Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #18

Dr. Fay, the therapist my parents sent me to see when they were prematurely concerned about my mental well being, would occasionally catch her tongue in her teeth and speak a word or two with a prolonged lisp. It wasn't until I'd seen her half a dozen times did I find the courage to look her in the eye, but I got to where I would almost hope to hear that lisp as one of my parents drove me across town to Dr. Fay's office. Something about it was alluring. Considering our family's often-precarious finances, in retrospect I should have appreciated my therapy more if only because I know now that my parents were going without something or another just so I could get the "help" they believed I needed.

"We'd like you to see someone," my mother said to me one autumn evening.

"Someone?" I said.

"Someone you might like to talk to," she said.

"Oh," I said. I thought of my friend Brian whose parents had taken him to "see someone" about the oval knob of bone on his forehead. That knob had turned out to be something bad, though in the decorum of small towns nobody ever gave me or my siblings the details. Brian left school a week later, and he and his family pretty much disappeared. "Sometimes people just grieve," my father told me, but I was too young to understand what that meant.

"It's a counselor," my mother said. "Your father and I spoke to her a few weeks ago, and she sounds very nice. "We'd like you to talk to her, too."

"Why?" I asked.

My mother bit her lower lip and squinted her left eye the way she did when she searched for answers. "She's very nice. Maybe you can tell her things that you don't want to tell anyone else."

"Like what?" This was the first time in my life when I considered that keeping things to myself was considered bad form.

Now my mother shrugged. "Things that might bother you."

"I talk to people all the time," I said. "Steven and I talk every night before we go to sleep."

She smiled. "I know. We hear the two of you. It's nice."

"Will she ask me questions?"

"Probably." Then she seemed to recognize something. "But it's not because you've done something wrong. This isn't a punishment."

Our first hour together, Dr. Fay did ask a lot of questions--about my brother and sister, mostly, but also other things that didn't seem to matter. "You like sports?" she asked.

"Not watching, but playing," I said.

"Which sports?"

"Baseball, mostly. Football's good. I'm not very good at basketball."

"Do you and Steven play together?"

I nodded. "When we can. He's smaller and younger, but he's faster and seems to know more than I do."

"He knows more about what?"

"How things work. How teams work together, too. He seems to know what's going to happen in a game before it even does."

"He sounds like a good brother." That was the first time I heard the lisp: thhhounds.

I said that he was a very good brother.

"Your parents are worried about you," Dr. Fay said.

"About what? I'm not a bad kid." I'd heard enough stories about "bad kids" to know that, mostly, I wasn't one.

"No, you're not a bad kid. And your mom and dad don't think you are. They just worry because you seem sad."

"I've told them I'm not sad." I thought about what my Uncle Frank had said once about my being quieter than a dead loon.

She changed the topic. "How's school?"

"It's fine," I said. "I've got nice teachers."

"I'm sure you do," Dr. Fay said. She let me stay silent before she said anything else, something I liked about her.

"Would you like to come back again?"

I had to wonder if this was a test of some sort. "Do I have to?" I was young enough to know that I probably did not have a choice.

"You never have to," she said. "Your mom and dad would like you to."

"What do you want?" I asked.

She seemed surprised by the question. "I'd like to talk to you some more."


On the quiet, motionless train, I wondered if the year's worth of discussions with Dr. Fay had done me any good. My parents and I had spoken very little about the visits, and they never told me why the visits stopped. For years I assumed that Dr. Fay--and probably my parents--had given up on me and pronounced me a lost cause. When I told Peggy about the therapy, she smiled.

"I think it's sweet," Peggy said. "Your parents cared enough about you to try something like that."

"I'm not convinced I needed 'something like that'," I said. I told her how I'd avoided Dr. Fay's eyes for a long time.

"You must have felt threatened," Peggy said. "Or scared."

"Maybe. But I got over it."

"What happened when you did?"

"I looked her in the eyes," I said, "and then things changed."

"How?"

"She had one blue eye and one brown eye."

"How did that change things?" Peggy asked. "So she had two different colored eyes."

I thought about it. "I just never knew which one of them to trust," I said.