The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller Read Free Book Online Page A

off from the suddenly former object of her affection as swiftly as a pair of scissors severing two sausage links. Back to square one.
    She blamed Ben for it all – smart, funny, endearing, infuriating Ben. No one would ever make her laugh so much; no one couldpeer at the world with the same good-natured, even loving derision. After a couple of weeks of looking at this same observation from different angles, her sessions with Dr Kreutzfeldt were drying up. Grace was embarrassed by the triviality of her problem. She chided herself for even initiating the therapy, but now she felt obliged to keep it up. She began to resent Dr Kreutzfeldt. She became sullen and uncommunicative during the sessions, staring out the window at the students walking from the library to the dorms, the dorms to the math building.
    This behavior piqued Sarah Kreutzfeldt’s interest. She had always sensed some subterranean explosion in the girl, a mine going off so far inside her that even she was unaware of it. When Grace first stomped into her office, she was surprised. This girl did not seem like Larken material. A very small university, Larken catered to the privileged painters, writers, critics, poets, and performance artists of the future. The teaching was not so much rigorous as expansive, the teachers stretching their courses to the point of deformity in order to encompass the whimsy of the students. Terms like participatory and student- centered took top billing in the school brochure. Most of the students had a vague, haunted look, like possums disturbed from their burrows in the middle of the day. They walked through campus slowly, in a haze of half-digested ideas, each convinced of his or her own inherent flair. By contrast, Grace had a sharp, intense countenance. Her eyes were very focused; her walk was a march. She seemed hyperawake.
    Dr Kreutzfeldt knew there was something besides her twin at work in this girl’s psyche. She wasn’t sick; she was stuck. There was some knot in her that needed to be loosened. Not sure where to begin, Dr Kreutzfeldt started with the obvious: the parents. Grace shrugged and spoke of Herb with affection, Pippa with a mix of regret and disdain. This mother was clearly a doormat, Dr Kreutzfeldt thought, internally shaking her head. She never would understand some women. The kids grow up, and then what?Yet she sensed strong emotion in Grace when she talked about her mother. Her cheeks flushed, she looked away. Kreutzfeldt sensed an emotional morass obscured by irony cool as a blanket of metal filings. Something had happened with the mother.
    Over the weeks, gently, shifting her weight slightly in her armchair, her attractive, full face tilted slightly as she spoke, Dr Kreutzfeldt guided Grace back, again and again, to what she saw as a kind of crossroads of character. For the first few years of her life, Grace had been extremely close to her mother. She remembered screaming when Pippa went out to dinner, craving her smell, her embrace, treasuring the time they spent together playing on the beach or just staring out the window. Yet by the time Grace was eight or nine, a vast, arid divide had opened up between them. Dr Kreutzfeldt kept returning to the period she had come to refer to as ‘the turning point’ in Grace’s relationship with her mother, hoping that some illuminating memory would spring from the girl’s mind. But there was nothing. And then one day, out of nowhere it seemed, after a long silence, Grace looked out the window and said softly, ‘I don’t think my mother likes me very much.’
    Dr Kreutzfeldt was taken aback. ‘But she seems to be almost slavishly devoted to you,’ she said.
    â€˜She is,’ said Grace. ‘But there’s a part of her that she always held back. Not with Ben. Just with me.’
    â€˜And you are angry with her for rejecting you,’ offered Dr Kreutzfeldt.
    â€˜I suppose,’ said Grace with a slight sneer. And