by Carol Selick
Marvin and I were meeting spontaneously on a regular basis. We went to the movies and tried going out to dinner, but I was having trouble eating in restaurants again. Most of the time, we ordered Chinese take-out.
Sex was still exciting and he had gotten used to the sound of my orgasm voice. Sometimes we would stand nude together in front of the living room windows and give the neighbors a show. Then one night we were sitting on the couch and he popped the question.
“I’m thinking of taking a few months off and going to California. Do you want to sublet my apartment?”
“Making the pilgrimage to paradise? If I’d found a job there, I would still be in Berkeley.”
“So, do you want the apartment or not?”
“Yes!”
Nina and I still hadn’t found a place and this was the answer to our prayers. I couldn’t wait to tell her the good news.
“Oh, and Carol—you know your eating thing? I have a friend who could help you with that.” Marvin offered. “He’s the best shrink in the city. Here’s his number. When I get back from California, I’m taking you out to dinner.”
“Thanks, Marv. Maybe I’ll give him a call.”
My father packed up his station wagon with Nina’s and my things and reluctantly drove us into the city. It was a sweltering hot Sunday in July and no one felt like talking. I knew my father wasn’t happy about the move, but I was twenty-two and desperately seeking my independence. I’d saved enough money working temp jobs to pay my share of the rent for the next few months. By then, I hoped to have a job in the city. Even if I had to work a day job in an office
We miraculously found a parking spot right in front of the apartment. Everything was going smoothly until I handed my father the key to the front door of the building.
“Are you sure this is the right key, Carol? It won’t open.” Before I could answer, he yelled, “It’s stuck! I think I broke the key!”
I didn’t need a shrink to figure out the symbolism of my father breaking the key that opened the door to my freedom.
I went down to the corner phone booth and called Marvin. He was staying with his mother in Jersey until he left for California the next day. He said he could get to us in under an hour.
When he arrived, Marvin was a perfect gentleman. He managed to get the old key out of the lock and used his spare to unlock the door. He even helped bring some of our things up to the apartment. Before he left, he told my father in his most serious lawyer voice, “I want you to know, Mr. Marks, that I was never ‘romantically involved’ with your daughter” (code for “I never slept with her”). “We just went out a few times.”
My father grabbed his hand and thanked him.
Just before my father left, he handed me an envelope. Inside was a hundred dollars in cash and a handwritten note:
Carol,
Boys must play and grow
Before they fall in love and know
The beauty and the longing theme
Of a girl’s aching heart and dream.
So, my dear Carol, until then,
Until boys learn to be men,
Please accept a father’s love
That’s as old as you and a true love.
2
THERAPY
Time has come to stop believing
In fairy tales that never can come true.
You held them close, swore you’d never leave them,
But you knew you would, ’cause you understood
Grown-up children can’t survive.
I’d been seeing Marvin’s therapist friend for about three weeks. Twice a week I took a crosstown bus to his Eastside office on 75th between Madison and Park. He said he could help me get over my phobias about eating in restaurants and riding the subway. I’d also been experiencing anxiety attacks. It was a free-floating, almost paralyzing fear that came on suddenly. Sometimes it would happen when I was crossing a busy street. My legs felt like jelly and I prayed I would make it to the other side.
I sat in his small waiting room on the sixth floor and stared at the Gustave Klimpt print hanging on the wall. The one of a handsome dark-haired man kissing a beautiful woman. I smoothed down my untamable summer hair and waited for Bruce to open the door to his office. I was curious to see if one of his clients would walk out of his inner sanctum, but so far, I’d never seen one. I assumed he timed it that way for privacy reasons. I didn’t understand what the big deal was about seeing a shrink. It seemed like everyone in the city bragged about being in analysis and was just as eager to give out their analyst’s number as they were their hairdresser’s.
Bruce Pasternak was no ordinary therapist. Although he was the same age as Marvin he seemed more adult. He had a calmness about him and a good sense of humor. He was the most caring man I’d ever met—and also the most handsome. With his thick, dark hair and large hazel eyes, he sort of looked like the man in the Klimpt painting.
The first time I walked into his office I was hooked. One of the earliest songs I wrote in college was “I’m a Girl/Woman, I Need a Boy/Man.” I was still a girl/woman but Bruce was definitely all man. He was the first person who accepted me unconditionally and the feeling was intoxicating!
During my very first session, I’d asked him what sign he was and he replied “positive!”
“Oh, come on, let me guess! I bet you’re a Virgo.” He smiled in spite of himself.
“I knew it! That’s a very analytical sign. Perfect for a shrink!”
I knew a few other things about him from Marvin. He was divorced, introspective, and slow to make decisions. Marvin said when he had brunch at Bruce’s apartment, his soon-to-be ex-wife asked him how he wanted his eggs cooked, and it took Bruce a few minutes to decide.
He was a hardcore Freudian psychologist, so I wasn’t surprised when he asked, “How did you feel when your father got the key stuck in the door, Carol?”
“Hmm . . .” I took a long drag on my cigarette. We were sitting face-to-face. There was a sofa in the office, but Bruce hadn’t asked me to lie on it yet.
“I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t want me to start a new life?”
“Dig deeper, Carol. Think about the shape of the key.”
“Are you saying it’s a phallic symbol?” I wasn’t completely clueless about Freudian analysis. I had taken Psychology 101 in college.
“Did it remind you of any other times in your life?”
“I was too young to remember, but my father told me that one night my mother cut her hand in the kitchen and he had to rush her to the hospital. He left me alone in the apartment and when he got back someone had tampered with the lock. I must have been frightened, but like I said, I don’t remember.”
Bruce blew a smoke ring from his cigar. A deliberate smokescreen to create a barrier between us. But it couldn’t hide the thick sexual tension in the air. I didn’t need a textbook to figure that out.
“Oh, wait, there was another time in college when I locked the keys in the car on moving day. It was when Melanie and I were moving into our apartment at George Washington University.”
“Do you see a pattern regarding moving and being on your own? From what you’ve told me, your parents were overly protective. Can you tell me more about them?”
“Well, my father came to this country from Poland right before the Nazis killed his family.”
“Your father lost his entire family?”
“Yeah, except for one brother who survived.”
“That could explain why he was so overly protective. Let’s talk more about this in a future session. Tell me about your mother.”
“She didn’t have it easy growing up either. Her parents came from Russia and owned a dry-cleaning store in Brooklyn. They lived in an apartment above the store and she and her brother were left on their own a lot. Oh, and she grew up during the Depression.”
&n
bsp; “Sounds like a hard life.”
I stopped for a minute and tried to think objectively about my mother. Betty Marks was an attractive, petite woman, with short, frosted, permed hair and a flair for fashion. She liked shopping at Loehmann’s and was perfectly capable of picking out her own clothes, but wouldn’t think of buying anything without my father’s approval. Even though she contributed to half of our family income, my father was clearly the boss. Theirs was a great love, and sometimes I thought they would’ve been a lot happier if I hadn’t come along. They had a tight system that worked for them, based on a mutual fear of germs, Germans, messes, and non-conformity.
I found the courage to look directly into Bruce’s eyes and asked, “How can talking about my parents’ lives get rid of my phobias and anxiety attacks?”
“From what you told me so far, your parents were overly protective. They didn’t want you to grow up.”
“Why not? Why wouldn’t parents want their child to grow up?”
“Control. You and your father had an unconscious agreement. You made a mess and he cleaned it up.”
“Hmm, I never thought about it that way. My mother hated messes too, but more the spilled milk and mud on the floor kind. I guess they could be afraid for me to be on my own.”
“Everyone grows old, Carol, but not everyone grows up. Seeing your parents as people with their own challenges and flaws is a good first step.”
I nodded, but my head was deep into my favorite daydream. The one where Bruce puts down his cigar takes my hand and throws me on the couch. I can feel his strong body on top of mine and he’s kissing me behind my ears, whispering, this is what you really need, Carol.
“Carol? Did you hear me?”
“Sorry, I guess I spaced out there for a minute.” My face felt flushed. If he knew what I’d been imagining, I’d be mortified! I knew that transference was common between a patient and a therapist, but I was sure I could feel his attraction to me, too. If only he weren’t so incredibly handsome, kind, funny, and accepting! He was everything I wanted in a man. The only thing missing was he wasn’t a musician, but I could live with that.
Bruce was my oasis in a world that I didn’t understand, and that never understood me either, from the time I was a child. A world that I was trying to make sense out of and find a place in. I couldn’t risk telling him how I really felt. I was searching for transcendence, not transference. That was a label I wasn’t willing to accept.
As I sat on the crosstown bus, the line Everyone grows old, but not everyone grows up echoed in my mind. By the time I climbed the stairs to my third-floor apartment, I’d come up with the title for a song: “Grown-Up Children Can’t Survive.” I grabbed a pen and a paper bag lying on the coffee table, sat at my rented piano, and played around with some chords. The verses poured out of me, or maybe it was through me. I scribbled them down and finished the entire song in twenty minutes. It was the fastest one I’d ever written and, I felt, the most meaningful.
And time has come to stop your grieving
About your parents’ love that seemed to pass you by.
You’ll understand, that you can’t make reasons
For the love you lost, when you paid the cost to see things as they are
’Cause grown-up children can’t survive.
And time will come when you’ll start believing
In your own strength, the way that people do.
You’re so afraid ’cause the child is leaving,
But you fight your fear, ’cause you know ’round here
Grown-up children can’t survive.
3
COLLEGE DAZE
All my life I was waiting for someone to start me,
Sitting like a wind-up doll, looking outside for the key.
On my shelf, I was feeling kinda lonely and dusty,
Ain’t nothing or anyone around gonna help me live my life.
Flashback: 1968, sophomore year. I’d transferred from boring, suburban Rider College in New Jersey to George Washington University in DC. When the Dean of Women at Rider asked me why I was transferring, I made up something about wanting to be in a more cosmopolitan environment. I couldn’t tell her the real reasons: that I wanted to be with hipper people, protest against the war, smoke dope, and stay out past my 9:00 p.m. curfew. It wasn’t any of her business, I thought, as I stared into her middle-aged patrician face. She looked like she was born old. She could never understand what it was like to be young and free. As I proudly handed her my letter of acceptance from George Washington, she just smiled and wished me luck. Even she couldn’t deny that I was moving up in the world!
Imagine my disappointment, when I got to GWU and found myself sharing a dorm suite with five straight-laced women who all knew each other from Freshman year. I felt like I was back at Rider. What were the odds, in a building that was so large, they called it Super Dorm, of rooming with five women who’d never heard one electrifying guitar riff from groups like Cream and Procol Harem? I was mortified later to hear that on the first day, they’d gone through my Indian print tops and bell-bottom jeans and labeled me their token hippie.
Although, one of my new roommates was her own kind of crazy. Randy Messinger came from a poor section of Philly and was on a full scholarship. She was very smart, but for extra money, she managed a nightclub downtown. She also belonged to a sorority and barely had time to sleep. Her short, red, pixie-cut hair drew attention to the ever-present dark circles under her eyes. Randy’s schedule was so erratic, she got to sleep in the only single room in the suite that was cordoned off by two wooden glass-paned doors. Some nights she got back from the club at 2:00 a.m. and fell asleep in her clothes and makeup. The next day she woke up early, washed her face, and went to class, then piled on the mascara and went back to work at the club that night. I started to question why I’d bothered to transfer.
That changed the day Melanie Bloom moved next door. A few weeks into the semester, I was rushing down the hall, late for my European Lit class, when I noticed that the door to the room next to mine was slightly open. I glanced in and saw a girl with long brown wavy hair sitting at the edge of the bed, staring out the window. She looked almost doll-like, sitting perfectly still and expressionless, although I sensed a feeling of sadness. When I came back from class, I knocked on the sad girl’s door and asked if I could come in. We bonded instantly probably because we both felt like outsiders.
Melanie told me she’d left her sorority because she couldn’t take the phoniness of the other girls and that quitting was a turning point in her life. She no longer wanted to be the “popular girl” and depend on friends and family to make her feel good. She wanted to take an inner journey. Like me, she wasn’t going to college to get her MRS. Degree and she definitely wasn’t a JAP—a Jewish American Princess. There were plenty of those at GWU. You could see them sitting in front of the dorm on a warm day, holding their shiny aluminum sun reflectors under their hopeful faces.
A few days later, she waved me into her room and read me one of her poems. I was blown away. She wasn’t rhyming moon and June, she was pouring out her pain. It was deep and symbolic and profound, not the ramblings of a superficial sorority girl!
I want to be in the pink-red rose womb of warm bloody cushions
To keep me from cold winds, cold money, cold people’s arrowed spears.
I want the world to love my insides, no matter how messy and frightened they are.
There were things we could learn from each other. I was an experienced hippie, but she was an experienced woman, having lost her virginity in high school. It was easy to see why, with her almond-shaped brown eyes, perfect nose, and pouty lips. She was petite but her C cups were too big to go braless. No doubt about it—Melanie Bloom was a fox and men were drawn to her wherever we went. That was the downside of hanging out with her, but I had found my first friend at GWU and I was willing to risk it.
“I almost did it first-semester last year,” I confessed to her one Friday night. We were lounging in her dorm room making plans for the weekend.
“He was a senior and one of the few cool guys. He looked like Woody Allen and everyone called him Woody, including me.” I stopped to light a cigarette. That was another thing Melanie and I had in common, we both smoked Tareytons.
“He asked me to go away with him for the weekend to his best friend’s place in Bayonne. It was the first time we’d spent the night together. We were down to our underwear when I pushed his hand away. That’s when he played the love card. If we loved each other, blah, blah, blah. I don’t know what stopped me, but I just wasn’t ready. The next day we were history. He just cared about the sex.”
“What a jerk! Obviously, he wasn’t the right one.”
“Yeah, but I’m tired of waiting.”
Two days later, Melanie came up with a bright idea. “Let’s go on a double date,” she said. It was more of a statement than a question.
Three weeks had gone by since I’d first knocked on her door and we were now officially best friends. Melanie was getting hipper and we’d even shared a joint that she’d scored from one of her ex-boyfriends.
“Far out! Who are they?” I asked.
“It could be weird, but I met this cute Navy guy when I was studying by the Washington Monument, and he asked me if I had a friend.”
That Friday night I peeked over the second-floor balcony to check out our sailors down in the lobby. I spotted them right away. They looked out of place with their bright white sailor uniforms in a sea of blue denim, but they were cute enough to make me want to go downstairs. Bill was tall and blond and from the Midwest. He kissed Melanie on the cheek and introduced us both to Jerry. He was more my type, medium height, and build with dark wavy hair. He looked me up and down but not in a creepy way.
“Let’s go to Georgetown!” Jerry suggested.
“Yeah, let’s have some fun!” Bill chimed in, then turned to Melanie and me. “It’s our last weekend. We’re shipping out to Vietnam,” he informed us with a serious look.