Big Swiss

by Jen Beagin

Teutonic stoicism made the people around her seem like emotional libertines or, to use a more psychiatric term, total fucking basket cases.

She had trouble being in her body in general, which was why she liked to be roughed up by the elements and was always either sunburned, windblown, or damp from the rain.

“Your aura is giving me a head injury,” Greta would’ve said, had they been in the same room. “I’m clinging to the side of the barge, bleeding from the scalp.”

The pharmacy was hot, bright, and stagelike, and Greta found herself exaggerating her body language and facial expressions, as if acting in a silent film.

It wasn’t a great look, but she felt the need to be held. Squeezed.

And Greta? Unflappable, as always, so long as her socks were tight, tight, tight.

So, Greta had taken another stab at therapy. After hearing her whole story, which had taken ten weeks to tell, the shrink diagnosed her with emotional detachment disorder, which seemed like a stretch to Greta, who preferred to think of it as “poise” on a bad day, “grace” on a good one, and, when she was feeling full of herself, “serenity.”

So, suppose someone has been gang-raped at gunpoint and can’t seem to pull themselves together, stop drinking, return to work, or find meaning in their lives, would you tell them to just “get over themselves”? FEW: Well, there is a hierarchy, isn’t there? OM: I don’t think so. FEW: If you didn’t think there was, you wouldn’t have used that example. You would have said, “Suppose someone has been molested by a neighbor” or “neglected by their mother” or “bullied all their lives.” But there is a hierarchy. Trauma people don’t like to hear that. To them, all trauma matters.

It feels like a chore, but I also feel better afterward. It’s sort of like walking the dog and drinking wheatgrass at the same time.

They didn’t have Lyme disease in California, so when Greta first started transcribing for Om, she’d assumed everyone was talking about limes. Were these limes from outer space?

In the recent past, if Greta didn’t excuse herself right around now, Sabine would talk both of Greta’s arms off, and then both of her legs, until Greta was twitching on the floor like one of the bees.

“It’s gong, honey, not dong,” a phrase Greta now repeated to herself at random.

Anyone could see that Greta was not a horse person. Her hair wasn’t long enough and neither were her teeth, and as a child, she hadn’t been mistreated by other children.

Yes, people age horribly. They suffer strokes. Their bodies and brains fall apart. But the male ego? Firmly intact until the bitter end.

Named after a portrait of a blond French woman by Picasso, the restaurant did not serve French, or even Spanish, food, but rather rustic Italian.

It was family owned, which was nice, but the family was Indian. Until Greta came along, spaghetti was served by an exhausted woman wearing a sari. If you poked your head in the kitchen, you saw half a dozen Indian dudes in dhotis. But the family had lived in Rome for many years, and the food was authentic and delicious, and the restaurant, though tucked away in a strip mall surrounded by rehab centers, had a loyal, if mostly alcoholic, following. In fact, most of their customers were either on their way to one of these facilities or just getting out.

Unfortunately, her real self was horny, easily enraged, and no longer interested in making money.

“It’s all good,” one of the more vapid verbal tics of Californians at the time.

She could only ever say, “Well, that’s one good thing, I guess.”

Instead of saying “Right behind you,” he always sang out, “Coming inside you!”

Greta admitted that her mother had been an addict, too. Her drug of choice: terrible news. Nothing gave her mother more pleasure than hearing about the worst thing that ever happened to you, preferably in exhaustive detail, the more visually disturbing the better. The only metric she used to judge someone’s worth: had they suffered enough?

wanted to travel so much, he said it was because he’d been in prison for many years, and so he’d missed out on a few things. Like Europe. And then, to my disbelief, he actually said he wanted to “see the Mona Lisa.” OM: A much bigger red flag. FEW: Right? I honestly couldn’t think of anything lamer. OM: I meant prison. Did you believe him?

Greta considered her own behavior around red flags. Her habit was not to ignore them so much as to ingest them, a somewhat laborious mental production that involved placing them in a stockpot with butter, herbs, and mirepoix; cooking over low heat without browning; adding red meat, additional red flags, a jug of red wine; and voilà, four hours at a lazy simmer later, an extremely rich red-flag stew that she forked into her mouth every day like a fucking moron, sometimes for years on end.

Truth-telling—a bizarre choice.

Nicole finally picked up the toy but waited too long to throw it. Piñon snatched it out of her hands and did his whirling dervish routine while making a murderous noise at the back of his throat. Then he threw the toy against the wall and left the room.

If I had that incessant, insatiable impulse to thrive that I see in others, I would move out immediately, or at least find a way to fill the cracks in the walls so that I don’t see my breath at night. Instead, I sleep with a hair dryer.

For whatever reason, I wish it were either all brown or all white, not both. It’s like a saddle shoe. OM: You’re familiar with the term “body shaming”? FEW: Sorry. It’s like a beautiful, well-oiled saddle shoe.

He had what Greta called trans-breed dysmorphia of the soul and believed himself to be a young wolf trapped in the body of a terrier with worn-down teeth.

A lifelong romance with poverty. Meow, kitty.

You’re probably aware of this, but you really turn heads when you enter a room. I bet you could turn heads of lettuce.

“Why do you hate nature so much?” Big Swiss asked. “Everything seems so overdetermined,”

“Most of the trees in this park are male,” Big Swiss said, ignoring her. “Which means they don’t have seeds or pods. They have pollen, though, which they spew everywhere indiscriminately.” “I knew I smelled semen,” Greta said.

I’d like to discourage you from becoming overly focused on her behavior. It’s very easy to fall into the habit of keeping the focus on her misconduct rather than yours, and to blame her for your unhappiness, because she’s acting out her emotions.

The more productive thing would be to look at your own part in this, or why you’ve manifested this person in your life,

If it feels love/hate, then it’s not love. It’s probably not hate, either. FEW: What is it? OM: Fear. FEW: I’m not afraid of her. OM: You fear engulfment. She fears abandonment. It’s not love/hate so much as push/pull, and it’s very hard to stop once the cycle starts.

“I’m not a con artist. Calm down. What I did was weirder, yes, but not worse. We’re both guilty.

She sat at a table and waited for it to kick in—the sweats, the shakes, hopefully not the shits—and

What you and Luke have is confidence, that’s all, along with the expectation that things will go your way, because they probably will, because they already have.”

I could never truly celebrate anything, because I didn’t want to arouse her envy or paranoia.