Lidia Yuknavitch - Dora - A Headcase

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 see 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.