Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets (21 page)

“I thought it would be nice. But Dad doesn’t seem to want Jorie here so, whatever.” I start eating faster because I’m going to break down—not in tears. I am dehydrated of sadness. I’m just going to fall asleep for about two weeks and wake up in a hospital with doctors and nurses and parents who have been scared into concern and love for me.

“Listen,” my father, the Brute, says, grabbing my recently healed arm, preventing a forkful of salad from entering my mouth. “Your sister is not coming back. I don’t even know why you want her back here anyway. She just made this house
unstable.
”

“Remove. Your hand. From my arm.” A fleck of pasta flies from my lip to the tablecloth.

He lifts his hand away and apologizes in a mocking tone.

“Mom said she’d talk to you about it because she was okay with it,” I lie. Dishonesty can be my weapon too.

“I did not!”

“She said she’s still mad and embarrassed about the whole thing.” I’m very calm.

“James Whitman, you are
lying!
”

“Mom says you have an evil streak. She says that to lots of people.”

See, this is what happens when you have no more energy to yell: you turn your parents against each other.

“Also, Jorie said Mom hits harder than you.”

My mother stands, picks up my plate, and throws it at the wall above the kitchen sink, about ten feet away. The resulting sound amazes me. It’s the sound of relief, in some sick way. This is exactly the kind of thing my mother is fond of doing, and in a few days she’ll deny that she even did it. Just like the bruises on my sister’s arms or the terrible things my parents said to Jorie in their blizzards of anger.

With my dinner taken away, I walk upstairs, ignoring the eruptions. I know that my parents are not addressing me, even as the Brute calls me a
spoiled asshole
and the Banshee tells me to
apologize
and the Brute tells her to
tell the truth
and the Banshee says she
can’t take living in a house like this with people like this!

I ignore them.

I’m powerful enough to ignore.

In my room I feel my pulse pound in my eyes. I look at the pictures on my ceiling, my posters, calendar, books, ticket stubs, Little League trophies, clothes on the dresser. All the detritus that surrounds me: they’re the first things I see and the last things I see every day. These are the things that maintain my anxieties even though I think they’re important and safe and part of me.

The room keeps me sane and crazy. I ask Dr. Bird what to do. Dr. Bird says I need to rearrange the world. The plate-breaking only begins the necessary changes. “Move the pictures. Throw things away. Give things away. Get new clothes. New sheets. Open the windows. Get the dust out.”

I find trash bags and rags to wipe away the dust that coats everything. I throw open the windows and breathe in the late-May air. My door is locked and I am a whirlwind, ready to destroy my room.

With trash bags half full and piles of things on my bed in limbo, waiting for me to decide if I can part with them, I stand on my bed and start pulling down my photo tree. The pictures stick together and then one of them rips. I just wanted to take the whole thing down and put it on the wall or something. I just wanted to rearrange it a bit. Now I’ve ruined the photo tree. I toss it to the floor and feel heat blast my body.

I have to get out of here.

Before I escape, I go into Jorie’s room. I take the box of pain out of the closet. I leave it shut, but I hold it in my hands. The weight of it cannot be measured.

I want to burn it. I want to destroy it so that when she comes home Jorie won’t be able to prove to herself that she ever cut her skin.

But Dr. Bird tells me that only Jorie can burn the box. This makes perfect sense, so we fly out of the house to take it to her.

“I’M CALLING IN A FAVOR,”
I say to Derek when he opens his front door.

“Is this a call?”

“I’m calling on you. In the nineteenth-century sense of the word.”

“I’d prefer a phone call.”

I dial his cell from my cell and we stand, grinning stupidly, before disconnecting and carrying on like semi-adults.

Derek’s house always seems dark. Part of that is the wood paneling. But the other part just seems to be the natural aura of his house. Normally I wouldn’t be bothered by the dimness, but I ask if we can sit on his back porch, just so I can get the last glimpses of daylight. The walk over has done a lot to calm me.

Derek tells me that Sally hasn’t called him at all and he’s had to threaten his sisters with physical abuse so they won’t tell on him.

“Seems pretty sad that you are at the whim of your little sisters,” I tease, though the idea of him beating his sisters disturbs me, considering everything.

“That’s how it works around here. The ladies run the show.”

Being outnumbered three-to-one by women must make Derek think about his dad a lot, though he rarely mentions him. Maybe my own father is not so full of shit.

We sit, and there’s a discomfort to the silence.
Guys don’t sit in silence,
I think over and over.
Guys joke or complain.

“Are you nervous about graduating?” I ask him.

He answers quickly, refusing to admit to the weakness of anxiety. I hear about how he’s excited to be done with high school and how he’ll probably go to community college for a while.

“You aren’t going to take over the pizza shop, are you?” I ask, making sure my joking disapproval of such a move seems serious.

“Seriously? I could make so much money with a place like that. And I could do it making a better pizza, probably.”

“But then you’d be a pizza shop owner. Not the glamorous life we talked about back in the day.”

“What did we think we were going to be when we grew up?”

“I think I was going to be a chemist,” I say.

“You sucked in chemistry.”

“I was just a kid—what did I know?”

“I was going to be a football player,” he says. “Then a NASCAR driver.”

“You told me once you wanted to be a crossing guard.”

“Shut up!” he laughs.

“You did.”

“I must have been three or four.”

“Yeah, three or four days ago!”

We laugh. I watch the sky get dark. I think about what Derek is thinking about. He’s my closest friend and I don’t know what he thinks about at dusk, when all the best thinking gets done. Maybe I’m not allowed to know what’s in his head. To be fair, he has only been able to piece together little bits of my mangled brain. So, maybe we know each other well enough to stay friends. Maybe knowing too much would
be
too much. And maybe I’ll go off to live somewhere and make different friends. Or he’ll make new friends or get a new job or move out and have a party-apartment that I can’t hang out at because I don’t have a car.

I’m making myself sad. Who knows? But things definitely seem to be changing. I can feel it, like the pain of my bones growing faster than my muscles.

“Can you give me a ride to my sister’s?” I say after a few minutes of silence.

“After what you did for me, I might give you my car.”

“My dad won’t even take me to practice driving yet,” I laugh. “He took my sister a couple times and then gave up. Said she wouldn’t listen. To be fair, I’ve never asked if he’d take me out. The image of being in the car with my father know-it- alling from the passenger seat—that just doesn’t compute.”

“I’ll take you out to practice.”

“Thanks, man,” I say. “That’d be a good way to get us both killed.”

“Best Friends Die in Horrific Parallel Parking Tragedy.”

“Two Traffic Cones in Critical Condition.”

Derek drives us to Jorie’s as I navigate, working from my bad memory—which means I’m piecing the route backwards and trying to remember landmarks as they speed by in the direction opposite the way I remember them. Does that make sense? It probably shouldn’t.

Still, I manage to get us there, and I see Jorie’s light on. Who knows if she’s home? Part of me wants her to be, and part of me wants her to be out at a new job, smiling, making new friends, impressing people with her sociability and pep.

Derek lets me sit in the car for a minute, quietly (though the radio is thumping out some crazy song he seems to know).

“Can I ask you something?” he says finally.

“Yeah?”

“You’re not going in there to stab yourself to death or anything?”

“No!”

“And you’re not going to stab her to death?”

“Shut up.” Dr. Dora would chastise us both for laughing about mental illness. But I have to admit, it feels nice for someone else to make light of things.

“So what are you contemplating, then?” he asks.

“I’m just figuring out what I should lie about.”

“Honesty’s the best policy.”

“Sounds like a kindergarten teacher’s bumper sticker.”

“Apparently my dad used to say it all the time.”

I say it’s a good philosophy. Dr. Bird agrees (though Derek doesn’t hear that part). I get out of the car with Jorie’s box of pain held in my hands. I tromp up the steps, loud enough to signal my approach.

When Jorie opens the door, my brain begins assigning adjectives.
Tired
seems inadequate.
Haggard?
Too chimney-sweep.
Fatigued?
She probably has not run any races lately.
Tuckered out?
She’s not a five-year-old.
Weary?
Maybe.
Zonked?

Yes.

“You look zonked,” I say.

“Zonked?” she asks, zonkedly.

“You know. Tired.”

“Why didn’t you just say
tired
then?”

“Would Walt Whitman use such a plain word?”

We’re having this whole exchange with me on the porch and her inside as a few bugs flitter over my head before dive-bombing my eye or nose. Perhaps it’s this that tells her to let me in, as she finally steps back and makes an elaborate arm-wave to point the obvious way.

Her apartment has furniture now. A couch, two cheap construct-them-yourself chairs, a huge saucer-shaped wicker seat, and a small table in front of the couch that seems too high, but as there’s still no TV, it probably doesn’t matter.

“Fancy!” I comment. I am much too hyper to have a serious conversation. I’m still not even sure what conversation to have with her.

Jorie paces. It’s not an orderly path. It’s just movement. She picks up a book and puts it somewhere else. She folds a few pieces of clothing that are on her bed, then smells them and tosses them in a laundry basket.

She finally sits herself down in the wicker saucer. The high-pitched squeaks of the wicker seem out of place.

“Sorry, I’m just having a bit of a panic attack,” she admits.

I brace myself for talk of money woes, potential homelessness, suicidal thoughts, and a newspaper headline about a local girl living under suburban bridges just a few miles from her parents’ house.

“This guy was supposed to call me today and he didn’t. Stupid stuff.” She relaxes a bit in the weird wicker chair.

“I thought you were going to say something completely different.” I tell her about the headline.

“Jeez, I thought I was a pessimist!” She grins. “I’m sorry. I freaked out when I heard the car because I thought this guy was going to come over. But it was just you.”

I make a mock-offended face.

“Not that a visit isn’t nice!”

“How was this guy gonna call?”

“Oh! I got a new phone.” She struggles to extricate herself from the saucer chair but gives up quickly. “Can you grab it? It’s on the kitchen counter.”

I do, and the phone looks like one of the kind that people get when they can’t afford the one in the commercials. Still, it’s better than nothing.

“I’m glad you’ve got a phone again. It’ll be nice to get in touch with you easier.”

“Totally. Without my phone and e-mail and junk, I just totally don’t talk to anyone unless I see them. It felt good for a little bit—to talk to people face-to-face. People have to make more of an effort that way.”

She may be talking about us, too, but I’m just so happy that I’ll have a direct connection to her again. Assuming she can keep paying the phone bill.

She tells me about her new job. It sounds like her old job, just a different cuisine and better tips.

“It’s a upper-tier chain, I guess. There’s some nonsense industry ranking system that the manager talks about. I’m not even sure. But the people there are nice and there’s less drinking on the job, so less shenanigans.”

Jorie interrupts my thought when she finally notices her box of pain, semi-tucked in my sweatshirt.

“Whoa. Why do you have that?”

I open my sweatshirt more and look down at my guilty hands.

“I brought it over so you could destroy it.”

“That was hidden in my room.”

“I know.”

Even though I did something wrong by going through Jorie’s stuff, I don’t want to apologize for digging out the small tumor in the closet.

“Why did you go in my room?”

“I didn’t go looking for it.” I sit on her uncomfortable, cat-odor-y couch. (It should be noted that Jorie does not have any cats.) I feel itchy.

“It didn’t fall out of my closet on purpose, James. Give it to me!” She takes it and doesn’t look at it or hold it close to her body. She places it in the kitchen on the counter, then, perhaps thinking that the light in there is too bright, she places it on the floor on the other side of her mattress.

“I was looking for poems for the literary magazine and I thought it had poetry inside.”

Jorie starts pinching her arm. She’s not screaming or crying or banging around her apartment.

I ask if she’s okay; she says not to change the subject.

“Jorie,
I know.
I opened something I shouldn’t have. I brought it here because I want you to destroy it, though. I want you to promise me you’ll do something to stop hurting yourself. That’s all I want to say about it.”

“You don’t understand. I can’t explain it.”

“I know. I just thought the gesture—setting it on fire, or something—would be nice. But I was in a bad mind-set when I left home to come here tonight. Probably not a good idea to burn things in this mind-set.”