DOCTOR GORDON's WAITING ROOM Was Hushed and Beige

Chapter 11

DOCTOR GORDON'S WAITING ROOM was hushed and beige.

The walls were beige, and the carpets were beige, and the upholstered chairs and

sofas were beige. There were no mirrors or pictures, only certificates from different

medical schools, with Doctor Gordon's name in Latin, hung about the walls. Pale green

loopy ferns and spiked leaves of a much darker green filled the ceramic pots on the end

table and the coffee table and the magazine table.

At first I wondered why the room felt so safe. Then I realized it was because there

were no windows.

The air-conditioning made me shiver.

I was still wearing Betsy's white blouse and dirndl skirt. They drooped a bit now,

as I hadn't washed them in my three weeks at home. The sweaty cotton gave off a sour

but friendly smell.

I hadn't washed my hair for three weeks, either.

I hadn't slept for seven nights.

My mother told me I must have slept, it was impossible not to sleep in all that

time, but if I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, luminous

course of the second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock

through their circles and semi-circles, every night for seven nights, without missing a

second, or a minute, or an hour.

The reason I hadn't washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly.

I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and

separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long

perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I

could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely

desolate avenue.

It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.

It made me tired just to think of it.

I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.

Doctor Gordon twiddled a silver pencil

"Your mother tells me you are upset."

I curled in the cavernous leather chair and faced Doctor Gordon across an acre of

highly polished desk.

Doctor Gordon waited. He tapped his pencil -- tap, tap, tap -- across the neat

green field of his blotter.

His eyelashes were so long and thick they looked artificial. Black plastic reeds

fringing two green, glacial pools.

Doctor Gordon's features were so perfect he was almost pretty.

I hated him the minute I walked in through the door.

I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and saying "Ah!" in an

encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn't, and then I would find words to

tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black,

airless sack with no way out.

Then he would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in

a little steeple and tell me why I couldn't sleep and why I couldn't read and why I couldn't

eat and why everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

And then, I thought, he would help me, step by step, to be myself again.

But Doctor Gordon wasn't like that at all. He was young and good-looking, and I

could see right away he was conceited.

Doctor Gordon had a photograph on his desk, in a silver frame, that half faced

him and half faced my leather chair. It was a family photograph, and it showed a

beautiful dark-haired woman, who could have been Doctor Gordon's sister, smiling out

over the heads of two blond children.

I think one child was a boy and one was a girl, but it may have been that both

children were boys or that both were girls, it is hard to tell when children are so small. I

think there was also a dog in the picture, toward the bottom -- a kind of Airedale or a

golden retriever -- but it may have only been the pattern in the woman's skirt.

For some reason the photograph made me furious.

I didn't see why it should be turned half toward me unless Doctor Gordon was

trying to show me right away that he was married to some glamorous woman and I'd

better not get any funny ideas.

Then I thought, how could this Doctor Gordon help me anyway, with a beautiful

wife and beautiful children and a beautiful dog haloing him like the angels on a

Christmas card?

"Suppose you try and tell me what you think is wrong."

I turned the words over suspiciously, like round, sea-polished pebbles that might

suddenly put out a claw and change into something else.

What did I think was wrong?

That made it sound as if nothing was really wrong, I only thought it was wrong.

In a dull, flat voice -- to show I was not beguiled by his good looks or his family

photograph -- I told Doctor Gordon about not sleeping and not eating and not reading. I

didn't tell him about the handwriting, which bothered me most of all.

That morning I had tried to write a letter to Doreen, down in West Virginia,

asking whether I could come and live with her and maybe get a job at her college waiting

on table or something.

But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child,

and the lines sloped down the page from left to right almost diagonally, as if they were

loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.

I knew I couldn't send a letter like that, so I tore it up in little pieces and put them

in my pocketbook, next to my all-purpose compact, in case the psychiatrist asked to see

them.

But of course Doctor Gordon didn't ask to see them, as I hadn't mentioned them,

and I began to feel pleased at my cleverness. I thought I only need tell him what I wanted

to, and that I could control the picture he had of me by hiding this and revealing that, all

the while he thought he was so smart.

The whole time I was talking, Doctor Gordon bent his head as if he were praying,

and the only noise apart from the dull, flat voice was the tap, tap, tap of Doctor Gordon's

pencil at the same point on the green blotter, like a stalled walking stick.

When I had finished, Doctor Gordon lifted his head. ''Where did you say you went

to college?" Baffled, I told him. I didn't see where college fitted in. "Ah!" Doctor Gordon

leaned back in his chair, staring into the air over my shoulder with a reminiscent smile.

I thought he was going to tell me his diagnosis, and that perhaps I had judged him

too hastily and too unkindly. But he only said, "I remember your college well. I was up

there, during the war. They had a WAC station, didn't they? Or was it WAVES?"

I said I didn't know.

"Yes, a WAC station, I remember now. I was doctor for the lot, before I was sent

overseas. My, they were a pretty bunch of girls."

Doctor Gordon laughed.

Then, in one smooth move, he rose to his feet and strolled toward me round the

corner of his desk. I wasn't sure what he meant to do, so I stood up as well.

Doctor Gordon reached for the hand that hung at my right side and shook it.

"See you next week, then."

The full, bosomy elms made a tunnel of shade over the yellow and red brick

fronts along Commonwealth Avenue, and a trolley car was threading itself toward Boston

down its slim, silver track. I waited for the trolley to pass, then crossed to the gray

Chevrolet at the opposite curb.

I could see my mother's face, anxious and sallow as a slice of lemon, peering up

at me through the windshield.

"Well, what did he say?"

I pulled the car door shut. It didn't catch. I pushed it out and drew it in again with

a dull slam.

"He said he'll see me next week."

My mother sighed.

Doctor Gordon cost twenty-five dollars an hour.