Here’s how Rita’s days went: Get up early (“Menopause ruined my sleep”), drive to the Y. Come home, eat breakfast while watching Good Morning America. Paint or nap. Eat lunch while reading the paper. Paint or nap. Heat up frozen dinner (“It’s too much trouble cooking for one”), sit on her building’s stoop (“I like to look at the babies and puppies that people walk at dusk”), watch “junk” on TV, fall asleep.
Rita seemed to have almost no contact with other human beings. Many days, she talked to nobody. But what struck me most about her life wasn’t just how solitary it was, but how nearly everything she said or did conjured for me an image of death. As Andrew Solomon wrote in The Noonday Demon: “The opposite of depression isn’t happiness, but vitality.”
Vitality. Yes, Rita had had lifelong depression and a complicated history, but I wasn’t sure that her past should be our initial focus. Even if she hadn’t given herself a one-year deadline, there was another deadline that neither of us could change: mortality. As with Julie, I wondered what the goal should be in treating her. Did she just need somebody to talk to, to ease the pain and loneliness, or was she willing to understand her role in creating it? It was also the question I was struggling with in Wendell’s office: What should be accepted and what should be changed in my own life? But I was more than two decades younger than Rita. Was it too late for her to redeem herself—is it ever too late for that? And what degree of emotional discomfort would she be willing to endure to find out? I thought about how regret can go one of two ways: it can either shackle you to the past or serve as an engine for change.
Rita said that she wanted her life to improve by her seventieth birthday. Instead of dredging up the past seven decades, I thought, maybe we should start with trying to inject her life with a little vitality—now.
“Companionship?” Rita says today after I tell her that I won’t try to talk her out of finding companionship with men under seventy-five. “Oh, honey, please don’t be so naive—I want more than companionship. I’m not dead yet. Even I know how to order something on the internet from the privacy of my apartment.”
It takes me a minute to connect the dots: She buys vibrators? Good for her!
“Do you know,” Rita adds, “how long it’s been since I’ve been touched?”
Rita goes on to describe how disheartening she finds the dating scene—and in this regard, at least, she’s not alone. It’s the most common refrain I hear from single women of all ages: Dating sucks.
Marriage, though, hasn’t been much better for her. She’d met the man who would be husband number one when she was twenty years old, eager to escape her dreary home. She commuted to college each day and went from “dying of boredom and silence” to “a world of interesting ideas and people.” But she also had to hold down a job, and while she sat in a real estate agent’s office typing up mind-numbing correspondence after class, she missed out on the social life she craved.
Enter Richard, a charming, sophisticated upperclassman in her English seminar with whom she had deep conversations and who swept her off her feet and into the life she wanted—until their first child was born a couple of years later. That’s when Richard started working longer hours and drinking; soon, Rita was just as bored and lonely as she had been in her childhood home. After four kids, countless fights, and too many drunken episodes during which Richard struck both her and their children, Rita wanted out.
But how? What could she do? She had dropped out of college; how would she support herself and the kids? With Richard, the kids had clothes and food and good schools and friends. What could she, by herself, offer them? In many ways, Rita felt like a child herself, helpless. Soon Richard wasn’t the only one who drank.
It wasn’t until a particularly terrifying incident that Rita screwed up the courage to leave, but by then her children were well into their teens and the family was a shambles.
She married husband number two five years later. Edward was Richard’s opposite: a kind and caring widower who’d recently lost his wife. After her divorce at age thirty-nine, Rita had returned to tedious secretarial work (her only marketable skill, despite her keen intelligence and artistic talent). Edward was a client of the insurance agent Rita worked for. They married six months after they met, but Edward was still grieving his wife’s death, and Rita felt envious of his love for her. They argued constantly. The marriage lasted two years and then Edward called it quits. Husband number three left his wife for Rita, and five years later, he left Rita for someone else.
Each time, Rita was shocked to find herself alone, but her history didn’t surprise me. We marry our unfinished business.
For the next decade, Rita steered clear of dating. Not that she met men anyway, holed up in her apartment or aerobicizing at the Y. Then came the recent reality of an eighty-year-old’s body—so withered and saggy compared to the body of her last husband, who had been only fifty-five at the time of their divorce. Rita had met Mr. Saggy, as she called him, through the dating app, and “because I wanted to be touched,” she said, “I thought I could give it a try.” He had looked young for his age, she explained (“more like seventy”) and handsome—in clothing, that is.
After they had sex, she told me, he had wanted to cuddle but she’d escaped to the bathroom, where she discovered “an entire pharmacy of medications,” including Viagra. Finding the whole scene “revolting” (Rita found many things revolting), she waited until her date was fast asleep (“His snores sounded as revolting as his orgasm”), and took a taxi home.
“Never again,” she says now.
I try to imagine sleeping with an eighty-year-old and wonder if most elderly people are put off by their partners’ bodies. Is it jarring only to those who haven’t been with an older body before? Do people who have been together fifty years not notice because they acclimate to the gradual changes over time?
I remember reading a news story in which a couple, married for more than sixty years, was asked for tips on happy marriages. After the usual advice about communication and compromise, the husband added that oral sex was still in their repertoire. Naturally, this story spread like wildfire online, and most of the commenters were disgusted. Given the public’s visceral reactions to aging bodies, it’s no wonder old people don’t get touched much.
But it’s a deep human need. It’s well documented that touch is important for well-being throughout our lifetimes. Touch can lower blood pressure and stress levels, boost moods and immune systems. Babies can die from lack of touch, and so can adults (adults who are touched regularly live longer). There’s even a term for this condition: skin hunger.
Rita tells me that she splurges on pedicures not because it matters if her toenails are painted (“Who’s going to see them?”), but because the only human touch she gets is from a woman named Connie. Connie has been doing her toes for years and doesn’t speak a lick of English. But her foot massages, Rita says, “are heaven.”
When she got divorced for the third time, Rita didn’t know how to live without being touched even for a week. She’d get antsy, she says. Then it was a month. Then years turned to a decade. She doesn’t like to spend the money on a pedicure nobody will see, but what choice does she have? The pedicures are a necessity because she’ll go crazy with no human contact at all.
“It’s like going to a prostitute, paying to be touched,” Rita says.
Like John does with me, I think—I’m his emotional hooker.
“The point,” Rita is saying about the eighty-year-old, “is that I thought it would feel good to be touched by a man again, but I think I’ll just stick with my pedicures.”
I tell her that the choices aren’t necessarily limited to either Connie or an eighty-year-old, but Rita shoots me a look and I know what she’s thinking.
“I don’t know who you’ll meet,” I concede. “But maybe you’ll be touched—both physically and emotionally—by somebody you care about and who cares about you. Maybe you’ll be touched in an entirely new way, one that’s more satisfying
than your other relationships have been.”
I’m expecting a click of the tongue, which I’ve come to recognize as Rita’s version of an eye roll, but she goes quiet, her green eyes filling with tears.
“Let me tell you a story,” she says, fishing out a crumpled, used-looking tissue from the depths of her purse, even though a fresh box sits right beside her on the end table. “There’s a family in the apartment across from mine,” she begins. “Moved in about a year ago. New to town, saving up for a house. Two small children. The husband works from home and plays with the kids in the courtyard, hoisting them onto his shoulders and giving them piggyback rides and tossing a ball with them. All the things I never had.”
She reaches into her purse for more tissues, can’t find any, and dabs her eyes with the one she’s just blown her nose into. I always wonder why she doesn’t take a clean tissue from the box a few inches from her.
“Anyway,” she says, “every day around five p.m., the mother comes home from work. And every day the same thing happens.”
Rita chokes up here, stops. More nose-blowing and eye dabbing. Take the damn tissues! I want to scream. This pained woman, whom nobody talks to or touches, won’t even let herself have a clean tissue. Rita squeezes what’s left of the snot ball in her hand, wipes her eyes, and takes a breath.
“Every day,” she continues, “the mother unlocks the front door, opens it up, and calls out, ‘Hello, family!’ That’s how she greets them: ‘Hello, family!’”
Her voice falters and she takes a minute to compose herself. The children, Rita explains, come running, squealing with joy, and her husband gives her a big, excited kiss. Rita tells me that she watches all this through the peephole that she secretly had enlarged for spying purposes. (“Don’t judge,” she says.)
“And do you know what I do?” she asks. “I know it’s horribly ungenerous, but I seethe with anger.” She’s sobbing now. “There’s never been a ‘Hello, family!’ for me.”
I try to imagine the kind of family Rita might fashion for herself at this point in her life—perhaps with a partner or a rapprochement with her adult children. But I wonder about other possibilities too—what she might do with her passion for art or how she might form some new friendships. I think about the abandonment she experienced as a child and the trauma her own children experienced. How all of them must feel so ripped off and full of resentment that none of them can see what’s actually there and what kind of lives they might still be able to create. And how for a while, I haven’t been able to see it for Rita either.
I walk over to the tissue box, hand it to Rita, then sit down next to her on the couch.
“Thank you,” she says. “Where did those come from?”
“They’ve been there all along,” I say. But instead of taking a fresh tissue, she continues to wipe her face with the snot ball.
In the car on the way home, I call Jen. I know she’s probably also in the car driving home.
When she picks up, I say, “Please tell me that I won’t still be dating in retirement.”
She laughs. “I don’t know. I might be dating in retirement. People used to hang it up once their spouses died. Now they date.” I hear the blare of horns before she continues. “And there are so many divorced people out there too.”
“Are you trying to tell me you’re having marital problems?”
“Yes.”
“He’s farting again?”
“Yes.”
It’s their ongoing joke. Jen has warned her husband that she’s moving into the next room at night if he keeps eating dairy, but he loves dairy and she loves him, so she never moves.
I pull into the driveway and tell Jen I have to go. I park the car and unlock the front door to our house, where my son is being cared for by his babysitter, Cesar. Technically, Cesar works for us, but really, he’s like an older brother to my son and a second son to me. We’re close with his parents and sibling and his multitude of cousins, and I’ve watched him grow up through the years into the college student he is now, taking care of my son as he grows too.
I open the door and yell, “Hello, family!”
Zach shouts from his room, “Hey, Mom!” Cesar takes off an earbud and calls out from the kitchen, where he’s preparing dinner, “Hey!”
Nobody runs up excitedly to greet me, nobody squeals with delight, but I don’t feel deprived the way Rita does—just the opposite. I go to my bedroom to change into sweatpants, and when I come back out, we all start talking at once, sharing our days, teasing one another, vying for airtime, putting plates on the table and pouring the drinks. The boys bicker over setting the table and race to get the bigger portions. Hello, family.
I once told Wendell that I’m a terrible decision maker, that often what I think I want doesn’t turn out the way I’d imagined. But there were two notable exceptions, and both proved to be the best decisions of my life. In each case, I was nearly forty.
One was my decision to have a baby.
The other was my decision to become a therapist.
25
The UPS Guy
The year Zach was born, I began acting inappropriately with my UPS delivery guy.
I don’t mean that I tried to seduce him (it’s hard to be seductive with milk stains on your T-shirt). I mean that whenever he delivered a package—which was often, given the need for baby supplies—I would try to detain him with conversation simply because I craved adult company. I’d strain to make small talk about the weather, a news headline, even the weight of a package (“Wow, who knew diapers were so heavy! Do you have kids?”) while the UPS driver fake-smiled and nodded as he not-so-subtly backed away from me to the safety of his truck.
At the time I was working from home as a writer, which meant that all day, I sat alone in my pajamas at a computer when I wasn’t feeding, changing, bouncing, or otherwise engaging with an adorable but demanding ten-pound human with a talent for screaming like a banshee. Basically, I interacted with what I called, in my darkest moments, “a gastrointestinal tract with lungs.” Before having a baby, I’d relished the freedom of a non-office job. But now I longed to get dressed every day and be in the company of verbal grownups.
It was during this perfect storm of isolation and plummeting estrogen that I started to wonder if I’d made a mistake by leaving medical school. Journalism suited me well—I got to cover hundreds of topics for dozens of publications, and they all revolved around a common thread that fascinated me: the human psyche. I didn’t want to stop writing, but now, while reeking of spit-up in the middle of the night, I reconsidered the possibility of a dual career. If I became a psychiatrist, I reasoned, I could interact with people in a meaningful way, helping them to be happier, but I could also have the flexibility to write and spend time with my family.
I sat on the idea for a few weeks, until one spring morning I called up my former dean at Stanford and floated my plan by her. A renowned researcher, she was also the med-school version of a camp mom—warm, wise, intuitive. I had run her mother-daughter book group when I was in medical school and knew her well. I was sure that after I explained my thought process, she would be supportive of my plan.
Instead she said: “Why would you do that?”
And then: “Besides, psychiatrists don’t make people happy!”
I remembered the old medical-school quip: “Psychiatrists don’t make people happy—prescriptions do!” Suddenly sobered, I knew what she meant. It wasn’t that she didn’t respect psychiatrists; it was that psychiatry today tends to be more about the nuances of medication and neurotransmitters than the subtleties of people’s life stories—all of which she knew I knew.
Anyway, she asked, did I really want to do three years of residency with a toddler? Did I want to spend time with my son before he started kindergarten? Did I remember talking with her as a medical student about my desire to have more substantial relationships with patients than the contemporary medical model afforded?
Then—just as I imagined my former dean
shaking her head on the other end of the phone, just when I wished I could turn back time so that this conversation had never happened—she said something that would change the course of my life: “You should go to graduate school and get a degree in clinical psychology.” By going the clinical psychology route, she said, I could work with people in the way I’d always talked about—the appointments would be fifty minutes instead of fifteen, and the work would be deeper and longer term.
I got chills. People often use that expression loosely, but I actually did get chills, goose bumps and all. It was shocking how right this felt, as if my life’s plan had finally been revealed. In journalism, I thought, I could tell people’s stories, but I wasn’t changing their stories. As a therapist, I could help people change their stories. And with this dual career, I could have the perfect combination.
“Being a therapist is going to require a blend of the cognitive and the creative,” the dean continued. “There’s an artistry in combining the two. What could be a better mix of your abilities and interests?”
Not long after that conversation, I sat in a room with college seniors and took the GRE, the graduate-school version of the SAT. I applied to a local graduate program, and over the next few years, I worked toward my degree. And I continued to write, hearing stories and sharing them, while learning to help people change as my life changed too.
During this time, my son began to talk and walk, and the UPS guy’s deliveries gradually evolved from diapers to Legos. “Oh, the Jedi Starfighter!” I’d say. “Are you a Star Wars fan?” And when I was finally ready to graduate, I told the UPS guy the news.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone Page 18