Unbreathed Memories (15 page)

Joy plopped back in her chair and everyone seemed to relax perceptibly. I felt as if I’d passed some sort of test. “What we do here every week, Hannah, is support each other in our healing,” Joy explained with a sympathetic smile. “We’re all at different stages in our journey. Sometimes the path to healing is rocky and hard, but you’ll discover that the only way out is through.”

I nodded, trying to dredge up everything I had ever read in the popular press about bulimia in case I was called upon to perform.

“Today, we are going to be dealing with anger.” Joy surveyed the group, her dark eyes alighting on each of our faces for a moment.

A plumpish woman I took to be in her mid-thirties,
with her dark hair tied back in a low ponytail, raised a tentative hand.

“Claudia?”

Claudia rummaged in the colorful fabric-covered gym bag at her feet and withdrew a photograph in a simple black frame. “I want to show you something.” Her voice quavered and she crushed the picture to her bosom so that no one could actually see it. After a few moments, she tipped the photograph away from herself slightly, looked at it one last time, then passed it to Suzanne. “This is the child my father was having sex with thirty years ago. That precious little girl with the flowered Easter hat, lacy dress, white anklets, and Mary Jane shoes. Me.”

Suzanne studied the picture for a few moments, then solemnly handed the photograph to me. I felt like Alice, stepping through to the other side of the looking glass.

“One night my father came into my room, slipped his hand under my nightgown …” Claudia’s voice broke and she began to sob. “After that, the world was never the same. How could he do that to me? I loved him! I trusted him!”

Joy’s voice was soothing as molasses. “Relax, Claudia, and let the memory come.”

“The next morning I told my mother, but she didn’t believe me. She slapped me halfway across the room and called me a liar. Said I was a wicked little girl. Mothers are supposed to protect their children! Oh, God, oh, God!” She rocked back and forth, tears streaming down her face and landing, unchecked, on her blouse.

The picture of Claudia had stopped with Gwen, who returned it to the sobbing woman, holding it faceup on her outstretched palms. “It’s not your fault, Claudia.”

Claudia retrieved her picture and gazed at it again, her cheeks streaked black with mascara-laden tears. She caressed the face of her childhood image. “I was a smart little girl. I should have figured out how to avoid it.”

“You were just five years old then, Claudia. You didn’t have the power to protect yourself.” Gwen caressed the other woman’s cheek.

With loving care, Claudia laid the picture on the floor next to her chair. When she looked at us again, her face was flushed and her eyes mere slits. “I’m so angry at him for doing this to me! He screwed up my whole life!”

Gwen wrapped her arms around Claudia in an expansive hug. Toni stood and did the same. Everyone began chanting variations on a theme of “It’s not your fault.” I sat motionless, silently observing.

Joy approached and touched Gwen on the shoulder. Gwen and Toni stepped back, leaving Claudia exposed, her head bowed, looking sad and vulnerable. Joy handed Claudia a soft towel she’d produced from somewhere. “Here,” she said. “Pretend your father is sitting in that chair and show him how angry you are.”

Claudia held the towel by both ends and, in a practiced motion, twirled it into a tube. “I
hate
you!” she screamed, slapping the empty chair with the towel that cracked over it, like a whip. “How could you do this to me?”
Thwack!
The chair shuddered with each blow and inched across the floor away from her.

All of the women were standing now, cheering Claudia on.

“Hit him, Claudia!”

“Show him who’s boss!”

“Kick him in the balls!”

“Kill the bastard!”

Claudia, red-faced, continued to flail at the defenseless chair. After a few minutes, she wound down and drooped, exhausted, the towel hanging limp in her hand, the tears dry on her face. Everyone leapt up and surrounded her like Teletubbies in a big group hug. Seeing me hesitating on the sidelines, Joy turned to me and cocked her head toward the huddle, indicating I should get into the supportive spirit of things. I strolled over and stood uncomfortably on the periphery, my arms draped loosely around Joy and Mindy. Half of the women were crying, and I was pretty close to tears myself. Eventually individuals began to peel away from the edges of the group, break up, and return to their seats. Claudia retrieved her chair, sat rigidly in it, her precious picture in her lap. “I love you,” she told her image. “I’m so proud of you.”

Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. That was the significance of the photograph in Georgina’s bedroom! The children hadn’t been playing with it, after all. Georgina had been using it in just this way, to handle her feelings of guilt over our father’s alleged sexual abuse. As much as I wanted to wring her neck, I felt a twinge of sympathy for my sister. For whatever reason, perhaps what went on in this very group, Georgina really believed she had been abused.

“You are a
good
little girl,” Claudia cooed.

“We talk to our inner child,” Mindy whispered helpfully in my ear. “We let her know that we love her and forgive her.”

For a minute, I thought I’d been beamed from Maryland to a commune in Malibu. People in Maryland didn’t speak to their inner children. I wondered, vaguely, where I had stashed my love beads.

For the remainder of the session we listened to Toni
complain about her louse of a husband. She had been hoping to get him into therapy with Dr. Sturges, but just when he agreed to go, the doctor had died. “Now I have to start all over,” she whined. “In the meantime, if he lays one finger on me,” she waggled a finger for emphasis, “even one little finger, I’m going to have him arrested for assault and battery.” I shared the opinion expressed by Mindy that Toni would be better off without the bum, then we surrounded Toni in a group hug.

I was thinking about the old saying—a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Joy was not a trained therapist, after all. How much of what I was seeing tonight was Diane Sturges’s and how much was Joy’s interpretation of her former therapist’s techniques? I recalled that party game where the first person whispers “I went to London to visit the Queen” in someone’s ear and dozens of players later it comes out “Camels wear army boots in winter.” It was scary. These women were still so profoundly under Diane Sturges’s influence that she might as well have been controlling them from beyond the grave.

When I checked my watch again, it was nearly eight-thirty and I had just breathed a sigh of relief when Joy, the perfectly correct facilitator, turned to me.

“How can we help you, Hannah?”

I started tap-dancing. “Well, talking about anger, I’m here because I’m angry with myself for not being able to control my eating. I binge on ice cream and pizza, Little Debbie snack cakes, potato chips, any kind of junk food I can get my hands on.” I paused and looked around the circle. “Then I throw it all up.”

“First of all,” Joy explained, “you need to understand and accept that it’s not your fault. There’s something in your past that’s making you treat yourself this way.” She
aimed a long, manicured finger at my chest. “There’s an unhappy child in there. Think about your history. Search your memory.”

My homework was to buy a notebook. “The prettiest notebook you can find,” advised Mindy. I was supposed to go to a quiet place where I wouldn’t be interrupted and write a letter to the little girl inside of me.

“Even if you don’t yet believe she exists, say that. Or you can say, ‘I hate you! You got me into this mess!’ ” Joy instructed. “You can’t begin to have a relationship with your child until you make contact with her. Writing to her is the first step.” I gathered I would be first up at next week’s meeting, so if I intended to come back, I’d actually have to give this writing nonsense a whirl.

The meeting ended with everyone standing in a circle, holding hands in silent prayer.
Lord, get me out of here
, I prayed.

In two minutes, He did.

On the way to my car, while wrapping my scarf around my neck against a chill mid-January wind, Mindy and Gwen caught up with me. Gwen had blond pigtails, wide blue eyes, and freckles. She looked like Pippi Longstocking. “Mindy and I usually go to Starbucks for coffee afterward. Would you like to join us?”

“Sure. I could use a tall cappuccino right now.” The heck with the decaf, I decided. I’d have high-test.

“Do you know where it is?” Mindy wanted to know.

“Off Falls Road, over by Fresh Fields?”

“Right! We’ll meet you there.”

From the church, I turned right onto Roland, left on Lake, and proceeded cautiously down the hill to Falls Road. As I passed Coldbrook, I shivered. For all I knew, Dr. Sturges’s ghost was still hovering about, unavenged, in the woods surrounding her house down at the end of
that dark, silent street. I turned right on Falls and left almost immediately into the Fresh Fields parking lot, winding clockwise around the store until I came to Starbucks.

When I entered, Mindy and Gwen were already saving me a place in line. We picked up our coffees, and I watched Mindy doctor hers with two packets of brown sugar and a generous sprinkling each of cinnamon, cocoa, and vanilla. In spite of the season, Gwen had ordered a Frappuccino.

Feeling uncomfortably new-kid-on-the-block, I joined the two women at a small, round table.

“Where do you live?” asked Gwen.

“In Annapolis,” I said without thinking.

“Annapolis. That’s a long way to drive. Don’t they have support groups in Annapolis?”

Mindy rapped the back of Gwen’s hand with a black plastic spoon. “Don’t be so rude, Gwennie. You’re supposed to be welcoming!”

“No, no,” I said, thinking fast. “It’s a fair question.” I set down my cup. “To tell you the truth, I just didn’t know anybody in Annapolis to ask. And Georgina was so keen on your group that I decided to give it a try.”

“Where is she, by the way?” Gwen pushed the ice around in her Frappuccino with a straw.

“I’m not sure,” I said truthfully. “I stopped by her house, but she wasn’t home.”

Mindy studied me seriously over the rim of her cup. “Your bulimia?”

“Yes?”

“You force yourself to throw up all the time?”

“Uh-huh.”

A looked passed between Mindy and Gwen. “You know what Diane would have said about that?”

“What?”

“Diane would have told you that’s usually a symptom of childhood sexual abuse.”

I nearly choked on my coffee. “No way!”

“Way!” said Gwen. “ ‘Don’t vomit,’ she would have advised you. ‘Get that penis out of your mouth another way.’ ”

I stared at Gwen, hardly daring to breathe.

“Believe me, I know,” offered Mindy. “I used to be anorexic.” She ran her hands down her sides and over her hips. “You’d never know it to look at me now.”

“I’ll say.” Mindy was the perfect size six most women were fruitlessly starving themselves for. “So Diane Sturges cured your anorexia?”

Mindy nodded. “We did it together.”

“How?”

“I’ll have to go back to the beginning to explain. I started starving myself in college. I felt obese if I weighed more than one hundred pounds. I’d eat a cracker and a can of tuna. That’d be it for the day. I dated for a while, but I was terrified of sex. But you have to be a woman to have sex, don’t you? So if you don’t eat, you don’t mature. No hips, no breasts, no period—no problem!” She turned her coffee cup around and around in its saucer. “I was raped by my uncle every summer from the time I was nine until I turned sixteen.”

“She finally got the courage to confront him.” Gwen looked at Mindy and smiled, obviously proud of her friend’s accomplishments. “We couldn’t have done it without Diane.”

I turned to Gwen. “Were you anorexic too?”

“No. I came to Diane for help with my drinking problem. She made me see that my addiction was a way of coping with sexual abuse. I drank to keep the memories
at bay, and when they did come, I drank to numb the feelings, to escape the pain. When I sobered up, those memories started flashing back at me like a slide show gone berserk. Diane saved my life and my sanity.” Gwen covered her eyes with her hands for a few seconds, then turned her unflinching gaze on me. “I was raped by my father when I was three. He hurt me so badly I had to have stitches.”

“My God!”

“We lived on a farm in Wisconsin. Isn’t that a hoot? The land of purest milk and cheese. One time my father forced me into the barn and made me stick a nail into my doll, right between her legs where her vagina would have been. I had forgotten all this, but Diane helped me remember.”

“Why would you
want
to remember? That sounds like a nightmare, Gwen. Are you sure that it really happened?”

Gwen twisted her straw into a spiral and wove it around her fingers. “Would anyone
invent
something that bad? Would anyone willingly go through all this torture?” She threw what was left of her straw onto the table. “I don’t think so.”

We sat in silence for a while, drinking our coffee while the staff behind the counter made noisy preparations for closing.

Suddenly Gwen turned to me and changed the subject. “How’s Georgina? Have you talked to her recently?”

I shook my head.

Mindy and Gwen exchanged glances. “We haven’t seen her since before Diane was killed.”

“She’s taking that pretty hard,” I told them.

“She was abused by her father, too, you know,” Mindy added.

I froze. “She mentioned something about that.”

Gwen rested her elbows on the table, leaned forward, and whispered. “Her father gave her a knife and ordered her to dismember her favorite Cabbage Patch doll.”

I started to feel light-headed. I wished the kid behind the counter had a good tot of rum I could slosh in my coffee. I stared at a poster on the wall and silently counted to ten. “Pardon me for saying this. Perhaps it just shows how naive I am, but don’t you think it’s a little strange that both you and Georgina have such similar memories about mutilating your dolls?”