FISH TANK

I was wild, raw, still crazed with grief twelve years after my son had fallen from a wall in Rome and died alone in the night. Despite the details gleaned from the embassy and investigation, the autopsy, his teachers in the junior year abroad program and the friend who was with him that night, his death remained an unsolved mystery in my mind. I thought I’d tried everything possible to heal myself—becoming a shaman, falling in love with a woman, writing poetry, traveling the world, going to therapy, living alone on an island for nine months, meditating long hours on Buddhist retreats. But my world continued crumbled and unredeemed. My husband and I grieved differently, so often found it difficult to offer the comfort we so badly needed to each other.

     I was stuck in a black hole, blind and dumb, staring at what Pema Chodron, esteemed Buddhist scholar and teacher, called “the gorilla in the mirror.”

     Me.

     I couldn’t bear what I saw. 

     Someone, maybe one of my therapy clients, gave me a book, Ophelia Speaks, a collection of first person pieces written by teen girls. I ripped through it, remembering the inner city girls I’d taught so long ago, my adolescent clients, and how I’d loved them. The girls in the book--their pain felt like my pain, somehow. And they were writing about it, pouring out their stories as I’d been prompting the women in my writing workshops to do.

     Around the same time I heard about Touchstone, a residential treatment center for girls that had opened up in a town not too far from mine. I thought, Maybe I could go there, volunteer myself, start a group, get the girls to write about their lives ?

     I called the place and talked with the director about my idea. We agreed to meet the following week.

****

      I pulled into a small parking lot across from an impressive stone mansion. This must be Touchstone, I thought, startled to see such a non-institutional looking building. Suddenly chilly in the Indian summer heat, I pushed the buzzer at the locked front door several times before someone came. A strikingly pretty and very young woman opened it, a little out of breath.

     “Hi, I’m Lori,” she said, looking at me a little questioningly. It was almost fifteen minutes past the time I’d promised to arrive on this mid-September day in 1999.

     “I got a bit lost,” I said. “So sorry to be late.”

     “No problem,” she said, “Come on in, I’ve got to make lunch for the kids. We can talk while I cook.”

     Lori led me past the stairs she’d just run down, through a dismal room housing a bunch of brown wood tables and chairs--a dining room, maybe--to a big business-like kitchen full of stainless steel. She opened the oven of the enormous commercial stove to slide in several baking sheets full of frozen tater tots. Corn was heating up on the gas burner in a big pot. There was no one else in sight.

    “They’re at school,” she said, hearing the question in my mind. “They’ll come up for lunch around 12:30. So we can talk until then.”

     I was confused. Why was the director making lunch? Why was she so impossibly young? I didn’t know then how great the director turnover would be at Touchstone. The facility had just opened a few years ago, and was a fledgling attempt at the first all-girls residential treatment center in Connecticut. Gayle Brooks, a long-time Department of Children And Families senior staff member, who’d believed in gender-sensitive treatment rather than punitive incarceration for girls in trouble with the law, had looked for a piece of Connecticut real estate that might be appropriate for a small pilot program for these girls. The North American Family Institute had purchased this 57-acre property, a former psychiatric institution for rich people, in the wealthy country town of Litchfield.

     Lori had begun working here as a staff member right after college. She later told me three residents had locked her in a closet the first year, that no one had really known quite what they were doing, and that it had been the daily crises that had educated the young staff in how to figure out a program and structure that contained the obstreperous girls.  She’d been made director just recently, at twenty-six.

     Lori and I sat at one of the wooden dining tables inset with blue Formica. The day was hot and there was no air-conditioning. I was surprised at her outfit, a light tank top and capris, having imagined a director who wore a suit or dress.

   “Gee, you’re looking nice and cool in this heat,” I said.

   “Oh, we’re pretty casual around here, “ she said, pulling off a scrunchie and remaking her blonde ponytail.

     I put out my CV and some writing retreat brochures on the table, feeling I needed to authenticate myself. She didn’t look down.

     “I’ve been doing writing workshops with women for years,” I said, a little fast. “I’d really like to try working with teen girls, and I’ve always wanted to work with the incarcerated. “Um, I’d volunteer, of course,” I added hastily.  

     “Well, what exactly do you want to do?” she asked. Here it comes, I thought. She won’t like the idea, or will say it couldn’t work here. I sat up straighter, trying to look more serious.

    “Well, um, I thought I would meet with all the girls, do a sample presentation of what I’d like to do each week with them, you know, get them to write, and then see who wants to be part of a weekly writing group”.

     “That sounds fine. Why don’t you come next Monday after school, around 3:00? How long do you think it will take to do one group?”

     “Well, I’m not sure. Maybe an hour, hour and a half?”

     “Okay, we’ll do it all in a day, then. We’ll try two groups of ten girls each. All right? I’ve got to get those tater tots out before they burn.”

     “Sure, okay, fine, Lori. So I’ll come here at 3:00, then, on Monday?”

     Somehow I had thought we’d talk longer, that she would have wanted to know more about exactly what I would do, about me, question me further. That our meeting would have been more, well, official.    

     “Yes, we’ll meet in the living room, right across the way. See you then.”

     “Do you think I could look at the room before I leave?” I could feel her needing to move on to the next task, but I was compelled to stay longer, get more of a sense of the place, prepare myself for the meeting with the young women I hadn’t really been sure she’d agree to. Suddenly, it seemed what I’d hoped for so impulsively was going to actually happen.

     “Sure”, she said, “It’s right across the hall.” She pulled open a heavy metal door and gestured towards the large dark room.  A gurgling fish tank sat in a corner, and a bunch of scruffy chairs were scattered about on the rugless floor. A massive fireplace, remnant of a time this had been someone’s home, dominated the shadowy space. It seemed as oddly out of place as I was.

     “Take a look; I’ve got to go, the girls will be coming up soon.” Lori smiled and shook my damp hand, turned and went back to the kitchen.

     I stood in there staring at the fish tank. It contained a large, solitary orange fish that swam in slow, rhythmic circles.

     It had seemed too easy, getting Lori to say yes to my idea. I hadn’t had to offer any credentials, tell her I’d worked as a therapist for twenty years, was a published poet.

     As I stood there staring at the fish, working with this group of girls began to seem like an unthinkable task. Suddenly I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to do this new thing that might actually shift the focus of my life out from under its leaden coat of mourning. After all, nothing else had worked. “Mother of a dead son” had become my definition, the pain that weighted my days a connection to my son I was unwilling to surrender.

     I remembered Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron’s gorilla in the mirror. It was hard to look at mine. How could I face a whole roomful of tough, suspicious girls and keep myself together? They would probably see right through me, a gray-haired white woman so much older than they were, trying to get some relief from her own pain. Maybe there was no way I was ready to do this.

     I walked back to my car, stomach caved in on itself, head clanging. When I opened the door, I dropped my bag, everything spilling out onto the cracked and heaving pavement of the parking lot.