Good in Bed

by Jennifer Weiner

  “You probably made her uncomfortable.”

  “But I didn’t say anything! She’s never even met me! And she was the one who called me, so how could I make her uncomfortable?”

  Bruce shrugged. “It’s just the way you are, I guess.”

  I scowled at him. He reached for my hand. “Don’t get mad. It’s just that… you have this kind of judgmental thing going on.”

  “Says who?”

  “Well, my friends, I guess.”

  “What, just because I think they should get jobs?”

  “See, there you go. That’s judgmental.”

  “Honey, they’re slackers. Accept it. It’s the truth.”

  “They’re not slackers, Cannie. They do have jobs, you know.”

  “Oh, come on. What does Eric Silverberg do for a living?”

  Eric, as we both knew, had a full-time temporary job at an Internet startup, where, as best we could both figure, he spent his days trading Springsteen bootleg tapes, meeting girls on one of the three online dating services he subscribed to, and arranging drug buys.

  “George has a real job.”

  “George spends every weekend in a Civil War reenactment brigade. George owns his own musket.”

  “You’re changing the subject,” Bruce said. I could tell he was trying to stay angry, but he was starting to smile.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s just that a guy who has his own musket is such an easy punchline.”

  I stood up, crossed the table, and sat down next to him on his side of the booth, squeezing his thigh and resting my head against his shoulder. “You know the only reason I’m judgmental is because I’m jealous,” I said. “I wish I could have that kind of life. No college loans to pay, rent taken care of, nice, stable, married heterosexual parents who’d set me up with their slightly used furniture every time they redecorate and buy me a car for Chanukah…” My voice trailed off. Bruce was staring at me hard. I realized that, in addition to describing most of his friends, I’d just described him, too.

  “I’m sorry,” I said gently. “It’s just that sometimes it feels like everybody’s got things easier than I do, and that every time I get close to having things be kind of okay… something like this happens.”

  “Did you ever think that maybe these things happen to you because you’re strong enough to take them?” Bruce asked. He reached down, grabbed my hand, and moved it up on his thigh. Way up. “You’re so strong, Cannie,” he whispered.

  “I just,” I said, “I wish…” And then he was kissing me. I could taste ketchup and salt on his lips. Then his tongue was in my mouth. I shut my eyes and let myself forget.

  I spent the weekend at Bruce’s apartment. It was one of those times where we got it just right: good sex, a nice meal out, lazy afternoons trading sections of the Sunday Times, and then I was on my way home before we started grating on each other. We talked about my mother a little bit, but mostly I got to just lose myself with him. And he gave me his favorite flannel shirt to wear home. It smelled like him, like us: like dope and sex, his skin and my shampoo. It was too tight across my chest – all of his things were – but the sleeves fell to my finger-tips, and I felt enclosed, comforted, as if he was there hugging me tight, holding my hands.

  Be brave, I thought back home in my bed. I pulled Bruce’s shirt tight around me, tilted my cheek toward Nifkin so he could give me an encouraging lick, and phoned home.

  Thankfully, my mother answered. “Cannie!” she said, sounding relieved. “Where have you been? I’ve been calling and calling…”

  “I went to Bruce’s,” I told her. “We had theater tickets,” I lied. Bruce didn’t do well in theaters. Short attention span.

  “Well,” she said. “Well. Um, I want to tell you that I’m sorry for springing things on you like that. I guess I should have… well, I know I should have waited and maybe told you in person…”

  “Or at least not at the office,” I said.

  She laughed. “Right. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “So…” I could almost hear her testing half a dozen opening remarks in her head. “Do you have any questions?” she finally asked.

  I took a deep breath. “Are you happy?”

  “I feel like I’m in high school!” my mother said jubilantly. “I feel… oh, I can’t even describe it.”

  Please, don’t try, I thought.

  “Tanya’s really terrific. You’ll see.”

  “How old is she?” I asked.

  “Thirty-six,” said my fifty-six-year-old mother.

  “A younger woman,” I observed. My mother giggled. You have no idea how disturbing that was. My mother has never been the giggling type.

  “She does seem to have a little problem with… boundaries,” I ventured.

  My mother’s voice got very serious. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, she called me Friday morning… I guess you weren’t there”

  A quick intake of breath. “What did she say?”

  “It might take me less time to cover what she didn’t say.”

  “Oh, God. Oh, Cannie.”

  “I mean, I’m sorry she was, you know, molested…”

  “Oh, Cannie, she didn’t!” But underneath the shocked, horrified tone, my mother sounded… almost proud. As if underneath the anger, she was indulging a favored child in the child’s favorite prank.

  “Yup,” I said grimly. “I got the whole saga, from the piano teacher who tickled her ivories…”

  “… Cannie!”

  “… and the wicked stepmother, to the obsessive-compulsive co-dependent ex-girlfriend.”

  “Ack,” said my mother. “Jeez.”

  “She might want to consider some therapy,” I said.

  “She goes. Believe me, she goes. She’s been going for years.”

  “And she still hasn’t figured out that you don’t go blurting your whole life story to a complete stranger the first time you speak to them?”

  My mother sighed. “I guess not,” she said.

  I waited. I waited for an apology, an explanation, something that could make sense of this. Nothing came. After a moment of awkward silence, my mother changed the subject, and I went along, hoping this was a phase, a fling, a bad dream, even. No such luck. Tanya had arrived for good.

  What does a lesbian bring on a second date? goes the joke. A U-Haul. What does a gay guy bring on a second date? What second date?

  An old joke, true, but there’s a certain amount of truth to it. After they started dating, Tanya did in fact move out of the basement of her codependent obsessive-compulsive ex-girlfriend’s condominium and into an apartment of her own.

  But for all intents and purposes, she’d moved in on the second date. I realized this when I came home six weeks after what my siblings and I were referring to as Mom’s Outage, and saw the writing on the wall.

  Well, the poster on the wall. “Inspiration,” it read, above a picture of a cresting wave, “is believing we can all pull together.”

  “Mom?” I called, dropping my bags on the floor. Nifkin, meanwhile, was whining and cringing by my legs in a most un-Nifkin-like manner.

  “In here, honey,” yelled my mother.

  Honey? I wondered, and walked into the family room with Nifkin cowering behind me. This time, the new poster was of frolicking dolphins. “Teamwork,” it said. And beneath the dolphin poster were my mother and a woman who could only be Tanya, in matching purple sweatsuits.

  “Hey!” said Tanya.

  “Hey,” my mother repeated.

  A large tangerine-colored cat leapt off of the windowsill, stalked insolently up to Nifkin, and stretched out a paw, claws extended. Nifkin gave a shrill yip and fled.

  “Gertrude! Bad cat!” called Tanya. The cat ignored her and curled up in a patch of sunlight in the center of the room.

  “Nifkin!” I called. From upstairs I heard a faint whine of protest – Nifkin-speak for no way, no day.

  “Do we have employees that we’re try
ing to motivate?” I asked, pointing at the teamwork dolphins.

  “Huh?” said Tanya.

  “What?” said my mother.

  “The posters,” I said. “We’ve got the exact same ones in the printing plant at work. Right next to the “27 Days Injury Free” sign. They’re, like, motivational artwork.”

  Tanya shrugged. I’d been expecting a standard-issue gym teacher, with sinewy calves and ropy biceps and a no-nonsense haircut. Evidently I’d been expecting wrong. Tanya was a tiny boiled pea of a woman, barely five feet tall, with an aureole of frizzy reddish hair and skin tanned the color and consistency of old leather. No chest or hips to speak of. She looked like a little kid, right down to the scabby knees and the Band-Aid wrapped around one finger. “I just like dolphins,” she said shyly.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “I see.”

  And those were just the most obvious of the changes. There was a collection of dolphin figurines above the fireplace where the family pictures had been. Plastic magazine racks were bolted to the walls, giving our family room the look of a doctor’s office – the better to display Tanya’s copies of Rehabilitation magazine. And when I went to drop my bags in my room, the door wouldn’t open.

  “Mom!” I called, “there’s something wrong up here!”

  I heard a whispered consultation going on in the kitchen: my mother’s voice calm and soothing, Tanya’s bass grumble rising toward hysteria. Every once in a while I could make out words. “Therapist” and “privacy” seemed to comprise a dominant theme. Finally my mother walked up the stairs, looking troubled.

  “Um, actually, I was going to talk to you about this.”

  “About what? The door being stuck?”

  “Well, the door’s locked, actually.”

  I just stared.

  “Tanya’s kind of been… keeping some of her things in there.”

  “Tanya,” I pointed out, “has an apartment. Can’t she keep her things there?”

  My mother shrugged. “Well, it’s a very small apartment. An effi-ciency, really. And it just kind of made sense… maybe you can sleep in Josh’s room tonight.”

  At this point I was getting impatient. “Ma, it’s my room. I’d like to sleep in my room. What’s the big deal?”

  “Well, Cannie, you don’t… you don’t live here anymore.”

  “Of course I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to sleep there when I come home.”

  My mother sighed. “We made some changes,” she murmured.

  “Yeah, I noticed. So what’s the big deal?”

  “We, um… well. We kind of got rid of your bed.”

  I was speechless. “You got rid of…”

  “Tanya needed the space for her loom.”

  “There’s a loom in there?”

  Indeed there was. Tanya stomped up the stairs, unbolted the door, and stomped back downstairs, looking sullen. I entered my room and saw the loom, a computer, a battered futon, a few ugly pressboard bookshelves covered with plastic walnut veneer, containing volumes with titles like Smart Women, Foolish Choices, and Courage to Heal, and It’s Not What You’re Eating, It’s What’s Eating You. There was a rainbow-triangle suncatcher hanging in the window and, worst of all, an ashtray on the desk.

  “She smokes?”

  My mother bit her lip. “She’s trying to quit.”

  I inhaled. Sure enough, Marlboro Lights and incense. Yuck. Why did she have to plant her self-help guides and her cigarette smells in my room? And where was my stuff?

  I turned toward my mother. “You know, you really could have told me about this. I could have come down and taken my things with me.”

  “Oh, we didn’t get rid of anything, Cannie. It’s all in boxes in the basement.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Well, that makes me feel a lot better.”

  “Look,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to balance things here”

  “No, no,” I said. “ ‘Balance’ involves taking different things into account. This,” I said, sweeping my hand to indicate the loom, the ashtray, the stuffed dolphin perched upon the futon, “is taking what one person wants into account, and completely screwing the other person. This is completely selfish. This is absolutely ridiculous. This is…”

  “Cannie,” said Tanya. She’d somehow come up the stairs without my hearing.

  “Excuse us, please,” I said, and slammed the door in her face. I took a perverse pleasure in listening to her work at the door handle after I’d locked it with her lock.

  My mother started to sit down where my bed used to be, caught herself mid-sit and settled for Tanya’s desk chair. “Cannie, look. I know this is a shock”

  “Have you gone completely crazy? This is ridiculous! All it would have taken was one lousy phone call. I could have come, gotten my stuff…”

  My mother looked miserable. “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  I wound up not staying the night. That visit occasioned my first – and, so far, my last – stint at therapy. The Examiner’s health plan paid for ten visits with Dr. Blum, the smallish, Little Orphan Annie -looking woman who scribbled frantically, while I told her the whole crazy-father-bad-divorce-‌lesbian-mother tale. I worried about Dr. Blum. For one thing, she always looked a little scared of me. And she always seemed a few twists behind the current plot.

  “Now, back up,” she’d say, when I’d segue abruptly from Tanya’s latest atrocity to my sister, Lucy’s, inability to keep a job. “Your sister was, um, dancing topless for a living, and your parents didn’t notice?’

  “This was ’86,” I’d say. “My father was gone. And my mother somehow managed to miss the fact that I was sleeping with my substitute history teacher and I’d gained fifty pounds during my freshman year of college, so yeah, she pretty much believed that Lucy was babysitting until four every morning.”

  Dr. Blum would squint down at her notes. “Okay, and the history teacher was… James?”

  “No, no. James was the guy on the crew team. Jason was the E-Z-Lube poet. And Bill was the guy in college, and Bruce is the guy right now.”

  “Bruce!” she’d say triumphantly, having located his name in her notes.

  “But I’m really worried that I’m, you know, leading him on or something.” I sighed. “I’m not sure I really love him.”

  “Let’s go back to your sister for a minute,” she’d say, flipping faster and faster through her legal pad, while I sat there and tried not to yawn.

  In addition to her inability to keep up, Dr. Blum was rendered less than trustworthy by her clothes. She dressed as if she didn’t know there was such a thing as the petite section. Her sleeves routinely brushed her fingertips; her skirts sagged around her ankles. I opened up as best I could, answered her questions when she asked them, but I never really trusted her. How could I trust a woman who had even less fashion sense than I did?

  At the end of our ten sessions, she didn’t quite pronounce me cured, but she did leave me with two pieces of advice.

  “First,” she said, “you can’t change anything anybody else in this world does. Not your father, not your mother, not Tanya, not Lisa…”

  “… Lucy,” I corrected.

  “Right. Well, you can’t control what they do, but you can control how you respond to it… whether you allow it to drive you crazy, or occupy all of your thoughts, or whether you note what they’re doing, consider it, and make a conscious decision as to how much you’ll let it affect you.”

  “Okay. And what’s thing two?”

  “Hang on to Bruce,” she said seriously. “Even if you don’t think he’s Mr. Right. He’s there for you, and he sounds like a good support, and I think you’re going to need that in the coming months.”

  We shook hands. She wished me good luck. I thanked her for her help and told her that Ma Jolie in Manayunk was having a big sale, and that they made things in her size. And that was the end of my big therapy experience.

  I wish that I could say that, in the years since Tanya and her loom and h
er pain and her posters moved in, that things have gotten easier. The fact is, they haven’t. Tanya has the people skills of plant life. It’s like a special kind of tone-deafness, only instead of not hearing the music, she’s deaf to nuances, to subtleties, to euphemisms, small talk, and white lies. Ask her how she’s doing, and you’ll get a full and lengthy explication of her latest work/health crisis, complete with an invitation to look at her latest surgical scar. Tell her that you liked whatever she cooked (and Lord knows you’ll be lying), and she’ll regale you with endless recipes, each with a story behind it (“My mother cooked this for me, I remember, the night after she came home from the hospital”).

  At the same time, she’s also incredibly thin-skinned, prone to public crying fits, and temper tantrums that conclude with her either locking herself in my ex-bedroom, if we’re home, or stomping away from wherever we are, if we’re out. And she dotes on my mother in the most annoying way you could imagine, following her around like a lovestruck puppy, always reaching to hold her hand, touch her hair, rub her feet, tuck a blanket around her.

  “Sick,” pronounced Josh.

  “Immature,” said Lucy.

  “I don’t get it,” is what I said. “Having somebody treat you that way for, like, a week would be nice… but where’s the challenge? Where’s the excitement? And what do they talk about?”

  “Nothing,” said Lucy. The three of us had come home for Chanukah, and we were sitting around the family room after the guests had gone home and my mother and Tanya had gone to bed, all of us holding the gifts Tanya had woven for us. I had a rainbow-colored scarf (“You can wear it to the Pride Parade,” Tanya offered). Josh had mittens, also in the gay-pride rainbow, and Lucy had an odd-looking bundle of yarn that Tanya had explained was a muff. “It’s to keep your hands warm,” she’d rumbled, but Lucy and I had already dissolved into gales of laughter, and Josh was wondering in a whisper whether such a thing could be dropped to the bottom of the pool for a little summertime muff diving.