Girls, Girls, Girls

by Jonah Black

  “Yes, I understand that,” she said. She listened for a moment, tapping her foot impatiently. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

  She stopped tapping her foot and started pacing. “But I think you ought to consider your process,” she insisted. “All this monkey business sounds like it’s about control. You’re really not being present to my observations, and it is my son we’re talking about, not yours. I’m in a space that’s very open and willing to listen, but your space sounds like it’s shut tight. You haven’t been listening to what I have to say.”

  I heard furious squawking on the other end.

  “Fine,” Mom said, sounding like she had stopped caring whether she won the argument or not. “Fine. Thank you.”

  She hung up.

  “Mom . . .” I said.

  She held out one hand as if to hold me back, and then she put her other hand on top of her forehead and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then let it out.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “I need a cup of tea.”

  “Mom—”

  “Jonah,” Mom said, her forehead wrinkled with worry. “I just want you to know I’m still proud of you no matter what. You’re doing great. You’re really trying!”

  “Good,” I said. “What are you proud of, exactly?”

  “Bup, bup,” she said, holding out her hand again to stop me from talking. She put her hand on her forehead again and took another deep breath, and held it. While she held her breath, Honey came in. She was wearing this leather thing with studs around her neck that looked kind of like a dog collar. Honey took one look at Mom and rolled her eyes at me.

  “You got her doing deep breathing two seconds after you come inside, Nutly?” Honey said. “You work fast.”

  Mom exhaled.

  “Honey, Jonah hasn’t done anything wrong,” Mom said. “We need to let him know we’re proud of him.”

  “For what?” Honey said.

  “For dealing so well with his needs and his situation.”

  “What needs?” Honey said.

  “What situation?” I said.

  Mom patted her hair, which is now dyed a sort of beige color and styled like a newscaster’s. Camera ready. She put the kettle on the stove and got out a box of Female Toner tea. The box looked pretty beat up.

  “You’d think a boy who has to repeat eleventh grade all over again would be depressed,” Mom said proudly.

  “You sure would!” Honey chimed in.

  “But look how well Jonah’s doing,” Mom said. “He’s smiling!”

  I was only smiling because I didn’t know what other face to make. I had kind of forgotten what a freak my mother is.

  “Jonah,” Mom said, talking very slowly. “I just got off the phone with Mrs. Perella. She confirmed what Honey told me. You’re repeating junior year.”

  I glared at Honey. “You told Mom already?”

  Honey went to the pantry and got out a box of Ring Dings. “Yeah,” she said. “It seemed like the right thing to do.” She unwrapped a Ring Ding and stuffed it into her mouth whole. “Hey, Ma, can I have some whiskey?” she said when she’d swallowed it.

  “No. Have an apple or a cheese stick.”

  “Aw, you never let me do anything!” Honey said. She grabbed the keys to her Jeep.

  “Where are you going, Pumpkin?” Mom said.

  “I’m meeting the football team,” Honey said.

  “Really?” said Mom. “Are you helping them with their homework?”

  Honey gave me this big smile. “Yeah, that’s what I’m doing,” she said. “I’m helping them with their homework.” Then she winked at me and left.

  “She’s so thoughtful,” Mom said.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s one word for it,” I said.

  “Jonah, I know you must have a lot of feelings right now,” Mom said. “If you want to talk you know I’m always here. And you have your first session with your therapist tomorrow, which is going to do wonders for you. But . . .”

  She got down a well-worn copy of her new best-selling book. On the front was the title, orange letters against a black background: Hello Penis! Hello Vagina!

  “I think this will help, too,” she said. “Try chapter eight, ‘Exploring the Forbidden.’”

  Mom thinks all problems in life have something to do with the way you deal with sex when you’re a teenager. She’s so fanatical about it, she wrote that book, which I haven’t read. I’m not going to, either.

  “Mom, I don’t have a problem—”

  “Bup, bup,” she said, holding out her hand again, and putting the other hand on her forehead. Big inhale, big exhale.

  Her cell phone rang, and she whisked it off the table. “Hello?” she said. “This is she.”

  She put one hand over the receiver. “I have to take this,” she told me. Then she walked outside with the phone and sat down by the pool, and I walked into my room, and lay down on the bed.

  While I was away, Mom remade my room into a guest bedroom. It has mint-green wall-to-wall carpeting and a matching mint-green bedspread. There’s a little table next to the double bed with a dinky little lamp and a box of Kleenex. There’s nothing on the walls except a framed print of a sailboat over the bed. It looks like a motel room.

  How appropriate.

  About five minutes later, Mom came back and knocked on my door. I said, “Yeah?”

  Mom came in. “Good news, Jonah.” She looked very excited. I sat up, all happy, thinking, Mom talked to the school board. They worked something out. I’m a senior again!

  “Guess whose radio show is going national?” she said.

  “Guess whose . . . what?”

  “That was my agent. They closed the deal. My radio show is syndicated, coast to coast! Pillow Talk, they’re calling it, with Dr. Judith Black. Oh, Jonah, this is what we’ve always wanted!” She hugged me.

  “They know you’re not a doctor, though, right?” I said.

  Mom looked at me, all hurt. “Well, that wasn’t a very empowering thing to say.”

  “Mom,” I said. “It’s just that people are going to call you up with their, you know—”

  “With their sex problems?”

  “Yeah, and they’re probably thinking you’re a doctor. Which you’re not. Does that seem right?”

  “Jonah,” Mom said suspiciously. “Are we playing the Honesty Game?”

  “I’m just asking a question,” I said.

  “It’s a stage name, Jonah. Like Marilyn Monroe was really named Norma Jean. And Judy Garland was named . . . something else.”

  “So Doctor isn’t a title? It’s like, your first name?” I asked, laughing at how ridiculous this sounded. “Like some people are called Mary Lou or Kathy Jo, but you’re called Doctor Judith? Is that it?”

  But my mother didn’t think this was funny at all. She takes herself pretty seriously.

  “Jonah,” Mom said angrily. “This is a big thing for our family. This means money. An income. So I can pay for Honey’s college.” She looked out at the pool, all misty-eyed. “And your college, too,” she said, like an afterthought.

  “Sorry, Mom,” I said. “I’m glad for you. It’s good news. Really.”

  “It’s not easy raising two children all by yourself! Your father doesn’t do anything! I have to get by on my own!”

  I had a choice here. I could point out that, in fact, our fairly well-off dad still pays all our bills and is definitely paying for our colleges. But I decided not to say anything.

  “I know, Mom,” I said. “I’m sorry. I really am happy for you.”

  “Are you?” Mom said, all earnest. “Really?”

  Her cell phone rang again and she flipped it open. “Hello?” She put her hand over the receiver. “I have to take this,” she told me. Then she got up and walked down the hall to her bedroom and shut the door.

  Wow, it’s great to be back.

  Sept. 6

  I’m sitting in First Amendment Pizza, waiting to talk to Mr. Swed
e about getting my old job back. It’s very busy in here so I guess I’m going to have to wait awhile. Anyway, school today kind of sucked, but what’s new? All day long all I thought about was how I can get out of the eleventh grade and back into the senior class. I think I’m going to write some letters to the school board maybe, or the governor if I have to. I’m not staying in eleventh grade, that’s for sure.

  After school I had to go down to Amerishrinks at the Pompano Square Mall for my first meeting with the shrink.

  I don’t know what to think about Dr. LaRue. I mean, what kind of shrink has an office in a shopping mall, anyway? It’s like a chain therapy franchise, I guess, because in the waiting room there was this pamphlet that said, “Visit our other fifteen locations in central Florida.” So if you start to flip out while you’re on the highway, you can always pull into one of these Amerishrinks outlets. How reassuring.

  There was this girl a year or two younger than me sitting in the waiting room, reading a copy of Glamour. Her hands were so small they looked like little bear paws. She glanced up at me, and then quickly looked back down at her magazine. On the cover of the magazine were the titles of all these articles, like 30 Sex Secrets, and Look Good Naked, and I tried to guess which one she was reading. The girl heaved this big, exhausted sigh. I wondered if she was waiting to see the same shrink as me, and what her problem was.

  Then she starts to sniffle and I see that she’s crying. She puts down the magazine, which is open to an article titled 30 Ways to Have Sex with Jonah.

  “Are you here to see Dr. LaRue?” I ask her.

  “Yes,” she says. “And I am so afraid.”

  “What are you afraid of?” I ask.

  And she says with this sudden flood of tears, “Oh, I’m afraid of you, Jonah. I’m afraid you don’t love me!”

  I go over and sit down next to her and hold her hand. She’s wearing an Indian bead bracelet that doesn’t really go with her diamond stud earrings.

  “Sophie, you don’t have to worry about anything anymore,” I say.

  And she says, “It’s hard to let go of your fear when you’ve been afraid all your life.”

  “You don’t have to be afraid from now on,” I tell her. She closes her eyes and her lips part softly and I kiss her and her lips taste like saltwater.

  The girl’s mother came out a moment later. She weighed like three hundred thousand pounds and she said in this gravelly voice, “Come on, Crystal, let’s go.”

  The girl kind of shrank into herself, and I understood what she had been so sad about. She wasn’t sad because she had to have therapy; she was sad because she hated her mother.

  Then Dr. LaRue said, “Come on in, Jonah.”

  I got up and went into Dr. LaRue’s office. It wasn’t a very nice office. There were fluorescent lights overhead that buzzed and the floor was dirty gray linoleum, like an airport bathroom. The walls were papered with blue and white stripes and a framed diploma from the University of Central Florida was hanging from a hook on the back of the door.

  Dr. LaRue was sitting behind a messy metal desk. He’s a small man, about fifty, with a bald head and a tiny toothbrush mustache. He reminded me of that Muppet on Sesame Street who is always being tortured by Grover.

  “Hello, Jonah,” Dr. LaRue said. “I’m Dr. LaRue, but if you prefer you can call me Lenny.”

  “Hi, Dr. LaRue,” I said. I sat down in the big blue armchair in front of his desk.

  He waited for me to say something more, but I didn’t.

  “Jonah, your mother is very concerned about you. That’s why she asked me to see you. Do you think your mother has reason to be concerned?”

  “I don’t know.” What was I supposed to do? Just tell him the whole story of my life?

  “You just moved back to Pompano Beach after living in Pennsylvania for two years. How does it feel to be back?”

  “I don’t know. All right, I guess.” I could already see that therapy was going to be a big waste of time.

  “And it’s my understanding that you were attending a private boarding school up there? A place called Masthead Academy?”

  “Yes. I was at Masthead.”

  “Were you sad about being asked to leave Masthead?”

  “Sad? Um, yeah. I guess I was sad. Sure.” What a great diagnosis doctor: Jonah, you are sad.

  “Why were you sad?”

  “Because they asked me to leave?”

  “And why did they ask you to leave?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Actually, I don’t really know. I mean they could have just suspended me, or made me repeat junior year there, or something. I don’t know why they had to kick me out. Maybe they didn’t want to be responsible if I did something really dangerous.

  “Jonah, did your getting kicked out have anything to do with girls’ underwear?”

  He sat there, very wound up, fingering his little mustache. Suddenly I started laughing. I felt bad, but I couldn’t stop. It was all too ridiculous.

  “Did I say something funny, Jonah?” he asked me.

  I tried to answer but it was impossible. I wiped the tears from my eyes and Dr. LaRue handed me a box of tissues. “It’s all right, Jonah. There are a lot of men who like to wear women’s underthings. There is nothing wrong with it.”

  I made myself stop laughing.

  “No, it’s not that,” I said, trying to be serious. “Is that really what they told you? That I like to wear—?”

  “Well, I was given to understand by your mother—”

  “Dr. LaRue, I may have a lot of problems, but wearing girls’ underwear isn’t one of them. Mom tends to exaggerate,” I told him.

  There was a long silence. I think Dr. LaRue was embarrassed. His left leg was bouncing up and down nervously. I don’t think he even knew he was doing it.

  “So what are your problems, Jonah?” he said. “Do you want to talk about them?”

  “My problems?”

  “Yes. You said you have a lot of problems. What are they?”

  I looked at the clock. “How much time have we got?”

  Dr. LaRue shrugged. “Enough to get started.”

  “Well, okay,” I said.

  “All right then. Tell me,” he said.

  I opened my mouth but nothing came out, so I shut it again. I tried to think back to when everything in my life started going wrong, but I couldn’t think of a good starting point. Was it when I got kicked out of Masthead, or when I first saw Sophie, or way before that? Was it when I first left Florida two years ago to live with Dad? Or when my parents got divorced? Or maybe it was when I was still in the womb, this little bundle of cells, all pissed off about the way my mom’s amniotic fluid tasted.

  Dr. LaRue blew the air through his lips, making a sound like a horse. I guess he was getting impatient.

  Sophie sits down on Dr. LaRue’s desk. She is wearing brown suede chaps over her cutoffs. She smells like hay and Murphy’s Oil Soap.

  “Are you going to tell him?” she asks me.

  I don’t answer. I still can’t figure out where to begin.

  “Jonah?” said Dr. LaRue.

  “I’m thinking,” I said.

  “Jonah, don’t tell him,” Sophie says.

  I heard the clock ticking and the sound of people talking in the dentist’s office on the other side of the wall.

  Sophie just sits there, perched on the edge of the desk, waiting for me to say something.

  But I never did. Dr. LaRue stood up and told me time was up. I’d wasted the whole hour.

  I guess I was pretty depressed after I left his office. I was supposed to meet Posie and Thorne down at the dune where we always used to hang out and I wasn’t really up for it anymore. But I figured if anybody was going to understand it would be those guys.

  It took about fifteen minutes to ride over to the ocean. The dune seemed smaller to me than it had in ninth grade. Back then it always seemed like this big hill of sand overlooking the ocean. But when I locked up my bike
and started walking toward the beach all I could think was, That’s it? I wondered if there had been some kind of hurricane that had blown most of the old dune away. Then I realized that it just seemed smaller now. In a way, everything does. Well, maybe not smaller, but not as good.

  Thorne and Posie weren’t the only ones at the dune. There were two other people there with them, a girl and a guy I’d never seen before. And there were a bunch of people sitting around on the beach nearby, watching the surfers and hanging out.

  When he saw me Thorne called out, “Hey, Jonah’s here!” And Posie let out this loud whooping sound. Everyone on the dune turned to look at me.

  Posie was sitting with this guy who I knew right away was Wailer. He was big and muscular with a white triangle of zinc oxide on his nose and this leather string with a shark tooth on it tied around his neck. They were holding hands, and when I walked up to them Posie said, “Wailer, this is Jonah, the first love of my life.”

  I blushed even though what Posie said isn’t true. We’ve always been just friends. Wailer laughed and shook my hand like he knew Posie was joking. That pissed me off. I mean, what if I really was her first love?

  Thorne had his arm around this girl I didn’t recognize.

  “This is Jonah Black,” he said. “Jonah, this is Lucy.” Then I remembered who she was: Lucy McIntyre, who used to be this chubby short girl who lived in a modern glass house with two St. Bernards named Genius and Stupid. In grade school Lucy always had big birthday parties out by her pool and those huge dogs would knock kids over and drool all over them and make them cry. Lucy is still short, but the only chubby part of her now is her chest.

  “Hi, Jonah,” Lucy said. “Wow, you haven’t changed a bit.”

  Everyone keeps saying this and it’s driving me crazy. Does this mean I still look like a ninth grader? Bullshit.

  “So you surf, Jonah?” Wailer asked.

  “No,” I said. “Never got into it.”

  Wailer laughed and shook his head like that was funny. “Dude never got into it,” he said to himself. It was like he was saying, This guy’s a total moron.

  “Jonah just got back from his psychiatrist,” Thorne announced, like this was something cool that everyone should know. They all looked at me.