Sensitivities 

Jon MacDougal

My behaviour was an issue, which is why we were going there in the first place. Ritalin-laced ice cream, attachment therapy, beatings, and vague but constant threats about being sent to a boarding home had failed to soothe my wild, nine-year-old spirit, so this was the next logical step.

“You’re to be on your best behaviour, understood?”

I gave a perfunctory nod to Mom’s non-question. Her voice was on edge. Her voice was often that way, as she had been living on black tea, rye crispbreads, and angel hair pasta for months. She had also learned that she was allergic to sunlight and grass, which meant that my sister and I hardly left our neighbourhood that summer. Mom’s drastic lifestyle changes were the result of the counsel she held with her naturopath, whom she began seeing earlier in the year. Since their meeting, the naturopath's presence haunted my mother and our home. As a result of this relationship, our household conversations in the year 2000 revolved around dieting, weight loss, health foods, allergies, and my lower-middle-class family’s financial ruin. Without having met her, I hated the naturopath.

That hate grew exponentially when we pulled into her driveway. It was a huge harbour-front property on the outskirts of town, with a field for a front lawn and a block-length, Kiwi-polished driveway that gleamed beneath the bright August sun. The home at the end of the drive was a massive Queen Anne-style house with baby-blue siding, a blue shingled roof, spires, and gingerbread trim. The house had a pillared front porch, and its perimeter was lined with shrubs and flower beds that extended about six feet out from the foundation. The flowers were unfamiliar to me. They looked large and exotic, like something you would see in Hawai’i, not Nova Scotia. Their vibrancy shone all the better for being contrasted against fresh black mulch. We had flowers, too, but ours were just petunias that Mom proudly planted in the dirt each year, inside the homemade wooden boxes that Dad mounted on top of decorative concrete blocks.

We arrived sweating in our family car, a 1987 blue-mist Nissan Sentra, which had no air conditioning. What it did have were splotches of red Tremclad paint that my father sprayed over the rust spots, and holes covered with shiny patches of aluminum tape that Dad used instead of body filler. Our little car was a household joke. It didn’t belong in this place, and neither did we. Mom didn’t seem to notice, though, as she promptly got out and instructed me to do the same.

After ascending the wide stairway, Mom began banging a large brass knocker on one of the wooden double doors, which looked like something from a medieval stronghold. In a stern whisper, she repeated her previous instructions, “I mean it—best behaviour!” As if she had spoken a magical phrase, one of the large doors swung open.

In the doorway stood a prim-looking woman about a decade older than my forty-seven-year-old mother. The woman was short, emaciated, and dressed in a brown pantsuit that matched her coppery hair, which was cut short, like Princess Diana’s. Large, wire-framed glasses rested on her severe, toad-like face. When she spoke, she spoke in a steely monotone. The orchestrated seriousness of her demeanour struck me as theatrical, and I couldn’t keep from smiling. Before we were permitted entry to the castle, the tiny woman began my front porch interrogation.

Did I understand that my mother was getting well because she had been helping her? Did I know why I was there? On these points, I did well. Next, she asked me which foods I ate and when I ate them. Fine. Finally, she asked me, a nine-year-old boy suffering from behavioural issues, how often I eliminated.

“Hunh? What do you mean?” I asked. I felt my mother turn rigid at my side.

The woman sighed in exasperation at having to rephrase her question.      

“How often do you…take out the trash.”

“I don’t take out the trash,” I replied.

The woman reddened and looked disapprovingly at my mother, who quickly intervened, using her best mild Mom voice, “No, no, what she means is -- ”

“Oh!” I interrupted. I then turned to the woman in my moment of feigned clarity: “You mean how often do I take a shit!”

My mother, who when she was angry, favoured yelling strings of unrelated curses, nonetheless gave a haughty gasp there on the Queen Anne’s porch. The woman said nothing. She stared down at my cheeky smile with the drawn mouth and cold indifference of an amphibian preparing to dart its tongue at a fly. Meanwhile, my mother apologized with the fervour of a peasant who had offended their Lord. Without bothering to learn about my elimination schedule, the woman turned her body to allow us inside.

I expected to enter something like a clinic or a doctor’s office, but there was no semblance of a professional workplace here. As Mom and the naturopath spoke at length, I marvelled at the uninviting atmosphere of this stuffy house. Things appeared antique yet untouched. The lacquered walls reflected sunshine from their original Victorian wooden panels, which matched the abundance of fancy mouldings and the winding staircase.

After a few minutes of their banter, I was led into a large kitchen. Set up along a wall of old china cabinets with glass doors and glossy wood the colour of chestnuts, there was a cushioned burgundy table. The table had a funny little headrest, which I knew from watching television for hours a day meant that it was a massage table.

When we arrived at the table, the naturopath instructed me to take off my shirt, so I did. Then, she pointed to my tiny belly and explained to my mother that I was overweight, which was causing my behavioural issues. I felt stunned. Kevin MacLeod from school was fat. I wasn’t fat! If I were, somebody would have teased me, but no one had.

To drive the point home, she gestured to my side with a wagging finger, the way a licensed doctor might do to an MRI image of clogged arteries. Doing so, she emphasized that no one, let alone a child my age, should have love handles. I was trying to figure out what love handles were when she told me to lie on the tall table, which required my mother’s help. Once I was supine, the two of them left the room.

As I lay half-naked and strangely self-aware, I found myself nervously looking at the articles surrounding me. Instead of seeing walls with framed certificates and charts explaining bodily functions, like the ones at my doctor’s office, there were teacups and saucers stacked on doilies behind glass cabinet doors, as well as decorative dishes wrapped in cellophane. In my discomfort, I remembered my mother telling me that this woman was also an acupuncturist, who cured some of my mother’s many ailments by placing tiny needles all over her body. Was she going to poke me full of needles? Why else would I be shirtless? I hated needles! And why was I in this lady’s kitchen?

When they came back, the naturopath explained that she was going to perform a test, just like she did on my mother, which would determine what I was allergic to. I pleaded with her not to stick me full of needles. Both she and my mother assured me that she wouldn’t be doing that on this visit. I felt an odd mix of dread and relief, as well as confusion, because our doctor had recently tested me for allergies by pricking the top of my forearm in numerous places. I had no allergies! Mom knew this; she was the one who told me I had no allergies. Yet, here she was, nodding soberly at the naturopath’s instructions. The naturopath told me to lie on my back, very still, and say nothing as she performed her examination.

The frog-lipped little woman leaned in and pushed on my stomach with her fingertips. She didn’t speak to me while pressing into the small body she had condemned moments earlier as too fat and unhealthy. Instead, she pressed deep and lowered her ear to my body, as though she was waiting for words to whisper out of my belly button. Years later, while taking a course in cultural anthropology, I thought of this woman while reading about soothsaying tribesmen who would read fortunes on the livers of freshly killed pigs.

After each bout of hard prodding and intense listening, she would turn to my mother and announce a new allergy, then reposition her fingertips and start over. At first, each announcement infuriated me, which prompted urgent shushes from my mother. My eyes grew hot as the mocking woman continued fondling different regions of my stomach, before craning over her shoulder and proclaiming yet another allergy.

“Popcorn.

Chocolate.

Sugar.”

The list went on, but after hearing these three, I went numb. No longer paying attention to the items being forbidden to me, I stared absently at the adjacent china display and endured the remainder of my molestation.

It felt like an awful joke without a punchline. How could my mother possibly believe that this woman could know these things by performing this act? Don’t people need sugar? Why am I only allergic to popcorn and not corn? My head was whirling with questions, and I knew that none of them would be answered to my satisfaction.

After the examination was over, I was instructed to put my shirt back on and wait outside while my mother and the naturopath talked. Or, while my mother paid a small fortune to someone whose credentials were as legitimate as my allergies, using money too dire to be squandered without leading to family turmoil in the following days. I suppressed the urge to cry in helpless frustration as I put my shirt and shoes back on, then walked out the door. When I got outside, angry sobs blubbered out of me.

I thought I hated the naturopath before we arrived, but it must have been more like a profound dislike, because the feeling I now had for this black-blooded creature was far worse. She turned from a money-draining nuisance that inconvenienced my family to a charlatan with God-like power over me, all in the span of about an hour.

I thought of her emotionless little face as I ripped her flowers up from their roots. I ran through her flower beds, stomping plant stems and kicking mounds of mulch onto her perfectly manicured lawn. I knew my mother would see what I had done when she finally came outside, but I was too distraught to care.

After a short while, my mother descended the steps and beckoned for me to come along. Amazingly, she failed to notice the dirt on my sneakers, or that the large flowerbed, which ran parallel to the wall of this massive house, was destroyed. For days afterward, I tensed with each phone call, sure that the woman would be calling about my vandalism, but the call never came.

On the sweltering drive home, I questioned my terse mother incessantly, despite the cold ache in my throat.

“Does this mean I can never eat sugar again?”

“Yes.”

“What about Easter and Christmas? Can’t I have chocolate at Easter and Christmas?”

“No.”

“How can I be allergic to popcorn? I eat it all the time!”

“Not anymore.”

The Wednesday after my visit, I was eating a bowl of popcorn and watching Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place. At the time, I didn’t question why there was no conversation around my resumed consumption of allergens. I didn’t ask how my mother gradually “outgrew” her more inconvenient allergies in the months that followed, either. Like everyone else in my household, I was relieved that the naturopath’s power over my mother was waning. I don’t recall the final straw, if there was one. What I do remember was Mom’s yearning for turkey, once among her most lethal allergies, but downgraded by that Christmas to one of many “sensitivities.”

By early in the new year, Mom’s pursuit of increasingly insightful counsel led her to a psychic convention, where she met Keith, the clairvoyant. Sometime between the dinner they had shared after the convention, and the private reading she had received, during which he assured her that the footprint-shaped birthmark on her back was residue from a past-life murder, he helped her to realize that she had fallen victim to a fraud. After that, Mom ended things with the naturopath, for good.