The Empress Chronicles (16 page)

Somehow, in spite of a week of toxic spraying, of Willow’s scrutiny of my eating and hand washing, of Cory’s theft of Dad’s marijuana, of my embarrassment at having been applauded for eating a stupid muffin, of my obsession with Sisi and her secret romance, and my mom never calling, not one time, from her new life at sea, I didn’t scrape my skin off before my next session with Dr. Greta. I gained a pound, and they cheered for me again, Dad and Willow, as though I were a prize doe with kid and an endless supply of cheese-producing milk.

I pulled weeds in the garden. I milked a goat with only two pair of gloves separating me from the foul udder. I collected an egg, plucking it from a bed of straw, tiptoeing around the surprisingly enormous dollops of chicken manure. I kept the kitchen spotless, reordering mason jars, wiping down shelves, sneaking bleach into the house in order to sanitize the sacred maple cutting boards. But mainly, I watched Cory.

I couldn’t figure him out. On the one hand, he was all stoner skater boy. Disheveled and big and dorky and dumb. But from his fat boy lips, at least once a day, would come amazing things. Out of nowhere, apropos of nothing, he said, “We could probably feed the world on the energy Liz puts into avoiding dirt.”

Which, if someone else said that, I’d think the person was cruel. But Cory would base those comments on real observation. Like when we had this argument about whether his sister was trophy-wife material. I, of course, took the negative position in the debate.

“Here’s the thing,” Cory said. “When guys are young, they want the hot older chick. Someone who can spank them sassy. Then, all of a sudden they lose their hair and look in the mirror and see fat under their chins, and it’s all about proving their muscle still works like it used to. And for that, they look for a virgin. Or someone who seems like a virgin.”

“Your sister’s no virgin,” I said, sneering.

“We had a rule in our house growing up,” Cory said. “Just one rule. If it hurts someone else, don’t do it. Anything else was fair game. Willow was sort of a late bloomer, even though she was the oldest. I mean, philosophically, she’s kind of in her own world. She genuinely thinks everyone on earth was brought up like us.”

I didn’t want to think so highly of his sister. Cory was making it much more difficult for me to resent her. I watched him watch the rest of us. He would intervene during arguments his sister had with my father:

Dad: Who took my keys?

Willow: What makes you think someone did?

Dad: I always put them on the hook.

Willow: Or in your pocket or on the sink in the bathroom.

Cory: It’s a pisser when you can’t find your keys, huh?

Dad: You seen them?

Cory: Nah. But I can help you retrace your steps.

He’d be all peacemaker and sweet then get silent and dark, Cory would. He was moody, going happy–sad over the course of minutes.

“My brother is a blend of sanguine and melancholy,” Willow reports after Cory stomps off in cloud of pissed off after breakfast one morning.

What I don’t say is,
He’s jonesing from herb
. Instead, I ask her what she means by sanguine. So she goes into this Rudolf Steiner diatribe about the four temperaments. Sanguine is shallow, happy, light, spring. The typical temperament of childhood. Then there’s warrior temperament: Dad. Choleric. Someone who likes to lead, has trouble with authority. Is sometimes stubborn. Melancholics, apparently, are depressive, sentimental. That would be me, mostly. The Sylvia Plaths. The brooders and deep thinkers. People who expend energy avoiding dirt. Phlegmatics are couch potatoes. Hermits. Nobody wants to be thought of as phlegmatic. It conjures obesity, sloth. “More and more,” lectures Willow, “we are becoming a nation absorbed in stagnant phlegma.”

Being melancholic—and a bit of an asshole—I question her choice of the word absorbed. I want to say, don’t you mean
stuck
? I can be a smart-ass that way. But Cory’s whole thing about her being trusting and sweet and naïve holds me back from my usual full-on judgment.

I wonder about Sisi’s temperament. She was poetic, for sure. And from Dr. Greta’s claim—
She was like you, very unhappy
—melancholic seemed to be the shoe that fit. One thing is clear. A hundred and fifty years ago, it was a hell of a lot easier to be sentimental. To just say what was in your heart without worrying about sounding corny, or uncool. Cory translated her poem, scratched out at the bottom of the page:

I am Sunday’s child, a child of the sun;

Her golden rays she wove into my throne,

With her glow she wove my crown,

It is in her light that I live.

In these times, nobody could get away with writing such a biographical poem without seeming like a ridiculous, self-involved narcissist. And yet, it’s the way people are—everyone, to a certain degree, sees the universe as a reflection of themselves. It’s just easier to admit, I guess, if you’re a Bavarian princess.

On the day of my next (and nearly last) Dr. Greta appointment, all of us at the farmhouse are grumpy. It’s full-on June gloom, when days are cast in a heavy, gray cloud that doesn’t evaporate until evening, and we’ve had days and days of it. Willow caught Cory smoking weed in the granary and they’re currently not speaking.

So this morning, Dad says, “Let’s jump ship, Princess. Spend the day downtown, maybe go for a long walk in Forest Park after your appointment.”

“Sounds good,” I tell him. The other two members of our household are locked in the melancholy, as though those same heavy clouds outside have leaked inside them, so it’s just the two of us driving the seven and a half miles down the curving lane, past the oil tanks at the side of the Columbia slough, past the Northwest Portland warehouses, all under the colorless sky. Dad lets me off at the corner of 10th and Taylor, like always, and we agree to meet at the new parking lot turned urban living room a few blocks away after my session.

Up in the office, Dr. Greta has on her usual ensemble of therapist’s clothes: sandals, yoga pants, a tunic and a headscarf. She starts her session, as always, with a curt “So?”

I sit down across from her as usual. I say, “Are you really retiring?”

She nods. “Did you remember to bring your ingestion log, Lizbeth?”

Unless she’s suddenly gone blind, she can see the answer. I came empty-handed. But I also came prepared. The usual Q and A would be reversed today. “I gained a pound,” I tell her.

Dr. Greta doesn’t like being rerouted. She leans forward, alarm spreading across her face like a quick-forming shadow. “In order to recover, you must do your part.”

I nod. Resolve cloaked me like a heavy jacket. “I know.”

“So. Tell me about your week.”

The books are all there, in the glass cabinet, just as they were the week prior. “They argue a lot. Willow and my dad,” I say. “But I’m good with that. It doesn’t affect me the way it did when my dad fought with my mom.”

“
Goot
,” nods Dr. Greta. “And the boy?”

My stomach does a little somersault. “The boy?”

“Coriander I believe you said was his name.”

“He’s okay.” I shrug.

She has her eyes on my hands, which look better but are still reddish, cracked, ugly.

“Chores,” I say. “I have to clean the kitchen and do farm stuff.” Then, just because I can’t always stop weird spasms from pushing out my mouth, “Did you know that in the original Snow White, the evil witch was the biological mom?”

Dr. Greta nods. Of course she knows that. “German fairy tales are very dark, actually. In their original version.”

I glance at the musty old diary in the cabinet; it’s leaned up against a book on clinical depression, put back on the wrong shelf. “Can I look at that book again?”

“Which?”

“Empress Sisi’s diary?”

Dr. Great shakes her head, her freshly trimmed hair grazing her cheekbone. “It really is not for public,” she says. “I apologize for bringing it up last session.”

My heart sinks. “You said she had an eating disorder?”

“Later in life. After she wed Emperor Franz Joseph. She became oddly phobic and suspicious. When she traveled, she brought along her own cows for milk. She was quite distrustful.”

“Do you know anything about boyfriends she had? Like, before the emperor?”

“Boyfriends?” Dr. Greta’s forehead wrinkles in question. “There was the mysterious count—a Count S. Nobody ever learned his true name. Totally unsuitable, of course.”

“Well, it sounds like she went nuts when she was forced to marry someone she didn’t love, right? I’m just wondering if her heart was broken. If maybe that was why she was so, um, lonely.”

Dr. Greta’s face goes from questioning to perplexed. Her eyes stare beyond me. She stands from her chair. “Lizbeth, it’s a very complicated story. Beyond the concerns of one girl and her silly crush. There was much more at stake.”

“Like what?”

“Like two world wars. Like an entire empire. The ultimate defeat of fascism and Nazism. When you change one part of history’s narrative, the consequences can be greater than anyone imagines.”

I’m not a total history nerd, but I know Empress Elisabeth lived way before the Nazis and Hitler. “I don’t understand.”

Dr. Greta palms my shoulder blades and looks me in the eye. “People think that what kills the soul is failed love. It is not. The real tragedy to one’s soul is regret. Regret, Lizbeth, leaves its stain for generations.”

The honey cough drop smell of her breath. The crow’s-feet furrowed into her skin. It’s all too real. I don’t like it, having her this close, talking about regret. She’s my
therapist
. I squirm.

She lets go of my shoulders and returns to her chair. “Again, Lizbeth, I must apologize. Now, tell me what you ate this last week.”

Dad is standing right out front with a still-steaming Starbucks venti cup for me. “You look like you just saw a ghost,” he says.

“I’m glad I’m terminating with her,” I say.

“Oh?” I can tell this alarms my father, but he’s forcing himself to be chill. To wait until I dribble out the details. We walk a few blocks to the newest urban
improvement
in downtown Portland. Everything gleaming, concrete, spotless. Dad knows this makes me comfortable—the lack of filth. There’s a fountain at the edge of the park, and a large granite ball on one side is inscribed with a dedication to teachers: “… to all who educate and inspire.” The block letters above say TEACHERS FOUNTAIN.

“Someone should have educated the engraver,” I remark, “that a possessive noun requires an apostrophe.”

He can’t hold out any longer. “So with Dr. Greta quitting the biz, what’s next?”

I shrug.

Dad gives me one of his worried frowny faces. “Did she give you the referral info?”

“I think I might be done,” I say, “with this shrink stuff.”

Dad stops and sits down, patting a relatively clean swatch of concrete next to him. I spy a lone splotch of bird dropping there and sit on the other side of Dad from it. “You have one bony rump there, missy,” my father says.

I lean my head against my father’s shoulder. Sip my coffee drink.

“So,” Dad says after a while. “What do you think of Willow?”

I close my eyes, try to summon the right words. “She’s okay,” I manage.

Dad puts his arm around my shoulder, and I lean against him. “You miss your mother, don’t you?”

I nod, but really, at this point, I’m not sure that it’s Mom I miss. It’s more that I miss beginnings, middles and ends. A sense of completion. I miss school, and having first, second, third period. Bells—I miss bells. I miss my calendar, the external gratification of honor roll. And Dr. Greta. As much as she drives me nuts, I don’t want to start over with someone else. I hate her
consequences
and her freak-outs if I don’t
engage
, but I also need structure. Somewhere deep inside me, I know this.

Dad runs his hand over my jagged hair. “By September, you should have enough up here to get a real cut and style.”

“Cut and style?” I say. “Nobody calls it cut and style, Dad.”

“Look, Princess, I’m sorry about the way I’ve been lately. My remarks about Cory. The arguing with Willow. You shouldn’t have to witness all that grown-up crap. The four of us? This summer, we’re a team. Maybe not a family, exactly, but a team. Or maybe we can just think of it as a panel on a think tank. We have a set of challenges, and we’ll work together for a solution. Get what I’m saying?”

I do, but I also know that Dad’s in one of his naïve, optimistic, hopeful moods, and so I take a chance. “Dad,” I begin, not sure what will come out of my mouth, exactly. “Do you ever regret giving it up?”

Under my ear, his shoulder stiffens. “I’m guessing you’re referring to the marriage, right?”

I’m not. And my stomach folds over in a panic. The weird thing that happens when you have your mind on something else and
boom
, along comes the thing that has the power to knock you flat. “Actually, I was talking about the piano.”

Dad’s shoulder softens after I say
piano
. “What I regret, Princess, isn’t about the music, or quitting, or even disappointing my parents. I suppose it’s that what I was good at and what I loved didn’t line up. They weren’t the same.”