“Excellent!” Rarely did her calls end in such a crescendo for her. “And remember,” she added, dispensing advice she knew she had to take herself, “small steps. Don’t try to do it all at once.”
“Penny,” he paused, and she pictured him shaking his head and smiling, “you are the greatest.”
“You, too, Steve,” she said, wondering if either one of them was using a real name, or if this whole camaraderie was a mirage. “Now you let me know how things go, okay?”
“You got it.” He sounded stronger than usual. “I’ll be calling you back.”
“Thanks, Steve.” She pushed the END button on her phone and hesitated, wondering for the thousandth time if it was as wrong as it felt to let this poor guy call and pay so much per minute for a friend.
She knew it wasn’t a good thing, but it was his choice. He chose to do it over and over again. Even though she’d warned him it was costing a lot.
How responsible did she need to be for that?
It wasn’t a question she could answer, so she decided to pose it to Dr. Ratner, her four o’clock appointment. For which she was paying 130 bucks an hour.
Compared with what Steve was paying, it seemed like a bargain.
The conversation with Dr. Ratner went the same way it usually did.
“I’m concerned that you’re not feeling confident enough to come to my office,” Dr. Ratner said. “It’s only six blocks away. You could walk here in ten or fifteen minutes and have the pleasure of knowing you beat one of your challenges.”
Challenges. Right. It was a phobia. There was no spin on that. Sandra didn’t like to leave her apartment. She knew it was called agoraphobia, she knew it was common, she knew it could be cured with some work…for some people. She knew a lot of stuff about it.
She knew she had to break through the fear by going out. It was practically Psychology 101, and it was time she did it.
“I’ve just been busy,” she lied, wondering why she was paying so much per hour to lie to a therapist.
“Sandra, you need to make yourself a priority.”
“I know….”
“You’ve said that every week for almost a year,” Dr. Ratner persisted. “I’m not sure you’re really getting this. You can talk to me all you want, every week, every day, whatever you need. But you’re not going to get better until you bust through that wall and get out of your safe environment.”
“Every time you say that, it makes it sound like the world outside isn’t safe.”
“Maybe that’s because you feel it isn’t safe. Maybe that’s just one more good reason for you to get out and face your demons.” Dr. Ratner’s voice was soothing, but what she said still felt undoable to Sandra. “Until you do, I don’t think I, or anyone else, can truly help you.”
“So what are you saying?” Good God, was her therapist breaking up with her?
“I’m simply saying you need to get out for an hour. Half an hour. Whatever you can make yourself do. Look, you drive to the grocery store and the library, and you’ve come into my office now and again. You know you can do it without running into any personal danger. All I’m saying is that you need to challenge yourself a little so that you can grow through this phobia.” Dr. Ratner hesitated a moment, perhaps not realizing Sandra was sobbing silently on the other end of the line. “Does that make sense?”
Sandra nodded, then said in a small voice, “Yes.”
“Excellent. So how about a trip to the movies?”
Sandra shook her head, unseen. “Too crowded. And movies are too long these days.”
She knew what she had to try to do. And it wasn’t some boring movie in a creepy dark theater. She needed to meet people she could feel safe with, people she had something in common with. The only way she could envision herself going out and leading any semblance of a normal life was to be with friends, to be talking about something interesting to her—as opposed to a party where all the skinny girls and hot guys were hooking up and she was working in the kitchen.
“Then what are you interested in?” Dr. Ratner asked. “What feels comfortable and appealing to you? It really doesn’t matter what you pick—just pick something you think you can do.”
“I don’t know!”
“Okay.” Dr. Ratner’s voice was soft, but there was a firmness to the tone that Sandra had rarely heard. “That’s fine, Sandra. But let’s consider this an assignment for the next week. Find one thing—just one thing, and that’s for the whole week—that you can go out and spend, say, more than an hour doing. Sixty-one minutes would be fine. It just needs to be more than one hour. And that will be progress. Are you up for it?”
One hour.
She could do that.
Couldn’t she?
She wanted to. She wanted to get better. So she asked, “Are you talking about, like, a trip to the grocery store? Or the National Cathedral or the zoo or something?”
“No, Sandra. Those are all things that you picture yourself doing on your own—”
She was right.
“—what I’m suggesting is an hour of actual social contact. A town meeting, a homeowners’ association meeting, whatever you can think of. It doesn’t matter what it is; it only matters that you get out and do it.” She paused for a moment and Sandra said nothing, so she continued, “I think it would truly do you a world of good.”
“Okay,” Sandra said, suddenly a petulant child. “Fine. I’ll do it.”
Dr. Ratner said, “Excellent. Sandra, I’m very serious about this. I think you would find that it isn’t so hard as you fear it will be. It will change your life.”
It will change your life.
If there was one thing Sandra needed, it was for her life to change. It almost didn’t matter what the change was; she just needed a break from the routine she was stuck in before it devoured her.
After she’d hung up with Dr. Ratner, she turned on her computer and opened her browser to Gregslist.biz. From there, all she had to do was type in “Shoe Addicts, Bethesda,” and the ad Steve Fritz had told her about popped right up.
Shoe Addicts Anonymous—Are you like me? Love shoes but can’t keep buying them? If you wear a size 7½ medium and are interested in swapping your Manolos for Maglis, etc., Tuesday nights in the Bethesda area, e-mail [email protected] or call 301-555-5801. Maybe we can help each other.
She looked at the ad for a long time, trying to talk herself into making the call, but it seemed like such a big first step. Diving right into a meeting with people who would undoubtedly expect her to be sociable…As perfect as the group looked, Sandra needed to start herself off more slowly.
But she was interested. So she set up a couple of mini-challenges for herself.
The first was a trip to a fast-food restaurant. Since there was virtually nothing on the menu that was allowed by Weight Watchers, it was a quick trip. She went in, ordered a Diet Coke, sat down at a front window seat, and drank it, forcing herself to go slowly and use Dr. Ratner’s trick of “floating” through her feelings of discomfort.
Twenty minutes passed like two hours, but when she left, Sandra felt like she’d accomplished something.
It was a small thing, and virtually everyone else in the world could do it daily without giving it a thought, but Sandra was learning to stop berating herself for her phobia, so as soon as she had those impatient thoughts with herself, she tried to stop them.
It didn’t always work, though.
“The more you try and push your fear away, the more it’s going to push back,” Dr. Ratner said on the phone when Sandra called her later that day.
“But it’s so stupid,” Sandra said miserably. She wanted ice cream. Pizza. That ice box cake made from whipped cream and Nabisco famous wafer chocolate cookies.
She wanted something to give her pleasure, because drinking a diet aspartame soda in a greasy fast-food joint wasn’t doing it.
“It is what it is,” Dr. Ratner said. She came up with those maddening “philosophical” phrases sometimes, a
nd they were no help at all.
“It is,” Sandra said, “ridiculous. Everyone else in the world can walk down the street without getting palpitations. I hate this.” Boy, she was really being a brat about this. But she couldn’t help it. She did hate it. She was just expressing her feelings. Normally, Dr. Ratner would have applauded that.
“Sandra, you went out for half an hour today and it didn’t kill you. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
It was on the tip of Sandra’s tongue to give a flippant answer about how it told her she was a wimp for running home to get away from the big bad strangers, but she decided that would be counterproductive.
“It tells me I need to go on another field trip,” she said.
“Good!” Dr. Ratner sounded truly delighted. She obviously thought this was progress.
And maybe it was.
“What’s your next move?” she asked Sandra. “A museum? Maybe a sit-down meal at a real restaurant?”
“I made an appointment with a hypnotist,” Sandra said, half-expecting Dr. Ratner to express shock and disapproval. “To help hypnotize my phobia away.” There was a moment’s silence and Sandra asked, “Do you think that’s stupid?”
“Not at all,” Dr. Ratner replied. “I’m just kicking myself for not suggesting it to you sooner.”
“Really? So you think there’s some validity to it?”
“What I know is that it works wonderfully for some people. If you’re one of them, that’s terrific.”
“And if not?…”
“Then you’re no worse off than you are now. In fact, I’d say you’ll definitely come away from it better off because you’ll learn some new self-relaxation tips that can help you in any anxious situation. Good work, Sandra. I’m proud of you.”
Two days later, when Sandra was trying to talk herself into leaving her apartment five minutes before her appointment was due to start, she thought of Dr. Ratner’s words.
She respected Dr. Ratner a lot. Too much, in fact, to call her Jane, even though she’d told her to countless times. To Sandra, “Dr. Ratner” felt a lot more comfortable when it came to revealing her most embarrassing inner thoughts. And she respected her so much that she didn’t want to call and tell her that she’d chickened out of an appointment Dr. Ratner had felt so good about Sandra’s having made.
So she took a deep breath and went out the door.
When she got to the small square brick building where the hypnotist had his office, she was ten minutes late. On her way up to the third floor in the little steel box of an elevator, she tried to think of excuses to give the officious secretary she was expecting to see. But when she got to the office, there was no secretary. In fact, there was only a cramped room filled with books and pamphlets and an attractive middle-aged man who looked exactly like you’d imagine a guy in a messy office filled with books to look.
“Sandra?” he asked, breaking into a warm smile.
“Yes, I’m sorry I’m late. There was so much traffic—”
“Don’t worry about it.” He waved a hand. “A lot of people change their minds at the last minute and don’t show up at all. It’s hard to face your fears head-on.”
And getting harder by the minute. “Is there still time for…I’m sorry, I don’t know how this works. Is there a set time?”
“It depends on you.” He opened a door off the main room and gestured for her to go in. “I always block my appointments in hour-and-a-half slots so my client doesn’t have a feeling of being rushed.”
She went into the room and saw it was a smaller version of the one they’d just left. Bookshelves lined each wall and contained volume upon volume of psychology and hypnosis books, along with a good representation of other various health and well-being books and—Sandra noticed on its side at the top—a book on training your puppy.
“Have a seat.” He indicated an overstuffed easy chair and sat down at a desk a couple of feet away.
Sandra sank into the easy chair and let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Wow. This is really comfortable.”
“Isn’t it?” He was unwrapping a cassette tape and looked up at her. “Twenty years old, and it’s been patched more times than I can count, but I can’t find another one that’s nearly as cozy.”
She nodded. “What’s the tape for?”
“To record our session. Do you mind?”
Did she? She wasn’t sure. “Why?”
“Often my clients like to take the tape home and listen to it in private, to practice the progressive relaxation techniques I teach them. It’s completely up to you.”
“So I take the tape?”
“Yes. It’s for you. Value-added, you might say.”
“Oh. Okay.” She nodded. It made sense. And if she was serious about getting better—and she was—she needed to use every tool at her disposal. “Great.”
He put the tape into a machine, pressed a button, and a red light went on. “Now, if you’re ready to begin, lean back against the chair and close your eyes.”
She did so.
“Listen to the sound of my voice. Let me be your guide as you enter a new world of carefree, worry-free, existence….”
He had a good voice for this. Not too deep, but not too high. Mellow. Calm.
Familiar.
She tried to follow as he led her imagination down a flight of marble steps and into a great marble hall filled with doorways, but she was so distracted by trying to place his voice that she couldn’t concentrate on the exercise.
“When you look at the doors, you’ll notice each one has a word on it. Words like love, hate, anger, fear… whatever you see. It’s entirely up to you.”
She had it. He was one of her callers. Not frequent, like Steve, but she’d talked to him more than once. Whenever she asked him what he wanted, he’d say, “Surprise me. It’s entirely up to you.”
“Go through the door that says relax on it,” he went on, completely unaware of the revelation Sandra was having. “See what’s on the other side. See what makes you feel most at ease.”
Whatever it was, she was damn sure it wasn’t lying in a darkened room having a man who had, only a few weeks ago, told her to spank me again, I’ve been a bad boy lead her into the dark recesses of her psyche.
“What do you see, Sandra?”
“I—” She didn’t know what to say. She wanted to leave. This was a waste of time. There was no way she was going to relax and take this seriously.
But on the other hand, she couldn’t very well tell the poor guy she knew who he was and that he liked his balls sucked after having an orgasm.
So she did what she usually did with him.
She faked it until he was finished.
“I see a big green meadow….”
Chapter
7
The first thing you’ll need to do is cut up your credit cards and give them to me.”
Lorna looked at Phil Carson—short, fifty-ish, bald—as if he’d just suggested she drop a kitten in a blender and push FRAPPÉ. “What, now?”
He laughed. He was kind, but he didn’t seem to fully appreciate how hard this was for her. “No, no.”
“Oh.” Relief. “Good.”
“First you have to read me the numbers and the bank names—” He took some scissors out of his drawer and passed them across the desk to her. “—then you’ll cut them up and give them to me.”
She looked at him, hoping for a sign that he was joking, but his small round face was still, his thin lips a straight line.
And he’d taken out a pen and poised it over a black leather-bound notepad on his desk.
“At that point, I’ll call your creditors and negotiate a lower interest rate and payment plan,” he went on, sweetening the deal marginally. “It will save you hundreds, maybe thousands, in the long run.”
“But…” She knew what he was saying was true and that she shouldn’t voice any objection to it at all. Still, she had to wonder, “What happens if I have an emergency? Wi
ll I be able to use the credit cards then?”
He glanced down, looked over the list of creditors and debts she’d printed out. “Emergencies?…I don’t see anything much here that looks like an actual emergency.”
Well, of course he wouldn’t understand how a little retail therapy could cure her of otherwise deep emotional problems. Look at him! He was wearing a suit that was obviously poorly made—she could see the stitching. And his shoes! Good God, his shoes—they were probably from Payless or maybe the dollar store. They were a bright unnatural shade of tan. The kind of color her father always said “took hundreds of naugas to make.” (For some reason, Naugahyde jokes were big in the Rafferty household.)
“I’m not planning an emergency,” Lorna said, “but what if there was something like, I don’t know—” What would he consider a reasonable emergency? “—I was stuck out of town. Or needed to pay medical bills. Or had car trouble,” assuming she could hold on to her car for another month, “or whatever.” She wondered if she should just keep one card, in secret. Just in case. But which would she choose? The Visa with the 9.8 percent interest rate but a $4,200 limit, or the American Express with the 16 percent interest rate but a $10,000 limit?
It was like Sophie’s Choice.
Phil Carson looked at her across his desk. He was a small man, but he had his hydraulic chair pumped up high, so he looked like a little kid on a high chair, looking slightly down at her. “Lorna, I’ve seen this before. You’re used to living a certain way, and you’re insecure about changing that lifestyle.”
He was right. He had her pegged. “That’s definitely true. Isn’t there another way to go about this?”
He shook his head. “Not at this point.” He picked up one of the pieces of paper. “You’re paying interest rates close to thirty percent. Your minimum payments take your debt-to-income ratio into the stratosphere. I’m no psychologist, and please don’t take this the wrong way, but living this way has to be hard on you.”
For some reason that last sentence, or maybe just the way he said it, made her suddenly feel like crumbling. Hot tears threatened to become a full-blown embarrassment. She swiped her hand across her eyes, looked down for a moment to compose herself, then said, “You’re right. I can’t keep doing this. I’ve got to do whatever it takes to get rid of this debt once and for all.”
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