August by Judith Rossner

Author:Judith Rossner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

10

IN HER FIRST MONTHS with Dr. Shinefeld that September, Dawn was cheerful, edgy, voluble, and determined to “forge on with this analysis business.” She would discuss with considerable freedom what it meant to have been an infant abandoned by the people who cared for her. She explored at length what it might have been like to be an eighteen-month-old alone in her crib for a period of nearly twenty-four hours.

“What it must have been like,” she said the second or third time it came up. And finally, “What it was like. I know it was like that even if I don’t remember it.”

Eventually she cried for that infant without choking and pronounced herself relieved at having gotten past “that vomiting business.”

What she would not discuss, aside from the woman who had given birth to her and against whom she had lain on a mattress for much of the first six months of her life, was the matter of being special to Dr. Shinefeld. She assured the doctor that there was no need to discuss it. It was a natural need, everyone had it, and besides, she’d actually found a boyfriend to whom she was that special, and now she was happy.

Dawn had succeeded in splitting off the baby self she was discovering, and putting it under a microscope where she could weep over what the slide revealed without seriously endangering the feelings of the twenty-year-old who surrounded and rested upon that infant.

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