I hold up the T-shirt. It is black, with a plastic yellow old-fashioned Moviola decal.
“I think Pablo has a thing for women in tiny shirts,” Brit comments. “And this is just his way of getting us all into clothing so he can see our breasts. Although with me, my breasts are hard to miss no matter what I’m wearing. I don’t think there’s enough fabric here to cover even one of my boobs. But Kenneth luv, you are my fearless leader, where you go, I follow.” She blows him a kiss and he smiles at her.
“I’ll wear it too,” I say reluctantly.
The only person who seems enthused by the whole thing is Meg. “Oh, it will be fun,” she says smiling.
I realize it has been ages since I have seen her smile. Her happiness is infectious and I smile back at her.
The day of the games rolls around. I have eliminated all bloating foods from my diet for three days and have taken diuretics along with my mix of herbs and elixirs. In fact, I have eaten practically nothing but pills these past few days.
I go to the washroom and pull on the tiny black T-shirt.
“Darn things aren’t very long,” I call out to Brit when I get back.
She bursts out laughing and emerges from Meg’s office where she has been changing.
I look at her and laugh too. Brit’s T-shirt is stuck on her breasts like a tight awning. She is wearing an undershirt in matching black so her entire belly isn’t on display.
“Look at you,” she says. “You can even tuck yours in.”
I feel better about mine, which fits much the same as Meg’s, although Meg has much bigger boobs than me.
Reassured that I look okay, I leave with the two of them. We join the Namaste team at the elevator who are laughing at Fat Janet’s T-shirt that she has cut down the centre vertically and is wearing open on top of a white shirt, like a vest.
We get into the elevator.
“Where’s Kenneth?” Thin Lisa asks.
“He said he’ll join us there,” Meg says.
I am standing close to Max who has come up behind me. My insides turn to hot butter.
“Very nice,” he murmurs and his lips brush my ear, “to see you out of sack cloth and ashes.”
I ignore him. But my body doesn’t.
We get to the war games place and they explain the rules and fit us with vests and guns. It is my turn to sigh. It is more of a black-painted warehouse than an underground bunker, so I can’t find a reason not to play. They lead us through a curtain of black rubber netting into a maze of darkness filled with cobwebby things and ropes that hang from the ceiling. Red lights cast an eerie glow.
The others disperse while I decide to stay right where I am. I am not going to run around and shriek. I just can’t do it; it isn’t me.
The rest of the group has no such qualms and even Kenneth falls into it with glee. They start running around like mad things, shouting and screaming and shooting at each other with loud enthusiasm. I wonder if someone has told Pablo this is stress release therapy or something.
At one point I peer out from my hiding place and see Meg run past, her smile wide. A war cry sounds off as she fires off shot after shot.
I retreat inside my small cave.
“Hiding are you?” It is Max, of course it is. He ducks in to join me. I get all hot again.
“I am being strategic,” I say proudly and he laughs. He smells of heat and sweat. I glance at his face under the red light. He looks surreal.
Then he pulls me up to him hard and kisses me. Hot and wet, my mind spins. I wrap my arm up around his thick neck and press my body close to him. Our tongues mesh with an almost animal hunger. It is incredible.
We hear a voice – Kenneth’s – and we jerk apart.
Max laughs, points his gun at me and fires. Paint spatters all over my chest.
“You bastard,” I say and lift my gun but I am too late. He has ducked back out.
“I’m dead,” I say, and I make my way to the exit.
I drink a diet Coke while I wait for the others to finish. I join them for a drink, then leave to go to a function with Mathew. I don’t look at Max, not once, and I operate on automatic pilot, flawlessly being me. Meanwhile, I have no idea where I really am. I have disappeared.
Investigating sacred hearts
THE DAY AFTER THE WAR games multi-layered fiasco, I look up Indira’s and Brit’s adopted bible, the mysterious Messages From the Body. I expect its author, formerly known as Narayan-Singh Khalsa, to be a yogi or Gandhi reincarnate. I realize that I tend to see the world in very black and white terms, and that I label so many people, not only on the basis of my suburban and sheltered upbringing, but by the narrow focus of my petrified life. In order to control, I anticipate, because forewarned is forearmed. But, this kind of blanket branding can be so very wrong, as I find out in this particular instance. Instead of whatever Eastern mystic I expected to pop up on my screen, I find instead the prolific, modern-day author of Addictions and Craving; Animals: Their Psycho-Symbolic Meaning; Healer’s Handbook; Honey, I Blew Up the Kids!; My Car, Myself; Problematic Patterns; What’s Happening to Me!!??; and, What’s in a Face?
All this is revealed on a website called “Talking Hearts,” which rains fat pink hearts down a rose-coloured home page, like an endless shower of love. And what do you know, FKA Narayan-Singh Khalsa turns out to be a Heart-Centred, Sacred Teacher; a living, breathing, white-bearded, septuagenarian, Caucasian, American fellow called Michael J. Lincoln, Ph.D. Dr. Lincoln’s bio says he is a “comprehender of the deepest aspects of who we are. After twenty-five years as a child clinical psychologist and fifteen years as a spiritual student, he emerged as a sacred teacher, a heart-centred guide, a profound healer, an author and an international lecturer.”
I am in awe. You can even order a “face-reading,” which is “holographic, integrative, and holistic/gestalt in nature.” I would receive a “profound and transformative interpretation of how to experience and handle all aspects of life, including my purpose/destiny.”
All Dr. Lincoln’s readings come from an “intensely deeply penetrating and broad-ranging depth of perception and empathic resonation from the Heart, and that the outcome is a loving understanding and compassionate comprehension of the individual, their soul nature, their cosmic purpose, their life history, their experience of it all.”
So I choose to believe there is a level in which our bodies communicate with us, that our ailments are messages. Not causes, not solutions, but symptomatic messages of what might be going on behind the secret doors of our hearts and psyches.
I decide not to tell Brit of my findings; I am sure she’ll be online to order a face-reading before I can say “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and I don’t want to encourage her since she seems fragile lately.
I invite Clarissa to be a friend
SO, ALONE IN A SENSE, I turn to an old friend on my bookcase of treasured authors. I am determined to claw my way out of this deep dark hole, claw my way out with my bare nails if necessary, and I will not stop until I reach the light of day.
I will find a way out of my desire for Max; my daydreams and longing for him now overwhelm me, and apart from food, he is all I can think about. That unbelievably deep, hot kiss. I think even he’d been startled by the mutual intensity.
We continue to exchange glances at work, and it seems to me he is waiting for me to decide what comes next. And, while all I want to do is touch him, I can’t take that step towards him.
I want to find a way of out of my addiction to food, away from my tormenting obsessions, and I will stand in front of a mirror until the cape of invisibility falls away, and like a snake shedding a skin, I will be able to see who I really am.
I hold out my hand and reach for Women Who Run With the Wolves.
Years back, my mother decided it was time to get some therapy. She was having difficulty sleeping, her golf game was off, and she said she felt anxious all the time. One of her friends recommended a therapist who was apparently great. The friend had been seeing her f
or close to a decade. I asked my mother how great could the woman be, if her friend still had to see her, after so long? I mean, isn’t successful therapy not having to go one day? Anyway, my mother went for a session and the therapist recommended she read Women Who Run With the Wolves. My mother bought it, threw it aside, and seemed to forget to return to therapy. So, I took the book, read it and loved it. I wanted to live by what it said but life had taken over. I thought this time could be different; this time I would internalize the messages in a real way and really be able to live my happy life.
“I am sorry Isis,” I say, “sorry Narayan-Singh or Dr. Lincoln if you will, I need someone who understands me.” I open the book. “Help me Clarissa,” I say to the author, my imaginary friend, praying she’ll tell me what is going on, and what to do.
Running with the predators
I HAVE MADE A LARGE MUG of green tea and am sitting in the living room with Freddo at my feet. I open Women Who Run With the Wolves and find the chapter I am looking for. Clarissa is addressing the subject of naïve women as prey; she talks about the innate stalkers of our psyche and it seems to me she is directly reaching out and warning me about Max. She says we may find it difficult to recognize that we are prey, that we need to be aware, and open our psychic centres.
“I am opening my psychic centre,” I tell my canine companion. “We are going to sort this all out, you, me and Clarissa, my perfect circle of friends. But I can tell you this much for free, Max is trouble, I don’t need any newly-awakened psychic centre to tell me that. What I need to know is how to fix this longing.”
I feel quite free to chat out loud with Freddo. It’s Saturday and Mathew has gone to the horse races for the day.
“In the animal world,” I inform Freddo, “we learn to recognize predators via our mother and father’s teaching. Without our parents’ loving guidance, we will certainly be prey early on.”
Then I wonder if my idea of prey is my parents’ idea of treasure; what with their focus on physical beauty, money, status. I wonder if my mother would see Max as a predator. She might think he is everything she had ever wanted for me; finally, the union of the quarterback and the homecoming queen, isn’t that every mother’s fantasy? I am sure she’d find his flashing blond beauty preferable to cynical, watchful Mathew.
I read further, into Clarissa’s description of a semi-dazzling person who crawls in through our psychic windows at night, and catches us off guard. I have a quick vision of Max, shirtless, coming in through my bedroom window and I have to scold myself and force my concentration back to the book.
“You see,” I say to Freddo who acknowledges me with a heavy thump of his tail, “because I haven’t been properly trained not to be prey, I’ll believe any lies Max tells me, just because I am so compelled by him. I haven’t been taught how to weigh and assess other creatures that might be a threat to me. I don’t know who is a predator and who isn’t.”
I carry on reading aloud from the book. “Clarissa says a lot of women don’t even have the most basic teaching about predators, the kind that wolf mothers give their pups; like if it’s threatening and bigger than you, flee; if it has quills, fangs, or razor claws, back up and go in the other direction; if it smells nice but is wrapped in metal jaws, walk on by.”
Ah yes, I think, but what of the allure of beauty? What if you sense the threat under the beauty, but find it irresistible regardless? Particularly if you have been trained to see beauty as the prize? I consult the book and find that Clarissa says our early training teaches us to override our intuition and we are purposefully taught to submit to the predator in order to feed the pleasures of the ego. It would be like a wolf mother teaching her young to “make pretty” in the face of an angry ferret or wily diamondback rattler.
Yes. That’s what I have been taught. I want Max to want me, because of his beauty. I want him to hunger for me like no other. It is all about my ego, and I want to please my parents’ egos too.
I put the book down.
So there it is; the passage I have been looking for, but I can’t say it helps me in the way that I hoped.
Because I already know that Max is a predator and that I should flee and I am trying to do just that, to the very best of my abilities. What Clarissa doesn’t tell me is how to do it. How am I supposed to quell the desires of the ego, walk on by and resist temptation?
I have already figured out the why of my desire: Max offers me nihilism and peace. He’ll destroy everything once and for all and I won’t be subjected to living the sham of success. I won’t have to hold back the dam wall any longer.
I’ve always liked to think that forewarned is forearmed, that planning saves the day. But I am not sure that knowledge or planning will be able to save me from Max.
Because even if Max himself had read the passage to me out loud, casually adding, “You’re right, yes, I won’t lie to you; I’m every bad thing you suspect. I wish nothing more than to eat you, spit you out and leave you,” even then, had he beckoned, I would have followed.
Knowing the why doesn’t help. Knowledge is not power. I have no power. I hate to say that, and I hate even more to know it is true. What kind of weak-willed person am I that I can’t resist that which I so easily identify as my enemy?
But I know where the real trouble lies. I have no protection. Mathew is supposed to protect me.
Oh, stuff and nonsense, as Brit would say. Protect yourself. What are you, a mindless damsel in distress who needs rescuing?
But I do need to be rescued; I see the predator’s approach and I can’t run, my feet are frozen. I ask God for help because there is no one else who can save me.
And I am wrong to blame Mathew; he isn’t responsible for my morality or the lack thereof. It isn’t his fault. This is my desire, my hunger, my weakness, my mess.
So what if I am lonely? So what if marriage is harder than I thought it would be?
If I were Miranda, I’d shout empowerment and insist I am free to do whatever I want; immoral, amoral, whatever I like, but I’m not her and that’s not my way. What frightens me the most, like my purge episode at the Dave Matthews concert, is the powerlessness of how I feel for Max. I don’t have a choice.
His mouth, that tongue; he is driving me crazy.
More than anything, I want to disappear. Oh, yes, I do and I am trying my best to make it happen. But despite starving as much as I can, it isn’t working. Maybe Max can help me disappear. He can help me and not even realize what he is doing. I have tried to starve the emptiness away but it hasn’t worked and now, more than anything, all I want to do is vanish entirely.
Wouldn’t that be lovely? To cease being this tormented, tortured, agonized me? I’d never have to make a single decision again, not even one.
I look around at my lovely home. It is all an illusion. I turn back to Clarissa.
Help me.
The state of the starved soul
ACCORDING TO DR. CLARISSA, I am dancing the dance of the good girl, engaged in behaviours of compensatory addiction because I am soul-starved, because I am disconnected from my inner soul, from my instincts. But I’m not; it’s just that I’m hungry. And if I start to eat, I might never stop.
I make another mug of tea and allow myself a fifteen-calorie biscuit. Back on the sofa, the box of tiny cream-filled cookies foremost in my mind, I read that it’s the fault of my starved soul that I am so relentlessly hungry. I burn with hunger for anything that will make me feel alive.
“If this is alive,” I tell Freddo who wags his tail, “I’d rather be dead. And listen to this; I may look ‘cleaned up and combed’ on the outside but on the inside I am filled with dozens of pleading hands and empty mouths.”
To my surprise, my eyes fill with tears and my whole chest feels suddenly tight. I am filled with sorrow for those pleading hands, flooded with compassion for those empty mouths. But I can’t feed them, of course I can’t, because that would be the end of me. I take a gulp of my tea, hoping the scalding liquid will burn away my hurt.
“Overkill through excess, or excessive behaviours,” I read aloud, “is acted out by women who are famished for a life that has meaning and makes sense for them.”
I slide down off the sofa and sit next to Freddo on the floor.
Oh, dear, I think. Does this mean I am famished for meaning in my life? And yet, look. I have everything I could ever want. What’s wrong with me?
I rest my head on Freddo’s wonderful doggy warmth and try not to think about what else Clarissa said. About how I can try to have a secret life but sooner or later, the super-ego will take over because it’s hard to hide an unsanctioned desire one is ravenous about. It’s hard to hide stolen pleasures even when they are not nourishing ones.
Oh, dear God, I think. Clarissa knows. And unless I am very careful, one day the whole world will know too. My shameful secret will out, for all to see.
Anne Carmichael Pondicherry
“I HAD LUNCH WITH ANNE CARMICHAEL,” I tell pregnant Miranda who is fulfilling Mathew’s prediction – she is absolutely huge. I have finally persuaded Miranda to meet me for tea and I am trying to distract myself from her immense size by telling her about a recent encounter with Anne, an old friend from university.
“What?” Miranda strokes her huge belly, amazed. “Why on earth would you want to have lunch with Anne? Is she still so fat?”
“No, she actually looks very good,” I say.
“So how did that happen, and why? The lunch I mean.”
“I bumped into her accidentally the other day. I heard someone call my name and there she was.”
“Okay, but why have lunch with her? Is she still so ugly?” Miranda shifts in her seat, as though trying to rearrange her internal organs, which I presume are being crushed by the baby. I watch her and recall that Miranda had never much cared for Anne. I wonder if I am only noticing now that Miranda can be quite vicious when she doesn’t like someone.
“Actually,” I say again, “she looks pretty good. Her face has lost weight, and she’s got cheekbones, which is a bonus of getting older – one of the only ones if you ask me – and I had lunch with her because she said she’s a headhunter and I’ll do just about anything to get a new job.”
The Hungry Mirror Page 27