Laura Caldwell: The Night I got Lucky

As I dumped my bag on the wood floor of our foyer, I saw that he was working, sitting in front of the computer, which we’d set up on the dining room table. (We rarely had people for dinner anyway, and we usually ate on our own or in front of the TV.)

“Hi, Bill,” he said, when he heard me come inside. He didn’t turn his tall frame from the computer. His big hands kept clacking awkwardly at the keyboard.

“Hello, Marlowe.” Marlowe is Chris’s middle name, after the playwright Christopher Marlowe. His parents, a couple of academics from the University of Chicago, are staunch proponents of the theory that Marlowe was the real author of Shakespeare’s plays.

I patted Chris absently on the shoulder, a pat very similar to the one Evan had given me that day. “I got your flaxseed.”

“Thanks.”

“How was work?” I asked. “What’s going on with that health care merger?”

“Nothing much.”

I ruffled his short brown hair.

And that was about it. That was the extent of our marital affection. Not so different than any other day.

I went into the kitchen and put Chris’s flaxseed oil in the stainless steel fridge. When we’d bought this place shortly before our wedding, we’d filled it with top-of-the-line appliances, gleaming granite countertops and shiny hardwood floors. It was as promising as our relationship. Now, God knows why, the only things luminous were our furnishings.

“I’m going to see Blinda,” I called to Chris.

This made him twist around from the computer. “You’re still seeing her?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you said the therapy wasn’t doing much.”

“It’s not.”

“So-”

“So, I’m giving it a shot.”

He nodded. “Well, that’s good.”

“How about coming with me?”

“Billy, you know…” He turned back to the computer, and I couldn’t hear the rest of his words.

Chris didn’t believe in therapists. He believed, like his parents, that William Shakespeare was a myth, but he didn’t believe in therapists.

Blinda’s office was on LaSalle, only a few blocks from our condo. I’d never noticed the place until one day while I was walking back from the gym. The building was a brick three-flat that appeared to house luxury apartments, like so many on the block, but that day I saw a small black sign with gold letters in the window of the basement unit. Blinda Bright, M.S.W. the sign read. For Appointments Call 312.555.9090.

I’m not sure why I stopped and stared at that sign for as long as I did. It was nearly April, a capricious time in Chicago, and although it had been a lovely sixty degrees the day before, it was in the forties. Despite my optimistically light coat and the fact that I’d begun to shiver, I stood in front of that brick building, staring at the gold lettering and the gold light that glowed from behind the curtains. M.S.W. meant masters in social work, right? So this Blinda person must be some kind of therapist. I committed the number to memory.

I had considered therapy for a while. I knew I was messed up about my father, I knew Chris had pulled away from me after we got married and I knew it was wrong that I coveted my coworker. Over the past few months, I’d collected referrals from friends, and I had five therapists I could try. But it was that sign in the basement window that, for some reason, made me realize now was the time and she was the one I should call.

At the initial appointment with Blinda, I decided to attack one issue at a time. I explained that the main reason I’d come to see her was, as I put it, “to get over the abandonment issues I have with my father.” I thought this sounded rather intellectual and valid. Wasn’t there a reverse Oedipus complex or something? But Blinda didn’t approach it quite like that.

“He just took off, huh?” she said, shaking her head like she was pissed off. I told her what I knew about my father and how he’d left our house one morning and never came back.

“At first he told us that he had business in L.A.,” I said. “He was an importer of goods from Germany, and he had a brother who ran things from overseas.”

“What kind of goods?”

“Tiles, pots, earthenware.”

“Ah.” She sounded disappointed.

“Anyway, he said he had to go to Los Angeles for business, only he never came back. My mom spent lots of money looking for him and trying to enforce child support decrees, but he kept disappearing.”

“Bastard,” Blinda said under her voice.

I blinked a few times, studying her. Where were the sage comments about the father/daughter Oedipus complex or whatever it was?

“Right,” I said. “Well, my mother eventually realized she had spent more money trying to find him than she’d likely ever get from alimony, so finally she just had to make do. Before he left, we had a great house with white columns. I always thought it looked like a wedding cake. We lived in this little town about an hour and a half northwest of Chicago.”

Blinda smiled at the image.

“But she couldn’t afford it anymore, so we moved into an apartment behind the old hospital. My mom had one bedroom and my sisters had another, and they put a cot for me in the half room by the washing machine.”

Blinda nodded for me to continue. I hadn’t talked about this for so long-maybe never-and now I felt like I couldn’t stop. I told her about how we went from being one of the richest families in town to one of the poorest. I told her about how Dustin and Hadley were taunted at school about our deadbeat dad and how they became tough little girls, always getting into fights, coming home to proudly display black eyes and bloody noses. I explained that my mom got a job working as a receptionist at an auto plant, and that Dustin and Hadley had to get scholarships and put themselves through college. I told her about Jan and how it was he who put me through school and who took my mom out of that apartment behind the old hospital, out of that town and into the beautiful house in Barrington where she still lived.

Blinda chuckled at that point, although I didn’t think I’d said anything particularly funny. She caught my inquisitive look. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just ironic that your father considered himself such a man’s man, enough to give you girls male names, and then your mother marries someone named Jan-a rather womanly sounding name-and he makes her happy again.”

I laughed then, too. I think that’s when I knew for certain that Blinda was going to be different from the therapists I’d heard about.

This was our sixth visit, although I felt in some ways as if I’d been seeing Blinda forever. I knew to hang my sweater on the antique brass rack inside the door. I knew to pour myself a cup of the jasmine-scented tea from the cracked Asian pot on her sideboard. I knew that I could just start talking whenever I wanted, that Blinda was always there with a nod of her blond head or an empathetic cluck of her tongue. I knew the routine, but I didn’t necessarily feel any better for it.

“It’s not that much to ask for,” I said now.

“You want your husband to pay attention to you, is that right?” Blinda asked. I had moved from the topic of my father to my other issues-failing marriage, heartbroken mother with no life of her own, inappropriate crush on Evan, inability to get promoted.

“Well, yeah,” I said. I shifted around on her woolly red and orange love seat that looked like it was purchased in a Marrakech marketplace. On either end sat bamboo tables with lit yellow candles and boxes of recycled tissue. Those boxes were always different, replaced, each time I came. It seemed I was Blinda’s only client who didn’t cry constantly. I was the only angry, irritated one. “Yeah, I want Chris to look at me like he used to when we were dating, but I want more than just that,” I said.