Free We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

alone, some exercises in visualization or hypnosis—and our
     father would explode. Psychoanalysis was completely bogus, he would say, good only
     for literary theory. Maybe it was useful, when plotting books, to imagine that someone’s
     life could be shaped by a single early trauma, maybe even one inaccessible in memory.
     But where were the blind studies, the control groups? Where was the reproducible data?
    According to our father, the nomenclature of psychoanalysis had taken on a scientific
     patina only when it was translated into English Latinates. In the original German,
     it was refreshingly modest. (You must picture him shouting this. In the house I grew
     up in, it was perfectly ordinary for a tantrum to include words like
Latinates
,
nomenclature
, and
patina
.)
    Yet the counselor had been our father’s idea. Like so many other parents of troubled
     children, he’d felt the need to do
something
, and like so many other parents of troubled children, a counselor was the only something
     he could think of to do.
    For me, he engaged a babysitter, Melissa, a college student with owlish glasses and
     blue streaks zigzagging, like lightning, through her hair. The first week, I went
     to bed the minute she arrived and got up again only when she left. I was, let’s agree,
     a babysitter’s dream.
    It was a learned behavior. Once, when I was four, as a stratagem for shutting me up,
     a babysitter named Rachel had spooned several kernels of popcorn onto my tongue and
     told me they would pop if I only kept my mouth closed long enough. This seemed like
     an entirely desirable goal and I lasted as long as I could and took the failure hard
     until Lowell told me it never would have happened. That put me off babysitters entirely.
    As I got used to Melissa, I decided I liked her. This was a bit of luck. I’d concocted
     a plan that involved fixing my family with the only valuable thing I had to offer—my
     talking—and I couldn’t do it alone. I tried to explain to Melissa the games I was
     supposed to be playing for my father, the tests I was supposed to be taking, but she
     couldn’t or wouldn’t get it.
    We settled on a compromise. Every time she came, she would teach me a new word from
     the dictionary. The only rule was that it had to be a word so lonely, so dusty with
     neglect that she, too, hadn’t known it beforehand. I didn’t care what the words meant;
     that saved a lot of time and bother. In return, I had to not talk to her for an hour.
     She would set the oven timer to make sure, which generally resulted in me asking her
     every few minutes when the hour would be up. The things I had to say would collect
     in my chest until they were so crowded together I was ready to burst.
    “How was your day, Rosie?” Dad would ask when he came home from work and I’d tell
     him it was ebullient. Or limpid. Or dodecahedron. “That’s good to hear,” he’d say.
    None of this was meant to be informative. Obviously, it didn’t even need to cohere.
     Catachresis? Bonus points.
    I was merely trying to show him that I, at least, was continuing with our work. Whenever
     he was so disposed, he would find me, sleeves rolled up and hard at it.
    •   •   •
    O NE AFTERNOON, Grandma Donna came and forced our mother into an outing—coffee and a shopping trip.
     Summer had gone and autumn was headed toward its sell-by date. Melissa was supposed
     to be watching me but was watching television instead.
    Melissa was now an established part of the household and watched TV every afternoon,
     although daytime TV had never been allowed before, children being expected to make
     their fun up from scratch.
    Melissa had gotten hooked on a soap. It wasn’t the same soap as my grandparents’—there
     was no Karen, no Larry. Melissa’s soap was all about Ben and Amanda, Lucille and Alan.
     And if my grandparents’ soap had been regrettably sexed up, this one was an orgy.
     Melissa let me watch it with her because I