Approval Junkie

by Faith Salie

  I didn’t answer her question.

  “Have you ever tried…”

  What? What should I try, Lesly Kahn? Tell me and I’ll do it. Cupping? Kombucha colonics? (Please not Scientology.) Fewer vowels in my name?

  “Bangs?”

  Boom. BANGS. My gigantic forehead might be all that was standing in the way of my dream. I’d been overthinking everything. Rehearsing my lines too much, unearthing subtext where there needn’t be. This was a deeply superficial metanoia. I was relieved and so, so grateful—the simplicity of her prescription gave me hope. And then Lesly Kahn added something, as if it were an afterthought.

  “Do you have children?”

  No, I told her. I didn’t go into the fact that my husband wasn’t eager to have sex with me and that I never had any idea when I’d have my period and that my groovy lesbian gynecologist (from whom I hid when I saw her in the aisle of Ralph’s supermarket, because it’s just too awkward to see your OB-GYN when you are clothed from the waist down) had been telling me that I really needed to start trying to get pregnant if I ever wanted to have kids.

  No kids, not yet, I told her. I want to.

  “Because you should be a mother. You’re supposed to have babies, I can tell. And then all this tension I see in you will disappear. I’ll see you one day in the future and you’ll be…you’ll be happy…and the work will come because you’ll have a different energy. You’ll be…softer.”

  It was crazy, but I knew she was right. I left, feeling profoundly understood.

  I called my wasband from the dark Hollywood parking lot in my leased 5-series BMW that I’d thought would make me feel like a baller, but in which I’d recently curled up fetally in the backseat, on the night I learned I couldn’t even get cast as myself on my own husband’s show, and sobbed like I hadn’t since my mother died, years before.

  “Something important just happened. I need to have…bangs.”

  A decade, a new career, a new city, and a new husband later, I had a baby.

  And then another.

  The bangs, on the other hand, turned out to be too much of a commitment.

  I’ve only heard a howler monkey once.

  I was in a remote jungle in Belize at 6:30 in the morning. I was filming a piece on ants. (Ants are pretty amazing, by the way. Do you know that Southwest Airlines used algorithms based on ant behavior to figure out the most efficient boarding process? I know it doesn’t seem efficient when a couple of grandparents in baggy jorts are blocking the aisle with their sheer Middle American confusion, but it’s not the ants’ fault.) The only other people with me were the producer, who was also the cameraperson, our eager and compact Belizean guide, improbably named Vladimir, and our myrmecologist, a scientist who studies ants.

  The myrmecologist looked remarkably like the Swedish Chef from the Muppets, and he had a substantial belly over which stretched an eye of the tiger T-shirt. Not a T-shirt celebrating the hit Survivor song, but a depiction of an actual menacing tiger and its eye, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since perusing the design options for airbrush half-shirts in Daytona Beach circa ’82.

  We were doing a “walk and talk”—I was asking him ant-related questions on camera—when the entire canopy above us started to shake, and I heard a sound that stunned me. I grabbed Eye of the Tiger’s arm. “Oh. My. God.” I said. Like any teenager would, except I was a thirty-nine-year-old journalist on a news program. “Howler monkeys,” he said.

  It was a sound like I had never heard. And not at all what I expected a howler monkey to sound like.

  I thought a howler monkey would sound shrill, strident, screechy. The reason I expected high-pitched clamor was because my wasband used to tell me, when I got upset, that I was a howler monkey. He also said I was a shrieking harpy. Not being overly familiar with the aggression calls of primates, I ignorantly assumed that a howler monkey’s howls and a shrieking harpy’s shrieks were homophonic: piercing and querulous—just what you’d want in a woman. When my howls and shrieks turned into sobs—when we’d fight about why he wanted a prenup or with whose family we’d spend the holidays—my wasband would tell me I was disturbing the neighbors, so I would go into my bathroom, turn on the shower, and sob there.

  To be fair, he also called me lots of names that I loved. They made me giggle. They can be broken down into a few categories.

  Sweet and Meaningful

  “Blip” was the first nickname he called me. Sometimes it was “Blippy.” The wasband didn’t like to talk about his personal life, but when I came along, apparently he told his mother, “There’s a blip on the radar.”

  He was pathologically private. One time, after we were married, he smelled especially good, so I asked if he was wearing cologne. He refused to tell me or let me continue to sniff him. He didn’t want me to see him naked. He didn’t want to share a mailing address or even a grocery shopping list—he would go to the market alone on a stealth food mission. He also didn’t want me to show our wedding photos to anyone, including family or friends, who had flown to Scotland and donned kilts for our wedding. This was particularly sad for the sizable number of Jewish guests for whom it will presumably be a long time, like probably never, before they’ll wear tartan skirts again.

  But because my wasband was so private and had invited me in, I felt special. And because he was so handsome and confident and funny, he was very special. It was imperative, then, to stay special in his eyes, particularly as I’d volunteered to live in a world in which I kept asking to be chosen—to feel meaningful, I needed strangers to cast me. If those strangers weren’t deeming me special, I desperately needed him to. And I longed to be more than a blip.

  Little Names at Large

  Like “Little,” which he spelled “Lyiddlllelll” for no other reason than sheer silliness. He also called me “Little American,” because it was so ridiculous and meaningless that it made us both laugh. As someone who has had body issues since I had to start wearing a bra at age nine, you can imagine how much I loved to be called little. I got my period at eleven. I “became a woman” in a Stuckey’s restroom on a family drive to Disney World. They give out buttons at Disney World that say “1st Visit” and “Happy Birthday.” What they do not offer—and clearly should—is a button that says “Happy Menarche!” Tweens experiencing their first menses can wear it at a character breakfast with spunky, bleeding Disney princesses. The second time I got my period was at an Air Supply concert a few months later. Perhaps God was punishing me for being at an Air Supply concert by telling me to wear white shorts that evening. I spent many years trying to use my gigantic spiral perm to distract from my ample curves and finally solved it all by becoming a borderline anorexic ninety-five pounds. After five glorious, chilly, amenorrheic years, people started to tell me I looked “healthy,” which, if you have ever been happily, painfully skinny, feels as if someone is shaking your love handles while saying, “Way to go!!” So…I loved that my wasband was a six-two former Division I lacrosse player who always made me feel comparatively tiny, even if I constantly felt I had eleven pounds to lose.

  But he wasn’t just big in stature. He was big to me because he was, in my eyes, my future. We met when we were both twenty-four, the summer I moved from England to Los Angeles, introduced by a mutual friend in an encounter during which I found him arrogant and he found me snobbish. Like half of the beginning of Pride and Prejudice. I thought he was hot, so I maturely tried to make him jealous by mentioning the long-distance boyfriend I had at the time, and he returned the favor by hitting on my best friend. Again, all quite Austenian. I couldn’t forget about him because our friend kept updating me on the wasband’s health: not long after we met, he was diagnosed with cancer.

  This friend also updated the wasband on me. He informed him of my big breakout role as a guest star on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The wasband stayed home the night my episode aired, and—he later told me—as he watched, he asked God to bring me to him, which is possibly the nerdiest/most romantic thing ever.
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  By the time we remet three years later, he was quieter and leaner, hair just growing back from the chemotherapy. I, too, was humbled. Despite having recently been beamed up, my career was not stellar, but mostly I was bowed by grief. While he’d been beating cancer, cancer had beaten my mother.

  I also learned his brother had died a few years earlier. We felt like we would find recovery in each other.

  He wanted to feel big again, like he could take on the world after hanging on to his life, and I wanted to feel little enough to be held by him. There was a lot of sweetness to our early days. Enough that we spent a decade trying to recover it.

  Little Butt Names

  Like “Princess Little Butt.” For some reason, my wasband thought my butt was hilariously small. It is NOT, by the way. My other nicknames in this category were “Plum Butt,” “Mini Twin Turbos,” and “Dual Blues.” “Dual Blues” did not refer to my eyes, which are green, but to the fact that one day my wasband decided that my butt was so tiny, it looked like two blueberries. He then taped a picture of two blueberries to my bathroom mirror. This made me very happy; cf. egregious body issues above.

  My wasband loved my body. He used to applaud if he caught me in any state of undress. Even in his wedding toast, he made almost everyone but me feel uncomfortable by proclaiming, “Have you seen Faith naked?” (A few of our wedding guests had not, in fact.) This was amazing. This was confusing. He hardly wanted to ravage me. But I will always be grateful for the body confidence he gave me in a town where it’s easy to forget what a real body looks like.

  Bedtime Appearance

  “Frankenstein’s Pretty Little Baby” and “Sleepy Time Crash” fall into this category. This was because I prepared myself for sleep by putting in a retainer, an eye mask, and fluorescent pink-and-yellow-striped earplugs. Apparently I looked like Frankenstein’s Pretty Little Baby, because I sported this klugey assortment of parts above the neck, and the neon earplugs sticking out of my earholes reminded him of the bolts sticking out of Frankenstein’s neck. Also, the gear that protected me from sunlight, sound, and shifting teeth made me appear suited up for some kind of crash test. This ad hoc getup wasn’t exactly attractive, so you’re probably thinking, Of course he didn’t want to have sex with you when you looked like you were in some kind of hostage situation. But this was after many sexless years of my trying, at bedtime, to look attractive or at least not like I had been kidnapped by terrorists who nevertheless wanted me to maintain orthodontic integrity.

  So why did he almost never want to have sex with me? It wasn’t total bed death, since he did occasionally perform CPR on me with his tongue—and a man that skillful at oral sex clearly wasn’t gay. I figured it was my fault. I felt responsible, because sometimes at night, when I washed off my makeup, I’d lean into the mirror, far closer than anyone who loves herself should, and I’d pick at my face. This was something I’d long been doing—attempting to extract my imperfections. I was trying to make myself perfect when all I was really doing was vividly marking my own disapproval. Then my wasband would tell me I looked damaged and that made him feel sad for me rather than attracted to me. This did nothing except send me into a shame spiral that brought me closer to the mirror.

  If I’d been gentler to myself, things might have been different. Or he could have been gentler to me—seeing me like that, he might have chosen to embrace me. But even on countless nights over the years when my face was unpillaged, and all I wanted was for him to pillage me consensually, we rarely connected in that way. I think our lack of sex life came down to power. The wasband was a man of power. He was powerfully built, powerfully persuasive, and he trafficked in power—he sold people’s ideas and managed their careers, including, eventually, mine.

  A person who wants to be in power gives when it suits him. The wasband shut down when he perceived I wanted something from him—such as an “I love you” or a proposal or sex. The more he sensed I longed for intimacy—not so much out of desire but out of desire to be wanted—the less we had. I guess he saw giving me what I wanted, when I wanted it, as a diminishment of his agency—an anathema to an agent. I could never initiate it, just receive it: every other month or so, he chose arbitrary times like when I was fast asleep or fully dressed and about to leave to suggest getting it on.

  Sex became a reward for the rare span of days in which we’d not fought. Toward the end of our relationship, even as we talked (again) of separating, we took a long-planned trip to Peru. Perhaps because, by that time, we were being so open about our dismal future, our normally tense dynamic was deflated and easy. One night in Cusco, clearly intending to compliment me, he said, “If you acted like this all the time, I would want to have sex with you every day.”

  The kicker was, the sex was pretty good, occasionally superb. I wanted more all the time, because I wanted more of him in every way.

  Froggy

  Thanks in large part to my mad skillz with an eyelash curler and mascara, my wasband thought my eyes looked big enough to call me Froggy. He himself had beautiful eyes that fell somewhere between blue and gray.

  But not long after that, “Froggy” took on a different cast as our marriage devolved. He was working all the time and I wasn’t. Neither of us was supportive of the other. He named my requests for attention “needy.” My then-therapist Fran told me I was just wanty. Then she explained to me that a frog placed in boiling water will hop out to save itself. But if you are a nascent serial killer, and you turn the water temperature up gradually, the frog will stay put until it finally dies in water that has reached boiling. She suggested I was the frog, and I’d gotten so used to my needs not being met that I was hardly noticing I had unfulfilled, legitimate needs. I never recognized cause for a dramatic escape jump, so I just sat there, slowly expiring.

  If this was true—although it turns out the whole frog-in-boiling-water scenario has been scientifically disproven, but Fran’s not a biologist, and that’s not the point—if this metaphor was true, then I take ownership for being a pretty inert, dumb frog. Why did I stay so long when things were less than 50 percent good? For starters, the wasband and I were two people used to getting what we wanted. He not only topped my list of ambitions, he shared ambition with me and for me. It didn’t matter how bad things got—he was my goal. I wanted to be the woman he thought I could be. He once told me that when we were apart, he’d think about all the things he loved about me and imagine how it would be to see me. And then when he would see me, I was never in reality as sweet as he’d imagined. But I wanted to be his dream girl—he kept trying to cast me in a role I was determined to play, so I kept auditioning. All this happened at that age—from your late twenties to midthirties—when you think thirty is a big deal, and thirty-five equals a spontaneous hysterectomy, when you have to attend a wedding every month, and you fear being left behind by life. I focused on my age and the age of everyone around me. I counted every day with him as an investment I didn’t want to risk pulling out of.

  The primary reason I was a hot froggy, though, was that I loved him. I loved him so much, to the exclusion of much else.

  One day Fran told me to sit on the carpet of her office. It offered a nice thick pile, as it should have for the price of her fifty-minute sessions. I sat down dutifully, and Fran instructed me to draw a circle around myself. She said that circle was my state of mind. Then she asked me to draw a circle inside the big one that represented how much of my state of mind was taken up with thinking about him and feeling hurt, guilty, anxious, and neglected in my relationship. I drew a circle that took up about 80 percent of the bigger one. She then told me to sit inside the part of my rug-mind-circle that I dedicated to myself and my happiness, that is, inside the remaining 20 percent. Even Princess Little Butt couldn’t fit in that space. I had made him—and him and me—virtually my whole life. I had left myself about one butt cheek’s worth of self-possession.

  Themeless Absurd

  “Tits Malloy, Chi Town’s Most Infamous Crimefighter.” I don’t
have a lot of explication for this one, except I think it started because I was always cold (yes, even in LA—and not because I was too thin) and had the nipples to announce it. He used to call them “croissant nipples,” something I will only share if you promise to believe me that my nipples aren’t that big. Nor are they crescent shaped. Once you have breastfed, you realize what a big nipple truly looks like. Not only that, you also marvel that your nipples somehow turn into magic slinky straws, and you can basically lunge across the room to get something while your baby stays four feet behind, still sucking away. Your kid gets to keep one end of your nipple, and you get to take the rest of it with you.

  We were sillier with each other than with anyone else in the world. Playfulness pervaded our dynamic. If we were walking down the street, he thought it was fun to nudge me gently with his broad shoulders and then order me to do the same to him, as hard as I could. Sometimes I think he wanted to roughhouse with me in the way that he would have with his late brother. Even when we were holding hands, he liked to do this thing where he’d squeeze mine and then I was supposed to squeeze back, with just a tiny bit less pressure. And then he would squeeze with even less pressure and so on, until one of us won by squeezing so imperceptibly that we’d argue if there had been a squeeze at all. Every gesture of physical affection was tinged with competition.