Group

by Christie Tate

  Sam hadn’t made a reservation and offered no suggestions about where to go. An awkward silence hung between us until I suggested a Cuban place on Irving Park near my apartment. As we drove, the only sound in the car was my voice giving him directions. Had I made up the chemistry I felt on the phone?

  At Café 28, Sam left his wool Burberry scarf wrapped around his neck and was curt with the waitstaff. By the time our food came, it was clear this was going nowhere. The disappointment made me want to smash my fist into the stupid potatoes and hurl my salmon across the room. I’d bought lipstick and a sweater for this. I’d been going to group, calling Rory, calling Marty, and “letting the group in” as Dr. Rosen suggested. Where were the results? Why was Sam so remote and uninterested?

  We rode home in silence so complete it was nuclear. Sam did not walk me to the door; he did not cut the engine. Maybe he stuck his hand out for a closing handshake, but I’d turned my back on him after thanking him for dinner. When I walked into my apartment, the clock read eight fifty.

  My date hadn’t even lasted an hour.

  I dialed Dr. Rosen’s number; his was number one, the valedictorian of my speed dial. To his voice mail, I announced my conclusion. “Therapy isn’t working. Please call me tomorrow. I’m sinking.” I paced in circles around my apartment, wondering why Sam hadn’t given me a chance. I shared the humiliation with Rory when I called with my food report, and Marty when I called for my affirmation.

  “It’s not your fault the date sucked,” they promised. “Some dates just suck.”

  The next day I did something I’d never done in my entire educational career: Skipped class to huddle under the covers and stare into the void. I didn’t watch TV, read a book, or review any notes for class. Around noon, my closest friend from law school, Clare, left a voice mail. “Hey, no one can remember the last time you didn’t show up for class. Call me.”

  The familiar stuckness I’d felt most of my life shut out every other thought, every other sensation. It felt like it would always be there, obstructing my breath, my blood, my desire. Stuck, stuck, stuck. Therapy was supposed to change things, open me up. A cry was forming somewhere in my chest, like a hurricane gathering force way off the coast of Florida. The stuckness felt like my fault. How would this ever change? I sank into self-hate as I counted ridges on my popcorn ceiling. What was the point of those Tuesday sessions if I was going to remain this stuck?

  At three fifteen, Dr. Rosen’s number glowed on my phone’s screen.

  “Can you help me?” I said instead of hello.

  “I hope so.”

  “Why was my date such a disaster?”

  “Who says it was a disaster?

  “It was fifty minutes long. I didn’t even go to school today—I’m in bed.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “For what?”

  “When was the last time you made this much space for your feelings?”

  “Um.” He knew the answer was never.

  “You deserve space to feel.”

  “But what should I do?”

  “What were you doing before I called?”

  “Staring at the ceiling.”

  “Do that. And come to group tomorrow.”

  “That’s it?”

  He laughed. “Mamaleh, that’s plenty.”

  It didn’t feel like enough. But my body unclenched when I got off the phone. Rational thoughts filled my head: Sam was one of thousands of men in Chicago. There was nothing wrong with me. It was one lame date. Big deal. It wasn’t a reason to slip into catatonia.

  In group, Dr. Rosen affirmed that all I had to do was keep coming to sessions. To him, the ninety minutes I sat in the circle with him and my group mates were the be-all and end-all of emotional transformation. To him, they were potent enough to score my still-smooth heart. To him, it was enough.

  Not to me. I wanted a new prescription. Something bold and hard. Something that would require all my courage. Dr. Rosen wasn’t taking my distress seriously. He didn’t understand how it felt in my body. I was a window painted shut, a jar lid that wouldn’t budge no matter how much you banged it on the counter.

  I had to show him.

  * * *

  Andrew Barlee called me out of the blue. I remembered him from a holiday party as a quiet guy with lapis-blue eyes who laughed at my jokes. I agreed to meet him for brunch. Over eggs and potatoes, I studied his rough hands and his haircut that was almost a mullet. Did I like him? The gut answer was no. We had nothing in common, there was zero chemistry, and I couldn’t stop wondering about his unironic eighties haircut. But I pushed that no down below my ribs with a list of his positive traits: He was kind, solvent, sober, and interested in me. So what if he didn’t like to read? So what if he didn’t seem interested in current events that didn’t involve the Bears’ prospects for the Super Bowl? So what if my body convulsed with resistance when he grabbed my hand on the way to his car?

  Andrew offered to make dinner for me at his place for our second date. On the drive to his new condo in Rogers Park, the Friday-afternoon traffic crawled down Western. Frustrated after sitting through two green lights without moving forward an inch, I pounded on the steering wheel and screamed at the top of my lungs. I screamed so long and so loudly that my voice sounded hoarse for the next two days. I didn’t want to go to Andrew’s house, but I’d made myself say yes, because saying no meant I subconsciously wanted to be alone. Andrew was a nice guy! I screamed at myself. Give him a chance! How could I claim to be desperately lonely and then decline a date with a nice, sober man?

  After a tour of his bright, tasteful one-bedroom apartment, Andrew grilled two chicken breasts and emptied a bag of lettuce into a ceramic bowl after dousing it with Hidden Valley Ranch. I smiled at his earnest efforts, even though my stomach was churning with that no that longed to rise up and fly out of my mouth.

  We sat on his couch, balancing our plates on our knees and making polite small talk about his work and my family in Texas. When I looked at him head-on, I couldn’t tell he had a mullet, but making conversation felt like bone grinding on bone—our words didn’t flow naturally. Neither of us was witty or charming. This wasn’t what I wanted: Dry-ass chicken breasts with a nice-enough guy whom I could barely talk to.

  When we were done eating, I panicked. There was no more small talk inside me, so I scooted toward him and put my lips on his, hoping that kissing might spark something—something that might make me want to be there with him.

  Andrew’s eyes widened in surprise and then excitement. He kissed me back. I turned into a mechanical doll with no heat, no heart. I wanted to go home and hated myself for it. I also hated myself for rejecting Andrew for dumb reasons like his haircut. No wonder I was alone; I was a bitch. The no pulsed in my gut, but I pushed it down. Here was a nice guy sitting right in front of me, and if I didn’t like him or wasn’t into him, that was my own fault.

  “Do you have a condom?” I said. Maybe I could fuck my way out of this stuckness. Maybe sex would make me feel an attraction to him.

  I still had on my sweater, bra, underwear, jeans, socks, and boots. Andrew’s red flannel shirt was tucked tightly into his belted jeans. His shoes were still tied. Moving from a chaste ninety-second make-out session to intercourse made as much sense as robbing the 7-Eleven on the corner. But between us, we lacked the skills or desire to slow down and figure out what the hell was actually happening.

  There was no music. No mood lighting. Zero ambience, unless you counted the occasional wafts of charred chicken. Andrew pulled down his pants and slipped the condom on. I shimmied my jeans over my hips.

  He moved on top of me. I bit my lower lip and stared at his ceiling. Poisonous thoughts ran through my head: This is all you get. You will never feel anything. You are broken. Faulty score. When I blinked, tears spilled out of both eyes. I held the sob back and composed the story I would tell in group: Look what I did. Do you get it now? This is serious.

  Andrew struggled to get inside me. More stuckness
. I tilted my hips to give him a better angle and speed things up. In three or four thrusts it was over. I felt nothing outside the thrum of self-hate. My breath never changed rhythm.

  His phone rang as he was finishing up. Emergency at work. Andrew yanked his pants up. “Sorry, but I have to go.” I didn’t even know what his job was.

  Back in my car, I dialed Dr. Rosen’s number. I told his answering machine about the chicken breasts, the no in my gut, the sex that I instigated. “I tried to tell you. Please hear me.”

  Four days later in group: My eyes locked with Dr. Rosen’s. My fists were tight with rage. How many more guys did I have to fuck for him to take me seriously? What would it take to wipe that smirk off his face?

  “You think I can’t see you.” Dr. Rosen said.

  “Do you get that I’m in a lot of pain?”

  “Christie, I get that you are in a lot of pain.”

  “Can you help me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do I need to do?”

  “You’re doing it.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “It hurts!” I banged my fists on the arms of the chair. “I hurt.”

  “I know.”

  “I never want to fuck like that again.”

  “You never have to fuck like that again.”

  “This isn’t enough.”

  “Christie, it is enough.”

  How could it possibly be enough? The night with Andrew was a disaster on every level, and it was my fault. Yet I was the one who had a high-powered therapist and five supportive group members supposedly steering my life in a better direction.

  “What’s the point in all of this? The brass ring is just more shitty sex and disconnection.”

  “You’re not at the brass ring yet,” Dr. Rosen said. “But you’re on your way.”

  I swept my arm around the room. “How come they’re all ready and I’m not?” Every other person in group had a significant other next to whom they fell asleep every night. “How long is this going to take?” I imagined myself growing old and feeble as I waited for the miracle of group therapy to transform my life.

  “I don’t know how long it’s going to take. Can you celebrate the steps you’ve taken so far?”

  No, I couldn’t. I didn’t want to celebrate until I knew how much was left to do. The realization that there was no shortcut to the mental health I was working toward crushed my spirit. I’d ceded to the group my isolation and my secret eating rituals. Those were my long-cherished coping mechanisms. Now, for every interaction, including every single date, I had to show up without my primary defenses, which sounded healthy in theory, but what it felt like that morning in group was a stunning, irrevocable defeat. There would be no more solace in apple binges, no retreats to my hermetically sealed life. There would be the bright light of Dr. Rosen’s and my group mates’ gaze illuminating all my deficits, but no secret cave to stash my feelings. So I had them right there in my chair: I wept for how lonely I felt and how deeply afraid I was that my life would never truly change or, worse, that true change would ask more of me than I could give. And had the session not ended at nine, I’m certain I could have cried my way to the lunch hour.

  8

  “You should tell the group about the Smoker,” Carlos said.

  On the elevator ride up to group, I’d told Carlos about the Smoker—so named because he loved his cigarettes and because he was smoking hot—my newest crush at law school. He had a girlfriend, but she was never around. Her name was Winter, and she was a waitress. I’d hoped that she was ugly or dirty or mean, but when I finally saw her serving pitchers at John Barleycorn, I couldn’t deny that she was a willowy, fresh-faced beauty who offered a genuine smile to all of her customers.

  The Smoker and I had struck up a friendship because we both spent hours in the computer lab, typing up our notes between classes. In our first encounter, he asked me to watch his books while he stepped out to smoke. Of course I said yes. I loved his five o’clock shadow, his smoky-smelling sweater, the shy way he looked away when he laughed.

  “The Smoker?” Dr. Rosen cocked his head.

  “This guy at school. Has a girlfriend. Smokes like a chimney. Drinks heavily. I’m falling in love with him.”

  “He’s unavailable,” Patrice said.

  Dr. Rosen paused, covered his mouth with his hand, shifted his position, and then put his hands on the arms of his chair. Finally he said, “Next time you’re with him, tell him the truth.”

  “Which is?”

  “That you’re a cocktease.”

  I looked at Carlos. Was Dr. Rosen for real? Everyone in the circle shook their heads, like No, Dr. Rosen, she can’t say that. Rory blushed from behind her hands.

  “You want me to tell the guy I have the hots for that I’m a ‘cocktease’? Then what?” Wasn’t the Smoker the tease? He was the one flirting with me despite his apple-cheeked girlfriend. If you would have asked me before this session if Dr. Rosen, my middle-aged psychiatrist with the rubber-soled brown shoes who knew nothing of pop culture (“Who’s Bono?” he once asked), knew the term cocktease, I would have sworn he didn’t. Now, as part of my therapeutic treatment, he was telling me to drop it into conversation with the guy I wanted to bed.

  “We’ll find out.”

  Two nights later, I sat in a speeding yellow taxi going west on Lake Street with the Smoker and his affable sidekick, Bart, a jokey kid from our law school class. The air was sticky but the sky was clear. A sliver of moon smirked at me. We rolled the windows down to cut the stench of the tree-shaped potpourri dangling from the rearview mirror. I leaned out the window and turned my face to the inky sky and its cheerful moon. A laugh caught in my throat—I held it for a few seconds and then let it out. Over the pulsing music, I sat upright, squared my shoulders, and turned toward the Smoker, who was sitting between me and Bart.

  “I’m a total cocktease.” The “total” I added as a personal flourish to prove I wasn’t a mindless Rosen automaton.

  The Smoker stopped chewing his postcigarette gum and froze. Then a smile spread across the horizon of his beautiful face. He kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. My skin tingled as I watched him take in my words. I wanted to wrap my legs around him and rock myself against him and his perfectly frayed Levi’s.

  Bart craned his head around the Smoker’s chest and peered over at me.

  “Say what?”

  “You heard me,” I said, turning my head toward the window.

  “No, I didn’t,” Bart said.

  “Then why are you so determined to get me to say it again—”

  “Because—”

  “Because you heard me the first time.”

  “Damn. You crazy, girl.” Bart’s cackle was picked up by the wind, and it dissolved into the night, right along with my pride.

  The Smoker kept smiling and drumming his fingers on his long, ropy thighs. Mortification slowly set in as I realized the Smoker wasn’t going to make a move on me. He would hang out with me and Bart for another hour and then go home and slip between the covers to wait for Winter’s shift to end so they could fuck until dawn. I focused on the buildings we whizzed by along Milwaukee Avenue. Furniture stores, taco joints, Myopic Books. People waiting in line to hear a band at Subterranean. None of them knew what I’d said. Below the humiliation I felt the bud of something else: pride that I’d done what Dr. Rosen said. Saying those words had been a high-dive plunge, requiring all the courage I could summon. Now that a few minutes had passed, I realized that saying those words stitched me closer to Dr. Rosen and my group. And in four days I would sit in the circle and recount this night during which I had triumphed over my nerves—and better judgment—to follow Dr. Rosen’s advice.

  When we got to the Bucktown bar, we found that there was no room on its outdoor patio, so the Smoker lit up a cigarette on the sidewalk. Bougainvillea spilled over the fence and smelled faintly sweet.

  “Want one?” he asked, holding out his
pack of Marlboros.

  Oh, how I wanted to say yes so we could have a perfect moment together sucking in and puffing out like beautiful people in the movies, people with no mental health issues, no sexual hang-ups, no eating disorders, no worms. If I said yes, he would lean in close and light my cigarette. His smell—the smoke, the gum, the day’s residue—would become part of my memory.

  But I couldn’t make myself take one. Dr. Rosen had recently explained to Rory, when she mentioned how much she missed cigarettes, that when you smoke you are inhaling toxic self-hatred.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  The following Tuesday, I rode the Red Line train downtown before group as the sun inched over the tree line. I’d been up since four—despite calling Marty for an affirmation the night before—and decided to head downtown to sit in a coffee shop.

  I nursed a cup of tea and stared out the window on Madison Street. A bright yellow backpack—like one you’d expect Curious George’s handler to wear—caught my eye. The man wearing it walked a half beat slower than everyone else, as if he were touring an English garden. He looked shorter than average—barely my height—and his lips were moving slightly like he was having a conversation with himself. I took him for a tourist and fished the tea bag out of my cup. Not until he was almost out of view did it hit me: Dr. Rosen.

  It definitely was him—that untamed hair, those slightly hunched shoulders. How was he so puny? In group, he seemed so huge—larger than life—as I begged him for prescriptions, solutions, and answers.

  I watched until he disappeared down Madison, taking his sweet time, mumbling to himself.

  Why did he walk so slowly? He was headed to work—to my group session—not on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje. Why the mumbling? Where’d he get that god-awful backpack?

  By the time I’d finished my tea and headed to group, I faced the harder question: Was my therapist a complete freak? Why did I take his advice on what to say to the Smoker? Why did I give that strange little man so much power?