HYSTERIA by Debbie Urbanksi
“I killed my husband,” the woman tells her therapist.
“What do you mean by that?” her therapist asks.
“You mean how?”
“What?”
The woman’s therapist is distracted because her pen has stopped working. It worked a moment before, when the therapist was writing the woman’s name, Rebecca D – , at the top of a new yellow legal pad. But when she tried to write the date, Thursday, October 12, on the line below, the pen tip pressed blankly into the paper.
“How would I kill him?”
“No, I didn’t mean that. Excuse me.” The therapist removes a different black pen from the box of pens kept in her top left desk drawer in case of an emergency. She closes the pen box and shuts the drawer.
“I had been wondering if my husband and I went hiking, and I pushed him over the edge of a waterfall, if anyone would know,” says Rebecca, who has been working with this particular therapist for the past four months. “We used to go hiking quite a bit, just the two of us. We would leave the children at home napping in the afternoon while we went on a hike through the gorge. It was not a long hike. My mother didn’t like that we did this. She said somebody could call the police and get the children taken from us. I asked my mother, are you going to call the police and have the children taken?”
“Did she?”
“What?”
“Did your mother call the police?”
“No. Or I wondered about poison briefly, though it seems like when poison is involved, the wife is always under suspicion. I wondered, does everyone who dies get an autopsy? Or are there certain deaths where they just don’t bother. Like if something supernatural or otherworldly is involved – would they just not bother. Because of the strangeness of the situation?”
“You’re married still,” the therapist points out. “So the husband you’re talking about now, Rebecca, the husband you said you killed, he must be a different husband than the man you’re married to.”
“It’s the same husband. It’s complicated.”
“Tell me how is it complicated.”
“He’s still here. He keeps insisting that he loves me.”
“Okay. But why did you say you killed him?”
“I didn’t technically kill him. A monster did.”
Rebecca smells like grapefruit from the citrus lotion she used after her hurried shower. Her hair is damp and appears to be freshly combed. She makes a point to shower before these weekly therapy appointments, and she wears a clean outfit that she pulled from the laundry basket at the top of the basement stairs.
“But you said you killed him,” the therapist replies.
“Did I? I misspoke. Unless I’m the monster.”
“Are you the monster, Rebecca?”
“I really don’t think I’m the monster here.”
“Is there a monster?”
“It would help to explain the violence, I think.”
“Is this a real story you’re telling me?”
“It certainly felt real when it happened.” Rebecca pulls her fingers through the ends of her damp hair. She does this repeatedly, searching for a knot or tangle. There are no knots or tangles in her hair. “Do you believe in monsters?”
The therapist tilts her head in one direction. “What do you think? Do you think I believe in monsters? Do you think I see any monsters hiding inside the wardrobe over there or underneath the rug?”
The therapist is sitting in a chair behind her desk. The chair is not on casters but it does tilt depending on how the therapist shifts her weight. At the moment the therapist’s chair is tilted backwards. Rebecca is sitting in an armchair facing the therapist’s desk. A pillow has been shoved into the corner of Rebecca’s chair to hide a stain in the upholstery. There are other pillows lying on top of a leather recliner and along a couch at the far end of the room.
“Actually, what I believe or don’t believe isn’t important here,” says the therapist. “Do you believe in monsters?”
“I’m not a child,” says Rebecca flatly. She removes a tissue from the box set at the edge of the desk. Her movement shifts the pillow out of place. It tumbles onto the rug. Neither woman picks the pillow up. The exposed stain on Rebecca’s chair is shadowy and scrubbed.
The therapist records a line of private observation.
“How did the exercises go last week?” the therapist asks.
“What exercises?” says Rebecca.
“The exercises I gave you to do in bed with your husband.”
“I’m getting really tired of your questions,” says Rebecca.
The therapist nods. Behind her desk is a floating shelf. On top of the shelf are two glass jars filled with clean white shells. A lid is screwed tightly onto each of the jars. Beside the jars is a silver vase that presents a reflection of the room.
The room reflected by the vase is not the same room that Rebecca or the therapist sees.
Are there two rooms? Three? Are all these rooms similarly distorted?
Rebecca twists her wedding ring around and around her finger. The ring has shrunk over the years. It is too narrow now to slide over her swollen red knuckles.
“I’m wondering if this story you’re telling me about your husband,” says the therapist, “if it’s your way of saying, I’m thinking more seriously about a divorce. Have you been thinking more about a divorce, Rebecca?”
Rebecca tears at the perimeter of the tissue she is holding. Beginning at the farthest corner, she makes a series of tiny methodical slits. “I don’t have a job. I don’t have any job-like skills. I take care of my kids. I take them to the park and to the library. It’s my husband who has the MBA. He’s the one being headhunted. I watched the children while he went away to school, to the city, every other week.”
“You can always get a job,” says the therapist.
“What kind of job?” asks Rebecca.
“Certainly you can take care of other people’s children.”
“I don’t like other children,” says Rebecca.
“Then you can get a different type of job. You can put homemaker right at the top of your resume. Your experience caring for your family counts, Rebecca.”
Rebecca says, “I don’t have a resume. I don’t have somewhere to put my children. Look, I don’t think the house is even in my name. I don’t know. I didn’t care about these things. Or the credit cards. Or the bank account.” She rips the tissue into two parts then continues ripping. Ragged white pieces are falling into her lap. She gathers the pieces into her hand. It looks as if she is cradling a crushed white bird. She says, “This is around the time when the monster enters the story.”
“Your monster that is like a metaphor for divorce.”
“The monster isn’t a metaphor.”
“I actually thought about killing myself more than I thought about divorce,” says Rebecca.
The therapist places both of her hands beneath the desk. Rebecca cannot see what the therapist’s hands are doing. “We’ve talked a lot about that here. Rebecca, remind me, why shouldn’t you kill yourself?”
“There was never a good time. I didn’t want either of my children to find me. I wanted my husband to find me. I was going to write him a note and pin it to my shirt with his name written on the outside of the note, so he would have to read it. Enjoy the rest of your life, you fucker. I hope you find your perfect wife and she’ll fuck your brains out. The note would say something like that. But my husband was often traveling. Or the kids had a birthday, or a small recital. I didn’t want to ruin their birthday or their recital.”
Rebecca scatters what’s left of the tissue onto the rug. The scattering is an intentional movement, a shifting of the arm, a release of the fingers. The therapist acts as if she can’t notice the white fragments fluttering onto the floor.
“This was the husband who was obsessed with penetrating my body,” adds Rebecca.
“Why are you speaking about your husband in the past tense?” asks the therapist.
“He is obsessed,” says Rebecca. “He will be obsessed.”
“Do you love him?”
“You mean, do I love somebody who rapes me once a week, or more frequently, if he is in town more frequently?”
“You consider what the two of you do in bed together to be rape.”
”He will kick me out of the house if I do not allow him to penetrate me.”
“Does he say he loves you, Rebecca?”
“He says he loves me when he’s raping me.”
“I wonder, can we try substituting certain words here, as an experiment? He says he loves you when he’s having sex with you – when he’s making love to you – when you are having intercourse with each other. When he is exercising his conjugal rights, if we wish to be old fashioned about it. The language you choose is important here.”
The window next to the therapist’s desk overlooks a parking lot. Usually the window is cracked open to allow a breeze. Today the window is not open, as the lot was repaved the previous afternoon, and the fresh asphalt continues to stink of tar. There are no fans in the room. Rebecca has begun to sweat under her arms and through the fabric of her pretty yellow blouse.
“The language is not what’s important here,” Rebecca says.
“Tell me about what’s important,” says the therapist.
“I’ve already told you.”
It is halfway through the fifty-minute session.
Outside, a man walks the parking lot, pushing a burdensome machine that leaves behind a series of shining yellow lines.
The therapist says, “Many people find penetration pleasurable. I would venture to say most people enjoy it, outside of those with medical conditions. Is penetration painful for you, Rebecca? Do you think you have a medical condition?”
“I find it strange what people will allow inside of them,” says Rebecca.” I don’t want my husband inside of me.”
“Yet – correct me if I’m wrong – you’ve had two children.”
Rebecca pushes the thumbnail of her right hand into the flesh of her left thumb. She is leaving behind a stack of indeterminate marks. She says, “And both of my children were conceived through acts of enormous and bodily love.”
“Are you telling me the opposite of what you think is true?”
“I am.”
“Why are you doing that?”
“I’m saying what everybody wants to hear.”
“I want to hear the truth,” says the therapist.
“What is the truth?” asks the therapist.
“I suppose you think if you don’t believe in something,” says Rebecca, “if you don’t believe something is possible, then it’s not real.”
“No,” corrects the therapist. “If something isn’t real, then it was never there.”
She looks up at Rebecca and smiles.
“Do you think everybody should hate intercourse and penetration because you do?”
“No,” answers Rebecca.
“Do you think anyone who enjoys penetration should be punished physically?”
“No!”
“Men in particular?”
“Stop it.”
The therapist leans over her desk as if trying to reach the other woman. “Do you think you should be put in charge of punishment for people who enjoy penetration, people like your husband?”
The therapist’s office is never silent, not even when both women cease talking. There is the white noise machine plugged into the outlet nearest the door, a square speaker that emits varying pitches of static. There are the sounds from the waiting room: the next client, sick and coughing, and a child. There is the drone of traffic. A motor accelerates too quickly. There is a hissing from the parking lot.
Rebecca says, “I get that you’re trying to make a point.”
“What is my point, Rebecca?” asks the therapist.
“You think my husband can’t have a monster in him.”
The therapist sits back in her chair and rubs her finger across her lips, which are glossy from a recent coating of Aquaphor. “Might it be unfair,” she asks, “to expect your husband to stay in a marriage without intercourse?”
“There are other things we can do in bed together. There are other people he can have sex with,” says Rebecca.
“Of course. I am about ready for my afternoon chocolate,” says the therapist, reaching into the candy bowl positioned in the center of her desk. ”Please, take one, if you’d like.” Rebecca does not choose to take a piece of chocolate.
“Do you think your husband loves you?” the therapist asks, carefully separating the foil from the chocolate.
“Why don’t you ask him that?” says Rebecca.
“Because he isn’t here,” says the therapist. She eats the chocolate in a single bite, which is not how anybody is supposed to eat a piece of chocolate.
“Whatever you say,” says Rebecca.
“Rebecca, what if it isn’t rape?” suggests the therapist.
“It sure feels like rape,” says Rebecca.
“Must everything that feels like rape be a form of rape?” says the therapist.
“I don’t know,” says Rebecca.
“Do you believe your husband thought he was raping you?”
“No.”
“Have you been raped by other men?”
“No.”
“Okay. What about your hormone levels – have you gotten your levels checked, like we discussed?”
“No.”
“Are you using the relaxation techniques we went over? The visualization of your husband’s love? His love coming out of his chest and enveloping you with a kind of light? I think those were your words.”
“I never said that. What I said was, what if a person wished for a monster to come, and it came – are they responsible for what that monster did?”
“You wished for your husband to be attacked by something,” says the therapist.
“I wished for him to suffer. And what if, during the attack, my husband died, but he didn’t leave? He didn’t die enough?”
“These seem like separate problems to me,” says the therapist. “The first problem, Rebecca, is about responsibility. The second is about whether to remain in your marriage.”
“I’m wondering, what if the monster I wished for entered my husband, and then it stayed?”
“It’s easy in a conversation to lose track of what’s important,” says the therapist. “One thing that’s important here is your children. I’m wondering how the children are handling all this.”
“They’re confused,” says Rebecca. “They’re constantly wondering about the sounds.”
“What sounds?”
“The sounds coming out of our bedroom after dark.”
“What do you tell them about the sounds?”
“I tell them their father is a monster now, and that is how he sounds when he is mating, and that is how a monster makes me sound.”
“It’s tempting, isn’t it, to imagine a monster inside of your husband? That must help explain how his behavior feels to you. It allows you to separate the part of your husband that you love from the part you don’t love.”
“I’m not imagining anything,” says Rebecca.
The therapist glances to her right, to the white round clock hanging upon the wall.
There are seven minutes before the session will end.
“You used the word violence earlier,” says the therapist.
“What should I do?” asks Rebecca, distracted by a sharp bit of light. The light is flashing indiscriminately onto the wardrobe in the corner, whose doors Rebecca has never seen open. She glances around the room but cannot locate the light’s source.
“I want to know about the violence.”
“What do you want to know about it?” says Rebecca.
“I want to hear what it looks like to you,” says the therapist.
“I tried cutting myself,” says Rebecca. “I didn’t get very far. There was some blood.”
“You did that a long time ago,” says the therapist.
“My husband didn’t mind the blood. Oh, he said he did. He moaned, ‘What are you doing to yourself?’ But he didn’t mind. He wrapped my leg in the towels we reserve for guests and carried me into our bedroom. Sometimes he likes to act as if he isn’t a monster. Or he’ll act as if I’m the monster in our marriage.”
“Do you think you’re a monster?” asks the therapist.
“You already asked me that. The cutting was a test. I wanted to see if my pain would bother him. He carried me to our bed and removed my clothes. ‘I know you’re scared,’ he said to me so kindly.”
“What were you scared of when he began to remove your clothes?” asks the therapist.
“He sounds so different when he finally is sleeping. He sounds like something is inside of his chest and it is trying to get out.”
“What do you think will happen if that something gets out?” says the therapist.
“I need to know how you tell for sure where a monster has gone and when a monster has entered.”
“You’re worried that whatever is inside your husband might get inside of you,” says the therapist.
“How would you know for sure?”
“How do you think you would know?”
“I’m asking you.”
“I would think there’d be signs. Wouldn’t you?”
“What kind of signs?”
“Oh, the usual. We need to wrap things up for today,” says the therapist.
“Okay,” says Rebecca, who can no longer find the distracting light flickering onto the wardrobe, though she looks for it.
She pulls her wallet from her purse. She removes her credit card from her wallet and hands the card to the therapist, who slides it through an appendage she has attached to her phone.
“You’re a hard worker,” says the therapist. “I admire how you keep showing up. You keep wanting to work through this.”
“See you next week,” says Rebecca.
She leaves the room. She passes by a man hushing his son and she leaves the waiting room. She walks down the carpeted hallway then leaves the hallway to walk down the stairs. She leaves the office building and walks across the parking lot. The therapist stands beside the window of her office and watches Rebecca leave. The soles of Rebecca’s loafers stick lightly to the new asphalt. The therapist pulls the blinds and turns away from the window. Someone will need to pick the pillow up from the floor and gather the ruined tissue. The lot was closed off when Rebecca arrived so she had parked in the street beside some scattered sawdust and a raw stump. Her car is facing west; this is not the direction of home. She kicks the back tire of her sedan. She kicks the tire again, harder this time, with increased force. She kicks the tire again. She kicks it again.
Debbie Urbanski’s stories have appeared in The New England Review, The Sun, The Massachusetts Review, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Southern Review.