Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

“No, I don’t blame you,” he yelled. “I blame myself. I told you before that Ali always used the backward entry on the Salchow, and you, you told her to try something new for the triple!” His voice cracked, and he swallowed, breathed hard in and out. “You told her to try the forward takeoff, and I left it to you, to your expertise. Well, I guess you can be happy now because it took off. It took her all the way off. You broke two vertebrae. You broke her .” Then he pulled the cord out of the wall and threw the telephone on the floor. A few seconds later, the slam of a door shot through the sound of a post-operative woman crying because she finally had the body her mother hadn’t given her. She called her implants empowerment and the doctor hugged her. The woman was talking about how she now had the confidence to find love. Maybe her body was just the American Dream, I thought. Maybe it was just like the time Ryan took speed until he landed the quad-quad.

“Will you stay and watch television with me?” my mother asked, when I stood up. “It’s so lonely to watch alone.” I squeezed her hand and fixed my eyes on the screen, hoping for the ambivalence that follows from irrelevance. I let the television glaze coat my eyes until it was time for bed.

TODAY the doctor has a green glass candy goblet on her desk, and she slides it toward me questioningly, the trashy gleam of plasticized colored bows stuffed with hard bon bons winking terribly. This is a test, undisclosed, of course, coded, casually proctored by the good head doctor herself. Is Ali still starving achievement out of herself? It’s pass or fail. Orangey-yellow cellophane: butterscotch. A bloodshot, pupil-less eye: peppermint. Foil strawberry parody: strawberry. I take a candy to show her I’m not crazed and squeeze it in the wet warmth of my fist.

It seems that the transition was difficult for everyone in your family, she says.

Yes, I say.

And that must have made it even more difficult for you?

That’s a leading question, which as we both know, is not permitted during direct examination in the court of law. It is a mode of questioning exclusive to cross-examination. If you continue to ask leading questions, I can only assume that we are positioned in opposition for this trial.

It’s almost a joke, but almost a joke is still not a joke. She wants me to corroborate what she knows is true anyway: that their pain was difficult for me. To corroborate the truth is pointless, it seems, but no different than what I’m doing: refusing to admit this fact. I guess she’s not checking the facts. She’s checking to see if I know the facts.

Miss Doyle, certainly the doctor-patient relationship is non-adversarial. In fact, if we are to extend your trial metaphor, it must be noted that one tenet of the Hippocratic Oath is “That I will be an advocate for patients in need and strive for justice in the care of the sick.” So certainly, I can refrain from leading questions.

Sustained, counselor, I say. It’s meant to be funny, but the doctor’s sense of humor is curbed by her professionalism and she doesn’t laugh.

No one is on trial here.

My sanity is on trial.

Please believe me when I say that your sanity is not on trial. We are here for your wellbeing.

She is saying what she’s supposed to say, but we both know I’m here because of what I ended up doing to myself. They don’t know if they can trust me with myself, and neither do I. I’d like to sleep for a long time.

Miss Doyle, we’ve met now for several sessions, so I think it’s time that we address why you’re here. The threat you pose, in your own words.

But don’t you already know why? My file can’t be so incomplete.

I know how you hate a leading question, so I was going to leave it up to you to tell. But yes, I do see here that you attended Jeffrey Amherst High School, starting at age seventeen. This must have been different for you?

It was different that every day felt the same.

Is that it?

I asked myself that many times, I say. I try to look out the window, but the blinds are shut. Now every day is the same even more, if it’s even possible to be more same. But this is the trick of hospitals. Every day, every room, every door: same, same, same. I think this place was designed by a real bore or someone with a sadistic sense of humor.

Something must have differed each day?

Things differed within limits, yes. Food, for example. On my first day back to school my student guide Molly Sanders told me that Tuesday raped because there were pigs in a blanket and snickerdoodles for lunch. Wednesday there was grilled cheese. And so on.

Raped?

The first thing to know for high school was rape, Molly told me. The second was last night’s episode. As in last night’s episode raped Tuesday night TV. They’d watch anything as long as it pretended to be real, but the show they loved best placed twenty strangers in a house full of booze and condoms. The show was called Wasted, and everyone at school knew the strangers by first name. Someone would end up nearly naked in a puddle of tears and vomit if an episode was any good. The more tears, the more it raped.

I hadn’t realized rape was a colloquialism these days.

We have that in common.

And had you seen this show?

My mother tried to get me to watch because she thought it made her a fashionable parent. But I didn’t want to.

I can understand that.

I like that about you, doc. And that’s true, I realize. I do like the doctor.

But were you able to form relationships with your peers? There must have been some similarities between your peers at school and your peers from the skating rink.

The high schoolers obsessed about food and the other skaters obsessed about food. Chips! Brownies! Blondies! Cake! the girls at the rink used to moan. Most of them always talked about the delicious things they weren’t going to eat anymore: Cheesecake! Popcorn! Regular corn! Potatoes! “Covering my ears,” someone would say. “Don’t even say potatoes around me.” Then someone else would remember salad dressing, and suddenly everyone would be talking bleu cheese. But I could never much get excited for food. I didn’t want to interpret pudding then, and I didn’t want to when I returned to school either.

So you found yourself to be an outsider at school and at the skating rink?

The skating rink was a place where almost everyone was an outsider, and I was an insider; I was willing to deprive myself. This is something my mother never understood. I think of her asking me what kind of childhood didn’t include candy canes at Christmas, me telling her non-gentile ones. It wasn’t a question of religion, of course, but sometimes I did wonder what it was that kept other people going, the confections and emblems, traditions, television schedules, gods. I wondered why they didn’t do to me what they did to everyone else.

You feel as though your mother didn’t understand you?

Amongst other people.

Such as?

My father, I say. She’s made me say it before I even thought about it, and she’s getting it all recorded in victorious cursive: patient is incomprehensible even to both parents , or something to that effect.

And this upset you, she says, still writing.

Maybe.

Could you give me something more specific maybe?

Maybe we could play board games to relax my vigilance, and then in the middle of Parcheesi, I’ll yell out a repressed memory from my childhood and we’ll have a big cry together. I’ve heard you can really catch patients off guard with games.

And yet you are the one playing a game Miss Doyle. By challenging the psychiatric methodology, you reappropriate the narrative, much in the same way that your frequent figure skating fantasies allowed you to reassert the story of your life in place of the reality of your life. Much in the same way that forced regurgitation allowed you to experience a measure of control.