“Hi, Rotem? It’s Dani. My father spoke with you earlier.”
Faster than I expected. “Hi, Dani. Would you like to tell me a little bit about yourself? Or would you rather make an appointment? Fine, let me see when I’m free this week . . . How about Thursday at 9 a.m.? Done. See you then.” I wondered if she’d really show up. She had sounded hesitant and not very interested in elaborating, as though she had only called in order to get her father off her back.
Dani
I hung up the phone.
Strange conversation. Almost lacking in words. We made up for Thursday at nine, in two days’ time. I’d tried to get out of it. Wanted us to make up for the following week, but I didn’t have any good excuses and I’m terrible at lying. Surely with Dad’s threatening eyes glaring at me.
At the very end of the phone call, Dad left the apartment. I didn’t manage to decipher his mood. I sensed that he was angry, but his behavior wasn’t clear to me, like many other times during my life.
I remained alone. Stunned and pensive.
Suddenly things became clearer to me. It was the swarm of people who had shown up at my parents’ house two months earlier, when my Grandpa, Dad’s father, passed away. The swarm is what had caused Dad to take action. There’s always something that makes him take action, I thought to myself. It used to be the teachers at school, then the doctors in the unit. Another time it was that army psychologist who had insisted I’d be discharged, making sure to talk with my parents and explain the importance of the matter for my wellbeing, much beyond the Israeli army’s limitations to keep a girl like me among its soldiers. Dad had tried to use all of his connections so that my treatment would be within the army framework − even just that one hospitalization − until the nice army psychologist told him that he, Dad, was killing me by his own hands. Dad was furious and threatened to sue him. For days he planned the lawsuit, until he calmed down and was persuaded that I needed to be discharged from the army. And in any case, there was no longer any room for his opinion since I wasn’t able to function after my two-month stint at the eating disorders unit. The only thing that had interested me back then was shedding the dozens of pounds I had been forced to gain during my hospitalization.
My eyes became heavy, and I was forced to close them, allowing sleep to take over me.
I was scared of that meeting with Rotem Golan and I knew precisely what it was that worried me: I don’t believe that anyone can help me. And anyway, why would I want to share my thoughts, secrets, situation, with a total stranger - and a patronizing one at that? And if I were to withhold everything, then why even go to begin with and waste precious time? I had never understood this thing of sitting with a stranger and talking, telling them what I’m going through, the way that they want to hear it when coaxing me to speak. It’s forced and hypocritical and false. After all, the two people sitting in the room both know that one of them is getting paid to listen, and the other one is paying.
That’s so pathetic, I thought to myself and shuddered. Why should I pay money for a woman I don’t know to listen to all the nonsense? So what if it helped Fisher’s junkie son, and anyway, what do I care if loads of people go to see psychologists? I’m not like them. Loads of people do loads of things that I don’t do.
I started listing in my mind all of the times in my life I had been completely different from my peers, and then I stopped. That thought depressed me, and suddenly all of the faces of my past therapists began to flash in my mind. All had been filled with a genuine desire to help, listen, and even advise, but none had actually gotten through to me. They had all remained distant, beyond some cloud, where all of those people remain, or actually, where everyone who isn’t me remains.
And anyway, I’m actually at a pretty okay time in my life right now. True, I’m thin. I know that. It doesn’t bother me and I even prefer myself this way, but it’s also not my most extreme. I’ve learned to love the bones. The protruding pelvic bones, the ribs that stick out even through my shirt. My match-stick arms and legs have given me the feeling of a higher, superior being. Superhuman.
The alarm clock went off, interrupting a scary dream about meeting a strange creature. The figure of a man donning an oversized black hood. The figure approaches me and I try to get away but can’t because it’s sending its arms toward me and they’re getting longer and longer until they reach right to my stomach and try to penetrate me. That was the moment the alarm clock went off.
I opened my eyes and looked at my phone’s screen. 7 a.m. Bleak. No way am I going to see this Rotem who sounds like a kid who doesn’t know anything about anything, another one who’ll talk to me about my relationship with my mother and my father and ask me why I hate my body so much that I starve it.
Absolutely no way!
I felt like I didn’t have any more energy left for those people who just don’t get it. Maybe they learned a lot at the university, but deep down they still don’t know anything about anything.
I unlocked my phone and messaged Rotem Golan, the
