"What did I tell you. Willow? I told you to close your eyes and wish away the dreads. It was what my mother taught me. Just think of something nice, something pretty, and push the ugly dreads away," she said.
The scent of her lilac cologne filled my nostrils and soothed my troubled brain. I could feel my body relax, the fear drain out of me. The lightning flashed around us: the thunder clapped, and
then, its tail between its legs like some defeated big bad wolf, the storm gradually began to slink away toward some rendezvous with another small frightened child.
Amou remained with me until I closed my eyes again and drifted off. feeling my hand still held softly in hers, hearing her hum one of her Portuguese songs. In the morning all of it seemed like a bad dream, just another in a series of so many floating through our big house, settling in the walls, making each and every room just a little darker.
There was so much darkness in our home that I yearned for brightness and light. I cherished the sound of laughter. and especially held dear any glimmer of joy and pleasure I caught in my father's face when he spoke or gazed at me.
Our house had no reason to be dark. The formal sitting room, the den. the Doctor's office-- as my mother insisted I refer to my father-- had two large windows right behind his desk, and all of the bedrooms. even Amou's closet of a room, had nicesized windows. Everywhere there were beautiful views of rolling fields and trees. We had one hundred and fifty acres, and
there were wooded paths, two rather large ponds, and a stream that twisted itself over rocks and hills to empty into a larger stream that fed into the Congaree River,
My father and his sister. my aunt Agnes, had inherited the land and the house, but my aunt lived in Charleston and had no interest in the property, so my father paid her for her share. My mother never stopped criticizing him for paying too much. She was not fond of Aunt Agnes, and it was no secret that Aunt Agnes was not fond of her. I could count on the fingers of one hand how often she and her husband and their daughter-- my cousin. Margaret Selby-- visited our house.
"Your sister simply cannot stand how beautiful I have made this family relic." Mother would tell my father.
The formal rooms, including the dining room, had golden-brown satin curtains with elaborate piping when I was a little girl, but all that, including most of the rooms, had been decorated and redecorated richly three times between my birth and my mother's tragic death in a terrible car accident. She was never satisfied with anything she had done in the house, and went through decorators almost as frequently as she went through brands of makeup. No matter what she did, what she bought, whose advice she cherished at the moment, she would see something someone else had and immediately become critical of her own things. The grass was always greener in someone else's yard.
If the Doctor questioned her sudden
dissatisfaction with furniture and drapes and rugs she had relatively recently bought, she would cry and rage at how he was so wrapped up in his work, he had no idea what was in style and what wasn't.
As soon as I was old enough to understand what their arguments were about, if anyone could call them arguments that is, I realized that my father's work and career were a constant source of irritation for my mother. I hesitate to call them arguments, because. like Amou, he put up so little resistance, barely offering any sort of defense or opposition.
"You're not married to me!" my mother would scream at him. "You're married to that precious clinic of yours, that house of madness you have created. You spend so much time there I should sue you for adultery. How we that look? The perfect
psychiatrist, the man who could cure everyone else's messed-up life, can't cure his own?"
For some reason, a reason I wouldn't
understand for years and years to come, that particular threat was the only thing that actually dabbed a spot of fear in each of my father's eyes. She wielded it over him like a club, and any resistance, any objection he voiced about something she wanted to buy or spend money on in the house was immediately pulled back and buried under his nod of surrender, his whole body sinking in his chair like the flag of a defeated army.
I didn't know very much about the relationships between men and women yet, and sometimes I wonder if I ever will, but I did believe that, because my mother was so beautiful, my father loved her too deeply and completely to do anything that would displease her too much or too long. Ile was the most brilliant man I knew, and I knew even when I was only eight that he was a very famous and highly respected man in his field of psychology. There were piles of magazines with his articles in them, and his picture in many. Because the clinic he had created was becoming world-famous, he had been on television often as a guest on talk shows, and was constantly called upon to offer an opinion or a theory about one thing or another, especially in court trials.
I suppose that was why I didn't think it strange that she insisted I refer to him always as the Doctor when I was speaking about him.
"Don't say my father or my daddy. Say the Doctor," she instructed. After a while, with her watching over my shoulder whenever I spoke. I had trouble thinking of him as anything else but the Doctor.
Despite my age. I sensed that my mother wasn't making me refer to him as the Doctor because she had so much admiration for him. There had to be some other reason. My mother always referred to the Doctor's clinic as either a madhouse or a nuthouse. and I don't know how many times I heard her say what he was doing over there was just high-priced voodoo.
When I was little, he would simply tell me he was going to his hospital. For a long time I thought of it as a place where people went when they had accidents or bad colds, and then one day. when I was little more than seven. I went by his office door and saw him sitting alone, staring out his window, He looked very sad. so I paused and went in to see why.
He didn't hear me for a while, and I was positive I saw him wipe his eyes, just like someone who was crying would,
"What's the matter?" I asked, and he spun around. I thought at first that he was going to be angry I had snuck into his office and watched him, but after a moment, he smiled more warmly than I could ever remember,
"Come here." he beckoned. and I walked around his desk. "Why did you ask me what was the matter?" he wanted to know.
I stood there, gazing down at the floor.
"I thought you were crying," I finally said.
"Well. Willow, you were right. I was crying." he revealed.
I couldn't imagine the Doctor crying. Nothing my mother said, no matter how angrily she said it, made him cry. The most dramatic thing I had ever seen him do in response was shake his head with a little expression of disgust on his lips and then walk away.
"Why were you crying?"