Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [74]
The next week I went back, and Hildey wanted to talk about what had happened like it was some kind of international incident. Each week after that I was meaner and meaner to Hildey. I couldn’t help it. She wasn’t capable of doing her job. She lost her shit. Maybe she should have taken a day off.
“I think the transference has gone bad, Jeanne. Between therapist and patient,” she said to me one day.
“Oh, really? I think I might know when that happened. It might have been the moment you became my mother and I had to comfort you while you cried and charged me and cried and charged me. Bad as things may have been with my mother, she never charged me. Angry? Why, yes, I am, Hildey! Is there a problem with that? Anger is not just important to me. It’s essential. I need it. In my relationships with men, my father, my mother and to turn into material, frankly. Why is everybody so down on anger when to me, it’s so bloody practical.”
I never saw Hildey again, and what eats at me is I probably owe her some money. But then I think, Okay, I owe her for three sessions, but she cried at one and the other two we talked about how I felt about her crying on me, so do I actually owe her anything?
I tried talking to Julia about how I felt like blowing my head off. We had dinner, and when I said as much she threw her glove at me, hitting me in the face. I’m not entirely sure why she did this. I then threw my glove at her, and then the miso soup arrived.
One night I listened to Nina Simone and drank grappa I had stolen from my father. I called my friend Cassie from college who lived in Aspen and was an acupuncturist. Her life had seemed to just get better and better in the last few years, at the exact rate that mine was getting worse and worse. She was doing what she wanted to do, she kept making more and more money, she was making $90,000 a year, while I was buying loaves of bread and jars of peanut butter as the cheapest way to make it through a week. I would babysit my niece and bring my laundry over, use my sister’s detergent, and take things to eat later that I knew they probably wouldn’t miss: one PowerBar, three bags of mint tea, some small boxes of kidsized raisins, an apple, a hunk of cheddar. I always wanted to take coffee but it would smell too much, wafting out of my backpack. I classified this behavior as advanced mooching, something I was doing because I didn’t have time to go to the grocery store—that was what boring, married people with kids did. I was too edgy for the grocery store. Please.
Cassie was cheery and hopeful and she looked a hundred times better than me, she was traveling through Asia in the off-season and just loving everything all the time. I had no idea that she was sober, I just knew that she was a big pain in the ass whenever she came to New York.
“Can I bring anything to the party?” she’d ask.
“Beer.”
“What about something else?”
“Nope, just beer.”
She’d show up with flowers after this exchange, and I assumed she was just too lazy to carry a few six packs from the deli. Or I figured she was doing some kind of cleanse.
I was also pretty sick of her wanting to go to dinner all the time when she visited. Who had money for dinner? Insanity.
I normally didn’t talk to Cassie about my problems, because her shelves were nothing but self-help books, full of slogans like “Love yourself through disappointment” and “Feel your feelings!” Over the course of our friendship I had never contracted a slogan or an issue or a boundary or any sense of hope or cheerfulness, so I figured out it was safe to hang around these kinds of people. On the phone I went through the litany of things that were making me feel like killing myself and then, out of nowhere, I said, “And I’m working on a little drinking problem here.” She told me she had been sober for three years (that’s what that was?) and maybe I needed to get sober. Well, sure, maybe I needed to do a lot of things: quit smoking, do some actual writing, get a bathroom, get a job. Doesn’t mean I’m going to do any of