Therapy Speak
by E.M. Foley
Ryan suggested therapy when I almost burned his cottage down. Not on purpose, although I didn’t do anything to stop it. I was trying to light the grill in the backyard when the flames suddenly shot up from the back. I watched as they got bigger and bolder, reaching higher in the sky. In no time at all, from the size of my fingers to something frightening, like what you might see on the news. The yellow-red embers dancing in the air, the primal heat urgent against my face. I could feel my hair shifting on my scalp in the breeze. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t really, just fragments of images. When I was little, maybe ten or eleven, I would sneak out and burn leaves outside with my mother’s lighter, a silver Zippo she’d gotten from an ex-boyfriend. I’d forgotten about that. I liked how the flames consumed the dank, mulchy leaves, how they transformed into plumes of purple grey smoke. Disintegrating into nothingness. Into dust.
I usually dismissed whatever Ryan said to me easily because so often he spoke in platitudes. ‘For your inner child,’ he’d said earlier that day at the gas station, handing me a popsicle. I mean, come on. We were driving up to his parents’ cottage in the Eastern Townships. It was nine months into our relationship, if you don’t count the year prior to that where I avoided defining it as such. His parents had bought the cottage twenty years ago, and it had the A-frame wide window, warm-wooded red flannel charm that a horror movie might have. Standing there, I could just imagine his childhood, golden morning light streaming in, mom pouring a pitcher of orange juice at breakfast, his dad asking him if he wanted to take the boat out onto the lake. So much goodness, I didn’t know what to do with it.
I stood unmoving in front of the fire until Ryan ran out of the house. I heard him yelp, and instantly he grabbed the fire extinguisher and pushed me out of the way. The flames disappeared in a fog of white powder.
He looked at me then, fear and shock in his eyes. ‘Isabelle. What the fuck is wrong with you?’
‘Finally, he says it,’ I responded. I knew he’d been wondering for a while. But I was aware that this time I didn’t have much of a leg to stand on. I often felt this way when Ryan and I argued. It made me meaner. In fact, the first time he told me that I might find therapy helpful, I said that I was disappointed: I didn’t expect him to be such a cliché.
I liked Ryan because he was a simple person. I mean that in the nicest way possible. I met him when I was twenty-five outside an art show held in someone’s garage in Mile-Ex. He wore a navy-blue T-shirt with a horizontal line dented through the middle of it from where he’d hung it to air dry. He had an Apple Watch tan. When he introduced himself, he told me he knew nothing about art, so if anyone asked for our thoughts he was counting on my expert opinion. ‘I’ll just agree with anything you say,’ he told me. Those were his exact words.
Previously, I dated men who wanted to get matching tattoos on the second date and then told me they didn’t know who I was anymore when I didn’t like their favorite movie. They always said it like I’d killed their family or something. And the movie was always Boondocks Saints or The Usual Suspects. I asked my last boyfriend if he liked these movies because they showed him a version of masculinity that was effective in its goals in a clear-cut way. ‘What do you mean by that?’ he’d said. I’d responded that, well, in these movies the men actually achieve what they set out to do. That’s the fantasy of it. He didn’t talk to me for a week after that.
Ryan was different. His favorite movie was Shrek 2. I remember I laughed out loud, thinking he was kidding. But no. ‘I used to watch it with my brother,’ he said patiently, after I’d wiped the tears from my eyes. ‘It holds a lot of special memories for me.’ I’d soon learn that he often spoke like this, completely unafraid of his own sentimentality. He told me this on our first date, at a small bistro I’d walked by a million times in the Plateau. I’d walked in expecting it to be another damp-smelling Montreal restaurant, the kind where people took their snow boots off under the table in winter, but instead we were sat in a tree-lined backyard glowing with fairy lights and wicker furniture. He spoke some French so he translated the menu for me without making a big deal out of it. After our date I lit a cigarette, blowing smoke in his face. I expected him to move away, and he did.
The therapist’s office was all the way in Westmount. Ryan offered to drive me there, but I said I would walk. I couldn’t deal with his positive reinforcement while I amped myself up to pay a stranger $250 to confirm to me that I’m a bad person. Plus, if I walked, there was always the fantasy that I could not go. I could walk around Parc Lafontaine, watch dogs play in snow until the streetlights came on like I used to do instead of studying in college. I could go to the movies, pay eighteen dollars to sit in a dark room and forget about my life for a couple of hours. I could sit in a café and flirt with the barista, the one with the septum piercing who couldn’t have been a day older than twenty-two.
My mother called me that morning. I didn’t pick up, just let the phone go to voicemail. I knew why she was calling. She wanted to tell me about her ‘new’ boyfriend, Andrew. I’m using the word ‘new’ facetiously here because they’d actually dated before, when I was eighteen and still lived at home with her in Burlington. My mother had several boyfriends all throughout my childhood, and they each came with their annoyances (left the toilet seat up, ate all my snacks, banged on the table when they laughed with their mouths full), but Andrew left me with a particularly bad feeling. He liked to take up the full length of the couch and watch Prison Break in the living room while my mother cooked him dinner. When I met up with friends at night I’d have to walk past him. I could feel his eyes on my body like pressure about to snap. He used to ask me if I was going to a party, where it was, if it was a place he recognized and used to go to when he was young. My friends back home said it was like he was jealous he wasn’t invited.
One night just before Christmas, he knocked on my door at two in the morning. I could hear his breaths, heavy and laborious through the door. Fear like ice water gripped my chest, my legs, my whole body. I lay paralyzed, staring at the doorknob until it became a blur. I couldn’t remember if I’d left it unlocked. After several long moments, I heard him pull himself away from the doorframe, his footsteps retreating down the hall. I thought I might throw up from relief. I woke up the next morning with a sick feeling in my throat, hoping it was a bad dream. He broke up with my mother shortly after. Supposedly he was going to reunite with his ex-wife, the mother of his daughter, all while reassuring my mother that she was the actual love of his life. Like that was supposed to make her feel better. On Christmas morning I held her head in my hands as she sobbed into my neck. I haven’t gone home for the holidays since.
Last Christmas, Ryan invited me to spend the holidays with his family. For weeks, I agonized over what to get his parents and his brother for the holidays. ‘Would your mom like this?’ I’d text him, with a screenshot of a novel that had won some prize, an expensive candle, some hand-painted ceramics. All things I couldn’t really afford. I was making thirty thousand a year working as a photographer’s assistant to a guy who took high-contrast black-and-white photos of women pretending to be dead. The job mainly entailed me telling him what a misunderstood genius he was. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Ryan texted in response. ‘They’re not really gift people.’ This was hard to imagine. For my birthday the year before Ryan had gotten us reservations at one of Anthony Bourdain’s favorite restaurants in Montreal, which I’d told him about on our first date. I never actually thought I’d be able to eat there. For his birthday, I drank most of a bottle of wine and told him that we could try anal if he really wanted to. He didn’t.
Anyway at Christmas, his mother had hugged me for a full thirty seconds, telling me she had heard so much about me. His dad lifted himself from his chair to shake my hand, mine cartoonishly small in his, saying welcome to the family. The house smelled like warm spices. There were twinkling lights wrapped around the banister and actual stockings hanging on the mantel above the fireplace. While helping his mom set the table, I looked over and saw Ryan laughing with his dad, his head tossed back, completely relaxed. Until then I always thought that families where the parents were still together were miserable in more pervasive, subtle, but ultimately more damaging ways than mine, but here I could detect nothing but genuine happiness in being together. During dessert, his little brother Charlie asked me with his face scrunched up if Ryan and I ever kissed. I said only when I had to. Everybody laughed. That night, after I was sure that Ryan had fallen asleep, I locked myself in the guest bathroom and wept silently for twenty minutes.
My therapist was a woman in her mid-fifties named Miriam. She had a shock of dense curly blonde hair, and when she pulled a set of glasses out of them I wondered what else she could be hiding in there. A clipboard lay in her lap. Her nails were painted a purple iridescent colour, cut into a harsh square shape.
‘So, Isabelle,’ she said sharply, squinting at my name on her clipboard. ‘What brings you here today?’
‘My boyfriend suggested it.’
‘Suggested it?’
‘In the way that ultimatums are suggestions.’
She wrote something down on her clipboard, then put her pen down and peered at me. A long moment passed, but I was fine. I was used to tense silences.
Finally, she asked, ‘And why do you think he suggested it?’
‘Because I’m a bitch.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I mean that I’m a bitch to him.’ I was fixated on her hair. I bet she could easily have a second pair of glasses in there. One of my mother’s ex-boyfriends kept a pair hanging from the collar of his shirt and on the top of his head at once. He was all right. He brought me books that his adult daughter who wasn’t talking to him anymore had liked to read when she was my age. I had to give most of them back when they reconciled, but I still got a free copy of Jane Eyre that way.
I crossed my legs. ‘Also I’m pretty sure my inner child is an arsonist.’
She didn’t laugh. Rude. ‘Why don’t you tell me about your childhood?’
‘It was great.’
Another silence. Miriam peered at me over the top of her glasses. I could hear the rush of cars on the street outside. There was a loose thread on the hem of my skirt. I pressed it between my fingers. This time the quiet did bother me.
I took a deep breath, wrapping the thread around my index finger right so it would stop the circulation. ‘My mom and dad split up when I was two. He has a new family now. They live in the next town over and sometimes I’d see him at the grocery store. When I was little I used to stay at his house some weekends, but I don’t exactly get along with my stepmom. So when I was fourteen I stopped staying with them.’
Miriam was nodding, looking at me. I felt like she was looking beyond what normal people could see, past my skin and eyes, into my innards. I wished she’d go back to her clipboard.
‘That must have been difficult.’
‘It’s better this way.’
‘What about your mother?’
‘Oh my mom is…’ I felt my voice trail off. I could feel my face getting really hot, actually. That was annoying. And I was sure Miriam could tell. ‘She’s…unique.’
Another silence. Miriam was looking at me with a face of such complete empathy it made me want to throw myself out the window like the Kool-Aid man. But every minute I spent in silence felt twice as long, so I might as well start speaking if I wanted to get out of there.
‘When I was growing up, it was just the two of us. She had me when she was twenty, so it really felt like we were figuring life out together. She used to work as a receptionist at a dental clinic, so her hours were flexible. On her days off I would get to skip school and we’d spend the day at the mall trying on clothes. We could never buy that much but that wasn’t the point. It was never crowded, and the salespeople were always so nice to her because she just has that kind of personality, where everyone gravitates towards you. And then afterwards we’d get milkshakes at the diner across the street.’ I paused, loosening the thread around my finger so it would stop throbbing. ‘It was nice.’
’It sounds like you really love her.’
‘Actually I haven’t seen her in eight years.’ I tightened the string again. ‘My boyfriend thinks I cut people off too easily.’
Miriam sat back in her chair. The tip of my finger turned a pulpy mauve-pink.
‘What do you think?’
‘I think it’s easy for him to say that.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I mean that he sees life simply. Nothing has happened in his life to challenge these extremely simple moral lessons he learned in childhood. Things like, family is everything. Just be yourself. People will love you no matter what. It makes it hard to take him seriously.’
Miriam pulled her glasses off. ‘How does that make you feel?’
I could feel myself frowning. ‘What do you mean? I just told you.’
‘You told me it’s hard to take him seriously. I’m asking you,’ she leaned back, and touched the tips of her fingers together, ‘how that makes you feel.’
My face was burning now. I pulled the string even tighter, so the tip of my finger was a bruised purple colour.
‘Sometimes it makes me want to strangle him. When he says I’m being too harsh, or whatever. It just makes me want to be even meaner, which is easy for me to do, actually. I don’t know why I do that, other than I’m good at it, so in that way it feels good, to be mean. For a little while anyway. Other times, like when I’m sick and he makes me twenty cups of this disgusting lemon garlic honey tea my mom used to make me, even though it smells like an actual garbage disposal, it makes me feel kind of—’ my voice trailed off, and I realized I was gripping my chest.
Miriam looked at me, made a ‘go on’ gesture with her hands.
I shook my head. It was quiet then. I could hear the clock ticking. ‘I can’t explain it. I know he’s being nice but I can’t stand it when he takes care of me.’
There were small wet circles on my skirt. I’d been crying, I hadn’t realized. Miriam grabbed a tissue and held it out, and I stared at it for a few seconds before realizing she was trying to hand it to me. I took it and nodded a thank you.
***
On the way home from therapy, I stopped in Parc Lafontaine. It was the start of April and the snow was starting to melt, leaving large grey patches of slush in the icy paths. Soon it would be summer again, and I could walk here after work, the sun still high in the sky, tufts of cottonwood drifting in the summer air like a ballet. Parents playing with their children, colourful blankets laid out in the soft grass, elated laughter from their kids as they ran barefoot. It made me smile even just to think of it.
By the frozen-over lake, there was a little girl walking with a woman who must have been her mother. The mother was bent down, trying to put the girl’s mittens back on. The girl must have been about seven or eight, her hair was in two pigtails and it was messy, like she had been running. ‘I want to see the swans,’ the girl said, stamping her foot in the ground. Her voice was thick, like she had been crying. ‘It’s too cold for them, honey, I think they keep them indoors in the winter,’ her mother said. The girl started to cry again, and her mother took her in her arms. As they walked past me I locked eyes with the girl, hanging over her mom’s shoulder. I smiled at her, gave a little wave, but she looked at me gravely before burying her face in her mom’s hair.
When I finally made it back home, Ryan was sitting on the couch watching an old episode of The Office. He put the TV on mute while I unbuttoned my coat, hung up my scarf, and undid the laces of my boots. I checked my face in the mirror. The cold had tightened my skin, evened my complexion. You couldn’t tell I’d been crying anymore.
‘It smells good in here,’ I said as I plopped down on the couch beside him, propping my feet in his lap.
‘I made a vegetarian lasagna,’ he said. He traced the arch of my foot with his thumb absentmindedly. ‘It’ll be ready in about fifteen minutes.’
I could tell he was curious about how I found therapy, but I knew he wouldn’t ask. He was good at that. He unmuted the TV, and we watched the scene where the entire office is trying to lose weight.
When the episode was over, I asked him, ‘Do you know what happens to the swans in the winter?’
‘You mean the ones at Parc Lafontaine?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I think they keep them indoors, to protect them from the cold. Why?’
I closed my eyes, feeling his arms on my legs, the smell of the food cooking in the kitchen. I thought of the swans, warm and ensconced, their little heads resting on their bodies. Their big powerful wings, tucked safely into themselves. ‘No reason.’
ABOUT THE CREATOR
E.M. Foley is a French-American writer based in Dublin. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from University College Dublin and a BA in International Development from McGill University. Her short stories have been shortlisted in the 4-Faced Liar competition and longlisted in the Frazzled Literature competition.