by Rachel Yoder
I sat on the hard couch in her office. She had a potted plant and little stone figurines from an African nation. She had a special area rug, woven with many colors. She had a soft-light lamp on the end table. It was trying to be a living room, but the effort ruined the effect. I tried to tell her about the things he and I had gone over before I came to see her, how I drank too much and how my dad was a bastard. All she wanted to talk about, though, was him.
I had notes on how to handle that. He and I had reviewed how to deal with this very sort of scenario. I'd come prepared.
I'd rather focus on my father, I said. I flipped through my notebook until I found the points I'd enumerated, and then placed my finger there.
She wanted to know how he treated me, though, what he said and how he said it. Did he ever lay his hands on me. Did he ever.
These are my problems, I said, pointing to the notebook. These are what I feel comfortable discussing.
A few days later, my old roommate called me and asked would I please come back to the apartment for just an hour, she wanted to talk. I said sure but knew what was coming. When I got there, they were all there, sitting neatly in the living room with their hands in their laps. They were worried, is what they said. They talked and talked and talked. I flipped a switch inside my head so that it made it harder to hear.
After, I watched Natalie smoke a cigarette on the stoop. It was in a courtyard called The Fishbowl. Remember that one night with Aaron and Troy, she said. Natalie had been wearing a short pleated skirt. We went to one party, then the next. We sat on couches. We were teeth and eyes and hair. The streets were dark and lovely and when we walked them we were unalone, unthinking.
I knew I liked you that night, she said. We laughed. Natalie used to be a slut, but then she studied abroad and met this Irish guy and came back engaged for senior year. Maybe I had been a slut, too, but now I had him and everything was different. I held her hand and looked at her pretty ring. We used to drink too much, do guys. We used to say fuck all the time. He felt she'd been rehabilitated, however. He felt I could possibly still be her friend.
She blew smoke, and it floated by. I was afraid he'd smell it on me. I was afraid we'd lose a whole night to such a thing. I was afraid I wouldn't eat again, not for weeks.
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Another in the Pentagon City series.
These are my problems, I said, pointing to the notebook. These are what I feel comfortable discussing.
I flipped a switch inside my head so that it made it harder to hear.
These lines are gifts.
The story is wonderful. I wouldn't change a word. I even liked how I immediately assumed she was sleeping with the psychiatrist and wearing his underwear, only to see my assumption smashed.
I love the presence of "he" (boyfriend, i presume), how this unnamed man has taken such control. Staggering.
whatever dave said cuz i haven't had enough coffee to formulate an adequate response on the awesomeness of each paragraph.
You have a great little story here, but I disagree with David that it can't be rewritten. The therapist's office is a place where we need more conscious investigation. We realize when we include MacDonald's, for example, that we are invoking homogenous physical culture, bad architecture, poor diets, factory farming, and low wages. Similarly, conscious discovery (including of religion that lurks in back of this story) might produce deeper lines in the same scenarios. That is to say, while I eagerly read about the elements here, I want to take with me a line, thought, or image that changes what I knew. As it is, the story suggests that having sex leads to time at the doctor's.
So I read "Pentagon City" and noted the comments about Jesus' Son. There is no in/out of polite society in those stories. The therapist's office in your story may brook societal realms against some resistance. I read in an interview that Johnson wrote Jesus' Son based partly on memory once in recovery. He said he hesitated to put on display a spiritual illness. Someone once told me that recovery changes a writer's themes. In Johnson's book, there's little sense of police or of AA or of therapy clinics. The clinic is not AA, obviously, is "secular." Maybe what I wrote in the first comment doesn't apply if what you want is a world, as in Johnson, unto itself.
We were teeth and eyes and hair.She used to be a slut but then she studied abroad and met this British guy and came back engaged. I like these kinds of sentences because they pack a wallop.
Your writing hurts in the best way. This is fantastic.
Hi everyone! Thanks so much for taking the time to read and comment. Glad you enjoyed this. Also, xTx!, your name is awesome.
Ann, you mentioned that religion is lurking around in this piece. Could you give me some feedback about where specifically you see this? What lines? Thanks!
It's my analysis of psychoanalysis, really, so it may be of little use to you in thinking of your story. I see that people in therapy, though it's a very complex topic, are people who flunked childhood, for example, whose childhoods were unideal. I just read a notation in Gary Lutz's essay on the sentence, that his childhood was largely unobserved, something common to an older generation but hardly thinkable in our time. Religion was part of many childhoods then was discarded, and usually (in my view) it is because the major western religions can't be guides in sexuality very easily: only marriage is recommended. So therapy becomes a substitute in a secular culture for religion. Again, this is how I see it; as a reader, I bring it in with me.
The word "slut" drives me to distraction, even when it's used ironically. I have a man friend who was attending what he called sluts anonymous, and I said get the hell out of there, but he had to go to appease his live-in girlfriend. The word "slut" was in a Swedish folk song I found, written as "Slut!" translated as "all done." I've been meaning to ask a Swedish poet I know whether mothers say, "Slut!" when taking a cake out of the oven.
In Chaucer, "sluttish" refers to men not women, and in Pepys, my favorite on this topic, he writes about an "admirable slut."
some awful nice stuff here, R. where's the book? here's my credit card....
Thanks for the clarification, Ann. And Scott, you're on the advance copy list juuuuust as soon as I finish that book you mentioned... So nice of you to even think that. Thanks mucho.
Very nice piece in a very troubling way. Says a lot without saying anything directly. Hard to carry off without being oblique.
I love this. I love the structure of it, the language, the title...everything.
The rising sense of menace here left me feeling circled by sharks. I,too, loved everything about this.
Thanks so much, Andrew, Kathy, and Ethel!
Rachel, I haven't been on here in a billion years and I was so very happy to see this upon my return and be able to read it. I <3 u.
In your work I always find the nexus of: honest, loving, funny, sexy, scary/scared, brave. And your prose is so beautiful; everything in its place. I could go on. Luv it, dude.
Wow, Rachel. This is amazing. This man has so much presence, to her, to the therapist, to the reader. His consumption of her (and her inability to consume) are terrifying.
"...the effort ruined the effect." so true of so many things.
Loving this series!
Hey hey, Nazz! I haven't been on here in a while either. Thanks for the sweet note, per usual. And Lauren, thanks too to you for your comment and support! So kind.
Rachel, this is really great. Perfect lines, too, like: "We were teeth and eyes and hair," and, "I was afraid we'd lose a whole night to such a thing." Yum.
I was afraid he'd smell it on me.
He's ominous and unnamed. Good stuff.
I like the imagery of the boxers around shark fins. Vivid. Thanks for your story.
Hey Katrina and Dwight, thanks so much for your comments!
Favorite.
Faved it!
I love this, Rachel.
Glad I found this later than never. Splendid voice here.
Thanks, Neil!