Group

by Christie Tate

  I’d been bingeing and purging since seventh grade; I didn’t need to use my finger. All I had to do was bend over the toilet. When I was done purging, I ran the shower to clean myself up before my roommate returned from a study group. My stomach felt like it would split open lengthwise. Steam billowed in the tiny bathroom, and I hugged the wall, waiting to see if more vomit was coming. Black dots swirled in my vision. I sank into the floor, half in the shower and half out. Before everything went black, I thought: This is it; this is how I die, bingeing myself into oblivion and moping over a boy.

  * * *

  I dialed Rory’s number. Mercifully, her recorded voice greeted me, and then the beep. My turn. In a voice barely above a whisper, I recounted all the cabbage and the five postdinner apples. After I hung up, I threw my phone across the bedroom. It clattered across the hardwood floors. “Goddammit!” I yelled into my apartment, as I punched my pillows. In one moment, I thought: Why am I doing this? It hurts too much. Then: Why didn’t I get to Dr. Rosen sooner?

  I called Rory again the next night, and it wasn’t one bit easier. My hands still shook and I threw my phone across the room when I was done telling her voice mail what I’d eaten. My arms ached with phantom pain as if I’d literally wrestled to keep hold of my precious secret. By the third night, when the voice mail beeped, I almost said “ditto from yesterday,” I forced myself to enumerate each apple and cabbage leaf.

  The fourth night was the worst. Seven apples. Enough for a prizewinning pie at the state fair. I wanted to hide the reality of those seven apples, but I was midway on a tightrope. If I told her, could I scurry, quick like, to the platform ahead? Either way, I wanted off the tightrope.

  It’s not going to work if you don’t do the hard thing, I told myself. Deep breath. “Seven fucking apples.”

  6

  Dr. Rosen was a snake charmer. He could ask a pointed question and secrets from our past would slither out. He’d coax Rory into recounting details of her father’s harrowing escape from Poland, urging her to speak in her father’s Old World accent. At Dr. Rosen’s urging, Colonel Sanders described the dubious therapy he had with an unlicensed doctor who treated him for PTSD after his service in Vietnam. Dr. Rosen could get Carlos talking about the stepbrother who abused him after Sunday school, and Patrice misting up over her brother who hanged himself in the family orchard. Dr. Rosen sensed where our shame and grief was hidden and knew how to extract it. He prodded me to talk about Hawaii and bulimia almost every session.

  Every Tuesday morning, I rode the train eleven stops from my apartment to the Washington stop on the Red Line, where I would climb to the street level around seven ten. Twenty minutes early. The day I’d committed to joining a group, I stopped sleeping through the night. I could fall asleep around ten, but then I’d bolt awake at two or three, and never get back to sleep, so it was easy to get downtown early. But I didn’t want to drag my anxious, furiously beating heart to the waiting room to sit there among addiction books waiting for the door to swing open. I’d walk around the block—past Old Navy, down to Carson Pirie Scott, and then east toward the El tracks on Wabash. Sometimes I made two loops, assuring myself: You’re just a woman going to therapy; you’re going to sit in a circle and talk for ninety minutes. Easy peasy.

  Sometimes sessions were as emotionally charged as a juicer demonstration at Sam’s Club. One week we spent an entire session discussing the insurance forms that Carlos wanted Dr. Rosen to sign. Another time, when Patrice showed up with two different colored knee-high stockings (one midnight indigo, the other ebony), we debated for fifteen minutes whether it was progress for fastidious Patrice to mess up her hosiery or whether she was backsliding into self-neglect. There was no tidy conclusion, no resolution.

  There were disclosures. There was feedback. There was looking, seeing, and being seen. There were no answers.

  I wanted answers.

  Pivots happened without warning. One second, quiet Marty, the guy who started the same day I did, would be crying as he described his disturbing cache of death mementos—namely, the cyanide tablets he kept in his bedside table in case he ever wanted to end it all—and then suddenly the group conversation pinged to the time I had pinworm in kindergarten. Pinworm, a common childhood parasite, produces agonizing nighttime anal itching. I told the group how, at five years old, alone in my room at 6644 Thackeray Avenue, I scratched my ass like a feral dog for hours into the night, long after my parents flipped off The Tonight Show and went to sleep.

  “Did your parents know you had it?” Rory asked.

  “Wait,” I said, holding up my hands. “We were talking about Marty’s cyanide.” How had the group landed on my five-year-old butt?

  “The group has a way of uncovering things you might need to let go of,” Dr. Rosen said.

  Dr. Rosen loved detail, so I took a deep breath and described how my parents gave me a tube of Desitin for pinworm, but it didn’t relieve the itching. By morning, the stinky white paste was ground under my fingernails and smeared all over my sheets, my nightgown, my butt, and my vagina, which was not where the pinworms were, but everything got confused during the long night of scratching. My mauled vagina, the cream that smelled like fertilizer, and my itchy ass were excruciating. But worse than the physical discomfort was the horrific knowledge that there were live worms in my butt.

  “Desitin is a topical solution for diaper rash, and pinworm is a parasite. You would have needed mebendazole,” Dr. Rosen said, sounding super doctor-y and looking very Harvard, with his furrowed brow. I longed to dart to someone else’s issues, but the group snared me with its questions. Like why I didn’t tell my parents Desitin didn’t work.

  “I thought it was my fault the medicine wasn’t working.” I wasn’t supposed to scratch—they told me not to, but I did. All night long. Plus, who wants to talk about butt worms? Shame, a word I didn’t know at five, had clamped my mouth shut.

  “You were already committed to doing things alone by age five,” Dr. Rosen said like it was a big revelation, but it didn’t feel like one. When I had pinworm, I was embarrassed—in Rosen-speak ashamed—about being a dirty girl with worms in my butt, worms that weren’t crawling through my brother’s or my sister’s asses. Worms were proof that my body was defective and disgusting. Dr. Rosen pressed me to describe how it felt to be a little girl alone in a fight with an anal parasite.

  I shuddered and squeezed my eyes shut. From a distance of two decades, I could smell the Desitin and feel the infernal itching between my legs. I’d never discussed pinworm with anyone, much less a rapt audience of six.

  Without opening my eyes, I told them, unprompted, “I felt shame.”

  “Shame’s a cover. What’s underneath?” Dr. Rosen said.

  I put my head in my hands and scanned my body for an answer. I lifted the corners of shame to see what lurked beneath. I saw my five-year-old face twisted in horror in my childhood bedroom as I scratched past midnight. Horror that I didn’t know how to ask for help. That eventually I had to visit the pediatrician, a tall, middle-aged man with fat thumbs and a deep voice, and tell him all about my butt. That during reading circle at school I had to wedge the heel of my tennis shoe into my butt crack to ease the itching without anyone noticing. That I was dirty and lived in a body filled with food I couldn’t stop eating and worms that made my butt itch. Most of all, horror that my body was a filthy problem, a problem that no one else had.

  “Horror,” I answered.

  Dr. Rosen nodded his head in approval. “You’re getting closer.”

  “To what?”

  “Yourself and your feelings.” He swept his arms around the room. “And of course us.”

  “How will this trip down memory lane help me?”

  “Look at Patrice and ask her if she can identify.” Patrice looked startled and shook her head like don’t look at me. After a beat, she launched into a story about a medically administered enema that went wrong. Then Rory mentioned her distaste for anal sex, and Marty contributed a stor
y about the intractable constipation he’d suffered as a kid. By the end of group, everyone had shared a butt story.

  A few days after this session, I called my parents. My dad and I discussed my car’s sticky brakes, the Aggies’ prospects for the Cotton Bowl, and the unseasonably cool weather in Chicago. Then I pulled a Rosen: out of the blue, I asked him about my pinworm history. What did he remember? (not much) How many times did I get them? (several) Did my siblings ever have them? (no) In the background, I heard my mother’s voice: “Why is Christie asking about pinworm?” I gripped the phone harder. The confession that I’d joined a therapy group gathered in my mouth, but dissolved when I imagined her horror upon realizing that I’d discussed my butt worm history with a group of people. Plus, if I told her about Dr. Rosen and group, I’d have to admit that I’d failed at both willing myself to be happy and not telling other people my business.

  “Why are you asking?” my dad said.

  “Just curious.”

  * * *

  One Tuesday morning, no one said a word during the entire ninety-minute session. All of us literally sat in silence, listening to the El train lumber below, car brakes screeching, and someone shutting a door down the hall. We didn’t catch each other’s eyes or giggle. During the first half, I plucked lint off my sweater, jangled my leg, and picked my cuticles. I looked at the clock every thirty seconds. The silence made me feel exposed, antsy, and unproductive. I could be reading my Constitutional Law assignment. Gradually, I stilled and watched Lake Michigan out the window. The quiet space we were holding felt as vast as the ocean or outer space. The light streaming in the room seemed holy; the intimacy among us sacred. At nine, Dr. Rosen folded his hands and said his usual “We’ll stop there for today.”

  As I walked down the hall with my group members, I carried the quiet calm in my body, though once we reached the street, I shook Carlos’s arm: “What the fuck just happened in there?”

  Whatever it was, through the rest of the day, I carried a quiet calm and sense of awe that I could sit with six other people in total silence for ninety minutes.

  * * *

  Dr. Rosen gave a lot of prescriptions, though rarely for drugs. He wasn’t a pill guy. Carlos got a prescription to bring his guitar to group and play a song for us to help allay his fears about expanding his practice. Patrice got a prescription to rub strawberries on her husband’s stomach, lick them off, and then report the results to group. And because Dr. Rosen thought that the prescription Rory’s internist gave her for anxiety was suppressing her sexual feelings, he gave her his own: “Put one pill between each of your toes while your husband goes down on you.”

  I’d been following my prescription to call Rory every night to tell her my food for a few weeks. I no longer cried after I hung up the phone, and my apple consumption was down to a modest five per night. It was time for another prescription.

  “Can I have something for my insomnia. I can’t think straight.” My second year of law school was under way, and when I wasn’t sitting in group, I was interviewing with Chicago’s biggest law firms for a summer internship, which I hoped would lead to an offer for full-time employment. Not sleeping well for weeks meant that fatigue pressed against my skull, making it hard to stay awake for classes and interviews. At Winston & Strawn, I’d pinched the inside of my arm to stay awake while a white-haired managing partner described the time he argued before the Supreme Court.

  I’d already confessed that my eating was a hot steamy mess; now I admitted I couldn’t sleep. I was a newborn baby stuck in a twenty-seven-year-old’s body.

  Dr. Rosen sat up and rubbed his hands together like a mad scientist. “Call Marty tonight before you go to sleep and ask for an affirmation.”

  “Before or after I call Rory to tell her what I ate?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m going to the opera tonight, so call me before seven,” Marty said.

  At six fifty that night, I stood on the train platform at Belmont, exhausted from the long day of classes and a five-hour interview at Jones, Day, where again I’d pinched in the inside of my arm to stay awake while talking to senior partners. I dialed Marty’s number as wind slapped my hair into my face.

  “I’m calling for my affirmation,” I said into the phone as the lights of an incoming northbound train rose toward the platform.

  “You have great legs, toots.” Marty wasn’t skeevy, like Colonel Sanders. He wept every time he opened his mouth in group and seemed genuinely astonished when we asked to know more about what made him so sad. He always said, “I just can’t believe anyone is listening to me.”

  I laughed into the roar of the oncoming train and prayed his words would work like an extra-strength Ambien.

  The next morning I hesitated before opening my eyes, afraid to see that it was only two A.M. I heard morning sounds. My neighbor’s door slamming. Birdsong. A car starting. I opened my left eye and saw the clock—five fifteen. I’d gotten an unprecedented seven hours of sleep. I pumped my fist like a champion.

  Maybe Dr. Rosen was brilliant.

  7

  As winter descended on Chicago, I practiced bringing mundane issues to group. A prickle of shame skidded down my spine when I asked my group to weigh in on matters I should know how to handle as a reasonably intelligent twenty-seven-year-old, like whether I should use some of my financial aid money to go on a ski trip organized by my college roommate Kat. The group unanimously voted yes to the trip. Dr. Rosen pressed me for a good reason not to go.

  “It’s all couples. I’ll be the eleventh wheel.”

  “Be open,” Dr. Rosen said.

  I can’t believe it! You never come to anything! Kat wrote when I accepted her invitation.

  On the Tuesday morning between Christmas and New Year’s, I dialed Rory’s cell from a cabin in Crested Butte. It was my first time missing a session.

  “Hi, sweetie, let me put you on speaker.” I heard a rustling and then Rory’s voice, slightly muffled: “Everyone say hi to Christie.” A chorus of hellos in the background.

  “What’re y’all doing?” I asked, picturing each of them in their regular spots, the gray Chicago sky out the window.

  “It’s boring without you,” Carlos said.

  “Y’all miss me?” Weren’t they grateful to have a break from me and my pitiful stories of too many apples, too many worms?

  “Everyone’s nodding,” Rory said. “Even Dr. Rosen.”

  My heart soared up over the Rocky Mountains and zoomed across the plains to the fourteen-by-fourteen room where they sat, where there was an empty chair my body usually fit, where they held me in their minds.

  As a kid, my siblings and I would take turns visiting our paternal grandmother, who lived in a big yellow farmhouse in Forreston, Texas. I loved those weeks—I could roam around her property, looking for treasures by the creek and picking through bones at the cow graveyard. Once, I called home halfway through my visit. I can’t remember why. I think I was testing my ability to make a long-distance call. The phone at 6644 Thackeray Avenue rang and rang. Maybe they’re at the neighborhood pool or in the backyard. I tried again that night. No answer. Where could they be?

  When my dad called that weekend to arrange a time to pick me up, I grabbed the phone from my grandma. “Where were y’all? I tried to call two nights ago.”

  “We went to Oklahoma for a few days.”

  They took a vacation without me? My vision blurred as tears gathered. I’d never been to Oklahoma, and suddenly I was desperate to go—to see whatever they’d seen. Cool stuff like authentic tepees tended by women in long black braids and working oil rigs dotting a straight dusty highway. How could they travel—cross the state line!—without me? This clearly meant I wasn’t an integral part of my family, and the realization made me want to curl up and bawl.

  On the other end of the phone my dad explained that they’d gone to pick up an antique armoire from a family friend in Ponca City. “The Howard Johnson’s a/c was broken, and your mother is
still mad at me for making her eat at a Kentucky Fried Chicken, where we watched a dog eat a rat in the parking lot.” He spoke as if the trip was a disaster, but all I could hear was that magical, wondrous things happened in this land called Oklahoma. And I heard this: You don’t matter. We vacation without you, because you don’t matter.

  For years, my mother would shudder whenever the trip to Oklahoma came up. There was not a single picture, and no member of my family harbored a happy memory from their weekend jaunt to Oklahoma. And yet I too would shudder at the mention of the state due north of Texas because it was proof that I could be left behind.

  * * *

  Winter also brought my first date since joining group. Carlos set me up with his friend Sam, an attorney who was fresh out of a relationship. In our first phone conversation, Sam and I established an easy rapport. He admitted that he’d never seen an episode of Survivor, and I confessed I abandoned Harry Potter after the first chapter. When I got off the phone because my book club meeting was about to start, he sounded impressed that a busy law student would also take the time to read for pleasure.

  I had every reason to believe that Sam and I would hit it off. We both adored Carlos and had mixed feelings about the legal profession. I watched out the window as he parked his car in front of my apartment at eight o’clock sharp. My belly stirred with excitement. In the bathroom, I applied one more coat of the lipstick Carlos picked out for me at Barneys.

  When I opened the door, I thought we’d hug, but he stuck out his hand and smiled in a clinical way that didn’t reach his eyes. He then turned quickly to head down the stairs, like a man who had double parked in front of a hydrant. I didn’t despair, though. The whole night stretched before us full of possibility and, perhaps later, physical contact.