Blues for Beginners: Stories and Obsessions by Bacon Press Books Page A

firmly.
    I reset the calendar on my watch to Thursday,
and put my raincoat back on, prepared to leave.
    At 11:50 A.M. a crying woman comes out of Dr.
Freundlicht’s office.
    At noon, Dr. Freundlicht’s door opens
again.
    He looks like a tenured professor, the sort
who serves sherry to sophomores.
    No beard, but a brushy brown mustache. His
brown suit must be twenty years old, and he’s wearing
hushpuppies.
    No cigarettes either.
    .
    The office is a low ceilinged white room with
a view of the parking lot. The backless brown leather couch is wide
enough to accommodate the world’s most obese analysand and looks
like the text book model. A small red and black Bokhara rug the
size of a bathmat lies next to it. I spot only one ashtray, a tiny
one carved out of petrified wood.
    “Do I have to lie on it?” I ask, meaning the
couch.
    “I prefer initial consultations face to
face,” Dr. Freundlicht says.
    He motions to the twin brown club chairs,
also in leather.
    “The man in your waiting room thinks it’s
Thursday,” I tell him.
    Dr. Freundlicht looks perplexed.
    “You’ve got another patient out there.”
    “Would you excuse me?” he says.
    While he’s gone I contemplate the bathmat
Bokhara, its agitated paisley medallions barely held in by a border
of more frantic paisleys. Hundreds of knots per inch, the product
of a land where human life is cheap and child labor unregulated.
When Dr. Freundlicht returns he apologizes for the
inconvenience.
    .
    “Why are you here?” he asks.
    Maybe I’ve come a long way, but men in suits
can make me feel like a trespasser. The face I see every morning in
my bathroom mirror still belongs to a cipher. There is no
alternative to boredom except anxiety.
    “I’m an American girl and not the product of
a broken home,” I say. “It’s supposed to be better than this.”
    .
    After our second session Dr. Freundlicht
deems me a suitable candidate for psychoanalysis. This is meant to
be a compliment. Suitable candidate means an articulate,
self-absorbed, nervous wreck with good health insurance and no
immediate plans for leaving town. By the third session I climb onto
his brown leather couch like it is home, and place the tiny
petrified wood ashtray on my chest for ballast.
    “The aim of psychoanalysis is to transform
misery into ordinary unhappiness,” he says. “This is not a joke. I
suspect you will find ordinary unhappiness a distinct
improvement.”
    I empty the ashtray twice.
    Our fourth session I ask for a bigger
ashtray.
    “Would you mind very much not smoking?” he
says.
    He might as well ask if I mind not
breathing.
    ‘‘I smoke three packs of Merits a day, four
if I stay up late,” I explain. “That’s an average of five
cigarettes per waking hour, more if I’m actually talking. Analysis
is known as the talking cure, isn’t it?”
    “If you feel strongly about it,” he says in a
reasonable tone of voice,
    ‘‘I’ll withdraw the suggestion. Please watch
out for the rug.”
    .
    Dr. Freundlicht is a gentleman. A trifle
absent minded, but mild mannered and thoughtful.
    If I don’t watch out we’ll have transference.
Women patients always fall in love with their shrinks. The ones who
don’t have self-destructive affairs with them trot off to grad
school to become psychiatric social workers so they can run
encounter groups for a living. Psychoanalysis is such a werewolf
profession.
    He’s starting to show up in my dreams
anyway.
    For instance, he’s climbing a long flight of
stairs to find me. My father, holding an aluminum snow shovel,
blocks his passage and I hide in the closet of my childhood
bedroom, terrified of blame. I don’t tell Dr. Freundlicht about
that dream nor the nightmare about getting stuck in the freezer
chest of Friendly’s Ice Cream Parlor. Instead, I feed him something
safe, the dream where I watch my hair turn from black to gray and
back again.
    “What color is my hair?” he asks.
    “Salt and pepper?’’
    I’ve been lying on the