Goddamn it. I can’t remember what the fight was about. Why’d I fight him? He looked like somebody’s grandpa — in sad little orange pajamas.
It was a draw of sorts. An old man behind Plexiglas in orange pajamas. A young woman with a vag bag.
“I just want my stories to be mine,” I went, holding up my Dora purse. Why’d I even say that?
The Sig coughed. Then he coughed a lot. But he kept the phone at his ear.
“I hear that coughing is a diversion tactic,” I said, smiling like ha ha jokey.
Sig coughed some more, then smiled, then just looked like the saddest old man balls in the universe, then he hung up the phone.
“Bye then,” I went.
And that was that.
The next time I saw him I was thirty.
To be honest with you, he didn’t look all that much older than he did behind the Plexiglas. He had his old man on but more neatly-trimmed. And smaller and thinner. Like a shrinking Sig. I saw him in his office, if you can believe it. He made me tea. He asked me politely about my life, so I told him Obsidian and I had started our own vineyard and were producing organic pinot. That we hoped to build an artist colony for girls with a bunch more A-frames. I told him I built a small filmmaking studio to the side of our home. Everything seemed to please him. He seemed calm and gentle, though each time he raised his teacup to his mouth, his hand tremored quite noticeably.
At one point he produced a cigar from his jacket pocket, and so I stood up and crossed over to him and lit it for him. Between puffs of smoke he said “So kind.” His cigar? It just looked like a cigar.
We talked about my story. About how my father had betrayed me, how my mother had neglected me, how I needed to pass through a psychosexual crucible of sorts to work things through. The sentences seemed effortless and without drama.
“Thank you for believing me,” I remember saying to him. “I think it was important, that you never called me a liar,” I said.
“Your lies located themselves in deeper places. No doubt part of the reason you are an artist,” he said. “Though I always felt our time together had resulted in …”
I waited.
“Failure,” he said. “On my part.”
I stood up and moved toward him and opened my mouth to protest or something but he put his hand up between us like a five-fingered stop sign. And anyway, what would I have said? Done? I sat back down.
When the top of the hour of the visit came, his old cuckoo clock erupted, and to my surprise and delight, a cuckoo came shooting out. We laughed.
“My cuckoo is mended!” He announced, and we laughed more, but I suddenly saw that in spite of his age he looked exactly like a wizened child, nearly engulfed by his camel back chair, cigar smoke giving him a dream-like elfin quality.
I never made the film of his phallic adventure. The footage is archived, stored in several different forms in my studio. Sometimes I watch it like other people might watch home movies, and I smile. It’s not mockery. It’s nostalgia. For a drama that was a girl.
The third time was at his gravesite. In Vienna. Obsidian and I were visiting my mother in Europe. I’d heard that he had died there from her. His collected case studies were being compiled and a wing of the library would be dedicated to his life’s work. Beautifully archived and taken care of like the work of Franz Shubert.
Sigmund Freud smoked about twenty cigars a day all his adult life. He developed malignant oral cancer, but hid it for years. He underwent nearly thirty surgeries. The rest is all just a story passed like gossip between doctors, but the story goes that a well-known fellow doctor assisted him in suicide. That he wanted to die inside imagination, inside the act of reading literature, that the last book he read was a novel by Balzac. That his doctor friend pumped him with enough morphine to drop a horse, until he died inside a lovely, dizzy, exquisite interpretation of a roman à clef.
I know what Sig would say. He’d say we live out classic family romances, and there’s no way around it. On the other hand, goddamn it, is everything in life really all that fucking oedipal?
Because if it is, you know, just shoot me.
Acknowledgements
RHONDA HUGHES REMAINS A LITERARY HEROINE TO ME for her bravery and integrity; no better collaboration between writer and editor/publisher exists. Anywhere. Here it is straight-no-chaser: this book would not exist without the help of the posse. So: Thank you Chuck Palahniuk for the idea about you know what and that other thing and especially the part that is going to creep out everyone but you and me. And for laughing. Thank you Monica Drake for already being as nerd-girl obsessed with Dora and Freud as I was. Thank you Chelsea Cain for liking Ave Maria — parts of her I made pretending you and me grew up best friends. And for the title. Thank you Suzy Vitello for “getting” the psychology stuff and the Gemini stuff and forgiving me for being the daughter I probably was and liking me anyway. Thank you Erin Leonard for writing weird things that make the weird things I write seem less foreign. Thank you Cheryl Strayed for loving those mother and father pages we both know I made up from a deep wishful place. Thank you Diana Page Jordan for understanding how big a deal it is to survive and then tell about it through stories. Thank you Mary Wysong-Haeri for the secrets we passed back and forth and the sneaker wine dates. And thank you to the Mingo, who read every damn word, every page, and told me how to better kick ass before I brought them to the posse. All quotes from Sigmund Freud from Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Touchstone, 1997).