Who Rusk is: the accreditation-mandated staff counselor the kids won't use

texture · UNDATED (standing role, attested in the YDAU present)

• When: UNDATED (standing status; the portrait is delivered in the Interdependence-Day narration, 8 Nov YDAU)
• What: E.T.A.'s staff counselor exists because the accreditation rules require her: after the ghastly Fresno family-suicide case, "it’s one historical reason why all accredited tennis academies have to have a Ph.D.-level counselor on full-time staff, to screen student athletes for their possibly lethal reactions to ever actually reaching the level they’ve been pointed at for years." The slot at E.T.A. is filled by "the bird-of-prey-faced Dr. Dolores Rusk, M.S., Ph.D.," and the kids' verdict on her is the novel's most quoted Rusk datum: she is "regarded by the kids as whatever’s just slightly worse than useless." Her method, as the students experience it, is pure mirroring — the cage of hands, the abstract look, the last dependent clause repeated back "with an interrogative lilt" (the narration's sample session runs from "Possible homosexual attraction to your doubles partner?" to the self-parodying "Drives you bats when people just parrot you instead of responding?"). "Only the very newest E.T.A. players ever go to Rusk, and then not for long"; she fills "her massive blocks of free time" in her Comm.-Ad. office with "involved acrostics" and a pop-psych manuscript whose first four pages (per Axford and Shaw's lock-dickying raid) contain 29 appearances of the prefix self-. The counseling she is paid for is done by the stand-ins the narration lists in her place: "Lyle, a dewimpled Carmelite who" works the kitchen day-shift — read here as a distinct, otherwise-unnamed second caregiver, since the book never moves Lyle from the weight room — "occasionally Mario Incandenza, and many times Avril herself take up most of the psychic slack, for practical purposes, among E.T.A.s in the know." Her office geography recurs across the E.T.A. chapters: first door in the little hallway at the Comm.-Ad. lobby's NE corner, "next to the shift-nurses’ office and infirmary" (scene 102); Schtitt's room is "past Dr. Rusk’s office and down a two-corner hall from the lobby" (scene 154). Hal's own avoidance gets the portrait's driest corroboration: "It’s a possible reason Hal avoids Dr. Dolores Rusk, who always wants to probe him on issues of space and self-definition and something she keeps calling the ‘Coatlicue Complex’" (scene 102, p. 0516) — on which the book's endnote apparatus offers, in its five-word entirety: "No clue." (n.216)