[It's come to my attention that I should change this story's POV, mainly because I know jack-shit about psychology or whatever, but also because I am not an authority figure and never have/will identify as such. My stories should be told from the point of view of authority. Oh, and "Dear Diary" is fucking retarded, but whatevs.]
Dear ...,
The universe has decided: I will never be a licensed psychologist, nor, as was made clear today, will I even be allowed to remain a hack psychotherapist.
It should've been obvious that I would never cut it as a mental health professional given the fact that, now at the age of mortgages and husbands and children, I still begin my annual journal entires ("personal progress updates") with an affectionate address to an inanimate object. It's really quite unseemly. In fact, if I saw this written by one of my patients, I would surely turn up my nose and mentally hurl him or her into the pre-Oedipal diagnostic pit along with the thumb-suckers and bed-wetters of the world.
I say "would" because I've never had the chance to be so deliciously dismissive. You see, my dissertation was rejected. Twice. So instead of ensconcing myself in the leather recliners and six-figure neuroses of the Upper East Side like I'd always dreamt, I've been wiling away my daytime hours working as a discount therapist at the nearby community center. For $15 a pop, you could swing by and spend an hour prattling nonstop about your expanding waistline, ungrateful children, and the nefarious implications of your new shoe fetish.
Don't get me wrong: there were serious cases. In fact, you'd be surprised at how many drug addicts and psychotics there are in this one little, leafy suburb. But lacking the qualifications to deal in detox and prescriptions, I was stuck on bored housewife row.
Then--last Tuesday, to be exact--Melody walked into my office.
I admired her from the moment I saw her. She had that artfully bedraggled look that I had tried in vain to pull off in high schoool. A tall, waifish woman, she managed not to look ridiculous in a cut-off tee shirt and low-rise jeans, though from a close distance it was clear she was 38 at the least.
Her hair fell across the left side of her face in a frizzy blonde wave. I could see the thick, liquid eyeliner smudged around her own revealed set of eyelids, making her right eye bulge out as alert and frightened as a raccoon's. A supermodel Cyclops. I attempted to complement her for being the most interesting-looking person to walk through my small, windowless office in months, but she sat down in a huff and got right to the point.
The problem, she said, was that she forgot to take her pills that morning. She and her husband had just lost their home and were staying with her mother-in-law. She had been getting up early to do chores in order to feel useful while her husband got ready for work. She had been out of a job for a year.
It was when she was polishing the crystal in the dining room that she realized her mistake, but by then it was too late. Searching the fragmented globes of a chandelier that did not belong to her with a flannel rag cut from one of her old nightgowns, Melody had said she felt her thoughts slip out the back of her head like rats through a cellar door. She saw them dance along with the dust particles she had liberated and squeeze through the surface of the crystal, where they were reborn on the yellow dining room wallpaper as a thousand magnificent rainbows. Light and unburdened in her newfound emptiness, she didn't feel guilty when she halted her labor to admire these by-products of herself as they tentatively circled around the picture frame of a dead Gray family patriarch.
I interrupted Melody to ask if she obtained her pills from a psychiatrist and she burst into tears. Her mascara dribbled into her crows feet and trickled down her cheek, forming a black stitch connecting her eye and mouth. I handed her a tissue and allowed her to continue telling her story.
She had heard a strange noise coming from the living room. When she entered, she had no idea that the woman glowing in the neon light of a mid-morning religious program was her mother-in-law. With her body cocooned in the folds of a cashmere blanket, the woman's naked white head seemed to sprout from the red velvet trunk of the armchair like an old, withered twig. It fluttered with indignation upon the sight of Melody in the doorway. It demanded Melody open the shades.
At this point the story, Melody stopped talking and descended into a crying fit. She rubbed her eyes, streaking the remaining makeup across her face like mud water.
I asked her why she was so upset.
It was just that the room was so big, she cried. It frightened her. It took near an eternity to journey from the door to the window with the woman's steel blue eyes monitoring her the whole way. In the darkness she tripped over a bear-clawed ottoman and tumbled to the hardwood floor, scattering a week's worth of newspapers from the coffee table that broke her fall. Reaching out to get her bearings, she crashed the lower dusty keys of the as yet untouched piano, letting out a loud, dissonant drone that momentarily drowned out the loop of Hail Marys coming from the television.
The old woman laughed at her. The twig head rolled back and cackled and called Melody a failure at everything.
Still, Melody persevered and brought her bruised body to stand upright at the window, where she suddenly began to remember things. She said that the cold touch of the glass curdled the blood in her fingers and turned her heart to ice.
It was the strongest sensation she had felt in months.
Standing at the window on this February day made her remember the times she used to gaze out the window on the farm where she grew up. Sometimes she would see a hesitant coyote creep out of the woods and saunter towards the chicken coop. She would yell for her father and he would get his gun. As she got older, she began to start getting it herself. She never shot an animal, but she enjoyed firing it into the air, searing away the coyotes and any other intruders.
This time when Melody stopped talking, I found it difficult to remain patient while coaxing her back into the story. We only have a few more minutes, I warned her. She wasn't crying this time. Rather, she remained silent and motionless, fixing her glance on the snow globe village on my desk; it was as though she was toying with me.
"Well," I prodded, "what happened next?"
She smiled and pushed her hair away from the left side of her face, revealing a scratched cheek and a swollen black eye. "I finally killed the coyote," she said.
Dear ...,
The police wouldn't let me view the crime scene even though I was the one who gave them the address. According to the 11 o'clock news, the old woman (her name was Doris Gray) had put up quite a struggle, but was ultimately asphyxiated with a long piece of flannel. The primary suspect is Melody Gray.
Melody's husband, Ira, could not be reached for comment, but is rumored to be amassing an impressive army of doctors and lawyers on his wife's behalf. Some even think the murder was a team effort.
That house of his mother's, a colleague of mine chuckled cynically, is worth a bit of moola. I won't be on Melody's dream team, nor will I play for the offense. I didn't even report the full extent of Melody's confession, partly because I understand it too well.
That night I returned home to my son's dark room and sat on the bed beside his sleeping body. The more I thought about my job, the more the walls around me seemed to dissolve. I felt gusts of air cold enough to stop a heart. I saw the bare pines, clad only in a thin blanket of snow. I heard the coyotes.
