Mom brought an entire dead piglet home and dismembered it. She ground bits of it up to make sausage and left its head sitting in the fridge while she researched ways of serving it.
I dared to suggest that this was a deeply inconsiderate and even cruel thing to do when one of the people you lived with had been a vegetarian for three years, and in response, Mom filled out Dittmar’s parent questionnaire with the most obnoxious things she could think of to write and shoved it in my backpack. And as a performance artist, she writes obnoxious things professionally.
I found it at school during Calc. At first I thought, Ag, I have to turn this sheet of full-on madness in to Dittmar and he’s going to think I’m even more insane than he already does. It’s really going to hurt my chances in terms of getting any actual advice from him for my college applications—plus he’ll show it to the other teachers and they’ll all think I come from a completely certifiable family, and that’s even without knowing that we found my dad this morning sitting in the shower stall wearing only his underwear and staring blankly at the tiles.
But then I thought: I don’t have to give this paper to Dittmar.
I can tell him my parents keep not filling it out. Eventually, he’ll forget about it.
I know better now than to throw any kind of incriminating document in the school trash can, so I ripped the questionnaire into tiny, tiny shreds and flushed it down the toilet.
“It was liberating,” I told Doctor Z later. “Like I said, I’m not letting this badness in my life. I’m flushing it down with all the poo.”
The upside-down picture wasn’t on her desk anymore. I was grateful because it was seriously distracting. Likewise, Doctor Z wasn’t wearing an orange poncho or patchwork skirt or anything else so incredibly crafty and horrific that it detracted from my ability to have a therapeutic experience.
“My mother did this nasty thing,” I went on, “but I didn’t have to let it in. I mean, I have enough things in there tainting my brain. I don’t need that.”
“Good.”
“I also didn’t have to give the questionnaire to Dittmar. Even though he told us to turn it in. Sometimes, it’s just better to ignore what you’re supposed to do and do what’s best for you.”
Doctor Z nodded. Then she asked: “What else do you think is tainting your brain?”
“Oh,” I said. “Just my dad’s depression, missing my dead grandma, our carnivorous household, Meghan always off with Finn, Nora always off with Kim and Cricket, Hutch in Paris, total isolation, mental illness, people who are cruel to animals, the question of whether to grow out my bangs, college applications, guilt over Noel, guilt over Gideon, major heartbreak and self-loathing. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Well,” Doctor Z said, crossing her legs, “can you flush any of that?”
“How could I flush it?”
“You tell me.”
“These are not the kinds of things you can flush.”
“Why not?”
“They’re not pieces of paper. They’re situations.”
“What if you put them down on pieces of paper?”
“You’re not serious.”
“Sure. That can be a very therapeutic thing to do. You write out a problem that is bothering you, and then you flush it. Or burn it. Destroy it in some way as a gesture of setting yourself free.”
“Yeah, but I can write my heartbreak down on paper six thousand times and flush it just as many. I’m still going to be heartbroken when I wake up in the morning. I’m still going to feel awful when I see Noel at school.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
“How do you know until you try?”
“You’re serious.”
“This week. Consider writing something that’s bothering you on a piece of paper and flushing it,” said Doctor Z. “It can be a small thing, if you want. It doesn’t have to be your heartbreak, if you’re wedded to that.”
“I am not wedded to my heartbreak,” I said. “I hate my heartbreak. I hate it.” I was almost crying. “I am just heartbroken,” I said. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Really?” she said. “Really?”
After swim practice on Thursday I was in the B&O, reading The Yellow Wallpaper for Women Writers and cursing Mr. Wallace for insisting we both start and finish it over the weekend,2 when Nora came in, her face swollen and pink. It was Finn’s day off, so he and Meghan were somewhere else, doing couple things.
“Can I sit with you?” Nora asked.
We hadn’t hung out since school started. She was friendly, and we chatted in the halls if we ran into each other, but most of the time she was in Kim and Cricket land.
“Knock yourself out,” I told her. “You okay?”
Nora sniffed and shook her head. “Not really.”
“What happened? Something with Happy?”
“No, Happy’s fine.” She’d been arranging her tall frame on the chair across from me, digging around in her book bag, unwinding a cotton scarf she had around her neck. Now she looked at me and chewed on her thumbnail.
“What, then? Did I do something?” I asked.
“No.”
“Is it about Noel?”
“Roo, please, can you stop asking and just let me tell you?”
My skin felt hot and I nodded silently.
“Kim, Cricket and I were on a three-way call just like an hour ago,” she said. “Kim set it up so we could all talk about yearbook stuff while she had to be home supervising the gardener. I was talking to them on my cell from the photo lab where I was printing. I don’t know where Cricket was, but anyway. We finished the yearbook stuff and I hung up and put the phone down without really looking at it, because I had a picture in the fixer and I realized it had been in there kinda long.”
She stood up and ordered a black coffee from the guy at the counter. Like she didn’t want to go on with the story. But black coffee doesn’t take long to serve, and pretty soon Nora was back sitting across from me.
“So like ten minutes later I went to use the phone again and it had never hung up. I put it to my ear and Kim and Cricket were still talking.” Nora wiped her eyes. “I know it’s a bad thing to do, but I listened, and it didn’t take long to figure out they were talking about me.”
“Ag.”
“Cricket was saying she was sick of hearing about Happy Happy Happy all the time, and Kim was saying I was just so controlling about yearbook, which is really unfair because I’m the editor, I’m supposed to be the boss of it, and she didn’t have to be on it if she didn’t want to.”
“What did you do?”
“Cricket said I was no fun anymore and did I have to wear a stupid jog bra all the time, there was something about the jog bras that just really annoyed her and she couldn’t stand to look at my uniboob one more day.”
It was true. Nora did have the uniboob. But in her defense, she has these really ginormous hooters, and she’s kind of self-conscious about them, so she squashes them down with the jog bra. Summer after freshman year, back when all four of us were friends, Kim and I had written an entry in our group notebook on “The Care and Ownership of Boobs”3 that was in part intended to alert Nora to the uniboob issue that was going on. In fact, Kim and I had had a long discussion over whether to explicitly include information on the uniboob problem, but we had eventually decided to leave it off because we were too scared of hurting Nora’s feelings. We had hoped she would just read the instructions on the care and ownership and reexamine her own boob-related practices.