You'll Grow Out of It

by Jessi Klein

  So Connie doesn’t always adhere to typical therapist protocol. But Connie has also healed me. When I walked into her office ten years ago—or was it eleven?—I was a broken eggshell. I didn’t know what I was doing with my life. I was unmoored from the person who had been my person and I couldn’t stop feeling the ache. I wept as I walked the ten blocks from the subway to my apartment every night. I was crushingly lonely. Once a week, I showed up to her office and sat cross-legged on her couch, often holding a pillow like a security blanket, as I dumped these feelings at her feet so she could do something about them. The horror over my ex being with someone younger, blonder, how it undid me to think about them together, how my idea of what love meant had drained away, leaving a cold white void, an empty sink in my gut. I told her about my obsessive Googling. This went on for months until one day, Connie leaned forward in her leather chair, brass bead necklace swinging forward, and told me, “Jess, you have a tape that’s playing in your head. You need to decide to stop playing the tape.” I stared into her eyes and pictured an old ’80s cassette player. She was right.

  We started going through my other tapes. The tape of my dad always pointing me toward the safest path in life, the path of plan B. The tape of me wanting to escape this path but not believing in myself. We started going through older tapes. Deep cuts.

  It took years. But I gradually started to feel better. I started taking risks. I left my job and began my career. And I went on dates. Connie heard about all of them. There was the guy I brought in for one session of “couples therapy,” at the end of which Connie said, “Well, you’ve been together a year, and this is supposed to be the honeymoon of a relationship, so just know it’s only going to get harder from here.” We broke up in the elevator on the way out.

  There was the architect, a classic cad. When I told Connie he wore loafers without socks, she was agape. “Who is this phony?”

  Years later, right before her daughter gave birth, Connie found out she needed foot surgery. We were supposed to do a phone session on a Wednesday night, and Connie was fifteen minutes late calling me, which was unusual for her. When she did, I could hear that she was scared. “I don’t know how I’m going to help her,” she said, her voice breaking.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said.

  When I got engaged, I called my parents. They were thrilled, but even the happy news was not enough to break them of their habit of keeping every phone call as close to haiku-length as possible. I was on Martha’s Vineyard with Mike, but I took a moment to email Connie a photo of us, captured two seconds after he gave me a ring in the middle of a wooded hike to the beach. Then we went to see a movie. When we emerged from the theater, I had a voicemail from Connie.

  “Jessi,” she began. “I’m watching the Olympics, and I don’t even know what made me look at my iPad, but I did, and I see you and this ring, and I’m shaking. I’m shaking.”

  The message goes on for seven minutes. She seems to be signing off about ten different times, but then launches into another torrent of well wishes. “You just take real good care of each other,” she said. “Real good.”

  I still haven’t deleted it.

  When I returned from the trip, I made an appointment to see her. I didn’t have anything I needed to talk about, but she’d left me another message letting me know she had a gift for me. I went to her office, past the Pax and up the mirrored elevator, and then into the waiting room, where I looked at Jennifer Aniston’s house in Architectural Digest.1

  Once I was inside, Connie hugged me tightly. She looked at my finger and literally kissed the ring. Then she handed me a gift bag. Inside was a little jewelry box. “You need a place to put it when you do the dishes!” she said, and she was right. I did. After I thanked her for the gift, she gestured for me to sit down. “Tell me everything about the proposal.” For a full out-of-network non-reimbursable hour, I gave her all the details.

  1 A surprising amount of purple.

  Carole King and the Saddest To-Do List Ever

  When I was a little girl of about eight, I had this one very specific image of what it would look like to be a grown woman on my own. I am walking down Fifth Avenue in New York and I’m wearing a broad-brimmed hat, a full calf-length skirt and heels, white gloves, and big sunglasses. I’m carrying big fancy shopping bags in each hand. I am in control and living it up. Basically I am Julia Roberts in the second half of Pretty Woman.

  About six years ago, when I was thirty-two and single and living in a somewhat shabby West Village apartment that Mike now calls “the lean-to,” I realized I was staring at the beginning of a weekend where I had forgotten to make a single plan with anyone. No problem, I thought to myself, I’ll just take care of all the apartment stuff I’ve been neglecting. I took out a notepad to make a list, because that is what women do: We make lists. After twenty minutes of hard thinking, I had two errands: “buy pillows” and “get new plants.” Those were literally the only two things I had to do. Seeing these five horrifically lonely words in ink made me acutely aware of the possibility that if I were to die alone unexpectedly (a recurring fear), when the police went through my things they’d find this sad, pathetic list written by this pathetic, expired spinster. I pictured two of the older, more hardened cops kind of chuckling about it while a third cop, a younger rookie, would feel genuinely sad that this is how some ladies end up. Maybe he would even have to do the thing cops do on TV shows where they step outside to throw up.

  I decided the only safe thing to do would be to circle the two things on my list, draw an arrow to the circle, and write “BIG PLANS” in as sarcastic a font as I could manage, so whoever found it would know that when I made this list, I was aware that it was unacceptably lame, and by signaling this awareness, the cops, or the neighbors who would smell my body, would know how cool and fun I actually had been. So I actually wrote the words “BIG PLANS,” at which point the note transformed from a banal weekend agenda to a full-on transcript of a crazy person’s conversation with herself.

  I ended up going out to buy plants that needed to be potted. Because I don’t know how to do anything that isn’t the Internet, I called my friend Becky, who is the most self-reliant person I know. She grows her own vegetables; she has chickens; she is everything. She agreed to come over to help, and I started to feel like now the weekend was really cookin’: potting plants, girlfriend heading over. This was being a strong awesome independent woman. I threw on Carole King’s Tapestry so that as soon as Becky walked in, the festive party nature of our hang would be clear.

  Ninety minutes later Becky and I were busy potting at my kitchen table. Just as I was placing my new fern (or whatever sad plant it was) into a ceramic pot, I somehow knocked the whole thing off the table and it broke into five pieces, its landing in no way softened by the huge amount of soil that was now all over my floor. Carole was mournfully singing “So Far Away.” I looked at Becky and started to cry.

  On Sex and the City, every now and then, they would include a short scene in which Carrie was alone in her apartment. She was always dressed a thousand times sexier than anyone would be dressed in their own home (or even how most people look going out, for that matter) and she was always perfectly content, either typing about the things that she couldn’t help but wonder, or else happily reading and smoking by her window, a temperate breeze blowing first through a gauzy curtain and then through her fucking incredible hair. They never showed her just lying on her bed, staring into space while struggling to gather the will to think of something else to do. But as single people know, the real snapshots of living alone are often the most uncomfortable. The moments when you are shamefully eating a can of chocolate frosting for lunch (yup); the moments when you are scrolling through your phone, neurotically pressing REFRESH on all possible social apps to see if anyone has just now remembered they are in love with you; the moments when, if you were a part of a couple, your time would be filled with grocery shopping and brunch and bickering and sex; but since you are not, you sit
frozen with anxiety on your couch as the clock seems to go in reverse.

  There is a Zen saying that all men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone. But it’s hard to be Zen when you feel like your time in this quiet room might never end. When I was severely uncoupled—no boyfriend, no prospects, genuinely and deeply single—the need to fill time in a way that felt sexy and purposeful always seemed like a difficult homework assignment. On top of this, I often worked from home, which meant every day had the potential to turn into one long Bravo marathon. I wanted to structure a day where a hypothetical random snapshot of me looked like Carrie Bradshaw in her kimono, totally relaxed, not Brittany Murphy in Girl, Interrupted, diddling an old chicken under her bed. The key to doing this in a life devoid of the anchors that a spouse and kids usually provide is to build your day around tent-pole activities, things that will make you feel tethered to the calendar of humanity even though you are a single lonely alone person with no responsibilities.

  When I lived by myself, these were mine:

  6 a.m.—Wake up, be happy for two seconds, then remember every piercingly sad anxiety currently at play in my life. Get up to pee. Feel ever so slightly better for having peed. Try to go back to sleep.

  9:15 a.m.—Go buy the New York Times from local head shop. Try to make friendly eye contact with the Arab guy at the register so he knows I’m not some typical American racist and that I like him and want to be friends. Always get rejected.

  9:30 a.m.—Take the Times to my local café to read while eating my regular, balanced, healthy breakfast: scrambled egg whites with a mixed cup of blueberries and bananas on the side. Ordering the blueberries and bananas, instead of the normal fruit cup (which is chunks of hard melon and cantaloupe), is part of a fraught negotiation with the painfully adorable girls behind the counter, who always look confused. Explain that this has been done for me in the past. Get annoyed that this conversation has to be repeated every day but realize it takes up more time so it’s not actually that bad. Once settled at my table with my paper and my food, take a moment to appreciate the peacefulness at this quaint old place.1

  10:30 a.m.–12:15 p.m.—Return home. Sit down and try to write something. Look at everyone I’ve ever dated on Facebook and also join LinkedIn just to look at them on LinkedIn. Proceed to receive hundreds of LinkedIn requests a month for the rest of my life, never figure out how to get off LinkedIn.

  12:30–1:30 p.m.—Lunchtime. My lunch is spinach-and-cheese ravioli with two glasses of white wine. Boil the ravioli and also heat up a store-bought artisanal tomato sauce to feel like I am really a home cook, like Julia Child. Turn on the DVR’d episode of that morning’s The View to watch Hot Topics.

  1:30 p.m.–4 p.m.—Lose steam on writing. Eat two dainty squares of a Ritter dark chocolate bar that feels a little fancy, put the bar back in the fridge, sit down as if to stop eating it, get up again, and then gobble the whole thing.

  4 p.m.—Oprah time. I was devastated when Oprah ended. For years, watching Oprah was my closing tent pole of the day. No matter how badly I’d written, no matter what I’d failed to complete, as long as I tried to work until four, that was a day I’d shown up. And the reward was watching Oprah talk to sex addicts or sad moms or Jane Fonda for an hour, during which I’d have another glass or two of wine and know that I could now downshift into evening and figure out who I would call to go get a drunkish dinner.

  Together, these activities gave my day a shape, a journey from waking to sleep. But that journey was always fraught with the idea that I should be having more fun somehow. One night me and my three single girlfriends decided we should go out. We spent probably about forty-five minutes total reassuring one another we were just a group of friends getting some drinks and food, and we were not having a Girls’ Night Out, because Girls’ Night Out is a cliché and it’s embarrassing. On our way to dinner we ran into a handsome male friend of mine whom we all had a secret crush on. We stopped to chat.

  After exchanging hellos, he looked me up and down and said, “Nice girls’ night out shirt.”

  He was trying to be nice. And in fairness to him, I was wearing a gold sequin tank top. But his comment highlighted the problem when you are single: No matter what you are doing, there is always the danger of looking exactly like the kind of person you are trying not to look like.

  The question, then, is whom do you aim to look like, in this tenuous world of being an unmarried, unboyfriended woman? How can you look, when you are alone in your house, like you are not trying too hard, or neurotically frozen, or called out by strangers for your glitter top, or crying to Carole King at home as you scrape a fern off your floorboards?

  Ironically, maybe the answer is Carole King.

  I have always been obsessed with the picture of her on the cover of Tapestry. It’s one of those iconic 1970s lady photos, of Carole barefoot in bell-bottoms and a shmata blouse and frizzy Jew hair, seated in a window, in front of a patterned hippie curtain, with her cat at her feet. She seems content; not overjoyed, not sad, just…fine. She’s not self-conscious, and she’s not letting us stare at her without meeting our gaze. She definitely doesn’t give a shit what we think of her outfit, or the fact that she’s by herself. She doesn’t give a shit because she wrote “Natural Woman,” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” and “You’ve Got a Friend,” and “It’s Too Late,” and “I Feel the Earth Move,” and hundreds of other masterpieces. She’s a badass. She can have as many fucking cats as she wants.

  1 About a week after I wrote these words, I found out that one of the regulars of this café, a man I sat next to many times a week for years, had murdered his wife with an ax in their home.

  The Lingerie Dilemma

  I have never known what I’m supposed to do about underwear. I’m saying underwear because I don’t like the word lingerie. “Lingerie” seems to exist solely to make you feel bad about yourself if you’re still just wearing “underwear.” (Poodles wear lingerie. Wolves wear underwear.) I understand lingerie even less than I understand underwear, but what I’m saying is I fundamentally don’t understand either. Add to the equation the question of what men want me to do re: my underwear, and the fog gets even thicker. And lastly, if you want to know what I want men to want when it comes to my underwear, I have no idea anymore. I want to be sexy and comfortable and I want men to want to unwrap me like I’m a Christmas gift, but I also want to be left alone and take a nap.

  The whole thing is a massive tangle for which I place a large degree of blame on the Victoria’s Secret catalog, an insidious publication that has inevitably shown up at every address I’ve ever been attached to, no matter how much I don’t want it and have expressly put it out into the universe that I would like to never see it again. Does anyone know how to make this thing go away? Do the Obamas get a Victoria’s Secret catalog at the White House still addressed to “Jimmy Carter or Current Resident”? I’ve made every effort and still, once a month, I open my mailbox to find it curled up and waiting for me like a snake.

  I always almost throw it out and then I take a quick look at the tawny scrawny lion-maned lady on the cover, her perfect boobs hovering perfectly in their AngelicTM sling, and I think, Well, maybe I should just check in. And then I drop it in the magazine rack next to my toilet and the next time I am in the bathroom,1 I start thumbing through and, page by decimating page, get the sinking feeling that I should be disqualified from being considered a female, if that hasn’t happened already.

  Victoria’s Secret sets the standard for what underwear is supposed to look like. According to them, no woman should ever leave the house without wearing a matching bra and underwear set that is, at the very least, sexy enough for a fifteen-year-old boy to jerk off to. There is nothing in their catalog that sanctions what I do, which is to wear the same six pairs of basic Gap underwear in rotation for years until they start to resemble tattered old pirate flags.

  Victoria’s Secret’s advertising is so ubiquitous, and their brand so vividly
marketed, that if you live in the United States at least, it’s abundantly clear what they think you should look like when you take off your clothes, even when there’s no one else around and you’re just home alone making a peanut butter sandwich. It’s also clear they don’t want you to be eating a peanut butter sandwich.

  But before my idea of what underwear was supposed to be was informed by the thong-industrial complex, I was a little girl. My underwear came in three-packs, sealed in plastic bags that hung on hooks at CVS or Duane Reade. (I continued to buy underwear this way into my twenties.) I was severely flat-chested even after reaching the age when puberty normally begins, so when it came to bras, I knew nothing. Around the seventh grade, a group of boys began sidling up to the girls, draping their arms around their necks, and rubbing their fingers along our shoulders. They would make bullshit conversation while not-so-subtly feeling for a strap. In this ingenious manner, they discovered who was wearing a bra and who was not. I was not. If you are wondering if it was cooler to be on the wearing or not wearing a bra list, it was one million times cooler to be wearing a bra. Even though I absolutely didn’t need one, I began to feel like unless I owned a bra, I was somehow only a girl on a technicality.

  I didn’t even fully understand what a bra was for; what inherent mechanical problem breasts posed for which bras offered a solution. Part of this was because I rarely saw my mother’s bras. My mother is tall and very lithe, so her bra needs were not vast. She wasn’t one of those ladies from a Tennessee Williams film adaptation who has her bras perched to dry on a shower rod like rare birds, or flung dramatically around a couch. A bra appearance was like the fleeting sight of a mouse in the house. She had maybe three of them and they were all plain white cotton.