles Stampton. And she repented regularly for some of her ongoing thoughts, for the times when alone in her bed she still thought of Charles and wanted to touch the places that he used to.
“Do your friends know how hard you are on yourself or how much you care about what other people think?” Alex had asked just last week during their session. “Because it seems like your Christianity offers you grace, but you don’t seem to ever offer any to yourself.”
Marjorie almost told her about Coryn and Charles then, but she decided against it. Instead she said quietly, “I’m just trying to keep my hands clean, day by day. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life, and I’ve asked for forgiveness, but I feel like I can’t stop doing them.”
“And,” Alex said, “and you feel like you can’t stop doing them.”
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ONE DMV TELLER’S line moved particularly slowly, and judging from the paperwork in the hands of the people queuing there, Marjorie guessed it was one of the license renewal lines. She could barely see the teller because she was so short, but Marjorie could see that once people got to her, they appeared to be making a lot of unnecessary small talk. She hoped she wouldn’t get stuck with that teller. Marjorie shook her head. She did occasionally make small talk with the students who came to the bursar’s office, but nothing that would hold everyone up like this.