Dora: A Headcase

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  The only other thing I hear my father say late in the evening is “I’ve got late work to attend to.”

  And my mother going, in a voice even I have to admit is filled beautifully with tiny nails, “Your work takes you from the house in ways you positively relish.” Then the door slams. Then I hear the sound of unscrewing. Vodka? Scotch? Courvoisier? What’r’we drowning in tonight, mother? I really don’t blame her. If I was stuck in some kind of psychotic housewife hell in a condo with nothing but rich people objects to clean while a philandering husbandaid escaped for his nightly escapades … I’d medicate the shit out of myself. Or just check out. For real.

  I open my bedroom door a crack to spy on her. Ah. Well, I approve. She’s gone with Jim Morrison’s favorite booze. Live it up, mother. Into this house we’re born, into this world we’re thrown. She looks … she looks like she’s melting into the chair. She looks like a Francis Bacon painting.

  She wasn’t always a melted face. My mother, I mean. She used to be wicked smart. Read all kinds of books. And she was a concert pianist. When they got with each other. Apparently. That’s why a baby grand lives with us in the condo. But I’ve never heard her play. When I was born she had some kind of breakdown. Then when I was ten she ate an entire bottle of sleeping pills. I remember watching my father slap her face trying to wake her up. I remember how she looked lying on the hardwood floor, her body in a little “s” shape. I remember going into the bathroom and eating toilet paper and crying.

  After that she just sort of became an expert at rubbing things clean. That baby grand? Silent but spotless.

  When I was five … jesus christ was I ever five?

  I’m five and my mom and dad have me decked out in some kind of black velvety girl dress and black patent leather mary jane shoes and my hair is long and blonde and captured in a beautiful black satin bow. I have no idea what I look like to all the adults around us but I’m praying to the moon I look “pretty.”

  We are at one of my mother’s solo piano performances.

  My father and I sit on red velvet chairs, part of the “audience.” Everyone’s eyes are on my mother. Everyone’s heart is on my mother. Everyone’s leaning forward toward her, her face, her body, her hands, waiting to be pleasured. Her back is straight and strong. Her hair is wrapped and wrapped up and around in great swirls of French twist. Her gown, is off white silk and chiffon, and off of her shoulders, so that her shoulders look to me like perfect pearl drops. Everyone is holding their breath in anticipation.

  No one is everyone more than I am. I am hot underneath my black velvet and a little itchy and yep a little bit I have to pee but I’m also wanting. I could eat her. I want to run up that instant and crawl into her lap and fold my face between her jaw and collarbone and suck on her shoulder.

  When her hands lift and then lower onto the keys and the first notes sound I think I might die. I start crying.

  My father gently, so gently, puts his hand on my leg and whispers “Shhhh sweetheart, it’s OK, it’s OK” He puts his arm around me. He’s right, it is, but five-year olds can’t contain all the pleasure and pride and happiness I am feeling in their minds or bodies yet so now I’m not just crying I’m peeing, just a little, not enough for any kind of scene or anything, but enough to relieve some of this motherloving godforsaken pressure.

  She is beautiful. She is playing franz shoe burt.

  She is beautiful she is beautiful sheisbeautifulbeautiful-beautifulbeautiful.

  When she is finished playing franz shoe burt I can’t hold anything in any more and I leap out of my red velvet seat which has the faintest trace of girl pee on it and I squeeze through the aisle of pretty dressed up people clapping and I run up to the stage and I crawl on up her leg, knee, into her lap and she’s laughing and people are clapping and she’s kissing me and holding me and a little bit I put my mouth on one of her shoulders and a little bit I’m about to suck her shoulder and then we both stand up and she holds my hand and looks down at me smiling and signals me and miraculously I know what to do.

  We bow.

  Together.

  I PUNCH HER number into my cell. “Hello,” she goes.

  “Hello,” I go.

  “Ida,” she says.

  “Mother,” I respond.

  “Ida?” she asks.

  “Yes mother?”

  “Is there something you want to say?” She asks.

  “I just … just wanted to say hello, I guess…” I stare at my ceiling.

  “All right then,” she says, her voice barely audible.

  “Bye,” I go, but she’s already gone.

  I stick my phone in my ass pocket. I look up again at the vag crack on my ceiling. I dig inside my backpack and pull out a spoon. Yep, you know whose spoon. I put the spoon in my mouth for lubrication.

  I close my eyes.

  I picture Obsidian. Her hair black as a record album falling down on my face. The stone of her necklace jabbing my throat. Then I unzip my pants and pull down my deal and spoon rub my twinkle till it’s red. I’m a fucking daughter of Eve.

  Dizzy.

  White.

  Vibrate.

  I grab my cell from my backpack, my pants around my thighs. “Obsidian?” I go. Silence. “Obsidian?”

  But it’s just my own ass calling me.

  7.

  SOME MEETINGS I LIE, SOME MEETINGS I FLIRT, AND some meetings I box. With the Sig.

  Think about it. Psychotherapists—they’re all hot for your deepest darkest secrets anyway, so the more you lie, the happier they are. It gives them the chance to delve. Penetrate. Use weird hand gestures. Write crap down. And the whole set-up of this doctor /patient shit is completely porno. You spill your guts and cry like a pussy while they “father you better.” Christ. How is that different than Mrs. K ass-up in my father’s study? Yeah. I’m pretty sure the word for that is subjugation. Marlene taught it to me.

  All I’m saying is that you’ve got to get the upper hand in these deals or you are screwed.

  Anyway. Today Sig’s hell bent on talking about my blackouts, so the gloves are off. Turns out that’s the only part of my story he’s interested in. Letcho. But there’s no fucking way I’m telling him anything about Obsidian. Like ever. Whatever comes out of his pie-hole, I will motherfucking one-up it.

  In his cozy little liar’s den.

  With oriental rugs and floor to ceiling book walls.

  Me the girl on the couch. Catholic girl skirt with silver buckles.

  Him in the blonde camel back chair. Dockers and a blue button down. Tweed sport coat. No I’m not kidding.

  Hot girl on man mind fuck.

  Let’s get ready to rumble.

  We back and forth it a good while with neither of us going down. I’ll give the guy this – he’s persistent. He sort of hammers home with the same big words argument until it sounds true. Oddly, big words are kind of mesmerizing. Like neuropathology. Like psychosomatic. Paramnesias. If you don’t have what it takes, he could really hoo-doo you into thinking that you don’t know who you are.

  To make sure I do not get tricked I stare at the clock behind his head. Get this. It’s a cuckoo clock. Only the cuckoo doesn’t shoot out like it’s supposed to. It cuckoos at the top and half hours, but no bird.

  He goes, “There are neuropathologies created when the psyche is in an excited state.” It’s 4:30. The cuckoo clock does its thing. I get up and walk over to the clock. I reach up and push on the little door. It’s stuck in there. I stand on a chair and shove my fingers in the slit and try to grab that little fucker.

  “It’s no use,” Siggy says, “it’s stuck.”

  “So why do you have this broken fucking clock?” I ask.

  “Nostalgia. It’s from Vienna. My mother gave it to me. But it keeps time.”

  I get nostalgia. I remember hearing piano music before I could talk. But I’ve never seen it happen. I remember the smell of my father’s aftershave – when he’d hoist me up onto his shoulders – I remember how I could s
ee the world from the perch of father. I remember laughing with his head between my little girl legs.

  I sit back down on the couch across from him, but I keep my eyes on the stuck cuckoo’s door. Today Siggy’s got ants in his pants. He’s ratcheting up the lingo, I can tell, because his voice is ever so slightly higher and tighter like someone is slowly choking him.

  That’s why when he says, “Ida, your hysteria is the case for sexual excitement,” I have to immediately drop my gaze back down from the busted cuckoo clock with its stuck bird to his head and upper-cut with “Gee, you mean to say my giz biz is what makes me a psycho? Does it make you a psycho too? You know, when your little man salutes with a pearly drop on his little head?”

  You got to have your junk at the ready. Like I told you, he’s a sly one.

  Then I make a misstep though. I tell him accidentally about some pearl earrings my dad showed me that he told me he was going to give to me, then ended up giving to Mrs. K. I know because I saw her with them on when we bumped into the Ks at a restaurant. I have no idea why I tell him that. It just sort of came out when I said “pearly drop.” Goddamn it.

  But you can’t just say things in the office. He leans way forward in his camel back chair and points his little black pen at me and goes, “Jewel drops. The gift of pearl earrings your father gave to his lover instead of you. The jewel drops are a sexual symbol for that which he has given her and not you – his affections.” Then jewel drops this and jewel drops that – jewel drops dripping all over the goddamn place.

  Finally I snap out of it and left jab with “Jeez Sig, can you even make a sentence without your own cock in it? Jewel drops? Are you serious? When you’re walking around in the world and you see women with earrings on, is that what you are thinking? That their ear bling is dripping with … Eeeeewwwwwwww. Dude. That’s so boy teen cream dream! What are you, like seventeen?”

  He counters with, “Ida, your inability to admit your jealousy of your father’s lover creates a crisis in consciousness.” Oh. Score. That one gives me a bit of a fat lip. There is something about Mrs. K. Her ass is … unforgettable. So white. So big. Like the moon split. I sit silent for a second on the couch across from him. My father’s lover. Big white split moon ass.

  But no way is he gonna take this round. I give Sig the drop dead stare and part my legs just wide enough there on the couch to flash him some teen muff before I stand up and jet across the room. Panties on a need to wear basis only. You gotta have an ace in the hole.

  He drops his pen on the floor and coughs. Coughs. A lot. Something sticks in his throat. He stares at his thighs and rubs them briskly. Careful not to set your pants on fire.

  Bring it, old man.

  I pace around his office touching things, watching his progressively more anxious reactions.

  “Hey Siggy,” I go, “Why are you so interested in my father’s ho, anyway? Do you read your notes to yourself at night and jimmy the pickle? Or are you writing it all down for a bestselling novel or something?”

  “Ida.” He’s using the chin down gravel voice. “These discussions are not the material for some … roman à clef.”

  I stop dead in my tracks. This could be interesting. “What the fuck is a roman à clef?” I go, and proceed to walk around and around his desk.

  He sighs like this is all annoying him. But I know better. He loves to answer my questions. “A roman à clef – literally translated, is a novel with a key. But what it means is a novel that is based on real people from the author’s life. With the names changed.”

  “Gimme an example,” I go.

  “Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Or Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.”

  I stare at him with lockjaw, arms crossed over my chest. Unimpressed.

  “Each is a novel with a kind of … secret at its center. The secret is the author’s life, embedded in fiction.”

  I consider this. “Does On the Road count?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Tard. Please tell me with all these goddamned books lining the walls you know who Jack Kerouac is. “You know, Jack Kerouac?”

  “Ah. Well, yes I suppose. And to answer your earlier query, psychotherapy is not a novel.”

  “But you already told me you write … what are they called … case studies? What are those?”

  “Clinical recitations of patient pathologies.”

  “Right.” I click my heels together like Dorothy and close my eyes and recite, “There’s no place like home” a few times.

  I don’t know why. Just feel like it. I stop and open one eye and give him a stink eye for a second. “So you don’t take people’s lives and make them into books? With different names?”

  He coughs some more. He sounds a little asthmatic. I see my opening. I do random jumping jacks.

  He goes, “Ida, wouldn’t you like to have a seat?”

  “Thanks Siggy, I’m kinda fond of the ass I have already,” I say patting my girl butt.

  He scratches something invisible on his chest.

  Keep it moving. They hate that. They like you best on the couch.

  I kid skip over to the window and pull back the curtain and look down at the street. If only I had a lollipop.

  “Is there something out there that interests you?” he asks.

  “No,” I go, looking down at the street, “But I bet you get a big fat boner when you see the tops of your patient’s heads from here.”

  He does the church and steeple thing with his hands. “Ida, I really don’t see where you are going with this,” he grumbles in the I’m the doctor voice with his chin down.

  I don’t know either, but I am willing to wait for it.

  I saunter over to the bookshelf and run my hand over the spines of his books.

  He sits upright. His eyebrows knitting. “Is there a title there of interest to you?” he asks a little too hopefully. Talk about nerdoid.

  “Yeah,” I say, pulling out a bright yellow one, “Wasn’t this Magnus Hirschfeld dude known as ‘The Einstein of Sex?’ That so rocks. Didn’t he do dudes?” I turn to face him, waving the book in the air between us. “Do you do dudes? Siggy?”

  Eyebrow drop. Hands between legs. Heavy exhale of irritation. More coughing. Score. Bought myself a speechless on that one.

  Next I walk casually over to his desk and turn on the desk light and let him talk to my back for a bit. Blah blah blahbiddy blah repression repression repression. Blah Blah consciousness-subconsciousunconscious. Broken record.

  That, my friends, is how I find the blow.

  While he blathers on, I drag my finger dramatically across the surface of his desk. You know, that ol’ check for dirt number. Too bad I didn’t wear a little maid outfit. It’s just a gag. But when I look at my finger, it isn’t dirt. It’s white. Powder white. Very faint, but true. If you know what you are looking at. When I suck my finger, I smile the smile of a girl who knows things. Siggy. You old dirty dog.

  Uh huh, I’m saying the Sigster is into booger sugar.

  Well all righty then. He knows things about me, but two can play at that game. I turn slowly around, and in the middle of his gloriously wordy smarty guy sentences, I notice something he has not. With my finger still in my mouth, I say, looking at the clock on the wall just behind his head with its stuck cuckoo, “Um, Sig? I’m afraid our time is up.”

  That’s right. Knockout walking out the door.

  8.

  OCCASIONALLY AVE MARIA’S RICH AS FUCK MOTHER “treats us to lunch.”

  On the top floor of some mega-lame high-rise downtown. About once a month. I’m pretty sure that’s how often Ave Maria sees her moneyspawner. But I don’t care. Rich people food is fun to photograph with your iPhone and you can steal drinks off of peoples’ tables when they get up to relieve themselves.

  But check it: lo and behold, just on the other side of the faux indoor garden in the center of the restaurant … like a mini Eden but without the snake … through the shitty ass ficus leaves, is Sig. He’s with so
me slick-looking business joker with ferret hair, ferret eyes. Because their backs are mostly facing us, I can see him, but he can’t see me, so I do exactly what any self-respecting girl patient in my predicament would do. I pretend I have to go pee while Ave Maria’s mother sucks down her third Pomegranate Tini. I stealthily remove my Zoom H4n from my Dora purse and nonchalantly embed it in the river rocks at the base of the fake Eden. With a 32 Gb SD card, it can record for days. Or when the batteries give out, whichever comes first.

  Nobody watches girls like me in restaurants like that. We’re somebody’s daughter they pay to leave home. Whatever it is Sig and the Ferret are talking about, I’m gonna get the sound.

  Lunch proceeds retardedly as usual … Ave Maria chucks cold shrimps over her shoulder when her motherpuddle isn’t looking … one even hits some old bag whose earlobes look like they might fall off of her head from the weight of the pearls. Hey! Jewel drops! When the cold shrimp beans her, the gasbag looks up briefly at the ceiling fresco as if God has crapped on her. I sip on a white Russian I snagged off a table absent of humans on my way back from the pisser.

  Ave Maria’s mother looks like a puffer fish. She is blowing bubbles at us … talking about something at us … something about travel abroad. Ave Maria is no doubt about to be shipped off to some private school far far away from the word “family.” I look over at Ave Maria. Ave Maria is bending and unbending her spoon and making her own spit bubbles with her mouth.

  As often as possible, I steal peeks at the Sig scene. The slick business weasel is waving his little rodent hands around. Siggy’s shoulders look slumped to me. And his hair is all birds’ nesty. He puts his head in his hands. Is it bad news? Good? It’s so hard to read old people. Old men all look kinda like spent balloons to me. Happy just looks the same as sad on their faces. Wrinkled and sucked.

  But then a whole man drama happens.

  This other dude comes into the restaurant. I don’t mind telling you, he’s a head turner. Literally. You can see him coming from all the heads turning one by one to look at him. The kind of guy who looks like he deserves his own theme music. Basically to me he looks pretty much exactly like Paul Newman in “The Hustler.” Which Marlene showed me. Dang. Hotcha. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. Though it’s a tossup really … I could also go with Steve McQueen in “Bullitt.”