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vacant disposition is like a blank movie screen.
    â€œWould you go back to him?” Mom asks. “If he told you he was sorry? If he came back saying he had changed?”
    I know the politically expedient answer. “No,” I say. “Not a chance.”
    â€œGood girl,” she says, scratching the dog round its collar. “That’s my smart girl. That’s very good.”

3
    During my earliest weeks at my folks’ house I try to journal in a wire-bound notebook. Its size: roughly that of a cigarette pack. Its cover: glum gray, the color of mental confusion. I begin this diary because people keep telling me how important it is to “emote,” “vent,” “write down my feelings,” and “get it all out.” There’s a lot of talk during this time about “healing.” Lots of prescriptions for “good mental health.”
    Try as I might to use the notebook for this purpose, I can’t seem to write more than lists of books I’m reading, snippets of letters that arrive in the mail, newspaper headlines, and occasional, free-floating quotations.
    In retrospect, I think the notebook’s undemonstrative nature owes something to animus. I’d written Smashed not because I was ambitious (I had the get-up-and-go of a sack of Yukon Gold potatoes) and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one’s own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I’d made a habit—and eventually a profession—of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotion are discouraged. Talk of “feelings” is implicitly banned on the basis that it makes people uncomfortable. Later, I’ll think I resented being advised, in self-help speak, by my loved ones to “journal” when all I wanted was someone—a friend, a relative, a Good Samaritan hotline—who might give me the permission to talk. I take it as an act of defiance that I didn’t emote into that gray book. But the little record constructed there does give a rough outline that helps me account, day by day, for the better part of two glassy-eyed weeks.
    On Saturday, July 28, Alyssa, a friend who is studying homeopathy, calls from Boulder to say she’s express-mailed me “emotional remedies.” Four bottles will arrive at my folks’ house in two days’ time. They will be labeled: “Natrum Muriaticum” (for grief), “Lachesis” (for jealousy), “Lycopodium” (for fear, particularly fear of failure), and “Staphysagria” (for suppressed rage). I should mix the bottles according to her printed instructions, ingest the remedy for whatever emotion seems to be overwhelming me, and never take the same potion two days in a row. The routine might make me feel worse in the beginning, Alyssa warns. But in time, the remedies will make my psyche fight the grief I’m feeling “the way my immune system would attack a cold.”
    Although I’ve studied Eastern philosophies like yoga and Buddhism, I’ve always thought of my interest in them as more academic than anything else. In real life, there’s a limit to my patience with anything that smacks of metaphysics. I’ve squirmed at the mention of “mind expansion” or “warm healing energy.” I’ve dismissed things like acupressure as quackery. I don’t like drum circles, public nudity, or strangers touching my feet.
    It’s a testimony to my hopelessness that I agree to try Alyssa’s remedies. I’m desperate to glom onto whatever relief homeopathy might bring me, even if it ends up being (as I suspect) a placebo effect. By nightfall, I’ve express ordered Homeopathy: An A to Z Home Handbook from an online bookstore. A few days later, I’m jotting down remedies I suspect I need. In my little gray diary I find brief descriptions of two I considered ordering:
    Sepia (Ink of the