How to Be Safe by Tom McAllister

Author:Tom McAllister [McAllister, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2018-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

NOVEMBER

ROBBIE WAS CONCERNED about my mental state. He said, “Babe, I’m concerned about your mental state.” He put his hand on my face and made me look at him—it was one of the most sincere gestures he’d ever made. I wished he weren’t wearing a backward hat when he did it. I wished he looked more like someone’s father, with gray hair around his temples and gray eyes haunted by the war and a mouth like a tightrope stretched between the towers of his cheekbones. I wanted him to be my father, with his cold hands and his broken tooth and his Michelob breath and his distant, useless love.

I grabbed the remote and turned on the TV. He took it from me and turned it back off.

“You have to do something about it,” he said. “You are not healthy.”

Isn’t everyone unhealthy? Health is a condition of being between unhealthful periods. I told him I would get better. It just needed time.

“You can’t just wait for things to get better.”

He wanted me to see a therapist. Get some meds. Start keeping a diary. I told him I would think about it. But what would I get from a psychiatrist besides more judgment? Why did I need another person to perform for, another person to tell me what I was doing wrong? Now Robbie wanted me to spend time sitting in an office doing what? Talking about myself? Trying to open up my brain and hoping it didn’t spill all over the floor?

It’s not as if I’d never been to therapy before. When I was a freshman, my teachers accused me of acting up in class. They said I’d become a troublemaker. Outbursts and failures of decorum. “It’s just hormones,” my father said. The principal scheduled a weekly appointment with the school therapist; I would be held back a grade if I didn’t comply. The therapist was a man in his late twenties who spent most of his time telling me this was not the job he’d signed up for. “I didn’t go to school for eight years so I could help little girls get over their breakups,” he said. Our meetings lasted only a half hour, and every week I told him I just wanted to be angry for a while, but I would be better soon. He made me keep an anger journal, but never checked it. Sometimes he talked about his girlfriend, who was pressuring him to buy her an engagement ring. “What’s the fucking rush with women anyway? Have you ever even met a happy married person?” he said. I told him I had not. “Something happens to women when they get to their twenties,” he said. “They change. They go from being fun and open-minded to being some other thing. They turn miserable.” I sat quietly, waiting until I was given permission to leave. “My advice to you is to enjoy the age you are now instead of always being mad about it. Girls your age are perfect, and they don’t even know it.

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