My first couple of sessions with Ditzy were all the same. She sat on the couch, I sat on the chair, and I stared at her until she shut up. She’d start with something like “So what was your mom like?” and when she realized she wasn’t going to get anything out of me she went on to lighter things like “Do you have a lot of friends?”
She was the kind of person who tried to ignore the problem. She didn’t ask me anything like “How many times a week do you usually get high?” She didn’t ask about my relationship with Smog, and she didn’t ask what my living conditions were like. She didn’t even ask what I thought about myself. Daisy and I had therapy sessions every morning after breakfast, and she was the kind of cheerful that made me think the milk in my cereal had curdled in my stomach and was coming back up.
Morning sickness didn’t help.
But then there was that one glorious day. The day she gave in and realized she wasn’t getting anywhere with me. My foolish hopes were that she’d move on and say that she was going to send me somewhere else, or send me home, or tell me she thought that I was just fine the way I was and she wasn’t going to try and “Help” me anymore.
It was a Sunday morning, so breakfast wasn’t the usual cereal. We had eggs and toast and fruit and stuff, and for once I wasn’t completely uninterested. My mood was looking up, if not for morning sickness. It’d been about two weeks since I’d gotten there. Sixteen meetings with Ditzy gone by and it took her this long to give in. She was wearing her most cheerfully false smile, and she asked me how I was feeling.
“Alright,” I said, staring at her diploma on the wall. “And you?” I tried my best to seem sincerely sarcastic. My voice was horribly grumbly and raspy because my lungs were still cleaning themselves after smoking since I was fourteen.
“I’m doing fantastic, thanks for asking honey!” I flinched at her voice, thinking about how my meetings should really not be in the morning. I thought of her drowning in the bathtub, or maybe falling off a cliff or something. I couldn’t help thinking of her body all twisted up on the rocks, and smiled.
“Gosh, Rowena! What’s got you in such a good mood?” And then I laughed at her, right in her face.
“You are such a stupid bitch. You need to get real.” I said at her, sitting back in my stupid striped chair. “I can’t stand you.” I thought of stopping there, but as I said more it just came to me. I needed to tell her why she was so stupid, I couldn’t help myself. “You are so freaking cheerful that it makes you look stupid beyond your wildest dreams. You look so fake all the time. Your exterior is so nice, and so perfect to you that you’re like a one dimensional character in a bad movie. You’re the gullible elementary school teacher. You’re the ditzy teenage girl. I can’t even think of anything to compare you to because you’re so fake. Someone in your life must’ve hated you growing up.” My voice got louder and louder with momentum. “Your dad or someone, yeah. He told you to sit down and shut up and act like a lady, right? So you’re nice and you’re helpful and you’re not useless, daddy!” And at the end it was a shriek.
Dazey ran from the room, leaving the door open in her wake. I watched her crack open Vanilla boy’s door and ask him if he had a minute.
They stepped in the hall and whispered to each other as I watched on, leaning my back against Daisy’s door. Vanilla glanced up at me when she was done
whispering and nodded to her, touching her arm. He walked back into his room and Daisy walked back towards me, trying to look at the floor. When she did make eye contact She quickly looked away like I’d burned her.
“What was that all about?”
She sighed a little and made wavering eye contact again. “Tomorrow you’ll start having sessions with Vanilla instead of me, at the same time every day.” She brushed past me with slumped shoulders and a generally deflated body language. I din’t feel bad in the least.
~o~
That night Pomme and I stayed out in the garden area a little later than usual. We sat and casually chatted, and I told him about how annoyed I was with Daisy. He laughed at all the little nicknames I’d come up with to describe her.
I liked Pomegranate, generally. He wasn’t someone to go to for the most engaging conversation, and he told me that he’d dropped out of high school. He was younger than me, and I found his adventures being a nymphomaniac pretty funny. I think that was the point though. He told me that when he was fifteen and sixteen he started selling himself because he was so obsessed with sex. He’d managed to keep it mostly secret from his mom, but she could always tell something was up.
The way he talked about his mom was endearing, but also like he thought of her as being stupid, or ignorant of the world around here. “It’s just like Daisy,” He said “she chooses to ignore everything that’s wrong with the world instead of embracing it.”
I nodded. We were in perfect harmony, I thought. We understood each other. I never considered for even one moment that he was only trying to get in my pants. That was only natural for me, I never thought of relationships as being more than that considering I’d been with Smog for so long.
We got up to go inside, because Daisy had given us a five-minute warning. He felt my belly and told me, “I can’t wait until you give birth, then we can totally do stuff.” I laughed at his antics and he winked at me, and then we went inside to go to bed.
~o~
The next day I got up and stretched and tried my best to rub my own back, sleeping on the tiny bunkbed was definitely not doing wonders for me. I’d asked about getting a different bed weeks ago, but Daisy just said that “They hadn’t planned” to take care of a pregnant woman when they redid the house to be a rehab facility. Meanwhile, she sleeps on her own huge bed every night. But whatever, that’s not what I’m trying to say.
What I’m getting to is that that was my first day of sessions with Vanilla, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I certainly didn’t want to acknowledge that I felt a little nervous, and passed it off as anticipation influenced by pregnancy hormones. I didn’t even have a reason to be nervous. If anything, I thought of him as being more of a potential “friend” than how I thought of Daisy, but that was a bad thing to me, because if he was my friend, and he got through to me, then I’d get “better.”
Their definition of better, not mine.
When I went upstairs to his office and walked inside, he was sitting at his desk waiting for me. I mentally winced at how awkward it made me feel. But, the first thing I noticed was how much brighter his room was than Ditzy’s. It was much more yellow and bright, and hers had been more neutral and had darker purples.
He had been waiting for me, sitting at his desk. He got up and shook my hand and said “Welcome, Welcome, have a seat.” He actually seemed kind of excited and it was funny to me. He rubbed his hands together and tried to start a conversation.
“So, Rowena, where are you from?”
“This is my hometown.” I told him flatly.
“Never moved away or anything?”
I shook my head and then fell silent, staring off blankly so that he’d get the hint and stop talking to me.
It was all quiet for a moment, Vanilla boy just stared at me. And then he got up and moved the two chairs in front of his desk to face each other, even though I was still sitting in one of them. I didn’t really know what to do when he sat in the one across from me. We were so close we were almost knocking knees.
“Look, Rowena. I know Daisy tolerated your shit, but I genuinely care about what’s going on with you.” He was looking right at me, very serious. I was suddenly very uncomfortable. I still sat and stared at a place on the wall just above his right shoulder.
“So we can do this the easy way, and you can help me, and I can help you. Or we can transfer you somewhere much more rigorous, where the people are not half as nice as Daisy and I. I can promise you that.”
I rolled my eyes. “Alright, alright. Ask away, Vanilla boy.”
He sat back in his seat and smiled. “Thank you.” He paused for a moment, considering his words. “So you’re, uh... friends with Pomegranate.”
“Yeah, we’re friends. I know what you’re thinking, too. The way you said friends and all. We totally want to bump uglies.”
He laughed, which was not what I was expecting. “Do you really think you’re in the position to be doing that, I mean-” Vanilla gestured to my swelling stomach.
“We’re not gonna do it while I’m still pregnant, jeez!”
“No, no. That’s not what I meant at all. I just mean you know you’re going to have a baby, right?”
“No, I’m going to give birth to a litter of puppies.”
“Right, so, you won’t be able to keep it unless you get better and get out of here first. And then if Pomegranate has sex, he’ll go back to square one. He’ll never get out of here. And you’ll have a baby and everything. It just sounds like you both want to destroy yourselves.”
Absentmindedly, my hand came up to my stomach. “Yeah, but. You guys think you’re making us better, but we’re fine just where we are.”
“Do you really think that, Rowena?”
“Yes! I was happy, and I don’t think I was destroying myself. Nobody I knew criticized my lifestyle and then I came here.”
“But, Rowena. You were high off your ass. You couldn’t even form coherent sentences. You were drunk while pregnant. You could’ve killed your baby, it could be born completely deformed for all you know, and that’s because of your lifestyle.”
“So? That’s my choice, not yours. I could pretend to get better and get out of here and go back to drinking and getting high for all you know.”
“I don’t think you could do that.”
“Do what? Go back to drinking and everything?”
“You don’t know how to act normal enough for us to accept it, Rowena.” When I stared off at the wall again he continued.
“From what I can gather, your life has been like this for as long as you can remember. You’ve never had anything normal, but because of that you think what you’re going through and the way you act is normal and OK.”
“What’s wrong with that? It is normal and OK!”
“Not when you’re hurting someone else’s life, Rowena. Here you are talking about ruining Pomegranate’s chances, and your baby’s chances, and you’re completely alright with that. Why?”
“I don’t know.”I mumbled. I had never considered anyone else’s feelings before, and I didn’t know how I felt about that. I just automatically thought that if anyone had any problems with anything, they’d deal with it instead of just going with what I was giving them. It was a completely new perspective, and if it had been shown to me at any other time, I wouldn’t have been ready for it.
~o~
With that new perspective, I spent the next couple of days worrying about my baby and what I was doing at all hours of the day. What was he going to like? How would he feel about his mama?
I immediately thought back to my mother, and my scorn towards her. I always respected her as a woman, she had her own agenda and she didn’t want a child, and she made that clear.
But now here I was, in the same situation she had been, only she had had a steady job and a house and an at least somewhat good life. Now I was bringing a child into the world under even worse circumstances.
~o~
This was the topic the next time I had a meeting with Vanilla.
I walked into his office and sat down in the same chair as last time, and he was sitting in one of the chairs too instead of at his desk. I guess he decided it was easier.
“I don’t know how I feel about my baby now.” I looked at the floor because I was embarrassed to admit that he’d gotten to me. I half expected some sort of clever remark, but there was none of that.
“Oh, Rowena. There’s so much you can do for it. You can give it up for adoption or you could hand it over to a family member.”
“I think it’s a boy. But I want to keep him. I can’t stand the thought of him going somewhere else that isn’t home with me. But now I don’t know how much of a home my grubby apartment is. It smells like smoke and marijuana.” A smell that was once nostalgic and calming, I thought to myself.
“I don’t know Rowena, now that you’re getting better, maybe I can help you find a job somewhere, yeah? Then you wouldn’t have to stay in your apartment for so long.”
I nearly cried at his kind words and his utter sincerity.
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