Alix Ohlin - Inside

One Saturday morning she came home from the store to find Mitch emerging, oddly red-faced, from the bedroom. At first she didn’t want to say anything. She put away the groceries, and Mitch got into the shower. Then she walked into the bedroom and started looking around his side of the bed. Stuffed hastily below the mattress, its shiny spine extruding like a scab, was a porn magazine. The girls were young, with enormous fake breasts. That was the most disturbing part, she thought at first, their lack of resemblance to any real woman. But this wasn’t true; the most disturbing part was that her husband was jerking off to a porn magazine while she was at the grocery store. She tried speaking to herself as if she were a client: This kind of behavior is not uncommon, nor does it signal an automatic betrayal . But it was bullshit. All the counsel she had ever given burned to ashes in the face of lived experience.

Mitch walked in, wearing a towel, and stopped. Seeming to read her mind, which he could still do, he said, “No. The most disturbing part is that I feel more emotionally connected to the girls in those pictures than I do to you.”

Grace began to cry, tears not of anger or sadness but of sheer, straight pain. Mitch comforted her, because he was good at that. And they slept together with a kind of pathetic, slippery lust she hated even to remember, the porn magazine askew on the floor beside the bed. They didn’t separate until a year later, but looking back she knew this was the day their marriage ended.

She lived alone now, in a two-bedroom apartment in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. She’d been on some dates since the divorce, but nothing had taken. She was thirty-five and thought that maybe she just wasn’t the marrying kind — a statement she would have dismissed, or at least raised an eyebrow at, if it came from a client. The therapist’s prerogative was sometimes to put the blinders back on.

Most of the day’s appointments were routine, until it came to Annie Hardwick. During an earlier visit, Grace had seen the shiny pink scars that inched up the girl’s pale stomach to her rib cage; she had lifted her shirt with a feigned reluctance that failed to conceal her pride in the harm she’d done herself. As common as cutting was, Grace still winced to see the evidence of it on Annie’s skin. The girl wasn’t beautiful yet, but she was going to be. She hadn’t grown into herself or into her body. Her features loomed too large on her face, and blue veins showed through her translucent skin at her temples and chin. Her dirty-blond hair hung thin and lank to her shoulders, and her forehead was covered with small red pimples. In a few years, Grace could imagine, when Annie was taller and learned to sit up straight, when her body grew curves to match her face, she would look like the movie star she so desperately wanted to be.

But Annie didn’t know this. All she saw was the infinite distance between herself as she was and the perfection to which she aspired. Her father was an orthodontist and her mother a lawyer, and they had raised her to hold herself to a high standard. She got good grades, participated in extracurricular activities, had friends and family who cared for her. All this was invisible to her, or at least immaterial. Her lack of perspective was gigantic. When she looked at herself she saw an ugly, mean, ungainly girl, constantly failing, deservedly ignored. She believed wholeheartedly in her own shortcomings, and nothing Grace had told her had unsettled this conviction.

One day her mother had found her asleep on the couch. A button on her shirt gaped open, exposing her midriff, and her mother thought she saw a rash there. Bending closer to inspect it, she saw that it was an intricate maze of cuts, each line crossing the next, forming a mass that looked like a star.

Hence, therapy.

Annie’s after-school hours passed in appointments: the dentist, the hairdresser, the dermatologist. She was being raised and tended by a corps of professionals, to which Grace was only the latest addition. Thus far, she didn’t think they had made much headway. The girl was polite, did as she was asked, and answered questions at a reasonable length, all while giving away as little as possible. Her parents believed her when she said she wasn’t cutting anymore. Grace didn’t.

But today was different. She came in wearing a fleece zip-up over her uniform, with her long hair swept up in a messy ponytail. Usually she sat staring at the ground with her legs crossed as Grace prodded her to get the conversation rolling. This time, though, she held the homework assignment out right away.

Taking it, Grace said, “Why don’t you tell me, in your own words, what it says?”

Annie shook her head. “Please don’t make me,” she said. “Look, I did it. You can read it, okay?”

“This wasn’t really for me. It was for you. To get you thinking when you’re on your own, and to give us a basis for our discussion here.”

Annie didn’t say anything, just looked at her with her enormous eyes. Her face had a coltish, unfinished look, a softness in her features, as if her bones hadn’t quite finished forming. Her hands played nervously with the pleats of her navy-blue kilt. Her fingernails were long and perfectly manicured; it was something she and her mother did together. As Grace watched, Annie lifted her hand and squeezed a pimple on her chin, tried to stop, then pressed it again, the look on her face pleading.

Grace waited her out for a minute, hoping she’d give in, but finally relented. “All right,” she said. “I’ll read it out loud—”

“No!” Annie said. “Please.”

“Okay. I’ll read it to myself, and then we’ll talk about it. You have to promise that we’ll be able to discuss it together, all right? Is that a deal?”

The girl nodded and looked down at the floor. Finally, Grace looked down at the page. The letter was extremely short, the handwriting strangely androgynous: slanted, angular, not the usual bubbled teenage-girl script.

A Letter to Myself Now From Myself

When I Am 24, by Annie Hardwick

Im sorry I couldn’t focus on this assignment .

I think Im pregnant .

Grace looked up. The girl was crying, her head turned toward the corner of the room as if this made her invisible. She sniffled.

Grace held out a box of tissues. “Here, blow.” Then she said, “Do your parents know?”

Annie shook her head.

“Have you taken a pregnancy test?”

She nodded.

“How late are you? When was your last period?”

“I should have gotten it almost a month ago,” the girl burst out. “You have to help me.”

“Of course I’ll help you,” Grace said calmly. Instantly Annie’s face brightened, only to dim again when she added, “I’ll help you tell your parents.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Annie said. She’d never sworn in session before. She’d stopped crying now, and her face was red and swollen. “My mom threw a fit this morning because I have a hangnail . ‘Annie, there’s no point in me buying you a twenty-dollar manicure if you can’t keep it neat for more than a day. Why are you so careless?’ What do you think she’d say if she found out I had a fetus inside me? How careless is that?”

Careless was the last thing Annie was. She was weighted with care, which was rounding her shoulders and curving her spine; it was crushing her.

“I think she’d be glad, in the end, that you could confide in her,” Grace said, though truthfully, Annie’s characterization of her mother seemed accurate. The girl might have been high-strung and deluded about her own failings, but she had a pretty good grasp of her parents’.

“You’re crazy,” Annie said, the tears falling again, “if you think she wants to hear about this.”