I Like You Just the Way I Am

by Jenny Mollen

  “Okay. Cool,” I conceded.

  The next afternoon, my mom, Bruno, and I got dressed for the cruise. I settled on a simple sundress. Bruno went casual in his pink V-neck, pale blue jeans, and double-breasted black blazer. My mom spiced things up with a low-cut Tadashi cocktail dress and python pumps.

  When we pulled into the harbor, my mom dropped off Bruno and me in front of the boat.

  “You guys go grab our tickets, and I’ll look for a place to park.”

  “You’re in heels, why don’t I park the car?” I said.

  “I’m fine, just get our tix and I’ll meet you guys in a second.”

  “You want me to come with you?”

  “Jen. Come,” Bruno said, like I was a Labrador.

  We got out of the car and headed up to the ticket line. I kept a lookout for my mom while Bruno retrieved our passes.

  “I don’t see her,” I said, scanning the lot, concerned.

  “Oh, well. Let’s board.”

  “No. Where is she? This is so weird.”

  “Das macht nichts. Wir gehen uns,” he said sternly as he pushed me toward the dock.

  I started to panic. In my youth, my mom was notorious for dropping me off someplace, saying she’d be right back, and then disappearing for days. Once, I was left for three weeks with two live-in babysitters who only cooked beans. Another time, she took me to meet a woman she worked with, asked me to go play in her backyard, and then vanished for a weekend without further explanation. When she returned, she’d always act like it was no big deal and try to distract me with some sort of embroidered airport souvenir sarong from wherever she’d just been. I got back at her later in life by sleeping with one of my stepbrothers.

  “I just don’t understand where she could have gone,” I said, unable to focus.

  I stood on the deck of the boat, looking wide-eyed and pathetic, like Fievel from An American Tail.

  Bruno ignored me as we boarded the boat and entered the main salon. Tables separated the long windows from a simple parquet dance floor in the center of the room. The tasteful white tablecloths struggled to stay classy in a sea of folding chairs and cheap balloons. If it weren’t for the crowd of retirees, I would have assumed I was crashing someone’s fraternity date dash.

  A waiter handed us glasses of champagne and escorted us to a small table for two perched on a tiny platform at the front of the room. Once I got to the table, I realized I’d been set up. A bottle of champagne sat waiting for us with a note. I knew it was from my mom before I even opened it.

  Have a magical evening, you two! Love, The Mothership, it read.

  I hated how cavalier she could be. No apology for triggering my abandonment issues, no information stating whether or not I’d ever be seeing her again. Just a “Have fun!” I wanted to have a note delivered back to her, saying, “Thanks for ruining my life.”

  Bruno’s patience with me seemed to be dwindling, and since it was our last night together, I tried to put my anger aside.

  “Prost!” he said, raising his engraved keepsake champagne flute and staring into my eyes like he was stealing my soul.

  The cruise set sail just as the DJ started pumping Bonnie Raitt’s “Something to Talk About.” Bruno asked me to dance and I obliged. His moves were always a bit eccentric—he loved spinning me, walking a couple feet away, then pulling me by my hair back into a dip. But there was something about him that night that seemed especially intense.

  Bruno looked stoical as he sipped his champagne with his pinkie in the air and started talking about the coming months we’d be spending apart. He had to go to Yugoslavia to finish his master’s then return to Germany to begin his M.B.A. Like a true German, his plan was laid out precisely. It would take no less than five years before he could even consider living in the States. And my B.A. in theater made less sense internationally than Craig’s forthcoming tribal tattoo.

  Dinner interrupted our conversation and helped lighten the mood. Etta James’s “At Last” played softly in the background as I accidentally inhaled a whole basket of garlic knots—because I was still mad at my mom, and food represented the love she wasn’t giving me.

  “I love this song. I want it to play at my wedding someday,” I said through a mouthful of dough.

  Bruno smirked a weird “I’m Euro” smirk but said nothing.

  Once I’d ingested every carb on the table, I excused myself to the bathroom. I made sure I was alone, then proceeded to use my entire fist to plunge up the five pounds of flour currently sitting in my stomach. After my recent stint in rehab, I had successfully convinced Bruno and everyone around me that I’d beaten anorexia. The truth was, rehab made me the best anorexic ever. Half the hospital was skinnier than me (annoying), so I had to learn new tricks in order to keep up. One of those tricks was bulimia. According to my then roommate, who’d recently been put on a feeding tube and looked great, you could eat whatever you wanted as long as you threw it all back up within thirty minutes of swallowing. Any longer would result in absorption of sugars, fats, and feelings.

  Working yourself into vomiting feels kind of like working yourself into orgasm. You basically rub back and forth along the back of your throat until you explode. Once you are finished, you’re left with a nose full of snot, the worst breath in the world, and an overall sense of euphoria. Eventually my behavior led to the loss of my period, most of my hair, and my entire social circle (made up of two people). But like all addictions, when you are in them, they seem like the best idea in the world.

  I quickly washed my hands up to my elbows, blew my nose, wiped the tears from my eyes, and walked back to the table. When I returned, a chocolate lava cake covered in a mountain of whipped cream was waiting. Suspecting nothing, I watched as Bruno stood up to pull out my chair.

  “Ich liebe dich so sehr mein schatz,” Bruno professed.

  “Ich dich auch,” I replied, locking eyes with the lava cake.

  Just then, Etta James’s “At Last” kicked in again, only this time louder.

  I looked over to the DJ, who seemed to be staring directly at me. As the music continued, Bruno took a deep breath, rolled out of his chair, and crawled over to me on his knees.

  “Wha—? What are you doing?” I was scared to hear his answer.

  “Jen, will you be engaged to me?” He opened up a small box that must have been hiding in his ass. Inside the box was a small white gold band with a tiny sapphire embedded between two diamond chips. Now, look, I didn’t want to get engaged regardless of what kind of ring Bruno had. But, come on, diamond chips? This felt like some kind of cheap move my dad would pull. The only other time I’d seen diamonds that small was when my father bought me studs for my eighth birthday instead of the dog I’d been begging for. A week into wearing them, the diamonds slipped backwards through my ear holes and were gone forever.

  “Well?” asked Bruno, looking back for support from the sea of strangers awaiting my response.

  “I … I hate you,” I said.

  Before I elaborated, Bruno interpreted my “I hate you” to be less of an “I don’t want to do this” and more of an “Oh shucks, you got me,” and forced the ring down my swollen, bulimic finger.

  The crowd erupted in applause.

  “No, wait, I can’t do this,” I whispered.

  Bruno looked at me in utter disbelief, his hand still covered in the whipped cream he no doubt planned to plant on my nose, then lick off with a kiss. He got up from his knee and sat down quietly as the cruise pulled back into port.

  As we disembarked, we were bombarded by pats on the back and congratulatory high fives. Bruno refused to look at me. We walked silently to the nearest cab and jumped in. Neither of us spoke a word until we were back at my mom’s apartment.

  When I opened the door, my mom and her meathead boyfriend were waiting for us.

  “Show us the ring, you engaged gal!” she said.

  This was irritating on two levels: one, the fact that my mom aided in Bruno’s ambush; and two, the fact t
hat my mom didn’t have any problem with her barely-out-of-college, anorexic, underemployed daughter getting engaged to a kid who lived on the other side of the world.

  “Mom, can I speak to you alone for a minute?” I said.

  Once we were in her bedroom with the door securely shut, I lost it. “What were you thinking, letting that happen!”

  “What do you mean? You aren’t happy? But you love Bruno.”

  “I’m twenty-two years old. I don’t know what I love!”

  “So you don’t want to move to the next level with your relationship? You guys have been together for two whole years.”

  “Mom, I know that sounds like a long time to you, but imagine if you’d married the guy you were dating at twenty-two.”

  “I did,” she said.

  “Exactly!”

  Eventually she apologized and promised to be on my team for the remainder of Bruno’s stay (about eight more hours).

  Knowing Bruno and I had some talking to do, mom and her dildo with a face retreated to his apartment across the hall. Bruno was busy throwing around all his low-cut V-necks when I finally asked if we could talk.

  “Es gibt nichts zu sagen, Jenny,” he said, unwilling to talk.

  “I’m really sorry. I just think we are both too young to be doing something like getting married.”

  “Who’s talking about being married? This is about being engaged. Promising ourselves to each other for all of eternity, like our tear lockets.”

  “Maybe what you really mean is you want me to wear a promise ring?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well,” I said, “it signifies that we’re in an exclusive relationship but not making any rash decisions about the future. I’ll totally wear it if we can agree that’s what it symbolizes.” In the right light, the ring did kind of look cute on me.

  “No!” he said, snatching the ring off my hand. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with these. I can’t return them.”

  “Them?”

  Bruno reached into his purple nylon duffel bag and produced a matching ring. “I got myself one too.”

  Things were getting worse by the minute. Bruno not only wanted to be engaged, but he also wanted to wear matching engagement rings, and to top it all off, his finger was thinner than mine!

  Bruno picked up the phone and called himself a cab while I thought about how to diet my finger down to a more competitive size. He glared at me as he rattled off my mother’s address and asked that the car come as soon as possible. I followed Bruno down to the lobby, trying desperately to assuage his animosity.

  “I don’t want you to leave on bad terms,” I said, noticing a cab painted like a mini Shamu wearing a birthday hat pull up behind us.

  “Jen, it’s too late.” He was somber. The smiling Shamu face seemed to mock him behind his back.

  “You’re not going to kill yourself, are you?” I asked, half worried and half curious.

  Bruno didn’t answer, but he did hand me back the engagement ring.

  “Keep it, throw it in a drawer, it doesn’t matter,” he said, defeated, before locking himself inside Shamu’s belly and driving away.

  I didn’t speak to Bruno for several weeks after that and was completely devastated in the way all twenty-two-year-olds are when their first long-distance lover tries to pirate their future. When we did speak, things seemed different. It was as if we’d peeked into the future and realized that for us, as a couple, there wasn’t one. Our fear of change kept us on the phone and in denial for a good three months more before I finally lashed out and fucked my forty-year-old circumcized neighbor.

  As time went on, Bruno and I eventually lost touch completely. From time to time, I do think of him. I hope that he’s able to look back on our time together with fondness. I really do wish the best for him. But he isn’t on Facebook, Twitter, JDate, or any other social media site I’ve searched, so it’s safe to assume he killed himself.

  3.

  All the Best Men Are Either Gay, Married, or Your Therapist

  There are two types of people in the world: those who think everyone needs therapy, and those who have never been. My parents divorced when I was an infant. I’ve been dyslexic, anorexic, and a theater major, so it’s fairly obvious which category I fall under.

  Throughout my childhood, my parents dropped me off at a multitude of therapists’ offices in hopes that I’d avoid growing up to be the kind of asshole who writes books about them. Also because it was sometimes easier than finding a nanny. And as a result, I’m one of those therapy junkies that believes I’d be a fraction of the person I am if I didn’t have fifty to ninety minutes a week of somebody’s undivided attention.

  I was six years old when I was shown my first Rorschach test. (I think I saw a Boston terrier driving a Camaro.) Dr. Rob, my child psychologist at the time, used to watch me play with shapes and clay while subtly trying to decipher whether or not I’d grow up to be a raging psychopath. He’d ask me questions like, “If you were leaving town on a boat and there were only three seats, whom would you take with you?” I remember his alarm when I gave my toy poodle, Bouncer, all three seats, after prefacing that my little sister would start a mutiny if granted permission to board. At that time, it was obvious to even my poodle that my sister most likely had a personality disorder and that I would make an impressively level-headed captain of an imaginary boat.

  When I was sixteen and having panic attacks, I saw Bethany Fryman, an M.F.T. who lived on my street. Bethany was a morbidly obese grandma who studied Carl Jung and smelled like a Cinnamon Roll Yankee Candle. She blamed my mom for everything, which I assume had something to do with the fact that she was being paid by my father. Bethany came to all my high school plays and even wrote me a letter of recommendation for college. I think she’s dead now.

  At twenty, I developed an eating disorder and started seeing Pamela Mann, a nutritional therapist I met at LA Fitness. Pamela was fifty but looked thirty. She loved jewelry and would always talk about redesigning her late mother-in-law’s brooches. We had dinner a few times, and I think once I even went on a date with her son (small penis).

  I terminated with Mona, the lesbian L.C.S.W. from Calabasas, after she tried to hypnotize me and steal my car at my twenty-eighth birthday party.

  Unable to find the kind of treatment I needed (that is, someone who wouldn’t steal my car), I went to graduate school to get my own degree in the field. Like a pot dealer who sells only to smoke for free, a master’s in psychology seemed like a great way to help people while helping myself in the process. I was also out of work as an actress and needed something to say when people asked the dreaded question, “Soooo, what are you working on?”

  Graduate school was composed of twenty-something degree collectors who didn’t want to face the real world, older women whose kids were out of the house and whose husbands were sick of looking at them, and lost souls whose plan A wasn’t covering their rent. I was positive my involvement was a complete anomaly.

  “You know, just something to do in between gigs,” I explained to the guy who handed me a ticket to park in the school lot.

  I walked into my first class with the kind of “I want to see how your side lives, but I’m still sort of looking down on you” swagger I picture Colin Farrell having when he does a ride-along with the NYPD to get in character for a role. I avoided sitting next to any angry cat ladies and instead plopped down next to a nonthreatening gay guy.

  Eric was in his mid-thirties with blond scruffy hair, designer jeans, and several sandalwood bracelets that let me know he had his life together. I was confiding in him that I wasn’t sure what I’d gotten myself into and that I’d probably be getting a super-important acting gig that would force me to cut my studies short, but that it was nice getting to know him regardless—when the teacher, a spitting image of Wallace Shawn who I’m still not entirely convinced wasn’t Wallace Shawn, walked in.

  “Yeah, everything about this place reminds me of this episode of Strong Me
dicine I once did where I—”

  Professor Shawn looked at me hard and cleared his throat to shut me up. He drew a large circle in red marker on the whiteboard that I guess was supposed to symbolize how we are all one. Inside the circle, he wrote a fact he found interesting about himself. I don’t remember what it was, but it’s safe to assume it was something like “I eat food.” He then proceeded to go around the room and ask each person to stand up and share a fact of their own. Rolling my eyes, I gave my new friend, whom I’d probably never see again because of my imminent rise to superstardom, a nudge. Eric looked back at me like he felt sorry for my lack of maturity and stood up to share.

  “Well, you may not know it from looking at me … clean-cut prepster that I am … but, the reality is … I just got out of prison and you are the first people I’ve said that out loud to.” Eric burst into tears, then gave the room a giant Namaste salute.

  I put my hands nervously over my mouth to stop my body from doing anything stupid, like laughing uncontrollably or choking, and tried to remain open-minded about the slight detour my life had taken.

  * * *

  As a master’s student, it’s mandatory that you go to therapy for at least two semesters. The fee is waived and the school gives you a list of preapproved professionals to choose from. I perused the names carefully to make sure I didn’t see the Calabasas car thief and eventually settled on Dr. Carl Sandford. I thought it might be interesting to try working with a man for a change, and since I wasn’t paying for it, and people like Eric were allowed to hold master’s degrees, I figured I’d go with a more expensive, less prisoner-y Ph.D.

  After a quick chat over the phone, Dr. Carl gave me a time to come see him in his Beverly Hills office. Around 3 P.M. the next day, I pulled into an underground parking garage in workout gear most real workout people would classify as “pajamas” and rushed inside to “sort of” make my 2:45 appointment time.

  I walked into a tastefully decorated waiting room and sat down. The coffee table in front of me was scattered with various magazines, which I took to be my first test. And though I was tempted to check out Angelina Jolie as shot by Brad Pitt for W magazine, my ego and need for approval made me choose The Economist. I know I didn’t know him, had never seen him in my entire life, and might never see him again because I was about get famous, but like any first date, I wanted Dr. Carl to think I was smart and better than the real me actually was. Within minutes, the adjacent door leading to his office flung open and a dapper man in his late forties was revealed.