“Why?”
“Because you want a truly intimate relationship.”
“That means fighting?”
“If you aren’t willing to fight, how can you can be intimate?”
Did wrestling with my brother at 6644 Thackeray over the remote control count? I searched my memory for a good old-fashioned throwdown—a slammed door, a fist curled, a throat raw from bellowing. I found nothing. In high school, my friend Denise snuck out of my house so she could have sex with her senior boyfriend at Caruth Park. I didn’t get mad at her for potentially getting me in trouble by fleeing out my window. I swallowed my anger and let her back in when she tapped on the sill. Freshman year of college, my friend Anne invited the guy I was dating over to watch a movie with her while I was at the library. I never said a word. Instead, I moved out two months later. And when my friend Tyra confronted me for leaving her theater performance before her final curtain call, I felt hot plumes of anger shoot up from my stomach to my mouth. She ignored that I brought her flowers, stayed until she’d delivered all of her lines, and left because I had the stomach flu. Part of me wanted to get up in her wounded face and say, real vicious-like, “Could you think about someone else for one hot second?” Instead, I said, “I’m so sorry. I promise I’ll be at the next one.”
When it came to anger, I swallowed, pretended, ignored, withdrew. I knew nothing about fighting.
* * *
“I think you should join the Monday men’s group,” Dr. Rosen said to Carlos one Tuesday morning about thirteen months into my treatment. “It will help you prepare for your marriage.”
I asked if I should join a second group too and Dr. Rosen shook his head and said I wasn’t ready. Shame pinned me to my chair, and I remained silent for the rest of group. I didn’t know whether I wanted to join a second group, but that wasn’t the point. Dr. Rosen offered something to Carlos that he didn’t offer me. For the rest of the session, noxious thoughts scrolled through my mind:
He likes Carlos more than me.
I’m not doing this right.
I suck at therapy.
I left group in a wordless, huffy silence. I avoided Carlos’s calls—first, because I was jealous that he was the favored son, and then because I was ashamed of my petulance. We didn’t speak until Sunday night, when I confessed my jealousy. “Don’t be jealous of a second group, girl,” he said. “It’s just going to cost more money and create more hassle.”
That night, I left Dr. Rosen a message asking him to call me before group so I could get his feedback on my intense reaction to Carlos’s invitation to join a second group. Dr. Rosen often returned my calls between sessions. I assumed I’d hear from him.
All day Monday, I carried my phone turned up in my palm like a heart transplant patient waiting for news about a donor. By sundown, I lost hope. I called Marnie while browning a chicken breast on the fancy stove-top range in Clare’s condo. She still saw Dr. Rosen, so I thought she’d understand how I was feeling
Before I could tell her anything, her other line beeped. “Hey, that’s Dr. Rosen. Let me call you back.”
Click. Marnie was gone.
I grabbed the skillet handle and the hot cast iron seared my fingers. “Dammit!” I cradled my burned fingers and hopped in pain, still cursing under my breath. I sat down in the middle of the kitchen and rocked back and forth. The chicken and oil hissed in the pan.
Five minutes later, Marnie called back. I took a deep breath. Maybe Dr. Rosen had called her back because she’d recently gotten pregnant after a miscarriage—maybe things weren’t going well. Maybe she was cramping or had gotten bad news at the doctor.
“Everything okay?” I asked, genuinely concerned.
“It’s our stupid contractor. He put in the wrong door—we ordered oak, not mahogany. Dr. Rosen coached me on how to talk to him tomorrow.”
The air whooshed out of my lungs, and I doubled over. I pressed freezer-burned ice into my burned hand while glowing, newly pregnant Marnie discussed how to boss around laborers from a custom-upholstered settee in her four-story house.
Why would Dr. Rosen help her and not me?
As I dialed his number, my whole body shook. At the beep: “I can’t believe you! You FUCKING ASSHOLE. You’ve been teaching me to ask for help. To reach out. To ‘LET YOU AND THE GROUP IN.’ But you don’t reach back? Fuck you!” On and on, I yelled at Dr. Rosen’s voice mail as my hand throbbed.
His voice mail beeped. I’d talked until the end of the message and then smashed the phone down on the floor. I wanted to smash everything: Clare’s beautiful plum-colored Pottery Barn plates, the wine chiller in the corner, the vase of dried flowers, the framed Jazz Fest print above the table. Everything was throbbing: my head, my heart, my throat, my hand. I hated everything about Dr. Rosen: his smug face, his dumb elfin laughter, his arrogant prescriptions. Fuck him and that circle of chairs in that eighteenth-floor office.
* * *
During the first few minutes of group, I avoided eye contact with everyone. I folded my hands in my lap, my gaze fixed on an oval-shaped stain on the carpet. Marty filled us in on his mother’s hip operation, and Dr. Rosen did his routine of shifting his gaze from one person to the next.
“Did you leave me a message?” I looked up, and Dr. Rosen was staring at me. I nodded and felt light-headed.
“Do you want to tell the group about it?” He beamed at me like he did when Rory reported finishing a chapter of her dissertation. Around the room eager faces met my glance.
“I was upset and said some things that were not very nice—”
“Not very nice? Don’t minimize! You were vicious!” Dr. Rosen gestured with his hands and bounced in his seat. He rubbed his heart and closed his eyes like he was savoring a great meal. “We should all go into my office and listen to it.”
Everyone stood up. Field trip! It was my first time in his office since starting group and everything looked the same: the framed Harvard diplomas, the needlepoint, the uncluttered desk against the wall.
As Dr. Rosen held the receiver and punched in the passcode to his voice mail, Carlos whispered, “What the hell did you say?”
Dr. Rosen pressed the speaker button and there was my voice, shrill and clear. “You don’t give two shits about me! Marnie has EVERYTHING! What about me?” My voice went on for three minutes. The group huddled around the phone.
When my voice finally shut up, he clicked the phone off. “Can you celebrate this?” He enunciated each word as if I was new to the English language.
Celebrate anger? That was rarer than fighting. I have no memory of yelling at my parents for any reason. Not even as a teenager. We weren’t yellers. We were silent treatment people; we did huffy sighs and quiet seething. When my parents forbade me from attending Troy Tabucci’s New Year’s party sophomore year because they suspected there would be underaged drinking, I holed up in my room, making mixtapes of sad songs. When they told me that I had to go to college in Texas, I threw away the dog-eared Dartmouth brochure I’d been poring over for weeks. I used fake smiles, “I’m fines,” and gigantic binges like other people used Kleenex. But now this man was treating my rant like a Chopin sonata.
“Celebrate?”
Dr. Rosen’s eyes grew huge. “It’s beautiful!”
“It’s gross—”
“Says who?”
“The self-pity, for one thing—”
“I disagree—it’s honest, authentic, and real. It’s yours. And you shared it with me. Thank you.” He rubbed his palm over his heart. “Welcome to your anger, Mamaleh. This is going to help you.”
This was my first praise for the parts of me that were ugly, irrational, petty, reckless, spiteful, and spewing. I’d never heard of such a thing. If I were my therapist, I’d tell me to cut that shit out, but Dr. Rosen celebrated like it was Armistice Day with dance-in-the-streets, cancel-work jubilation.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re just getting started.”
15
For the first
time in over a year, I woke up after a whopping eight solid hours of sleep. I wasn’t quite sure where I was, but I knew that there was a warm, buzzy feeling between my legs.
I’d had a sex dream. A graphic, steamy sex dream about R&B singer Luther Vandross. My main man Luther had caressed my face and kissed me deeply, his tongue filling my whole mouth. Then he did something with his tongue on my stomach—a circling-thrusting combo—that made me see beyond stars to other planets and galaxies. And when his soft lips circled between my legs, I mewled like a newborn kitten.
I woke up wet, hot, and satisfied.
On the train to group that morning, I hummed my favorite Luther Vandross song, “Here and Now.” Oh yes, Luther, here and now indeed.
As the train lumbered past the darkened gay nightclubs and funky boutiques on Belmont, I felt buoyant—as if I could float up to the sky like an escaped balloon. I was not nearly as dead inside as I feared. The dream was also proof that whatever part of my subconscious had brought Mr. Vandross into my bed and let his tongue roam over my body was alive. And she was hungry. This sexual anorexic was working her way to the buffet table. I’d dreamed and felt sex that was hot, wild, noisy, wet, and completely focused on my pleasure. Sex with no inhibition, no nuns with their threats of hell, no disapproving parents who wanted sex linked to marriage, no worries about being pregnant or being fat or not “doing it right.” There was my body, a gorgeous man, and pleasure.
Within the first ten minutes of group, I’d told them everything. “He was going down on me, and his back was smooth and muscular. I had an orgasm in my sleep.”
“How long did it last?”
“Have you ever seen him in concert?”
“Is he the guy who sang that duet with Chaka Khan?”
Dr. Rosen, who had been silently taking in this conversation, finally spoke. “The dream’s about me.”
You could hear our necks swivel toward him.
“Come again, Freud?” I said, laughing. “No offense, but you bear zero resemblance to a smoking-hot black guy who’s won a bunch of Grammys and is friends with Oprah. You’re… well…” I gestured to his tufted head, his cable-knit brown sweater, and his thick-soled brown shoes. “I mean, look at you.”
Dr. Rosen shook his head in that patronizing way. I scowled. If the dream was really about him, then why didn’t Dustin Hoffman show up? Or maybe Adam Sandler?
“Uh-oh,” Carlos said.
“What?” I asked.
Carlos and Rory exchanged a knowing glance. Then Carlos broke the news to me. “Don’t you know that once you start psychotherapy all your sex dreams are about your therapist?”
Dr. Rosen nodded. “Van-de-Ross, sounds like ‘Rosen.’ ”
“My god, they practically rhyme.” I rolled my eyes. In no universe did my slim, balding, Jewish therapist resemble my new main man Luther. Dr. Rosen threw up his hands and shrugged. He wasn’t going to try to convince me, which was the quickest way to get me to second-guess myself.
“Why do you have to make everything about you?” I murmured “creep” loud enough for him to hear. Then I ignored him as he rubbed his chest as if I’d said he was a stellar therapist. I refused to look at him, and the group moved on to another topic.
“Do you understand why that dream was possible?” Dr. Rosen turned to me with two minutes to go in the session. I shook my head. “Do you think it’s a coincidence that you were able to express your rage directly to me two weeks ago, and then you had an orgasmic dream about me?”
I ignored the part where he connected my rage and sexual desire and bit on his insistence that the dream was about him.
“Why are you trying to ruin my dream?”
“Why would having sex with me ruin it?”
“You’re my shrink.” My face contorted at the thought.
“And?”
“What happened to Dr. Celebrate Everything?”
“I am celebrating. I’m not the one resisting.”
“Resistant” was the one charge I couldn’t ignore. It was the gravest therapeutic transgression, and I cringed when I saw it in my group mates. Dr. Rosen had been urging Rory to apply for jobs at higher-paying civil-rights organizations that would give her primo benefits, but she insisted that she could get hired only at legal clinics in Wisconsin that were run on a shoestring. With her credentials she could have worked anywhere in the Chicago area, but she continued to commute to Waupun, Wisconsin, and got pissed whenever we prodded her to reach for Something Better. Resistance—to change, to pleasure, to a shorter commute—was what held us back from what we really wanted. I would not commit that sin, even if I would rather punch Dr. Rosen in his smug little face than acknowledge my dream was about his saggy ass.
“Fine.” I scooted to the edge of my seat and sat up straight. I gripped the arms of my chair and whispered in a singsong voice, “Dr. Rosen, I’d love to have your face in my crotch. I’m dying for you to put your tongue on me and slowly, slowly, slowly circle me until I come.” I moaned a little for effect.
“Damn, girl,” Carlos murmured.
The Colonel’s eyes opened, cartoon-character wide. Rory blushed and cast her gaze to the window.
Dr. Rosen blinked twice. Then he said, “You’re ready for another group.”
Everyone waited for me to speak but I had no words, only sensations: hot Luther between my legs, annoyance at Dr. Rosen roiling in my belly, and the terror rising through my chest as I digested his words.
I mumbled the prayer at the end of group and walked out with Carlos in a haze. He put his arm around my shoulders. “I told you you’d get your chance for a second group.”
Of course, now that I had it, I questioned it. Did I really want a whole other group? Coming downtown twice a week to excavate pinworm memories and pick up prescriptions to call group mates about my basic human functions? Why had I wanted this so badly? I thought it would make me feel like a favored child, like one of Rosen’s Chosen, but now the invitation to a second group made me feel ashamed of how sick I must be.
The following week, I opened the session with my burning question: “Why now?” Dr. Rosen hadn’t even taken his seat—he was futzing with the blinds across the room.
He took his seat and considered my question. “Your willingness to bring the dream into group, to be proud of it, and to discuss it means you’re ready.”
“For what?”
“For more.”
“More what?”
“Heat. Intimacy. Intensity. Sex.”
“Will it help me with relationships?”
“Guaranteed.”
“Now group is like Best Buy?”
* * *
Sometimes I felt like Rosen-world was a cult. I’d begun to spot Rosen-patients out in the wild. In a 12-step meeting, I heard a woman say, “My name is Ginny, and my crazy therapist told me to tell you all that I’m bingeing on off-brand Oreos.” Before she said another word, I realized I’d heard about her from Carlos: she was dating Chip from the men’s group, and they almost broke up because he wouldn’t go down on her. In another meeting, a woman sat in the middle of the circle taking superhuman bites of a Burger King Whopper. In the eleven years I’d been in recovery meetings for eating disorders, I’d never seen anyone eat so much as an oyster cracker during a meeting. Most meetings had an explicit rule that you weren’t supposed to mention any specific foods by name because you could trigger someone’s bingeing. So seeing someone devour a Whopper was shocking—like seeing the moon fall from the sky and land in your lap. Marnie leaned over and whispered: “She’s got to be one of us.” We later confirmed that Dr. Rosen had given her a prescription to gorge on fast food during meetings instead of in secret at home.
How would increasing my participation in Rosen-world mesh with my daily life as a seminormal person? As a law student, it was tricky to reconcile my public, professional trajectory with my, shall we say, unorthodox therapy life. Keeping Baby Jeremiah in my closet. Calling Rory and Marty every night. Telling the Smoker I’m a “c
ocktease.” Part of me wanted to join the second group for the same reason I joined the first: I was curious. Curious about who would be in my group and how my life would change if I joined. My five current group mates and Dr. Rosen knew all the details of my eating, sleeping, and sex-dreaming. What would I do with more group?
As I mulled over the possibility of joining a second group, I surveyed the developments in my love life since starting the first. I’d been on one official date since the debacle with fifty-minute Sam and the fiasco with Andrew of the charred chicken breasts. Two weeks after I had sex with Andrew, I met Greg at a house party, and he asked for my number. He’d just gotten out of a yearlong medically induced coma. On the way out of a sushi restaurant on our first date, he forgot where he lived. I may not have been ready for a relationship, but he definitely wasn’t.
Then there was Xavier, my ex-boyfriend from college—one of the decent guys I dumped because his steady loyalty nauseated me. I hooked up with him while visiting my family in Texas. We met in a darkened parking lot in a sketchy neighborhood near the DFW airport. When we started making out, I could see the faint outline of stars and galaxies. His lips on mine woke me up. His hand on my thigh was an unlocking, and I wanted to go further, all the way right there under the neon “Checks Cashed” sign. Of course, I’d never felt this gut longing for him when we were together—I avoided sex with complaints about headaches and early morning shifts at my mall job.
As I hitched up my skirt, Xavier pulled away.
“Connie’s flight is about to land,” he said. I stared at him without blinking. “I know what you’re thinking. But I’m not hooking up with you because I’m freaking out about getting serious with Connie.”
My heart sunk. The word fool flashed in my mind. When I returned to Chicago a few days later, my group pointed out that Xavier was unavailable, which is precisely why I was attracted to him.
Now Xavier was engaged. So was my college roommate Kat, two of my law school friends, and two of my cousins. Dr. Rosen’s new group felt like a rope I should probably grab.
Group Page 10
