by Lisa Cach
Lessons for use on Dr. Andrew
Mirroring:
Every high school psychology student has learned that mirroring behaviors indicate that one person is in tune with another: for example, when you pick up your glass, the person across the table does the same. Sophia says that clumsy flirts try to fake this response, intentionally mirroring their target so exactly that they are quickly detected. The key to successful mirroring is to delay the response by a few seconds and to alter it. Instead of picking up the water glass as soon as the other person does so, the skilled seductress will count three beats and then swirl the contents of her wineglass.
Author’s practice of this technique with S. has confirmed that the concentration required to delay and alter the mirroring taxes one’s mental resources to such a degree that simultaneous intelligent conversation is impossible. Author suspects this is S.’s goal.
New question: Given that physical behavior can create emotional/psychological conditions (i.e., smiling on purpose has been shown to improve mood), does intentionally mirroring a person with whom one is not naturally in sync create a feeling of bonding? By behaving as if you like someone, do you in fact begin to like him better? (Another theory as to why Author is attracted to the despised male!)
Touching:
Sophia advises touching own hair, lips, and sternum while conversing with Andrew. He will read this as a sign that Author is attracted to him, and his attention will be drawn to all areas touched. This is supposed to be performed with such subtlety that no conscious note is made of self-touching actions. Overt displays of this sort can be read as signs of mental unbalance: drunkenness, desperation, easy virtue, social clumsiness.
Author has firsthand reason to doubt the veracity of this theory. Author believes that, given proper circumstances (i.e., the woman is attractive enough that the man would be willing to have sex with her—this is not a high bar to surmount; even Agnes Gooch got laid), the more self-touching the better. Declan may be an anomaly, however, easily stimulated to sexual excitement. One wonders about his childhood.
Sophia also advises frequent light touching of Andrew on the hand or arm. This will let him know it’s okay to touch Author in return. No mention made of what grabbing Andrew’s dick would let him know, although Author suspects the meaning is clear.
Why didn’t Declan ignore his “I can make you come without touching you” and go ahead and touch Author? Why didn’t he even ask, when he so clearly wanted to do it? Obviously, proving himself right was of greater importance than physical gratification. This fits with Author’s earlier experience of him as arrogant pig. Conclusion must be that he has an abnormal disconnect between heart, body, and mind.
Note: Must find a copy of the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and determine whether Declan meets the criteria for personality disorder. Despised male may also be a psychopath. This might also explain Author’s incomprehensible attraction, as psychopaths are known to be preternaturally charming when they wish to be.
Grace chewed her lip. That last bit seemed a little harsh. She shrugged, then closed the file. She stored her files on the University of Washington’s server, just in case someone got snoopy with her laptop. The only other person with access to it was her advisor, Dr. Joansdatter, but she never opened files unless Grace asked her to, to review her work.
Grace opened her e-mail and found the draft of a letter to her mother.
To answer your question about how the dissertation writing is going, well, Sophia has been giving me a lot to think about, and I’m wondering how to work it into my thesis. I’m still trying to get her to open up about her past, but she keeps changing the subject. She says she’s more interested in the present, and only fools and the nearly dead dwell on times and people long gone.
I know that Sophia was always considered the black sheep (black ewe?) of the family, and that Grandma hated her. Did she ever give you a hint as to why (beyond the obvious flaws of Sophia’s character)? I know your relationship with Grandma was strained, but I just wondered if before she died she softened up a bit and shared more about her sister.
I like Sophia more than I thought I would. I think there’s a heart under all the venom, and whether she’s being kind or cruel, she’s never boring.
No mention yet of when she’s actually going to get her hip replaced, by the way.
Much love to you and Dad,
Grace
She sent the e-mail, then, with a sigh, forced herself to respond to the latest “What’s the evil bitch up to now?” message from Cat.
Cat,
Don’t worry so much! I wouldn’t want Sophia for an enemy, but fortunately she seems to like me, and in her own perverse way she wants to help me. I’ve been taking copious notes on her, and really think my summer here is going to add a valuable dimension both to my dissertation and to my thinking as I move forward in the field of Women’s Studies. Sophia is making me look at things in a whole new way, and that’s always important. I think when we’re in an academic environment we run the risk of our viewpoints becoming too narrow and inflexible, and too divorced from concrete reality. We get wrapped up in our theories and see people only through that filter. We forget what a variety of ways there are of being in the world—or worse yet, we never get to see those ways of being at all.
I guess that’s true of anyone living their life, academic or not. But I have realized that I was too emotionally invested in being right where Sophia was concerned, and wasn’t having as open a mind as I should have. Which isn’t to say I’m unaware of how treacherous dealing with her can be or how warped some of her ideas are. Don’t worry, I haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid! Sophia’s a genius in her own way, though, and it would be a waste not to learn what I could from her.
We’ll have lots to talk about when the summer’s over. You’ll probably be appalled by what I’ve learned, but don’t worry, I haven’t been transformed into an evil mini-Sophia.
Not quite yet, anyway.
Ha-ha, just kidding!
Love,
Grace
CHAPTER
14
“And then Brooke told Chandler that I was hanging out with Brandon, so now he thinks I like him instead of him, and I don’t know what to do.” Lali threw up her hands, then dropped them onto Andrew’s arm and looked imploringly into his eyes. “What do you think, Dr. Andrew? Should I tell him how I feel?”
“Er …” Andrew cast a helpless look at Grace, who shrugged. They were walking down the path onto the beach in Carmel, joining dozens of others who’d gathered for a volunteer beach cleanup. It had been Lali’s idea to go, and she’d swept Grace and Andrew along in her wake, for which Grace was grateful; her own halting attempts to speak to Andrew had resulted in foot-shuffling awkwardness on both their parts. All Sophia’s advice the night before on how to handle him had fled from Grace’s mind, chased away by the embarrassment of their last meeting and the knowledge that he thought she looked bloated.
Her confidence was further lowered by remembering his comment on the day she’d arrived, about how it wasn’t the beauty of the face across the dinner table that mattered. It no longer seemed quite so sweet. If a guy liked you, you should seem pretty in his eyes, even if you were a bit out of shape and liked the occasional chocolate chocolate-chip banana cookie.
Lali shook Andrew’s arm. “You’re a guy. What do you think? Would he like that or be turned off?”
“I … uh, tell which one what?”
Lali rolled her eyes and turned to Grace. “Men! They act like we speak in tongues. Ooh! There’s Kristie. If I don’t see you later, don’t wait for me! I’ll get a ride with Kristie.” She dashed off across the sand to her friend, leaving the two of them alone.
Grace and Andrew headed toward the tables where the organizers were handing out trash bags and directing the volunteers. Grace glanced shyly up at Andrew, hoping to catch his eye or at least exchange a smile, but his attention was elsewhere and
he seemed oblivious to her presence. Or maybe he, too, was just too shy to look at her.
But then Andrew’s face lit up with recognition and was transformed from coolly distant to warm and vivacious. “George!” he called as they approached one of the tables, behind which stood a skeletal, wildly bearded man in an old T-shirt declaring LIFE’S A BEACH, AND MOST DUMB SUCKERS ARE CRAPPING THEIRS UP!
“Dr. Andrew,” George answered, and pumped his hand in enthusiastic greeting. “Good to see you out here!”
“Just doing my part,” Andrew said as Grace smiled by his side, waiting to be introduced. The thin man had squirrelly eyes, open a little too wide, so that the whites showed at the top of his irises. Was he on drugs?
“Excellent, excellent,” George said, handing Andrew two bags. “See you at Thursday’s meeting?”
“Wouldn’t miss it!” Andrew moved away from the table, leaving Grace standing there, still expecting to be introduced. George’s eyes skimmed over her, then looked past her at the next volunteer coming up for a bag.
Grace felt a small stab of hurt. Was she invisible today?
“Who was that?” Grace asked as she caught up to Andrew and they moved out of earshot. “He acted like I didn’t exist.”
“Don’t take it personally. He’s probably hungry.”
Grace felt a stab of shame and looked back over her shoulder at the man, whose skeletal frame and ragged clothes now made sense. A homeless man was volunteering to help save the environment, and here she’d been silently calling him Squirrel Eyes. “You mean, like homeless hungry?”
“No, I mean he hasn’t had his midday nutritional allotment.”
Grace swung her gaze back to Andrew. “What?”
“His midday—”
“Oh, lunch!” she laughed, and suddenly remembering Sophia’s advice to touch him, gave him a nudge with her elbow. “You had me for a moment.”
“I guess you could call it lunch. He follows CRON.”
“Is that a guru?” Grace asked, lurching through the soft sand. She could already feel sweat starting to break out. She was wearing a big straw hat, an apricot cotton sundress, and pale green Havaianas flip-flops. She grabbed Andrew’s arm to stop him as she slipped out of the flip-flops and bent to pick them up. When she glanced up at him this time, still bent over, she was rewarded by his gaze on her chest.
Ha! He wasn’t so impervious to her after all!
“It’s an acronym: Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition.”
“Oh, a diet. No wonder he’s grumpy.” They resumed their walk toward the south end of the beach, Grace walking a little closer to him so that their arms occasionally brushed. Apparently her question had distracted him from the allure of her feminine self, though.
“CRON isn’t a diet, it’s a lifestyle,” Andrew said, becoming animated. “Calorie restriction is the only proven way to slow the aging process. You cut down on your food intake by about forty percent—while maintaining maximum nutrition—for the rest of your life.”
“How perfectly horrible.”
“You think cancer, heart disease, and death aren’t horrible? CRON might give you a long life free of all those things.”
“I’d throw myself off a cliff if I was never going to be able to eat pizza again, and I mean pizza on a fairly regular basis,” she said teasingly.
He met her eyes. “When you’re seventy-five, you might think a little differently about whether or not you should have eaten those pizzas.”
Grace bit the insides of her cheeks, clamping down on the urge to argue, and forcefully shoving aside the thought that Dr. Andrew was a wack job on the topic of food. Open mind, Grace, open mind … She made herself smile and entwined her arm in his, and felt his surprise at the contact. “You seem to know a lot about it,” she purred. “Is George a patient of yours?”
“I met him at a CRON meeting.”
“You’re one of them?” she squeaked before she could control herself.
“There’s some sound science to back it up, although of course no one is sure yet if it’ll work the same way in humans as in animals.”
“But how could it possibly be good for you? I’d feel awful if I ate so little. I wouldn’t have any energy or be able to think.”
“Not at all! You get great energy doing CRON, and until you try it, you don’t realize how much the processed crap that makes up the standard American diet is fogging your brain. About the only complaint people make is of a loss of libido.”
Grace stared at him in shock. “No libido?”
“The body doesn’t want to reproduce when its calorie intake is low.”
“So you—er, I mean people who do CRON, they don’t have sex?”
“I don’t mean that.”
“Phew! Long life is one thing, but long life with no food and no sex … What’s the point?”
He stiffened. “To be perfectly honest, CRONies do think much less about sex than those who eat a standard diet. But that’s good, and I should think you’d approve. Isn’t civil discourse between men and women much easier if there isn’t a constant subtext of sex? Isn’t it much easier for them to be friends and coworkers?”
“You’re right, of course,” she said, even as she felt a stab of disappointment. She wanted to be friends with Andrew, but she also wanted him to ogle her, at least a little. She wanted him to have a sexual thought or two with her in the starring role.
An image of yesterday afternoon in the field with Declan made her stomach flutter. That had been so naughty, and nothing about the day had been about building a stable friendship.
But Declan was bad. Andrew, and his ideas, were good. She squeezed his arm and leaned a little more against him, looking up at him with as open an expression as she could muster. “Tell me more about CRON. I’m very interested.”
He happily obliged, just as Declan had in talking about his car. Gesturing with his free hand he said, “It’s pretty exciting, isn’t it, the idea of living to be a hundred and twenty, or even longer. It’s conceivable that you could extend your life so far that with the medical advances of the next fifty years, you could live past two hundred! Can you imagine?”
Sadly, Grace could. “At one pizza a week for fifty-two weeks in a year, for two hundred years, that would be more than ten thousand pizzas a girl wouldn’t eat. Probably not much bacon, either,” she added faintly.
Andrew put his hand over hers on his arm and stopped walking, looking down at her with eyes moist with emotion. “Your body is a beautiful temple designed by God, Grace. You should not spoil it with poisonous foods.”
She gazed back, feeling the warmth of his regard. He thought her body was a beautiful temple … but he also thought she was vandalizing it with her eating habits.
“You don’t truly want to put destructive garbage like pizza in it, do you?” he said.
Yes, she did, she very much did. She would slather her temple with tomato sauce and melted cheese, given half the chance. But she stuck to Sophia’s advice, and said, “I’m a vegetarian already.” She shuddered, suddenly overcome by a lust for freshly cooked bacon—crispy, fried, rich with salty, fatty goodness. Bacon still warm from the pan, with a thin rind of maple-cured deliciousness on the edges. Her mouth watered. Bacon, bacon, oh, how I love you, bacon …
“That’s good! Grace, that’s so good.” He beamed at her as if she were a child in need of praise for using the potty.
She felt patronized, and a shard of orneriness made her modify what she’d said. “Well, flexitarian, to be precise. Declan accused me of hypocrisy for calling myself a vegetarian when I still eat fish and dairy.”
Andrew looked appalled. “There can be a lot of mercury in fish, you know. And dairy … Grace, no, really, you need to switch to soy or almond milk.”
“Maybe you can help me become a better eater,” she said, and batted her eyes at him even as she wanted to cry inside. Good-bye, ice cream; good-bye, cheese; so long, butter and all the marvelous things to be made with it. She was already on
starvation rations thanks to the sadistic nutritionist, and it was pushing her over the edge. She couldn’t think straight half the time, and her moods were going wonky. She sat around fantasizing about food when she should be writing her dissertation. There was no way she could face a whole lifetime of restricted calories.
“I’d love the chance to help you, Grace! You’ll see, this will be the best thing that’s ever happened to you.” He patted her hand where it rested on his arm.
Instead of being thrilled, she felt slightly depressed.
She forgot about Andrew’s hand on top of hers as she imagined a bacon and butter sandwich: She’d use white bread, sprinkle sugar on the butter, lay on four or five strips of bacon, then squish it all nearly flat, until the bread was as thin as a flour tortilla. Mmm.
Maybe Andrew could eventually be persuaded to eat proper food like that. And then his libido would fire up, and—
“I really don’t see why Declan should care whether you’re a flexitarian or a vegetarian,” Andrew said.
The mention of Declan’s name shook Grace free from her mental food orgy. So there was competition between the two men. Excellent. “Neither do I. He wouldn’t recognize anything as food unless it had four hooves and a brand on its butt.”
“He is a bit of a Neanderthal, isn’t he?” Andrew asked, glancing at her from the corner of his eye as if to gauge her reaction.
“I didn’t know men like him still existed,” she drawled, thinking of how good Declan had looked naked. “I thought they’d all gone the way of the woolly mammoth. Still, I suppose there are women who find that type of raw masculinity appealing,” Grace said, hoping to tap into that sense of competition. They were now a couple hundred yards past the last of the volunteers. “This looks like a good spot to go to work, don’t you think?”
“I’ve never understood why women are attracted to that sort,” Andrew complained, bending down to pick up a plastic bottle. “Don’t they know what a lousy husband he’d be?”
“Oh, I suppose every woman has some vulnerability to his type.”
“But not you, surely?”