It has nothing to do with you."
"It doesn't help to tell myself that.
Those people—for all these years—were my family.
It was like being thrown out of my own home."
"That's just it," she said. "This has become a symbolic repetition of experiences you had as a child.
Being rejected by your parents… being sent away…"
"Oh, Christ!
Never mind giving it a nice neat label.
What matters is that before I got involved in this experiment I had friends, people who cared for me.
Now I'm afraid..."
"You've still got friends."
"It's not the same."
"Fear is a normal reaction."
"It's more than that.
I've been afraid before.
Afraid of being strapped for not giving in to Norma, afraid of passing Howells Street where the gang used to tease me and push me around.
And I was afraid of the schoolteacher, Mrs. Libby, who tied my hands so I wouldn't fidget with things on my desk.
But those things were real—something I was justified in being afraid of.
This terror at being kicked out of the bakery is vague, a fear I dont understand."
"Get hold of yourself"
"You don't feel the panic."
"But, Charlie, it's to be expected.
You're a new swimmer forced off a diving raft and terrified of losing the solid wood under your feet.
Mr. Donner was good to you, and you were sheltered all these years.
Being driven out of the bakery this way is an even greater shock than you expected."
"Knowing it intellectually doesn't help.
I can't sit alone in my room any more.
I wander into the streets at all hours of the day or night, not knowing what Im looking for… walking until I'm lost… finding myself outside the bakery.
Last night I walked all the way from Washington Square to Central Park, and I slept in the park.
"What the hell am I searching for?"
The more I talked, the more upset she became.
"What can I do to help you, Charlie?"
"I don't know. I'm like an animal who's been locked out of his nice, safe cage."
She sat beside me on the couch.
"They're pushing you too fast.
You're confused.
You want to be an adult, but there's still a little boy inside you.
Alone and frightened."
She put my head on her shoulder, trying to comfort me, and as she stroked my hair I knew that she needed me the way I needed her.
"Charlie," she whispered after a while, "whatever you want… don't be afraid of me—" I wanted to tell her I was waiting for the panic.
Once—during a bakery delivery—Charlie had nearly fainted when a middle-aged woman, just out of the bath, amused herself by opening her bathrobe and exposing herself.
Had he ever seen a woman without clothes on?
Did he know how to make love?
His terror—his whining—must have frightened her because she clutched her robe together and gave him a quarter to forget what had happened.
She was only testing him, she warned, to see if he was a good boy.
He tried to be good, he told her, and not look at women, because his mother used to beat him whenever that happened in his pants….
Now he had the clear picture of Charlie's mother, screaming at him, holding a leather belt in her hand, and his father trying to hold her back.
"Enough, Rose!
You'll kill him!
Leave him alone!"