Tinderbox (16 page)

Leaving to pick up Omar at school on the afternoon of their first lesson, Myra asks
Eva if she could have a snack prepared for Omar when he gets back.

Eva is ironing a pair of Adam’s jeans. She irons expertly, never getting trapped on
sleeves or collars, singing along with the songs from a pop radio station. Myra has
made a list for her of what to iron. Otherwise, Eva would iron everything: underwear,
sheets, dish towels, Myra’s nightgowns.

Eva holds the iron in front of her and smiles. “Snack. I never hear that word until
I come to this country. Miss Caro, when she meet me at the airport, she ask me if
I want a snack.”

“What’s the word in Spanish?”

“We have
porción
or
bocadillo
, but they are not really the same. Maybe we do not have this word?”

Eva places the iron on the leg of Adam’s jeans. The meaning of her word lapse seems
obvious: no one had offered her an after-school welcome.

When Eva looks up, it is with an expression that Myra has learned means she wants
to ask something but feels hesitant.

“Yes?”

“It would bother you if I listen when you give Omar the piano lesson?”

“No, of course not,” Myra says, though by the time she has walked the seven minutes
to Omar’s school and then waited in the crowd of mothers and nannies for the children
to be dismissed, she realizes, too late, it seems now, that she does not like the
idea at all.

The lesson is uneventful. Omar, as expected, is an attentive student. He quickly learns
the names of the piano keys, the C scale, and “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater.” By the
end of the half hour, while Myra has not forgotten Eva’s presence on the chair behind
them, she is no longer monitoring Eva’s response, so that it comes as an unwelcome
surprise when Myra gets up from the bench and sees Eva’s face, her eyes half-closed,
her chin tipped heavenward in what looks like rapture.

21

A week later, Myra tells Eva that she is going to start having her lunch in her office.
When she lived alone in the brownstone, she often made phone calls or looked over
her patient notes while she ate her lunch at the farm table. Now, with others again
in the house, her concern for her patients’ confidentiality no longer permits this.
Moreover, between Eva’s puppy-dog looks and Adam’s habit of plunking himself across
from her to launch a lengthy anecdote about the Amazonian rubber trade, she misses
the quiet hour she’d had to read and think and jot an occasional note for her own
work in progress.

“I bring it down to you,” Eva says.

“Thank you, but I can get it.”

“I can do it,” Eva insists.

And so it has come about that after her noon walk around the reservoir, Myra calls
out a hello to Eva and heads down the front stairs to shower in the tiny maid’s bath.
With her hair still wet, she returns to her office where she finds her lunch tray
on her ottoman. Like clockwork, at 2:20, ten minutes before Myra’s first afternoon
patient, Eva knocks on the rear office door, the door that leads to the back stairs
to the kitchen. Myra looks up from the phone or whatever work she is doing and smiles
as Eva retrieves the tray.

On the Friday that ends the first week of this new routine, Myra is reading in the
armchair where she sits while she sees her patients when Eva knocks.

Eva pauses, looking around. “This is where your patients sit?” She points to the armchair
across from Myra.

“Yes.”

Eva touches the tissue box on the table next to the patient chair.

“They cry?”

“Sometimes.”

“I can try the chair?”

“If you’d like.”

Eva lowers herself into the chair. She yawns like a sleepy cat. How many times has
Myra watched her patients respond to her office in this feline way, as though the
upholstery itself stimulates an evolutionary regression?

“This is nice,” Eva says. “I like it here.”

Myra picks up the napkin on her tray. She folds it into a triangle. Aware from years
of listening to patients talk about tempestuous relationships with nannies and housekeepers,
relationships often more fraught than marriages, she has been careful not to ask Eva
too much about herself, refraining from pursuing the clues.

“What do people talk about?”

“I can’t say specifically. Everything my patients tell me is confidential. But, in
general, people talk about what is bothering them.”

“But what bothers them?”

“Events from their past. Their relationships. Aspects of themselves.”

“When something bothers me, I ask God to take it away.”

“Well then, you’re lucky. Not everyone has your faith in God.”

A fierce look Myra has not seen before settles across Eva’s face. “I just said that.
God never helps me. God hates me, I think.”

“What do you mean?”

Immediately Myra regrets her question, the reflexive curiosity that she has come to
understand is experienced as love—a recognition of something not yet spoken. If she
believed in the kind of God Eva is talking about, she would ask to have the clock
skip back five seconds and the four-word invitation disappear.

“If God love me, he does not let my father do what he do to me.” Eva looks Myra straight
in the eye.

Myra feels her breath catch in her throat.

The buzzer rings. Myra glances at the clock on the table next to Eva.

Eva stands. She is a good girl. “I am sorry. I take your lunch now.” She picks up
the tray with the remains of a turkey sandwich and carries it to the door. When she
gets there, she turns halfway to look at Myra. “Do not worry, I won’t bother you anymore.”

22

By the time Myra comes upstairs from seeing patients, Eva has left for synagogue.
Saturday, Myra is out all day at a friend’s daughter’s wedding, and on Sunday, Eva’s
day off, Eva leaves early in the morning and doesn’t return until late.

On Monday, when Myra comes in from her midday walk, she calls out hello, but Eva doesn’t
respond. A tray is on the ottoman when she returns to her office after her shower.
When Eva has not come to retrieve it by 2:25, Myra carries it up the back stairs herself.

Eva is folding laundry on the farm table. The room feels strangely quiet, and it takes
Myra a moment to realize it is because Eva is not singing.

“Hello, Eva.”

Eva keeps her eyes locked on the clothes in front of her.

“Is something the matter?”

Eva shakes her head.

“You usually come for my tray.”

Eva shrugs her shoulders.

Myra stands watching the girl, trying to intuit what is going on inside her head,
the atmosphere charged like the positive-ion-laden air before a deluge. Myra says
the only thing she can feel any certainty about. “You seem not to want to talk with
me.”

With those words, Eva looks up. “We can do that? Not talk? You leave me a note about
what you want me to do.”

The truth is that Eva has verbalized precisely what Myra—at this moment, suddenly
terribly tired, wishing more than anything that she were alone, without Eva in her
kitchen, without her patient about to arrive—would love were it not so absurd, so
ominous. She would curl up on the couch and fall into an immediate sleep.

“It’s impossible not to ever talk.”

“You write on a piece of paper what I supposed to do. I read it.”

Myra inhales deeply, reeling her thoughts back from the world of desire to the reality
of her kitchen, of this mid-afternoon hour. “Perhaps you were upset that I didn’t
have the time on Friday to hear what you were starting to tell me?”

“I never talk to anyone. I never tell anyone. When I was little, I stop talking for
three years.”

“What do you mean?”

It takes Myra a moment to recognize that she has repeated her question from Friday.

Eva shakes out one of Omar’s T-shirts. She presses it flat with her hands.

“For three years, I say nothing to no one. My mother take me to a doctor, then to
a priest, then to this lady in the Belén market who makes medicines from herbs, but
I never talk.”

“You must have a lot to say bottled up inside.”

“Bottled up?”

“Things from the past that it would make you feel better to share with someone.”

Eva looks at her strangely, as Myra realizes how incomprehensible her words must be.
When new patients come to see her, they already know this. It is the premise for their
coming—either their own or that of the person who has encouraged or, in some unfortunate
cases, coerced them to come.

“No. I do not think it make me feel better. How does it make me feel better? Now I
think about loving God. I study Hebrew. I work to go to Israel.”

23

The next day, Eva knocks at precisely 2:20. Without looking at Myra, she sits down
in the patient chair.

“I will tell you everything now.”

Myra gets up from her seat and closes the door.

Eva pushes back her hair from over her ear, revealing an albumen-colored scar where
her hair meets her neck. “This is where I try to shoot myself. I use my father’s gun.”

Myra stares at the scar. She can feel her heart pounding. Out of her mouth comes the
brief humming interjection “Mmmm” she sometimes thinks is the most important thing
she does with her patients. “How old were you?”

“I was ten years old. The bullet didn’t go in. It just scrape the side of my head.
I never try again. My mother die a few months later and I don’t want to go to Hell.
I want to go to Heaven to see her.”

The buzzer rings. Eva stands. “Your patient is here.”

That night, at the piano, Myra cannot focus on the notes in front of her. She repeatedly
misses the beat for the turns on a Beethoven rondo, cannot keep in mind the flats
when she reaches the minor section. Her thoughts are on Eva. Is the girl too unstable
to take care of Omar? Could she possibly be a danger?

Who, though, behind the veil of social appropriateness, does not have a hidden story?
A teenage run-in with the law, a depression, a bankruptcy. It is naïve to think that
there is anyone who does not have ghosts in the attic. If a Good Housekeeping seal
of mental health were required to take care of a child, would Adam or Rachida or,
for that matter, Larry or herself, have made the grade?

Myra switches off the piano light and tidies her music books. She sits in the wing
chair that now faces the table where Adam works. Papers are scattered every which
way, books piled in precarious towers. The closet door is flung open, revealing lopsided
stacks of file boxes. She wishes she could simply tell Adam and Rachida what Eva has
told her and leave her questions with them. Had Eva shown Myra her scar and told its
story seated at the farm table, Myra would have felt able, but what is said behind
the closed door of her office, unless there is a clear danger at hand, belongs to
the speaker and is not hers to share. Besides, she knows what Adam and Rachida would
say about Eva. That she is wonderful with Omar—playful and loving and responsible.

When asked how to decide if a child needs treatment, Anna Freud had responded, If
his problems are interfering with his life. If a child is proceeding with the tasks
before him—his schoolwork, his friendships, his growing independence—leave him be.
Wouldn’t the same apply to an adult? If Eva is doing her job well, should she be penalized
for having had troubles as a child?

Too much talk
, Myra imagines Dreis saying.
Why so much explaining?

24

For the next two weeks, Eva comes to Myra’s office every day at precisely 2:20. Sometimes
she sits down, sometimes she does not. When she sits, she waits for Myra to give an
indication that she is ready to listen—a tilt of her head, a lift of an eyebrow. Sometimes
she stops before Myra’s buzzer rings. If not, the moment the buzzer rings, she stands
and heads upstairs to the kitchen with Myra’s tray.

The story unfolds piecemeal, like a photo collage where the images don’t quite match
up, fractured so the mind needs to connect the lines to make up a whole. A courtyard
behind the house where Eva’s family lived before her mother died. In the courtyard,
there was a chicken coop. Eva’s father forbade anyone other than himself to kill the
chickens.

“He drink from this brown bottle and then twist off their heads and throw the heads
on the cement for the cats to eat.” Eva shudders. “It was disgusting. In the morning,
I see bloody chicken heads outside the door.”

The next day: “When I do not eat the chickens, he come into my sister and my room
and wave his hands covered with the blood over me. He smear the blood all over my
blanket.”

Then on the Friday: “He smear it in my hair.”

It is 2:25. Eva has a faraway look in her eyes. “I scream so loud, my mother come
running in with a butcher’s knife. She chase my father outside into the courtyard.
He trip and chip his tooth. When he get up, he spit a piece of his tooth onto the
cement.”

Myra prays for her patient to be late.

“My father take the rifle he keep in the chicken coop. My sister hide under the bed,
but I watch from the door. He point the rifle at me, then at my mother. He shoot my
mother in the thigh.”

Eva holds her fingers a centimeter apart. “He miss the bone by this much. When my
mother get home from the hospital, he tell her, If you ever raise a knife at me again,
putano
, I will kill you. I will twist your neck like one of those chickens.”

The buzzer rings. Eva’s eyes follow Myra’s hand as she pushes the button to unlock
the outside door. Eva stands. She takes Myra’s tray. “When I scream the next time,
my sister run and my mother know not to come.”

After Eva leaves, Myra remains frozen in her chair. She feels the walls of her own
house closing on her.

All weekend, her mind goes in circles. On the one hand, she feels bound by the confidentiality
between therapist and patient. On the other hand, there are the strictures against
dual relationships: not treating an employee, a friend, a relative. But Eva never
stays in her office more than eight, nine minutes. How could these snippets of time
be considered a treatment?