The Ice Storm by Rick Moody

Author:Rick Moody
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504027670
Publisher: Open Road Media

The party peaked around ten-thirty like a cheap acid trip. This party was going through some changes. Describing them, describing these changes—the personal growth, the group dynamics taking place at the Halfords’—would have taxed the keenest reader of Psychology Today. Thomas Harris, M.D., author of I’m Okay—You’re Okay, put it this way: “Early in his work in the development of Transactional Analysis, Eric Berne observed that as you watch and listen to people you can see them change before your eyes. It is a total kind of change. There are simultaneous changes in facial expression, vocabulary, gestures, posture and body functions, which may cause the face to flush, the heart to pound, or the breathing to become rapid. We can observe these changes in everyone.”

Elena didn’t see how this transactional model was going to work for her. Though she was a reader of personal-growth books. She had read Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge and The Primal Scream by Arthur Janov and I’m Okay—You’re Okay and Games People Play by Eric Berne and Notes to Myself by Hugh Prather and The Gestalt Approach and Eyewitness Therapy by Fritz Perls and Be Here Now by Ram Dass and Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and The Divided Self and Human Sexual Response and Island by Aldous Huxley and The Tibetan Book of the Dead and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. She read this stuff, but it didn’t help her at parties.

And the party itself was of two minds, one mind in which the selection of house keys was a worthy and modern preoccupation, and one mind in which the whole game was a shame. Some people felt both ways, and some shifted back and forth between these two belief systems.

Uncomfortable as she was, how was Elena to account for the change that had overcome her? How was Elena to account for the joy that seized her not long after her arrival at the party? New Canaan society crept around trying to make decisions about the keys, about the repercussions of its participation. The conversations became vague, Elena noticed, as husbands and wives tried to avoid one another. They slunk from the bar to their conversations with eyes downcast, as Elena herself was avoiding Benjamin. Still, she found herself suddenly elated at the party; there was no other way to put it. She felt the loosening of the constraints that had bound her since she had come of age, and she realized she would play. She would select a key. She would clutch it to her, permit it to dangle around her neck, between her small, subdued breasts. She would play.

This decision was a function of her Parent, her Child, or her Adult. A function of one or more of the three. The Parent, of course, was a huge collection of recordings in the brain of “unquestioned or imposed external events perceived by

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