The Swans
By Elizabeth Smith
“Are your worries ever extreme?” Dr. Hutchins asked, the image of his face projecting from the large desktop computer.
Lisa paused. What worry was ever not extreme? When she worried her twins would choke on grapes, she pureed them into slushies until her kids’ third birthday. When her car got rear-ended on the off-ramp, she avoided the highway for months. What about the time she started her emergency fund after her sister was evicted? Lisa spent a few years going without takeout on weekends, so she could put that money aside in an extra savings account until it reached $15,000. Was that over the top, or was that just common sense?
Was signing the bloated life insurance policy for her and Ethan too much? Probably. Ethan already had life insurance through his benefits at work, and Lisa’s job wasn’t a huge deal, just a little side hustle for vacations and the occasional maintenance repair. With the current pandemic, there was that cleanliness issue. She kept disinfectant wipes in every bathroom now and aired out the house whenever the weather permitted. She stopped buying the cheap, natural cleaners. No, the pandemic called for bleach, isopropyl alcohol, ammonia—none of the gentle stuff.
She fidgeted in her desk chair. Surely Dr. Hutchins was expecting a ready answer by now. Lisa rummaged through her recent worries to see what she could find. The day the governor announced the pandemic-induced shutdown, Lisa got off work late. By the time she got to Target, the only thing left in the produce section was lemons. Lemons! She couldn’t feed her family on lemons; nobody could. Lisa was not going to let that happen again. That spring, she dug out the lawn in the backyard and planted corn, tomatoes, peppers, beets, onions, peas, strawberries, and herbs. She bought a canner and hoped that by October, her pantry would be full to the brim regardless of the state of the supply chains. Maybe that was extreme.
She considered mentioning the creekside trail. Everything had been pulled so tight. Her twins had refused to attend school online, so Lisa ordered some books and became their new teacher. The spare room became Ethan’s office, so they set up “school” in a corner of the living room and put the family desktop computer on a folding table in the master bedroom. The kids were constantly too noisy for Ethan, yet there was hardly anywhere for them to go. While her husband was in his meeting with the executives one Thursday, Lisa walked with the twins along the creekside trail. There was a pit bull without a leash up ahead, its owner several yards behind. Lisa considered all she knew about the breed—the insensitivity to pain, the quick urge to anger, the attacks without warning, the incredibly strong jaw. The dog never attacked, never barked, yet its very presence without the leash threw Lisa into a tearful heap in the bushes.
Lisa could feel Dr. Hutchins’s gaze, despite his eyes being slightly off center on the screen, due to the placement of his webcam.
“Um,” she began.
“What was that? Is your mic still on?”
“Y-yes,” she said. “I mean, no. I don’t think my worries are extreme.”
The doorknob wiggled, and Madison skipped into her mother’s home office, her braids bouncing. She plopped an armful of letters and junkmail onto the desk and asked for a snack. After Lisa’s coaxing, Madison sulked away to get the snack herself from the kitchen pantry. Lisa glanced down at the envelope on the top of the stack. It was from the women’s clinic. A wave of stomach acid splashed up her esophagus, as she recalled her most recent appointment for a pap smear. She slouched.
No wonder I’m wasting my afternoon on a video call, she thought. I get all shook up by an envelope.
Their session dragged on as Dr. Hutchins explained the link between physical exercise and release of anxieties. Lisa nodded politely, suppressing the desire to say she works up a sweat in the small farm in her yard.
“There’s really nothing wrong with you,” he said. “You’re simply anxious and don’t have your normal tools to deal with it.” Then he emailed digital files of worksheets for her to try that week.
Of course, a few days later Lisa saw the headline. A man named George Floyd suffocated underneath a police officer’s knee. Ethan reassured her that it happened way out in Minneapolis and that it had been years since an officer questioned either of them because of their race. But then there were protests just downtown that started peaceful but ended with looting and riots. Someone even lit a car on fire.
Lisa printed the worksheets. The first was about her earliest memories relating to anxiety and worry. She filled out the first page, but when she noticed there were four more left, she slid the papers in the trash.
The next worksheet was about her values and priorities. She circled and scratched out words on a long list. Fifteen minutes had passed by the time she reached the next section, prompting her to write her daily activities and routine. She wrote so quickly that the ink splattered from her pen. Those pages—along with the pen—also fell into the can.
The last worksheet looked more promising. The first question: What event has triggered your fear? Lisa’s answer, written with a freshly sharpened pencil: “The death of a man who looks somewhat like my husband and the looting of innocent businesses.” The second: What belief is behind this fear? Lisa rapped the eraser on her desk. “If this could happen anywhere,” she wrote, “why not here and why not to my family?”
She looked at that question, slightly smudged because she was left handed. She heard music wafting in through the open window. Her neighbor was working on his car again. When Lisa approached the window, the sun threatened her from an open, cloudless sky. She pulled the glass shut and yanked blinds downward, but it didn’t change the sense of urgent danger, the sense that she was exposed and vulnerable, naked while fully clothed. She pushed the chair away and lay on the carpet beneath the folding table.
Lisa heard a pitter patter of little feet in the hallway. Max thundered through the door, and upon seeing his mother, nestled himself between her and the wall. Madison joined with her sleeve of crackers. Max stretched his arms across his mother toward the snack, and soon Ethan peered beneath the desk. He attacked the children with tickles, and after they dispersed, Lisa remained.
“What you thinking about?” he asked.
Lisa stared at the underside of the desk. “I’m thinking we should get a gun—just in case.”
Ethan chuckled. “We’re not getting a gun.”
“It would just be for emergencies.”
He held up his index finger, holding back more laughs. “We’re not getting a gun.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know. Lisa, you would worry about the kids being safe with the gun around. You’d be afraid to clean the damn thing because of that accident that almost killed Jerry. You’d take weeks to decide where to lock up the ammunition.”
Lisa blinked, and her lips formed a tight smile against her will.
“You know, you don’t have to do the whole therapy thing just because,” Ethan said.
“You mean just because you say so.”
“Well, when you put it that way.” Ethan held out his hand and helped his wife come out from under the desk.
As the last few weeks of spring rolled into the summer, Lisa noticed a pattern in her appointments with Dr. Hutchins. He would ask about the events of her week, and she would detail her reactions and symptoms. He would take notes, lecture about the workings of the mind and body, and send over a relevant document, usually in the form of another worksheet.
On a particularly hot afternoon, Lisa wore short-shorts—Dr. Hutchins would only see her top half anyway—and turned the ceiling fan on full blast. It was spinning so quickly that the chain clicked constantly. Lisa’s neck glistened with sweat as she struggled to concentrate on the doctor’s explanation of the day. He might have noticed her glazed look. He asked a question.
“Sorry. Can you repeat that?” Lisa said.
“What do you want?”
What kind of a question is that? Lisa thought. What do I want from the sessions? From him? Was Dr. Hutchins fed up? Or is this one of those existential questions—what do I want with my life? She blinked and opened her mouth but could not come up with a response.
“Well, I’ll let you think about that.” He finally said. “Let me know your thoughts next week.”
Early the next morning, Lisa speedwalked with Raycelan, her friend from work, as part of her effort to exercise more with the gym being closed. They huffed and chatted through their masks along the route Lisa had laid out.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” Lisa said, “what do you want?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just something my shrink asked me.”
“Oh, OK.” Raycelan’s eyelashes fluttered. “I want to own the home I live in.”
“Ray, your house is a dump.”
“Yeah. So what if it’s old. I want to do whatever I want with it. No landlord telling me I can’t repaint the bathroom purple or plant a shade tree.”
“You want to own your home,” Lisa repeated.
Soon they looped around the neighborhood and ended their three miles at Raycelan’s place.
A house, Lisa thought as she stretched her hamstrings, what a load of bull.
The morning was still cool, surprisingly. Lisa looked down the road to the trailhead toward the creek. She calculated the odds of seeing the dog again. There might be the wild sunflowers she had seen a few years ago. But there might be that pit bull—or any other pitt bull—without a leash. Lisa checked her watch: she still had plenty of time to walk another mile until Ethan had to log in for work. In her fanny pack was pepper spray. She drew a shaky breath. The shade of the trees looked relieving. She headed for the dirt path.
Sure, Ray could paint her bathroom and put in that tree, but she’d have to pay for a new water heater.
Lisa stepped onto the trail shaded by old, twisting oaks. The sun peeked through a cloud, causing the ground to appear polka-dotted with light. When she rounded the bend, a trailrunner zipped past, huffing. A woman with two Jack Russel Terriers came in the opposite direction. Lisa stiffened as the little dogs yapped at her, but all was fine in the end.
She wants a house! That golden ball and chain.
When she reached the pond, she stopped. A flock of swans was swimming. They were gigantic, gliding along the surface of such a small body of water, and they were clean, with crisp feathers, the image of quietude. One dipped its head down and reemerged smacking on grub and shaking off the droplets. Lisa had never seen anything so rare or majestic at the little neighborhood pond; usually there were geese and mallards, maybe the occasional wood duck. She unzipped her pocket to take a photo on her phone, but the image on the screen did not carry the contrast of color, the morning dew, or the warmth of the summer sunlight.
As she looked at the birds, Lisa was glad a mortgage couldn’t get her what she wanted. In fact, no one could truly give her what she wanted, not even a professional like Dr. Hutchins.
“This is what I want,” she said aloud. “This moment, just as it is.”
Soon it was time to move on, and for the next fifteen minutes along that creekside trail toward home, Lisa didn’t have a single worry that was extreme.
Inspired by E. B. White
“Are your worries ever extreme?” Dr. Hutchins asked, the image of his face projecting from the large desktop computer.
Lisa paused. What worry was ever not extreme? When she worried her twins would choke on grapes, she pureed them into slushies until her kids’ third birthday. When her car got rear-ended on the off-ramp, she avoided the highway for months. What about the time she started her emergency fund after her sister was evicted? Lisa spent a few years going without takeout on weekends, so she could put that money aside in an extra savings account until it reached $15,000. Was that over the top, or was that just common sense?
Was signing the bloated life insurance policy for her and Ethan too much? Probably. Ethan already had life insurance through his benefits at work, and Lisa’s job wasn’t a huge deal, just a little side hustle for vacations and the occasional maintenance repair. With the current pandemic, there was that cleanliness issue. She kept disinfectant wipes in every bathroom now and aired out the house whenever the weather permitted. She stopped buying the cheap, natural cleaners. No, the pandemic called for bleach, isopropyl alcohol, ammonia—none of the gentle stuff.
She fidgeted in her desk chair. Surely Dr. Hutchins was expecting a ready answer by now. Lisa rummaged through her recent worries to see what she could find. The day the governor announced the pandemic-induced shutdown, Lisa got off work late. By the time she got to Target, the only thing left in the produce section was lemons. Lemons! She couldn’t feed her family on lemons; nobody could. Lisa was not going to let that happen again. That spring, she dug out the lawn in the backyard and planted corn, tomatoes, peppers, beets, onions, peas, strawberries, and herbs. She bought a canner and hoped that by October, her pantry would be full to the brim regardless of the state of the supply chains. Maybe that was extreme.
She considered mentioning the creekside trail. Everything had been pulled so tight. Her twins had refused to attend school online, so Lisa ordered some books and became their new teacher. The spare room became Ethan’s office, so they set up “school” in a corner of the living room and put the family desktop computer on a folding table in the master bedroom. The kids were constantly too noisy for Ethan, yet there was hardly anywhere for them to go. While her husband was in his meeting with the executives one Thursday, Lisa walked with the twins along the creekside trail. There was a pit bull without a leash up ahead, its owner several yards behind. Lisa considered all she knew about the breed—the insensitivity to pain, the quick urge to anger, the attacks without warning, the incredibly strong jaw. The dog never attacked, never barked, yet its very presence without the leash threw Lisa into a tearful heap in the bushes.
Lisa could feel Dr. Hutchins’s gaze, despite his eyes being slightly off center on the screen, due to the placement of his webcam.
“Um,” she began.
“What was that? Is your mic still on?”
“Y-yes,” she said. “I mean, no. I don’t think my worries are extreme.”
The doorknob wiggled, and Madison skipped into her mother’s home office, her braids bouncing. She plopped an armful of letters and junkmail onto the desk and asked for a snack. After Lisa’s coaxing, Madison sulked away to get the snack herself from the kitchen pantry. Lisa glanced down at the envelope on the top of the stack. It was from the women’s clinic. A wave of stomach acid splashed up her esophagus, as she recalled her most recent appointment for a pap smear. She slouched.
No wonder I’m wasting my afternoon on a video call, she thought. I get all shook up by an envelope.
Their session dragged on as Dr. Hutchins explained the link between physical exercise and release of anxieties. Lisa nodded politely, suppressing the desire to say she works up a sweat in the small farm in her yard.
“There’s really nothing wrong with you,” he said. “You’re simply anxious and don’t have your normal tools to deal with it.” Then he emailed digital files of worksheets for her to try that week.
Of course, a few days later Lisa saw the headline. A man named George Floyd suffocated underneath a police officer’s knee. Ethan reassured her that it happened way out in Minneapolis and that it had been years since an officer questioned either of them because of their race. But then there were protests just downtown that started peaceful but ended with looting and riots. Someone even lit a car on fire.
Lisa printed the worksheets. The first was about her earliest memories relating to anxiety and worry. She filled out the first page, but when she noticed there were four more left, she slid the papers in the trash.
The next worksheet was about her values and priorities. She circled and scratched out words on a long list. Fifteen minutes had passed by the time she reached the next section, prompting her to write her daily activities and routine. She wrote so quickly that the ink splattered from her pen. Those pages—along with the pen—also fell into the can.
The last worksheet looked more promising. The first question: What event has triggered your fear? Lisa’s answer, written with a freshly sharpened pencil: “The death of a man who looks somewhat like my husband and the looting of innocent businesses.” The second: What belief is behind this fear? Lisa rapped the eraser on her desk. “If this could happen anywhere,” she wrote, “why not here and why not to my family?”
She looked at that question, slightly smudged because she was left handed. She heard music wafting in through the open window. Her neighbor was working on his car again. When Lisa approached the window, the sun threatened her from an open, cloudless sky. She pulled the glass shut and yanked blinds downward, but it didn’t change the sense of urgent danger, the sense that she was exposed and vulnerable, naked while fully clothed. She pushed the chair away and lay on the carpet beneath the folding table.
Lisa heard a pitter patter of little feet in the hallway. Max thundered through the door, and upon seeing his mother, nestled himself between her and the wall. Madison joined with her sleeve of crackers. Max stretched his arms across his mother toward the snack, and soon Ethan peered beneath the desk. He attacked the children with tickles, and after they dispersed, Lisa remained.
“What you thinking about?” he asked.
Lisa stared at the underside of the desk. “I’m thinking we should get a gun—just in case.”
Ethan chuckled. “We’re not getting a gun.”
“It would just be for emergencies.”
He held up his index finger, holding back more laughs. “We’re not getting a gun.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know. Lisa, you would worry about the kids being safe with the gun around. You’d be afraid to clean the damn thing because of that accident that almost killed Jerry. You’d take weeks to decide where to lock up the ammunition.”
Lisa blinked, and her lips formed a tight smile against her will.
“You know, you don’t have to do the whole therapy thing just because,” Ethan said.
“You mean just because you say so.”
“Well, when you put it that way.” Ethan held out his hand and helped his wife come out from under the desk.
As the last few weeks of spring rolled into the summer, Lisa noticed a pattern in her appointments with Dr. Hutchins. He would ask about the events of her week, and she would detail her reactions and symptoms. He would take notes, lecture about the workings of the mind and body, and send over a relevant document, usually in the form of another worksheet.
On a particularly hot afternoon, Lisa wore short-shorts—Dr. Hutchins would only see her top half anyway—and turned the ceiling fan on full blast. It was spinning so quickly that the chain clicked constantly. Lisa’s neck glistened with sweat as she struggled to concentrate on the doctor’s explanation of the day. He might have noticed her glazed look. He asked a question.
“Sorry. Can you repeat that?” Lisa said.
“What do you want?”
What kind of a question is that? Lisa thought. What do I want from the sessions? From him? Was Dr. Hutchins fed up? Or is this one of those existential questions—what do I want with my life? She blinked and opened her mouth but could not come up with a response.
“Well, I’ll let you think about that.” He finally said. “Let me know your thoughts next week.”
Early the next morning, Lisa speedwalked with Raycelan, her friend from work, as part of her effort to exercise more with the gym being closed. They huffed and chatted through their masks along the route Lisa had laid out.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” Lisa said, “what do you want?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just something my shrink asked me.”
“Oh, OK.” Raycelan’s eyelashes fluttered. “I want to own the home I live in.”
“Ray, your house is a dump.”
“Yeah. So what if it’s old. I want to do whatever I want with it. No landlord telling me I can’t repaint the bathroom purple or plant a shade tree.”
“You want to own your home,” Lisa repeated.
Soon they looped around the neighborhood and ended their three miles at Raycelan’s place.
A house, Lisa thought as she stretched her hamstrings, what a load of bull.
The morning was still cool, surprisingly. Lisa looked down the road to the trailhead toward the creek. She calculated the odds of seeing the dog again. There might be the wild sunflowers she had seen a few years ago. But there might be that pit bull—or any other pitt bull—without a leash. Lisa checked her watch: she still had plenty of time to walk another mile until Ethan had to log in for work. In her fanny pack was pepper spray. She drew a shaky breath. The shade of the trees looked relieving. She headed for the dirt path.
Sure, Ray could paint her bathroom and put in that tree, but she’d have to pay for a new water heater.
Lisa stepped onto the trail shaded by old, twisting oaks. The sun peeked through a cloud, causing the ground to appear polka-dotted with light. When she rounded the bend, a trailrunner zipped past, huffing. A woman with two Jack Russel Terriers came in the opposite direction. Lisa stiffened as the little dogs yapped at her, but all was fine in the end.
She wants a house! That golden ball and chain.
When she reached the pond, she stopped. A flock of swans was swimming. They were gigantic, gliding along the surface of such a small body of water, and they were clean, with crisp feathers, the image of quietude. One dipped its head down and reemerged smacking on grub and shaking off the droplets. Lisa had never seen anything so rare or majestic at the little neighborhood pond; usually there were geese and mallards, maybe the occasional wood duck. She unzipped her pocket to take a photo on her phone, but the image on the screen did not carry the contrast of color, the morning dew, or the warmth of the summer sunlight.
As she looked at the birds, Lisa was glad a mortgage couldn’t get her what she wanted. In fact, no one could truly give her what she wanted, not even a professional like Dr. Hutchins.
“This is what I want,” she said aloud. “This moment, just as it is.”
Soon it was time to move on, and for the next fifteen minutes along that creekside trail toward home, Lisa didn’t have a single worry that was extreme.
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