by Theresa Alan
How could I have risked imprisonment so I would have extra energy to plan the perfect wedding? How could I have been so stupid?
A nne Braithwaite is an attractive woman in her early fifties. She’s a blonde with a prodigious bosom and a warm, comforting smile.
“It’s nice to meet you, Eva.”
I clear my throat. “It’s nice to meet you, too.”
She gestures for me to take a seat. Her office is small and very plain. The carpet is worn and the furniture is old—thousands of troubled people have parked their butts on the very cushions of the loveseat I sit in now.
Anne has a large desk with a thick mahogany clock facing my direction. That’s really the only decoration in the room except for books. Books are everywhere. Thick, serious-looking books that jam shelves that reach the ceiling on two of Anne’s walls. Books are stacked on her desk and on the two end tables on either side of the loveseat where I sit and there are piles of them on the floor, too.
“What brings you here today?” Anne asks.
“A friend of mine, she was a former patient of yours, and she recommended you.”
We stare at each other for a moment. We both know that’s not what she meant.
“I’m not really sure where to begin,” I say. I start where I think it starts, one year ago when I fell in love with the man I want to spend my life with. I tell her about the project with Woodruff Pharmaceuticals and about planning the wedding and trying to be the perfect domestic and sex goddess to Will, and how there wasn’t enough time in the day for it all. “And when Sandy gave me the drugs and said it would give me energy, I—unbelievably, stupidly, idiotically—I just took it. And what happened was that after I used it, I loved it, and I wanted more, and I didn’t particularly care about what it was exactly that I was putting into my body. I’m feeling very stupid right now. And ashamed. I’m a smart woman, and yet somehow I managed to convince myself that it was better to poison myself with an illegal drug than to waste time being tired.
“I think,” I continue, “that at the base of all this, I struggle with self-esteem. In my teens, I really had serious problems with it. I wrote over and over again in my diaries that I was fat and ugly and boring and not worth loving. Then I got to college and I discovered feminism. I was surrounded by other feminists and reading these authors who told me about how the diet and fashion and makeup industries fueled our insecurities to sell products and that it was a bunch of bullshit and we were wonderful just the way we were, and I believed that. I stopped hating myself. I stopped counting calories. I stopped putting myself down all the time, and I came to believe that I was okay just as I was. I don’t mean to say that I never suffered from self-doubt, because I did, but I stopped thinking things like I didn’t deserve to be loved just because I was a little overweight. And then I started succeeding at my career, and I really began believing in myself, believing that I had talent and worth. Then, when I met Will, I fell for him so hard. I was out of my mind in love with him. I’d never loved anyone like that, and it kind of scared me. I started worrying that I would lose him. I worried that he would think I wasn’t as sexually adventurous or fun as his first wife, and that he would constantly be comparing us in his mind. I worried that even if we did get married, I’d mess it up because I have a hard time communicating my emotions. I worried that he’d leave me for a woman who could cook. It was just this downward spiral of self-doubt.”
I pause to take a breath. I look at the clock. I’ve been talking nonstop for forty-nine minutes of our fifty-minute session.
Anne smiles at me. “You certainly make my job easy, Eva. You’re very self-aware.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“It’s a good thing, but I think that because you’re so self-aware, you beat yourself up too much. I’m going to give you a homework assignment.”
My homework is to pat myself on the back three times every day for something I’ve done well, even if it’s as insignificant as making a good cup of coffee. Any time I start to beat myself up over something or put myself down, I’m supposed to banish the negative thoughts from my mind immediately.
It’s much harder than it sounds. I have no trouble picking on myself for things I don’t do well, but I have a much harder time thinking of things I do right.
Chapter 35
F or the first several days after I get out of the hospital, Will watches me in a way he never did before. When we go out for beer at Mickie’s with our friends, he studies me taking every sip of beer, as if I’m some junkie who can’t be trusted with any mind-altering substance, even something as innocuous as beer.
This is what fucking freaks me out. On Sunday night, I suddenly, out of nowhere, get this incredibly intense desire to get high. I think briefly about all the terrible things about taking drugs. The heart attacks, getting hooked, getting thrown in jail, and I think, no, no, that’s not going to happen, I just want to get high tonight. I can’t stop thinking about calling Sandy and seeing if she can hook me up. I try to think of lies I can tell Will to get out of the house so I can meet her.
But I get through the night sober. Several more times over the next couple weeks, my craving for drugs nearly overwhelms me. The craving is so intense that things like getting thrown in jail don’t seem like that big of a deal. Jail? Bah! A trivial detail. And it scares the shit out of me to find myself thinking this way. I think about what the doctor said about how it seems like I’m the one thinking I want to use, when really it’s the drug addiction telling me to. I get through these nights white-knuckled with my craving to get high. All I can do is not use. I can’t read, or watch TV, or concentrate on anything. I just don’t use drugs. It takes everything I have. All my energy, all my mental faculties. It’s exhausting. I only used a few times. How could it possibly be this hard to quit?
After three weeks of staying sober, Will begins to believe me that I’ve learned my lesson. He stops watching my every move like a hawk. We start to build trust again. On the nights when I don’t have the strength or courage to stay sober for myself, I find the strength and courage to stay sober for Will. I want ours to be a relationship based on trust and honesty, and if I’m using, that’s not possible.
Seeing Anne is helping me, too. I’ve talked to her about how all my life I tried to succeed to make my father proud of me, and how I always strove to be perfect and beat myself up when it turned out I wasn’t.
I’ve also told her about all the stress in my life. She tells me to think of creative ways of how to reduce it. I talk with Will, and we decide we’ll hire a maid to come once a week to clean the house. We also agree that he’ll do the dishes on the nights I cook, and I ask him to be in charge of dinner three nights a week, whether he makes grilled cheese or frozen pizza or takeout, I don’t care, I just don’t want to have to worry about feeding us. I’ll cook dinner the other nights of the week, but I’m going to stop killing myself trying to plan perfect meals. We may eat mac and cheese every night, but I just don’t have it in me, at least not right now, to worry about achieving perfection.
The work I’ve been contracted to do with WP will be over in a month. Kyle Woodruff will likely want to renew my contract and have me consult on the launch of their new product line. I’m undecided about whether to turn him down. If I did, it would mean I’d very probably never get work from WP again and Kyle would likely bad mouth my work to other execs in the area, which would potentially damage my career. My other option is to agree to do more work, but only if Kyle agrees to let me bring in a partner or lets me map out more reasonable deadlines. Whatever happens, I can’t worry about it right now.
My efforts to finish planning the wedding are halfhearted. It’s t-minus four months until we’re supposed to get hitched, and I’ve pretty much stopped planning the thing.
The only thing I’m still doing is looking for the elusive perfect dress. Something that will transform me. I don’t mean just some dress that will make me look beautiful, although I want that, too, but a dres
s that somehow gets me feeling like having a wedding will be the most exciting thing in the world for me. I go into boutiques and try on dresses, and I just feel hollow. I feel bored with all the work it takes to plan a wedding. I just want to be married and not have to bother with all this other stuff.
It occurs to me that I could just hire a wedding planner, but when I think of how quickly the cost of this wedding could escalate. I feel torn by genuinely wanting a gorgeous, perfect wedding and not wanting to get sucked into the expense and hype of having a gorgeous, perfect wedding.
So rather than deciding what it is I really want, I do nothing.
Chapter 36
I ’m nervous about meeting Gabrielle and Rachel for lunch. I take extra care with my hair, makeup, and clothes, trying to look as healthy, happy, and normal as I can. I haven’t seen them since I landed in the hospital, but I’ve spoken to them on the phone so they both know about what happened. Rachel is already sitting at a table when I get to the café. I take a seat across from her.
“How are you?” Rachel asks me. She looks at me like I’m a china doll with a hairline fracture threatening to split into a million pieces in the slightest breeze. I want to die of embarrassment.
“I’m doing okay. Work has been really stressful.”
“I wasn’t talking about work,” Rachel says.
“I know, but I mean…that was a big trigger for…what happened.”
“Why don’t you quit then?”
“I signed a contract. It would be hell to get out of now. This phase of the project is almost done anyway.”
“You’re used to dealing with stress. What’s different about this?”
“It’s the man I’m working for. Did you hear that Warren Woodruff, the founder of Woodruff Pharmaceuticals, turned the company over to his son when he retired about a year ago?”
“That sounds vaguely familiar, but I can’t say I really stay on top of business news,” Rachel says.
“Well, it’s one thing to turn a small family business over to your son, but it’s another thing to turn over a huge company to your kid. It wouldn’t have been a big deal if Kyle had experience, but he didn’t. It’s unfortunate because I really liked Warren. Warren was an unpretentious self-made man. I learned a lot about business from him. But his son…Kyle doesn’t really know what he’s doing, so he’s got this personality that’s a cross between being arrogant while at the same time craving approval. He’s kind of a dictator. He’s a rich kid who is used to getting his own way, not through consensus, but by demanding it or manipulating it. So anyway, between that and the wedding, I just, I…What am I saying? I don’t have a good excuse. I’m going to shut up now.”
“I want to murder Sandy.”
“It’s not her fault.”
“Yes, it is. She got back together with her loser boyfriend, and how does she make a living? By selling drugs. To my friends. Drugs her idiot boyfriend cooks up in his kitchen.”
“I didn’t realize she’d gotten back together with him.”
“It’s still an on-and-off thing. Right now it’s back off. But yeah, that’s where she got it. It’s just so infuriating. Do you know how much all of us chipped in so she could afford to go to rehab? A lot. I feel like she owes it to us to stay clean.”
I look up to see Gabrielle pulling out the chair next to Rachel, so I’m now facing both of them.
“How are you?” Gabrielle asks.
“I’m good. I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”
“How’s therapy?”
“It’s good. Who knows, my little brush with drugs could actually turn out to be a good thing. It’s making me face a lot of things I didn’t want to face.”
“Like what?”
“Like my lack of self-esteem. I have such a warped sense of self-worth. My therapist wants me to work at complimenting myself on all the things I do well. I can’t even tell you how hard it is. All I can see is what I don’t do well. I have such a hard time believing I’m beautiful and worthy. How could I have such a low opinion of myself? What kind of feminist am I?”
“You live in a culture that doesn’t value anything women do,” Gabrielle says. “It doesn’t value child-rearing, or cleaning, or cooking. And it values sexy women at the exact same time it degrades them as sluts and whores. We’re constantly barraged by images of eternally young and surgically enhanced women that we compare ourselves to. It’s very hard not to let all that patriarchal bullshit get to you.”
“‘Patriarchal. I’ve heard that word before. What does it mean again?” Rachel asks.
“Patriarchy is Kyle Woodruff being named chief executive officer of Woodruff Pharmaceuticals, even though he’s not qualified for it, just because his father started the company,” I say. “Patriarchy is children and women taking the man’s surname. Patriarchy is when sons get elected to office not because of their intellect or ability, but because their dad is wealthy and well-connected in political circles.”
“Ah. Got it. But what if the daughter of a wealthy politically connected family gets elected to office? What’s that?” Rachel asks.
“That’s a simple case of nepotism and class warfare,” I say with a wink.
“Patriarchy also expresses itself in the fact that we’re endlessly subjected to gorgeous young women in movies and advertisements,” Gabrielle says. “That’s because, by and large, men still have the money in Hollywood and business, so they’re the ones deciding what movies get made and what products get sold and how, and we’re constantly subjected to images of women most of us can’t possibly measure up to. So we feel bad about ourselves and will go to ridiculous lengths to feel pretty. All these girls on those Girls Gone Wild videos, I just want to pull them aside and say, Girlfriend, men hooting at you will never fill the holes you seek to fill. You need self-esteem and self-respect. Come on!”
“Yeah, you know, I remember when the movie Troy came out,” I say. “And all my male friends got all blustery by how distractingly good-looking Brad Pitt looked in that movie. I mentioned how I’d read that Brad had been kind of put out because he’d had to add on ten pounds of muscle for the role, and the guys were all like, ‘Oh yeah, poor Brad Pitt, his normal Adonislike body isn’t enough.’ I remember thinking, ‘Ah-ah! That’s a small taste of what it’s like to be a woman. Now just multiple that by a thousand percent, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and you’ll get the full picture.”
“Plus, when you live in a world where men are valued more than women, it’s really hard not to let that get to you,” Gabrielle says. “You feel like you can never quite measure up because you’ll never be a male.”
“I don’t feel like things are quite so dire,” Rachel says. “I mean, yes, women don’t make as much money as men and we don’t have nearly as many women in government as men, but I don’t think things are unequal. Well, I mean, not exactly—”
“Back in the days when women couldn’t vote or work or own property, they didn’t think things were unequal either. They thought that’s just the way things were and always would be. They thought it was natural. Inequality is even more dangerous when it’s subtle. It’s easier to kid yourself that things are okay,” I say. The three of us pick at our food in silence for a moment. I think about mentioning how in China and India there is a huge disparity in the number of men to women because female fetuses are aborted and female babies are abandoned. The implications of this for the future are significant, but I decide that I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Reality can really just be too much of a drag. I decide to change the subject instead. “Anyway, how are things going in your life, Rachel? Still sending steamy emails to Shane?”
She smiles. “I know it’s terrible, but it’s been really fun.”
“What if Jon found the emails?” I ask.
“I’ve been saving them in an obscure folder within a folder. He could never find them.”
“You’re not deleting them?” Gabrielle asks, eyes wide.
“I like rereading them.”
“What do you say in the emails?” I ask.
“Sometimes we just talk about our days. But other times…he tells me how beautiful he thinks I am and how sexy I am. He tells me the things he’d like to do to me if I weren’t married. He tells me about the tropical paradises he’d take me to and how he’d make love to me for hours and basically worship me. It’s a nice fantasyland.”
“But it’s always just going to stay a fantasy, right?” I say.
Rachel pauses a moment too long.
“Rachel?” I prompt.
“Yes, yes, of course, it’s just going to remain a fantasy.”
“Rachel,” Gabrielle says, “I’ve got to tell you, as someone who’s been cheated on, it’s the most painful thing in the world to experience. You really need to think this through.”
“Yeah, Rach, think of this from Jon’s point of view. What if you found out he was flirting with a woman via email?”
“He’s already done it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There was this little chippy he worked with that he flirted with through email.”
“When? How did you find out about it?”
“A couple of years ago. We never use passwords or anything on our email, and then suddenly I noticed that he’d password-protected his email account, so I immediately got suspicious and hacked my way in.”
“How’d you do that?” I ask.
“Because I know my husband. I know he doesn’t have a great memory, so I knew he wouldn’t use anything complicated. I tried several combinations of the kids’ names, his age, the dog’s name, until I finally figured out what his password was.”