“I guess it made me feel good. Because I think the hardest part about her being dead is the finality. I’ll never ever get to see her again. I mean, it’s over. It’s been over for fifteen years. That’s really scary.” As soon as the words are out, I feel my insides shift. The tears begin to fall down my face, too fast to stop them. I grab a tissue, angry that Dr. Lerner was one step ahead of me.
“So coming up for a way for that not to be true, even with something as stupid as the Mafia, gives me just one second of hope. Or possibility. Or something. And before I realize how screwed up it all is, it felt like, I mean, I guess it feels…It feels like relief,” I say.
“I don’t think it’s screwed up, as you say, to look for that kind of escape every once in a while. It makes perfect sense, and I imagine it’s very common. But I want you to think about other ways in which you find relief,” she says, putting another set of air quotes around “screwed up” and “relief.” If I weren’t busy crying, I would laugh at the gesture. “Basically, what we are doing here is unraveling your defense mechanisms. Because, over time, normal defense mechanisms can hold us back from living our lives.”
“I live my life,” I say.
“Let’s go back to your mother for now,” she says, ignoring me. Dr. Lerner has mastered the art of ignoring me. “What do you miss the most?”
I almost laugh again, because it’s like I’m watching one of those oops-cancer movies, a manipulative tearjerker that shows shiny bald heads and dying children despite being billed as the “feel-good film of the year.” The trailers should come with a warning: This movie will leave you bawling and dehydrated.
Dr. Lerner is guilty of that same false advertising. She looks kind, like an earth mother, sitting lotus-style in her hand-woven kimono, but she’s diabolical.
“You know what I miss the most? This is going to sound horrible, but I think I miss the idea of her more than anything else,” I say. “I’m not so sure I miss my mother. I just miss having a mother.”
“What does that mean? Having a mother?”
“Sometimes it’s just really hard not to have a mom. When everyone else goes home for the holidays, for example, they have this person, and I probably romanticize the notion a bit, but they have this person who wants to take care of them, who loves them unconditionally. I miss having that person—you know, that person who, no matter what happened, no matter how much I screwed up my life, would love me.”
“There are lots of people who love you, Emily.”
“I know, but that’s not the point, is it? Not with that unconditionality. I may barely be able to remember her, but I do know she gave me comfort in a way no one has or can since. I can’t remember ever feeling alone or unloved as a kid. I may have been a bit of a loner, but I never felt lonely.”
“What do you remember about your mother, about her specifically?”
“Random details, mostly. Like how she was always so much smarter than everyone else. She just seemed to know everything. She could explain how batteries worked or photosynthesis.”
Dr. Lerner nods. She doesn’t state the obvious: How can you not remember all the times your mom tucked you in and said “I love you” and stayed up late gluing pasta elbows to your art projects? How can you not remember that but remember that she knew how to explain photosynthesis?
What kind of person doesn’t remember their own mother? I remember when she was dying and who she was then—brave, defiant, and sick, so unbelievably sick—but that wasn’t who she was. That would be like judging a book on the last sentence. I didn’t take the time to memorize her when I had the chance. None of the important stuff, like the rhythm of her laugh or the texture of her voice or the feeling of her fingertips against my forehead. It never occurred to me that I might need those memories one day.
When I picture her now, I have to rely on the cheapest form of nostalgia. A photograph. I think of one that used to live on one of the bookshelves in our living room, though that has disappeared into the ether also. It was taken in the early ’70s, and in it my mother sits directly on the beach without a towel to protect her bathing-suit bottom from the sand. But it’s her hazel eyes that have stayed with me, unguarded and bright, alive enough to burn through the static of the photograph. It was taken long before I was born, so when I picture my mother, I picture a woman who never knew me, and a woman whom I never knew.
“Yeah, it’s the idea I miss. Because I forgot to meet the person behind the idea.”
“Bullshit.”
“What?”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it. You just told me exactly what you remember about your mother. That she made you feel less alone. That she was smarter than everyone else. Don’t take that stuff away from her, and don’t take that away from yourself.”
“But that’s my point exactly. There’s nothing to take away from myself. She’s long gone.”
“Let’s talk about some of your other defense mechanisms,” Dr. Lerner says later, after she tells me she has a free back-to-back hour and that I need to stay.
“What other defense mechanisms? And please don’t say anything about Andrew. I can’t handle it right now.” I am tempted to walk out the door and into the mouth of New York City. Get swallowed and chewed up into another faceless, nameless person trudging down the block.
“Let’s come back to the present, shall we,” she says, and steeples her hands, the way a lawyer would just before an opening statement. After seeing me twice a week for almost a month, Dr. Lerner is about to present her case.
“I’m not even sure where to start.” A real lawyer would have come prepared, I think. Am I that screwed up that she doesn’t even know where to start?
“Well, Grandpa Jack for one. You chose not to read the signs about his illness. I am not assigning blame here. I understand why, but you need to see the pattern. Your father. It takes two not to communicate. You think it makes life better to just stay quiet about what you want. And Andrew—I know you said that I shouldn’t talk about him, but let me just say this. I could write a whole book on your defense mechanisms with Andrew.” Dr. Lerner takes apart the steeple with her hands and puts them in a pile on her lap. She looks pleased with herself for saying it like it is. The same look people use after they say “No offense, but…”
“Oh, and I almost forgot. Your career. How long can you ignore the fact that you are unemployed? Have you even taken the time to consider what you actually want to do with your life? Your days? Don’t you get it? Don’t you get bored of denial?” she asks.
“I see what you mean,” I say, though that’s a lie. I don’t see anything at all except the box of tissues, which is now just an empty cardboard box. This, it seems, is how therapy works: Dr. Lerner throws something out there, and now it is my job to take her words and lend them credence with real-world examples. I could tell her how I haven’t told my dad that I’d like to spend Christmas together. Or how it took me over a year to tell Andrew I loved him. How I was so scared of losing him, of feeling anything, that I left him first. But I don’t say any of this out loud.
I can’t do it. Maybe because I don’t believe her, because her explanations are too simple, too shrink-wrapped. When I think of defense mechanisms, I think of a little boy hitting the girl he likes the most on the playground. I don’t think of me. I don’t think of couches, and dead mothers, and ex-boyfriends, and Alzheimer’s, and unemployment, and absentee fathers, and sexual harassment, and everything else that is confusing in my life.
Nope, I don’t think of me at all. So, instead, I say nothing and stew in the awkward silence and wait Dr. Lerner out. Two can play her game.
“I love when you prove my point for me,” she says a few minutes later, and smiles at me—not in a happy way but in an I-win kind of way. “I mention defense mechanisms, how you clam up and stonewall your own life, and how do you react? What do you do? You shut up.”
“But—”
“But what? Emily, wake up. This is your life, for God sakes. It’s time
to face up to it. You can’t get anywhere, can’t get over anything, if you don’t let yourself feel anything in the first place. It’s time.”
“Okay.”
“Stop looking at the tissue box. It doesn’t have any answers for you.”
“But…I just…I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know? That your mom has been dead for fifteen years and finally, finally you are just starting to deal with it? That you are sabotaging your own life because you are too afraid to actually live it?”
“It’s just…I don’t know, I—”
“Speak up,” Dr. Lerner says, gently now. “I can’t hear you. No one can.”
Twenty-seven
It’s been twenty-four hours since my last session with Dr. Lerner, and I find myself on an Andrew binge. A torturous exercise of recounting him, the nuances and the details, with the specificity of a documentary filmmaker. I realize now that during our two years together, I spent much of that time—not enjoying, no, that would have been too easy—but memorizing, saving those best bits for later. To savor after he left me behind. Dr. Lerner is right. I’ve been living a life of delayed gratification—the cigarette after sex.
But someone has ripped off my bulletproof vest. Someone has forced me to watch, over and over again, the life I shed with barely a glance backward.
Not someone, Emily, you.
Watch it, I tell myself. Watch it.
And so I do. I watch all of it, on a loop, everything I miss, everything I deserved to lose:
I miss the way he used to kiss my shoulder whenever it was bare and he was nearby. I miss how he cleared his throat before he took a sip of water and scratched his left arm with his right hand when he was nervous. I miss how he tucked my hair behind my ear when it came loose and took my temperature when I was sick or when he was bored. I miss his glasses on my nightstand. I miss watching him take Sunday afternoon naps on my couch, with the newspaper resting on his stomach like a blanket. How his hands stayed clasped, fingers intertwined, while he slept. I miss the cadence of his speech and the stupidity of his puns. I miss playing doctor when we made love, and even when we didn’t. I miss his smell, like fresh laundry and honey (because of his shampoo) at his place. Fresh laundry and coconut (because of my shampoo) at mine. I miss that he used to force me to listen to French rap and would sing along in a horrible accent. I miss that he always said “I love you” when he hung up the phone with his sister, never shy or embarrassed, regardless of who else was around. I miss that his ideal Friday night included a DVD, eating Chinese food right out of the carton, and cuddling on top of my duvet cover. I miss that he reread books from his childhood and then from mine. I miss that he was the only man that I have ever farted on, and with, freely. I miss that he understood that the holidays were hard for me and that he wanted me to never feel lonely.
Never again, for the rest of my life.
I miss Andrew so much that I stop and keel over and put my head between my knees. I miss Andrew so much, I begin to rock back and forth, hugging myself to make it stop. I miss Andrew so much that I throw up in the bathroom, emptying my body into the bowl in one violent motion.
I miss Andrew so much, I flush it all away.
Twenty-eight
To: Jess S. Stanton, [email protected], Ruth
Wasserstein, [email protected], Mason C. Shaw,
APT, Kate R. Callahan, APT
From: Emily M. Haxby, [email protected]
Subject: Help!
Okay, troops, I need your input. I need a new job pronto, and not sure what to do with this stinkin’ law degree. All suggestions and thoughts much appreciated.
Love,
Emily
PS: Please no jobs that involve food preparation, sweating, or tassels, or any combination thereof.
To: Emily M. Haxby, [email protected]
From: Kate R. Callahan, APT
Subject: Re: Help!
Maybe you should be a therapist. Speaking of which, thanks so much for your help the other night and all your support since. You make me feel so much better. I am starting to feel like calling off the engagement was the best decision I have ever made…
To: Emily M. Haxby, [email protected]
From: Jess S. Stanton, [email protected]
Subject: Re: Help!
Best friend extraordinaire! Too bad it is a nonpaying position, because you already got the job. I know this sounds far-fetched, but how about a job as a lawyer?
To: Emily M. Haxby, [email protected]
From: Mason C. Shaw, APT
Subject: Re: Help!
I say become a stripper.
By the way, who is this Ruth friend of yours? Is she hot?
Are we still on for drinks on Friday?
To: Mason C. Shaw, APT
From: Emily M. Haxby, [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Help!
Ruth is hot, but way, way out of your league. Still on for drinks. Stripping often requires both tassels and sweating. Next time read directions carefully.
To: Emily M. Haxby, [email protected]
From: Ruth Wasserstein, [email protected]
Subject: Re: Help!
Sorry to miss you over Thanksgiving, but had a great time with the grandkids in D.C. Anyhow, it is about time you asked about a job. I have some great ideas, but I will keep them to myself until I make some calls.
By the way, kicked Jack’s butt again at poker.
I won thirty bucks!
Twenty-nine
When she says she wants a fag, does Bridget mean she wants to have sex with a gay person?” Maryann, a tiny raisin of a woman with a red smear of lipstick, asks the rest of my octogenarian book club. “Because I think that’s a very offensive term. My grandson is a gay.”
“I didn’t know that. We should set him up with my Walter. He just came out of the closet this last June,” Shirley says, and grabs a napkin to write down her grandson’s telephone number. Shirley is more prune than raisin, wearing her weight squarely in her middle. It looks like her body wanted to hold on to some extra padding just to warm her organs.
There are six of us, five women in their eighties—though I have a sneaking suspicion that Shirley may well be in her mid-nineties—and me, sitting in the diner I usually go to with Grandpa Jack. We have only been here about half an hour, but I am already in love with each and every one of them. Their hair is dyed improbable colors, yellows, reds, and blues, and then sprayed up into tufted balloons around their faces. The group’s collective perfume is heavy in the air and mixes with the diner smells, a pungent combination of baby powder and bacon.
So far, the meal itself has not gone smoothly. Three of the women have sent back their soup—two because it was too cold, one because it was too salty. The air-conditioning has been turned down and then up again. The restaurant is too noisy, our waiter too slow, the portions too large. Surprisingly, their fussiness is not annoying; there is relief in sitting with people who have opted out of social politeness. They have long done away with pretense and the filter between thoughts and words.
Although I read Bridget Jones’s Diary a few years back, I’m not here to discuss the book. Instead, I’m one hundred percent here for the company, cranky though it may be. I want to rest my head in each of these women’s laps and ask them to stroke my hair and tell me the story of their lives. Their loves lost and gained. And likely lost again. If they have ever felt too tired to leave their couch. If they have ever vomited from heartache. If they are afraid of dying.
I wonder if the women think it’s strange that I’m here, especially since I’m not even related to Ruth, but I’m the one thing they don’t seem to mind. Instead, they look to me as the representative of all things young, a spokesperson for my generation. This makes me wish that they had chosen the Margaret Thatcher biography after all. I don’t feel like talking about the plight of “singletons,” the promiscuity of the women on Sex and the City, or even the charmingly sloppy Bridget. My fri
ends and I have rehashed it all before. I want to know what it feels like to be on the other end of your life and to have your choices already made. I want to learn from them, not the other way around.
“A fag is a cigarette,” I say. “It’s a British expression.”
“She sure smokes a lot. Do your friends smoke that much, Emily?” Shirley asks, her raspy voice suggesting she spent years sucking down the Winstons. She takes out her cell phone, flips it open and then shut again. I have noticed each of the women do this, the gadget apparently a badge of honor among the senior set.
“Not really.” Which is true, but I think I would have lied even if it wasn’t. I want to make a good impression.
“And drinking? Do your friends drink that much?” Shirley says, downing her coffee like a shot of vodka. This woman has stories. I picture Shirley at twenty, hanging out at naval docks, smoking long cigarettes and hoping to seduce a fine young officer in a starched uniform.
“Some of them do. Most of my friends work pretty long hours, so they don’t have that much time.”
“Sorry to ask you so many questions, it’s just that we picked the book to see what it’s like to be young nowadays,” Maryann says.
“And because Colin Firth is gorgeous,” Shirley says.
“I’m so glad that Bridget got herself a happy ending,” Maryann says, smiles to herself, and then reapplies her lipstick, which has the effect of holding the smile in place. “I like happy endings.”
“Me too,” Shirley says, and closes her eyes. She runs away in her head to a better, pre–Riverdale Retirement Home time. Perhaps she sees one officer in particular and makes love to him in the back of a Chevy.
“So, do you have a boyfriend, Emily?” Maryann asks, and the women all turn to look at me, their curiosity pulsing just under their skin. What she is really asking is what category I fit into: Am I looking or am I taken?
I wish it were that simple. None of the above, I want to say. I give myself an F on my report card. F for fucked it up.
The Opposite of Love Page 19