1962 – New York
I walked into Marjorie Wallis’s small office on West Seventy-ninth Street. I was very nervous.
“What do I call you?” I asked.
“What do you want to call me?”
“I heard Dr. Steiner call you Margie on the telephone … is that all right?”
“Margie it is! Sit down.”
She indicated the plain couch in front of me. There were no pictures on the walls. Margie sat in a comfortable-looking armchair, with an ottoman – which she wasn’t using – resting in front of her. Her face wasn’t warm, but it wasn’t stern, either.
“What seems to be the trouble?” she asked.
I couldn’t bring myself to look at her.
“I want to give all my money away.”
“How much do you have?”
“… I owe three hundred dollars.”
She looked at me silently for four or five seconds.
“I see. Well, let’s get to work, and maybe by the time you have some money you’ll be wise enough to know what to do with it. In the meantime tell me about …”
And then she asked me a lot of questions. “Your mother was how old? … How did you feel when the doctor said that? … Have you ever tried to blah, blah, blah?” I took so many long pauses before I answered each question that I thought she might throw me out, but she just sat there, with her feet up on the ottoman now, and waited. When I did start talking again, she made little notes on a small pad that rested on her lap.
What I couldn’t understand was this: why on earth was I thinking about a fifteen-year-old girl named Seema Clark during all my long pauses in between Margie’s questions? Seema kept popping into my head while I was talking about my mother and doctors and heart attacks and my Russian father and masturbation.
I thought Seema was Eurasian when I met her the first time – she certainly didn’t look Jewish – but when we both came out of the synagogue together I realized that she must be Jewish. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. I was only fifteen, but I had seen a lot of movies and I thought she looked like a very thin, teenage Rita Hayworth. I was her date when Seema had her fifteenth birthday party. There were eight or ten other kids at her house that night, all laughing their heads off at some wisenheimer who was “hypnotizing” one of the girls. I thought he was pretty stupid, but I enjoyed watching the cocky little faker who thought he knew how to hypnotize people because he’d read his uncle’s book on hypnosis.
Seema held my hand while we watched the “hypnotist” go through his fake talk. I knew she really liked me. She looked so pretty that night, with a pink barrette in her hair and wearing a brand-new yellow angora sweater. Her mother served all of us birthday cake and some delicious coffee. When all the other kids had gone home, Mrs. Clark showed me the coffee can, because I had said how good the coffee tasted – it was A&P’s Eight O’clock Coffee – and then her mother said good night and left Seema and me alone.