Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine Page B

different question because she had already told me she wasn’t a therapist; and when I said I had no other questions, she left, abruptly, the room.
    In the waiting room, the receptionist asked me, with a frankness I found off-putting, how I wanted to pay.
    â€œYou have my mom’s address. Did the doctor leave me a prescription?”
    She hadn’t. Had there been a mistake? No. Then there would be no pills? No, the receptionist said, but Dr. Klug would be happy to refer me to a psychiatrist. I didn’t want a psychiatrist, I explained, I wanted a sample.
    â€œYou guys are supposed to be giving it away like candy. Come on, I bet you have a closet full of starter packages. Please don’t pretend Dr. Klug is the only doctor in America not in the drug companies’ pocket!”
    â€œI beg your
pardon
?” the receptionist said, as if my pardon were an ugly damp thing and the only possession I had.
    â€œYou heard what I said” (after I walked out).
    For a few moments I stood quaking in the elevator, unsure of which button to press. Eventually a stoop-shouldered old lady stepped in and pressed “L.” Why were the simplest encounters complicated for me? I had trusted Dr. Klug with my personal history and she had repulsed me like she would have any other patient. It was enough to make a person feel . . . generic. I worked myself up to a high level of disgust as the elevator worked its way down to the low level of the lobby. When the doors chortled open, the sun-struck, airy atrium broke the elevator’s gloomy ambience. My elderly companion hustled out before I could even make a show of letting her go first.
    Â 
    â€œI got a doctor’s bill for you from Rattner’s office,” my mother said. “I hadn’t known you were sick.”
    â€œNo, I wasn’t,” I said carelessly. “I just wanted to go for a check-up.”
    â€œWell, next time, let’s talk about it first. You’re not on Daddy’s insurance. When you get a job—”
    â€œI’m fine now. Actually, I’m exploring alternative kinds of medicine.”
    For my mother the phrase “alternative medicine” registered only as some kind of youth-culture slang. “Really? Well, good for you. It’s so important to have a hobby.”
    Lars hardly understood it either. “Why are you going for a healing?” he said. At this point we no longer spoke openly about our schedules, but I had left a portrait of my new friend, crisply drawn, on a doodle pad, under which I’d written, absent-mindedly, in a fine cursive sprawl,
Beverly Flowers Personal Healer Beverly Flowers Personal Healer Beverly Flowers Personal Healer
. Also I had used the page to blot up some spilled coffee, and now, a few days later, Lars was finally getting around to cleaning up the mess.
    â€œShe’s a remarkable woman, if you have to know.”
    I had known this the first time I set foot in her office. Bev Flowers looked to be in her early fifties, and her rooms were elegantly furnished in a grey and green color scheme, as if to suggest the mossy underside of a stone. She greeted me honorably, as if I were a soldier just back from the war, and as we faced each other on matching Indonesian chairs, she was so attentive I thought I might weep. So this is what it was like to be around a spiritual person. I fished
Treasure Island
out of my bag and laid it on my knees.
    â€œEvery hour alone with this book helps fortify me. I’m cast away, like Ben Gunn on the island, only I’m in our apartment, and instead of powder and shot . . . ”
    â€œMaybe”—Bev pressed her hand against the book and cocked her head—“Maybe this book has a higher vibration.”
    â€œExactly! Yes!” My relief was so intense, I wanted to stand up and punch a hole through the rice paper screen that divided the room. Instead I signed up for Beverly Flowers’s package deal, six