Grievance Line
Welcome to Grievance Line. Thank you for signing up for our services in your time of change, loss, and/or growth. We are committed to excellence and precision in determining the nature and/or validity of your personal grievances. Below you will find the analysis of your submission pertaining to Susan Bloom. We have sorted it into the following categories: Valid, Valid - Qualified, Invalid, or Indeterminate, and paired them with a brief analysis.
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Grievance 1: Valid
When you were children in London, Susan and you would wake up in the morning together before the heat got oppressive. You would go out onto the balcony and draw pictures on the lower part of the wall with crayons. Eventually, your father noticed, but until then—for one blissful summer—you did this every day. Each morning, she drew geometrical figures—triangles and squares and perfect cubes. You always drew cats. One day you noticed that she had attempted a feline portrayal, though—unlike your fully whiskered and lusciously flowing fur—it was merely a combination of circles and triangles. When confronted, she denied that she got the idea from you. We have ranked this grievance as [Valid]. Cats were your thing.
Grievance 2: Indeterminate
This grievance falls under the category of [Perceived Abandonment] when Susan and Cool Girl Dana Cosgrove decided to go to the beach after school without you. Your anger stems from being excluded, and the hot embarrassment of being left alone on the school steps with Sister Abbey, eating a butter and potato chip sandwich, waiting for a ride home. You had just moved to Australia, and you felt that Susan was making friends like Cool Girl Dana more quickly than you, whose main friend was Sister Abbey from the Art department.
We have concluded that your grievance is [Indeterminate]. Adolescents are 80% more likely to act selfishly, so we must leave a wide berth for their mistreatment under the category of [Acceptable Behavior]. There are many worse things Susan could have done: Called you fat in front of her friends. Let you flounder over Chemistry homework instead of helping you every evening. Told your father what you said about hating him for making you move again.
Grievance 3: Invalid
Just because Susan was able to fully evolve to the bird of paradise pose in Fabulous Mrs. Jansson's Yoga class in Hawaii, where you had moved for high school, after Australia, does not meet our qualifications for [Valid Grievance]. The fact that Mrs. Jansson called Susan an “elegant crane” while she said she could tell you ate too much white bread “from the way your legs looked” was not at all the fault of Susan. We have categorized this as a [Misdirected Grievance].
Grievance 4: Invalid
On this account, we have concluded [Invalid]. By our analytics, no one is required to disclose the fact that she lost her virginity to Cool Girl Dana Cosgrove's chauffeur after Dana's 17th birthday party on the sticky leather backseat of Dana’s father’s BMW. Not even if there is a precedent for divulging, as you call it, “vital information,” with a certain person. Not even if you have promised to “grow old together” and to “never ever keep secrets from” said person. Not even a sister.
What's more, she did tell you, eventually. According to our data, the four-month period between losing her virginity and leaving her diary entry open on your desk for you to read is a negligible time lapse in comparison to most filial confidences.
Grievance 5: Valid
She should have said goodbye after graduating, before leaving for California for college, and leaving you alone for your senior year. Four years later, after you followed her to California, she should have told you she was leaving Berkeley for Pennsylvania, leaving Art History for Business Management, leaving your shared apartment for a penthouse with Hunky Pre-Med Jonah Sandburg.
The following Grievances [6-7] were placed in the Betrayal Category:
Grievance 6: Valid - Qualified
We have categorized the art residency debacle of 1992 as a [Minor Betrayal of Trust]. When Susan applied to the art residency on Orcas Island—the one with the big windows looking over the pond, the wooden facades, the friendly but incisive mentor and acclaimed painter, Cindy O. Englestein—she did know that you had been saving up for three years to apply to that particular residency. We have scrutinized your two reasons for grievance: (1) That Susan “was not even an artist” and (2) That “Corporate shilling allowed her to afford the program.” These reasons figured less into our conclusion than the fact that she denied having applied in the first place when you asked her.
We have included three caveats in our analysis: (1) Our polls show that being cheated on by a long-term boyfriend, especially a doctor like Hunky Jonah Sandburg, can cause people to act extremely and uncharacteristically.
[Join our Premium Services to read the last two caveats.]
Grievance 7: Valid
When she was already married to Larry and pregnant with Maya, she told you to not marry Jon. You were standing on the blue stairs leading down to the laundry room in the house that you and Jon had already bought. The one already installed with new granite countertops and low water landscaping. In this case, her warnings were unhelpful because you already knew that he had a tendency toward anti-sociability. We have validated this grievance as a Category C or D [Betrayal], straddling the line between [Well-Intended Betrayal] and [Pointless Betrayal] because sisters should support each other in matters of the heart before it’s too late, or just be quiet about it, and certainly not wait until the house has just been remodeled to voice their concerns.
Grievance 8: Invalid
As you informed us: Susan was not a smoker, refrained from alcohol, and incorporated leafy greens into most of her meals. She busied herself with spiritually enriching endeavors such as long phone calls with her children Maya and Caleb, and attempting headstands in her daily yoga routine. She engaged in playful activities, such as biking and traveling with Larry, and stealing fruit from the Moynahans’ yard across the street. Even though she may have, on occasion, taken a tone of “smug satisfaction,” and even though she did “never like him,” she did call every day when you went through your divorce from Jon, extending invitations to her vacations to Marfa and New York with Larry, where you went on morning walks and remembered aloud the names of all the plants from when you were children. Her volunteering for the nonprofit Emily’s List demonstrated her political involvement, and her British sense of humor—while unpalatable to Grievance Line—can be traced to the international nature of her childhood. Her jabs at Nancy Bigsby and her petty PTA politics were perfectly defensible based on our understanding of Ms. Bigsby’s pitch of voice and proclivity for exaggerating her children’s achievements. Her flirtation with Bread Man at the Sonoma Farmer’s Market does not register on our scale of infidelity. Thus, Grievance 8—the development of and succumbing to the malignant tumors that began in her left breast and soon spread to her other major organs—is [Invalid]. None of the actions you listed would lead to breast cancer or the noted painful complications—loss of appetite, irritability, bouts of anger, difficulty breathing, swallowing, or, in the end, recognizing her children Caleb and Maya, or you. In fact, our algorithm would contend that you are describing a healthy person who was struck with the same bad luck as approximately 42,000 other women in the United States.
We were unable, unfortunately, to analyze Grievance 9, considering the first half just listed grievances you imagine Susan might have harbored against you. As you wrote:
Never committing her cell phone number to memory, four belated birthday calls, stealing her ID to get into the Rose and Crown Pub in college, throwing that dirty sock in her face, letting Jon call her a bitch. That time flirting with Larry at the Christmas party, when they had just started dating. Kissing him too long on the cheek in Marfa, after four martinis. Kissing him on the lips—just once, sober. Wanting to know what it felt like to live in her skin. To taste her life down to its most intimate scrapings: stubble on the upper lip, gin-saliva against cheek.
You also wrote: “She would never have submitted any grievances about me, or did she?” For the latter section of Grievance 9, we remind you of our strict Confidentiality Policy.
Lastly, Grievance 10 is also not able to be analyzed. It seems you have submitted a recollection of a dream in which you and Susan are adults, old, with sagging breasts, inside a dressing room. She is in a glittery silver night dress that scatters beads of light across her face. You are in your underwear. Outside, you can see a tree with pink blossoms and beneath it, a blue heron.
The subconscious is not within our interpretive capacity, and anyway, there isn’t much more to the dream except that Susan looks at both of you in the mirror, does a little shimmy, and says: We’re not who we used to be. You look up and suddenly the bird tautens its wings, presses off the ground, and flies toward you and Susan, maw agape and hungry, before slamming into the window in front of you. Together you watch as blood and beak mingle on the gory glass pane.
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