Group

by Christie Tate

  That night, I called my mom out of the blue. We usually spoke once or twice a month, usually on Sunday after she and Dad returned from mass. I wanted to tell her about Germany, but the first thing out of my mouth was that I was terrified there was something seriously wrong with me, something that would keep me from having a family of my own.

  “I’m so alone,” I said, bursting into tears with my mom for the first time in my adult life. We’d never discussed my isolation from the family or my fears about ending up alone. My plan had been to have Dr. Rosen fix me so I could present myself as the daughter who wasn’t fucked up after all. But we’d both be dead at the rate I was going.

  “Honey, I felt the same way.”

  I sat up on the couch and wiped my nose on my sleeve. As far as I knew, my parents met at a volleyball party and the rest—three kids and a redbrick ranch house on 6644 Thackeray—was history. It was impossible to picture my mother—with her late-1960s bob and postcollege job as a bank teller in Dallas—curled under a blanket, worried she would die alone.

  “I was just like you. All my friends were married and had babies on the way, and I never thought it would happen for me. I was still single at twenty-six, which in 1970 was pretty ancient. It felt like nobody wanted me.”

  This was genetic? I felt strangely exhilarated—maybe this wasn’t all my fault. Maybe it wasn’t a failure of imagination or feminism or will. This state of believing that something was wrong with me around relationships was something I shared with my mother like brown eyes and a mortal fear of dental procedures. Maybe I could stop trying to outrun it. Maybe I didn’t have to hide my grief and confusion from her anymore. I wasn’t ready to tell her I was back in therapy to the tune of three group sessions a week, but it was a relief to share some emotional truth.

  “Do you want me to come to Chicago?”

  Her offer made me cry harder. I needed her mothering, but I couldn’t stomach her flying all the way Chicago. It was enough that she asked and that I no longer had to hide my greatest fears from her.

  * * *

  I never saw the Autobahn. Or a German courtroom. What I saw day after day in Germany was a giant, un-air-conditioned room in a nondescript four-story office building in the middle of a field outside Augsburg. The low sound of cows’ mooing greeted me in moments of unexpected silence. The sharp smell of dung also made its way into the second-story work space, where lawyers and paralegals from Germany, Chicago, and Atlanta worked elbow to elbow on long tables. The office was stingy with toilet paper, so you had to go before three in the afternoon if you wanted to wipe.

  The high point of the day was lunch in the staff cafeteria, where the main food group was brown gravy. It appeared on absolutely everything: main dishes, side dishes, salads. Brown, viscous, fatty, and flavorless.

  I hated Germany. I hated my work. I hated my life.

  I was grateful to be busy, but in the downtime between tasks, I’d stare at the clock and compute the time back in Chicago. One Tuesday afternoon, I used the office phone to call Rory’s cell while she was in group. She didn’t pick up.

  That night, alone in my German hotel, I collapsed on the bed. I’d been expecting fancy four-star digs, but instead, we stayed at the German version of a La Quinta, minus the friendly staff and Denny’s next door. In the shower, the temperature hovered at lukewarm. I missed home, where at least the water was scalding hot.

  The only thing on TV was the brewing destruction of Hurricane Katrina—startling images of surging brown water and displaced people crammed into the Superdome in New Orleans—and violent German porn. Room service was my last hope. The “pizza” I ordered arrived as a hunk of semimelted white cheese on a plain pita swimming atop a smear of ketchup. I crawled under the covers, still shivering from my tepid shower. Sleep mercifully delivered me from consciousness.

  The clinking of glasses and muffled laughter woke me less than an hour later. I lifted the window shade and saw that directly below me was the pool, an open bar, and a dozen people eating appetizers and having drinks, buck naked. My room was just above the Schwaben Quellen, which apparently means “eating schnitzels and drinking Heineken in your birthday suit.”

  I dialed the international operator and gave her Dr. Rosen’s number. Across the Atlantic, Dr. Rosen sat in his final group of the day and would check his office voice mail soon.

  Beep.

  “There are naked people cocktailing outside my room. I can’t do this. Please call me. Please.” I left the number where he could reach me.

  At two in the morning German time—seven back home in Chicago—I accepted the truth: Dr. Rosen wasn’t going to call me. I rolled myself up in the scratchy comforter and closed my eyes. How dare he abandon me. I unrolled myself and asked the international operator to connect me again.

  Beep.

  “Show me the goddamned JAMA article that says doctors can’t help patients across international lines! How could you possibly withhold five minutes of your time to assure me that you’re still there? I would have paid you back for the charges, you know. Asshole!” I slammed the phone down. Fuck him. After all the money, time, and trust I’d willingly given him—he had nothing for me?

  On Friday, in the Augsburg conference room, Jack asked for a show of hands: Who wants to go home? Those who flew home would brief the team back in Chicago and return the following week. Most associates wanted to stay for weekend jaunts to beer gardens and the Black Forest. Oktoberfest was days away. My hand shot up, high and tall. Send me home.

  I arrived at the airport three hours early, but the Augsburg-to-Frankfurt leg of my flight was canceled. An officious woman at the United counter offered me a flight the following day. I shook my head. No. I bought a train ticket to Frankfurt; I booked a later flight to Chicago. If I had to crawl across Germany, I was going home.

  An hour later, I handed the train conductor my ticket without looking up. I’d made a decision: when I returned to group, I would break up with Dr. Rosen. My hurt and anger wasn’t hot and fiery. It was cold and sharp. A decision made. A contract signed. A door locked. If I was sinking all the way down, then let my feet hit the bottom. Dr. Rosen proved he couldn’t tend to me when I needed him most, so I didn’t want to be in his care. I’d look up Linda or Francis. Get myself a real therapist. One who gave a shit about me.

  I curled toward the window, not seeing the German countryside zooming by. I was supposed to be better by now. No one else had made so little progress after so many years of treatment. Other group members came in and got better. Their careers shot off in promising new directions. They paid off debts. Their kids graduated and went to liberal arts colleges. They moved in with their boyfriends. They got married. They had babies.

  And then there was me. Relationships kept slipping through my hands no matter how many groups I joined. What a damn fool. Maybe Dr. Rosen was mad at me because I ruined his track record. I was the quarter horse who was expected to win but couldn’t make a clean lap around the course. Someone should shoot me. I was back to where I was before I ever called Dr. Rosen, except this was worse because I’d learned to feel so much more. All those one- and two-syllable words: Angry. Hurt. Lonely. Ashamed.

  I pulled out my BlackBerry so I could let someone know I would be arriving in Chicago six hours later than expected. But who? I could tell my parents that I was now on a train instead of a plane, but that made me feel like a thirty-three-year-old loser. Who cared where I was at this very minute? No one. Absolutely no one.

  I typed a message to Dr. Rosen: I’m so sorry. I really tried. I swear I did.

  On Monday morning in group, I did not say a single word for the first hour and twenty-five minutes of the ninety-minute session. Everyone seemed to sense I needed space. I felt Max and Grandma Maggie staring at me, but they said nothing. I lacked the energy to break up with Dr. Rosen. It would take too many words, spawn too much discussion. For now, I would float until my head went under.

  “I won’t be here next week,” Patrice said at five minutes
to nine. “Conference in San Francisco.” Dr. Rosen pulled out the blue appointment book he kept in his pocket—his customary practice for when someone announced they would be gone from group. I once asked why he always wrote our absences down in his little book, and he’d said it was because he cared where we were. I remembered when I believed that.

  He looked at me, his pen poised, waiting for me to announce when I’d be back in Germany—so he could write my initials in the Monday, Tuesday, Thursday squares. I said nothing. My head slipped below the waterline.

  Dr. Rosen clipped his pen to his book and cleared his throat. “I need to turn something over to the group.” His lips were a straight line, his eyes blazed serious. I felt him looking at me, but my gaze bored into Brad’s New Balances.

  “When I got your last e-mail, Christie, for the first time ever”—he paused and looked around the room—“I feared for your safety.”

  I’d scared the impervious Dr. Rosen? The guy who thought everything was hilarious, useful fodder for emotional growth?

  “Normally, you’re full of passion and fury.” He waved his hands spastically and bobbed his head back and forth, imitating me. “You’re screaming and frothing and outraged. This was different. Scary.”

  It couldn’t be good to scare your therapist.

  A memory flashed into my head: two summers earlier, I hunkered down with bar exam study guides seven days a week, and in my off-hours, dug my claws into my dwindling relationship with Jeremy.

  “Can I borrow one of those?” I pointed at the motley stash of stuffed animals that Dr. Rosen kept in the group room. “I could sleep with it at Jeremy’s house when he’s too busy playing video games to sleep with me.” Dr. Rosen opened his palms like go ahead, and Carlos tossed me a careworn brown teddy bear. I tucked it under my chin and pretended to snooze. “Perfect.”

  One Sunday night that summer, my youngest cousin—the one whose diapers I’d changed growing up—called to tell me that she and her fiancé had signed a contract on a house in Houston. When I got off the phone, I burned with shame. I hadn’t even known my cousin was engaged. I also burned with envy at her forward momentum, while my boyfriend couldn’t be bothered to swivel away from his computer screen. Now, couples composed my entire family tree. It was only I who still dangled alone on a branch by myself.

  When Jeremy fell asleep that night, I sat in his darkened living room, mentally decorating my cousin’s new house: a Mission-style dining room table, a sleigh bed in the master. As I dreamed up her perfect life, a streetlight glared through the window, emitting just enough buttery light to see a pair of orange-handled scissors on Jeremy’s desk. I grabbed them and hacked at the teddy bear’s right arm with the scissors. The following Tuesday, I tossed the dismembered bear and the Ziploc bag full of its arm stuffing onto the floor in the middle of group.

  Dr. Rosen stared hard.

  “My baby cousin’s buying a house. It’s two stories.” The group was used to my outbursts by then, but Dr. Rosen sat still as poured concrete.

  “He looks mad.” Rory sounded anxious.

  “Why is his jaw twitching?” Carlos said.

  The Colonel grabbed the one-armed bear carcass. Pieces of white fluffy stuffing rained to the floor.

  “Why are you acting so weird?” I asked Dr. Rosen. He was definitely not beaming with pride. He sighed, started to speak, and then shifted in his seat again. I imagined him opening his mouth and hissing: You’re in trouble, trouble, trouble.

  “You destroyed something that belongs to me. What does that mean to you?”

  “It means I’m an isolated loser next to my entire family tree! Every last one of them is on the way to joint tenancy—”

  “And the bear?” I searched my body for the feeling Dr. Rosen insisted should be there. I knew I was in trouble. Shame churned in my belly.

  “I grabbed the first thing I saw.”

  Dr. Rosen didn’t blink or soften. “The bear represents me and the group.” He gestured around the circle. “Are you willing to look at what it means to take scissors to that?”

  “But I hammered all those dishes on my balcony—” My hands began to shake.

  “Those didn’t belong to me.”

  Why wasn’t he smiling? Why were my eyes filling with tears? I picked up the bear and placed it in my lap. I ran my finger along the hole where the arm had been attached, trying to feel something. What I found under the shame of being in trouble was a cold lump of fear. It scared me that I didn’t understand my subconscious mind. Why, since starting group, did my response to jealousy and disappointment involve sharp objects?

  “How can I fix this?”

  Dr. Rosen’s jaw softened slightly. “Ask the group for help.”

  Marty met my gaze. “Come to my office this afternoon. I’ll suture the arm.” Before settling on psychiatry, Marty had dreamed of being a surgeon. He looked excited about the prospect of getting out his needle and thread.

  In Marty’s tiny Uptown office, I stuffed as much of the polyester filling back into the bear as possible, and then gathered the edges of the wound for Marty to stitch. “Like this,” he said, pulling the thick thread through the bear’s fur. I sewed the last few stiches, and then held it up for him to inspect. With the arm sewn up, the white stuffing had no way to escape.

  * * *

  When I’d hacked up his teddy bear, Dr. Rosen seemed angry. Now, in the wake of my e-mail from Germany, he seemed afraid and sad. I knew better than to ask for a quick fix. Those didn’t exist in Rosen-world. It was nine o’clock. Group was over. We all stood up, and I offered my open hands to Lorne and Patrice, but it was only muscle memory, not a genuine gesture of connection. Their warm palms against mine did nothing to thaw the chill. When each of them hugged me, I went through the motions of hugging them back. More muscle memory. None of it reached the frozen center of my being. And I didn’t join Brad, Max, and Lorne for breakfast. I didn’t let Brad walk me to my office. I rejected their concerned joviality and refused to watch them take turns keeping me afloat with jokes and affirmations. I wanted to be alone. I wanted them to let me sink all the way down. I walked back to my office, shut the door, turned on Riverdance, and drafted memos all day until the sky darkened at eight fifteen, and I went home.

  28

  I had to get off the German case.

  I’d returned for my second stint in Augsburg and found myself in a room overlooking the naked schnitzel nibblers. Again I’d fantasized, briefly, about swallowing a bottle of Aleve. When I got back to Chicago that second time, Dr. Rosen suggested that I tell Jack that personal matters would prevent me from traveling to Germany for the near future. I e-mailed Jack saying I needed to discuss a personal matter. He responded right away. Let’s have lunch!

  He was an important partner and a decent person. He’d invited me to lunch; he’d used exclamation points. Maybe I could do a few more weeks in Germany? I thought of the hotel, the naked happy hour, and those long lonely nights. My whole body howled No. If I was ruining my legal career by turning down this plum assignment, so be it.

  Jack and I walked to One North and sat at a table on the terrace, surrounded mostly by other people in power suits eating power lunches. I took a few deep breaths while Jack ordered a chopped salad, feeling the seconds drag me closer to my confession.

  “So what’s up?” Jack’s face was so open that I almost lost my nerve. I flexed my fingers under the table and leaned forward.

  “I can’t travel to Germany—there’s a personal matter—”

  Jack held up his hand. “Say no more. There’s plenty for you to do here. I’ll let the partners know.” He picked up his BlackBerry and typed a new message. I stared out at Wacker Drive, praying I had not completely derailed my career.

  * * *

  Twice, I ran into Alex in the elevator, and both times he was with a blond woman wearing Duke University spirit-wear and running shoes. Both times we ignored each other. Both times I held my breath and stared straight ahead, but as soon as they disappear
ed down the street, I dialed Rory to cry about Alex’s new no-fat girlfriend.

  “You should buy a place in another building,” Max said.

  “With your income, you could afford a three-bedroom,” Brad said.

  “A woman in your position should definitely own property,” Grandma Maggie said.

  When Dr. Rosen asked about my resistance to buying a condo, I told the truth: “I don’t want to do it by myself.” Buying a condo alone would cement my status as a successful but single, alone-in-the-world woman. How depressing to visit empty homes and dream of the future with only a real estate agent at my side. How lonely to embark on a massive financial transaction by myself. Buying the condo might be a win for feminism, but it felt like the exact future I had hoped Dr. Rosen would help me avoid.

  “It couldn’t hurt to look,” Max said on the way out of group.

  * * *

  On a Thursday in late January, I sat on the tenth floor of a title company in a navy-blue suit signing a stack of documents. I wasn’t totally alone: a lawyer I hired sat on my right and Lorne’s wife, Renee, sat on my left. I signed my name dozens of times under the line that read: Christie O. Tate, Unmarried Woman, Spinster. “Wow,” I whispered.

  “Some of the standard real estate documents have retained rather antiquated language,” my lawyer said with a chuckle.

  “Ha-ha,” Renee said sarcastically. “Maybe someone should update them.” She rubbed my back in a circular motion as I signed page after page.