Page 80 of Guy's Girl
She types something else into the translator. When the Hungarian result appears, she shows the screen to him:Van több képed róla? Do you have more pictures of him?
Imre nods, smiling. He sets the album aside, then stands up from the couch and walks across the room. Instead of stopping at the bookshelf, he walks further to a wooden chest in the corner. He cracks open its lid. Ginny had assumed the chest was decorative, filled, perhaps, with more quilts and throws.
Instead, when she peers over Imre’s shoulder, she spots a mess of books, papers, cassette tapes, even a pair of glasses. Ginny wonders if they’re the same glasses in the photograph she just saw. But before she can get a closer look, Imre shuts the chest and returns to the couch, this time bearing a smaller photo album.
This album only holds photos from before Adrian was born. First comes a young version of hisapa, high school age or so. He has a girl on his arm, slight, with dark hair and red lipstick. Adrian’s mother. Ginny recognizes her from the photograph on Beatrix’s dresser. Imre flips through the photographs until he finds the one he’s looking for—Adrian’s mother and father standing outside a church.
Ginny takes out her phone to ask another question, but a voice surprises her from behind.
“What’s going on?”
Ginny and Imre jump. Behind them is Adrian, who had approached so silently that neither of them heard. Her face warms. She wants to reach down, to shut the album and pretend she sawnothing. With Adrian standing there, face unreadable, she feels as if she’s done something deeply wrong.
Adrian’s eyes flit over the album spread out on Imre’s lap. His gaze lingers on the photograph of his parents getting married. In it, his mother and father stand outside a grey cathedral, his mother’s bouquet waving in the air. Adrian holds out a hand and says something to Imre in Hungarian. Imre passes him the album.
Adrian leafs through the album with a blank expression. He flips so quickly that he doesn’t seem to take in the photographs at all. He asks his grandfather another question. Imre responds. Adrian nods. Then he passes back the album, turns around, and walks away.
Imre and Ginny look at each other. She’s sure he can tell from her expression that she feels guilty, and he just shakes his head. She opens her phone and googles a translation:
What did he ask you?
Imre holds out his hand. She passes him the phone. He types in a few words, then shows Ginny the English translation:He wanted to know why I had never shown him those photographs before.
Ginny tilts her head, hoping he will understand her question:And why didn’t you?
Imre types in another sentence, then turns the phone around to face her again:
Because he never asked.
***
One morning, during their walk, Adrian asks Ginny a question.
“Did you mean it?” he asks as they round Bogdányi and head for the Danube. “What you said at lunch our first day?”
“Which lunch? The one on Váci Street?”
He nods. “You said that trauma is something that happens when you experience something but push down any emotion around it.”
She isn’t sure what she expected him to say, but it wasn’t that.
She thinks about it for a little, then says, “It’s something I read about in an article a few years ago. A piece inPsychology Todayabout processing emotions.” She looks out at the milky waves of the Danube. “Say you endure something sad, like the death of a loved one, but instead of letting yourself feel sadness, your body just shuts down. You feel nothing. Or maybe you actively run from the grief. You use booze or drugs or sex, or you get really into working out, or whatever—I don’t know. Whatever it takes to turn it off.
“In the moment, you aren’t processing your emotions. You’re avoiding them. But that doesn’t mean they go away. They’re always there, just below the surface. Watching. Waiting.” While she talks, she fiddles absentmindedly with the strap of her tank top. When she thinks about it, it’s strange that she can wear tank tops in front of him at all, terrified as she is about the expansion of her body. “They find you in moments of silence or stillness, flashes of memory or tears you can’t explain. And the process repeats itself, over and over, until you finally let yourself feel.” She lets her hand fall to her thigh. “That’s trauma.”
“And that’s why trauma can come from anywhere,” Adrian says. “Not just extreme circumstances, like war.”
“Right.”
“Has that ever... I mean, have you ever...?”
Her eyes travel up and over Adrian’s shoulder, to the ridge of buildings beyond. “Having anxiety is chronic trauma. That’s what the article said, anyway. Everything is bigger and more terrifying than it should be. Sometimes, it seems fucking impossible to live your life feeling all that, all the time, so...”
“So you repress,” Adrian says.
Several moments pass, then she continues: “Anorexia is acoping mechanism. I know that. Starving yourself—it keeps you from feeling anything. And I did that to myself for five years.Five years. But I don’t—” Her bottom lip wavers, then. “I don’t know what I was hiding from.”
Adrian says nothing.
