When You Meet the Buddha in the Road

Meredith is making Mom and Dad fight. Jenny and I watch from the couch. Dad is Mom and Mom is Dad. Meredith tells them to say what they hear when the other person says something when they're really fighting, so they can hear what they sound like to each other.

I don't want to be a father or a husband anymore, Mom-Dad says.

You're a narcissist and a rage-aholic and we don't need you in this family, Dad-Mom says.

Good, Meredith says. Good. Keep going.

Fine. I don't care if this is just my midlife crisis, Mom-Dad says. I don't want to be a part of this family.

Fine, Dad-Mom says. The only thing of any value you contribute to this family is a paycheck.

I don't love you anymore. You're fat.

You're pathetic. I can't even look at you. Get out.

Jenny pulls at a thread in the knee-hole in her jeans.

What I like is that I get to get out of school early. The third Friday every month Mom and Dad pick me up right at first recess and we go to the high school to pick up Jenny and we drive down here. It's a long drive. Jenny sits in the way back and listens to her Walkman. I sit in the middle seat and listen to the tapes Mom and Dad play in front. Mom likes Graceland and Dad likes the soundtrack from Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. They both like A Prairie Home Companion and Les Misérables. Not the musical, the book-on-tape. I say I like them too because they both like it, and I like it when everybody is just happy and quiet.

What I like is that we get to stay at a Hampton Inn and have the continental breakfast, which is really just donuts and coffee and juice but I like the way continental breakfast sounds. It impressed Heidi Schwinn when I said it to her, that we stay at a hotel and have a continental breakfast. What I like is that when it's my turn to pick, we get to have lunch at Red Lobster even though if I don't order off the kiddie menu, the difference comes out of my allowance. It's like a vacation, except for the two hours Friday night and the four hours Saturday morning we're here in Meredith's living room, which we're supposed to call her office when we're having our sessions in it.

I bite off hangnails and chew them. I think up questions. Like would I know my hangnails tasted like me if I hadn't bitten them off my own fingers? If I had just a pile of hangnails and didn't know where they came from?

I like Neil okay. Neil is Meredith's husband. They don't have the same last name. They both took each other's name, but they put them in the order they had them first, so she's Spencer-Foster and he's Foster-Spencer. They don't have any kids. Meredith says they made a conscious choice that didn't have anything at all to do with the vasectomy Neil had when he was married before. Meredith says that children aren't the be-all end-all and that it takes a lot of courage to find fulfillment in yourself.

If they did have a kid, I wonder which last name the kid would have first.

When Mom and Dad told us we were going to start coming here to see Meredith, I asked why. They knew Meredith from graduate school. They met each other in graduate school and they met Meredith there too and they all took the same classes and studied the same thing. So why did we need Meredith to fix us? What did Meredith know that they didn't know, squared? Dad said, physician, heal thyself, and Mom said, when you meet the Buddha...