by Cathy Lamb
“You’re abrasive, offensive, and difficult. You come off as superior and condescending.”
“This is the third session I’ve paid for, Madeline, and I’m not coming here to listen to you take their side.”
“Then you can go.”
That took her aback. “What?”
“You can go. You came here because I’m a life coach and I help people with their relationships and their lives. I can’t help you with your life, with all the problems you’re having at work and home, if I’m not honest with you, so here’s the truth. You’re obnoxious.”
She sputtered. She bopped up and down in her seat on that interesting bottom, her graying, curly brown hair bouncing. “I am not!”
“Yes, you are. You have to learn how to like Corky. You don’t like her at all, do you?”
She sputtered. The sputtering sounded like: Blind denial.
“Yes, I do! I’m smart! I’m successful! I have a bunch of money and a huge house and a Lexus!”
“You have much of that because you received an inheritance. You’ve been fired from three jobs in three years. You complain that your Lexus is too low to the ground, and all this is beside the point.” I waved a hand in the air. “You have got to do something to learn how to like yourself, and when you like yourself, you’ll be able to like others—”
“I don’t like other people because they’re rude, uncouth and judgmental, and social idiots—”
“You don’t like all those people because you don’t like yourself. Pure and simple. Look here, Corky.” I leaned my elbows on my knees. I would add hot sauce to my burrito. “You need a Bash ’em in the Brains O’Shea Reality Check. You have to re-do Corky. You need a makeover physically so you’ll like yourself. You need to join one of those diet places and a gym, because you have to get your health together before you collapse. You need to walk every night so you can be in nature. Notice leaves, trees, spiders, obsessive-compulsive squirrels and chipmunks, stuff like that. Get your hair done at a salon. That’ll give you a lift you won’t believe.”
“I don’t like the outside! I don’t like nature! I don’t want to be in it!”
“I’m sure nature doesn’t like you, either, but she’s willing to put up with you in hopes for a better tomorrow. Now, for your personality fix, you need to chill. Relax. Quit attacking people. Compliment them. Be sincerely interested in their lives. Volunteer, if you can be well behaved, so you can get a picture of what other people’s lives are like who are not on your same socioeconomic ladder. Your complaints and incessant whining will seem ridiculously petty, and hopefully you will shut up at that point. Honestly, there are teenagers who are homeless, kids in prostitution, and others starving tonight. They’d trade places with you in a minute. Spend time reading to open up that clampeddown brain of yours, have adventures to get yourself out of your rut, go to a play so you can be interesting. Be someone people want to talk to. Right now, your entire conversation is filled with what I call Roaring Shit Negatives and Corrosive Complaints. No wonder you have no friends.”
“How dare you say that, you skinny moronic twit.” She was purple with rage.
“I dare because you’ve paid me money to be honest. I will have to deny being a twit.” The twit wanted lemonade with her burrito, too.
“I’ve paid a lot of money!”
“I charge you extra because you’re a pain in the butt.” I ignored her shocked look. “You need to change so the rest of the world does not have to put up with your critical, narcissistic personality anymore. It’s unfair, Corky. No one should be allowed to ruin someone else’s day. That should be a law.”
She hauled her interesting bottom up and grabbed her chair, and her face, which resembled a purple sponge, scrunched in fury. I leaped behind the couch, and she tossed that chair with a bad word following closely behind it like a tail.
Luckily, the chair did not break any windows. I am up high in this building, after all.
“Bitch!” she screamed.
“I thought I was a twit.”
Georgie popped in with Stanley at her heels. He barked. “Can I help with this degenerating emotional situation before it reaches a galaxy-sized disaster?” Georgie said, quite calmly through a sucker she had in her mouth.
“Nope,” I said.
“Bitch!” Corky twisted and reached for another chair. Her bottom wiggled at me.
“If you do the things I told you, Corky, people won’t hate you so much.”
“Double bitch!” she screamed again.
I did not tell her that she should have screamed “Triple bitch,” not “Double bitch,” as I dove beneath my desk when another chair went flying.
“You’re not doing what I said,” I called out, singsongy.
“Should I grab her?” Georgie asked. She was wearing a short jean jacket over a purple tube top and a floaty black skirt with ruffles and black ankle high boots. “Should I hold her against her will and cap the volcanic emotional rocks bursting forth?”
“Triple bitch!” Corky threw another chair. I ducked once again.
She was out of chairs. I grabbed one of the chairs that had been thrown, scooted around the desk, dropped it right in front of her, then darted back behind my desk. “Go ahead and throw it again, Corky!”
She picked up the chair and pitched it. “Straight-haired, spindly legged snot!”
I scrambled out and brought her another chair, then hustled back behind my desk.
That chair broke on my desk.
“Tight-assed, stuck-up, know-it-all!”
Even though she called me “tight ass,” I didn’t think it was time to tell her about her wiggly Jell-O bottom. I scooted out a third time, handed her another chair, and darted behind the desk. “One more time, Corky.”
“Arggghhh!” She tossed that chair and it split, too.
“Okay, you’ve had your temper tantrum, Corky. Now go home and think about what I said. Meditate. Yoga-ize yourself. Slap your cheeks. Whatever it takes.”
“I’ll never think!”
“Never?”
“No, never! I’ll never think!” She was shaking all over.
Georgie said, “Wrap yourself in your spiritual nature as you leave. Think pleasant thoughts. Think of waterfalls, rivers, streams, a naked man. Think of a naked man. That’s what I do to calm my spirit.”
I glanced at Georgie while keeping a close eye on the chair thrower. Eye candy. Georgie used men as eye candy for inner peace.
Corky turned to huff out, but first she kicked my wall and threw a metal side table. Stanley barked at her. Twice. He did not raise his paw, he did not want a hug. “I’m going to sue you, you liar, you silly-headed creep, you poop!”
Poop? I was a poop?
She blushed redder. I knew she regretted saying the word poop. It sounded so poopy.
“My pleasure,” I called out. “Call my attorney, Keith Stein, directly. He’s in the book.”
“You’re going to regret this!”
“You’re not. You’re going to go home and fume and rant and rave until everyone around you is literally running when they see you lumbering their way, and you’re finally going to have a Herculean breakdown and cry your eyes out, and three days later you’re going to call me and make an appointment.”
“Never! I’ll never make an appointment with you again. You don’t know anything. I don’t know why you’re all famous and everyone thinks you know it all, you know-it-all-poop.”
“Think about what I said,” I said. Maybe I’d have two burritos.
Georgie sucked on her sucker. She is such a noisy sucker sucker. “Thinking can cause different philosophical and metaphysical thought processes to grow stronger, making you more one with the intelligence in the universe.”
“I’ll never think!” Corky declared again, red, sweaty, quivering. “Never!”
When she finally waddled out, Georgie said, “She’s vowed to never think. That’s a first.”
“Sure is. Make sure you charge her for the chairs
she broke. Three hundred dollars each, at least.”
“Okeydokey.” I heard Stanley bark. Twice.
I went over and shook his hand, then hugged him. “Sorry about that, Stanley. Let it go.”
“He doesn’t like conflict,” Georgie said.
“You’re going to have to get used to it, Stanley. Life’s a conflict.”
Georgie rolled her eyes. “How about that shopping trip?”
I read an article about him in the New York Times that night. He was also in the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, and so on. I cut them out, studied what he said, how he said it.
I wasn’t stalking him. Or spying on him.
I was merely keeping track of him and his life. That’s why I have a manila envelope full of his photos, articles, etcetera, which I peek at when the moon is high and feeling romantic.
I did not have tears in my eyes for any other reason than a bit of dust had gotten through a window in the house that I live in that I don’t like.
A bit of dust.
10
I remember when we met Sherwinn.
Momma, Annie, and I were walking down the main street of our town near the ocean. Momma was wearing a purple and pink flowered dress and a wicker hat with a pink flower in it, her hair flowing down her back, like a black, feathered wing.
Annie and I were in matching blue jean shorts and matching pink T-shirts with butterflies. We were going to the ice-cream saloon. At that point, we loved ice cream. Chocolate mint, chocolate fudge, rainbow, and our favorite, peppermint, because it was pink.
“Whooaa,” Sherwinn drawled, stopping right in his tracks on the sidewalk and ogling Momma. “Lady, you are the finest looking woman I have seen in years.”
My momma gave him a hint of a smile. She wasn’t feeling “as bright and white as daisies,” as she put it to us, what with her headaches from crying and all.
“I had no idea the Cape produced such beautiful, can I say, sexy women.”
Sherwinn was tall, muscled, and good looking, with all the right words for a lonely widow. To many people, he would appear perfectly normal. He had moved to town to work in the fishing industry and had that tough-guy attitude so many women find irresistible, to their own peril. “If I had known that you were here, I would have moved sooner than I did. That was my loss, but we can always turn it into a gain.”
My momma said, “Heard it before, slick, and it’s not going to work,” but she smiled and he smiled back and he knew he had her. He had her. Like a gang of tarantulas, he had her.
Will you, Marie Elise O’Shea, have Sherwinn Barnes to be your husband? Will you love him, comfort and keep him, and forsaking all others remain true to him as long as you both shall live?
Theirs was a short, intense romance. Lots of dates, lots of intensity, enough so my momma’s brain whirled. Sherwinn spent money on her that my momma found out later wasn’t his money. As an adult, I understood what my momma temporarily liked about Sherwinn. She liked feeling alive again. She liked shedding the grief of losing my dad twenty months prior. She liked all of Sherwinn’s attention. He was a charismatic, compelling force, with that possessive, I’m-in-control sexiness. My momma, fighting fatigue, her headaches, her grief, her aloneness, couldn’t think straight, couldn’t put up a fight against Sherwinn’s overwhelming, take-charge personality.
And I know something else, something I shouldn’t know. My momma was the last of the virgins. She did not have relations with my dad until she was married. They only dated six months, after meeting their senior year of college in Boston, but he was a looker and, as my momma told me later, “I could barely restrain myself, darlin’, around your dad. That’s why we didn’t wait long to marry. I wanted that white dress and I wanted it to mean something.”
Will you, Sherwinn Barnes, have Marie Elise O’Shea to be your wife? Will you love her, comfort and keep her, and forsaking all others remain true to her as long as you both shall live?
One night, I got up to get myself another slice of my momma’s French silk chocolate pie and I saw my momma and Sherwinn under a tree. I saw them rolling, I saw what they were doing, and I closed my eyes and ran upstairs, sickened.
The next day, my momma cried all day, and the next day, too.
On the third day, she was engaged to marry Sherwinn. Now why a grown woman would feel compelled to marry a man simply because she’d had relations with him is something I don’t understand. But that incident under the tree, combined with the force of Sherwinn’s personality, well, it was a tornado that swept her up, up, and away.
Almost two years after our dad died, she married Sherwinn in the backyard of our house by the sea. My dad’s parents weren’t there. The grief of losing their only child had overwhelmed them and they died six months apart, starting three months after my dad died. Though I was not as close to them as I was to my momma’s parents, it was two more losses.
My momma was pale on her wedding morning, withdrawn. Sherwinn was grinning, happy as could be. His family consisted of his father, who got sloshy drunk and had to be hauled off by my dad’s relatives, a younger brother who had been released from the state pen two weeks before, and another who ambled in and hit on no fewer than three clients of Marie Elise’s French Beauty Parlor.
The night before the wedding, after the rehearsal dinner, I heard my grandparents talking to my momma on the porch. They spoke German.
“Honey, please don’t, it’s not too late to back out . . . what do you find attractive about this man . . . he resembles a good-looking possum with the education of a rancid pig . . . he might be sexy, Marie Elise, but there needs to be more . . . I don’t understand . . . we don’t understand, dammit . . . no, we don’t like him, we can’t pinpoint what it is, but there’s something there, a gut feeling, it’s killing me, something’s off, damn off . . . what about the children . . . now, don’t cry, Marie Elise, chin up, shoulders back, let’s fix this ruckus of a problem and send him off on his merry way . . . we know you’ve been lonely, we know you miss Luke, we do, too, sugar . . . this is not the answer, it’s a rat hole . . . for God’s sakes, Marie Elise, what are you doing?”
The talk degenerated from there, my granddad clearly furious and baffled as to why my momma would marry Sherwinn, and my grandma tried to cajole her daughter with gentle persuasion, but my momma wouldn’t listen. For once in her life, she wouldn’t listen to her parents. Later, we would blame our momma’s insidious grief and her medical issues for her colossal lack of judgment.
After the wedding, Grandma and Granddad called Annie and me to chat by phone, they sent cookies and gifts, but that fight with my momma was so bad, we didn’t see them again for what seemed like, to us as children, forever. Maybe momma told them not to come. Maybe they didn’t want to be around Sherwinn. But whatever it was, we felt abandoned by two of the people we loved best in the world.
Later, after what happened, they both apologized, their agony over not seeing what was happening to Annie and me, bringing them to their knees.
With this ring I thee wed, and all my worldly goods I thee endow. In sickness and in health, in poverty or in wealth . . .
The next day, the wedding day, it rained like someone had taken a machete to the turbulent clouds massed over Massachusetts and dumped all the rain in one place.
The wedding was moved indoors. The caterers burned the steaks Sherwinn insisted on. The minister came late because Shell Dee’s and Trudy Jo’s sons dismantled the minister’s engine so he wouldn’t make it. When he arrived, after running to the house, he said to my momma, “Are you sure, Marie Elise? Very sure?”
Dr. Rubenstein and his wife were in a minor car accident on the way over. Two mirrors fell off the walls and broke. Carman saw a black cat run across the grass.
And still, in our living room, my momma said, I do. Yes.
Interestingly enough, she did not change her last name. “We’re the O’Shea girls, that’s never going to change.”
Sherwinn’s eyes, from the moment he was in
our house, moved all the way up and down my body, like a serpent. He snapped my bra strap when my momma wasn’t looking, wound my curls around his fingers and pulled. He patted my butt when he could, telling me not to be a “bad girl” and to obey him. “I’m your father now, Madeline. As long as you do what I say, we’ll get along.”
He could hardly quit hugging Annie, dragging her onto his lap and cuddling her.
But never when my momma was looking.
Oh, no, when my momma was around, he was careful. Fatherly.
He touched our momma. He’d hold her close, squishing her chest against his. He’d grab her boobs. He was always slipping a hand over my momma’s body, as if her body were his drug. She’d slap his hands away and say, “Not in front of the girls.” He’d come up from behind and grind himself against her.
Pretty soon the grind was on us.
. . . till death do us part.
Death did part my momma and Sherwinn.
Death parted Annie and me, physically, from Sherwinn.
But his demented spirit, the crimes he and they committed against us, that hasn’t left. It’s like I have Sherwinn still with me, still controlling part of my mind that I have tried to snatch back from his evil psychosis my whole life.
11
I dreaded telling Granddad and Annie about the article Marlene was writing, as much as I would dread being run over by a pack of raging rhinos. But it was coming down the pike, and though Keith was throwing legal bombs the publisher’s way, he had no ground to stand on, and we both knew it. If I didn’t tell them, someone else would, like Marlene, or they’d hear of it when that blasted article was published.
In addition, in the last blackmail letter I had received, one of the photographs, of Annie and me, had been torn up into about five pieces. I got the point. Pay up, or our lives would be ripped apart.
I would not pay up, even though my air seemed to be hiding behind my organs, not swirling through my lungs as it should. I would not be threatened by any man, or woman, ever again in my life. I would not be told what to do. I would not be a victim again.