Excessive Joy Injures the Heart by Elisabeth Harvor Page B

not very much. My guess is that you let people push you around.”
    He paced around her some more, speculating and frowning. She felt like a horse or a slave on the block, his gaze was so shrewd and total.
    “You would believe almost anything anyone told you,” he told her.
    She wanted to say to him “As a matter of fact I have very fierce opinions,” but instead she decided to smile at him to say, “I’ll believe anything. I even believe
you
as you’re telling me this.”
    He didn’t smile back. “Also, you keep your knees locked.”
    “Oh, do I? Why do I do that?”
    “Fear,” he answered, in a light voice.
    “Of what?”
    “Somebody was always at you when you were small, wouldn’t let you be.” And he knelt to her knees to unlock them. Then he looked up at her: “That’s right. Cry.”
    She tried to wipe her eyes with the backs of her hands.
    “But do you cry right? Do you cry with your body? Or are you just crying up in your head?”
    “I cry as quietly as I can, usually.”
    “Well yes,” he said in a professionally serious and gratified voice. “That’s what I see when I look at your body. A tremendous stillness. You’ve stilled your body so much. It’s as if your body is saying, ‘I’ll be quiet, I’ll be good, I won’t have temper tantrums, I’ll work hard, I’ll study hard and I’ll think, think, think.’ You must get very, very tired of being so good all the time.”
    Whereupon she was overwhelmed by such an ashamed pity for her falsely good self that it was a moment before she was able to answer him. But when she could she said, “I do.”

 
    W hen Claire came down into the room with the great tree on the wall the following Thursday afternoon, Declan was waiting for her. He even allowed her to babble on for a bit, but he didn’t really want her to talk, he wanted her to breathe, and to breathe properly. That was her job here.
    A tedious session of grounding and breathing exercises followed, then there was the work of breaking up the tension in her lower back and legs.
    The next appointment, for acupuncture, was in town, at the Institute. In one of the rooms at the back of the clinic she studied a bruise on her left thigh as she waited for Declan. She had always bruised easily, but before leaving home she’d circled the bruise’s mauve thumbprint with a ballpoint pen and drawn a furious little face inside it, and above the face a cartoon balloon containing the words THIS BRUTALITY MUST CEASE IMMEDIATELY!
    But he wasn’t alone. Another voice was coming down the hall along with his voice, and the owner of this other voice turned out to be a short bearded man in a lab coat. Hearing their voicesand then seeing them come in together, she felt ashamed. With this other doctor to witness it, her little joke would seem flirty and tacky. She kept the words on her thigh covered with the pressure of her left hand as Declan introduced the younger doctor to her. “Claire, this is Gus Gustavsen. I was just wondering if it would be okay with you if Gus had a little look at your eczema.”
    She looked up at the younger doctor. He had kind eyes, the eyes of a respectful medical sightseer. But she wanted him to go. She wanted them both to go. She decided to try for bravado. “I am not a leopard,” she said to Declan. “And so I don’t show off my spots. And I am not a leper either.” The younger doctor looked startled, but Declan only said, “That’s okay, Claire,” then told her that he’d be back with her in a minute or two. At this, the two men stepped out of the room to talk together in low voices out in the hallway.
    She couldn’t stop thinking what it would be like when he came back in to see her again. She was afraid he would dislike her for putting him on the spot about her spots, she was afraid he would dislike her for being so childish and rude to him in front of the visitor doctor. But the eyes of the younger doctor had been so expressive that she’d had a disloyal moment