There is a tuna fish sandwich waiting for me on the table when I arrive in the kitchen. There are pickles in it, and I can see extra mayonnaise dribbling out the side. She’s made it exactly the way I like it best. What is going on?
Mom is trying to look happy but I can see the effort it is taking by the way her lips quiver in the corners. This is very confusing. Am I in trouble or not?
“Hey. What’s up?” I try to sound innocent, which I am, though I don’t feel like it.
“Nothing, Sylvie.” Not Honey, not Sweetie, not Cookie or Cupcake. This is very bad. “Eat your sandwich. Then I thought we could have a talk.”
I don’t know how I can eat a sandwich when my stomach is literally tied in a knot, but I sit down and nibble on a crust. A chunk of celery falls out from between the pieces of bread and lands in a puddle of tuna juice on the plate. I figure I can eat the celery, it won’t be dry like the bread, it won’t stick in my throat and choke me to death, so I pick it up and shove it in my mouth and chew.
Mom has turned her back. She is wiping down the already immaculate counter tops. Then she grabs a box of baking soda from the cupboard, half-empties it in the sink and starts to scrub.
I swear it takes me twenty minutes, but I finish the sandwich and half the glass of milk and then Mom says we should go in the family room.
She takes me to the computer. She opens the web browser. And clicks on the history tab. And scrolls down.
There are all the sites I visited last night. The ones I was mostly too tired to read but clicked on them anyway.
“Do you want to talk to me about this?” says Mom.
I am so frozen by the apparent seriousness of the matter that I can’t think straight, and have no idea whatsoever what I should be saying.
“You can’t deny it, Sylvie. I’ve already talked to your father so I know that it wasn’t him visiting these sites.”
Well of course not, he has no interest in guerilla marketing or barnacles or ponies.
“Not that you have to talk to me. If you want to talk to someone else, that will be fine, I can find a professional, one of my colleagues perhaps, or if you prefer I will find someone for you to talk to that I don’t know.”
Some kind of crustacean expert I am thinking. But then I think about how sneaky that whole guerilla marketing stuff is and that maybe it’s worse than sneaky maybe it’s downright dishonest and I shouldn’t have been doing it and now she’s found out, it was the last stuff I looked at on the net and now she’s disappointed in me.
I hang my head. “Stephanie told me about it. She’s studying it at university.”
“Are you telling me you have no personal interest in these topics?”
“Well no, not exactly.” I’m not sure this is the right time to come clean on the details of my marketing campaign.
“You can trust me, Sylvie. I’m aware that puberty can be an extremely confusing stage, and I also know that sexual preference is determined very early. Your Uncle Brian—.” She stops abruptly and I take a peak up at her. Her face has gone all red. She sniffs, takes a deep breath, lets it out, and starts again. “I don’t mind that you are searching for answers, but the internet may not be the best source of information. Nor for that matter is someone taking a first-year psychology course.”
Okay, I must be really slow. So this has nothing to do with marketing campaigns. It’s one of these puberty things. I review the sites listed on the history screen. Surely she can’t think I’m a hermaphrodite—she’s my mother, she’s seen me naked. She must think I’m bisexual. I wonder briefly if there’s any advantage in letting her think this, anything I might be able to use to get my own horse. But then I think, gee, this is my mother who knows me better than anyone. Could she be right?
“Mom, do you think I’m bisexual?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” says Mom. “What matters is what you think.”
“I don’t know what I think.”
Mom reaches over and pulls me tight into her. “Sylvie, we will love you no matter what you are. We won’t try to change you. You’re perfect just the way you are.”
I can feel her quivering against me. I hate it when she gets emotional like this. It reminds me of the way she used to be, before she went back to school and became a psychoanalyst. When Uncle Brian died she cried for weeks.
This is such a big deal to her, and I don’t get it. Everything has become way too serious and out of proportion. It’s time for a joke.
“What if I decide,” I start slowly, “that I am . . . ,” I pause like Dad would for comedic effect, “an equestrian?”
Mom stiffens against me and then says the scariest thing I’ve heard all day. “I’ll find you a therapist.”
First gymnastics, then hi-lights, now this. She’s right about one thing: puberty is a very confusing stage, even for someone who isn’t there yet.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The therapist says to call him John, not Dr. Clyde, like Mom told me. He works for the same agency as my mom. She’s been there almost a year, since she graduated from university. John has been there longer, but Mom says he’s younger than her and he’s not her boss and he specializes in adolescents. He looks like a sea lion. He’s got no neck. I know I’m not supposed to make comments on someone’s physical characteristics but John’s are kind of hard to miss. And since Mom always says that exercise is an important component of good mental health, I find his condition worrisome. But it also explains to me why Mom has been on a diet ever since she started her job. She says getting overweight is an occupational hazard when you’re a therapist and you make your living sitting on your butt listening to people’s problems all day. She must have taken one look at John and called Weightwatchers right away.
John has diplomas on one wall and very bad kid art on another. There is one especially pathetic drawing of what is probably meant to be a unicorn: it’s something like a horse with four unjointed legs so how it moves I have no idea, and there’s a bright yellow spike sticking out of its forehead at an angle that would ensure the poor creature would never be able to graze. Well, maybe in fantasy-land unicorns don’t have to eat.
John wants to know what grade I’m in and how I like my teachers and what my favourite subjects are. It’s like we’re both pretending we don’t know why I’m there, but that’s okay with me and I relax until he asks if I have any pets.
“Well, yeah, sort of,” I say.
“A dog? Cat? Hamster?”
For each one I shake my head. He goes on for a while: rat, iguana, guinea pig, but finally gives up.
“I have barnacles.”
“Well that’s unusual. More than one? A family?”
I figure he’s probably pretending, that Mom has told him about everything, and he’s treating me like a dim-wit. I say, “Barnacles are crustaceans. They don’t have families.” And then because we might as well get down to business I add, “They’re hermaphrodites.”
“Well who would have thought?”
“With very long penises.” This is inappropriate but I want to see how he responds.
He nods thoughtfully. “Well, I guess if you’re stuck in one spot . . . .”
I sit back and cross my arms.
“You going to clam up now?” says John.
I look at him blankly.
“That’s a joke—you know: barnacles, clams.”
“Clams are mollusks, not crustaceans.”
“True enough.”
I swing my feet under my chair. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say now and he’s looking at me as though it’s my turn.
“So what brings you here?” he asks eventually.
“My mom.”
He clears his throat. “Anything I can help you with?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It�
��s not easy being the kid of a therapist.”
“Psychoanalyst,” I correct him because Mom has stressed the distinction.
“Even more so.”
He probably isn’t supposed to say something like this, which makes me like him just a little. “Puberty,” I offer.
He purses his lips. “Very difficult stage, from what I hear.”
His tone is ironic but I’m not sure if he means he’s read about the problems in therapy journals, which would be okay, or if my mom has talked to him about me, which would not be okay.
I sit. He sits. We are both waiting but I know I can out-wait anyone. All I have to do is start thinking about horses and I’m off in another world. Kansas has promised me I can start taking lessons on Electra as soon as her riding ring has been built. I told her I thought I’d rather ride Hambone (formerly Nickers) but she didn’t think that was a good idea. He’s still what she calls an unknown quantity and he’s kind of dominant for a gelding and may need a more experienced rider, at least in the beginning. He might be safe after he’s been tuned. Obviously I couldn’t tell her that I’ve ridden him already. Electra . . .
“I can help you, Sylvie” says John.
“I don’t need any help.”
“You’ve got a problem.”
“Not really.”
“I think you do.”
I don’t know if an adolescent expert can look at someone and know that they’re bisexual. If he tells me I’m bisexual I’ll die. Or I’ll leave. I wonder if it’s breaking a law to get up and leave in the middle of a therapy session, and whether he can grab me and bring me back in. But even if it isn’t illegal, what would my mom say. Would it embarrass her if her daughter was a failure at therapy?
John steeples his fingers and leans way back in his chair. With his weight the chair better be made of specially reinforced materials. “I think your problem is . . . ” and he pauses, dropping his head until his lips meet his fingertips, then he whispers, “your mother.”
“My mother?”
“If nothing else, your problem is that your mother is worried about you. And I can help you with that. I can help you get her off your back.”
Behind John is his desk and on it is a telephone. One of the lights is flashing. He must have the phone on mute so we can’t be disturbed. My feet have stopped swinging so I wrap my ankles tight around the chair legs. I don’t like it that he’s criticized my mom—even if he’s right. Electra is quite small, she’s only thirteen hands tall. She’s chestnut with four white sox and a blaze. Kansas says she’s Arab/Welsh and very very smart but that she likes kids, especially light ones like me because she’s very fine-boned so she won’t give me any trouble and I’ll learn a lot from her. And she loves to jump, which I’m not too sure about right now but maybe by the time I—
“I’m thinking we could even do our next session with your mom here. Or better still, with your mom and dad. Generally this is my preference, I tend not to think of problems as being inside people, more I think of them as being between people.” He gestures to the middle of the carpet, as though problems could be happening out there in the middle of the room. And I’m not sure how, but I still think he’s being critical of my mom. It’s like he has a point to make that has nothing to do with me.
How am I going to get out of this? I know what my problem is. My problem is that I want a horse, I’ve wanted one since I was born and I’m not going to be happy until I have one. But if I tell him that and he thinks the same way Mom does and then wants to talk to me about how a horse is a substitute for conscious masturbation I’ll die. I’ll crawl under the carpet and die. They’ll cart my body out on a stretcher and I will never ride again, let alone have my own horse.
“Well, it’s up to you.” John shrugs as though it doesn’t matter to him, but I know that it does.
I try to picture Hambone but I can’t. There’s just John, sitting in his over-sized swivel chair, stroking the little bit of beard he has on the place where his chin should be, rocking ever so slightly back and forth.Waiting.
I mumble, “Okay,” because this seems to be the only way to get out of the room alive.
“Okay?” He sounds surprised. Or maybe terrifically pleased.
I nod.
“I’ll set it up, then,” says John. “You, me, Evelyn and your father. It’ll be great.”
What have I done to my family?
Mom drives me home. She says she doesn’t want to be intrusive about the session so she won’t ask what we talked about but she does want to know if it went all right. She wants to know what I thought of John. I tell her he was okay. Then I tell her that John is going to talk to her about setting up an appointment for a family session. I think it’s better coming from me, then she won’t be taken by surprise tomorrow at work.
“A family session?” she says. “He thinks there are problems in the family?”
“He says problems happen between people not inside people.”
She sighs. “Well that’s one way of looking at things.” She isn’t pleased.
Mom waits until after dinner before she reminds Dad that I had my appointment today, then she tells him that John wants a family session.
“John?” says Dad. “Wasn’t he that cocky little guy at the Christmas party?”
“Well, hardly little,” says Mom.
“Short,” says Dad, “but . . . ”
“Tony,” she cautions. “He’s Sylvie’s therapist.”
“Right,” says Dad. “But I thought he worked exclusively with kids. I thought he did art therapy and that sort of thing.”
“Me too,” says Mom. “That’s what he used to do. Maybe he’s been to a workshop. Maybe he’s into family therapy now.”
“There’s nothing wrong with our family,” says Dad. “Is there Snookums?” He puts his arms around me and lifts me right off the ground. He’s wearing the aftershave I got him for Christmas and I press my face in hard against his neck.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I’m searching for Electra. There is a herd of a hundred chestnut horses with white socks and I can’t find her because they all look alike which means I’m a pretty inadequate horse person since I can’t tell them apart. I try to remember the particular shape of the blaze on her face and whether it went above her eyes or faded to a snip between her nostrils, but it’s no use. And then I see Nickers; she ambles up to me and I’m so happy to see her that I kiss her on the nose, then leap on her back even though there’s no saddle, and that’s when I realize I must be dreaming and I don’t quite manage it right and accidentally wake myself up.
I lie in bed because the alarm won’t go off for a few minutes. It’s a school day so there’s not much to look forward to but Kansas says I can drop by on my way home if I don’t have anything else to do, like therapy appointments. She thinks those are funny. She says I’m the most normal kid she’s ever met, but I haven’t told her everything. I don’t want to tell her I might be bisexual in case she worries this means that I might fall in love with her.
Maybe I should have asked John how I can tell if I’m bisexual or not. Maybe he would have kept it confidential. Or maybe not. My mom says some things that are discussed in therapy cannot be kept confidential because of the law though mostly these things have to do with abuse and self-harm. I don’t know how bisexuality fits into that. I don’t even really know why I’m thinking about it so much all of a sudden. Unless it’s because of the barnacles.
My alarm goes off. I change out of my pajamas then ride my bike to the beach and back. I change the barnacles’ water and watch their tentacles for a minute. I still can’t see anything that looks like it might be a penis which frankly is a great relief.
Mom and Dad still aren’t awake, so I do a few stretches, then put the Pony Club manual on my head and measure myself against the edge of the door. There’s bee
n very little progress. To be completely accurate, there’s been no progress at all.
At school, we have a substitute teacher for math, which is great because for once I won’t have to deal with Mr. Brumby. However the substitute isn’t prepared, so she tells us we can read or draw or do whatever we want, so of course everyone goes crazy. I haven’t brought a book to read, so I try to drown out the din by drawing, even though I’m lousy at it. My drawings aren’t much better than the ones on John’s wall, though at least I get the joints in the legs. I know other girls in my class draw horses too and often they end up with prettier art but it’s rarely realistic. Or even if they get the horse anatomy fairly accurate, they put the saddles too far back and never put throatlatches on the bridles.
At lunch everyone’s still wound up and I know this is exactly the sort of situation where they find someone (like me) to pick on in an extra-merciless way. I decide to avoid the cafeteria altogether, and take my lunch bag to the far corner of the grounds and eat my sandwich sitting under a tree. When I finish, I notice that one of the tree branches is within my reach, so I grab it and have a really good hanging stretch. I hold on a long time until my hands start to ache, and then I close my eyes and hum to distract myself from the pain and extend the stretch as long as possible. When I open my eyes, standing in front of me are Amber and Topaz with three girls from their fan club and Logan Losino. They’re not wearing jackets and Amber and Topaz have sleeveless tops on and their bra straps are showing. It’s like they think developing breasts is something to brag about and not something personal that should be kept private, which is what I’m going to do if it ever happens to me.
“Hey monkey,” says Amber, “did you fall out of your tree?” The girls all giggle.
“Pygmy chimp,” says Topaz. Apparently this is hysterically funny.
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