Self Help in Cow Print

The visions started when I handed in my final Great American Novel essay on American Pastoral at the end of my Freshman year. The humanities professors’ offices in Gilman Tower were built in a perfect square with one long corridor connecting the two sides, and I did laps around the floor trying to locate the correct room, manically thinking about what Philip Roth might have to say about my twelve-page essay.

A line of three other students all holding their stapled bits of paper revealed Professor Marxin’s office, and in my mind my wrists opened up like a shot-gunned beer.

During that finals period, my former best friend and roommate grew to hate me because I kept the hours of two to seven am. One night at five am, snuggling my laptop, I wondered if I’d actually died when I’d envisioned my wrists bleeding in Gilman Tower and if this was an eternal time loop. I made it to an end-of-year ‘Dinosaurs and Sluts’ fraternity party, to wish my fellow rising sophomores a good summer, shaking from the Ritalin I’d purchased to get me through two-and-half hours of slide identification, covering 25,000 years of Western Art History. Then I saw myself fall, from too many pills, like timber onto the sticky fraternity floor.

I needed to go home. I imagined myself wrinkling like a prune in a lavender scented bath, sure that the visions would stop once I got out of Baltimore and could once again sleep in my bed on Winston Road.

My father had worked for most of my life as a Middle School English teacher at the all-girls private school I’d attended for twelve years, until a year ago when he sold his first book, The Last Cannoli, about his Italian grandparents’ first year in New York. He now worked at home as a writer. In my first two days back, I’d catch glimpses of him collaging fuzzy printed images of Ohio, inspiration for his next book.

My mother worked at a dance studio as a movement therapist for kids from inner city Philadelphia. She commented that college had altered my hip rotation and tried to engage me in some high kicks.

“It really helps me every time a tuition bill arrives from that expensive university of yours,” she said. I had tried to ignore her, but she would not let the subject of my body alignment go. “High kicks are good enough for Asia to express how it feels to have a junkie as a mother, but not for Miss Julia’s stressful undergraduate exams?”

I high kicked so hard that I whacked the table. A bowl of spinach fell and smashed to the ground, and I had to ice my knee.

Over a dinner of chicken and pasta, but no spinach, my father shook two identical images of yellow suburban houses with white picket fences at me. “Which image looks more like a setting for a murder-suicide?” he asked.

A bullet exploded my brains.

“I’m having visions of killing myself.”

My mother wanted to send me to an arts therapist in West Philadelphia, but my father insisted that I go to a Jungian with an impressive reputation. Linda Horthorne saw patients in the library of her large suburban house on the Main Line, separated from our neighborhood in Chestnut Hill by the city and a river. The room was stocked full of hefty psychological books and tribal art. I found the box of tissues on the side table next to my armchair unnerving. It tried to make crying in front of a lady who read books like The Secret Life of Drawing natural, like its sister tissue box at a fertility clinic.

Our first meeting was a trial to see if Linda would take me on as a patient. The shame of getting rejected by my psychologist was almost unimaginable. The conversation began when I was ready, and motivated by this anxiety, I dove right into the visions.

“Do you ever see yourself committing the act of suicide?” she asked.

I never saw myself positioning the rope, sliding the noose around my neck, and kicking off from the chair beneath me, but wasn’t it enough that I envisioned myself dangling above my parents’ dining room table?

I left with an invitation to return for another two-hundred-dollar session. On the way back to Chestnut Hill, I pulled in to a mini mall to buy a four-dollar carrot and apple juice from a juice bar called Juicy Perks. I discovered that it had closed and been replaced by an ice cream store, Mooish Scoops.

“Do I want ice cream?” I asked myself. “Does it fucking matter?” I responded in a much louder voice.

I looked inside Mooish Scoops. It was sterile, like a hospital, and had bright lights and large windows to showcase that no one was in the store with the cow-print walls, besides the two boys who were staring absently at the glass window in front of them like it was a television set. I noticed a ‘Help Wanted’ sign.

The door announced me as I walked onto the premises.

“How can I help you?” a pimply teenager asked me.

“Hi, yes, I’m Julia. I was driving here for a carrot and orange juice when I noticed that you’re hiring.” The one with better skin approached the counter bearing a manager’s badge.

“Do you have any experience working at an ice cream establishment?” he asked me, his face not breaking to show if he was joking or not.

“No, but I go to Johns Hopkins.” I was, for the first time in a long while, convinced that this actually meant something. I deserved not to be rejected from Mooish Scoops for the sole reason that they’d probably have heard of my university.

“Whatever. I’m Sky. Fill these out.”

The trio of adults who knew my personal problems congratulated me for getting a job. My initial motivation for working was to help pay for Linda, but I only kind of wanted to contribute, and sort of wanted to keep the money for myself, so I told only my father how much Linda cost.

He nodded and said, “It’s just not an option for you not to get the best help.”

I was sitting in the spare chair in the corner of his small office filled with signed copies of The Last Cannoli. I asked how his day was going.

“Great. I started a new novel. It’s about a ship in Norway for retired people.”

“What about the murder-suicide novel?”

“Yes, I was having trouble working on that today. I might give it a rest.” He’d been working on it for over a year.

The room filled with water. I was drowning.

I found my first days of work at the ice cream store shockingly hard. My wrists had not yet built up the stamina to get a full scoop in one go, so it would take me twenty little scoops for the smallest cup. The Mooish Scoops customers could choose from a variety of additional fillings, from chocolate chips to whole brownies, that we would beat into the ice cream as if we were a band of bongo players. Unable to get anything larger than an M & M (the normal kind, not the pretzel ones) to blend with the ice cream, I handed over a chunk of cookie dough, surrounded by mushed vanilla, to disappointed customers.

After three days of work, Sky and Aaron invited me to smoke pot with them before the shop opened. We then all stared at the wide window with the SUVs coming and going like it was a television show. Both boys went to the same public high school but did not hang out together, because Sky was a stoner and Aaron a video gamer.

“Why don’t you just smoke pot and then play video games?” I asked one morning.

“The world doesn’t work that way,” Aaron said to me.

My eyes followed a woman trying to coerce a stubborn Yorkie across the parking lot to Bow Wow Meow. Sometimes all three of us would be so captivated by the window that we wouldn’t notice a customer.

“Excuse me, Julia Dolfini. Can I have a medium mint chocolate chip ice cream with graham crackers, peanut butter and pretzels?” The person who asked this looked like Terrence McNervin from the all boys’ school in Chestnut Hill, but I couldn’t be sure if he was real or not. Terrance had been on the track team, and I used to watch him lead his topless herd on after school runs by my house during the spring semesters.

I tried to bring myself back to life, but there were weights on my eyes. “Shh-ur,” I managed to say. “How’s Yale?”

“Oh you know, we’re a quarter way through the best four years of our lives. Did you go to GW?”

“She goes to John Hopkins,” Sky cut in. He handed Terrence his ice cream, because it turned out, I was just hitting granola into strawberry sorbet.

“Johnsssss,” I corrected.

“Right. You look cute in cow print,” Terrence said and mock dipped into his seemingly empty wallet.

“It’s on the house.” I said, and he smiled and left.

“As your manager, I have to tell you that you can’t just give free ice cream to your friends,” Sky said. He took a spoon that he’d just used to eat from the butterscotch tub and double dipped into the coffee.

We all watched Terrence get into his Lexus and pull away.

My head was in the freezer with a plastic bag over it.

My mother saw Linda’s bills and did such a dramatic high kick that she had to ice her buttocks.

“I’m a therapist, I’ll treat you,” she said.

My father tried to defend the continued sessions with Linda, but looking at the psychologist’s bills left even him speechless. I shrugged it off. I was not totally convinced she was helping me either. I’d had this vivid dream the previous week of my mother sitting with me at the MSE Library at Hopkins proclaiming that I must read The Great Gatsby. When I’d told Linda, she became jumpy and overexcited, telling me that I could not ignore “the words of the Great Mater.” I’d read The Great Gatsby more than once, and didn’t know what I could learn about myself from the shallow splendor of the roaring 1920s and a failed love story. However, there was no way that I was going to let my mother make me act out my visions through pointing my toes.

“It’s just like when she was little and had to carry around a snack and a bottle of water in case she got thirsty or hungry, and then it evolved into an extra change of clothes in case she had an accident,” my mother said clutching the bill in her fist. “Now she’s getting paranoid that she might be suicidal. Well, throwing away untouched peanut butter and jelly sandwiches was one thing, but two-hundred-dollar sessions is quite another.”

I got up to leave the room, thinking of the satisfying slam that my bedroom door would make. I rose with such force that my two legs scissored in the air and I slipped to land butt first on the floor. We both sat on packs of ice not speaking to each other, while Curb Your Enthusiasm re-runs played on the TV.

Sky, Aaron and I got high before closing Mooish Scoops and conducted a blindfold, taste-testing competition. I could not tell the difference between chocolate and blue raspberry, while Aaron could not differentiate a snicker doodle cookie from strawberry ice cream. So Sky inevitably won, and we carved his name into one of the black blobs making up the cow print walls.

To get back to Winston Road, I had to take Lincoln Drive, which curved around the Wissahicken River. It was much more fun driving high than sober, when I’d give myself shooting pains up the arm from clasping the wheel so tightly. Driving while high made me feel like I was an animated character in the Mario Kart game, and the wheel was light and smooth in my hands, like a massive marble. The road in front of me ribboned and I laughed, but my laughter turned into sobs as a black shape decided to block the road. My car bounced off the shape, off the road and on the way down to the crash, I thought about the Medieval Manuscript course that I’d enrolled in for next year and that maybe those monks knew something I didn’t yet understand. The car collapsed onto my body and I became a bloody corpse. Soon I would be only a pretty picture on a poster, a Johns Hopkins rising sophomore with a smile to warn others of the perils of driving under-the-influence.

Then my eyes popped open and my hands went wild. My fingers hit the steering wheel, my knuckles knocked against the cold window. I was still in my car in the parking lot of Mooish Scoops, my iPhone was playing GroupLove, and I was alive. I started hitting my body to make sure it was not mangled on the side of the road.

It was 9pm on a Sunday. The Starbucks, the photo store, Trader Joe’s and Bow Wow Meow were all closed. At Ming Wah, the favorite Bar and Bat Mitzvah venue, families were leaving with brown bags of Chinese leftovers, heading towards their SUVs.

I chugged some water from an old Evian bottle retrieved from the bottom of the passenger’s seat and clutched the wheel, which now felt hard and sturdy, and I asked myself, “Do I want General Tso’s chicken?”