Why I'm Like This

by Cynthia Kaplan

There was nothing better than a visit with my grandfather. We played endless games of ghost, tic-tac-toe, and dot, which is the game where you connect a grid of dots, one line at a time, trying to make boxes, which you then write your initial in. The one with the most boxes at the end wins. This is a very good game. We also walked South Ocean Boulevard looking for fallen coconuts so Ben could make a coconut shake. When we found one, we would take it to the side of his building’s garage and smash it repeatedly against the concrete wall until it cracked. We played together in shuffle-board tournaments. Ben was a South Florida champion in his age category and had a considerable collection of paperweight trophies. They were not exquisite and so were relegated to the lower shelf of his night table and the powder-room medicine chest.

  Ben was always up for something, or up to something. He hummed and whistled constantly, little doodly nothings, snatches of old-time songs, vaudeville numbers; there was a funny sly quality to it, like he was standing lookout for the big heist. He picked out songs like “The Michigan Rag” on our piano, running both hands up and down the keyboard, even though he didn’t really know how to play. He told jokes and wrote poems (yes, “What’s Gnu at the Zoo” was his) and he wrote fantastical letters addressed to My Li’l Cin and signed Dit Loves Cin, written in a heart with an arrow through it. My brother and I never called him Grandpa, or Pops, or Pop Pop, or any traditional endearment; we called him Dit, because when my brother was a baby he heard my mother call him Dad, and Dit was the best he could do and it stuck. My heart still aches to see that configuration of letters.

  Once, when Ben was visiting us in Connecticut, I complimented him on his sport shirt. That night I found the shirt folded on my bed with a note that read, You can always have the shirt off my back.

  He died the year after I graduated from college. We flew down to Florida and stayed in the same hotel as Aerosmith. I cried everywhere we went. I was crying in a corner at the funeral home when I suddenly heard the familiar whistling and humming. I turned sharply to find a Not Quite Ben, a Faux Ben, who was in fact my grandfather’s brother, Frank, whom I’d met maybe once. They looked alike, and obviously they’d had the same noisy habit. He trailed me the entire funeral, a puckish apparition, and I know it was ungenerous of me but by the end I wanted to kill him.

  During the service Lil, who loved a grand gesture, threw her arms around the casket.

  After Ben’s death, I occasionally flew down to Florida by myself to see Lil. As soon as I arrived I would change into a bathing suit or shorts and a T-shirt, and we would go sit by the pool. She would show me off to whichever friends were not across the boulevard at a spa called Le Mer, or, as they called it, the Le Mer, which, for the benefit of those who do not speak French, means The The Sea. Lil always had something to say about my summer clothes. No shorts were ever short enough. No midriff sufficiently bare. “It’s what all the young people are wearing,” she would say. In her insular South Florida world, that is, her building, “young people” could only mean the succession of foxy Jamaican girls who shopped and cooked and kept house for her. She loved these girls, loved their beauty and their youth, and they in turn loved my grandmother’s high spirits and her generosity. Lil also had a fondness for voodoo, and together they indulged in their mutual superstitions. Lil even read tarot, although, ever genial, she had pulled the death card from the deck so it would not come up in her readings. One afternoon, we went across the street to the Diplomat, where a recently deceased friend’s daughter was staying, to pay a sort of belated shiva call. When we left, my grandmother stopped in front of the elevator. She said: “That woman gave you the evil eye. Turn around three times and then spit three times.” I turned around. “Puh puh puh,” I said. “Puh puh puh,” she said. “Okay, now we can go.”

  Besides her jewelry, there was one thing that Lil really wanted me to have. Or to do. She knew I wanted to be an actress and she thought that if only someone could get in touch with Nat, I would be set on my way to international stardom. Nat was my grandmother’s uncle, Nathan Birnbaum, or, as he was known to the world, George Burns.

  “You must write to Nat,” my grandmother said every time she saw me.

  “Why would he read a letter from me?” I asked.

  “You just tell him that you are Lily’s granddaughter, his sister Annie’s great-granddaughter.”

  Lil’s idea of help probably included a seven-year studio contract with Warner Brothers (if they were still giving those out) or at least a screen test for the next God movie. Maybe George would introduce me to Brooke Shields. Or get me an agent. Even Lil knew a person had to have an agent, although she was probably thinking along the lines of the agent character Red Buttons played in a terrible 1960s biopic about Jean Harlow. According to the movie, Red discovered Jean trying to filch a drumstick from catering on a film set she’d crashed. He was convinced that she had “it” and would someday make them both rich. So he took her on. He drove her from audition to audition. He introduced her to lecherous stars and producers. But he was not a pimp. He just believed in her and that’s how you got known in those days, scampering about in a bathing suit at a famous person’s pool party. Maybe this was why Lil was always after me to show a little more skin.

  “You know that Nat discovered Ann-Margret?” said Lil.

  After several years someone in my family finally coughed up a number. I spoke to George’s secretary, who had been with George for decades and whose name may or may not have been Jack. I explained my pedigree to Jack and what I wanted, which was just to meet George, that’s all. Lil gave me two pictures to bring with me. One was a formal of her mother and father and the other was of George, Maurice Chevalier, Al Jolson, and another man, their arms slung around each other’s necks, laughing. It was a wonderful picture. Even though it was fifty years old, I felt a pang that no such glorious picture would ever be taken of me. I often experience a sense of loss for having been excluded from events that took place decades, if not centuries, before my birth. I still have a crush on Joseph Cotten.

  So I flew to L.A., ostensibly to see friends and have “meetings,” but really to see George.

  Jack met me at the door of George’s office, which probably had not been redecorated since 1955. I had a half an hour, said Jack, after which George was scheduled to do a radio interview. George was seated in one of several tall director’s chairs. He did not look a day over ninety-gazillion. Once again, I explained who I was. I brought out the pictures and showed them to George.

  “This is who?” George asked.

  “Your sister.”

  “My sister.”

  “Yes, your sister Annie.”

  “My sister Annie.”

  I realized then that I could be anyone, any scheming young wanna-be starlet, waving a couple of raw-edged, sepia-toned photographs in his face, claiming to be his blood relation. If only I was a scheming young wanna-be starlet, I’d probably have gotten a lot farther. I put the pictures back in my purse and fell silent. George told fifteen jokes in a row. Then he asked me if I had an agent. No, I said. He yelled to Jack to get me a meeting with a big agent friend of his, a man he had had lunch with every week for the past forty years at the Hillcrest Country Club. Then Jack came in to say that it was time to call the radio station. George wished me well, got up, or rather down—the chair was high, he was short—went to his desk, picked up the phone, and started telling jokes.

  I had my meeting with the agent, an exercise in futility. He seemed as stymied by my presence as George.

  Lil was philosophical about the encounter.

  “He’s as old as the hills,” she said.

  On one of the last visits I had with my grandmother before she died, we spread her things out on the bed, and among them were some I had not seen before. A small green chiffon scarf and a jeweled pillbox.

  “These belonged to Gracie Allen. They’re for you,” Lil told me.

  “Well, at least that’s something,” I said.

  “She was a very sweet woman. George love
d her more than life itself. He visits her every day in the mausoleum.”

  Obviously we had seen the same Barbara Walters interview.

  “Your mother has Gracie’s pocketbook. You’ll get that too, one day, puh puh puh.” She spit through a Vin her fingers.

  Then she showed me a gold locket.

  “This is from England. It’s exquisite,” she said.

  On the front was the imprint of a bird and on the back a spray of flowers. It was exquisite. I opened it expecting faded photographs of my ancestors but found instead a crusty green residue.

  “You must never wash it out,” said Lil.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It is a special love potion and it will bring you good luck.”

  One of her island girls had given it to her, and a year later, when my mother and I were going through Lil’s things, I found its source, a small jar with an ancient label that read COMPELLING POWDER.

  Ah, my inheritance.

  the story of r

  Part One

  HOW do you tell the story of someone you know, whom others know, when that story ends badly, infamously, even ignobly? How long do you wait before its telling is neither a betrayal nor a humorous anecdote, despite its inherent and obvious ironies (despite the fact that it actually is funny), but is rather a reasonably considered part of the fabric of your own story and therefore demands to be told, that is, if someone were apt to make such a demand, like your publisher who is paying you for a book of personal essays?

  All right, so my therapist went nuts. There, I said it. Her life fell apart and she crinkled and crumbled slowly before my eyes until I knew, for sure, that I was cured.

  She’d always been odd. She’d always been messy and bohemian, an earth mother in loose triangular velvet dresses and elaborate beaded necklaces. She wore large, buggy glasses and had long center-parted mussed hair. Her office was crammed with classic therapist voodoo: a large and valuable photograph of a famous poet on one wall, a Tibetan blanket on another, two corduroy club chairs, a couch, plenty of books, and a vast collection of exotic-looking figurines that in time came to include those small rubber promotional dolls that come with Happy Meals at McDonald’s. But every week more stuff arrived and over the three years I was with her the condition of her office went from homey-messy to creepy-filthy. The place became a dumping ground of her personal and professional detritus. A computer that didn’t work, old blankets, lamps, piles of books and magazines, stuffed animals, real animals. Some time in my first year a dog appeared, a poodle-ish affair, and then later a cat, too, and then another cat, a skinny, icky cat. She once asked me if I wanted to buy this big black and white photograph of an orchard that she knew I liked. A patient had given it to her in lieu of payment. I considered it for several weeks until one day I saw it propped between the waiting-room sofa and wall with a lump of what could only have been cat shit on it.

  If ever a room was the manifestation of a troubled soul, this was it. If ever there was a textbook case of impending emotional disturbance, this was it. And she frequently took mysterious phone calls. She popped pills. Sometimes she fell asleep with her mouth open. I could go on and on, but what’s the point? The party was over. I was on my own. And still, I think she helped me. By the time I left I felt pretty together. Everything’s relative.

  I’d come to her because my idiot boyfriend had broken up with me so meanly, so damagingly, that in a brief moment of insight following weeks of despair (yes, it hurts to be dumped, even by a fool. That could be the title of a book—Yes! It Hurts to Be Dumped, Even by a Fool! ) it occurred to me that I didn’t want to devote my entire year to getting over him. Also, after playing two pathetic though not entirely unironic songs I’d written about him to my friends John and Sarah (not their real names), they wisely suggested I call a therapist—in fact, theirs.

  Rule number one: Never go to a therapist your friends go to.

  This would be the first time I had sought the advice of a professional. I’d been so sick to death of hearing my friends quote their shrinks that I’d vowed to stay mentally ill for as long as possible. But, as they say, time marches on, or is a winged something, so I promptly left a teary message for R, as I will call her. Nothing inspires tears so much as admitting to a total stranger’s answering machine that you need help. I proceeded to see her once a week for the next three and a half years. Here was my diagnosis, for insurance purposes: DSM III–R: Axis I 300.02, Axis II 301.50. Look it up if you want. Our sessions were fairly cerebral; R was not a Freudian, whatever that means, but more of a Jungian, whatever that means, and I never became a fetus or pretended to be my mother or a tree or a wild animal. And I only cried when I arrived at her office immediately after witnessing something sad, as I did the day I crossed paths with a crippled young man on crutches, inching along to wherever, slug-slow but determined, just outside R’s building. My capacity for self-pity is exceeded only by my capacity to pity others, and R and I went to work on both.

  We talked about my self-image, my family, my work. We set little goals. Could I wear some beads maybe or a sort of sexy shirt sometime? I liked R because she never said, “How did that make you feel?” to me and because we took time to discuss books and current events, like real people. Actually, now that I mention them, we also discussed Real People, as in people we mutually knew, some of whom were her patients. R hated the woman who had the appointment before me and she often spent the first fifteen minutes of my appointment venting. My hints to change the subject to something more relevant, i.e. me, went unheeded. One day R was positively incensed that the woman had criticized R’s increasingly unhygienic surroundings, suggesting that maybe R give the place a coat of paint or have the floors fixed. At the time I sided with R in her righteous rage, but I secretly toyed with the idea of giving my co-patient a high five next time I passed her in the hall. The floor was, in fact, buckling from a small flood some months before and had not been fixed. The walls were marked up and the paint was peeling in spots.

  Occasionally, R spent time updating me on the progress, or lack thereof, of a thirteen-year-old anorexic and her controlling, warring parents. Or, on more familiar ground, she liked to chat about which among my friends/her patients were talented and which weren’t. I didn’t mind this so much, especially since we always came to the conclusion that I was exceptionally talented. (R was writing a play, so she said, and was always casting it and recasting it within our small theatrical circle; she liked being one of us, us creative folk, such as we are.) It was the breaches of confidence I found most unsettling, but I didn’t have the guts to ask R not to make them. They were always prefaced with “I know he wouldn’t mind you knowing this” or “I’m sure they are going to tell you” or even, “I think they would want me to tell you,” which is how I found out that one friend’s boyfriend had a severe drinking problem and two other friends, whom R saw individually and as a couple (isn’t there a rule about that?) were having marital difficulties and were in fact separating.

  Rule number two: Be careful what you tell your therapist.

  Still, I got along with R because I felt I was getting help without getting my guts vacuumed out. I’d had a boyfriend who did that. If I was unhappy with him he’d flip the thing around and force me to search myself for the source of my displeasure and together, with his urging, we’d scrape and scrape and suck and suck until I felt my vital organs rising up in my gorge. I’d eventually start to cry—could you blame me?—and he’d feel vindicated. We wouldn’t even have gotten at any truths, since the main truth was that he was an ass-hole. We would just hypothesize me into a coma. Anyway, since R didn’t completely inspire my trust, I kept certain things from her, which was empowering in itself. Sometimes, before I told her something private, a little voice in the back of my head asked me if I wanted my friends to know this thing as well. Good practice for later in life, I should think. Thanks, R.

  One day, R asked me for one of my migraine pills. She had a terrible migraine and was out of m
edication and couldn’t reach her doctor. Now, it just so happens that I don’t really take a designated migraine medication for my migraines. I take Tylenol 3, or for the uninitiated, Tylenol with codeine, which is a narcotic. It doesn’t stop the headache itself but it almost always kills the pain. Okay, let’s pause here for a moment and discuss narcotics. I am particularly partial to the combination of pain relief and seemingly paradoxical, but not if you know your narcotics, sleep-slash buzz-inducing element, where you lie down and talk your head off until you suddenly, exquisitely pass out. If you don’t take a lot of them, because they are addictive and constipating, they are your friend. If you take a lot of them, they become your friend in that way a woman who is sleeping with your boyfriend becomes your friend—you want to get rid of her but you can’t no matter how hard you try. That’s just a theory because I’m not addicted, although I have experienced the latter, which is a nachtmare. That said, I gave her one.

  R offered to pay me for the pill, which seemed ridiculous at the time, maybe even illegal, and I refused to let her give me back any of my hard-earned money. Over the years, in addition to popping “aspirin,” or something, throughout our sessions, she continued to “borrow” my Tylenol 3. There were weekends she left messages for me at home, asking if I could leave some downstairs with my doorman for her, she couldn’t get in touch with her doctor, or she didn’t have a doctor, or she was between doctors. Or she lost her wallet or her dog ate her meds. She actually used the wallet excuse several times but not the dog one, although that dog certainly looked strung out to me. My current boyfriend found the whole business entirely improper. But I felt strange refusing her so sometimes I just didn’t tell him.

  Rule number three: Don’t share your prescription medication with your therapist.

  A long time ago, my friend Kate wrote a performance piece about how shocked she was when she realized her therapist was seven months pregnant. She knew so little about the woman and the sessions so focused on her, she simply failed to notice. I knew that R was married, a second marriage, and that there was a college-age daughter from the first and a son from the second. I only once saw R’s husband, although he often showed up during my sessions and R would excuse herself and meet him in the waiting room. From what I understood, which, as usual, was more than I should have, he took care of their son a good bit of the time. If he didn’t actually swing by, he would call R on the phone at least once, sometimes twice a session, reporting their whereabouts and planning the next time he would call in. I didn’t know what to make of this, and it was pretty annoying to have to stop cold in the middle of an earth-moving epiphany so she could confirm her son was at the playground or the library or a birthday party. She would say, “Okay, where are you going? And what time are you going to be there? Okay”—she would look at her watch—“call me when you get there.” And then twenty minutes later the phone would ring. Besides making me privy to these strange reconnaissances, R would also talk about how bright and talented her son was—at six, a natural actor.