Notes on a Near-Life Experience

by Olivia Birdsall

  “I'm going to be staying in a condo across town. Your mother asked me to leave.”

  “Why?” Keatie asks.

  Dad hugs her again, then gets in his car and drives away. I realize at this moment that my father has never explained anything to me; it's always been my mom: Santa, sex, quadratic equations, it was always Mom. I wonder what I will miss about my father, if I will miss him at all, and I am scared.

  Julian and Keatie are the only ones who seem choked up when he leaves. Mom doesn't come out of her room until that evening, when she asks Allen to go pick up some Chinese food for dinner. I feel stronger, smarter than her for not being paralyzed the way she is. For the first time in my life, she offers no explanations. Maybe because we haven't asked the right questions, any questions. Maybe because this is too big for an explanation. Maybe she doesn't know how to explain. Maybe there is no explanation.

  LAST SUMMER WHILE OUR FAMILY WAS ON VACATION IN Mexico, I met this guy named Miguel. He had an accent that made him seem more attractive than he really was—I can see that now when I look at the pictures. Anyway, he really wanted to be a veterinarian. He talked about it a lot: how he “loffed aneemahls,” how “ees barry hard go to betreenahrian school.” I couldn't figure out why anyone would want to spend their life neutering cats. I mean, really want it.

  My mom used to paint and sculpt; she studied art in college. She works in public relations now. She plans art openings once in a while—I think that's the closest she comes to actually making art. Allen, Keatie, and I bought her a potter's wheel last Christmas and she got pretty emotional when she opened it, but she's never used it. I found it in the garage last week when I was looking for a box of my old dance costumes. A heavy, dusty box with a picture of a smiling, muddy, fully clothed couple on the front, clay on a wheel in front of them—a G-rated version of the sexy pot-throwing scene from that movie Ghost. I imagined my mom and dad making pots together. I pictured them arguing and throwing mud in each other's faces rather than smiling happily.

  My dad spent nine years earning his PhD in film studies, and now he sells commercial real estate.

  When I say that I want to be a dancer—“the next Martha Graham,” my mom says—and they tell me that I can do it, that I can be anything I want—I'm not sure I believe them.

  THE MONDAY AFTER DAD LEFT, I WAS EATING A BOWL OF cereal in the kitchen and Keatie came in. She opened the door of the refrigerator, stared inside it for a few seconds, and then closed it.

  “Mo-om,” she yelled. “Nobody made lunches.”

  Mom came in half dressed, her hair still wet. “What's going on, sweetie?”

  “There's no lunch in here. Dad usually makes me a lunch.”

  “Oh, that's right, I forgot. Well, I'll give you some money for a school lunch today, and then we'll decide what to do for the rest of the week tonight, okay?”

  Keatie frowns. “But I don't like the lunches they make at school. I want bologna.”

  My mom sighs. “Keatie, it's just one day, then we'll figure something out.”

  “It isn't just one day. Dad made the sandwiches and now he's not here. Tell him to come back. Tell him it's for the bologna.”

  I rinse my bowl in the sink and tune out the rest of their conversation, wondering how it is that the lack of a bologna sandwich may be the thing we notice most about my father's absence.

  I MET MY BEST FRIEND, HALEY, ON THE SECOND DAY OF FIRST grade. Actually, it was my first day of first grade, her second. I was supposed to be in kindergarten that year, but when I got to class on the first day, the teacher found out that I already knew how to read, tie my shoes, and add.

  “Do you know your address?” she asked.

  “Two nine oh one El Rancho Via, Yorba Linda, California. Nine two eight eight six,” I said.

  She left me in the chair where she'd been interrogating me since she'd found me reading Make Way for Ducklings and spoke in loud whispers to the other teacher.

  “What am I supposed to do with her?” She acted as if I'd done something horribly wrong.

  They decided to call my mother. The next thing I knew, I'd been kicked out of kindergarten and put in first grade. I wasn't a child genius. I knew how to read because Allen did. I'd had no idea I was transforming myself into some kind of freak by learning to read, tie my shoes, add, and recite my address.

  So I met Haley on the second day of first grade. I thought she must have been a princess or a giant, she was so tall— taller than all the kids in first and even second grade. I was pretty short, I guess, so that made her seem even taller. When the teacher had us draw pictures of ourselves, Haley's looked different than everyone else's: she had a neck in her picture, and her arms weren't drawn as short as the rest of ours.

  Our teacher, Ms. Beccia, assigned me the desk next to Haley's, and it just made sense for us to be friends since we had to share paste and stuff.

  We've had disagreements: I used to want to hold her hand all the time—it felt natural since she seemed almost as tall as my mom—and she didn't like it; she wanted us to take tennis lessons together, but I was more interested in dance; she wanted us to dress up as cowgirls one Halloween, but I wanted us to be princesses. At some point it must've dawned on us that we didn't have to be clones to be friends.

  Now I make up dances and Haley practices tennis. I dream about kissing Julian Paynter and Haley dreams about finding a guy who is taller than she is but who doesn't think basketball is the only reason to live. I hang up flyers for the spring dance concert and Haley writes the phone number for the Rwandan Relief Fund on the chalkboard of every classroom in school. Between the two of us, we can talk about anything.

  But I feel that saying something out loud makes it more true. Final. I haven't told Haley about my parents. It feels like telling her will make this whole mess real. Right now, there are some things I'm not ready to finalize.

  MY DAD DECIDED THAT ALLEN, KEATIE, AND I NEEDED THERAPY if we were ever going to be normal again once he moved out. I think it's the Woody Allen thing; all the people in Woody Allen movies see analysts, but they're all weirdos who live in New York City and have affairs with their sister's husband or their girlfriend's best friend. Mom agreed to take us to a shrink, but only if she got to pick him. These are the things they argue about. Like they are children. Mom's friend Eileen recommended Dr. Lynder. I had no say in the matter.

  So here I am, sitting on the leather couch in the waiting room, reading People magazine, trying to guess what Dr. Lynder will be like.

  I wonder if he'll try to seduce me. That's what always happens in the movies. You know, a young, innocent girl, a bit unstable, goes to a shrink, and the next thing you know she's thinking, He's the only one who really understands me. One thing leads to another…. You get the picture. Ba-da-boom, ba-da-bing…. And then when the girl tries to expose the psychiatrist after she figures out that what's going on isn't right, after she regains some of her sanity, he diagnoses her as delusional and has her locked up, along with his other victims.

  The receptionist tells me to fill out a paper with a bunch of statements on it that you have to rate from one to five, one being never and five being always. They are questions like:

  My life is of value.

  I am loved by others.

  I love myself.

  I contemplate suicide.

  Questions for crazy people. Any reasonably intelligent person can figure out what the right answers are. It's pretty easy. I put in some twos and fours on the less crazy questions so that it will look like I've really thought hard about the questions and my true feelings.

  The door to Dr. Lynder's office opens and a man and a woman step out. The woman looks like she's about twenty-five; she has long ice blue fingernails and wears leather pants. The man is balding and fairly nondescript. I imagine myself falling asleep during our sessions.

  “See you next week,” the woman calls after the man as he heads for the door. The man grumbles as he leaves. Before I can stop him, before I realize what's hap
pening, my boring, balding therapist is out the door, leaving me with the blueclawed bimbo. She notices me before the door closes behind the man. “You must be Mia,” she says, smiling down at me. “I'm Lisz Lynder.”

  “Yeah, umm, hi.” I don't know what to say. I mean, I don't know why I assumed my doctor would be a man. When I get a closer look at Lisz Lynder, I notice some little lines around her eyes and mouth; I realize that she probably isn't as young as I thought, probably closer to my mom's age than to twenty-five.

  “Whaddya say we go back to my office and talk a little,” Lisz Lynder suggests.

  I follow her through the door she and the bald man just came out of.

  During my first visit, Lisz—she says I should call her by her first name, “Dr. Lynder's too formal”—explains that we'll talk about whatever I want to talk about and that nothing I say will ever leave this room unless I give my express permission or if she suspects that I have plans to harm myself. I must not look very thrilled about what she's said.

  “Mia, why don't you tell me why you are here and what you hope to gain through your visits.”

  “To tell you the truth, I didn't want to come here. My parents thought that all us kids should get counseling because of, you know, the separation. So my brother, Allen, and I are going to visit you, and my sister, Keatie, is seeing someone who specializes in helping younger kids. I think the whole thing is ridiculous. I mean, my parents are the ones who need counseling, not us.”

  Lisz isn't fazed by my answer. She says that if I don't feel like I have anything to say, that's fine. She also says that if it's okay with me, she'll think up some topics for us to talk about, write them on pieces of paper, and put them in a jar. Then if I feel like I need help figuring out what to “discuss,” I can take a piece of paper out of the jar and talk about what it says. If I don't like one topic, I can choose another paper and another until I find something I am willing to discuss. Or we don't have to talk about anything.

  “If worst comes to worst, if you don't feel like chatting, we'll play Uno or something,” she says.

  I try to smile.

  “But I want you to understand what I hope to do here as well. I am not going to tell you what's wrong with you, or tell you what you need to do to be a happy person or anything like that. My approach to therapy is a little different. I believe that we all possess the faculties we need to be happy; we just need to learn how to access them. So we're going to talk and you're going to find your own answers, a way to live that works for you. I'm going to be your guide, in a way…. If you ever get lost or really off track, I'll help you find your way back, and I'll try to help you understand what's going on in your life and what your options are for coping with certain situations. Everyone sees the world differently and has a different set of values, so we're going to figure out what yours are and help you be true to them. How does that sound?”

  “Great,” I manage to respond. What am I supposed to say? “It sounds like a load of crap and I can't believe you get paid for this?” “Excuse me, I can talk to myself for free?” “Did you graduate from an accredited institution of higher learning or earn your degree through a correspondence course?”

  So now I have my own shrink, my own Dr. Marlena Evans from Days of our Lives. But the whole thing seems weird: talking to a stranger about the things that are most personal and important to you; paying someone to listen to you. Why would they care? They don't even know you; you could tell them whatever you wanted and they'd never know if it was true. Besides, I don't even know what's really going on. I don't like the idea of someone else figuring my family out, figuring my life out, before I do. And what if she gets it wrong? What if she sees things I don't, or things I don't want to see?

  TODAY ON THE WAY TO SCHOOL A DOG RUNS OUT INTO THE road, and Al swerves and slams on his brakes to avoid hitting it. Al's backpack is open and its contents spill onto the floor of the van. As I'm shoving his stuff back in, I notice a small silver canteenish thing among the pencils and notebooks.

  “What's this?” I ask him, shaking the silver container. I can hear liquid swishing around in it. “A canteen?”

  Allen looks nervous. “Yeah. You know, instead of carrying one of those stupid plastic water bottles, I use that…. It looks cooler.”

  “Yeah, I guess, but it doesn't hold much. You know what it looks like? A flask, like some bum on the street or a secret agent would carry. I've never seen one before, but this totally looks like it could be one.”

  He laughs. “A flask? Yeah, the principal would love it if I brought a flask to school, huh?”

  He's weird sometimes, my brother.

  HALEY OBSERVES THE SOCIAL SYSTEM AT OUR HIGH SCHOOL like she's doing a study for National Geographic. “Even the bathrooms are divided up, Meems. Do you know that we've always naturally used the bathrooms for popular kids, even though no one ever told us to?”

  “What are you talking about?” I've never really considered myself a popular person. I wear normal clothes, go to normal parties, have normal friends. I guess I've just assumed that my life is normal, that I'm normal. Maybe things are really better, or worse, than I thought. Maybe I'm popular, or maybe I'm an outcast who hasn't been using the right bathroom.

  “Have you ever used the bathrooms in the math building or the ones near the industrial technology building?”

  “Math building, no. And I have no idea what industrial technology is.”

  “Exactly. We're naturally stratified. We're practically living in a caste system, you know, like in India, where there's a whole class of people whose existence no one will acknowledge. There are some really freaky kids in those bathrooms, too.”

  Haley has a flair for the dramatic. But I wonder about the bathrooms. And the people and things I've never bothered to notice.

  KIKI NORDGREN IS PERFECT. HER FAMILY IS RICH, SHE HAS A perfect body, and she has the third-highest GPA in the senior class. The only imperfect thing about Kiki is the fact that she is perpetually pissed off. Of course, I could be biased because she has never really liked me. And things only got worse when I was chosen to be a dance team choreographer and she wasn't; she's a senior and I'm just a junior. So I should have known something was up last July during dance clinics, when Kiki kept wanting to come over and practice with me, when she was nice to me for no reason, and when she kept offering to pick me up in the mornings.

  “Well, you are one of the only girls on the team who doesn't drive, so I thought I'd ask.” Big smile.

  I noticed that she kept finding reasons to wander around the house in her skimpy dance clothes, but I was too dumb to figure out why until the day I found Kiki in the driveway talking to Allen and Julian while they were rebuilding the engine of Allen's 1973 VW bus. She'd gone upstairs to get some water and had been gone for twenty minutes.

  “Is your name really Kiki?” Allen was asking.

  “Kiki's short for Kirsten,” she said.

  “It sounds kind of like… ummm …,” Julian started to say.

  “Norwegian?” Kiki said.

  “No, not that,” Julian said, “like a trained seal or something, you know?”

  I laughed out loud. Kiki looked at me like she was going to eat me alive.

  Allen piped up, “No, dude, I think it sounds Norwegian. I really do.”

  And that's where it all began. I think Kiki would have been happy to date either Allen or Julian, but since Allen was the guy who stepped up and defended her heritage, Kiki chose him. When Allen dumped Kiki the day before the dance team fund-raising car wash six weeks later—“She's just too intense…. Man, she's intense,” he told me—she called Julian a few times, but he ignored her, thank goodness. The only thing that could possibly be worse than Kiki's dating your brother would be Kiki's dating the boy you're in love with. She went back to despising me, only with much greater intensity: she hasn't come to pick me up for practice since then, but she has made a point of suggesting major changes to most of the pieces I choreograph and talking about her endless stream
of dates very loudly in front of me whenever she gets a chance. She told everyone on the dance team that she was sure I had something to do with Allen's dumping her. If I had, I would have most definitely taken credit for it. Unfortunately, my brother has never been one to take the advice of others, however wise or sensible it may be.

  TONIGHT WHEN I GET INTO BED AND TRY TO FALL ASLEEP, something seems off. It takes me a while to figure out what it is: no Mom. She hasn't come in to talk to me about my day and say good night. I lie there and wait for her to come in. And I wait. And I wait. But there's nothing. She doesn't come.

  I get out of bed and walk down the hall to the bathroom near the living room, under the pretense of getting a glass of water, to see if she's awake and watching TV or something. Maybe she got really tired and fell asleep while she was watching it. But I don't hear any noise, so I go out into the living room and investigate. The clock on the DVD player says 11:23. Mom is nowhere to be found. The house is quiet.

  I start back toward my room and run into Keatie in the hall.

  “What are you doing up so late?” I ask.

  “Looking for Mom. She never came.”

  “She's not out there,” I tell her. “Go back to bed.”

  “No,” she says. “I'm getting Allen. He'll do it.”

  She knocks on his door, and I go back to my room. So Mom misses a night; do I really need someone to tuck me in every night? I know I shouldn't, but I feel like I do. I go over all the things I would have told Mom in my head, but it isn't the same.

  BECAUSE I SKIPPED KINDERGARTEN, I'M PRACTICALLY THE only person in the entire junior class who can't drive; I won't be sixteen until May. As far as I know, the only other person who can't, besides the kids in those remedial classes, is Barrett Waterson, this guy who got so many speeding tickets that his license was revoked about a month after he got it. I'm supposed to take my driving test the day after my birthday, because my birthday is on Sunday this year.