You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know

by Heather Sellers

  I couldn’t imagine these were intelligent professors.

  It wasn’t the place, she said. It was me. “You’re going to move again, and guess who you’re going to find when you get there?”

  I stared at her. I was hungry for cake.

  “You!” she said, pointing at me triumphantly.

  In the third session, Christine was eager to talk about why I pretended not to know her at the grocery store and the fabric store. She understood patients wanting to keep a distance, but I had looked right at her and acted as if I had never seen her before. When she’d said hello, I’d turned away. Why? We could talk about ways to interact when we ran into each other. I didn’t have to pretend.

  I thought she was deranged. “I never saw you at the store,” I said. “I’ve never seen you outside the office.” There was no doubt in my mind. If I’d seen her, I would have known. I would have said hello. I was a friendly southerner.

  “Why are you saying you didn’t, Heather? We both know you did. Twice. You looked right at me, Heather. If you would prefer I pretend not to know you when we run into each other in public, I can do that. Let’s talk about it. Let’s dialogue openly.”

  “I didn’t see you, Christine. I’ve never run into you.” My depression had a hostile cranky marbling, which I enjoyed more than I could have admitted.

  I never went back. This was not therapy. It was argument.

  After my first session with Helder, I decided I wouldn’t see him again. He was a good man. But IMAGINE was not for me. I would assure my mother that she was welcome. Dave would help me handle her. Maybe she could even stay at the apartment; the boys could stay down with me. It would be good to be together. My new therapist would help me communicate better with my family. When I thought about it, though, what I liked best about the session was that Helder said fuck. A good, hard word, a word with a life of its own, a fearless word. A rent in the dry elegance. Fuck.

  “We are on our way!” It was my mother and she was whispering hard, breathy and excited. She was so excited to see me. She was calling from a pay phone. She wasn’t quite sure where.

  Peter Helder, Jr., therapy vulture, flashed before me, shaking his head. The adult drives the car.

  “Well, Mom, it sounds like a lot. It sounds like too much. You don’t have to do this. You know,” I said, “I can come down later this fall. I can visit you.” As I spoke, I sensed this would be the end of our lives as we knew them. I was surprised at what was coming out of my mouth.

  “What do you mean? What’s wrong?” She sounded sharp and guarded. “We are on our way, Heather. What’s happening?”

  The words came out on their own. I told her I was afraid I couldn’t show her a good time because I was absolutely overwhelmed with work.

  The line went dead.

  When the phone rang again, the voice on the other end was strong as iron.

  “I’m praying for you.”

  It was the middle of the night.

  “You are hurting your mother. How can you tell her you do not love her? How can you say a thing like that to your dear sweet mother? She loves you so much, Heather. She wants to heal this rift. It is time to heal this rift. She thinks you don’t want her to come! I need you to talk to her, she’s right here. She’s very upset.”

  “Where are y’all?” It was quiet on the line. I was afraid they were down the street, that they’d come over anyway.

  “You need to have a relationship with your mother, Heather Laurie Sellers.” The way she said the word “mother” scared me.

  “Bernie,” I said, very calmly, in the voice I used for students who talked too much. “I am not sure my mom is up to making this big of a trip. She is very fragile. And I am not able to take off work to have company right now. I am going through a difficult time.”

  It was all like a dream. Not bad, not good.

  In the morning, I called Peter Helder, Jr. I needed to come in.

  Two

  I started driving a car when I was twelve. Fred, tumbler of straight gin in hand, would yell at me for turning left on red and for driving on the wrong side of the road, but he continued to put me behind the wheel and gave a lot of verbal direction and physical correction, grabbing the wheel, torturing my elbow. I hated driving. Often I had the sensation I was in the wrong lane, headed in the wrong direction, as though somehow everything was reversed. Even after I got my license, I had trouble figuring out which way to go, which side of the road to drive on, and how to get from one point to another. One warm spring day, when I swung out of the Winn-Dixie parking lot and onto the wrong side of Orange Avenue, my father had had enough. It was time for me to get my head examined.

  I was thrilled. Finally. All my life, I’d wanted my head examined. My whole family believed I had mental problems and I wanted to see a neurologist very much. I wanted the doctor to say: She shouldn’t have to drive. I wanted him to say: You people are ruining her! I wanted a long, complex surgery with a recovery in Europe, like in a book. No visitors. I wanted him to explain to me how I could get into a great college up East. These desires felt only vaguely unrealistic; I was in high school.

  At the neurologist’s, Fred didn’t want to wait for me in the lobby. He didn’t even want to come inside the office and meet the doctor. I sensed the reason he had decided to take me to a doctor at all was that my mother had been down to the house every night that week, laying into him about what a bad idea it was.

  The neurologist was waxy, shiny, and kindly, and his hands were thick and freezing cold. He ran a little serrated wheel up and down my shins. He banged on my knees with a rubber arrowhead attached to a hammer. He held out fingers. I held out my fingers to match his. He asked me questions: Who was the president? What day was it? Press on his hand with my foot. Other foot. Lift my right hand, right, left, left, right. I giggled and he took it very seriously and wrote everything down. I thought it was going too well, I was doing too well, it was going to look like nothing was wrong. I’m not this great! I wanted to say. Really, I’m a wreck, help! But I couldn’t speak up. I smiled and tried to look brilliant. He left without saying anything. I thought he would be back so I could tell him the whole story. But he never came back.

  When my dad finally picked me up out front, there was a man in the front seat, in my seat—his buddy Joe Plaster, he said. I climbed in the back with the gin bottles and made a big deal about kicking them to the side, so they would know I knew just what they were up to. “I just paid forty-five bucks. How was it?” my father said. He shook his head. “A buck a minute.”

  Joe shook his head. “A buck a minute. What us assholes are doing wrong, that’s what I want to know,” he said.

  Driving around, skipping work, drinking all day, I wanted to say. For starters.

  “So?” my father said as we sped down Orange Avenue, through a red light. He swung his hand back, swiped me on the side of the cheek, trying to knock some words out. “Well,” he said. “Invite some of your friends over for dinner tonight. Let’s have a backyard barbecue. I have a mess a catfish. Make hush puppies.” He was all lit up, smiling at me in the rearview mirror . I was staring at my knees. Why had they jumped? Reflexes. I had good reflexes. I was despairing over my knees. I’d blown my one chance for diagnosis.

  “Poobah commandeth. We’re having a party. C’mon, now. Don’t be like your mother. Don’t get like her, now. You two are just completely averse to fun, that’s your problem. Smile, now! Get with the program!”

  “I’m not giving the United States government, or anyone else, personal information of any kind,” my mother said. But she had to, or I would not be eligible for financial aid. I’d listed my mother as my primary guardian, thinking I’d have a better shot at a need-based scholarship that way. But Social Security number, bank information, a copy of her last tax return—these were required items.

  My mother set her mouth in a long thin line. “Please don’t ask me again. You know my views.” She turned the sheaf of forms facedown and put the saltshaker on t
op. “Florida State University?” she said. She put on her reading glasses and stared at me hard, leaning back in the chair with her legs spread open, like a seasoned cowhand. “You? With your grades and your behavior? You need to get a job. Save up. And grow up.”

  “Can I just please have your Social Security number?” I said. “I’m going to need it for other things too. They have to have it.”

  Over her dead body. She took pleasure in saying the words dead body, like it was a victory—a hundred-pound woman against the entire U.S. government.

  “I feel like you’re against me,” I said. “Just really against anything I want. I thought you wanted us to go to college. You’d saved up. You and Daddy.”

  “There is nothing I support more than my children—within reason! You are the reason I go on! I would have killed myself long ago if it wasn’t for my two precious, beautiful, wonderful children. I would not even be here. I do not know why I am even here, really. I don’t. Does that sound terrible?”

  The next morning, all the forms were gone. She denied throwing them away. I gathered a new set of forms and they sat on Fred’s kitchen counter for weeks. He had said he would help. My mother was a fool, he said. She had money to help me. Plenty, he said. He should know: she’d got it from him. He said I must put her as the primary parent. Her address should be my address. It was in my interest to do it that way. He refused to give me copies of his tax returns. He refused to fill out the financial aid forms. I rooted around in his office, a frightening little room off the garage where porn magazines were stacked several feet high, covered in filmy dust. Theoretically, in addition to working as an accountant for Martin Marietta, he ran a tax consulting and filing business and this was the headquarters. As long as I had known him, only two or three people had brought their taxes to him. Their paperwork had disappeared into the maw, mixed in with piles of bills and printouts from Martin Marietta and bank statements and credit card receipts and insurance and legal paperwork and those gross magazines. I rifled through the mess but couldn’t find anything I needed. I suspected my father hadn’t been filing tax returns.

  As the spring semester wore on and the weather got hotter and steamier, the kids from nice families talked about where they were going to college. In the halls, between classes, the rest of us watched them, hating and pretending. Someone was going to Clemson. A few others to the University of South Florida. Most people were going to the University of Florida. Sara Simko, in her capacity as student council rep, accosted me every day after second period. I had changed my route, but she figured it out and cornered me in the rear stairwell.

  “You have not signed up for graduation and it’s a decision you will regret for the rest of your life,” she said. “I will walk down with you right now if you want me to. I will. Let’s!” She was like a little mother, with that sweet, perky, bossy voice of hers, her bangs curled and sprayed against her forehead in a tight, matronly C. I was touched that she worried about me. She had to wear a back and neck brace because of scoliosis and

  I worried about her too. I flipped my hair around, shifted my purse onto my other hip.

  “I’m cool,” I kept saying. “It’s all cool.” I wanted her to keep talking. I wanted her to tell me what to wear to the ceremony. I wanted her to fix my hair. Not like hers, but nice, and I knew she could. I wanted her to drag me down to the office, to invite me to go to graduation with her and her family, to move in with her family. I wanted her friendship.

  “Heather Laurie Sellers,” she said, and she stamped her little feet in her little mauve suede flats. She had tears in her eyes. I wanted to have tears in my eyes. The bell rang.

  Wayne started hounding me too. I had to go, he said. We had to go. Yeah, it was a dorky sheep-mentality mindless waste of time, a sick ritual: most of our classmates had already peaked. They would lead, he said, lives of soulless desperation. But we had to do it. We had to do it stoned.

  I did not want to do anything stoned. I was having a hard enough time going from point A to point B straight. Of course I wanted to go to high school graduation. But how? If I went to graduation, I would have to invite my parents. It was too stressful. I liked them inside; I liked them one at a time; I liked them asleep. As long as I didn’t think too much about who they were, I loved them.

  My mother presented me with tiny little slivers of newspaper ads: secretary, product hostess, telemarketer. I threw them all away. My father kept urging me to apply to Valencia Community College. He himself was thinking of teaching out there.

  “I’ll probably have to fail you,” he said. He thought this was very funny.

  Ruby said she couldn’t see him as an instructor, exactly. Maybe an administrator? A consultant? Teachers, she said, required patience. Heather-Feather, she said, would make a great teacher.

  “What subject are you thinking of teaching?” I asked gingerly. We were playing hearts after dinner at his dining room table, the way we did every night.

  “Life!” he said. “The philosophy of life according to Fred P. should be a required course. A prerequisite for all learning. For all educable peoples.”

  “That’s a class I have to take,” Ruby said. She laughed in a nice way. She fingered her gold-nugget necklace and dropped it between her breasts.

  “Yes!” Fred hollered. “Hell, yes!” and he slammed both palms on the table. Then he leered at Ruby. “Where did that nugget go? Where did it go? Can’t see it no more!”

  The kids who were going to Valencia were regular kids. They smoked. They wanted to stay in Orlando. They liked Orlando. They liked Bob Seger and longnecks and drawings of pot leaves and surfboards and Camaros and Styx and the laser show at the planetarium. I wanted a school where I could study philosophy. Psychology. Art history. I wanted a bicycle, not a car. I wanted a bookish boyfriend, not a stoner. I wanted to go to school up North. Up North seemed more intelligent and sober and elegant. But I really had only one very basic requirement: I had to leave Orlando.

  “I have the feeling you might be prone to BS a little in front of a class,” I said. “No offense.”

  “ ‘BS’?” Fred yelled. “All BS!” He laughed long and hard until he started coughing and choking. “All BS.” And it started again. “It’s college,” he said. “It’s all BS. Best preparation for life there is.”

  “You are whip-smart, cute as a button, and flunkin’ three classes, honey bunch.” My guidance counselor was like a broad from the 1940s: redheaded, plucky, talking fast. “I got one question: Why are you with that Wayne Goggins? I’m sorry, but he looks like a forty-year-old man!” She was a spaz, a nut, but I was happy to have landed her and not one of the other two guidance counselors, the gigantic gruesome PE teacher or bearded, wizened Ichabod Crane.

  “I do not like what I have been seeing,” she continued. I’d been called into her office before, when Wayne had interrupted my fifth-period PE class, slung me over his shoulder, screaming at the top of my lungs, dumped me in his car, and peeled out of the parking lot. There’d been other incidents. I knew she thought Wayne was a bad influence. I knew she thought I should stand up for myself. She cited other problems: how my grades had dropped into the toilet since I’d started seeing Wayne, how I didn’t seem to have any girlfriends. I wasn’t in any clubs. She asked me if he was isolating me.

  I couldn’t speak. I isolate me, I wanted to tell her. I wanted to tell her about my parents. I wanted to tell her I had no idea why I had no friends. The school was huge. I never felt like I saw anyone I knew.

  “That’s not love, hon.” She leaned way over her desk and peered up into my face. She was shaking her head very slowly back and forth, her tongue moving in the opposite direction, hitting the inside corner of her mouth, a little windshield wiper. “That is not love. You live with your father?”

  I felt myself turn red under my curtains of hair, and I burst into a full-body sweat. In my halter and tight pink jeans, I was sticking to the hard wood chair in her office. Above my head, an air conditioner squeaked and hummed in the w
indow; I guessed you would get used to the racket after a while. I wished I was wearing something less trashy, more studious, more college-y, more like my dream. Something more like the real me.

  “It’s temporary,” I said. My father’s house was out-of-district.

  “Did you know you have had friends come in here, worried about you because of that boy?” she said.

  “Sara Simko,” I said. “She’s like my little mother.” I rolled my eyes.

  She smiled. “I’ve seen the carrying on, Heather. I’ve seen and heard plenty. These things go in one direction.” She made a kind of sputtering, farting noise and lowered her hand from way up in the air down to her desk with a thud. I guessed the hand was me. She handed me a business card: Katherine Weckerlie, MSW. “Think of this as guidance homework, hon,” she said. She wanted me to see this counselor, she said. It could really help. I had to get a permission slip signed by my mother, take it to the first session.

  She opened my file. My permanent record. “Look at these test scores. Stunning. Your grades—you’ve missed a lot of school. But my letter explains some of the background situation, I think. Here is the form you need to fill out.” She handed me a yellow form. She typed away at a letter in progress in her typewriter. She said, “I’ll send the letter to the college you choose.”

  I had no idea what she knew of my family, our lives. I had no idea what else was in my permanent record. If my mother knew a counselor had used the words “background situation” with respect to our lives, she would have forced me to change schools again. Or she might have left town, attempted to start over, get anonymous again. So I smiled, nodded, and kept my mouth shut. To even think about any of this, I feared, would make the good parts stop working. Don’t think, close your eyes, don’t hope for the best.