When I first started having sex, I don’t know that I even realized that I was faking it. I mean, no one ever told me what an orgasm was supposed to feel like. I certainly felt something—excited, turned on, all that—so was that an orgasm? How the heck would I have known? It wasn’t until I was truly in love with a man that I had my first real orgasm. And then I remember thinking, Oh, I get it now. All those years before that point, I was way more focused on how the man was feeling and whether I was doing it for him than whether he was doing it for me. I might as well not have been there at all—I could have just been a reflection in a mirror.
For me, the thrill was the romantic chase. I knew I had a good body, and I loved being the prize at the end of the chase. After feeling unattractive for so many years, being physically admired was a huge turn-on for me. I loved the power that I felt in bed with a man—I knew what to do, and I definitely knew how to please him. But I should have been more focused on how to please myself. Well, live and learn.
AROUND THIS TIME A lot of people in my life were marrying, and some were even starting families. As uninterested in marriage as I was, it’s still hard not to feel a little left out when everyone’s pairing off. It didn’t help that people would give me sad looks when they were telling me their happy news, as if I needed reassurance or comforting. I remember once a really good friend of mine invited a bunch of us over to her new house to tell us the big news that she was pregnant. All her other friends were married and either pregnant or pointed in that direction, so she gave me a sheepish look when she made her announcement. I think she even said something like, “Don’t worry, Lisa; it will happen for you soon.” I was nice about it, but I wish she’d known me well enough to realize that it really wasn’t what I wanted. I think marriage and kids is one of those things that feels so natural to some people—like breathing or eating—that they can’t imagine not needing it. They think you must be kidding yourself, or just pretending not to care.
It’s not that I didn’t want a relationship. I did want a steady partner—someone who cared for me, and whom I loved and respected in return. But the traditional way of having it wasn’t anything that I dreamed about. I’d happily go along with my friends while they shopped for engagement rings. I remember I even called a friend one time when I spotted a ring in a window that I thought she’d like. But there was no vicarious thrill for me in doing that. It wasn’t like I was taking notes for future me.
When my sister Andrea got married, and then my two close girlfriends from high school got married too, I was happy for them. I was also happy to buy a new dress, and to go to a big party with an open bar and fun music. But I definitely never thought, When’s my turn? or Now I need to find someone, too. I never felt sad, or that I was missing out. Maybe I was permanently dissuaded from marriage by my parents’ toxic union, but I think at a certain point you have to own your decisions. For whatever reason, I just didn’t have the marriage chip.
Which isn’t to say that I didn’t sometimes feel like the rocky third wheel at weddings. It got kind of tiresome always being relegated to the “singles table”—you know, the one table where they stick everyone who isn’t already married. The only thing that this motley crew had in common was that they weren’t paired off. I always felt like I was on the wedding version of the Island of Misfit Toys. Initially I’d make conversation about how we all knew the bride or groom. Before long, I was drowning myself in champagne and pigs in a blanket. I was very good at playing the part of the happy wedding guest, but I felt like the extra in a movie. I put my hair up and wore a pretty outfit, but I was just window dressing, not really a part of the scene. It was a job. And at the end of the night I was happy to go home and take off my “Extra #1 Wedding Guest” outfit.
Over time, I found myself gravitating more toward my single friends. This was definitely the case once my friends started having babies. As much as I loved my friends with kids, and I loved their children, too, I just have to say this: children’s birthday parties are not that much fun for single adults. There were only two elements of every child’s birthday party that I liked and those were (1) pizza and (2) cake. But even the charms of melted cheese and frosted layers weren’t enough of an incentive. I was grateful to my friends for wanting to include me, but I’d usually find that I was one of the only single people invited, and all the other adults were either married with kids already, married with a baby on the way, or married and thinking about getting pregnant—so they were perfectly happy to spend hours talking about all things baby-and child-related. Invariably, some mom who didn’t know me would walk up and ask me if I knew the mother of the birthday boy from some mommy and me class, and I wanted to say that my whole life was a me class—forget the mommy part of it. “Me” was all I knew, and at that stage it was all I wanted to know.
So I avoided going to the children’s birthday parties, which meant that I missed out on a lot of social occasions with my friends. Meanwhile, I know my married friends didn’t invite me to all their adult gatherings—probably because they felt awkward about inviting one single girl to a dinner party full of couples. I get it now, but then I really didn’t. Not having kids myself, I didn’t understand why they couldn’t talk about anything other than babies and babysitters and school. It seemed obsessive, like they’d lost themselves. I remember thinking, What’s going on here? How come I never see anyone?
Just as I didn’t always have as much sympathy for my friends as I might have, I did occasionally lose patience when people would ask me when I was going to settle down. It wasn’t that I felt defensive, it was more that I wished they’d known me better and realized that I was doing really well already, and that I was on my way to my own version of happiness. I joke about my dating misadventures, but my work success gave me real joy, and I had wonderful friends, and I was already realizing a lot of the goals I had set for myself. How many other women in their twenties could say the same thing? So when I felt pestered by anyone, I just politely switched topics and said, “How about those Mets?”
Some people didn’t get the hint and they’d keep pressing me. At a family gathering one time, an old friend of the family was eager to tell me all about her daughter, Marissa, and how happily married she was, and what a great provider her husband was, and how she was pregnant for the second time in two years, and how they’d just built a big, new house, and on and on. After all that, she looked at me insinuatingly and said, “So how about you, Lisa … anyone special?”
As proud of my work accomplishments as I was, it’s still difficult to feel like people are judging you according to the rules of a game you’re not even playing. It’s hard to bite your tongue in those situations while trying to think of a polite way to say, “none of your business.” But I realized that when certain women asked me about settling down, they were seeing me through their own dreams and choices. They shook their heads and felt sorry for me that I “still needed to work”—that is, that I didn’t have a man to take care of me. The irony of this was that a lot of the women I knew who’d relied on a man to take care of them found themselves disappointed in the long run. They might have picked a man that they thought could provide for them financially, but when things didn’t work out, they felt abandoned. That wasn’t what I wanted for myself. So I pledged early on that if I ended up finding Mr. Right, it wasn’t going to be because of his money. Ambition was important to me, but as long as he could pay his own bills, the size of his bank account wasn’t an issue. I may not have known exactly what I should be looking for in a man—at least not yet—but I knew that much.
This is my no-fail recipe. You can dump everything into a bowl at the same time if necessary (especially if you’re headed out for a bootie call—no judgments here), and it will still come out delicious. Early on, I discovered the trick to these was to use store-bought cookie dough. Just add a warm coat over great lingerie and you can be on your way at a moment’s notice.
Another great thing about this recipe is that the bars are best eaten froz
en—they taste just like ice cream. So you can always keep a few stashed away for when the urge strikes.
HOW-TO-GET-A-MAN CHOCOLATE CHIP CHEESECAKE SQUARES
1–2 rolls of store-bought chocolate chip cookie dough (see note)
2 8-ounce packages of cream cheese, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
8–10 ounces candy toppings (M&M’s, toffee bits, chocolate chips, etc.), optional
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Line a 9 x 13–inch pan with parchment paper so that it overhangs on the short ends of the pan—this way the bars will easily lift out after baking.
Take slices of cookie dough (or crumble dough with hands) and press together on the bottom of the pan to make one smooth layer.
Mix cream cheese and sugar. Add eggs, then vanilla. Pour mixture over the cookie crust and smooth with a spatula.
Top with any candy topping you like. Note: Alternatively, you can use a second roll of cookie dough and place slices on top of the cream cheese mixture to form another cookie layer. Don’t worry about neatness, the rounds will bake together here, and looks aren’t important in this recipe. You have other things on your mind.
Bake for 30 to 35 minutes.
Let cool. Place in freezer until frozen, then remove from pan and slice into 16 bars or 32 bite-sized squares.
CHAPTER 8
CEREAL MONOGAMY
I’d been happily freelancing for a while when I was offered a morning newsperson job at WNEW, the biggest rock station in New York City at the time. This was really the be-all and end-all of radio for me, and the station’s DJs were like gods to me—that’s how much I respected them.
I was teamed up with Richard Neer and Mark McEwen, two consummate radio professionals, and as always, it was like being thrown together on a blind date. Okay, you total strangers go on and have fun—right now! From the start, I adored Mark, and to this day he’s someone I count on for support and honest feedback. Richard and I didn’t get along quite so easily. He was one of those people who wanted to be the center of everything, the star of the show, and I was used to things being more collaborative. He had a very specific idea about how he wanted the show to be, and he wasn’t going to have some relatively young woman come in and steal his thunder. He’s not that much older than me, but somehow he seemed like he was from a different generation, and I got the feeling that he didn’t much like having a woman on the air with him.
Mark, me, and Richard.
After a few years, WNEW decided to shake up their morning show and they broke up Richard and Mark and paired me with another experienced DJ, Dave Herman. He was pretty much cut from the same cloth as Richard. He’d already made a name for himself, and he clearly didn’t get why he should have to share airtime with me.
This was one time in my life when my work situation correlated with my personal life—I was searching for the right mix, not always successfully, but I had faith that it was out there somewhere.
AFTER DAVID AND I broke up, I started getting a little more thoughtful about the kind of guys I was dating. I even started seeing some people who were genuine boyfriend material. I wasn’t always ready to see them that way in the long term, but it was a step in the right direction for me.
My first semiserious boyfriend was introduced to me by my good friend Nadine. Michael was her husband’s best friend, and he worked as an executive for a breakfast cereal company. I’d never had much luck with guys in ordinary nine-to-five jobs—I’d always found that kind of dull—but I decided to give him a try, and lo and behold, on our first date we clicked right away. Because he was an early riser too, he was completely fine with me needing to eat dinner at the same time as most eight-year-olds. In my experience, it was always the nice guys who were understanding and flexible with my hours. Unfortunately, I was rarely attracted to nice guys.
Michael was good-looking and kind, but he didn’t excite me. This definitely wasn’t any failing on his part—my issues were the problem, not Michael. The hottest sex we ever had was when we stayed overnight at his mother’s house one weekend. We were supposed to stay in separate bedrooms, but he snuck me into his childhood room like we were a couple of teenagers. We had sex in his narrow wood-framed single bed and I remember the headboard actually heated up—not because our sex was so steamy, but because the kitchen stove was on the other side of the wall.
Michael was a lovely guy and we had fun together, but I felt like something was missing. To me, he lacked the spark of the unknown that I found so magnetic in other men. Of course, what I mistook for predictable other women might have seen as reliable. I think I actually saw decency and niceness as weakness. Based on what I knew, men weren’t supposed to be sensitive and caring, and I didn’t know how to react when they were. With men I was like a cat chasing down a mouse—I lost interest when my prey stopped fighting back.
Michael’s social life revolved around a close circle of friends, and he worked really hard to maintain those friendships. His idea of a fun Saturday night was to have a small cocktail party for his circle, or to all meet at a restaurant. Now I realize I was scared to slow down and live in the moment, but back then I just felt bored and confined by the routine of his life. He’d want to make plans with me several days in advance so that he could coordinate everyone’s schedules (the way adults do), but I still wanted to be a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kid. I didn’t want to plan a day in advance, much less a week.
My relationship with Michael was probably the healthiest I’d ever had, but it wasn’t destined to last, and I couldn’t give him what he needed or deserved—I was way too selfish at that point in my life. I wish there had been a guidebook I could have followed to tell me how to be a good girlfriend. You can’t buy the simplest electronic device without getting a ten-page instruction manual, but no one ever gives you a manual before your first date with a new guy. Maybe certain things should have been obvious to me—maybe I shouldn’t have needed to be told how to meet someone else halfway and to compromise, but it was all or nothing with me. Either I was hurling myself headfirst into a bad relationship, or I was keeping my heart under lock and key in a good relationship.
Michael once asked me to participate in a charity walkathon for a childhood disease that ran in his family, and I actually said no. I told him that I was a radio personality and I should have been hosting the walk, not walking in it. Of course he was upset, and he didn’t try to conceal it, which surprised me—I never showed my own feelings so I didn’t know what to do with a man who showed his. I was actually angry that he’d tried to make me feel bad about it, as if I were the one in the wrong. It was only later that I’d realize that he was asking me to be a supportive girlfriend and not a successful radio personality. At the time I wouldn’t even acknowledge his feelings, and in fact I found his emotions kind of inexplicable. I’d never been with a man who was so up-front with what he was thinking and feeling.
In trying to bolster my own self-esteem, I had way over-course-corrected. I thought I was too big and important for Michael’s rinky-dink walkathon, and in the process I’d gone from being a self-perceived zero to being a fathead. But either way, my warped sense of myself all came from the same place—insecurity. I needed outside reassurance of my value, and it would take me a few years longer to get my head right.
My next victim was Jeffrey, a truly lovely man. We even met cute, at least from the perspective of a Jewish mother. I’ve always said that I didn’t grow up with life lessons instilled in me—I couldn’t spout off a single little gem of wisdom that was passed down to me at a young age. But the one bit of relationship advice I remembered one of my uncles offering me was to try flirting on the steps outside a synagogue. So I did.
I wasn’t exactly devout, so it must have been a high holy day that brought me to my mother’s Long Island synagogue—I think it was Yom Kippur. I batted my eyes at Jeffrey while we were both weak from hunger, and he took my number. He was a surgery r
esident at a hospital in Philadelphia, and even I, Miss Nontraditional, had to laugh at my luck in meeting a nice Jewish doctor at temple.
I thought he was smart and delightful. He made me laugh. He had a great smile, light eyes, and blond hair. As a resident, he kept his own crazy hours, so he was completely understanding about mine. In short, he checked off just about every item on my list of the perfect man. Except for one thing: there was no drama. He didn’t leave me hanging, he didn’t make me feel on edge, and he made it clear that he was looking for a long-term relationship. I didn’t know what to do with that kind of clarity. But I also didn’t want to break up with him, because I really cared about the guy.
I remember visiting him at work in Philadelphia and seeing him in action. I was so proud of him. It was the first time in my life that I felt that I could really love someone. I was deeply struck by what a wonderful human being he was.
That might have been our happy ending—or promising beginning—but, instead, that feeling of opening myself up to him utterly terrified me.
I stayed with him that night in his tiny resident’s apartment. It was like being back in college in my eight-foot-by-eight-foot cell again. We tried to have sex in the shower, but we couldn’t stand in there together and also move. We nearly broke the door. It should have been romantic—those could have been our salad days that we looked back on and told our grandchildren about when we were old and gray. But I didn’t look at life that way—I didn’t want to wait for my reward. I wanted to skip the work stage of things, wave a magic wand, and magically be where I wanted to be. I knew I had to work at my career, but somehow I got it in my head that I shouldn’t have to work on a relationship. Spending the night in his little apartment should have been a bonding experience, but instead it felt like a letdown, like I didn’t belong there.
Sex, Lies, and Cookies: An Unrated Memoir Page 8