I've Got Sand In All the Wrong Places

by Lisa Scottoline

  I want you to live that long, too, especially if you’re buying my books.

  I always used to think about death. I truly wonder what will kill me, but unfortunately as soon as I find out, I’ll be dead.

  Everything has a catch.

  But I do find myself being more conscientious about eating healthy foods and exercising even when I don’t want to.

  Let’s pretend golf is exercise.

  Everybody else does.

  But my favorite exercise of all is sitting down, and now I can sit down and know that I’m getting healthier, every time I’m in the throne room.

  Look at it this way.

  If you don’t want to do squats, you can just, well, squat.

  Facets of a Stone

  Francesca

  I think I had a panic attack.

  It was the middle of the night, I was lying in bed in a quiet beach house, but I was up, thinking, always thinking when it’s dark—when my heart rate suddenly sped up. There was no specific thought that triggered it, no particular emotion I could identify to make sense of it. But I felt like I had been injected with something, a drug, adrenaline. I tried to take a deep breath, but couldn’t. My heart was racing now, going so fast it scared me. I sat up and brought my hand to my chest, as if I could catch it by the tail.

  The assault had taken place two weeks prior. I had spent the first week at home with my mother recovering from the worst of my physical injuries, then I had accepted my friend’s serendipitous offer to share her week in the Hamptons. This was the last night in the beach house before I was supposed to return to New York, fully recovered.

  A few days later, our book tour began. Spooked by the panic attack, I’d decided that I wasn’t ready to turn the mugging into a story to tell on tour. But I had to briefly address it, because I had posted about it on Facebook when it happened, and because I still had visible injuries on my legs. The response from our readers was uniformly concerned and kind.

  And yet on the car ride home after our first signing, I was in tears.

  With each person who smiled in relief and said, “You’re so lucky,” or “Thank goodness it wasn’t worse,” I felt more and more guilty that I wasn’t feeling more happy and healed. With every person who told me I was strong, I felt weak and phony.

  Ironically, I had felt both happy and lucky when it had first happened.

  The swell of emotion when I saw a group of people running toward me seconds after my assailant had gone might best be described as catastrophic relief. I had thought I could die, I had fought for my life, and I had escaped without grave injury. When help arrived, I was manic with gratitude and excess adrenaline. Even when the exhaustion began to hit, I was sanguine.

  I was the one who had spent the following weeks telling everyone how “lucky” I was, putting their fears to rest, reminding them it could’ve been worse, shit happens.

  But the feeling didn’t stick.

  I was still obsessively reliving the attack every night, going over it second by second, trying to fill in the blank spots where fear or injury had damaged my memory. I felt scared walking alone at night. I cut the last dog walk before bed short, sometimes just walking back and forth up and down my block.

  I told the story to anyone who asked—even though recounting it made my heart race—until I ended most social interactions fatigued. I wasn’t seeking out attention or sympathy, on the contrary, my friends’ and family’s concern made me uncomfortable, but it was like I had to purge the experience. I wanted to say it out loud enough times so that it did become a “story,” a collection of words in a particular order, divorced from visceral memory. I wanted to transform an attack that rendered me helpless into words that I controlled.

  I might still be trying to do that.

  But the process drained me. I was receiving many kind messages from friends via email and Facebook, but replying left me mentally and emotionally derailed. Sometimes I let the messages sit in my inbox, starred, and didn’t reply at all—which made me feel so guilty.

  I still stay up some nights drafting my apologetic responses.

  The D.A. assigned to my case encouraged me to avail myself of free counseling provided by the city to crime victims. After the book tour, I waited over an hour in the Office of Victims’ Services, an overworked department located in the courthouse downtown. I was given a stack of forms to fill out to qualify for medical compensation, counseling, etc.

  Every fourth question began, “In the case of deceased victim…”

  It reminded me how many people using these services are bereaved, and how many of the victims lost their lives.

  And I wanted counseling because someone roughed me up?

  I was lucky. It could’ve been so much worse.

  I filled out the forms but didn’t follow up.

  I didn’t need help, or I decided, I shouldn’t.

  Judging all of my emotions became a common theme. I didn’t want to suppress my feelings, but I didn’t want to wallow. I wanted to face my fears, but not indulge them. I put enormous pressure on myself to recover the right way, the emotionally healthy, mentally strong way.

  To do whatever it takes not to let this leave a mark.

  “Victim” has never been a label I’m comfortable with, anyway. I was afraid once you took on that role, you could never shake it.

  I was most afraid of being afraid.

  That I had made a life on my own in New York was one of my proudest accomplishments. I lived alone and I loved it. I considered myself a strong, independent, savvy woman, like all the women I admire most, like my mother. These were the traits I liked most about myself.

  And suddenly I felt they were under siege.

  My remaining negative feelings after the assault didn’t just threaten my sense of safety, they threatened my very identity.

  The night that it happened, the police needed to know the house address nearest to the location of the attack, but I struggled to recall exactly where I had been when it started.

  “You had an umbrella, right? Look for that,” the cop said.

  I had completely forgotten. With all my things taken from me, it was hard to remember what I’d started with. We drove a few hundred feet more, when I saw it.

  My pink, floral-print umbrella lay on the ground utterly destroyed. It was inside out and half-smashed, the nylon fabric torn from its metal limbs, the arms bent back unnaturally.

  I remember thinking, if that’s what happened to my umbrella, what had happened to me?

  That anxiety was part of what spurred my actions the day after the attack. I wanted to do everything I could to return things to normal, by force if necessary.

  I declared that Sunday my “day of defiant fun.” My mom wanted me to rest, cancel plans, but I refused. I convinced her to eat brunch at my favorite restaurant and sit outside, because “brunch must go on!” I had my mom take a picture of this victory brunch to post on Facebook.

  It took several tries to get a shot where I looked the least injured.

  My mom said all the pictures made her sad and deleted them from her phone.

  We walked all over my neighborhood to replace what was stolen, from my iPhone to my favorite lipstick, parading my injured body instead of hiding it. I took my mom to the exact spot where I was attacked. I wanted to see it in the daylight, holding my mom’s hand, and dispel the bad juju.

  I made her take some gag photos on that spot, too.

  Again, I wanted to retake control over that physical space. I lived in this neighborhood, and I didn’t want to cede any territory to a bad experience.

  But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t influenced by the fact that my mother was behind the camera. I wanted badly to prove to both of us that I was okay.

  I was probably pushing myself too much when I insisted we keep our prior plans with friends to go to the Broadway Bares benefit show that night. I was exhausted, my voice was completely gone, but canceling something fun and positive felt like admitting defeat.


  When we were getting ready to leave my apartment, I realized my new iPhone hadn’t restored my contacts list and needed more time on the Wi-Fi network. I said I wanted to wait. My mom said we had to go, or we would be late.

  “We won’t be late, it will only take ten minutes,” I said.

  She insisted that it was rude to keep them waiting.

  I exploded. “It’s useless without the contacts! What if I get separated from the group? I don’t know anyone’s number. I just went through this, I can’t not have my phone!” I burst into tears, surprising us both.

  It was the first time I had cried in front of her, and the first time I had cried since the assault, over a phone.

  But I had been white-knuckling it through the lingering sense of vulnerability for the last twelve hours. After feeling stripped bare the night before, I needed the security of a working cell phone.

  It was the first crack in my defiantly cheerful façade.

  Which is not to say that my behavior that day was artifice. I genuinely wanted to do these things, and I derived real satisfaction from testing and proving my own resilience. But my victory lap belied a fear and anxiety about change—deep down, somewhere I couldn’t yet articulate, I was acting defensively.

  I didn’t want the stain to set.

  I didn’t want to be “damaged.”

  There’s a pervasive narrative in books, TV, and movies about damaged women. We see many depictions of traumatized women, women with baggage, fragile women in need of protection and special consideration but just as often abandoned for being too complicated. It’s portrayed as a status, not a journey.

  But as time went on, I found the starkness of that definition wasn’t working for me. It didn’t fit my lived experience of trauma and its aftermath, which was proving to be paradoxical. I had to allow for the contradictions I was experiencing.

  Yes, I am lucky that it wasn’t worse, but no, it wasn’t my lucky night. I can be grateful for my current health and the people who helped me, while still acknowledging my own suffering. I can get scared and still be strong. Courage doesn’t exist without fear.

  Resilience, in human beings, doesn’t mean snapping back to normal fast as a rubber band. Resilience begins from the first moment of challenge and continues every day after to meet it. Resilience and struggle are often one and the same.

  The way reading often delivers you exactly what you need, I happened to come across an Elizabeth Gilbert quote that reflected my revised view. She wrote, “The women whom I love and admire for their strength and grace did not get that way because shit worked out.”

  Mental fortitude doesn’t require you to maintain a pristine existence, and real life doesn’t allow for that anyway. Emotions, even riotous ones, are the antibodies to a traumatic experience. I have to let them do their work.

  Once I gave myself the permission, the freedom, and the time to feel my emotions without judgment, my anxiety began to subside. I haven’t had another panic attack since, but if I do, I won’t take it as a blow to my identity. I am still the woman I thought I was, and I am still on my way to becoming the woman I want to be.

  Like a diamond has many facets, there are many sides to a strong woman. As I go through the spectrum of life experience, I find more and more angles to catch the light.

  This Call Is Being Monitored for Quality Assurance Purposes

  Lisa

  If you’ve read what Daughter Francesca and I have written about Mother Mary, you can guess how she would react to the following story.

  In fact, you have to guess.

  Because I can’t print her reaction here.

  We begin with the fact that Mother Mary passed away, leaving a bank account with some money. It wasn’t a lot, which was a fact she used to joke about. She’d say:

  “I’m set for life, if I die next week.”

  God love her.

  Sadly, she did pass, and I was named POD on her account, which means payable on death.

  This will get funny soon, I hope.

  So naturally, I went to the bank to get the money, and they told me I have to produce her death certificate. This, even though they had already been notified of her death and closed the account.

  But okay.

  I get that.

  So I went back to the bank with her death certificate, and they told me I had to fill out a “Letter of Instruction,” get it notarized, and mail it to the address they provided.

  By the way, the instruction in the letter is to mail me a check because I am POD, even though that is exactly what POD means.

  But okay, I get that, too. We have rules and regulations, and this is America.

  The bank told me that I would receive a check in ten days.

  Three months later, I still hadn’t gotten the check, so I went back to the bank, where they told me they don’t know what happened to the Letter of Instruction I’d sent, so I had to fill out another one, get it notarized again, and resend it to the same address.

  Which I did.

  But three months after that, I still hadn’t gotten the check.

  So I called the bank, and the woman told me that they didn’t know what happened to the second Letter of Instruction I sent, either. She told me to come back a third time, get a third Letter of Instruction, get it notarized a third time, and send it to the same address.

  In other words, I’m POD but it’s been over a year since Mother Mary passed. Put simply, there has been D, but there is still no P.

  So I told the bank lady what I thought of that, in creatively profane terms.

  Because I am my mother’s daughter.

  And I have no reason to believe that the fourth time I do the same thing will lead to success.

  In fact, it was Albert Einstein who said, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

  Guy was a genius.

  I wish I knew where he banks.

  I know where he doesn’t.

  Bank of Insanity.

  Anyway, you don’t have to be Einstein to know that I will have to do what the bank says, all over again, for the fourth time. The bank has the money, and they’ve had it for over a year, and they’re keeping it, even though it’s not theirs anymore.

  If they do this to enough people, they’ll have free use of lots of money.

  And they’ll get away with it, because banks run America.

  And the federal banking laws are basically, what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine.

  If you don’t think so, try to be even a week late on your credit-card payment, mortgage, or car loan. You’ll be charged late fees and interest, and you’ll get threatening phone calls from the Mafia.

  I mean, the banks.

  I’m writing about it because I know I’m not the only person to lose a beloved parent, which is bad enough, but banks make it all worse by their pointless rules, red tape, and general incompetence, which only serve to remind you that YOUR MOM DIED.

  You know what Mother Mary would say, don’t you?

  I do, too.

  And that’s why she will never really D.

  A Thing of Beauty

  Francesca

  “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

  Keats, one of the greatest poets of the Romantic era.

  I once wrote an entire term paper on those lines, and I still didn’t understand them.

  Aesthetic pleasure isn’t completely lost on me; I’ve always dated attractive people. But I’ve mostly found my level. I don’t think my looks are my best trait, which I’m perfectly fine with, so I’ve never prioritized that in my romantic partners.

  But if you look at the great literature of the past, so much ink has been spilled for beauty. Such artistic depth for such a superficial subject. I didn’t get it.

  Until I dated someone super hot.

  Remember that guy I met at the bachelorette party? His dance moves won me over that night, and it w
as a little too dark to get a great look at him. Then it took two months of playful texting before we could get our schedules to sync up. So when we finally made plans for a first date, I’d practically forgotten what he looked like.

  We were meeting at a Lower East Side speakeasy, one of those kitschy bars with a hidden entrance. He texted me that he would wait outside and added, “I’m the one in orange.”

  I remember thinking he had to be pretty bold to pull off orange on a first date.

  Then I spotted him.

  He was gorgeous by every superficial metric possible. He was taller than I’d remembered, at least six-foot-three, and perfectly proportioned with broad shoulders tapering to a trim waist. Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man would look awkward beside him.

  He wore a pumpkin-colored, fine-knit sweater that draped over his pectoral muscles and strained at his biceps.

  I would’ve undressed him with my eyes, but I’d never seen someone that fit naked in real life.

  I had to use my imagination.

  Then he saw me and flashed a dazzling smile.

  And I wanted to throw up.

  I plunged into an abyss of insecurity. As we hugged hello, a million thoughts ran through my head: Was my dress flattering? I should suck in. I had rushed my eyeliner, was it uneven? I forgot leg moisturizer. I should’ve worn less perfume. Am I wearing deodorant? Yes, but not enough.

  “You found me,” he said. “My buddy said I look like a traffic cone.”

  He could certainly stop traffic.

  “You look … great.”

  Where’s poetry when you need it?

  We went inside and sat at the bar. As we talked, my eyes traced the outlines of his face by candlelight. His bone structure made the Parthenon look amateurish, he had the cheekbones of a god, a jawline cut from marble, and these full, pillowy lips made for, well …

  Where was that drink?

  I tried to focus on the words coming out of his mouth, but my mind was busy comparing myself to the type of girl he typically dates.

  He was saying, “Well, I have four brothers…”

  The girl he dates styles her hair every morning, and she knows how to do that soft-wave thing with a curling iron. I don’t even own a curling iron. My stupid hair is already curly.