The View from Here

1

I sat in the waiting room of Orleigh Tremaine Newman – a Whole Person Corporation. The space stank of old coffee, onions and lavender perfume. The receptionist—a Goth girl named Piper—sat at a messy desk and polished her nails shiny black as the ringing telephone rolled to voice-mail. Boxes of copy paper and toner towered near a dusty, plastic fichus. A crumpled Burger King bag sat atop an abandoned computer monitor.

This space was nothing like my former shrink’s clean, bright and clutter-free waiting room. There, Kimmy, the receptionist, answered the telephone after the first ring and never ate obnoxious foods at her desk. She had remembered each patient’s name and most important, each of our prescription needs.

Nervous, I kept my eyes on Angelina Jolie’s picture in People magazine because I didn’t want to chat with the other patients seated around me.

The blonde sitting across the room tore at a napkin until tiny bits of paper settled at her feet like snowflakes. A morbidly-obese pink-skinned man rocked back and forth in his chair. I didn’t know his problem, but I’m sure eating played a role. Another woman—a redhead—sat next to the fat man. She rubbed a blue satiny square cut from an old baby blanket.

I was the ordinary, always-anxious Black girl wearing antiqued Levis and Gucci loafers. I had a house, a husband, a Volvo, and a job writing about groundbreaking drug therapies developed by CelluTech, one of the leading biotechnology firms in the country. Unlike the blonde across from me, I tore my tiny bits of paper internally—mounds of confetti piled near my gallbladder. I never thought that at 37 years old, I’d still need therapy.

#

During the spring of my fifth grade year, my great-aunt Beryl had noticed that I had “retreated inside” of myself. No matter how many tablets of Vitamin C and St. John’s wort she forced me to take, I still wasn’t ‘actin’ right.’

“Your momma and daddy been dead for eight years,” she said. “Why you all strange now?”

I shrugged, then retreated to the pages of Anne of Green Gables. Strange? I had never talked much. Had always picked at my food. Preferred the company of fictional characters in books and on television over Aunt Beryl, her ten cats and her nosy church friends.

Out of ideas, she took me to see Simon Daniels, Ph.D. Once a week, I’d expressed my anguish through journal entries, word searches and collages made from cut-out pictures from Ebony magazine.

After Session 10, Aunt Beryl marched into Dr. Daniels’ office to say, “You still ain’t fixed her.”

Dr. Daniels cast a worried glance at me, then said, “Miss Porter, she’s lost both of her parents. That’s a painful ordeal, even for adults. There’s no pill for grief, and it doesn’t have a time-table. It doesn't show up like the Number 3 bus, rumbling at each stop—anger, denial, acceptance—until it reaches the terminal at the end of the day.”

Aunt Beryl clucked her tongue and hoisted her purse onto her lap.

“Nicole’s bus has just taken an eight-year journey,” Dr. Daniels explained. “It may be years before she reaches the end. She needs your patience and understanding. You are the only person she has left in the world.”

Aunt Beryl glanced at me, then, her brown eyes—Dad’s eyes, my eyes—softer than before. “You sure she don’t need to take nothing? I hear ginger root—”

“She’ll be fine,” Dr. Daniels had assured her. “She’s young. She’ll bounce back.”

I stopped seeing psychiatrists during college because college women often resisted advice from people with wrinkles and W-4 forms. We ignored The Man and embraced Oppression, stumbled around campus hung-over from weed or Boone’s Strawberry Hill, zoned out during French Lit, but incredibly alert back in the dorm for General Hospital. Angry, moody and high for four years—who had the time or the desire to see a shrink?

Besides, Doctors Daniels, Handler and Grinstein had fixed me. Yes: each had suggested that I continue seeing a psychiatrist throughout my life; but those had been “suggestions.” I’d suggest that all women consult a personal dietician and a genetics counselor, and to hire a maid. No harm if they didn’t. Merely a suggestion. And I considered therapy like that—an elective like Metals or Home Ec class.

Truman and I married, and all was fine until our 11^th anniversary. As we spent less time together, I became more insecure and Truman became less communicative. Once we started bickering over trivial things—you didn’t put gas in the car, why didn’t you put gas in the car? — I thought, Maybe it’s me. Maybe I should get help.

I didn’t perform a comprehensive search for a psychiatrist. Instead, I called my HMO’s customer service line, and asked for an African-American woman who specialized in death, grief and marriage. Gayle Clark, M.D., a wee Black woman with a small gray Afro, made pots of hot peppermint tea at each of our sessions. She had listened, nodded and prodded me about my parents, my aunt, about my insecurities and abandonment issues, and how all of this was affecting my marriage. She had also prescribed Paxil to combat my anxiety, and Valium to help me sleep.

Truman knew about Dr. Clark, but he never asked what we talked about. Instead, he said, “Glad you’re talking to someone,” then returned to playing “World of Warcraft.”

“Someone” used to be him.

One afternoon, after discussing Truman’s late nights at work, and my sense of being ignored, Dr. Clark announced her departure. Her husband, an Adventist pastor, had agreed to build a church in Bolivia. Dr. Clark would follow him and provide family counseling for the soon-to-be-converted. She had already selected my rebound relationship. “Her name’s Lori Tremaine,” she had said. “And she is a jewel. A wonderful, warm human being.”

I studied Dr. Tremaine’s profile on the Find-a-Therapist, Inc. website. The white woman in the picture posed with a golden retriever beneath a giant oak. Her long auburn hair piled atop her head like autumn leaves. Do you feel detached from your life, from who you are? Do confusion and dread haunt you day-to-day? Are you exhausted by the secrets you keep? I can help you find inner peace.