Just Pretending Read online

  “Oh, Hanna,” she says.

  He knows it has something to do with the girl who died, but instead we talk about my mother. It’s the obvious thing – abandonment issues and all that. I’ve been reading a lot of psychology books in my spare time lately, trying to guess what Shrinky Dink will come up with. Dry stuff, for the most part, until you get to some of the juicier bits of Freud. Most interesting is the patient named Anna O, who was the basis for Freud’s theories. She didn’t talk much, and then she would do this thing she called “chimney sweeping,” where she would talk like mad to get it all out, as though she had been saving it up. Then she felt better. I believe I’m on to Pink-o and his tricks now.

  So he knows it’s about the dead girl, and he knows I know he knows. I have the feeling he’s just humouring me with all his unimaginative talk about my so-called real mother while he waits for me to get to the real point and tell him why I’m here (all this talk about “reality” makes my head spin. I’m in the process of converting from a blind faith in structuralism, that I didn’t even realize I had, to a belief in post-structuralism. I’m finding that it really suits my cynical nature.)

  I’ve been told that for fourteen, I’m a smart girl. I’ve also been told that I am deeply immature. “That’s okay,” I sometimes reply, “I like being complex.”

  “You’re a smart girl, Hanna.” How many times have I heard that? Or the somewhat sideways, “You’re too smart for your own good” (Mrs. Connor, grade six). Or the much more interesting and straightforward, “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?” (Melody Perkins, member of so-called “peer group.”)

  “Hanna,” Melody singsongs in the lunch room, and giggles erupt from her table. “Hanna Banana.” More giggles. “Hanna, want a banana?” Lewd gestures with the banana.

  “Is that the best you can do?” I ask, picking up my untouched lunch tray to dump in the garbage by the door again.

  Singsong voice gives way to hard edge. Loudly: “But Hanna doesn’t like bananas. I think Hanna would rather eat flowers.” Louder still: “I heard Hanna’s a lesbian who does it with Miss Flowers. She’s the teacher’s pet, or maybe she just pets the…” The cafeteria door swings shut behind me.

  Of course I love Miss Flowers. Everyone loves Miss Flowers. But I have a deep and inevitable crush on her. Different, I’m sure, than everyone else who loves Miss Flowers. Maybe I’ve been underestimating Melody Perkins.

  Dr. Shrinky Dink interrupts the sound of the ticking clock steadily marking off our silent hour together (well, fifty minutes, or three thousand seconds, if you want to be technical) to suggest to me that I’m addicted to the “high” I get from the endorphins when I tell bold lies, or steal, or otherwise overtly oppose the so-called authority figures in my life. After he says that, he sits back with his pink face gleaming, trying to look benign, reassuring, and masterful all at once. The effect, more than anything, is to make him look pompous.

  A little too convenient, I think as I stare at his round belly straining to escape his food-spotted shirt. Lunch, I wonder, or something (disgusting) much earlier, like last night’s supper, perhaps? Or (more likely, I smirk inwardly in my special inward-smirking kind of way), a masturbatorial bit of goo that has something to do with the two thousand Playboy magazines that this creepy shrink keeps in his office as some quasi-political statement about the okay-ness of nudity that I am too young (thank god) to hear about but that all good post-war feminist hippies like my mother (a.k.a. grandmother) would likely agree with. I spend half my time here praying that this sicko isn’t some kind of child molester.

  His theory about the addiction to the endorphin high makes me say, “Isn’t that a bit ironic?” right out loud, which I didn’t really mean to do, and causes Dr. McOink-Oink to pause and cock his left eyebrow in such a way that I am left with the impression that this is a very practiced move. But he’s keen now because he’s gotten something out of me.

  “Ironic? How so?” he queries, his fingers laced together over his tub-o’-guts.

  I practice raising my left eyebrow at him as if to say, Don’t you know? But both my eyebrows work in tandem, and I’m sure I only achieve the undesired effect of looking surprised. Damn. I am particularly annoyed with myself for having given this impression when I am most certainly NOT surprised.

  Nothing this buffoon could do or say would surprise me. He could go into labour and have a baby right here on the mouldy green carpet and I would hardly be surprised. He could lunge from his chair and try to plant sloppy wet kisses on my neck (ugh) and I would not find myself surprised. He could slip obscene words randomly into his droning sentences – You know, Hanna, your penis mother pays good money for these sessions. She really wants tits to help you. Isn’t there anything screw you’d like to talk to me about? I’m only here to help you (benevolent smile) – and I would hardly bat an eyelash. At least that’s what I think until Dr. Shrinky Dink does the surprising thing. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

  I see the dead girl sometimes in my dreams. It happens at first just like it did for real. I look, by chance, down the ravine. The same ravine that I walk past every day twice a day, sometimes more, and never (rarely) am tempted to veer from my path to look down into it. Usually I walk past, noting its presence only with my ears, my mind’s eye conjuring the sight of the cool water running over the flat red and grey stones.

  But that day something made my feet move to the left to look over the edge into the ravine, where the little river runs shallowly but swiftly over the large stones. Perhaps my ears detected a difference that day? What I expected to see – the large slab of flat red stone where the stream dips and runs faster to pour tidily over the grey and black stones – isn’t what I do see. Instead, there’s a girl. She lies prone over the red stone, covering it completely with her body, interrupting the beautiful dip and flow of the water the way a piece of debris sometimes does before it is eventually nudged on by the current. But this is not the same at all.

  She lies on her back with her face turned away from me, hair covering her cheek. One arm is flung out as if she might be preparing to wave or hitch a ride or make a one-winged snow angel. Anything is possible. But she does not because there she is, lying still as stone, covering the red rock.

  I hang from the ledge by my fingertips and let myself drop, bending my knees and landing on the balls of my feet like I’ve done so many times before. Gingerly over the flat stones, water rushing about my wet sneakers, I make my way to the girl. I yell at her, then poke her with my toe. She lies still, ignoring me. In my dream, I straddle her body with my knees and grab her by the shoulders and shake and shake her as though I’m angry with her. Her hair whips around and her limp neck tosses her head to and fro, and then there it is, the blood coming from the back of her head and running down the little river and over the flat stones, making all of them red just the same way it did when I moved her head for real. And then I see her face, by now uncovered by her hair and… That’s usually when I wake up. That’s what I don’t tell McOinkster.

  Just before Pink-o does the surprising thing, I say, “Ironic as in ‘like addict mother, like daughter’.” I’m still pissed off about the surprise eyebrows and thinking of how to recover from this.

  He snorts a shot of laughter out his nostrils. Not a real laugh, but a mean one. Then he says (snort), “I think you mean obvious (snort snort), not ironic. Tcha.” He actually says tcha like the juvenile, snotty, unoriginal fourteen-year-old girls in my class, Melody Perkins, for instance, who tchas after every cocky sentence – Like you would know, tcha – that she throws at anyone who’s not on her exclusive list of who’s “in” this week. I, for one, am pleased to say that I have never been on that list.

  So Pinky’s tcha after he says that is like saying stupid at the end of his sentence. Okay, so Dr. McOink-Oink did do something to surprise me. But I don’t show it. Instead of letting him see my surprise, I slowly and purposefully sit back in my chair, and then I smile just a little smile. A Mona Lisa smil
e. I have to struggle to keep it from taking over. I want it to show just a bit.

  I want him to wonder, later – that is, if he’s not too self-absorbed in replaying his tcha moment – I want him to wonder if I really did smile at that moment. And if so, what did it mean? That’s what I hope he’ll think about later, maybe in the night after he’s been asleep once but woken up, perhaps from the neighbour’s dog barking, and he can’t fall asleep again.

  The reason I do smile is because in that tcha moment, in the derisive snort, I caught a glimpse of the fact that he is afraid of me. Me: a fourteen-year-old girl. I saw it right before he covered it up: He’s afraid I’m smarter than him. That’s why he tchad, that’s why he ridiculed my choice of words, that’s why he snorted that mean little snort. I ponder these new insights as I sit there smiling my very little smile.

  Freud would have a field day with this, I think.

  “I pushed her,” I say one day, out of the blue, interrupting Pink-o’s blathering.

  “Who?”

  Thick, I think. Then he seems to get it.

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  Annoying, I think, then say, “I didn’t say I wanted to, I said I did,” enunciating every word as though talking to a slow child.

  “Why would you say you did that?”

  “I didn’t say I did it, I did do it.”

  He just sits there looking at me over his round belly, not saying a word. Was that a little smile? I am about to say You don’t believe me but then change my mind. The clock ticks until the so-called hour is up.

  The minutes are ticking, adding up to the requisite fifty, when I suddenly say that the dead girl was me. Pinky seems to consider this for a moment.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I saw her face (a.k.a. my face) when I turned her head with my toe. She was me.”

  “You think she was you?”

  I feel us slipping into the usual cat-and mouse-semantics games, and I don’t want to go there. I pretend I didn’t hear him.

  “I was her and she was me and I knew what it was like to be dead. I understood it.” Pause. “And it was okay.”

  “Do you often have thoughts of hurting yourself?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Do you think about it?”

  “I’m not that unimaginative.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not one of those girls who resorts to cutting or anorexia. I think I can do something more original than that, don’t you?”

  “So you make a conscious effort not to harm yourself?”

  “I wouldn’t call it that.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “I believe the textbooks call it a Nirvana principle. You know, looking for an escape and all that. Death. Suicide. But I think I’ll learn to live with it – the randomness, the stress. Apparently most people do.”

  Shrinky Dink raises one eyebrow but says nothing.

  tick tick tick

  Fifty minutes are up.

  “I went to the ravine today.”

  Silence. Annoying.

  “I went into the ravine today.”

  “Oh?”

  What I don’t tell is the part where I walked out to the red stone and lay down, arm out as if to wave or hitch a ride. I turned my head to the left, draped some hair over my face, lay perfectly still, counted to a thousand, then counted to a thousand again. It was getting cold, and water was in my ear. I turned my head and looked up to see an unexpected sky above me. Between that and the cold, I nearly lost my breath. I hate to admit it, wouldn’t if pressed, but that expanse of sky made me wonder if there was a god(dess), and then it made me cry. Just a little at first, and then in gross heaves that made me sit up, and the cold water streamed into my face and that helped a bit. I hate being pathetic.

  “It was Melody Perkins.”

  “Who?”

  “You know.” We’ve talked about MP before, early on, as part of his pointless inquiry about whether or not I have any “friends.”

  “Oh.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Too easy?”

  “I’d say.”

  “Yeah.” I’d rather wish an incurable or permanently disfiguring disease on her. “If it were Melody Perkins, that would be a waste,” I say.

  tick tick tick

  I spy the toilet – seat up – through the bathroom door, which he tends to leave open, whether by design or accident I don’t know. The whole thing is slightly obscene. I wrinkle my nose, imagining I smell pee.

  Time’s up.

  “You’re the shrink. You tell me who it was.”

  “It’s your trauma, not mine. You’ll have to tell me.”

  “But you have your opinions?”

  “I always have my opinions. Tell me, who did you see in the ravine?”

  “You know it was her.”

  “Her who?”

  He’s making me angry on purpose. I concentrate on reading the impossibly tiny print on the map on the wall and spend the rest of the time thinking of new names for him: Chester the Molester, Semenchuk’s a Monkey’s Butt, Glutt-o-rama (okay), Gut-o-rama (better). I consider asking him his first name, but then I change my mind. It might give him the wrong impression. Apparently Freud’s Anna O fell in love with her shrink and even had a so-called hysterical pregnancy. And that’s not the kind of hysterical that means funny.

  The clock ticks down the time.

  “Do you think I’m hysterical?”

  “What would make you say that?”

  “I’ve done my research.”

  “Nobody uses that term any more.”

  “Unless they’re talking about being funny.”

  “Do you think you’re hysterical?”

  “Hysterical as in ‘funny’ or hysterical as in ‘obsolete term’?”

  “Either.”

  “Funny as in ‘ha ha’ or funny as in ‘weird’?”

  “Again, your choice.”

  “I might consider myself a little funny.”

  “In which sense?”

  “You pick.”

  I think I hear him say Argh.

  “I thought all that talk at the beginning about my so-called mother was a pointless exercise.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “Don’t be coy.”

  “My apologies.”

  tick tick tick

  I laugh out loud, then realize Pinky doesn’t think my latest revelation is funny.

  “What would Freud have to say about this?” He thinks I’m being flip, so he doesn’t answer me. I try again. “An unusual twist on the jealous killing of one’s parent, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think that’s it at all.”

  “What then?”

  “You tell me.”

  Argh.

  tick tick tick

  Next time I come prepared.

  “Okay. So if I’m not killing her, what am I doing?”

  “What do you think?”

  Shit. I hate that he thinks he knows something about me. About what I want. He’s not going to let me off – he’s going to wait for me say it. He’s a bastard tub-o’-guts communist fascist pig. I let the clock tick.

  Why is he so fucking patient? I decide not to let him get away with it.

  “Letting her go?” I finally say.

  “Perhaps. How so?”

  “Look, I don’t know. You asked me to speculate, so that’s what I’m doing.”

  “Continue.”

  “If she’s dead, figuratively, or whatever, then I can let her go, right?”

  “Go on.”

  “I don’t have to keep wondering where the hell she is or if she’ll ever show up again. If she ever thinks about me and wonders…you know.”

  tick tick

  Thoughtful consideration.

  “Can you live with that explanation?”

  “I’ve lived with worse.”

  tick tick
tick

  “Will you be in next week?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  Semenchuk breathes through his mouth as he sits in his usual chair. Through the open bathroom door I stare at the yellowed toilet brush with its smooth plastic handle. I wonder what it would be like to brush Shrinky Dink’s hair with it.

  We listen together to the familiar sound of the clock, waiting.

  Summer’s turned. The water in the ravine is getting colder now.

  The image of my mother, barefoot, pant legs rolled to the knees, shoes swinging from her fingertips, enters my mind. I imagine her with her back to me, tiptoeing across the ravine, from rock to rock. Her hair is long and hangs carelessly across her shoulders in waves. Her laughter sprinkles the air as she moves further away from me and I almost catch a glimpse of her profile. I will her to look over her shoulder. I want her to turn and see me.

  Time’s up.

  someone’s been lying to you

  When Fred’s car pulls up in the alley, I’m out on the back step having a smoke and exchanging dirty looks with the neighbour, who’s at least a hundred and always calling the cops on us. I swear a dozen people pile out of Fred’s green Pontiac while the old bird next door stands there with her trap open catching flies before she runs inside to hide behind the curtains with her phone in her hand.

  I don’t know any of the girls Fred brought with him. They all basically give me the evil eye as they file in, so I give it right back.

  But Fred is nice; he calls out, “Hey Gee-O,” and taps me on the shoulder like we’re pals. I’m twenty-three and I’ve got a nickname like a baby. Nobody calls me Georgina but my mom.

  “Kenny inside?” he asks, and I nod, getting up to follow.

  I was only outside to try and cool off after my scrap with Jerry, screaming through the bathroom door, Come outta there, you fucking cracker had been my best line – I actually thought I heard it hit.

  I know he’ll flip it over in his mind, weigh the possibilities. There was a time when apple would have packed more sting, but it’s lost its effect on him. With cracker, I might have crossed a line. He’ll worry it into a wound. It won’t seem so bad at first until it starts to scab and smart. Then it’ll fester. I know calling him names is dirty, but that’s how I fight. It’s also dirty to be locked in the john with that PROSTITUTE Sherry or Shirley or whatever her name is from across the street, even if Jerry says she’s not and he wasn’t doing anything. Just talking, my ass.