"To You From Me" By Gail Ansel
You be the analyst, okay? Pretend concern, adopt a soft kitten voice, coo nouns and verbs and say, "how ARE you" and "Nice to see YOU," and "HAVE a seat," waving your neutral manicure to a motley compendium of furniture in the too large space. No cocoon room, we're ready for a crowd.
When I choose—not the wooden rocking chair, not the weird padded folding chair with a startling likeness to my dead grandmother's flowered dinette set, not the rolling desk chair in the corner piled high with stacks of laundry, wait, no, hand-knit afghans—when I choose the two-seater couch with three matching corduroy pillows you nod, Freud whispering in your ear.
Jungian stages load into the cannon.
Sit yourself down in your therapist chair with the good back support. Cross your ankles and your wrists. Play pretend bondage. You are my captive, you silently indicate, head poking forward like Yurtle.
You'll wait. For me. I am in command.
I will puddle down across the couch, adjusting the left pillow under my left ear, hair protecting my temple from the smell of the last guy and the next. My legs lengthening, I'll jam my hiking boots over the couch arm, and you'll have to decide whether to leap at me or. Sit there.
You sit.
My mother's blood money flutters to the floor. I tear up her check and stomp her hopes and dreams to remake me in her image and later you will tape the torn edges and deposit the bribe into your account and raise your already outrageous rates and tell me and my mother and my father in family session we should see each other two times a week INDIVIDUALLY until we get past the CRISIS, this small SETBACK.
Pills and pills, round and round.
Act like I'm normal. Act like you're helping. Pretend you like me. Tell me I'm angry, tell me, I'm hurting, tell me I'm in PAIN unending unrelenting hopeless sorrow.
Hand me the tissue box, ass half-raised, arm stretched out of your shoulder socket.
Make me cry. Make me cry. Make me cry.
Halfway into the sob-fest, scrape the pieces of bone and tissue splattered onto the faded 1984 Monet exhibit posters above the couch, and reassemble the Me, your own personal 3-D puzzle, highest level of difficulty, my essential weirdness, my essence—oops too late, TIME'S UP, see you NEXT time, and oh, by the way?
By the way?
Say, GOOD JOB, Honey. We made REAL progress today, Honey.
Lift your right foot in your sensible navy pump to my coccyx, and without grunting or losing your balance, kick my now-more-normal ass to the dim outer waiting room, past another mopey teenager no worse, no better than me, and thereby finally, finally expressing your first honest assessment.
Or. I choose the floor. I refuse your invitation to sit on your normative seats. You won't join me, your silk skirt, your thick nylons. Instead, I will untie my hiking boots and unbutton my black jacket with the breaking Anarchy heart over the left breast, and I'll cross my legs and cross my arms and smile in yesterday's t-shirt and grass stained jeans.
Great, I'll say, great week. And I won't tell you what I did with Evan and Scott in the woods, how I couldn't stop myself, couldn't stop them, didn't want to anyway. I won't tell you that the rumors the looks the side-long stares make me want to kill myself. I want to die, I won't tell you. I found my people, my place in the world, finally, and now all I do is fuck up fuck up fuck up.
I got all my assignments in on time, I'll say. Well, except this one. I apologized to my mother, I'll say, before my father asked, before my mother pulled the disappointed look off the shelf and plastered the death mask on her face. I exercised, I did yoga, I meditated, I thought all good thoughts, I'll say. Thank you. You helped.
And I don't need to tear up the blood money, because I never entered the room, not Me, it's She, the good girl, smiling, wasting mother's money, better than withholding, hiding the Me you won’t see coming, until the day I explode and shred your thoughts of me into oblivion, then—Hoorah! Destroy capitalists! Freedom! Me and only Me!
But for now: You play analyst. I play client. Take a bow.
Gail Ansel is a member of the SF Castro Writer’s Coop, Page Street Writers, and on the Lit Camp Conference Advisory Board. Her stories have appeared in Noyo River Review. She is revising her novel inspired by Roth’s American Pastoral, told from the daughter and wife’s point of view. She lives in Moss Beach, California.
