Our journey westward in the summer of 1972 ended at a whitewashed, drenched-in-sun house in Beverly Hills with vines of brilliant purple bougainvillea overhanging the front door. I pulled my bulging suitcase out of the car and hauled it over the threshold and into the Spanish-tiled entry to meet my future mother-in-law, Marjorie, a psychotherapist. Before we met, I had never spoken to a counselor in the realm of the emotions; her work lay outside the boundaries of my repressed Eastern background. In my family we pushed our feelings so far down into an emotional haze that we weren’t able to find them when we wanted. Bruce had told me about his mother’s profession before we arrived in California, and I regarded therapeutic practice in the same light as the Grand Canyon and Carlsbad Caverns, as part of a brand-new Western adventure he was introducing me to, suffused with an air of romance. Bruce was my guide on an odyssey that took me to deep rifts that can’t be found on a map—the unfathomed depths of my psyche, from which I made an unsteady return to the surface of my life.
Marjorie’s house—I came to call it the therapy house—doubled as her office. Therapy as professional occupation and therapy as lifestyle were one and the same in this place, and everyone present was involved: the paying clients, Marjorie’s assistant Lillian, who was a therapist in training, Hershel, Marjorie’s second husband, and Bruce and I, since we were there. If Marjorie had owned a cat, the cat would have had encounter sessions. Her workspace wasn’t confined to one room that served as an office where she saw clients. She used the living room, strewn with over- sized Turkish pillows, for indoor group experiences, which often spilled into the out-of-doors. Lillian had a sort of office space in the screened porch that opened onto the pool, and the pool itself was used for water therapies. The only spot for temporary escape from intensive work on our emotions was the small bedroom that Bruce and I occupied next to the driveway.
Everyone I met at the house was in therapy, working on issues. Everyone had lots of issues and liked to talk about them—the opposite of my family, who also had lots of issues, all of which they denied and never wanted to talk about. People in the therapy house used the language of psycho-speak, words like script, repression, defenses, inner child, mind game, being in touch with your feelings, getting somewhere, dealing with it, crazy-making, double bind, blockage, openness, centering, fear of intimacy, letting it all out, dependence, and, my personal favorite, passive-aggressive.
When you conversed on these matters—even when you conversed on other matters—every sentence you uttered was subject to inspection for signs of good or bad emotional hygiene. I hardly dared open my mouth, even to say something innocuous like “Sure, I’m hungry. I could eat dinner.” My words might be analyzed to reveal something knotty, something sinister I didn’t know I felt but really ought to know I felt. Maybe I wasn’t really hungry—maybe my hunger was a sign of an inner emptiness I was trying to fill. Or maybe my agreeing that it was time for dinner was too accommodating, evidence that I was trying to please others because I wasn’t in touch with my feelings. The hard part was that all of these diagnoses seemed right, even if they were contradictory, even if they implied I was hungry and not hungry at the same time. All of that and more was true about me. In fact, I rarely felt comfortable saying what I wanted. I often didn’t know what I wanted. I became excruciatingly aware that I didn’t know. And when I did have a glimmer of insight into my own feelings, I didn’t act on them.
In the early days of 1970s political turmoil, therapy was sometimes rough-and-tumble, like another form of social violence, from Werner Erhard’s no-bathroom-break “est” marathons to Black Muslim antidrug initiations. In Southern California I had landed in a hotbed of trendy techniques, some of which, like the primal scream, would go on to become the butt of jokes and parodies, and some of which would be embraced as standard therapeutic practice. A few days after we arrived at Marjorie’s, I was in the kitchen late one morning with Lillian. She started to cry. When I asked her what was wrong and if I could help, she lifted her blouse to show me bruises on her back and torso. The night before she had been Rolfed, she said, and sadness had emerged over abuse experienced as a child and stored deep in her body. Now she was dealing with it. The word Rolfed rang a bell as something Bruce had mentioned, and I asked her what the treatment was. After Lillian’s description of the therapist’s knuckles digging deep into her back, I was baffled, shaken really. She had been pummeled and turned inside out until she screamed, and she had the bruises to prove it. To think that people subjected themselves to such abuse! Yet Lillian thought it was good for her—the pain was absolutely necessary to get somewhere. She could have said aliens had kidnapped her last night, beaten, and released her this morning, and I wouldn’t have felt more out of my depth.
It had already been established that I stored a ton of shit inside me, like a blocked sewer line that needed to be roto-rootered. Lillian hoped I would consider Rolfing. She was sure it would do me a world of good. My response was a stricken look of horror and fear that I tried to twist into something more accepting. If Rolfing was necessary to get somewhere, I wanted to ask, where was Lillian getting? Was going forward dependent on going back? Lillian was just the first of many who recommended I get major work done for my body’s release and realignment. I had no idea what I was carrying around inside me that everyone was so sure I should let go of. But the summer was young.
Before long, Bruce and I became part of what-ever therapeutic event Marjorie was overseeing at the therapy house. She folded us into the batter like egg whites, and soon we were taking part in sessions in the living room with her regular patients. We sat next to each other, cross-legged on the shag carpet, leaning back on enormous pillows, facing the windows that opened onto the pool. While the regulars gave updates on how they had done during the week since the last session, I watched the water snaking and the palm trees basking in the late afternoon glow. The updates went on a while, as this was an earnest and introspective group. At least that’s how it struck me after nineteen years of life during which the members of my family said nothing honest or penetrating about how they felt.
After a few sessions I realized that the participants repeated the same stories each week, with slight variations. Maybe that’s why they were in therapy. Or maybe that’s how life is: change is slow and incremental, with setbacks. I was almost entirely mute, dumbfounded by the company I found myself in, all of them older and far more advanced in the art of inspecting their emotions. I focused on the palm trees to keep from shouting, I don’t belong here, or, when the elaborate self-analysis got to be too much for me, Why don’t you just shut the fuck up. I imagined, with pleasure, my parents’ horror if they saw me in this group, though I didn’t divulge any of the family’s precious secrets. Maybe I was passive-aggressive, as Marjorie had already suggested.
The member of the group nearest to me in age was a woman in her early thirties who was living with a man attached to the film industry. Almost everyone in the group was attached to the film industry. I naively supposed her beau to be a bigwig at a studio. She was afraid he was about to cast her off for someone new, though she wasn’t certain that was his plan. She usually wore a crocheted halter, really a bikini top, and white bell-bottoms. She was tan, the kind of tan you get from baking out by the pool all day. I was thin, but she was thinner than I was; she looked like she starved herself. She made quite an impression. She was hard and calculating, and she frightened and fascinated me. So far as I could tell, she didn’t have a job or a skill or an education—her entire life turned on her film boyfriend and whether he would keep her around, which was one of her issues. She had a lot of issues, and she was in therapy to figure out whether she should stick with this man or hitch herself to someone else before he dumped her. There were plenty of dangers for someone in her position—after all, the town was constantly refreshing its supply of attractive new girls. I got the impression she had faced the same puzzle before with a different man—there was a ring of familiarity to her tale. The group agreed that it was all about her dependency. Why was the discussion confined to what the man would decide? I wondered. Wasn’t there another option? Why didn’t she strike out on her own and support herself? Or stay with her movie guy but put a little balance into the relationship? Those were my thoughts, and I kept them to myself.
The emotions this woman provoked in me were messy and disturbing. I wanted to feel that she was not me, that I was nothing like her. Her dependency on a film-industry boyfriend, I’d tell myself, wasn’t anything like my dependency on Bruce, a professor, although I no longer called him my professor. But of course I had more in common with the woman in white bell-bottoms than I cared to admit. Really, what differences distinguished us? I didn’t have a job or a college degree; wasn’t I just hanging onto a man? Bruce had left his wife for me. Why wouldn’t he leave me for someone else? There was a ready supply of candidates in college. Professor or producer-director: they weren’t so dissimilar. Bruce even studied movies! To protect myself from these unhappy truths, I turned against the woman, concentrating particularly on her excessive tan.
I also felt some envy. She looked really good in her skimpy, crocheted halter and tight pants. She must look the way women who were considered desirable in Hollywood look, I thought. A bit tough, maybe. I felt soft around her, as if I were still carrying baby fat.
I never mentioned all the feelings the tanned woman provoked in me, even to Marjorie in our individual therapy—yes, I had begun sessions with Bruce’s mother, just the two of us talking. How that happened is hard to say. Bruce thought I wanted to go into therapy, even asked for it. Marjorie offered to provide the counseling, and she was a bargain—I mean she was a good therapist and wouldn’t charge for her time. A neutral observer who overheard our conversations would no doubt agree with Bruce, saying, yes, Marcia desired it, Marjorie offered, and that’s how the decision was made.
But there is an inner story of my consent that puts the choice in a different light and suggests the conflicts I faced, or was failing to face. My motivations were a cocktail, one part youth, one part passivity, one part curiosity, a dash of bitters and stir. According to this story, there was no particular scene or conversation that got me into Marjorie’s patient chair. Our arrangement just emerged in the course of sharing a therapy house together. We’d start talking, not in a formal therapeutic session, but just talking, and our path would follow a trail that led downward toward the valley floor of my psyche. And then we’d have another chat that started from where we left off and continued down the trail. Soon it was understood to be a therapeutic hike we were having.
An issue for me was that it seemed peculiar for the mother of my boyfriend to give me professional counsel, to be privy to my private matters. The notion freaked me out. It was weird to emerge from Marjorie’s darkened den, having just unburdened myself about her son, and run into Bruce. Then why didn’t I say no? Why didn’t I say, “Thank you very much for the generous offer, but the complications of our relationship make it a poor idea.” Or, “Thank you for your offer, but I don’t need to talk to anyone.” That last one would have been a blatant falsehood. Take the most cursory look at my life and you’d shout, Get her to a counselor before she makes an irrevocable mess of it! I was stalled, this I dimly knew. So I said, “Sure, I’m hungry. I could eat dinner.”
In part, I felt conscripted. When Bruce’s mother offered her services, my youth (that is to say, I was overwhelmed by my circumstances) and not wanting to offend reinforced a pattern of passivity. My parents had called most of the shots, and then Bruce took over. As of yet I hadn’t experienced what calling the shots for myself might feel like. I went along with lots of what Bruce and his mother wanted me to do. Furthermore, I was curious about therapy. Now that I was staying in Marjorie’s world, I might as well throw myself into it, rather than devote my energies to hanging back. Once you’ve seen the rim of the Grand Canyon, you want to check out the bottom before you depart.
From Marjorie’s point of view, giving and getting counseling was as ordinary as eating an apple, part of keeping alive. In her world, everyone did it. Why shouldn’t I? Maternal instincts, not just professional interest, drove her to help me, and the best way she knew to help was through therapy. But it raised ethical questions, or it would have, if anyone had raised them. There was not a single conversation about how this alliance might not be such a good thing, but I instinctively knew I wouldn’t mention it to my parents.
In sum, my reasons for falling into therapy were pretty much the same as what the ensuing therapy revealed about me: I said yes and no, hello and good-bye, at the same time—the aloha girl. I became a nonpaying semi-patient in counseling with Marjorie. There wasn’t anything official about it, and no records of our sessions exist.
What did Marjorie and I talk about? Everything, all over the map. She quickly gleaned the unhappy basics of my relationship with my parents and how I became involved with her son, and the mess I was in with all of the above. It must have frustrated her to witness how stuck I was—to see me, pinned and wiggling. My own construction of the process that got me stuck would go something like this: I often consented to things while withholding consent, saying yes but really saying no. The no was largely unvoiced. The only person who heard my no was me, although even that audition seemed questionable. I didn’t act upon the no—of that much I could be certain. My behavior was difficult if not impossible to read, and most people took my consent as normal consent. What else should they have done? But I didn’t commit to my consent, and I could see this in a series of examples, the most glaring being an affair with Bruce from which I withheld my full participation. My passivity didn’t come in only one flavor—there were variations, shades. Sometimes I went along with proposals or invitations because I honestly didn’t know my own mind, didn’t know what I felt or wanted. It would have been advisable in such cases to say just that, something like, “At the moment I don’t know what I feel, and so why don’t we wait until I do.” How honest and straightforward, how reasonable and mature that sounds! And how foreign to me. Much more my style was to go mute and dead, hoping someone would notice and stop the proceedings. If I had a glimmer of my own feeling, it was a brief flash and then a long fade until, like a star, it slipped over the horizon, falling out of sight.
As I’ve already mentioned, the clinical term Marjorie used to describe me was passive-aggressive, a description I had never heard until that summer. Popular diagnoses come and go in psychotherapy, and it was the noon hour for this one. It was first defined clinically to describe soldiers who were not openly defiant of orders their superior officers gave, but expressed their resistance by passive measures, like procrastination and whining. Later the term became a catchall, covering a lot of behavior that expressed aggression in nonassertive and indirect—and, one might add, unproductive—ways.
At first I was resistant to processing myself through that sieve. I didn’t think the passive-aggressive descriptors fit me. I latched onto the quick diligence with which I did schoolwork as evidence that I didn’t procrastinate. However, my resistance to the label did fit the profile: when called on it, the person who indirectly and secretly expresses aggression rarely acknowledges her behavior. Her whole design is plausible deniability! So my initial rejection of Marjorie’s opinion convinced no one—in fact, my denial indicated the accuracy of the diagnosis.
I had to admit, my background fit the bill. I did grow up in a family in which the honest expression of feelings was forbidden, and I learned to repress my feelings and use other channels to process frustration. I was misunderstood by my parents—my superior officers, as it were—and said so. Perhaps I didn’t whine about it, but it was a key element of my life history so far as I had constructed it. I wouldn’t have said that I felt underappreciated by my family, but that they harbored a negative opinion of me. At some level not known to me I may have undertaken my affair with Bruce to hurt my parents—I thought our relationship might put an end to them. I would not acknowledge this aggression because there was a tricky disconnect between what I did and what I felt. I didn’t channel feelings of anger outward; I turned my frustrations inward, back on myself. I was often contrite, and that feeling alternated with hostility. The passive-aggressive label was useful in bringing to light some of the ways I operated, letting me look at them. I saw them as if written on a blackboard, and mentally put check marks by the items that especially applied to me. Good God, I was a mess!
The immediate issue in my counseling was Bruce. When I first walked through her vine-shrouded front door, Marjorie’s heart must have gone out to me. I was so very young. While her son wasn’t old by any means, he was worlds of experience and accomplishment older than I. She saw I had gotten in way over my head and didn’t know how to get out. But I couldn’t admit as much to others because I couldn’t admit it to myself. She probably thought Bruce had no business being involved with a girl as young as I was, one of his former students, and knew nothing good would come of it. But she didn’t tell him that, and she didn’t tell me directly. She wasn’t the sort of mother who interfered. Instead she assumed her therapist role and fomented change from that position. She couldn’t counsel me to leave her son, for that would betray him— serve me but not Bruce. Perhaps she thought that she could help me decide either to go forward in the relationship or get out, and that since I was doing neither, either choice would be a good step in the right direction. Without appearing to do so, she tried to help me leave Bruce—or if not leave him, then fully consent to being with him. We shared a natural kinship, and whatever transpired, I never doubted her goodwill. She loved her son, and she came to love me.
*
Another endeavor at the therapy house was biofeedback. Marjorie and Hershel were pioneers in using it. The idea was that once you located where and how your body stored unproductive emotions, you could undo the blockages, allowing energy to flow through rather than be trapped in pockets of negativity. Marjorie and Hershel expressed it more technically in one of the articles they wrote based on their research and practice: biofeedback “increases the effectiveness of verbal psycho-therapy by providing immediate awareness of body-mind relationships and by encouraging the client to express emotionally relevant concerns.” Hershel, who was an electrical engineer, had developed a machine, or I should say an instrument, that measured the amount of tension stored in various places of the body. Like a polygraph, I thought, when I first heard about it.
I became a volunteer who tested this invention, consenting to participate in biofeedback sessions—consenting in my usual way, believing no other recourse was available. I was asked, and it was impossible to refuse, or so it seemed, because all the family members and Lillian were participating. The others thought I could refuse, and, of course, technically I was a free agent. If I didn’t want to be a subject in Hershel’s experiment, I could say so. Why didn’t I say so? Good question. The answer doesn’t present an affirming portrait of my self-determination. The answer is more aloha. I thought it would be poor manners to beg off. I was a guest in the house and should go along with the flow, as my parents taught me. I must accommodate others—a self-effacing mantra that hadn’t stood me in good stead.
In my first biofeedback session I sat in Marjorie’s leather lounger, and Hershel pulled a plastic strap around my head, with electrodes front and back attached to wires that ran to a small black plastic box. The device measured alpha brain waves. The idea was that producing alpha was a good thing, so you paid attention to your brain and tried to pump out more alpha.
Marjorie first asked questions to gauge what topics triggered tension in me. Some of her questions were designed to be innocuous, but others were unsettling: How are you enjoying your first visit to California? What do you think of the house? Tell me about your mother.
My thought about the polygraph turned out to be more right than I realized. I treated the session like a police interrogation. Every question struck me as loaded, and I couldn’t see my way clear to answer it. I often felt this with my parents, that all responses risked giving offense, and I had lost the ability to give a spontaneous answer. By the time I routed through all the possible problems an answer could cause, I had lost touch with what I felt. Asked whether I preferred scrambled eggs to fried, I would have felt there was a right answer and a wrong answer and didn’t know which was which.
It seemed that my biofeedback starting position, which should have registered a relaxed baseline score, was already terrifically tense. My normal resting state was wound tight.
“Dear,” Marjorie said after her opening questions, “do you not feel relaxed?”
She might as well ask if the plastic strap and wires around my skull made me feel beautiful. I wanted to turn the tables and ask her, Would you feel relaxed in my position? But of course I didn’t. I never said what I thought. Her look of concern told me that my face was a steel plate of tension, without shade or shadow, that my forehead was a sheet of solid stress, that the tension was so great I might self-combust. I’d set off the smoke detector if they had one.
“News to me,” I said, responding to her unspoken words of concern with a tense little laugh that had become my staple in psyche-central California.
No one laughed back. In the therapy house, tension was the worst of sins, worse than lacking a sense of humor, much worse than crying or angry meltdowns—then, at least, you were letting it all out, which was healthy and meant you were in touch with your feelings. I was screwed too tight, too wound up, and never more so than in this house where my tension was on display and a topic of conversation. In sessions with biofeedback I demonstrated no facility for relaxation. Letting go wasn’t in my vocabulary. The more I tried to ease my facial muscles, the more they seized. I had no control over what my body did—the control center of my brain was disconnected from my mind and will. If you’d asked me when my tension began, I would have said I was born in a twist like a pretzel.
So the biofeedback experiment turned into a depressing indictment of my bodily being. I had to absorb a great deal of negative assessment, however well-meaning, about the state of my mind, my body, and my life. While I accepted as a truth that I was unusually tense, I had no idea what to do about it. It wasn’t good, that much I knew; it wasn’t something people wanted to be. I was told that my tension was something I should work on, that is, I should work on relaxing. I was nineteen years old in a house of patients at least twice my age, and I was being told I needed to let go, get in touch with my feelings, relax, accept myself, and a whole lot of other things I didn’t understand, didn’t know how to approach. I didn’t know where the trailhead lay. My daily to-do list went something like this:
Relax.
Breathe deeply.
Release tension in my neck, jaw, and forehead.
Float in the pool, focus on the source of stress, and concentrate on letting everything go. Gentle pool waves, gentle brain waves.
The trouble was, there is no alpha wave in a pretzel.
*
My summer of treatment peaked in a therapy marathon, a weekend retreat at a house in Claremont featuring an intensive re-birthing session. On a Saturday morning, Marjorie, Bruce, and I made the drive on I-10 east from Beverly Hills, through downtown L.A. and past Covina and the eerie green of the Forest Lawn cemetery, to Claremont, where Mt. Baldy to the northeast was obscured by a thick layer of haze. We exited the freeway and entered a nearby neighborhood where all the houses were ranch style and—to my Eastern eye— looked nearly identical. In fact, that would describe a great deal of Claremont. Our destination was the last house on the block, painted an olive shade the sun had drained of its depth. The walkway to the entrance was cut on the diagonal. Before entering the house I thought of myself as playing the young ingénue in a cast of varied characters and the Claremont house was a movie set for an Agatha Christie–style movie. Instead of solving a murder, we were looking for our lost origins.
The couple hosting the marathon wasn’t what I expected. They weren’t hippies or stoners with unruly hair, or even L.A. casual, with Hawaiian shirts, baggy shorts, and flip-flops. They didn’t look counterculture. They were a suburban couple in polo shirts and khakis— young, fit, prosperous professionals. Excessively clean, well groomed, neat; they probably were members of a local church. The house too was a surprise: no clutter, no paper lanterns or macramé wall hangings, no incense or candles, no posters of rock concerts. It was orderly and sanitized, with wall-to-wall carpeting in beige, walls painted a soothing sage or cream. There were air fresheners in the bathrooms. Sliding glass doors opened onto the pool in the back, lit a pristine blue by the sun. Hedges were rigorously pruned, the grass cut short and smooth. Nothing spilled, nothing cascaded, nothing was rounded. Everything was sharp angles. All in all, not what I expected for a birth retreat.
We were on a quest for rebirth because redoing the traumatic original event could have therapeutic benefits, or so the theory went. Any number of therapeutic approaches used these regression rituals, based on a belief that a person can go back to harmful experiences and put them right. You could cleanse body and mind, let go of unhealthy behavioral patterns, restore bodily communication, and heal suppressed emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness. These ideas were all in the water that the New Age therapeutic community in Southern California drank. The people gathered at the house in Claremont were a thirsty bunch who had paid a large sum of money to float in a pool and be reborn. There were more participants than in the small sessions in the living room I had been attending at the therapy house.
First we introduced ourselves and our problems. Many people mentioned drugs and alcohol and referred to themselves as damaged and scarred. On the whole, they made me feel better about my own conflicts. I considered introducing myself as the student who broke up Bruce’s marriage and now was hanging out in his mother’s therapy groups for the summer, learning about my problem with tension. But I didn’t. I was, as usual, the youngest in the group.
The ritual of rebirth enacted in the swimming pool would be the culminating event of the marathon. As preparation, we tried to re-enter our original birth experience so we could start life over again. Marjorie’s hope for me personally was that I could loop back and start over, that rebirthing would sync me up with my infant self and give her a loving welcome to the world. I could then grow past whatever harms—whether abuse or just coldness—my parents had inflicted on me.
Marjorie’s technique for leading us back to birth was guided imagery, a popular form of mind-body therapy, used even in acting classes. In her sessions at home she started with breathing techniques and progressive muscle relaxation to achieve a state of deep calm, and we took the same first step here. The drapes were pulled, blinds shuttered, and we all found a place on the floor. We closed our eyes and Marjorie led us in breathing exercises that helped us relax and move toward a meditative, hypnotic readiness. Once we were calm and centered—a state I heard a lot about that summer but never achieved—Marjorie would guide us back in stages, steadily back, back through layers of images, back to the house where I lived as a little girl, and then still further, back to my moment of birth.
Visualize the house, she said, her voice soft and warm. What color is it, what images come to mind, what does it smell like, what does your mother smell like?
I could remember my house:
White with black shutters. The front door with a brass knocker and a mail slot. A red-tiled front stoop with two wooden benches and a lattice arbor. Forsythia at the front of the walkway where it met the sidewalk. Lily of the valley in the rock garden in the back. Crab apples on each side of the house, one reaching up to my window.
Go back, she said softly.
My sister and her date sitting on the wooden benches, talking past her curfew. My father opening a window in the master bedroom and throwing a bucket of cold water out. My sister humiliated and fighting with him the next day. Four years old and thrilled with it.
Back, she said, back.
A rocking chair, creaking in rhythm on the wood floor. A drafty room, wind clicking branches against the window.
But my birth—I couldn’t get back there. I couldn’t remember a thing.
*
Some people in the group didn’t make it to the end of the image-tracing process, back to birth. They were visited by wrenching memories of trauma, and they collapsed into tears. Marjorie comforted them as best she could. When the exercise was over, we regrouped and reported on what we had recovered. One woman remembered being wrapped in blankets and suffocated, unable to move or breathe. Another had relived the scalding water her mother had poured on her minutes after her delivery, and she showed us the burns on her chest.
I was skeptical. I couldn’t believe the details people tapped into, what they claimed to remember and feel. They were putting it on—I was confident those burns had happened during a later incident. I myself declined to speak about my images.
Primed for the finale, we changed into bathing suits and moved outside to the pool. My birth partners formed two columns, and with outstretched arms we hooked together like a giant bicycle chain, forming a support that would cradle us one by one as we floated with eyes closed down the simulated birth canal until we were pushed out into the free water and reborn. The youngest of the group, I would be last in the rebirthing order. I supported those who went before me, uttering soothing sounds, stroking each form softly as the borning baby passed by and out into the world of open water. Beyond the end of the chain, several of the newly born erupted into tears, shaking with emotion.
I wondered how they could give themselves over to such hokum. Or was something really shaking them to the zero of their lives? Would I, too, be overtaken by traumas I didn’t know I had? When my turn came, I turned onto my back, the poolside lights blinding me, and let myself be supported and passed from hand to hand in the flashing water, pushed out at the end of the birth canal into a world I had not yet seen. I stood upright on the pool floor and opened my eyes. I felt instantly that I was unchanged. I was a nineteen-year-old in a blue-and-white-striped bathing suit who had been awkwardly passed from one stranger’s hands to another in a kidney-shaped pool. The process had awakened nothing in me, and I was decidedly not reborn. The birthing ritual had not redone the trauma of my birth and expelled it. Those memories were still curled like tight buds inside me.
*
My weekend in Claremont was confined to the host couple’s house, except for a walk up to Foothill Boulevard once the retreat was over. Claremont struck me as a place where no one actually lived, like a movie set. The land on the other side of Foothill, which runs for dozens of miles below the arid brown mountains, was a basin of sand and stone where scrub brush lived on nothing and no breezes swayed the peeling eucalyptus with its bark of white linen. No birds sang their twittering birdsong, not a vulture or a crow, just an amphitheater of blinding white. As bright as all of California was, Claremont was the brightest, its colors bleached pale and chalky by the powerful sun, as if a fine white powder had fallen from the sky and dusted the pavements. There were no soft shadows, no gradations of light. The shade was not the shade I knew, but compressed by the pressure of the sun to a black intensity. My head hurt from the light, my eyes from squinting. They felt scratchy, as if they had been oxidized. I felt captive in a prison of light, and I began to fall in love with my captor, the sun. My eyes vibrated with images, pummeled by brightness. I was turned inside out; my skin burned from within. I felt someone new inside, something new, terribly awake and on edge.
It uttered: Nothing I am can survive this summer of light.
Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton, and of Companion to an Untold Story, which won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty First-Century Essays by Women, published by the University of Georgia Press. Her chapbook EDGE was published by New Michigan Press. Studio of The Voice is forthcoming from Wandering Aengus Press. Her website: marciaaldrich.com.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash