Read Online White Bird in a Blizzard by Laura Kasischke - Free Book Online Page A

boyfriend suggested you see me. How can I help?”
    The question throws me. I hadn’t thought of myself as here for
help
. I’d imagined I was here to
defy
analysis, to banter wittily with a professional about my personal life until she managed to wrestle some kernel of truth out of my clenched fist, weasel some secret out of my subconscious mind. Remember
Spellbound
?
    Surely I, too, had something extraordinary repressed, something Dr. Phaler was being paid a hundred dollars an hour to find—the way Ingrid Bergman forced Gregory Peck to remember how he’d slid down a banister into his brother’s back as a child and impaled him on a gate.
    Gregory Peck held his head a lot during his long psychiatric sessions, trying to keep it in, twisting around in close-up after close-up, looking exquisitely tortured—all that guilt and grief—while Ingrid Bergman kept on needling him. Couldn’t Dr. Phaler do something similar for me, shine her professional flashlight to the bottom of that well, that quiet ice at the center of myself, where
my
guilt, or grief, or anger, or mother still was?
    Then, I’d have a good long life fall of healthy relationships and mature responses to life’s inevitable ups and downs—spared all the psychosis and neurosis for which I am otherwise headed:
    The frigidity, or nymphomania.
    The handwashing.
    The hair twirling.
    The drive to fail, or the compulsive need to achieve.
    Perhaps I could dredge my memory, the way Peck did, and make some room in there so I could
heal
, or
begin the healing process
.
     
    Except that there doesn’t seem to be much dark mystery in there to dredge.
    I’ve tried.
    Over and over.
    Night after night.
    There must be
some
reason I feel nothing.
    Surely it is not just that
I feel nothing
.
    Surely I am suffering some exquisite torture, too. I am sensitive. I am good. Surely I am a victim of something, not nothing. I am not merely devoid of feeling, am I? I must be
troubled
. The troubled are everywhere. There are books and television shows and whole industries devoted to them—magazines for them to read, hot lines for them to call, uplifting magnets to stick on their refrigerators. They surround us, loving too much, crying real tears, confessing their sins and being forgiven.
    But there are no twelve-step programs for people who are selfish, or heartless, or shallow, as most people seem to be. There are no Monday night movies about girls who aren’t troubled at all.
    Instead, the girls on the Monday night movies are fragile, and big-eyed, and too sensitive for this world, and the bad things that happen to them bother them a lot. Their beauty is the beauty of suffering endured. You can always see their collarbones under the flimsy dresses they wear, and darkness gathers there.
    But I have never been able to imagine myself in one of those movies. Until my mother left, my life seemed ordinary, and dull, and untroubled. No “funny” games with uncles. No vague memories of my father torturing my childhood pets. I never had any childhood pets. Just a glimpse here or there of my mother in a bathrobe, looking annoyed. A few dull family outings—my father with a fishing pole, my mother running after a paper napkin that got loose from the picnic basket and flew across the park. There was a trip out West when I was five. I had to get out of the car to pee in the desert and got red dust on my knees. When I climbed back into the car, I asked my father where we were.
    “Death Valley,” he said.
    I slept all the way to the ocean while a groggy wand of sun moved back and forth across my face.
    I remember a beesting at Great Serpent Mound National Park one summer. A twisted ankle at the circus. A Jujube caught in my molar at the movies: I had to go to the rest room to dig it out.
    Nothing. Less than nothing. A childhood without trauma. Who ever heard of such a thing?
    Even now, I feel just lightness when I consider my life, even more lightness than ever now that my mother’s gone,