The Session

By Judith Kelman

Chapter 1

I should have said no or absolutely not or simply shaken my head in the unstinting negative. No was the correct answer, the one that could have averted the train wreck my life was about to become. But at that moment, it seemed out of the question to turn Jeannie Bagshaw down.

It was the first time she had asked me for anything. In fact, she had barely spoken a word to me until that fateful Monday nearly a year ago, when she showed up for her scheduled counseling session in my office at the Rose M. Singer Detention Center for Women on Riker’s Island, known to insiders as “Rosie”. Jeannie appeared in the doorway, a scrawny wraith capped by a riot of rust-colored, broken Slinky curls, as I was heading out to see her in her cell. Until then, that was the sum and substance of every one of our bi-weekly sessions: I saw Jeannie, though not at all clearly, as she cowered beneath the bottom bunk in her cell, hugging her pale skinny legs, scared eyes skittering in the shadows like spooked mice. Time after time, I stood for the allotted hour and talked to her, coaxing and encouraging, hoping the sheer weight of my stubborn persistence might somehow get through.

But it had not, not once in the eight months since she arrived on the Rock, as Riker’s was often called, after her arrest for acting crazy in the wrong part of town. You simply did not pull off your clothes and stand naked in the beam of a blazing streetlamp in front of the elegant Sutton Place brownstone of Mr. And Mrs. Allston Grainger, IV, especially not in the middle of Alls and Taffy’s annual black tie fundraiser to benefit orphans from some appallingly poor (though thankfully, very faraway!) country. You certainly didn’t screech like a hoot owl while exposing your pale, scarred, bony form, stealing attention from the brilliant Natalya Sahkarova’s rousing performance in the Grainger’s parlor of Brahms’s “Double Concerto for Cello and Violin”. According to the report of the incident that had crossed my desk, Sakharova was nobody’s definition of a good sport.

As the psychologist assigned to Jeannie on the so-called Women’s Mental Observation Unit, my job was to determine why she had pulled such a stunt and determine what nifty pill or magical insight might guarantee that she would stay clothed and invisible to people like the Graingers once she was released. But until that fateful morning, about all I’d managed to elicit from her was the occasional sneeze.

So imagine my astonished delight to find her standing at my office threshold in a pea green T shirt and khaki cargo pants. She held out her child-sized left hand to show off the white Twist Tie bound to her ring finger and announced that she and Lolly Rasweiller were engaged.

“To be married,” she said in an eerie, dead-ball monotone. “Week from tomorrow.”

“Married?”

“Lolly and me. Down in the day room. Twelve noon.”

That’s when I should have said no. Though I’d never run across such an edict, what Jeannie proposed was almost certainly against one, or perhaps several, of the encyclopedic prison rules, not to mention asking for all manner of trouble. This was a psych ward, after all, the very definition of all that was dangerous, unpredictable and unknown.

“Why don’t you have a seat and tell me more about it.”

“Lolly and me.”

“Yes, Jeannie. Tell me about you and Lolly. I’d love to hear.”

She stood rooted in the doorway, staring past me at the featureless gray wall.

“Come in and sit, Jeannie. Please.”

“Tuesday.”

Her eyes were sinkholes, sucking light from the harsh fluorescents overhead. Not yet twenty-three years old, and life had long since tripped the breaker in her soul.

“Honestly, I think it should wait until we’ve had a chance to talk it through.”

“In the day room. Tuesday. Noontime. After ‘The View’”.

“I hear that you want to do this, Jeannie. But we first we ought to talk about why, try to figure out what it means for you.”

Her gaze fell. “Dearly beloved,” she explained to the desk. “We are gathered here.”

“You know it wouldn’t be real or hold any legal weight. Plus, legally, you’re already married.”

She tensed so hard her stick limbs quaked. “No!”

“All right,” I soothed. “Let’s put that aside for now. The wedding is only part of the issue. What happens next if you do this? We have to consider the consequences. Think about how things might change."

"Dearly beloved. Tuesday. Twelve noon.”

“I have to give this some thought, Jeannie. Why don’t I do that and let you know in a couple of days?”

Now her lusterless eyes locked on mine and her face spawned a pained, crooked grin. “Something for Jeannie.”

That hit me hard. Precious little in her life had been for Jeannie. Her intake report chronicled a history of unimaginable abuse. Born to rabid fundamentalists who had seen her flame-red hair as the Devil’s mark, she’d been variously threatened, whipped, neglected and reviled. Her parents had invented unthinkably brutal means to exorcise Jeannie’s demons. They’d held her head under the bathwater until she turned blue; made her sleep outside in the dead of winter; and forced her to fast for days on end.

Jeannie’s first attempted escape was a tragically-misguided marriage before she turned sixteen to a local boy named Charlie Booth. Booth turned out to be another sadistic nutcase, whose brutality made her parents’ seem benign. My strong suspicion is that Jeannie finally took leave of her senses to get away from Booth. Or at least, she tried.

“For Jeannie,” she echoed. A rare trace of resolve infused her expression; and I caught a hint of what she might have been in a world devoid of horrific cruelty: a puckish, pretty, headstrong little girl.

And so, I mutely went along. I failed to say no to her. And that started it all.