As I walked toward group, I prayed, “Please kill the Buddha.”
9
Everyone else in group got a special sex assignment. Colonel Sanders got a prescription to rub his wife’s back without pressuring her for sex. Patrice got a prescription involving sex toys. Carlos had been advised to get naked and hold his fiancé, Bruce, for ten minutes every night. Marty was supposed to invite his live-in lady friend, Janeen, to take a shower with him. Dr. Rosen renewed Rory’s prescription to have her husband go down on her while she put her Adderall between her toes.
I listened and burned with envy. “I want a sex assignment but I don’t have a partner.”
Dr. Rosen rubbed his hands together as if he’d been waiting weeks for me to ask. “I suggest you bookend your masturbation with Patrice.”
I rubbed my temples and squeezed my eyes shut. “Do what?”
“Call up Patrice.” Dr. Rosen pretended to dial a phone and then held his hand like a receiver. “Say, ‘Hi, Patrice. I’m going to masturbate now. I’m calling because I want your support with my sexuality. It’s worked really well with my food and now I’d like to work on my sexuality.’ Then, when you’re done, call her back and say, ‘Thank you for your support.’ ”
“No.” I stood up. “Absolutely not.”
Intellectually, I understood there was nothing wrong with masturbation—Dr. Ruth taught me that. Pleasure was nothing to be ashamed of. In theory. But in practice, I could manage pleasure only in secret, hidden under the covers in the dark of night. I had never—and could never—talk about self-pleasure. The ghosts of all the nuns who told me that sex was only for procreation with my Catholic husband haunted me. In sixth-grade health class Sister Callahan spent several awkward minutes explaining that masturbation was a “grave sin because each wasted sperm could have been a new life.” Sister Callahan didn’t mention the possibility that girls might engage in such behavior, which seemed like proof that girls didn’t—and shouldn’t—ever masturbate. It was unspeakable.
The technical term for my condition was sexual anorexia. The anorexia most people are familiar with is someone who severely restricts her food. A sexual anorexic like me starved herself of sex by chasing unavailable alcoholics, who usually had girlfriends, who did not or could not be intimate, or by forcing herself to have sex without any attraction to her partner. The label intrigued me—as a chubby kid, I’d longed for a sleek label like “anorexic.” Now I wasn’t sure I loved the label, but it made me feel less alone. If there was a name for me and my condition, that meant I wasn’t the only one.
There was no way I could “bookend my masturbation.” I stared at Dr. Rosen and shook my head.
“But you call me about your apples,” Rory said.
“This is different.”
“How so?” Dr. Rosen said.
“You can’t see the difference between apples and masturbation?” My neck contracted into my clavicle at the thought of calling Patrice. Calling Patrice about that was lighting up a flare: Guess what, world! I’m wacking off! It violated the Catholic Church’s anti-onanism rules and my mother’s don’t-tell-people-your-business rule. The prescription was outrageous, perverted, impossible.
“Do you want my take?” Dr. Rosen said. “Eating ten apples after dinner—”
“I’m down to four—”
“Okay, four, but eating those apples wasn’t pleasurable. You wanted it to stop. Stopping a negative behavior is radically different than getting support for starting a pleasurable one. You are more resistant to pleasure. That’s why I’m giving you this prescription—”
“Which I cannot do.” I should quit group.
“You have other choices,” Dr. Rosen said.
Rory tapped my foot with the tip of her boot and suggested I ask for something gentler. I took a deep breath. Was I going to drown in despair or was I willing to ask for what I needed?
“Can you dial it down?” I whispered.
Dr. Rosen smiled and paused. “How about this? You bookend taking a bath with Patrice.”
“No requirement that I do or touch or rub anything while I’m in there?”
“Strictly utilitarian.”
“Done.” My whole body relaxed. I could take a goddamn bath. I was back in the game.
Dr. Rosen stared at me.
“What?” I asked.
“When was the last time you told someone that you weren’t ready for what they were asking you to do?”
Senior year of high school, I dated Mike D., a basketball star who smoked pot daily. He was my first real boyfriend, and I wanted desperately to be a good girlfriend, whatever that meant. Before me, Mike dated a cheerleader who, apparently, gave amazing head. When he hinted he missed her deep throat, I felt summoned to suck his dick. But at seventeen, I’d only visited first base briefly, three years earlier. Blow jobs were third-base territory, and my ignorance about them made my throat constrict with panic. Where would my hands go? How long would I have his penis in my mouth? What would it taste like? When he pushed my head under the blankets, I shoved my fear down my throat and into my belly. When I tried to come up for air to ask for a performance review, Mike pushed my head back down. I’ve revisited my sweaty head under that blanket thousands of times, always wondering why I felt bereft of choices, words, and the right to lift the blanket and take a breath. Or to not suck his dick in the first place. I did it because I wanted to be a good girlfriend and good girlfriends say yes.
In college, my roommate Cherie graduated a semester ahead of me. Free-spirited Cherie’s postcollege plans entailed couch surfing in Colorado until she started graduate school. When she asked me to drive her Jetta to Denver after graduation, I should have said no. I was supposed to be in Dallas visiting family and working a part-time mall job. Driving Cherie, her bike, and her duffel bag full of tie-dyed shirts to the Mile High City was inconvenient and expensive. But I said yes because the thought of saying no made my stomach clench. I wanted to be a good friend. Good friends say yes.
Before moving to Chicago for graduate school, I got a job at Express in my college town, selling skorts to sorority girls. I got promoted to assistant manager after a few months. My supervisor often showed up to work with long, bloody scratches on her forearms—either from a feral cat or a serious self-harm habit—and would ask me to cover for her several times a month. Saying yes meant I had to work ten hours without a break—assistant managers were not allowed to leave the store unattended, even to run over to Chick-Fil-A for a snack. My supervisor would be at home engaging in mysterious physical behavior, and I’d be asking a stock boy to cover the registers so I could pee. It never occurred to me to say no, though. I wanted to be a good employee, and good employees say yes.
Yes was who I thought I was supposed to be as a girlfriend, friend, employee. A girl, and then a woman, in the world. When someone asked me to jump I prepared to leap without thinking about whether I was hungry or knew the route to Denver or knew what the fuck to do with a penis in my mouth.
I told Dr. Rosen I wasn’t in the habit of saying no. He asked if I knew what that cost me. I shook my head. Costs? People liked me because I was a Yes Girl. If I went around saying no, then what? They’d be mad at me. Disappointed. Unhappy. I couldn’t tolerate that. That kind of audacity belonged to other people, like guys and hot women with no emotional baggage.
“If you can’t say no in relationships, then you can’t be intimate,” Dr. Rosen said.
“Say that again.” I held still so that each word would seep inside me, past my skin and muscle, and settle in my bones.
“If you can’t say no, there can be no intimacy.”
People said no to me all the time, and I still loved them. Is this what people were learning in high school when I was bingeing on Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies and making mixtapes with Lionel Richie and Whitney Houston songs?
* * *
As my old claw-footed bathtub filled with sudsy, lavender-scented water, I left Patrice a voice mail completing part one of the “
bookend.” I’d purposely dialed her cell phone because she turned it off at night. I held my breath as I slid into the nearly scalding water. The bubbles made tiny rustling sounds. I leaned my head against the hard porcelain edge and exhaled. My breath hitched—a hint I might cry, but I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head. I didn’t want to blubber through this—I wanted to be a normal fucking woman taking a bath to relax. After two minutes, I wanted to get out. I’d filled the prescription, swallowed the medicine. Now I had things to do, like make three phone calls to three different group members.
But then I put my palms over my heart and took a deep breath. Tears welled in my eyes, and I let them come. What I felt was relief. Intense, cascading, pure relief. No might belong to me too.
Everybody else said no. My college roommate Kat was blunt, sassy, and secure. In college, she told a handsy Phi Delt to “fuck off” when he asked her for a blow job. There was no fist of anxiety in her stomach telling her she had to give him head. At age five, my headstrong brother had an hour-long stand-off with my parents when they insisted he eat a bite of tuna sandwich. He won the tuna showdown while I forced myself to eat every awful, mayonnaise-filled bite, crust and all. Carlos pushed back on Dr. Rosen insisting he was never going to bring in his guitar and sing for the group.
Meanwhile, I considered quitting group so I wouldn’t have to look at Dr. Rosen and say, “Nope. I can’t bookend my masturbation with Patrice.”
I cupped water into my hands and let it drain through my fingers. I’d always hated baths. What’s so relaxing about submerging in water when there’s nothing to stare at except a tiled wall or parts of my body beneath the suds? I hated looking at my body. I always ended up picking it apart—unshaven legs, unpedicured toes, unperky breasts, untoned stomach, and unsmooth thighs. All that scrutiny and shame drowned whatever pleasure I was supposed to be deriving from taking a bath, the pastime that was supposedly beloved by all womankind.
I still saw those things—the chipped red polish, the hairy legs, the lumpy flesh. And I still felt the heat of shame prickling my skin. But alongside it, a spark of something lighter and cooler chased the tail of the shame, and I had the barest sliver of a notion that I could have a different relationship with and to my body and then maybe with other people.
My fingertips pruned as the water cooled to room temperature. A shiver ran down my neck as I sat up. I wrapped myself in a pink-and-white striped beach towel and sat on the edge of the bathtub.
I dialed Patrice’s cell. “I did it. Good night.”
I called Rory to report my food.
I called Marty to collect my affirmation. “You’ve got what it takes, kiddo,” he said in Groucho Marx accent.
I laughed. My neck and shoulder muscles were warm and loose from the bath. I had a woozy, half-asleep feeling. “I love you,” I said, cupping the phone with my still-pruned fingers. The words just slipped out.
“Of course you do, sweetie. I love you too. Isn’t this fun?” I smiled. Fun was not quite the word I would have used for the warm expansive feeling spreading across my chest, but I couldn’t think of better one.
In bed, I had a vision: My group members’ hands tucked under me like in the childhood game Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. They worked together to invoke whatever spirits would help lift me up, up, up. I could feel Dr. Rosen’s hands cradling my head, Carlos and the Colonel at my shoulders, Patrice and Rory on each hip, and Marty at my feet. I did love them. For their presence, their effort, and their strong hands on my body. They were etching themselves into my life.
It thrilled me, made me want to bawl, and it scared me to death.
10
Fat tears rolled down Marty’s face one spring Tuesday. There was a silver tin in his lap, the size and shape of a small drum or a container of Williams-Sonoma Christmas cookies. He said he was sick of all the death. He didn’t want it anymore.
This was good work for Marty. He appeared congenial and functional on the outside, but we all knew about his stash of cyanide. Dr. Rosen mentioned it almost every session and urged him to bring it to group.
“It looks like you’re ready to let that go,” Dr. Rosen said, gesturing at the tin.
“What’s in there?” the Colonel asked.
Marty held the tin up to his heart. “The remains of a child.”
I dug my heel into the carpet and scooted my chair back. Babies were supposed to be fat-cheeked and loud—cooing, squalling, crying. They weren’t supposed to sealed up in a tin can.
Marty explained that the baby, who died when he was less than a month old, had been the son of one of his first patients in his psychiatry practice. The patient had asked Marty to keep the remains years ago while he worked through his grief, but then the patient died. Now Marty was asking Dr. Rosen what to do with this memento mori.
Dr. Rosen loved to stir up everyone’s feelings around death. If you made a pie chart of group topics, the two biggest pieces were sex and death. And if there was a trauma connected to a death experience, then Dr. Rosen would nudge you about it on at least a bimonthly basis. Rory had to talk about the Holocaust every other time she told a story, even if the decimation of European Jews in the 1940s had seemingly nothing to do with the late fees on her Citibank card. When Patrice struggled with a complex issue at work, Dr. Rosen pivoted right to her brother’s suicide. Naturally, he nudged me to discuss the accident in Hawaii regularly. Usually, I backed away and reminded him to focus on my sex life, not my great misfortune of witnessing a death on a trip to the beach when I was thirteen.
Marty handed the tin to Dr. Rosen, who inspected it and said something in Hebrew. Dr. Rosen told Marty that if he was ready to let go of his preoccupation with death, he’d be able to embrace his life more fully, and he’d grow closer to his longtime partner, Janeen.
A somber silence fell over the group. A wave of feeling swelled in my chest—memory flashes from Hawaii—but I pushed it down; I was convinced it was just sadness I was manufacturing to match the group mood.
Meanwhile, I had an urge to cross my legs in defiance. Where was Dr. Rosen’s magic trick for me? What had I stashed in my closet that I could bring to group and voilà! I’d be ready for intimacy and closeness? Marty and I had started on the same day, and now he was lapping me. I’d come to Dr. Rosen wishing for death because I was chronically and fundamentally alone, but Marty had cyanide pills in his bedside table. And somehow he was leaping forward? I let the jealousy and anger rise, but said nothing.
With only fifteen minutes left in the session, Dr. Rosen turned his attention to Marty’s tin. “Pick someone to hold that for you.” I gazed at the splotchy carpet as Marty scanned the room. Surely he would pick Patrice, the Mama Bear of the group.
“Christie.”
Holy flaming Freud balls. I narrowed my eyes at Marty, afraid and annoyed that he picked me to hold a baby who never got to grow up, whose flesh and bones were now sealed up in a silver tin. I scowled at Dr. Rosen for orchestrating this whole morbid affair. I wanted to stand up and beat my head with my fists and scream until my throat was shredded: “I’m not here for death and bones and ashes! I’m here for life! I WANT TO LIVE!”
How did it make sense that I, a random woman from Marty’s therapy group, was suddenly the custodian of this tin? Didn’t the baby deserve to be in the hands of someone who loved him or his parents dearly? The randomness was unbearable.
Dr. Rosen directed Marty to look at me and ask if I would take the tin. When Marty and I locked eyes, I saw his pain but couldn’t bear it. I turned to Dr. Rosen.
“How about I take Marty’s cyanide pills?”
“I don’t think so,” said Dr. Rosen. A pause. Then, “You don’t have to do that, you know.”
“What?”
“Make a joke when you’re scared or upset or angry. Deflect.”
“How’s this? Fuck you, Dr. Rosen.” Dr. Rosen rubbed his heart with his palm, a gesture I’d seen before. He once explained that when someone shared their anger with him directly,
it was a sign of love that he folded into his heart as a blessing.
“Better.”
“Okay,” I whispered, chastened. I asked Marty what the baby’s name was.
“Jeremiah.”
I couldn’t abandon Baby Jeremiah. Some part of that beloved child was still in that tin, and I wouldn’t turn my back on him. I was selfish and self-absorbed, but I was not a total monster. My outstretched arms reached for the tin.
Dr. Rosen passed the tin to Patrice, who handed it to me. I took it into my hands and held it perfectly still. I did not want to feel the contents inside. As I lowered the tin into my lap, I imagined it filled with tiny seashells. I tried really hard not to think about bones. An image of me rocking and sobbing, while cradling the tin, flashed through my mind, but a plume of anger at Dr. Rosen snuffed out the tender grief.
“Question,” I said to Dr. Rosen. “Marty gets closer to Janeen if he lets Jeremiah go, but what happens to me if I take him?”
After uttering a few mmms and umms at the ceiling, he said, “For you, these ashes represent your attachment to this group. You need the group’s support to lean into death, to stop running from it.” He leaned forward as if he was afraid I couldn’t hear him. “You want to move forward? Start feeling.”
“I don’t know.” My shaking hands gripped the tin.
“You don’t know what?”
“How to do it. Or if I can.”
“Mamaleh, it’s already happening.”
Two weeks later, Marty pulled out an envelope and presented it to Dr. Rosen.
“My pills,” Marty said. He poured the yellow disks into his palm and offered them to Dr. Rosen, who stood up and said, “We’re going to have a funeral.” We followed Dr. Rosen to the small bathroom just outside the group room. Rory held Marty’s hand until he was ready to let them go. Dr. Rosen announced that he would now recite the Mourner’s Kaddish.
“What are we mourning?” I asked.
Group Page 7
