blonde woman, ten years my senior, stood at the foot of the table, ordering me to swing up my feet. I swung them (gladly).
Chest, lung, nose, ears, throat. She smelled like rubbing alcohol and verbena. Why was she examining me, I wondered.
“What do you want pills for?”
“Anxious. Can’t sleep.”
“You look well-rested. Something bothering you?”
“Yes, no.”
“Lie back, please. I don’t like to throw a person pills until they’ve tried other options. Lie back, please. Have you talked to anyone about why you’re anxious?”
This was just the opening I needed—and although it was a pretty narrow gap, I shot through it like a winged termite. Rooting
Treasure Island
out of my bag, I told Dr. Klug my theory that there are basically two kinds of people in this world—“those who sail the ship—and that includes sailors, pirates, and cabin boys—and those who cling fearfully to the ship’s base. That would be the barnacles.”
“Marine biology. It’s been a while . . . ”
“Never mind, it’s a metaphor.” Surprisingly, steering the conversation away from that metaphor led me to explain a night in college when I found myself in the student union, pretending to know what
veni, vidi, vici
meant, and to a longer explanation of why I felt hampered by my family, unable to imagine myself casting any shadow in this world at all, except by their lanterns. “The thing is if I am going to become a Latin teacher I would have to go back to school, in my late twenties, and get a lot of Latin down.” I explained one of my favorite parts of
Treasure Island
, the bit where Jim Hawkins kisses his mother goodbye, and how, stumbling upon that sequin, I’d realized that, if you talk to your mother every other day, chances are you’re not going to
have
an adventure; you have to get away from your cove and open yourself up to strangers. Then, without wanting to go into the whole rationale about why I went to college only fifteen miles from home and after graduation settled in the same town as my parents, I managed to impart a certain amount of personal history and bring the conversation back to the barnacle, by saying my primary goal right now was to peel myself off my ship’s bottom—but here I broke off. Lars’s mother, when she used to bathe the children, called his sister’s butt her “bottom” and her vulva her “front bottom,” a euphemism that appalled me, as did the fact that, even though in
my
family we had struck strictly to clinical terms, my recent intimacy with Lars, who calls his penis his “Johnson,” had allowed his family language to insinuate itself into my consciousness. This is the best way I can explain why the blood rushed to my face as I heard myself saying “
my
ship’s bottom
,” and I felt obscurely, but acutely, as though I had just asked Dr. Klug to think about what Lars would call my “nether lips.” (He thinks he’s worldly because his vocabulary evolved away from “front bottom.” But the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.)
Dr. Klug nodded. “You do seem anxious. You shredded your gown.”
“Well, it takes an awful lot of energy to give birth to oneself. It’s not as though you do one bold thing and then you
are
bold. The thing about adventure is that you have to keep on doing it, day in and day out. I don’t know, can it ever be definitively accomplished? I hardly rest, I hardly can!”
Dr. Klug nodded slowly. I had a very good feeling about her; I liked her so much I thought I might come talk to her now and then, the way J im Hawkins strikes up a friendship with Dr. Livesey, whose bright black eyes and pleasant manners contrast with “the coltish folk” around him, though in my case, I might better say “doltish.” Dr. Klug replied that she was a doctor of internal medicine, that the best doctor for me to talk to would be a therapist, that there were many qualified therapists in town, that it was kind of me to be concerned but it wasn’t a question
Chest, lung, nose, ears, throat. She smelled like rubbing alcohol and verbena. Why was she examining me, I wondered.
“What do you want pills for?”
“Anxious. Can’t sleep.”
“You look well-rested. Something bothering you?”
“Yes, no.”
“Lie back, please. I don’t like to throw a person pills until they’ve tried other options. Lie back, please. Have you talked to anyone about why you’re anxious?”
This was just the opening I needed—and although it was a pretty narrow gap, I shot through it like a winged termite. Rooting
Treasure Island
out of my bag, I told Dr. Klug my theory that there are basically two kinds of people in this world—“those who sail the ship—and that includes sailors, pirates, and cabin boys—and those who cling fearfully to the ship’s base. That would be the barnacles.”
“Marine biology. It’s been a while . . . ”
“Never mind, it’s a metaphor.” Surprisingly, steering the conversation away from that metaphor led me to explain a night in college when I found myself in the student union, pretending to know what
veni, vidi, vici
meant, and to a longer explanation of why I felt hampered by my family, unable to imagine myself casting any shadow in this world at all, except by their lanterns. “The thing is if I am going to become a Latin teacher I would have to go back to school, in my late twenties, and get a lot of Latin down.” I explained one of my favorite parts of
Treasure Island
, the bit where Jim Hawkins kisses his mother goodbye, and how, stumbling upon that sequin, I’d realized that, if you talk to your mother every other day, chances are you’re not going to
have
an adventure; you have to get away from your cove and open yourself up to strangers. Then, without wanting to go into the whole rationale about why I went to college only fifteen miles from home and after graduation settled in the same town as my parents, I managed to impart a certain amount of personal history and bring the conversation back to the barnacle, by saying my primary goal right now was to peel myself off my ship’s bottom—but here I broke off. Lars’s mother, when she used to bathe the children, called his sister’s butt her “bottom” and her vulva her “front bottom,” a euphemism that appalled me, as did the fact that, even though in
my
family we had struck strictly to clinical terms, my recent intimacy with Lars, who calls his penis his “Johnson,” had allowed his family language to insinuate itself into my consciousness. This is the best way I can explain why the blood rushed to my face as I heard myself saying “
my
ship’s bottom
,” and I felt obscurely, but acutely, as though I had just asked Dr. Klug to think about what Lars would call my “nether lips.” (He thinks he’s worldly because his vocabulary evolved away from “front bottom.” But the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.)
Dr. Klug nodded. “You do seem anxious. You shredded your gown.”
“Well, it takes an awful lot of energy to give birth to oneself. It’s not as though you do one bold thing and then you
are
bold. The thing about adventure is that you have to keep on doing it, day in and day out. I don’t know, can it ever be definitively accomplished? I hardly rest, I hardly can!”
Dr. Klug nodded slowly. I had a very good feeling about her; I liked her so much I thought I might come talk to her now and then, the way J im Hawkins strikes up a friendship with Dr. Livesey, whose bright black eyes and pleasant manners contrast with “the coltish folk” around him, though in my case, I might better say “doltish.” Dr. Klug replied that she was a doctor of internal medicine, that the best doctor for me to talk to would be a therapist, that there were many qualified therapists in town, that it was kind of me to be concerned but it wasn’t a question
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