The Girlfriend Curse

by Valerie Frankel

  “What was going on back at the Federal?” he asked. “Anything I should know about?”

  She spat out the smoke, and started coughing in great wracking heaves. Grabbing at the bar for relief, she picked up her glass and drank, forgetting that it was vodka.

  Albert came rushing out to the bar, hearing the commotion.

  He asked, “What have you done to her?”

  Linus, who was whacking Peg on the back, said, “It was your cheap cigar!”

  “I’m fine,” she sputtered. And she was. In a minute, her face returned to a healthier shade of green. She drank the glass of water that appeared on the bar.

  Albert asked, “Well, she can’t smoke a cigar or drink vodka. I don’t know, Linus. I may have to take back what I said about her.”

  “You don’t like me anymore?” she asked.

  “I like you just fine,” he said.

  “Then, what?”

  Linus said quickly, “He’s changed his mind about leaving his wife for you.”

  Albert looked momentarily baffled, then he laughed loudly, drawing looks from diners and the bartender.

  Chapter 20

  “I’ve listened to the tape,” said Wilma. “I’m very disappointed in both of you.”

  Peg and Ben sat side by side in rockers on the back porch. Wilma scowled at them from her perch on the porch railing. She bounced the clipboard on her hand, making little thwack sounds.

  “It was Peg’s fault!” said Ben. “She made me say those things.”

  Peg said, “I thought we were getting individual evaluation sessions.”

  “Occasionally, it’s more productive to do them in tandem,” said Wilma.

  Ben said, “I’m not comfortable being in the same room with her.”

  “A porch is not a room,” clarified Peg.

  “I’m not comfortable on the same porch with Peg.”

  Peg wasn’t exactly comfortable with him either. Nor with Wilma, seducer of Ray, betrayer of Linus.

  “The tape disappointed me,” repeated Wilma. “But not for the reasons you might think.”

  Peg said, “You mean, you weren’t upset that Ben called you the slut of Manshire?”

  “I didn’t say that!” shouted Ben, his face reddening.

  “In several British studies on the benefits of physical contact, heterosexual men reported an increase in self-esteem, confidence and relaxation if they received ten skin-to-skin touches from a member of the opposite sex per day.”

  Ben said, “You stroked my knee to boost my confidence?”

  “Ten times a day,” said Wilma. She flipped back a few pages on her clipboard, and showed Ben a chart. “I got you only seven times last Wednesday, though. Just five times yesterday.”

  “So that explains his abysmal self-esteem last night,” said Peg.

  “Could be,” said Wilma in all seriousness.

  Ben said, “You weren’t flirting with me?”

  Wilma said, “I don’t flirt, Ben.”

  “You touch Luke more than ten times a day,” he said.

  “But who’s counting?” asked Peg.

  “I touch Luke exactly ten times a day,” said Wilma, showing them the chart. “But each instance was sustained, since Luke suffers from paralytic shyness.”

  He hadn’t looked too shy locking lips with Tracy last night, thought Peg. When she and Linus got back from Poule au Dent around ten, Tracy and Luke were still going at it. They sat next to each other at breakfast, too. Peg tried to catch secret glances between Ray and Wilma, but they were too sneaky to let on.

  “What about Ray?” Peg asked Wilma. “How does he figure in your touch chart?”

  Wilma said, “He gets the standard dose. Not sustained, though. His confidence is already at a high level.”

  “Did he get any extra touching last night?” asked Peg. “Any post-church services from you?”

  Wilma smiled at Peg, hiding nothing, and said, “Maybe we should have individual evaluations.”

  Ben protested, “Can we just get on with it?”

  But the two women were in a staring contest. Not blinking, nor breathing. Not until a mosquito flew into Peg’s eye.

  Wilma said, “Ben, your assignment was to engage Peg in conversation, to learn about her, ask questions.”

  “I did,” he whined.

  “Tell me what you learned,” said Wilma.

  “She’s from New York.”

  “Good.”

  “She gossips.”

  “Yes,” agreed Wilma.

  “She eats really fast,” said Ben. “And she might be an alcoholic.”

  “Anything else?”

  “She’s a florist,” he said suddenly, as if pulling a gem from the quarry.

  Peg groaned. “I am not a goddamn florist. I’m an interior landscape designer,” she said.

  “Isn’t that funny,” said Wilma.

  “I’m not laughing,” said Peg.

  “I mean your wording,” said the aspiring psychologist. “One could say that I’m also an interior landscape designer.”

  Peg shook her head. “You can’t stop yourself, can you? The metawhoring.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Forget it,” said Peg.

  Ben said, “Can we please get back to the evaluation?”

  “You get failing marks, Ben,” said Wilma. “Ninety percent of the conversation on this tape is you airing out your insecurities. When you did ask Peg a question, it was only a launching pad for you to talk about yourself. You sat at the restaurant for an hour, and all you managed to learn about her is where she’s from and what she does for a living. Most people get that far in three minutes.”

  Ben broke out in a sweat (it was beastly hot), and seemed to shrivel and curl into himself like a pork rind. Peg actually felt sorry for the guy. But Wilma was absolutely right. Ben had performed terribly. Criticism does hurt, but in the right circumstances, it could also help.

  “Don’t look so smug,” said Wilma to Peg. “You were supposed to resist your inclination to steer conversation toward the erotic, and the first chance you got, you asked Ben to talk about sexual attraction. In case you weren’t clear, that is within the realm of the erotic, Peg. You also fail.”

  Peg flashed to a phone conversation she’d had with one of her exes, Oleg. She’d pulled a muscle and couldn’t run—could barely walk—and was trapped alone in her apartment without alcohol, pain killers or marijuana. She bitched about it to Oleg, finally telling him she’d have to distract herself by thinking about what she’d do to him later. He said (in his Russian accent), “This is why I love you, Peg. If you can’t alter your mind, you’ve got only one thing on it.”

  Was he right? Did Peg have a one-track mind? She defended herself to Wilma. “I was trying to help Ben.”

  “Help him by acting as his pimp?” said Wilma. “Do you think about anything besides sex?”

  “I do think of other things,” she said thoughtfully. “But they’re so boring.” A line from a lesser-known John Waters movie. By the horrified look on Wilma’s face, Peg figured she hadn’t gotten the reference.

  “Are men merely sex objects to you?” asked Wilma.

  “Of course not. I have a brother and a father,” she said. “I have male friends.” A lie. “I liked the evaluation much better when we were talking about Ben.”

  “So did I,” he agreed.

  Wilma said, “Let’s go over tonight’s schedule. Ben, you and Gloria are going to Waterbury. Linus has arranged for a private tour of the Ben & Jerry’s factory. You’ll drive.”

  “How’d Linus do that?” asked Peg.

  “Ben Cohen is a friend of Linus’s,” she said.

  Was there anyone in Vermont who wasn’t a friend of Linus (henceforth, FOL)? wondered Peg.

  “How long is the drive?” asked Ben.

  “An hour. That’s a good opportunity to work on your conversation skills.”

  “Will there be a tape recorder in the car?”

  “I’ll be in the backseat,
” said Wilma. “Peg, you and Luke will be going to the U-Pick-Em blueberry farm in Thetford with Linus. I can’t image how you could turn picking blueberries into foreplay.”

  Peg could easily image it. Bending over, putting the plump fruit between her lips. Letting the juice run down her chin…stop it! Stop it now, she commanded herself.

  Wilma said, “Tracy and Ray are going to a sugar shack down the road for a primer on making syrup. They’ll be chaperoned by Stan Crowley, the man who owns the shack, a friend of Linus.”

  “Am I excused?” asked Ben.

  “We need to go over your OCEAN scores first,” said Wilma. “You recall the questionnaire you both filled out last week? That Big Five Personality Test? It tests you for the five major domains of personality: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. That’s where the acronym OCEAN comes from. On Sunday, I ran your answer sheets through the Dartmouth psychology department computers, and have calculated your breakdowns.” Wilma gave Peg and Ben each a sheet of paper, showing their individual OCEAN scores. “Take some time today to read the explanation, and what your percentiles mean.”

  Ben nodded and rushed off with his score sheet. Peg took a quick glance at hers, pleased to see she was in the eighty-sixth percentile in openness (whatever that meant), and then folded her sheet for later study.

  Wilma, interior landscape designer of the mind, asked, “Why are you openly hostile to me?”

  “I’m not hostile,” Peg said, “I’m friendly.”

  “I’m not your enemy.”

  “I saw Ray sneak out of your bedroom last night,” Peg blurted. “Not that I was spying, or eavesdropping.”

  Wilma was shocked at Peg’s accusation. “I was giving him his scores,” she said.

  “I bet he scored,” said Peg.

  “His OCEAN scores. He was in my room for all of three minutes, while I explained the printout. And if you’d stayed in your hiding place for two minutes longer, you’d have seen Gloria come out of my room after Ray, with her score sheet.”

  Peg’s felt herself getting smaller. And smaller, until she was an ant-sized speck. “I’ve made a terrible mistake,” she stammered. “I, uh, I have deep emotional problems. Trust issues. I need therapy. Intensive therapy.”

  Wilma sighed. “You don’t need therapy,” she said. “You need to think before you act. To think before you speak. And stay away from my bedroom door. And stop asking me personal questions about my relationship. Stick to the program, or get out of it.”

  Peg nodded emphatically in her shame. With a tiny voice, she asked, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention this conversation to Linus.”

  “He won’t hear a word of it.”

  “He wouldn’t like it that I was lurking outside your bedroom door. Or that I made assumptions about what you were doing in there with another man. I can see how telling him the story might be embarrassing for you, too. Especially considering that the two of you have been having—”

  “Stop,” said Wilma. “Think. Then speak.”

  Peg stopped. She thought, and then she said, “I’ll see you at lunch.”

  Chapter 21

  Dear Nina,

  Guess what? Just recently discovered that I’m obsessed with sex. And I’m a provocateur, and a Nosey Parker. And I may be an alcoholic. The revelations are coming fast and furious at Inward Bound. My dating challenge this week: undo everything I’ve always done, the main idea being, “If it’s broke, fix it.” For starters, I’m not supposed to think about sex, much less get any. I’m successful at keeping a clean mind for about two hours a day. Nancy Mitford wrote that women obsess about men from the cradle to the grave. Is that the nature of all women, or just me? And Nancy Mitford? (And you?)

  You’d think my continual exposure to nature up here would give me a clue about my own. You’d think. One thing’s for certain: My libidinous attentions (those that refuse to be suppressed) seem to have transferred from Ray Quick to Linus Bester. Linus has the mad mojo. Everyone in town is slavishly devoted to him. He’s got a quality, a charm. I had a fantasy about him. The only explanation: Trying to thwart sexual thought is doing strange things to my brain.

  Must run now. My turn to be sprayed with poison.

  Holistically,

  Peg

  Peg put a stamp on her letter and dropped it in the outgoing mail pile. Then she went into the front yard, where Linus waited with a family-sized can of insect repellent. Apparently, the blueberry field at dusk was a bug utopia.

  Linus sprayed Peg and Luke. When Peg was sufficiently protected, she went back up the women’s suite to say goodbye to her In-mates.

  “Have a great time with Luke!” said Tracy, way too cheerfully. “Not too good a time, of course. Because he’s mine. You stay away from him!” Then Tracy threw herself on her bed. “I’m sorry. This is a first for me. Liking a guy on sight, and then bagging him so easily. I should feel a surge of confidence, but I’m shakier than before. Now there’s something at stake.”

  “Can you fake confidence?” asked Peg. “Practice on Ray at the sugar shack.”

  “I’ll try,” said Tracy.

  “Don’t try,” said Peg. “Do.”

  “Yes, Yoda.”

  Gloria wandered into Tracy’s room from the bathroom. She was a vision in a yellow dress. Stunning. Neither Tracy nor Peg could speak. Gloria said, “I am in the eighty-ninth percentile for neuroticism.”

  That was surprising. According to the sheet, high scores in that domain meant the subject was high-strung, worrisome, tense. “You always seem so calm,” said Peg.

  “I’m overcompensating,” said Gloria. “Or overmedicated.”

  Peg said, “I was in the eighty-sixth percentile for openness.” Curiosity, creativity, willingness to take risks.

  Tracy said, “I hit ninety in conscientiousness. Also above average in agreeableness and extraversion.” Therefore, Tracy was organized and reliable, forgiving and sympathetic, as well as fun-loving and social.

  Peg was below average in agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism. With her high score in openness, that all added up to Peg being an unreliable risk-taking loner who was okay with that. Peg didn’t put too much stock in her results anyway. She’d blown off the last third of the test (low conscientiousness), had resisted taking it in the first place (low agreeableness), didn’t really care what her marks were anyway (low neuroticism), while still being curious how the test worked (high openness).

  Maybe there was something to it, after all.

  “Speaking of Ray, having spent an evening at church with him, I’m baffled by your attraction,” Gloria said to Peg, “He’s like a kid. He spent half the night playing Frisbee with a horde of church children. He ate hot dogs in two bites. There was a crop duster airstrip near the church, and whenever a plane took off, Ray would point and yell at me to look at it.”

  “So he gets excited to see a plane take off.”

  “Fifteen times?”

  Peg said, “Look, I barely know the guy.”

  “You practically slept with him.”

  “Back off, Gloria,” said Peg. “I’m not judging you.”

  In a snarl of anger and guilt (lashing out at Gloria was like stabbing a hamster), Peg went back down to the driveway, where she joined Luke and Linus in his pickup. They drove twenty minutes to the U-Pick-Em blueberry farm in Thetford. The owner was an FOL—a craggy long-haired farmer in a Phish concert jersey, overalls and Wellington boots. While he and Linus had a Vermont Time chat, Peg wandered into the fields. She was awed by the rolling carpet of blueberry bushes, the dark leaves with bulbous, ripe fruit. She smiled at Luke, trying to share her affection for the greenery. But he ignored her, standing ramrod straight, arms at his sides, feet shoulder-width apart. He looked like a statue, concrete running through his veins. Tracy had managed to loosen him up. Peg didn’t see how.

  Linus ambled over and handed the two Inward Bounders large baskets. He told his charges to fill them to the
top. Peg asked, “Aren’t you coming?”

  He shook his head. “You two go ahead.”

  Peg and Luke walked into the field. She’d far prefer filling her basket alongside Linus to the paralytically shy Luke. But the whole point here was to face a dating challenge, not fall back on reliably cheeky conversation with her host.

  Peg started picking, selecting the biggest, purplest, roundest fruit. She held each berry before dropping it in her basket, pinching to test for suppleness. Blue splotches dotted her hands. The earthy eroticism of picking—the satisfying pluck of fruit flesh, the quiver of the leaves underneath—got to her quickly. She glanced at Luke. He plundered mechanically.

  “I like the big ones,” she said to Luke.

  Luke said, “The smaller ones are better.”

  “You think?”

  He nodded. “My grandfather had a blueberry patch.”

  Peg was amazed. They were having a normal conversation. He’d revealed an intimate detail of his personal history. She said, “So you really know how to pick ‘em?” asked Peg.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” he answered tersely.

  Peg wouldn’t say she knew how to pick ‘em either—blueberries or anything. New York City had been like a U-Pick-Em farm for men, where she’d prowled among the rows of ripeness, squeezing and tasting along the way. Ten years of plucking (as it were), and her basket was still empty.

  Luke held up what he considered a perfect pebble-sized fruit. She complimented him on his choice. They talked about fresh produce, the merits of flash-freezing, why grapes were always mushy at the supermarket. Sticking to her assignment, Peg didn’t pry into Luke’s business. In fact, she didn’t bother asking him about his work (he was a professional golfer, she remembered), his background, his romantic history. Ordinarily (or should she say, historically), a conversation devoid of confessions, admissions or revelations would have been tedious for Peg. She was impatient with small talk. With Luke, she knew their conversation would be superficial yet full of subtext (considering the context). Despite the fertile potential, their chat would not build to a satisfying climax. But maybe that wasn’t necessary. Maybe the conversation could be a means in and of itself.