Writers & Lovers - Lily King Page 0,94

the table doing her homework.

He asks why I’m here, and I tell him about the buzzing under my skin, the ringing—

‘You have ringing in your ears?’

‘Not actual ringing. It’s like my whole body is a bell, like a huge bell in a tower that’s been struck and—’

He held up his hand. ‘Let’s skip the flowery descriptions. You’re anxious. Why? When’d it start?’

I tell him about Red Barn and Luke and the night I first felt it. I tell him about my mother dying and leaving Barcelona and moving East and Iris and the potting shed and the revisions and rejections and EdFund and all the debt collectors catching up with me. He listens, his fat pen with the jelly grip hovering over a yellow legal pad, but he doesn’t write anything.

‘Anything else?’

I tell him about Oscar. I tell him about Silas.

‘Did you ever hear the one about the donkey who starved to death between two stacks of hay,’ he says.

Fucking, fucking Pilgrims.

Down in the bright kitchen a man is chopping vegetables, and a woman is measuring out rice and water in a pot. The girl is still doing her homework. Her legs are swinging back and forth under her chair.

I start to cry.

Dr. Sitz seems to know exactly what I’m seeing even though he cannot see it from his chair. It almost feels staged. Cue the stable family.

At the start of the second appointment I begin by talking about my parents, and after a few minutes he waves his hand at me.

‘I don’t want to hear those old soggy stories. Tell me what you were thinking about on the way over here.’

I tell him I was thinking about all the people I’ve pitied and scorned for ‘selling out’ or ‘settling’ and how none of them are alone or broke or driving to a shrink’s office in Arlington.

‘You’re a gambler. You gambled. You bet the farm.’ ‘On this novel? That was a bad bet. I can’t even finish it.’

‘Not on the novel. Your success or failure is not based on what happens with that pile of papers. On yourself. On your fantasies. So what do you want now, at age thirty-one?’

‘I want to finish the book.’

He nods.

‘And start another one.’

He laughs. ‘You’re a very high roller.’

‘So what are you scared of?’ he asks me at our last appointment. ‘I mean really scared of.’

I try to think about it. ‘I’m scared that if I can’t even handle this right now, how will I be able to handle bigger things in the future?’

He nods. He scrapes his moustache against his thumbs. ‘Bigger things in the future. What’s bigger than this? Your mother dies suddenly. It echoes her previous abandonment of you thus making her death a double whammy. Your father proved to be incapable of being your father. You owe money to several large corporations who will squeeze you indefinitely. You spent six years writing a novel that may or may not get published. You got fired from your job. You say you want a family of your own but there doesn’t seem to be a man in your life, and you may have fertility problems. I don’t know, my friend. This is not nothing.’

Of all his strange responses, this is the one that helps me the most. This is not nothing.

Manolo calls and offers me the job. Two sections of ninth grade, two sections of juniors, and a creative writing elective starting next semester. Full-time salary, Blue Cross Blue Shield health insurance. No more Pilgrims.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What don’t you understand?’

‘The interview with Aisha didn’t go well.’

He laughs. ‘Trust me. It went very well. She wouldn’t hear of anyone else after you came in.’

He asks me to come in that afternoon to fill out some paperwork and pick up the books I’ll be teaching, the school handbook, and the English department curriculum. He asks if I can start the next Monday.

‘Also, I don’t know if you saw the posters but we’re hosting a writing festival in two weeks. Would you be willing to make some introductory remarks? You’re the one in the department who can speak to a real commitment to the writing life. Aisha liked whatever it was you said about that.’

What had I said about that?

‘Sure,’ I say. ‘I can say something.’

There’s a particular feeling in your body when something goes right after a long time of things going wrong. It feels warm and sweet and loose. I feel all that as I hold the phone and listen to Manolo talk