delicate, this chartreuse aroma of hollow woody stems swaying in an Asian breeze.
It is this airy, fluty sound of bamboo I hear more than I’m able to distinguish Dr. Gripon’s voice when he asks how I feel, when he tries to define what’s wrong. Besides, unsure of my own voice, I’m unable to answer. How, after all, can I say I feel like a rosary bead, a hankie, a bamboo twig? It’s as if I never learned the words of human feelings. I know how a marble feels; I can feel like a marble.
But how do I feel like me ?
I stop therapy after three years even though I still don’t know the right words to say to him. I’m unable to describe what’s wrong. Nevertheless, at our last session, I want to give him a going-away present. Maybe he’ll finally understand who I am if I give him my marble with the white swirl.
As I hand it to him, however, I drop it. It rolls under his desk. While I meant for this moment to be plush with meaning—presenting him the marble as if it’s a new world for him to explore—instead I’m on my hands and knees poking around dust balls and bits of paper. I now consider whether I’d have felt more comfortable sitting here —partially obscured by his desk—inhaling powdery dust. Its grit provides texture to my own transparent-feeling skin. He chuckles as I search for the marble, asking what’s going on, what have I dropped, what am I doing?
I finally retrieve the marble, but I’m too mortified to show it to him, let alone give him this present. Despite his name, I realize I’m unable to “grip on.” To him. To what he considers real. He’ll never understand the marble. Things. Me.
I return home, placing the marble on a bed of gauze in an antique ORIENTAL TOOTH PASTE jar, which I found at an excavation site in Galveston. It’s as if the marble, feverish in its swoon after inhaling the fumes of Dr. Gripon’s office, is contaminated. It rests, quarantined, quietly recovering from its brush with reality.
It will take years—and the threat of divorce—before I am the one to understand: understand the words and the world of people. Eventually, after ten more therapists likewise fail to correctly diagnose my condition, I finally find one, Randy Groskind (after I move to Georgia), who does. I present a conch shell to him, one from St. Thomas. He nods when I explain that in its whoosh of breath, I hear words circling the whorls of my own ears. He doesn’t laugh. Nor does he smile. He is perfectly quiet—as still and quiet as a thing—not rudely disturbing the presence of things.
Randy is always Randy. Like his last name, his kindness is large. Unlike other people, he never loses his essential quality, the reliable properties of “Randy Groskind.”
In his silence, in his consistency, I finally find a way to say that when I was a girl my father hurt me. He, my own father, was particularly opaque, unpredictable, unknowable. One moment he was a loving daddy who built me a dollhouse out of construction paper; the next moment he wasn’t a daddy at all.
I tell Randy about dropping the marble in Dr. Gripon’s office. I explain what I have now come to understand about that moment. That, for the first time, it’s as if I saw the marble for what it was—lying alone, helpless, hiding in shadows beneath the desk, as if ashamed, as if it had lost its magic. The white swirl seemed shriveled. The incorporeal essence of the marble dead.
Or maybe I, as a little girl, was the one who lost my own personal magic, only discovering the magic of childhood in things. I was the one who would have been feverish without them. I would have been dull, dark, contaminated, soulless in the heavy folds of loss without my beloved things.
It is then that I say, “But I was really a little girl. Not a marble. Not a thing.”
I don’t believe there’s only one reason why I became this way in the first place. Yes, maybe it was the particular betrayal of parents and teachers. Maybe I suffered chronic
It is this airy, fluty sound of bamboo I hear more than I’m able to distinguish Dr. Gripon’s voice when he asks how I feel, when he tries to define what’s wrong. Besides, unsure of my own voice, I’m unable to answer. How, after all, can I say I feel like a rosary bead, a hankie, a bamboo twig? It’s as if I never learned the words of human feelings. I know how a marble feels; I can feel like a marble.
But how do I feel like me ?
I stop therapy after three years even though I still don’t know the right words to say to him. I’m unable to describe what’s wrong. Nevertheless, at our last session, I want to give him a going-away present. Maybe he’ll finally understand who I am if I give him my marble with the white swirl.
As I hand it to him, however, I drop it. It rolls under his desk. While I meant for this moment to be plush with meaning—presenting him the marble as if it’s a new world for him to explore—instead I’m on my hands and knees poking around dust balls and bits of paper. I now consider whether I’d have felt more comfortable sitting here —partially obscured by his desk—inhaling powdery dust. Its grit provides texture to my own transparent-feeling skin. He chuckles as I search for the marble, asking what’s going on, what have I dropped, what am I doing?
I finally retrieve the marble, but I’m too mortified to show it to him, let alone give him this present. Despite his name, I realize I’m unable to “grip on.” To him. To what he considers real. He’ll never understand the marble. Things. Me.
I return home, placing the marble on a bed of gauze in an antique ORIENTAL TOOTH PASTE jar, which I found at an excavation site in Galveston. It’s as if the marble, feverish in its swoon after inhaling the fumes of Dr. Gripon’s office, is contaminated. It rests, quarantined, quietly recovering from its brush with reality.
It will take years—and the threat of divorce—before I am the one to understand: understand the words and the world of people. Eventually, after ten more therapists likewise fail to correctly diagnose my condition, I finally find one, Randy Groskind (after I move to Georgia), who does. I present a conch shell to him, one from St. Thomas. He nods when I explain that in its whoosh of breath, I hear words circling the whorls of my own ears. He doesn’t laugh. Nor does he smile. He is perfectly quiet—as still and quiet as a thing—not rudely disturbing the presence of things.
Randy is always Randy. Like his last name, his kindness is large. Unlike other people, he never loses his essential quality, the reliable properties of “Randy Groskind.”
In his silence, in his consistency, I finally find a way to say that when I was a girl my father hurt me. He, my own father, was particularly opaque, unpredictable, unknowable. One moment he was a loving daddy who built me a dollhouse out of construction paper; the next moment he wasn’t a daddy at all.
I tell Randy about dropping the marble in Dr. Gripon’s office. I explain what I have now come to understand about that moment. That, for the first time, it’s as if I saw the marble for what it was—lying alone, helpless, hiding in shadows beneath the desk, as if ashamed, as if it had lost its magic. The white swirl seemed shriveled. The incorporeal essence of the marble dead.
Or maybe I, as a little girl, was the one who lost my own personal magic, only discovering the magic of childhood in things. I was the one who would have been feverish without them. I would have been dull, dark, contaminated, soulless in the heavy folds of loss without my beloved things.
It is then that I say, “But I was really a little girl. Not a marble. Not a thing.”
I don’t believe there’s only one reason why I became this way in the first place. Yes, maybe it was the particular betrayal of parents and teachers. Maybe I suffered chronic
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