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bankruptcy, a place I know with pretty fair certainty that I am headed.
    Last night I clipped Safeway coupons. We are now going to save two dollars on Edna Valley Chardonnay.
    Michael announces that today he is not leaving the house, so he won’t have to spend another hundred dollars.
    I’m losing weight. My watch is loose; the face keeps slipping around so I can’t see the time. They say that happens when you get engaged, you dwindle. I feel uneasy. My soul may be contained in that extra pound. I could be pissing out my soul.
    People I haven’t seen in a while coo, as if I am a child who has completed a difficult task. It’s clear that I have gained status in the society, being both newly engaged and thinner. My former self feels slighted. Was I that bad off? I was happy most of the time, I think. I don’t remember. Yes I do. I was not so happy. But not
un
happy.
    A dirty voice in my head suggests that this may be some kind of elaborate practical joke. I’ll wake up alone in my old apartment, devils poking my thighs with pitchforks.
    • • •
    At four o’clock on Monday: Reuben. I sit down on the couch and say, “I don’t think I have anything to say today.”
    “That’s OK. I’ll wait,” he says.
    A minute goes by, then another. I become aware that I am paying for air. I try to conjure a worthy issue, not too big, not too small. Yet everything feels too complicated or embarrassing. Tomorrow is my father’s birthday, but I’m not going to bring that up.
    “I just don’t have anything to talk about, I guess.”
    “Those are always the best sessions,” he says. He settles back in his chair.
    Another minute goes by. I shred Kleenex. I arrange the shredded Kleenex. I am not going to crack.
    Then he says, “You ever heard of the gnostic gospels?”
    I don’t answer. I am thinking, Maybe he is too old to even be doing this.
    He quotes, “ ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will kill you.’ ”
    There is no question now that I dislike Reuben, that he is senile. But just to shut him down, I say, “It’s my father’s birthday tomorrow.”
    He says nothing, waiting for me to go on. I sigh.
    “That’s an awfully big sigh, Eve.”
    I hate him beyond words now. It comes on in a big red wave. I wait for it to pass. Fuck you, I think. Fuck you and your whole sad profession.
    A minute goes by. Finally, I say, “He was an alcoholic.”
    “Tell me about him,” says Reuben.
    I describe my father in a standardized speech, compressed into a few dozen words. Time, in therapy more thananywhere else, is money. Also, this way I don’t have to think about him while I am talking. Not thinking about my father is a skill, the speech is part of this. It’s the One-Minute Father.
    I try as always to be entertaining and informative, yet nonpartisan. A Presbyterian minister turned bartender. His near-fatal accident in a Volkswagen when I was five. How he discovered himself and left home in 1968, when I was nine. His work in the Peace Corps. His strict religious upbringing, his astute sense of humor. His time in jail for drunk driving. How he marched with Martin Luther King to D.C.; the dream he had to form his own progressive left-wing church. How he died with my stepmother, Leigh, on July 4, 1979, on a two-lane highway in Reno. How he wasn’t driving, how they had stopped for ribs just before.
    I wonder aloud to Reuben whether things would have been different if they’d had the half slab instead of the full slab. Baby back versus country style.
    Reuben is not visibly amused, not by this or even by the name of the church my father proposed: Reality Church. I found it among some notes in my father’s journal, the day my brother, Mark, and I went to the Filbert Street flat in San Francisco to clean out his belongings. He had also listed sermon topics.
    Reuben wants to know everything I removed from my father and Leigh’s flat.