ADAM
“Adam. Towhead. We speed down 680 toward Danville. He presses his mouth against the back of his seat and contemplates abstractedly the junk piled in the back of my car.
“I press his nub of a nose with a fingertip. ‘I just pressed your talk button. Now you have to tell me something.’
MANIPULATIVE?
“Helen said she didn’t believe my grief was real,” I tell Annee, “that real grief is quiet. Another time she told me that everything I was saying sounded rehearsed.
“When feelings weren’t allowed in your family,” Annee observes, “they’re liable to come out defended.”
SPECTERS
In my then journal I wrote about my therapy with Helen:“There was a moment when understanding failed irrevocably, when, bonded until then by a united effort, we split apart like a fractured atom. “That trim little woman with her wide, scrubbed face, close cap of red...
NO PROGRESS
After ten months of therapy with Helen, things hadn’t improved.
On one occasion she said that she didn’t believe my grief was real because authentic grief was quiet. (Not true, as anyone can testify who’s heard someone react to being told that a loved one has unexpectedly died.)
UPTIGHT
Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble. Dr. Johnson
“Last night I had a chill dream about celebrating my birthday with the Hartwicks, a family I never felt approved of me. I was supposed to appear on the balcony of a…
IN HER OWN TIME
Later I would write a short story—my first—that was a hodgepodge of fact and fiction:
It was the end of the school year, and she felt utterly oppressed by her situation at work—a class full of four-turning-five-year-olds, who seemed to become more heedless and willful as the last weeks wore themselves out. One little boy…