A Tall, Thin Lady

At some time in my adult life, I can't say when exactly, I became aware of a scene from my childhood. It came to me whole. Complete. I don't know where I was when it came to me, I don't know why it came when it did. I know it was not therapy, not psychoanalysis, not hypnosis—not any such exercise. It just came. I wondered at first if I had dreamt it. Imagined it. Made it up. At the very same time I knew it was real.

I can see it today, many years later, as clearly as I ever did. As clear as when it happened—no, clearer, because I can see me in it, a little girl, perhaps 3 years old. I am standing at the kitchen door of the house my family rented on Elm Street. It was a corner house, and the kitchen door opened onto the side street. Across the street an old square car is standing and my mother has just come out of it—she is wearing a long black coat—she is tall, and I notice, thin—and I know she has been in the hospital.

That's it. That's my picture. I am past 70 years old, and I can see it any time I want to. It is always available to me. It has never faded, never torn. In fact, not long ago, it became more precious than ever—it acquired a caption, accidentally, cruelly.

I am the youngest of nine children. Well, nine living—until recently. My mother lost a child long ago, a boy, between the first two girls, Jean and Norma. I believe it was a stillbirth but I cannot say for sure. This is just one of the many little things people never bothered to tell me, their baby sister so hungry for knowledge she would scream and hold her breath until she turned blue when she didn't get it. That's not their interpretation, of course. They said I was “spoiled.” My first psychiatrist actually winced when I used that word. We both knew he wasn't supposed to—this was in the mid-fifties—but he did. I saw him. My next therapist equated the word with rotten produce being thrown out in the garbage—my father was in the wholesale produce business. This was in the sixties when the poor-you sch