Trophy Son(16)
“I wanted to apologize to you for what I said yesterday. I didn’t handle that well. I shouldn’t have told you what to do.”
“I asked you what you thought. It’s fine, Mom. Don’t worry about it.”
“The truth is I don’t know what you should do. Which is more reason that I shouldn’t have answered.” She cleared her throat and started in on what she wanted to tell me and I could tell she had rehearsed the first line of it. “The clearest memories I have from when I was less than ten years old have nothing to do with birthday parties or vacations or barreling down a ski slope. The clearest memories I have are the times I would go to my mother on a rainy day in Minnesota and complain that I was bored. Do you know what she’d say? She’d say ‘Good.’”
“That’s not very helpful.”
“It was, though. She’d say, ‘Good, I’m looking forward to seeing what you do about that.’”
“What’s so memorable about that?”
“It’s memorable because even then I recognized what a gift that was. The gift to learn how to do it myself. To grow, imagine. It’s a gift I’ve never been able to give to you.”
It felt as though she was unloading her regrets on me which was doubly unfair. “I’m doing fine, Mom.”
“Are you? How can a person be aware of his absence of imagination?”
“It’s unimaginable.”
She was too busy lamenting her parenting to laugh. “There’s great value in spare time, in boredom. Early in life, it’s instructive. If it only ever comes late in life, it will be hard because you won’t have the tools for it.”
She was giving her work and me, her work product, a failing grade. It was a judgment, resigned and sad. I wanted to scream, “And so what now, Mom!,” but I knew she had no solution. This was not to be a constructive moment. It was only self-loathing, which I disliked witnessing, and pity for me, which I disliked even more. “Thanks, Mom. Very uplifting.”
*
The whole way to the psychiatrist’s office I wondered if there would be a sofa. Instead, there was a wide and very deep stuffed leather chair with fat armrests and I sat all the way back so my legs couldn’t bend to ninety degrees. Sitting that way naturally made me feel like a kid in a grown-up chair. I wondered if it was a deliberate tool to get patients in the frame of mind for regressing to childhood memories.
Dad had dropped me in the parking lot in Bryn Mawr and driven off to get coffee, just one town over and about ten minutes from our house. I was buzzed into a small, shared sitting area that fed into a maze of hallways and doctors’ offices. Every six feet or so in the halls was a round, white noise dampener about the size of a smoke alarm, except these were on the floor and made the constant static noise of an old-time TV that’s turned to no channel at all.
Dr. Ford sat facing me in an office chair on casters and his back to a small desk with only a phone and a pad of paper on it. The room was eight feet by eight feet with one window, no personal photos anywhere and almost nothing on the walls, just a large photo of the ocean. The sea, horizon and sky, not the waves breaking on a beach.
“How are you, Anton?”
“Good.”
“In our first session I’ll take a lot of notes if that’s okay?”
“Of course.”
“After that we’ll mostly talk and I won’t take notes but today we may cover a lot of information.”
“Sure.”
We covered all my significant relationships, who the characters in my life were. Grandparents, all deceased, parents, Panos, coach, tutor, a couple boys from school I was friends with but hadn’t spoken with on the phone in more than a year, a girl from school I thought was good looking but spoke to only a few times and never asked out and hadn’t spoken to in more than two years. I mentioned Ben Archer as a tennis rival though I didn’t know why I included him as a name for Dr. Ford. I’d never spoken to Ben off a tennis court. I mentioned Liz as an ex-girlfriend and moved right on.
It didn’t take long and I wondered if Dr. Ford found the list as short and disturbing as I did but he had a good poker face and I couldn’t tell.
He had me start with some of my earliest memories at home, at school, when I first felt love for tennis, first felt hate. I’m so bad at remembering stuff like that, especially on the spot, but I picked some examples. My first school memory was running out of the kindergarten schoolhouse to Mom, who picked me up, and we drove to a field where she had rented a garden plot to grow vegetables. My first memory at home was helping Mom do a load of laundry and spilling the cup of liquid detergent across the top of the washing machine and we made a game of Zamboni to push the soap into the machine on top of the clothes. The first I felt love for tennis was acing Dad for the first time a few years ago. For hate, I joked I’d have to narrow it down and get back to him. He laughed and let it go at that.
“Do you want to win at tennis?”
I had just downloaded Bull Durham and I paraphrased Tim Robbins. “Winning’s better than losing.”
He smiled. “I think I can help you win. Like many sports, and especially tennis, winning is a mental exercise. If we’re honest with each other in here, if the real you shows up each time you’re here, I can give you tools to help you win.”
“Okay, great,” I said. I didn’t realize it at the time but this doctor was wrong for me. What he had asked was wrong and I would realize it soon, but I didn’t know it then. Asking if I wanted to win at tennis should have been the second question, only if I had already answered yes to the question of whether I wanted to play tennis.