She fears that the therapist will work in an office decorated with sentimental kitsch — teddy bears, inspirational posters — and will try to hug her therapeutically. These concerns are put to rest the moment the therapist fetches her from the waiting room. A middle-aged woman with a severe black bob, a knee-length leather skirt, and high boots, she suggests a professional dominatrix more than a mother substitute. Maya has been steeling herself for their session since she made the appointment nine days ago. She hopes she’ll be strong enough to recall and confront her past in its horrifying glory, to replace her nebulous feelings with clarity — where she was, how old she was, what he did. Abreaction, catharsis: if she can remember, she won’t have to keep reliving the feelings. She has imagined the shrink urging her to force the memories into consciousness, like a physiotherapist exhorting a quadriplegic to push his atrophied muscles back into service.
It’s not like that. The therapist asks why she’s there, and Maya finds herself unable to answer. She sits in silence, staring at the shiny leather of the therapist’s boots for three or four minutes, before she can find a way to speak.
She gets it out by telling it as a story rather than a fact: We went out to dinner, and I came back and threw up, and this feeling came over me, and ever since I wake up in terror every night, and here’s what I think it means. The therapist doesn’t encourage her to remember anything, just asks about her relationship with her father. Maya tells her, and things seem sinister that until now had only seemed sad. The therapist makes notes on a yellow legal pad that she holds on her knee in landscape orientation, writing across the lines. The end of the session comes more quickly than Maya had expected, at which point the therapist suggests that they meet once a week.
Over the next semester Maya and the therapist become friends. The therapist likes Maya and thinks she’s clever: she laughs when Maya says something self-deprecating or amusingly honest, and she occasionally allows her own wit and warmth to break through her professional reserve. She doesn’t push Maya to talk about anything in particular. They spend one early session talking about Maya’s frustration with her history professor, a self-important fool, and as Maya walks out of the Health Services Annex toward the library she realizes that they didn’t mention her father at all. Two weeks later, after a difficult night in which panic woke her twice, she finds herself describing her experience more vividly than she has managed before.
“It goes beyond emotions,” she tells the therapist. “It’s a physical feeling — not like someone touching you, nothing concrete, but… it’s not in the senses, it’s in the body. It’s like — in high school they thought I had appendicitis and I had to get a CT scan. You know how before you get scanned they make you drink those chemicals to make your organs show up? And they say strawberry flavor or whatever, and you tell yourself it’s a milkshake, but as soon as you taste it you know it’s not a milkshake, it’s not even food, it’s something that does not belong in your body. You have to force yourself to drink it, not because it tastes bad, exactly, but because your body doesn’t want it, and you have to overcome your body’s deep, deep resistance to drinking it. God, I can taste it now, and it’s been three years. Anyway: that’s what this feeling is like, times a thousand. Like your body is stating as clearly as it possibly can that what’s happening is not right.”
The therapist has been sitting absolutely still, as though to avoid disturbing a grazing deer. She waits a few seconds more, to be sure Maya has finished talking, and then asks, “Are there any thoughts that accompany the feeling?”
“When it first happened, there weren’t any thoughts,” Maya says. “Except maybe No, no, no.” She and the therapist smile sadly at one another. “But now I usually think about my dad. Nothing specific, just thinking about him. I don’t know if he’s in my mind or if I’m, like, trying to think of him.” The therapist nods.
At the following session, Maya tells the therapist about her sexual history, which now spans three years and seems to her a complex narrative with developments and reversals and surprises. She’s clever and tough, and boys have always liked her. The boys she likes are the ones who don’t have a clear place in the social hierarchy, not at the top and not in the middle striving for the top, but off to one side. She tends to break their hearts. She feels sorry for them when this happens, but there’s something she likes about the naked emotion, the pleading and seriousness. It feels sad in a way she might call realistic. And she enjoys the power, the boy swept up in his passion for her while she vacillates and searches her feelings and remains unmoved. She also enjoys sex. From the beginning, or what seemed to her the beginning — sixteen years old, Jeff Keyhoe, in his room — she was adept at it, confident, confrontational. One thing bothers her: intermittently she’ll find that she’s not really present; the sex is going on and she’s missing it. Once, with Jake Sohnfeld, an orgasm returned her to herself and she realized she had no memory of turning over onto her back.
The therapist refers to this as dissociation. “How often does this dissociation happen?” Not often, but more than Maya would like. “Is it frightening?” Not frightening so much as saddening, like she’s being deprived of something. “Does it seem to you as though it’s connected to the abuse?” It’s the first time she has referred to the abuse, and it feels right, like snapping together the tongue and buckle of a seatbelt.
Maya arranges to stay with Emily’s family in Boston over Christmas break. She presents it to her father as a fait accompli. He objects mildly.
In their second session after the vacation, the therapist gently asks Maya if any memories of the abuse are coming into focus. Maya is silent, examining the knotted strings at the edge of the rug on the floor of the therapist’s office. Then she says that, yes, certain images and ideas have lately come into her mind, along with sensations more specifically located in her body. The therapist carefully asks her if she feels she can describe any of these memories, and Maya does so: the feeling of her father’s large hand between her legs, and of his smooth chest pressed against her face. After this session she goes to the library to research a paper on Max Weber and bureaucracy, then returns to her dorm and cries.
As the summer break approaches, Maya makes arrangements to join a group of students on a volunteer trip to Gaza, where they build homes alongside a crew of Israelis and Palestinians. The trip keeps her away from Los Angeles for all but a week, during which she stays with a high school friend. She sees her father for a single lunch, at a restaurant. During the meal she describes things she saw in the Middle East, things that didn’t matter to her; she offers sketches of her professors, making them sound pompous and stupid in a way she knows her father will appreciate. As she listens to herself speaking, a valedictory feeling comes over her, and she knows she will never see her father again. Back at school sophomore year, describing the conversation to her therapist, she realizes that she remembers almost nothing her father said.
New memories emerge, escalating in clarity as though titrated according to how much she can tolerate. She has replaced her life story with a new one: a tragic childhood, a long adolescence of denial, and now the first steps into maturity and self-knowledge. Eventually the therapist asks her if she has considered confronting her father with what she believes.