Jo Piazza

by Love Rehab

  Prithi and Dr. Mehti dated through the summer and then he grew distant. She was desperate.

  “If you think a good man is hard to find, a good Indian man is impossible,” she said with a sigh at this point in the story.

  As her desperation grew so did a plan, hatched by a joke Sasank had made in passing during their hours of chatting on the phone late at night.

  “Just get pregnant. No honorable Indian man will leave a pregnant woman,” he said, laughing. Prithi laughed too, but the next week she stopped taking birth control. At this point the good doctor was only returning one of every three of her calls. She got demanding about setting a date for them to go out and when it finally came around, she pulled out all the stops. She bought something called the water bra from Victoria’s Secret that gave her cleavage nature had never intended. She packaged her newfound assets in a slinky bandage dress from Max Azria and shoved her feet into six-inch heels. Her seduction measures worked, and the doctor could barely keep his hands to himself through the appetizer. By the time he choked down his roast chicken, he had his hand halfway up her tiny skirt and was practically licking her neck as he breathed into her ear that he needed to have her right then and there. They got up from their table and slipped cautiously into the single-stall bathroom of the swanky downtown restaurant and Prithi had what she attests was the greatest orgasm of her life.

  It was a hearty orgasm on all fronts, and four weeks later Prithi missed her period. She had also maintained her meticulous grooming regimen and now had the doctor eating out of her hand. Then she dropped the bomb. She was pregnant! He was shocked and a little terrified. He wasn’t ready to settle down. He asked if she was keeping it. She nodded. There was nothing he could do. Sasank was right; good Indian men married the women who were having their children. Dr. Mehti proposed, albeit reluctantly.

  “Will you?” he asked, as he handed over the requisite ruby ring his grandmother had given him to give his bride, a month after she told him she was expecting. Prithi screamed with delight. “I will!” She knew the doctor was just scared and he would come around once they were settled into their life together. She called her parents, and though they were upset about Sasank, they saw the doctor as a major upgrade. Doctor definitely trumped engineer. They also weren’t pleased about the little blessing coming their way, now seven months down the road, but since a wedding was in the works they couldn’t complain too much. Besides, her mother said, “We are a modern family.”

  By Prithi’s second trimester in June she barely saw the doctor, even though she had moved into his Upper West Side bachelor pad. But she contented herself by finishing her applications to med school and looking for a new family-friendly town house in Brooklyn.

  Then, last week, the doctor told her he couldn’t do it. He was in love with someone else, a brain surgeon at Columbia whom he had been seeing before Prithi and had apparently taken up with again after she stopped wearing that water bra (it had burst when her real breasts started swelling, causing quite a scene at the home of one of Dr. Mehti’s hospital’s major donors).

  He told Prithi he was calling off the wedding.

  “Holy Mary Louise Parker,” Allison whistled.

  “Tell me about it,” Prithi agreed. “And that surgeon isn’t even as cute as Claire Danes, but she does have that evil pointy chin.”

  The entire group agreed, Claire Danes’s pointy chin foreshadowed a certain man-stealing temptress who could convince a man to leave his eight-months-pregnant fiancée.

  Prithi moved downtown with Sasank, who was now living with Michael in a loft in Soho. And then she heard about the meeting and she got on the train to New Jersey.

  “I can’t face my family,” she said through tears. “I can’t go home. I have no job. I got accepted to Einstein for next fall, but how can I go as a single mother? And I can’t keep staying on Sasank’s bed. He and Michael need their space and a proper place to sleep and have sex since they would never kick a giant pregnant beast out of their bed.”

  Annie, typically not one to be a shoulder to cry on, had put her arm around Prithi. “You can stay here.” She looked at me and I nodded, not sure why I knew we had to take in this pregnant stranger, but knowing it was the right thing to do.

  “I can’t pay you rent,” Prithi said. “But I can cook for you.”

  “That’s enough,” I said. And the case was settled. We had a third roommate.

  The meeting went on like that for another twenty minutes, although no one could top Prithi’s tale of woe.

  Then I brought up the thing that had been nagging at me as I listened to each of the women’s stories.

  “Why do you guys think we want to get married so bad? I was listening to all of you and I keep hearing the same thing: ‘I go crazy because I want to get married.’ What’s that about?”

  The room got eerily quiet because it was true, and when you bring up something that’s true, people need to stop and think about it for a minute.

  “I genuinely want someone to love me and spend the rest of my life with me,” Lila said, twisting her pearls in between her fingers.

  “My parents want me to get married. I want to make them happy,” Prithi added.

  “I’m afraid of being alone,” Olivia said almost under her breath.

  The room grew even quieter on that beat. Being alone was something we all feared.

  Cameron broke the silence.

  “I’ve watched too many seasons of The Husband,” she offered, getting a few laughs.

  The Husband was a television show that had become widely popular with women (and more than a few men; Dave, for one, was a fan) over the past decade. The show found a single guy, typically in his thirties, with a good job—like a pilot, a doctor, or the brother of someone famous—and brought in twenty-seven women, on average ten years younger and abundantly less successful than him, to catfight their way into his heart over the span of eight weeks before the Husband finally narrows it down to two ladies. They add alcohol and hilarity really ensues. Everyone awkwardly professes their love, even though in real life they’ve only known each other for maybe three weeks. He then whisks them both away on a terribly romantic tropical vacation where they have to pretend to get all angsty about spending the night with him, even though they know if they don’t do it they’re donesky. Then he dumps one and proposes marriage to the other. All in all, it has raised and lowered the bar for what we should expect from a man in the first two months of dating.

  “Let’s stop watching The Husband,” I suggested. There were nods. We had made our second rule!

  Rule 2: Reality dating shows are not reality.

  Don’t drink that Kool-Aid.

  That seemed like as good a note as any to end the meeting on. I suggested we all stand in a circle and hold hands. I had printed out the serenity prayer on a piece of paper and passed it around. We all said it together and then erupted again in applause. Some lingered and had coffee and donuts. Annie showed Prithi to one of the spare rooms and I clucked after everyone, pleased at how well the meeting had gone and surprised again at how much lighter and happier I felt for sitting and talking about my problems and recognizing the same problems and patterns in other women. Finally, just as I said good-bye to the last guest and told her the meeting would be held at the same place, same time the following week, the phone rang. It was Joe. He wanted to hear all the details about the day, and I was eager to divulge what a success it had been. He said he would be over in a few hours to check on Annie, and I started thinking that maybe he would think Prithi was pretty. She did have a thing for doctors after all.

  I greeted Joe wearing sweats and no makeup. For some reason I didn’t feel like I needed to put on airs or try to impress him. He had instantly been relegated to the category of buddy. We sipped Diet Cokes in the backyard, watching Tito, the grandson of my grandmother’s longtime gardener and landscaper, Enrique, fight with a recalcitrant rosebush he was trying to relocate to the opposite side of the yard.

  “So meetin
g number one went well, it sounds like,” Joe said.

  “I think so,” I said eagerly. “Everyone was so excited to finally have a place to talk and share and open up. It was wonderful.”

  “Are you following the steps?” Joe asked.

  “The steps?” I drew a blank.

  “The twelve steps. That’s what AA and most of the As are based on at least. There are twelve steps to conquering addiction. First you admit you have a problem and that you need something extra in your life to help restore your sanity, then step two is to surrender yourself to a higher power.”

  “A higher power? That sounds like some cult-talk mumbo jumbo.”

  “It’s not like God or anything. Or it doesn’t have to be. What religion are you?”

  I recounted my family’s failed experiment at being Presbyterian.

  “OK, well, I grew up Catholic and we went to church every Sunday. After church we went to the local bar with all my Italian cousins, and starting at the ripe old age of fourteen, we were all allowed to have drinks. I always equated church with getting a little bit wasted, so the idea of embracing a higher power to get sober was kind of alien to me, too.”

  “So what do you do? Pray to be sober?”

  “It’s not about praying; it’s more about accepting that something greater than your own will is helping you out. That there is something guiding you on the right path if you just let it and stop getting in its way.”

  “So it’s more about relaxing and surrendering to the universe?”

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s like yoga! Like when you can’t get into a particular pose, like that hard one where you’re supposed to get your leg over your shoulder. The instructor always says to breathe and surrender, breathe and surrender.”

  Joe laughed. “I think it is something a little like that.”

  We chatted for an hour or so. I finished filling Joe in on all the women who had come to the meeting. He said he wouldn’t mind stopping by to see if any of them wanted to chat one-on-one with him. I was reminded that he still had hundreds of hours of community service to fulfill before they would let him be a real-life practicing doctor again.

  That night as I prepared for another bout with insomnia, I tried to think of ways to submit myself to some kind of higher power. First I got into child’s pose like I do in vinyasa class, but that didn’t feel right. It was too easy and my face was buried in the bed. Plus all I could think about was how my hips weren’t very open, or so my yoga instructor was constantly telling me.

  So I got down on my knees and prayed the way people do in old movies.

  “Dear God,” I started, which sounded silly. “Dear higher power” didn’t sound right either. “Hey, you!” I yelled before I realized that the serenity prayer I had printed out at the meeting seemed to be the perfect thing to say here. I tried saying it three times and then crossed myself and gave a fist pump into the air.

  Make a moral inventory of yourself (a.k.a. figure out what’s wrong with you) and keep the hell away from Facebook

  Having Prithi around became a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because even though I did try hard, I was a terrible cook. I often forgot key ingredients like salt or eggs, making things flat and bland and inedible. It was a curse because Prithi’s curries were so delicious that only two weeks after she arrived, I couldn’t button my skinny jeans.

  For a pregnant person Prithi was surprisingly without quirks. She never had cravings or got morning sickness and she never complained. In fact, somehow it was Annie who managed to get Prithi to give her a foot rub one night, which Prithi happily obliged. She said she used to do it for Dr. Mehti, and it made her feel good to be needed.

  Prithi was our first houseguest, but she wasn’t the last. On the Wednesday after the first meeting, Annie’s college roommate Melinda brought her cousin Stella over. Melinda explained that she had to get Stella out of the city due to her latest man drama. It seemed absurd to me that anyone who looked like Stella would have any kind of trouble. She had dark brown hair down to her butt, and her eyes were a bright green that didn’t look like any kind of color eyes should be. Even rimmed red and swollen by tears, they were gorgeous.

  Stella was speechless so we let Melinda do the talking for her.

  “You don’t have a TV here, do you?” were the first words out of her mouth.

  “We do, but the cable is out and it’s pretty old, so we just use it to watch DVDs.”

  “Good, good; so you don’t get ABC?” This line of questioning seemed odd. Was Stella in love with a character on a television show?

  “No, it comes in all fuzzy.”

  “OK, good,” Melinda nodded. “These questions must seem so strange. I’ll get to the point. Stella’s boyfriend broke up with her because he didn’t want to marry her.”

  “Commitment phobes. Common problem,” Annie said, shaking her head. Participating in just one meeting of LAA seemed to be giving Annie a new glimpse into the trials and tribulations of heterosexual dating. “A lot of commitment phobes out there.” Annie, who came out of the closet at age sixteen and had never lacked for female or male attention, didn’t know anything about anyone not wanting to commit to her. If anything, Annie was a commitment phobe herself.

  “Right, right, of course there are,” Melinda said. “But the problem is Stella’s boyfriend didn’t just not want to marry her. He wants to marry someone else.”

  “How do you know? Does he have a fiancée already?”

  “He has twenty-seven of them.”

  “That’s ambitious,” Annie said.

  “And illegal, I think,” I added. “Well, maybe not until he marries all of them. And if it isn’t illegal, well, it is awfully shitty.”

  “You guys aren’t getting it. He’s the new Husband.”

  “As in progressive? Like the new kind of husband, the kind you can only find in Sweden, home of mandatory paternity leave?”

  “No. As in the contestant on the reality show The Husband. He’s down to the final eight. Stella stopped talking after the third tulip ceremony.”

  “That would drive me fucking crazy too. No wonder she’s catatonic.”

  “She read about it in US Weekly,” Melinda nodded. “He didn’t have the balls to tell her himself.”

  Annie informed the ladies that we had already banned The Husband because of its deleterious effects on women’s general self-esteem and the unrealistic expectations it set on our dating lives. Stella, obviously beaten down by her circumstances, just gave us a small smile, revealing two rows of gorgeous teeth, and trudged upstairs to join Prithi.

  Then Friday night I opened the door to find a perfect butt facing me. It was just the right amount of round and high and pert and adorable. It was the kind of butt I always dreamed about having, but years of yoga had still failed to give me what nature had so obviously given this butt from birth. My eyes wandered up to a lithe frame and a mane of honey-blond hair that almost reached down to that perfect tush.

  The perfection ceased when the butt’s owner turned around to reveal swollen eyes, a mouth covered in powdered sugar, and a hand clutching a jelly donut like a life preserver.

  “Jordana?” I asked, not believing that the flawless being I had been taking yoga from in New York for the past two years was standing on my doorstep binge eating Dunkin’ Donuts and crying her eyes out. Yoga instructors are a little like models. We get these girl crushes on them, hold them up to an ideal, and never imagine that they have real people problems, the kind of problems that fleshy people who can’t put their leg behind their head have. You never picture them crying or drinking or eating something with more than five hundred calories. They’re simply not human—until that moment on your doorstep at two a.m. when they are.

  “What are you doing here? And why so late?” Jordana and I weren’t exactly friends, even though I had attended her Monday night class faithfully for twenty-four months. We had a teacher-student thing. Sometimes she moved my hip into a correct position as I blanche
d, trying to remember whether I properly applied deodorant that morning when her nose got uncomfortably close to my armpit. We said hello before class. I thanked her afterward with a head-bobbing, mumbling “Namaste,” and that was about the extent of it.

  “Amy McAlexander told me that you were holding this little thing here for women who are going through something uncomfortable,” Jordana said in Oxford-perfect English. I did happen to know that she had grown up in Leeds and was a philosophy major at the British University before seeking spiritual growth by way of the New York City yoga scene. Amy McAlexander was one of the girlfriends I regularly went to yoga with, who must have heard through the grapevine what was happening in Yardville, New Jersey.