Mindy, an attractive brunette with pale, Irish skin, picked nervously at the sleeve of her sweater and said, “I’m trying to overcome my addiction to cigarettes.”
As we went around the circle, I met a drinker, a compulsive eater, a battered wife, a cutter who couldn’t control the urge to mutilate her body, and individuals in various stages of depression. As it got closer and closer to me, I started to panic. I hadn’t even decided what my problem was going to be.
“I’m Suzanne and I’m an alcoholic.” Suzanne sat directly on my right.
Fish or cut bait, Hannah! You’re up! I sat there, tongue-tied. Fourteen eyes were focused on me. Except for the cancer, I was fairly normal. Maybe a tad on the thin side after all the weight I lost during chemo. “I’m bulimic,” I blurted.
Joy plopped back in her chair and everyone seemed to relax perceptibly. I felt as if I’d passed some sort of test. “What we do here every week, Hannah, is support each other in our healing,” Joy explained with a sympathetic smile. “We’re all at different stages in our journey. Sometimes the path to healing is rocky and hard, but you’ll discover that the only way out is through.”
I nodded, trying to dredge up everything I had ever read in the popular press about bulimia in case I was called upon to perform.
“Today, we are going to be dealing with anger.” Joy surveyed the group, her dark eyes alighting on each of our faces for a moment.
A plumpish woman I took to be in her mid-thirties, with her dark hair tied back in a low ponytail, raised a tentative hand.
“Claudia?”
Claudia rummaged in the colorful fabric-covered gym bag at her feet and withdrew a photograph in a simple black frame. “I want to show you something.” Her voice quavered and she crushed the picture to her bosom so that no one could actually see it. After a few moments, she tipped the photograph away from herself slightly, looked at it one last time, then passed it to Suzanne. “This is the child my father was having sex with thirty years ago. That precious little girl with the flowered Easter hat, lacy dress, white anklets, and Mary Jane shoes. Me.”
Suzanne studied the picture for a few moments, then solemnly handed the photograph to me. I felt like Alice, stepping through to the other side of the looking glass.
“One night my father came into my room, slipped his hand under my nightgown…” Claudia’s voice broke and she began to sob. “After that, the world was never the same. How could he do that to me? I loved him! I trusted him!”
Joy’s voice was soothing as molasses. “Relax, Claudia, and let the memory come.”
“The next morning I told my mother, but she didn’t believe me. She slapped me halfway across the room and called me a liar. Said I was a wicked little girl. Mothers are supposed to protect their children! Oh, God, oh, God!” She rocked back and forth, tears streaming down her face and landing, unchecked, on her blouse.
The picture of Claudia had stopped with Gwen, who returned it to the sobbing woman, holding it faceup on her outstretched palms. “It’s not your fault, Claudia.”
Claudia retrieved her picture and gazed at it again, her cheeks streaked black with mascara-laden tears. She caressed the face of her childhood image. “I was a smart little girl. I should have figured out how to avoid it.”
“You were just five years old then, Claudia. You didn’t have the power to protect yourself.” Gwen caressed the other woman’s cheek.
With loving care, Claudia laid the picture on the floor next to her chair. When she looked at us again, her face was flushed and her eyes mere slits. “I’m so angry at him for doing this to me! He screwed up my whole life!”
Gwen wrapped her arms around Claudia in an expansive hug. Toni stood and did the same. Everyone began chanting variations on a theme of “It’s not your fault.” I sat motionless, silently observing.
Joy approached and touched Gwen on the shoulder. Gwen and Toni stepped back, leaving Claudia exposed, her head bowed, looking sad and vulnerable. Joy handed Claudia a soft towel she’d produced from somewhere. “Here,” she said. “Pretend your father is sitting in that chair and show him how angry you are.”
Claudia held the towel by both ends and, in a practiced motion, twirled it into a tube. “I hate you!” she screamed, slapping the empty chair with the towel that cracked over it, like a whip. “How could you do this to me?” Thwack! The chair shuddered with each blow and inched across the floor away from her.
All of the women were standing now, cheering Claudia on.
“Hit him, Claudia!”
“Show him who’s boss!”
“Kick him in the balls!”
“Kill the bastard!”
Claudia, red-faced, continued to flail at the defenseless chair. After a few minutes, she wound down and drooped, exhausted, the towel hanging limp in her hand, the tears dry on her face. Everyone leapt up and surrounded her like Teletubbies in a big group hug. Seeing me hesitating on the sidelines, Joy turned to me and cocked her head toward the huddle, indicating I should get into the supportive spirit of things. I strolled over and stood uncomfortably on the periphery, my arms draped loosely around Joy and Mindy. Half of the women were crying, and I was pretty close to tears myself. Eventually individuals began to peel away from the edges of the group, break up, and return to their seats. Claudia retrieved her chair, sat rigidly in it, her precious picture in her lap. “I love you,” she told her image. “I’m so proud of you.”
Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. That was the significance of the photograph in Georgina’s bedroom! The children hadn’t been playing with it, after all. Georgina had been using it in just this way, to handle her feelings of guilt over our father’s alleged sexual abuse. As much as I wanted to wring her neck, I felt a twinge of sympathy for my sister. For whatever reason, perhaps what went on in this very group, Georgina really believed she had been abused.
“You are a good little girl,” Claudia cooed.
“We talk to our inner child,” Mindy whispered helpfully in my ear. “We let her know that we love her and forgive her.”
For a minute, I thought I’d been beamed from Maryland to a commune in Malibu. People in Maryland didn’t speak to their inner children. I wondered, vaguely, where I had stashed my love beads.
For the remainder of the session we listened to Toni complain about her louse of a husband. She had been hoping to get him into therapy with Dr. Sturges, but just when he agreed to go, the doctor had died. “Now I have to start all over,” she whined. “In the meantime, if he lays one finger on me,” she waggled a finger for emphasis, “even one little finger, I’m going to have him arrested for assault and battery.” I shared the opinion expressed by Mindy that Toni would be better off without the bum, then we surrounded Toni in a group hug.
I was thinking about the old saying-a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Joy was not a trained therapist, after all. How much of what I was seeing tonight was Diane Sturges’s and how much was Joy’s interpretation of her former therapist’s techniques? I recalled that party game where the first person whispers “I went to London to visit the Queen” in someone’s ear and dozens of players later it comes out “Camels wear army boots in winter.” It was scary. These women were still so profoundly under Diane Sturges’s influence that she might as well have been controlling them from beyond the grave.
When I checked my watch again, it was nearly eight-thirty and I had just breathed a sigh of relief when Joy, the perfectly correct facilitator, turned to me.
“How can we help you, Hannah?”