My brain hurts.
“What time is it?” I ask.
Trent checks his phone. “Eleven fifteen.”
As if on cue, the door opens and a few people enter, laughing. They’re all wearing black pants and white shirts. I elbow Trent who just mouths “Weird,” studies the late arrivals, and lands on one guy with a pen stuck behind his ear.
“What about that one?” He’s still focused on my getting some uncommitted lip.
I flag down the bartender. “Another round?” he asks.
“Can I ask you a really stupid question?”
“Shoot,” he says.
“Isn’t this a gay bar?”
The bartender laughs. “Used to be. The owners sold it. Now it’s mostly a hangout for local restaurant servers when their shifts end. That’s why it picks up late.”
I look at Trent, who just shrugs.
My head hits the bar and I speak into the crook of my arm. “We’re really bad at this,” I say. “I blame you. You’ve been happy too long.”
“I blame you. You’ve been unhappy too long.” Trent fixes his gaze on the blank space above me.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for the black cloud over your head.” He punches me playfully. I punch him back, a little less playfully.
“One more round,” Trent says to the bartender, who places two fresh cocktail napkins on the bar before retreating to make our drinks.
Friday
How was your week?”
It’s Friday again, which means I’m back in Jenny’s butter office having scant recollections of Wednesday or Thursday. There was another seizure, not as bad as the first but still scary. There was a call from the vet, but they were not able to extract enough cells from the octopus to find anything conclusive; Doogie wants to put her under general anesthesia to collect a larger sample. There was supposed to be another date with the hugging guy, but I canceled, since I was feeling gross and unattractive and unworthy of being loved. Ironically, this will probably help him clarify his feelings; men are hunters and tend to like other men who don’t make it easy.
Mostly, this week I withdrew.
Withdrawing, however, is difficult in therapy—even therapy with Jenny. It’s especially hard today, as Jenny sits forward on her chair with renewed zeal for her occupation. As if another patient weary of her obtuse observations has reported her to some board and she’s trying to avoid additional complaints. Or maybe she’s finally cleared whatever hurdle of ambivalence was blocking her getting involved. In either case, great time to come alive, Jenny.
I don’t want to answer her question, or maybe I don’t know how. How was my week? The visit to the vet was . . . irritating? Not knowing the difference between a straight bar and a gay bar was . . . humiliating? My mouth is empty of adjectives and qualifying words, so I relent and swallow and sigh and tell her something else. “I might as well fill you in on our visitor.”
“When you say our . . .” Jenny pauses. This is the kind of thing she never would have questioned in previous sessions. She would have figured it out contextually, or just not have been invested enough to care. This is an entirely new Jenny, and I don’t like her.
“Lily and me. And my. And mine.” The proper syntax eludes me.
“You and Lily. Okay. Proceed.”
Proceed. Oh, goody, may I?
Jenny licks her upper lip, hungry for more of the story.
“Lily and I have an octopus.” I pause for dramatic effect, but only get a confused stare. Then I launch into the whole ordeal, like I did for Trent, like I did for Doogie. It’s already becoming like the package of stories I have preselected to recount on dates; I bore myself in the telling. Jenny nods as she listens and her eye contact is unwavering. I almost don’t know who this woman is that I’m pouring my heart out to. Seriously, her scrutiny is unnerving.
“And when you say octopus, you mean . . .”
“Octopus. When I say we, I mean Lily and me, and when I say octopus, I mean octopus.” Jenny still looks uncertain, so I pull out my phone and show her the picture of Lily and me with the lei. “Look. Right here. Except now it’s bigger and more prominent and angry.”
Jenny studies the photo and uses her fingers to zoom in on the octopus. This in itself enrages me (even though I did the same thing), like she’s saying I’m making mountains out of molehills, that I have now been living a week and a day on the edge of hysteria for nothing. Plus, I just told her it was bigger now. Meaner. When she looks up there’s something akin to pity in her eyes. Something more than a sorrowful understanding, yet shy of commiseration. But I don’t want her pity, or whatever is pity-adjacent. I don’t need it. I am going to fix this. I am going to prevail over the octopus. I don’t want this look.
Jenny hands me back my phone. “Have you been to the veterinarian?”
Duh. “On Monday.”
“What did she say?” Jenny does this thing where she defaults to the feminine pronoun to make some sort of point about a male-dominated society, something she probably picked up in a women’s studies class in the late nineties and that now feels woeful and stilted.
“He”—I emphasize the he—“couldn’t say much of anything. He took a few cells to run some tests and the tests were inconclusive. Now they want to put Lily under anesthesia and take a larger sample.”
“How do you feel about that?”
When I don’t want to answer the question someone asks, I just give the answer to another, unasked question. I realize in this moment that
