By Carla Thomas
I began to lose confidence in Dr. Swain when I entered his waiting room for the first time and found it was painted pink. In all the years it must have taken him to finish his Ph.D. in psychology, you’d think he’d have learned something about the psychology of color. Pink is for little girls’ rooms, for powder rooms, for ladies’ rooms. Pink is the color fathers want to wrap their baby girls in. What was Dr. Swain doing, wrapping me in this pink room as though I were his daughter? His office would be tweeds and plaids, very masculine. The very image of daddy. And I, his little Electra, had come running to him for advice; for comfort, for… what? I wasn’t sure. But if I couldn’t think of anything to say during the session, I could at least discuss with him the implications of his pink waiting room.
Then there was the problem of his name. Swain. Too close to swindle. Or swine, or swear, or Twain, or maybe twain with a little t as in “we now join these twain in holy matrimony to be of one flesh forever and ever and ever.” Or maybe train. He left her on a freight train. In a jet plane. In the pouring rain. She’s going insane. I spent fifteen minutes in Dr. Swain’s pink waiting room practicing Word Association.
Throughout my senior year in college, throughout those hours of free counseling in the college’s interpersonal relations office during which I calmly and rationally discussed my fascination for steel knives, I had wanted to play Word Association. It was the funnest, easiest way to sanity. They say boy, you say girl. They say hot, you say cold. They say stop, you say go. Just like that, you pass the course and receive an eight by eleven certificate (suitable for framing) that certifies your sanity.
Not that I was now worried about my sanity. I’d been cured of my knife fascination in 1980 by the university counselor. And he hadn’t even had to use the Word Association game. Nor did he ask me if I hated my mother, though he seemed unusually interested in my father. The main thing the counselor and I accomplished was a rearrangement of sentence structure. He taught me to say “I get angry when I think of my childhood” instead of saying “my father makes me mad because he was never around when I needed him.”
“The importance of the ‘I’ statement cannot be overrated,” I was told by my counselor. “One must learn to take responsibility for his or her feelings.”
Back then, I was angry with my father, President Carter, my history professor, four of my five roommates, the Russians, my landlord, my landlord’s cat, etc. The counselor (he wanted me to call him Eric, but I never could) told me I was angry because I chose to be angry. He told me the same thing each Thursday at 2:30 for a year. And each Thursday at 3:30 I walked to my apartment feeling guilty about the way I had chosen to feel all my life. Finally, in what turned out to be our last session, I gathered all my hatred for President Carter, the Russians, my landlord’s cat, etc., and directed it at my counselor. I told him he was the biggest phony I’d ever seen, that the only thing his sessions had done for me was make me realize how sane and wonderful everyone else was in comparison to him. I have felt fine ever since.
So if I’m feeling so fine, what am I doing in Dr. Swain’s pink waiting room (the little girls’ room)? Why would anyone so undeniably certifiably sane as Hazel Nicely make an appointment with a psychologist whose name she doesn’t even like? Maybe, subconsciously, because I hate my own name, I feel comfortable only with those people whose names I hate as much as my own. Mother named me Hazel because my father had eaten hazelnuts throughout her pregnancy. Hazelnuts. Hazel’s nuts. Hazel is cracked. Hazel is rotten at the core.
An anemic-looking girl of about thirteen emerged from Dr. Swain’s office. I caught a glimpse of brown plaid furniture as the girl pulled the door closed. A minute later, the secretary’s red phone light blinked on and off twice and she smiled at me.
“Dr. Swain will see you now.”
