by Phoebe Fox
“Well...” She shifted in the banquette, looking anywhere but at me. “I threw up. A little bit. On Stu.”
“Oh, God.”
“And I might have peed on him slightly.”
“Oh, my God!”
“I couldn’t help it! I thought I was going to die—everything just let loose. Except the one thing I was shooting for. Turns out it’s not hot and sexy, and I do not recommend it.”
“Oh, okay, gosh, thanks for saying.”
“You did ask,” she said primly. “Even after I suggested you not.”
“You know what?” I said. “Never answer another question I ask you. Ever. Not as long as you’re dating my brother.”
“Quit deflecting. Tell me what’s going on.”
I sighed and took a long sip of my coffee, hoping it would burn out the memory of what she’d told me. Which it did not. The server came and we placed our orders.
“So I guess it’s pretty much over,” I told her when the woman left. “Because of my stupid reaction—or nonreaction—to his declaration.”
“Hold on—we still don’t know if he even made a declaration.”
“Why else would he leave town without seeing me, Sash? Why keep Jake from me? When a person’s normal behavior changes, you have to look at what’s different. In this case, everything was different after he maybe said he loved me and I didn’t say a thing. Ergo.”
Her eyebrows went skyward. “‘Ergo’? Really?”
“Or maybe it was about Chip’s call. I told him about it, but maybe I need to explain. Do you think I should call him and explain? But now it’s only going to draw more attention to it. And what would I say anyway?”
“Hold up, there, crazy.”
“Ben’s a nice guy. Too nice to actually break up with me. So I’m guessing this is a breakup by attrition—he’ll just slowly disappear.”
Sasha shook her head. “I really think you’re overthinking this. You’re making way too much out of what might be an innocuous event.”
“You know I’m right,” I countered. “If this were you in this situation, you’d already be boiling the bunny.”
“True,” she said reflectively. “I wonder if I’m maturing, or it’s just easier to be rational and objective when it’s not me directly involved.”
Our food came—gingerbread pancakes and sausage for me, and a fruit-and-yogurt plate for Sasha (why did she even bother eating?)—and as she dug into her dull breakfast with all the fervor of a starving person, which she probably was, I spread butter and syrup on my pancakes and mulled over what she’d said.
“You’re right, you know,” I said finally, then shoved a bite of pancake into my mouth.
“Usually. About what?”
“I’m catastrophizing,” I said around the mouthful. “That’s weird. I normally don’t do that. Why do you think I am now?”
Sasha bit into a blueberry. “Because you really like this guy.”
“I really liked Kendall. I really liked Michael.”
“Yes, but since then I think you’re turning into a real live boy, Pinocchio.”
I threw a packet of sugar at her.
“I’m serious, Brook,” she said, dodging it. “You’ve changed a lot in the last few months—you probably don’t even realize it. Ever since last spring you’re...I don’t know. Softer. More open. Not so intimidating.”
I drew my eyebrows into a furrow. “So before I was hard and closed and scary?”
“No. Just...guarded. Like nothing ever really affected you any more than skin-deep. Now things do. I can see it.”
I gnawed on a sausage link I’d speared on my fork while I thought about that. “Well, if this is what it feels like all the time, I’m not sure it’s an improvement.”
Sasha shook her head. “It won’t be all the time. You’re just getting used to it. It’s like when a deaf person gets a cochlear implant and hears for the first time. It’s too much at the beginning—overwhelming. Then he learns to filter.”
“Sasha, none of your metaphors for me are very flattering.”
“Before,” she stressed. “That was you before.”
I swallowed a too-large bite of sausage, washing it down with coffee so I didn’t choke. “So basically you’re saying that I’ll get used to being more...whatever, open. To ‘feeling’ more. And then this stuff won’t hit me so hard.”
“Oh, no. It always hits hard. Feels like crap. You just have to accept that, deal with it, and let it go.”
“Wow, such an improvement,” I said sarcastically.
Sasha put down her fork—she’d made a small dent in the yogurt and taken a few bites of berries—and leaned back in the banquette. “Would you stop? It is an improvement. What would you have done at this point as the old Brook?”
“Hard, cold, scary Brook?” I shot back.
“Yes, that sad creature. What would you do?”
“I’d walk away. When you see the ax descending you don’t hang around for the decapitation.”
“Right!” She leaned forward excitedly. “But how does it feel to think about not having Ben around anymore?”
My throat closed around a bite of pancake and it was an effort to swallow. “Awful.”
“Yes! That’s great!”
I eyeballed her.
She waved away my skepticism. “Not the awful part. The other part. Now you can admit that it would hurt to lose him, instead of shutting down. Brook, once you shut down it’s all over. There’s no chance. But I think it’s pretty likely this is just a normal relationship stumble—a speed bump. So cowgirl up.” I cracked a smile at her use of my mom’s phrase. “Take a chance and hang on, stay open. Maybe he does have one foot out the door. But maybe not. Don’t take the risk of slamming it right on his leg.”
I pushed my plate away and leaned back, letting out a long breath. What Sasha suggested was the total opposite of what I wanted to do: My instincts said cut and run—protect. But I thought about what I would advise a client to do in this situation, and I saw that she was right—I was being precipitous, jumping to a conclusion I didn’t yet have enough data to reach with any certainty.
“So I just...what,” I asked finally. “Go on as if nothing happened?”
She shrugged. “Why not? Nothing really has.”
I stared down at the carnage of my breakfast, thinking. It was hard not to act, but Sasha had a point—right now there was nothing to act on. I just had to chill out, lie low, and be open to whatever happened.
Damn. Sasha’s way was so much harder.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll just wait and see.”
She beamed as if I were a prize pupil. “That’s my brave Breakup Doctor! Breakfast is on me,” she said, reaching for her purse. “Think of it as the positive reinforcement you mental health people are so fond of.”
“Very funny.”
She looked up from plucking bills from her wallet and met my eyes, all trace of teasing gone. “Just don’t shut down, Brookie. Be open to anything. It’s like with me and Stu—sometimes the things you expect the least are the very best surprises of all.”
twenty
Sasha’s advice was so good, the next night I wrote my column on it:
“Doing Less”
It’s advice that flies in the face of probably most everything you’ve heard. We’re exhorted by experts to do more in every capacity: more work, more leisure time, more productivity, more efficiency—more, more, more.
But I suggest that, where love is concerned, you try doing less.
I don’t mean less of the good things—being attentive, listening, honoring your partner and being present in the relationship.
It’s the things that tie us in knots that we get wrapped up in doing too much of. We worry; we ruminate; we downright obsess
: Does our partner love us? Is he faithful? Have her feelings changed? Are we okay?
Are we doing enough?
When we’re so busy dwelling on the secret worries and fears and insecurities that we all have—because we are human—it’s impossible to see what’s actually there. That can be bad as well as good, of course—if you take time to breathe, to stop stressing about every what-if, every disaster scenario, every secret inadequacy, and look at what is actually happening, maybe you really will find out your fears are based in reality.
But maybe they aren’t, and you’re suffering for nothing.
Either way, you aren’t having the relationship that’s going on in your present. You’re living in the ones you had in your past that fed all the demons that come trooping out when we let ourselves believe that we could be happy: the ones that remind us of when we thought the same thing once before, and were spectacularly wrong. And we got hurt.
But if you’re confusing the relationship you’re having now with the ones you had before it, you’re reacting to phantom pain. You’re anticipating an outcome that may or may not occur—and if our fears get too firm a grasp on us, they may actually bring about the very thing we were so terrified of. If you are so afraid that your partner will cheat on you that you constantly harangue her about it, for instance, you create an atmosphere of mistrust that may in fact encourage her to look elsewhere for the kind of loving, trusting relationship most of us crave.
If you fear he doesn’t love you, it may be due to your own fears that you aren’t worthy of love. And if we can’t find it in us to love ourselves, as the tired-but-true trope says, how can anybody love us?
Do less—less of the kind of unhealthy, fear-driven thinking that brings about exactly the thing we fear most. Don’t twist yourself up in overthinking. Don’t torment yourself with every worst-case scenario from every unsuccessful relationship before this one that might—if you just let it—turn into the one that’s successful beyond your imagination.
In the wise words of Frankie Goes to Hollywood...relax.
It was only a first draft, and it needed polishing, but I liked it. It was everything I would tell a client in a similar situation. Everything I knew to be true in my head and my heart. My paranoia about Ben wasn’t about Ben at all. It was about Michael, and Kendall, and every other time I didn’t get the love I wanted.
And it was about me. I’d cringed as I wrote the line about not feeling worthy of love. Of all the therapeutic clichés, that was the one that made everyone roll their eyes. But it was the truest statement of all. Was I really afraid Ben might not love me?
Or was I afraid I didn’t?
Ever since I’d spent time with Ben’s mom, I’d been doing some thinking about my own. I wanted us to have a relationship—one that was more than Mom telling me how I could do things better and me rolling my eyes. But I’d been waiting angrily for her to offer me what I craved before I’d unbend and open up to her.
I could keep standing on my high horse and being resentful, and have the same distantly loving but troubled dynamic I’d always had with my mom. Or I could do what Adelaide had shown me with Jake: Accept a creature’s nature just as it was and modify the way I reacted to it to yield the behavior I wanted.
Yes, I was dog-training my mom. But whatever—it worked on Jake.
The thought of the big galumph sent a shard of pain into my chest. I missed him. I missed Ben.
I called Mom to see if she could meet for dinner tomorrow, just the two of us, but she greeted the request with a long silence.
“What’s wrong?” she asked finally.
“Nothing, Mom—I just thought it would be nice.”
“Are you sick? Pregnant?” she plowed on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Oh, lord, are you coming out?”
“What!? Mom, geez, I’m not gay. Or pregnant. Or sick, for that matter—I just wanted to have dinner with you.”
But her reaction pointed up the fact that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d called my mom for no reason, just to hang out. Or whether I ever had, for that matter. We didn’t have that kind of relationship.
So maybe it was time we did.
She offered to meet me on her dinner break from rehearsal the next night, somewhere halfway between her apartment in Naples and Fort Myers. We settled on Tradewinds in Bonita and hung up shortly after, our conversational stores exhausted.
And still there was no text or call from Ben. Even by the time I climbed into bed, fighting the suffocating feeling that threatened to smother me.
I was almost expecting Chip’s text when it dragged me out of a fitful sleep that night.
Hey, Brook. I heard you on the radio this morning. Hear you all the time, actually. I always listen. I like to hear U help people like you helped me.
His words spread over me like honey after the way I’d been beating myself up.
And, if I were honest with myself, it filled up the aching cavity in my chest from the total radio silence from Ben. I cradled the phone to my chest, knowing there would be more. Sure enough, it buzzed a few seconds later.
You take great care of people who need it. Been wondering if the guy you’re seeing takes good care of you.
I gripped the phone, blinking against a sudden heat in my eyes.
I wish that didn’t make me jealous, but it does.
I noticed distantly as another text came in that he’d started using more full words, fewer of the abbreviations that always made his texts feel like a teenager’s to me.
I don’t mean weird jealous. Just...I wish it could be me.
My mouth went dry. The phone buzzed immediately.
Even just as friends.
And immediately again: It sounds weird, but I think you’re the best friend I ever had.
I was full-out crying now, and feeling stupid for it. Chip’s words were achingly sweet, and I was flattered and gratified and even pleased all at once, against the loneliness and rejection and fear filling me up about Ben.
I wanted to reply so badly. Just to acknowledge him. Just because I knew firsthand what it felt like to live in the void of nonanswers that gnawed at your insides and broke down your self-confidence and equanimity and contentment.
It might be opening Pandora’s box. But I couldn’t let someone else feel as miserable as I did right now. I thumbed just a few words and hit send:
Thank you, Chip. That means a lot.
I powered the phone down before I could second-guess what I’d done.
twenty-one
“Oh, Brook, do you really have to eat so much shrimp?”
My mother frowned at me over her menu as the server took our order at Tradewinds, a once-upscale restaurant near Bonita Beach that was working as hard as an aging Botoxed debutante to mask its slow decline.
I manufactured a smile. “I love shrimp, Mom. You know that.”
She sighed. “You have since you were a little girl. You know they’re linked to high cholesterol.”
“Mom, I’m thirty-two. I think I’m good for now.”
“For now.” She looked up at the server. “I’ll have the Nicoise salad, please. No egg,” she added, looking pointedly at me.
I bit my tongue for about the twelfth time so far—and we’d barely been here ten minutes.
It probably wasn’t the best day to face my mom head-on. I woke this morning and turned my phone on with my breath held, wondering how many texts from Chip would have piled up after my ill-advised response—only to find none. Nor had Ben texted, or left a voicemail.
I buzzed like a live wire all day long as I met with clients, working much harder than usual to stay focused on their issues, rather than masticating my own. At three I came out into the waiting room to greet a new client and found two unfamiliar people there. “I’m so sorry,” I said, confused. “I don’t do couples t
herapy.” Only for them to shoot strange looks at each other and then at me.
“Um...I don’t know him,” the woman said uncertainly.
Turned out I’d double-booked two new clients—and I didn’t even remember ever speaking to the man. Probably blushing purple with mortification, I shepherded the woman—Minnie McDermot—into my office, while I pushed out a smile and an apology to the man, and rebooked him for the following week—still without knowing his name and too ashamed to ask. Hopefully I’d find it in my records somewhere.
By the time six o’clock rolled around and I’d seen my last client for the day, I felt like a wrung-out sponge. I’d driven to meet Mom on my usual favorite route—Estero Boulevard along the gulf shore—but even the sprawling vistas of sand and bay and ocean failed to pull me out of the funk I’d slipped into.
But I’d made plans with my mom. There was no way I could call them off.
We sat on a deck that overlooked a bayou-type inlet of cypress and mangrove, a trickle of tidal stream giving the place minimal waterfront cred. There was something different about my mother. She wore a pair of loose, flowing palazzo-type pants that were elegant on her, a simple short-sleeved gray cotton top hugging curves I had no idea she had. Her hair was different too—not the careful waves I was used to, but loose curls that framed her face, making her look young and...playful. A word I would never associate with my mom.
“You look awesome, Mom,” I said after the server left. I didn’t mean for my tone to sound so surprised.
She glanced up at me with a hesitant expression, almost cautious. Then her usual closed-lipped smile. “Thank you.” She unfolded her frayed cloth napkin, smoothed it over her lap, then leaned back, hands clasped. “Okay, Brook Lyn. What’s this all about?”
I let out a sigh. “Ma, seriously. I just wanted to see you. To have dinner. No agenda, okay?”
The skin between Mom’s eyebrows wrinkled as her stare on me intensified, as if she were trying to X-ray my head.