Sex, Lies, and Cookies: An Unrated Memoir

by Glasberg, Lisa

  I don’t think every woman has to aim for marriage and kids, but I do think that the one downside for me in not aiming for those goals was that I kept looking for boyfriends instead of partners. I didn’t have a picture of a life with a husband with whom you could share your innermost secrets. I had no idea that a husband could even fill that need. I had nothing to draw from in my upbringing. My aunt Nina had a happy marriage, but I wasn’t around her and my uncle enough to understand how that could work in practical terms.

  So I went back to dating for the sake of dating. My friend Susan and I were roommates in a Hamptons’ share, and one night she said, “Let’s do an experiment. We’ll put on our most cleavage-baring tops and see how quickly it helps us meet guys.” I was game, so I put on a low-cut black, stretchy, strappy top, and sure enough I met John. To this day, my friend and I laugh about the effectiveness of this strategy.

  Maybe it wasn’t actually the top, but John was definitely drawn to me, and I thought he was charming. He wasn’t classically handsome, but he was tall and funny. We went to play tennis the next day, and we started dating. It wasn’t sunbursts and star showers, but he made me laugh, and I was at a point in my life where I was starting to realize that no one was going to be a perfect amalgamation of everything I ever wanted.

  I learned something in that relationship, though, and that is, there are things you should compromise on, and there are things that you shouldn’t. Not too long after we started dating, cracks started to show in John’s seemingly nice façade. He’d make little comments that weren’t kind. A lot of times the cutting remarks related to money or my expensive taste.

  I didn’t need a man to be Daddy Warbucks, but I did want a man to be generous at heart. And I discovered that John had a really stingy side. It wasn’t about how much money he spent, it was more about the feeling I got that he was always looking to cut corners, and that he was always aware of the price tag on everything. When he gave me a birthday present—an impersonal basket of generic bath and body products—I had the distinct impression that it was regifted. He presented me with a gold bracelet once, and despite the velvet box it came in, it had the look of something he’d bought from a shady guy off a table on Canal Street.

  Then something awful occurred that ended up being a blessing in disguise. I was sleeping over at John’s apartment when the phone rang. He answered it, and I could clearly hear a woman’s voice on the other end, although I couldn’t hear her words. John left the room and talked for a while and then he returned to bed later. I was suspicious, but I decided to file it away.

  The next day I called him from work and I said, “So who called you in the middle of the night?” His response? “My buddy Dave.” I’d met John’s buddy Dave, and he was no boy soprano, so I said, “You’re lying.” Then I hung up the phone, and I never spoke to John again.

  Maybe I still had some confusion when it came to long-term commitment and what that meant, but after Andrew and John it turns out that I’d developed some pretty clear lines in the sand when it came to an acceptable boyfriend:

  1. He had to support my career.

  2. He had to be generous.

  3. He couldn’t be a jerk.

  4. He had to be truthful.

  5. No cheaters allowed.

  I was a lot less sad after John than I’d been after Andrew. John was like that bracelet he’d given me—shiny, brassy, weightless. And I knew I was worth a lot more than that.

  These cookies are so sweet and delicious that if you’re going through a breakup, you will soon forget about it. Or at least they will help ease the pain.

  Traditional linzer hearts have little cutouts on the top so you can get a glimpse of the raspberry filling inside. You can make these linzer hearts the traditional way, but since I call them my “broken heart” cookies, I like cutting the hearts in half before I bake them (and in that case don’t cut out the centers). When serving, arrange the cookies on a platter so that the halves aren’t quite touching but you can still tell that they’re hearts. Very cute.

  LINZER BROKEN-HEART COOKIES

  1½ cups almonds

  3 tablespoons granulated sugar

  1 cup confectioners’ sugar, plus more for dusting

  2¼ cups all-purpose flour

  ½ cup cornstarch

  2¼ sticks unsalted butter, very cold

  1 whole egg

  1 egg yolk

  6 ounces raspberry preserves (approximately)

  Rolling pin

  3-inch heart-shaped cookie cutter

  1½-inch heart-shaped cookie cutter (optional, for cutting out the traditional way)

  Cookie spatula

  Parchment-lined cookie sheets

  Mesh strainer

  In a food processor (see note below), pulse almonds and granulated sugar until fine. Add confectioners’ sugar, flour, and cornstarch, and pulse until well combined.

  Cut cold butter into pieces and add to mixture in food processor. Pulse until combined. Now add whole egg and egg yolk and pulse until mixture forms a smooth dough.

  Divide dough into four disks and wrap each in plastic wrap. Refrigerate until firm (about 2 hours).

  Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

  On a flour-dusted surface, use a floured rolling pin to roll out each disk (one at a time) until ¼ inch thick.

  If making broken-heart cookies, proceed to cut all the dough into 3-inch heart shapes, and then slice each heart in half using a very sharp knife. As you cut each half-heart, use your cookie spatula to transfer them to parchment-lined cookie sheets, spaced an inch apart.

  If proceeding the traditional way, cut all the dough into 3-inch heart shapes, and then use a 1½-inch cutter to cut out the center of half of the 3-inch heart-shaped cookies. As above, use your cookie spatula to transfer the hearts to baking sheets as you go. Note that if you can’t find a small heart-shaped cookie cutter, you can also use the base of a small rounded pastry tip. You can even cut out the centers with a sharp knife, if you have the patience for it.

  After you cut out each batch of hearts (and heart-shaped centers), you’ll have scraps left over. Gather them together, rechill if they’ve gotten soft, and continue to roll out as directed above.

  Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, until pale golden in color. Do not overbake! Allow to cool on racks.

  When cookies are cooled, set aside half the half-hearts, or all the whole hearts if you’ve made them the traditional way. Now flip over the remaining solid hearts or half-hearts and place ¾ teaspoon (or less, as needed) of preserves on each cookie bottom. Spread thinly, but not all the way to edges.

  Put about ¼ cup of confectioners’ sugar in a fine mesh strainer, and dust the tops of all the cookies that you set aside in the last step.

  Place a dusted top onto a preserve-covered bottom and press lightly. Adorable, am I right?

  Makes 32 hearts.

  Note: If you don’t have a food processor, you can mix the first two ingredients in a blender and then proceed with the rest of the recipe using a standing mixer. In a pinch, you can use a hand mixer; it will just take you more time to incorporate the cold butter. If you don’t have a blender, you can buy finely ground almonds and proceed the same way.

  CHAPTER 14

  IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS

  It’s easy not to focus on yourself and your problems when you’re running so fast that you can’t catch your breath. My years at Hot 97 were so insanely busy that I almost never took a pause to look at where my personal life was going and to really examine what I was doing wrong or right. Sure, I had my moments of clarity when a relationship ended, but they were just points on a graph. I hadn’t connected the dots yet.

  After Hot 97, I was offered a job to work on WOR’s morning show. I had known about WOR AM radio since I was a kid, and the on-air personalities working there were New York institutions—Dr. Joy Browne, Joan Hamburg, and the Gambling family that had passed the baton of hosting Rambling with Gambling for generations. I had been working so long in the
FM trenches, though, that I had to refresh myself where WOR AM was on the dial.

  I was brought in to work with John Gambling, whose talk radio show went on at 5 A.M. (which meant I had to be at my desk by 4:30 at the latest). WOR wasn’t looking for me to be a cohost with the kind of responsibility that I had at Hot 97, and I wouldn’t be expected to attend station events every night. So despite the fact that I had to wake up at 3:10 A.M.—the earliest I’d ever had to get up for a job—I felt like I could take a deep breath for the first time in years (maybe ever). I stayed there for three years, and it’s no coincidence that at a time when my work life became less frenetic, I started to really look inside and try to figure out what I needed to be happy.

  A live broadcast from Dublin, Ireland.

  When Andrew broke up with me, it really hit me that I hadn’t been listening to myself—I had buried that little inner voice that tells you what feels right and what doesn’t and replaced it with my imaginary ticker tape that just told me what I wanted to hear. I’d always avoided being terribly introspective. I found it too troubling. I preferred to just keep moving forward as opposed to looking back. And moving forward had the effect of drowning out that voice entirely. How can you listen to what’s going on inside when you’re working as hard as you can to make everything on the outside as noisy as possible? This is why people who work all the time are called workaholics. It’s an addiction, and it was my self-medication of choice.

  After my breakup with Andrew, I’d find myself crying out of nowhere when I was just walking down the street. I felt angry and disgusted when I broke up with John, but my response to Andrew was different. There was sadness, for sure, but my grief wasn’t over the relationship itself. I was genuinely worried that I didn’t know how to have a happy relationship and a happy life. I thought that all those people who’d managed to figure out the key to happiness must have been born with an internal compass that pointed them in roughly the right direction. Or maybe it was something instilled in them in childhood. Either way, I had no compass.

  This wasn’t depression. I didn’t need a pill. I was at a crossroads, and I needed someone to give me the tools to fix my life and find the kind of happiness that can’t be discovered on that next rung up the career ladder. I needed an expert, because left to my own devices I knew that I was going to keep flailing around in the dark and falling on my ass. At this point, I had no padding left back there.

  I was so naive when I started therapy. I thought that I would walk in, tell the therapist my problems, and she’d fix them. It would be just like going to the chiropractor for a back adjustment. When that turned out to be a little pie in the sky, I thought that at minimum she’d give me a recipe for how I could fix myself—just follow these steps, bake for an hour, and voilà, you’re done. But there was nothing easy and straightforward about therapy. It was absolutely horrible a lot of the time. I cried, I yelled. My therapist, Hettie, saw right through all my nonsense, and the experience of having her point out the truth behind my lifetime of denial was like having a full-body bandage ripped off over and over and over again. Hettie did not let me get away with anything.

  I learned from Hettie that if you’re not true to yourself, you become a bullshit artist. I had gotten very good at playing a shell game with myself and everyone else. I spun the cups around on the table, creating as many distractions as possible so that no one (myself included) ever knew where the truth lay. I convinced myself and everyone else that finding the right man was just a matter of time and luck. In truth, at the rate I was going I would never find a happy long-term relationship. I had no idea how to open myself up and to give at least as much as I got. I was a moving target with men, always on my toes, waving my arms in the air, distracting them with sex and cookies. And it wasn’t just men I hid myself from—I never went very deep into my female friendships either. There was no one to whom I showed my insecurities or my vulnerable side. I buried that part of me underneath way too many layers of smoke and mirrors.

  The problem with burying your personal truth so deeply—and under so much nonsense—is that you lose your sense of what you really want. Hettie pointed out to me that one of the reasons that I often felt taken advantage of in relationships—whether with men, or friends, or family, or even coworkers—is that I had no bottom line. I was so terrified of confrontation that I would run away rather than draw a line in the sand. She’d ask me, “Why not tell people what you want, what you will and won’t accept? What are you so afraid of?”

  I remember that I didn’t even know how to answer that question. I guess it was obvious—after growing up in a household with so much angry conflict that it ended a marriage, I figured that all disagreement was bad and would result in disaster. So I just avoided conflict altogether, even if it meant bending over when I should have been standing firm, or running away from a perfectly good relationship when all it needed was a little fixing. When my parents were screaming and yelling at each other, I learned to shut up and not rock the boat. I never was taught the right way to be angry, and to express it. And what I learned as a kid I carried into adulthood. When I felt an uncomfortable emotion, I just stopped it up. When someone made me feel unworthy—whether it was a relative or a boyfriend or a girlfriend—I swallowed it. I didn’t know that I could say “That hurts my feelings” or “Please don’t do that” and that we could work things out and still be friends afterward. It was easier to run away, just like I’d always done.

  Hettie could see the terror in my eyes at the mere thought of standing up for myself, so she suggested we role-play how I might handle conflict. She said, “Lisa, what’s the worst thing that could happen if you stand up for yourself?”

  I said, “Well, we’ll get into a fight.”

  “What do you mean,” Hettie said, “like a fistfight?”

  “No, like yelling and screaming, like my parents always did when they fought.”

  “Lisa, you don’t have to yell to disagree with someone. You just tell them how you feel in a calm tone of voice. And then they tell you how they feel. Then you work things out and sometimes you compromise. Sometimes you say sorry and sometimes the other person does.”

  When she put it like that, I guess it made sense, but when you’ve lived your whole life believing that conflict is the end of the world, then it’s very hard to start seeing it as a healthy part of life. So we started out slow, by pretending that she was a guy who hadn’t called me back.

  Hettie: Hey, Lisa, what’s up?

  Me: Well, I’m calling because I’ve been waiting to hear from you about our plans.

  Hettie: Sorry about that, the time got away from me. How about I pick you up Friday at eight?

  Me: When you tell me that you’re going to call and then you don’t, it makes me feel bad.

  Hettie: I’m sorry, I’ll give you more notice next time.

  Of course it’s a lot easier to say those things to your therapist than in a real-life situation, but over time I would incorporate what I learned in our role playing into my relationships. Once a coworker made a snotty comment to me. In the past I would have thought that I had to laugh it off and pretend it didn’t bother me, even though it really hurt my feelings. But this time I called him on it. I said, “What do you mean by that?”

  I still remember how that caught him up short, and how he was suddenly forced to explain himself. I walked away from that confrontation shaking my head in amazement. I actually thought to myself, Oh my God, I’m still alive. No one died—the world didn’t end. There was no screaming or yelling. Who knew things could work that way? It was like a shade being lifted, and suddenly I didn’t have to fumble around in the dark anymore.

  Of course you don’t change ingrained patterns overnight, and it wasn’t like one positive experience with confrontation magically transformed me forever after. Revealing myself in that way continued to terrify me, and I didn’t always practice what Hettie preached. As painful as it was to tamp down my emotions all the time and pretend they didn’t exist, it
was still a lot less scary than showing them. Telling people how you really feel requires a lot of bravery, and I had to admit that when it came to relationships, I was a big coward.

  I was also a big liar a lot of the time. I didn’t mean to be—or want to be—but I’d spent my whole life feeling like I had to be perfect and that any show of vulnerability was a massive failure. So I concealed any part of myself that might have seemed like a weakness. This meant that none of my relationships could be particularly close—even my friendships with people I loved, like Arlene. It took me a long time to learn that people actually feel more connected to you when they can help you in some way. Who can feel close to someone who is so guarded that he or she never admits to a less-than-happy emotion? All my friendships became much closer once I started to talk about my personality warts and shortcomings.

  There was a downside to all this honesty, though. When you experience true give-and-take with another human being, that’s when you realize that you’re really an adult. And that comes with a load of responsibility. I had to learn that honesty is a two-way street. If I could confront my friends and lovers, then that meant they could turn the tables right back on me.