“Yep,” Franny said, trying to sound cheerful and game, but her voice came out surprisingly untried.
“Okay. Well, then, let me just say this. The point is for it to feel good, right? There is no other point whatsoever. You don’t have to try and figure out what it means, or whether we’re going to be in a relationship, because I’ll tell you right now we’re not.”
“Got it,” said Franny, and then before she knew what was happening, Alana dove down upon her, her mouth between her legs—yikes, a woman’s mouth between her legs, licking her there with knowledge and patience and need. The strong sensation was instantaneous, like the moment when a mask with anesthesia is put over your face, or in this case a mask with reverse anesthesia, in which you feel more and not less. She easily went under.
Franny never saw Alana again, but she did go back to Ben-Her three more times before her parents discovered where she had been going during those trips into the city. One night senior year, she took Metro-North home from Manhattan as usual, and walked into the house on Heather Lane to find her mother waiting in the kitchen in a peach-colored bathrobe, though she might just as easily have been in her black judicial robe. Judge Wendy Eisenstat looked at her with serene confidence and said, “You haven’t been seeing Broadway shows. That was a lie about crying at the end of Phantom of the Opera. Let’s get that clear. I know you’ve been going to a women’s bar, using a fake ID, which is illegal.”
“How?” Franny asked in a light wail.
“Linda Mariani has been stealing office supplies from my chambers. Nothing big, mostly a lot of Hewlett-Packard inkjet cartridges, but we had to let her go because they add up. And as security escorted her out, she turned to me in front of everyone, mind you, in front of everyone, and said, ‘By the way, Judge, your daughter is gay. Ask her where she goes on all those trips into the city.’”
So all was revealed, and Franny and the judge both became teary. “I wish I hadn’t found out from my law clerk,” her mother said. Finally it was decided that Franny should see a therapist in order to “sort everything out.” After their conversation was over, Franny’s father, who had been hiding in the den, gently approached her. “Your mother’s manner is kind of absolute,” he said. “If it’s any consolation,” he added with a small laugh, “she’s that way on the bench, too. But just know we both believe in you and love you a lot. You’ll do fine.” He gave her a hug.
A few days later, Franny agreed to see Dr. Marjorie Albrecht, who had a therapy practice in the basement of her nearby Larchmont home. Dr. Albrecht was a former member of the Tri-State Modern Dance Troupe who was now working as a psychotherapist. She was a willowy, sun-damaged woman who wore leotards at all times, and who, even when she was listening to you intently, might do a casual arm-stretch over her head. Most of her clients were teenage girls—girls with eating disorders; girls with anger issues; girls who cut themselves shallowly but meaningfully in order to feel better. Girls who hated their mothers or fathers; girls who were disappearing into a morass of self-hate and hair in the face; girls with bad-news boyfriends. Dr. Albrecht also had a good number of patients with sexual identity issues.
Franny was at first defiant at having to go see her, but soon she came to like the early-evening sessions. Her mother would drop her off at the curb and drive to Starbucks and read a brief while Franny went in and sat and talked with the therapist, who at some point would suggest that they could “make some movement” while they discussed whatever was on Franny’s mind.
“I really loathe being called Franny,” she confided one day as they swept around the basement studio with its gleaming wooden floors and its mirror and barre. Somewhere overhead came the footfalls of the family Albrecht.
“So change it,” said the therapist, leaping diagonally across the room and landing like a cat.
“I can’t. I was named for Franny and Zooey, a book my parents love. It would hurt them too much.”
“Oh, they’ll live.”
“Maybe I could be Zooey,” she said shyly, and Dr. Albrecht grabbed her hand and they twirled. So Zooey it was, for a week. The name proved too . . . zooey, too animalistic, and ultimately too ugly. With Dr. Albrecht, she discovered that she didn’t dislike being female, she just disliked the metonymy of this lightweight female name standing in for all womankind. If you heard that someone was named Franny, she thought, you might assume some things about her—such as that she was totally feminine and perhaps prone to blushing—and you might be wrong. It was while dancing around that room the next time that she decided to collapse Zooey into Zee.
It was amazing that her name had come from those sessions with Dr. Albrecht, but more amazing still that a betrayal would come from them too. This would take years to discover. Off at Ryland College, where Zee had gone after being such a middling student in high school, she was in the library getting a book for her psychology class, when she accidentally came upon a volume with its author’s name stamped in large gold letters on the spine. MARJORIE ALBRECHT, PHD, she read, shocked. “Whoa,” Zee said aloud in the stacks. The book had a long boring psychological title.
She opened it and began to read. Each chapter was a different case study. Chapter 3 was called “A Girl Named Kew: Lesbianism as Mask and Mirror.”
“Whoa,” she said again.
“Kew” was raised by a workaholic mother who put her profession before parenting, and who likely struggled with her own gender issues, and a father who was removed and gentle and passive, hardly providing the template for a young girl’s future passions and fantasies, but instead staying obstinately weak and distant.
Is it any wonder that this young girl came to my consulting room so confused about her sexuality, and so reluctant to accept her femaleness, that she actually announced she was going to change her name to one that, like the garb she chose to wear, sadly bore no traces of femininity?
My heart ached for this very young patient who could not let herself enjoy the wonders of her own female self or embrace the love of men. It seemed to me that she had entered treatment too late, and that she would have no choice but to lead a “gay” lifestyle, unconsciously denying herself that which had been denied her and which she craved with a hunger she could never even feel.
We did a great deal of movement together, “Kew” and I, and in the furious motions she made I could sometimes see the real heterosexual self that wanted to be seen but sadly did not know how.
By the time Zee had finished reading, she was crying out quietly in injustice and insult. And when the light in the narrow aisle between metal bookshelves suddenly clicked off with a soft little catch like a release of breath, Zee was relieved. She thought she might pass out in the musty dark. Never had she felt as misrepresented, and yet she still couldn’t shake it off, and had to wonder if any or all of what Marjorie Albrecht had written was true. If Zee’s need to occupy the place she had essentially created—a zone where a person could have a name like “Zee” or “Kew” and wear a tuxedo shirt and yet not consider herself a cross-dresser or in any way be doing a weak imitation of men, but merely be finding for herself the most natural and graceful way to exist in the world—was in fact a result of something having gone psychologically wrong. She didn’t tell anyone about the book except for Greer, nor did she return it to the shelf. Instead she casually checked it out of the library and brought it to the dorm, and in front of Greer, despite fire regulations, she took a cigarette lighter and calmly set the book ablaze.
“We used to dance together,” Zee said softly, remembering the lovely feeling of flying across that room. “That’s why I’m a good dancer. But I can’t believe she wrote this.”