On Tuesdays, They Played Mah Jongg by Milton Stern

Author:Milton Stern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

10

Hannah was sitting at the kitchen table, looking down as she read the morning paper. There were a half empty cup of coffee and an ashtray to her left. Her left elbow rested on the table, and her left hand was next to her head with a lit cigarette and a dangerous length of ash. Whenever she smoked, ashes ended up everywhere. Her hair was in curlers, and she was wearing a velvet turquoise bathrobe with matching fuzzy slippers. She was also wearing no makeup …

~~~~~

“OK, I know it is cliché, Dr. Mikowsky, the turquoise robe, curlers and fuzzy slippers, but that is how she looked in the morning,” Michael said. “It was the one time of day she did not wear makeup.”

After a few sessions of Michael telling the story, Dr. Mikowsky was finally comfortable enough to interrupt his patient without fear of having him shut down and not finish. However, there were a couple of lingering issues. The screenplay was never finished. What if there is no end to the story? This breakthrough could go on for years. Michael could take the ending to his grave. He could have a fear of finishing the story.

“Alright, then a velvet turquoise bathrobe and matching slippers it is,” Dr. Mikowsky acquiesced to Michael. His mind then gave rise to another part of Michael’s story that disturbed him. Michael was telling the story as if he were there watching everything unfold. Could he be making it all up? As a therapist, Dr. Mikowsky knew it was not unusual for a patient to exaggerate and stretch the truth or even to lie outright. How could he find out whether this was the truth or not? So, in an unusual move for Dr. Mikowsky, he decided to take a break from listening to the story and ask Michael a few questions in order to clear up some of these issues.

“Michael, were you away at school during most of the time all this was happening?” the doctor asked him.

“Yes, until I graduated in May 1985, why?” Michael responded as he gave the doctor a puzzled look.

“It just seems that you were privy to conversations and situations that only an eyewitness could recount,” Dr. Mikowsky observed. He waited, for he knew he would either get a defensive or an irrational response.

Michael knew why the doctor was asking, for he himself wondered if the doctor would believe any of this story.

“I have always asked a lot of questions and had an almost too perfect memory,” Michael said. “Being the only gay child, or shall I say out-gay child, of my mother and her friends, the girls tended to confide in me more than anyone else. Let’s just say I had an inside track. They would tell me things they would not tell each other, their husbands or their own children. Since I really did not have many friends growing up, I was always with my mother and her friends, and this enabled me to become like one of them.

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