That box of her books felt like a profound and precious gift from the universe, an omen of the most auspicious kind.
I knew nothing about my therapist’s life, and yet she performed a similar role in mine that queer books did-her short hair and her kind face, her soft butchness, were all a promise that I, too, could be a happy and kind adult lesbian, professionally fulfilled, unshocked or dismayed at the sort of melancholies that I suffered at fifteen. They were my raison d’être, my friends, my window into a future that might fit me. There was nothing more personal than books, then. I leaned back in my vinyl seat, stunned, the ferry motor humming beneath me. I flipped open each of the books and found it in every one. It wasn’t until I had lugged them onto the ferry and relished a closer inspection that I spotted the name scrawled in pencil on the inside cover of Rubyfruit Jungle (a copy of which I had already borrowed from my mother’s bookshelf and read multiple times). I bought the whole box, probably twenty paperbacks, for five bucks. To judge by the cover, it was, even at first glance, everything I wanted in a book, both as a reader and a writer: at fifteen, I had already been thinking of myself as a writer for some years. The combination of the title-somehow brainy and sexy at the same time, exactly the combination I already aspired to be myself-and the cover art, a woman’s bare shoulder and neck, her head turned away from the viewer, tendrils of dark hair loose against her neck and, I imagined, slightly damp with sweat, woke some feeling in me. Of these unfamiliar titles I lingered longest over Written on the Body,by Jeanette Winterson. I recognized some of them from my mother’s shelf or the public library- The Price of Salt and The Well of Loneliness-but was surprised by the pulpier romances with blooming flowers on the covers, and Sarah Schulman’s After Dolores and Girls, Visions and Everything, which became a formative favorite. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey there, a 1964 Bantam edition with “75¢” printed on the cover, which I still own-but this was a jackpot beyond all reason. The store’s book section had already yielded some excellent finds on Wednesdays past-I first encountered J. One rainy spring Wednesday about six months into this routine, as I browsed the thrift store, I found a miraculous box of books. And so went every Wednesday of the subsequent year, almost exactly that way, including the hug. Then I hitchhiked back to Vineyard Haven, browsed a pretty decent thrift store, and rode the ferry back to my bike. “It seems like we should hug.” So we did. “How do you feel like saying goodbye?” she said. Over the next hour, I told her about my maudlin teenaged love affair, my arguments with my sea captain father, and my concerns about “authenticity to self” (a phrase I recently found in a childhood journal on a list of “things to talk to my therapist about”).Īt the end of the hour, I asked my therapist how we were supposed to say goodbye after our sessions. Her alert and intelligent expression reminded me of a small woodland animal, in a good way. Soon, a small woman with a kind face and a short haircut came to fetch me. I hitchhiked the few miles to my therapist’s office and sat in the bland waiting room. I stood on the deck, fog dampening my cheeks as the long smear of the island resolved into the docks of Vineyard Haven, the bright yellow raincoats of the ferry workers guiding us into port.
Free of the constraints of the school day, I rode my bike one Wednesday to the ferry station and purchased a ticket to cross the Vineyard Sound. The lesbian therapist my mother found lived and practiced on Martha’s Vineyard, a short ferry ride from our town on Cape Cod. It would not be the first time I’d go to therapy, but the first time I’d go of my own volition. My mother, herself a psychotherapist, set out to find one. When I was fifteen, recently dropped out of high school, and in love (with another girl) for the first time, I told my mother that I wanted a therapist.