Jo Piazza (12 page)

“How many of you are obsessive dialers?” Suze asked us without introducing herself or asking us anything about ourselves.

Five hands rose before Suze clarified, defining obsessive dialing as calling more than twice in an hour after getting an answering machine. Four more hands went up.

“What’s the point?” Suze yelled. “Do you think it’s 1987 and you’re dialing a rotary phone that doesn’t have caller ID and maybe just maybe they missed a call and have no way of knowing that you called or who called them? They know. It’s on their phone and when you’re through it ends up being on their phone twenty times. And you know what they’re doing as they hit the ignore button on their phones? They’re showing their friends the nineteenth call from this crazy-ass girl who will still sleep with them if they just answer their phone on call twenty and then say something slightly nice to her.”

The truth was totally harsh.

Suze’s eyes rested on Prithi for just a moment as she switched gears. “Pull the goalie?”

Prithi ducked her head and moved her arms protectively around her nearly nine-month belly. Suze walked over and chucked her under the chin the way my grandfather used to do.

“Don’t you be ashamed, little lady, pulled the goalie twice myself. Have two beautiful kids. Wouldn’t change a thing. It’s all about what we learn from what we do and how we make ourselves a better person each time.” Suze strode back to the front of the room. “I didn’t learn my lesson that first time and I did it again and then I learned my lesson. Nothing wrong with that since the lesson got learned. Here’s what we need to do, ladies. We need to live our lives in a spiral, a spiral all moving toward AWESOME YOU.”

Suze drew a swirly shape on the blackboard behind her and a stick figure in the middle with a big round circle at its midsection that we just assumed was a pregnant stick Prithi.

“Right now you’re probably in a cycle, and that’s no good because a cycle goes around and around doing the same thing over and over again.”

She repeated her earlier question.

“How many of you are obsessive dialers?”

All hands in the room shot in the air.

“It’s a funny thing, obsessively dialing these men who treat us like shit, who don’t call us. Who tell us they don’t want to be with us. It’s funny because who the hell uses the phone anymore? None of you, right? I’ll bet you Facebook your mom to say hi and how are you doing, but call, no one calls anyone. You even text your friends when you get a promotion at work. Except you call that one douchebag who doesn’t want you to call him. That’s why it’s funny.”

Suze picked up a piece of chalk and wrote in giant pink letters on the chalkboard—FAF. “You are going to FAF. Fone A Friend. That’s right. We never call our friends when we want to chat about the good shit, do we? Well, we will now. You pick a designated friend, one who can put up with your loads of BS once in a while, and you name that friend the nasty son of a bitch in your phone. When you want to make seventeen phone calls in the span of an hour to say you miiiiiissss him, you call your goddamned friend. Cycle one. BROKEN.”

When Suze said “Broken,” she spiked the chalk on the floor like it was a football and it shattered into a hundred shards. Now I understood why she requested we supply her with six boxes of chalk.

It went on like that for about an hour and a half and we went though two more boxes of chalk before Suze said she was hungry just as the doorbell rang. A pimply-faced teen balanced four pepperoni pizzas on his arms.

“How many pepperoni on each of those pizzas, Mikey?” Suze called from the living room without even looking out the door to see who it was.

“Twenty-two, Suze,” Mikey replied like his life depended on it. I tried to slip him some cash, but he just shook his head and muttered, “Already paid for,” before scurrying back to his Chevy Impala with a Crazy Eddie’s Pepperoni Palace sign balanced on the top. When the hell did Suze order pizza? How did she know where to call, and what was up with the twenty-two pieces of pepperoni? I didn’t even want to know the answers to these questions. I was a little in love with this woman who seemed to have complete control over every aspect of her life.

Suze was full of stories and metaphors, half of them involving sports, the other half involving wild animals. Joe, with his penchant for the Discovery Channel, would have loved her, except Joe had to do some work at the hospital today and wasn’t able to be there.

One story she told stuck with me.

She began each of her stories with “Did you hear about …” So “Did you hear about the golfer who couldn’t drive to save his life but was an ace on the putting green?” “Did you hear about the baboons who let the males impregnate them and then raise their baby baboons in female-centric tribes, forcing the men to wander the savannah alone looking for their next fertile female?”

Then, “Did you hear about the loneliest whale in the world?” This is the one that got me. Scientists tracked the loneliest whale for years. She didn’t have any friends. She didn’t have a family, tribe, pack, or gang. She never had a lover. Why? Her voice was unlike any other baleen whale. The rest of the whales sing at a level between 12 and 25 hertz. She sang at 52 hertz. None of the other whales could hear her. All her desperate calls to communicate went unanswered.

I imagined that massive whale floating alone and singing her song to her fellow whales and none of them hearing her. She didn’t know she was different. She just knew she was always alone.

Of course, the moral of the story (all Suze’s stories had morals) was that if we weren’t communicating with men on the same level, then they couldn’t hear us and we were bound to be alone. If in our heads we were picturing our wedding day on our first date—or in Cameron’s case picturing family beach vacations in Avalon—and proceeding with that path in our mind but never communicating what we wanted, it was no wonder these guys turned tail and ran. Our songs were being sung at a frequency out of their range so that when they finally caught a smidgen of what we were singing, they ran for the hills.

“I’m a lonely whale,” I muttered, picking at a piece of chipped nail polish on my big toe.

“Speak up, girl. There’s no whispering in baseball,” Suze barked.

“I’m a lonely whale. No one can hear what I am really saying. Sometimes
I
can’t even hear what I’m really saying.”

“That’s a start. There you go. Now you know it, and now you can start singing at a frequency someone can hear.” Suze walked over and gave me a very aggressive hug. “I’m proud of you, champ.”

Cameron flung her hand in the air.

“What do we do if we catch our boyfriend cyber cheating?” she asked.

“On the Internet? Like e-mailing?”

Cameron nodded. “But more tweeting and Facebooking.”

“Ahhh, common problem these days,” Suze said with a knowing nod. “All those congressmen sending out pics of their wangs and whatnot.”

“But that one said he never cheated. He said it was all online. He never physically did anything.”

“And would you women be cool with that?” Suze asked us, looking around the room.

Collectively we were about to shake our heads, but then we all just shrugged. We had come to accept a lot of bad behavior from dudes. If he didn’t physically cheat, did it matter what he did on the Internet?

Suze groaned low and long. “Ladies, ladies, ladies. None of you have any self-respect anymore. No dignity. But I will tell you that you aren’t entirely wrong. I’ve been doing some research for my next book:
Men: If They Didn’t Have a Penis We’d Give Them Back to Their Mothers
. And oddly enough I think that we need to feel sorry for them.”

This caught our attention.

“The world isn’t made for men anymore. Men naturally want to be in a tribe. Think about it. They used to be the hunters and soldiers, spending nights, weeks, months, sometimes years in the company of other men. Think about men today. How often have any of your boyfriends seen their man friends? Once a week? How often do they talk on the phone except to give a few grunts and a ‘Hey, meet me at the bar’?

“Never. Men no longer have camaraderie. They have no tribe.”

At this Suze pounded her chest. “Women have a tribe. How often do you tell a girlfriend she is pretty or wonderful or smart in a day? How often do you e-mail or text a friend to see what she just did or to send a picture of what you just ate? All the time. Women are intimately interwoven into other women’s lives. Women are validators for other women. And for men. We validate the men in our lives the same way we validate our female friends. We tell them they’re handsome and strong and we listen to the mundane shit details of their boring day at the office.

“So what does this have to do with the cyber cheating? In the absence of a tribe, men go looking for outside validation elsewhere. The validation of one person isn’t enough. They need more emotional support than that. We all do, but women get it from other women. Men only get a little from one woman. So they look outside their paltry tribe of two and seek emotional support from other women. When they do it online and they don’t physically cheat, then they really don’t see anything wrong with it. The problem is that men and women are not in the same tribe, and somehow sex, whether verbal or physical, typically happens.

“See, the world really isn’t set up for these men anymore. We should feel bad for them.

“Except … well, except for the fact that most of them are scumbags! Am I right?” Suze jumped over Cameron’s head to fist bump Prithi.

“Yes,” we chorused, even though she had begun to lose us on that last rant.

“Give me a hell yes,” Suze yelled. “Hell yes!” we responded with more vigor than I thought this group was capable of mustering.

With that the doorbell rang and Mikey from Crazy Eddie’s walked back into the living room.

“Time for my Sunday night date, ladies.” Suze winked at us, linked arms with the startled boy, and strutted out of the living room, chalk dust trailing behind her.

I’m not sure whose idea it was to have Dave speak at a meeting (it might have been his), but surprisingly it ended up being a really good one.

Dave was a natural-born teacher. He legitimately wanted to impart his knowledge of how men manipulate women, which was likely born of some kind of Catholic guilt about unburdening himself from all the horrible things he said and did to women. The bottle of holy water that he kept next to his bed was no longer cutting it.

He started out with a lesson on text messaging and the ways that texts are interpreted differently by men and by women.

“Men,” he said, pausing for effect as he strode in front of the room like one of those prissy teachers in movies where they have to teach underprivileged kids in the ghetto, “are simple creatures. I know that you think we are very tricky and very complicated and likely playing the same mind games you are and maybe going back to our friends in the bar to dissect every text message you send us and waiting a prerequisite three days before we text you because we like you and respect you. Sometimes you think we’re busy. So busy we can’t take ten seconds to text you. None of that is true. No one. No one …” Here Dave paused for effect and pulled out his phone. He punched in a few buttons for approximately ten seconds and then held it up in the air like a trophy. “Text sent. No one is too busy to do that. If we aren’t texting you, we don’t like you. Period. End of story. When we like a girl, we text. We blow up her phone with texts. We’re not complicated, and we don’t play games.

“A lot of girls think I’m a jerk. I was an unsophisticated jerk in my early years. Sometimes I appealed to a girl’s ego and I did send a ton of text messages and then maybe I would ignore her after I finally got her to juggle my balls a few times.”

At this Jordana gasped. For someone so schooled in healing the human anatomy, she didn’t seem to enjoy hearing about parts of it being juggled.

“But you ladies appear to be of a certain age.”

Now
everyone
gasped. I was worried Dave was about to be collectively attacked by a lot of angry women he had just referred to as over the hill. I did a quick head count. Twenty ladies. This was more than he was used to taking on.

“I don’t mean that as an insult. None of us are in our early twenties anymore. We have all been around the block a bit. I have become more and more honest in my older age … and this seems to confound your gender even more. I may have a first date with a woman and it will be great. We’ll have a second date. She wonders why I don’t text more or call more. We have a third date and we sleep together and she really wants to chat a lot. And I’m honest. I tell her I don’t have relationships. I’m flaky. I don’t really trust women. I don’t see anyone longer than a fiscal quarter. Have any of you heard this before?”

There were nods … maybe even a few teary eyes. “Well, it’s all true. We’re not lying to you. But for some reason it seems to turn women on even more. Why do you like us when we are assholes? Why, I ask?” Now Dave was getting a little too into the part and punctuating all his major points with a fist or a pointer finger jabbed into the air. He was becoming Suze. I guess everyone likes an audience.

“We lay down the law. We tell it like it is. We don’t think we’re bad people because we are being honest. All you tell us is that you want us to be honest and share our feelings, and we do and you don’t believe us.

“When do you believe us?

“When we tell you we love you after sex. You believe us when we mutter a half-guttural ‘I love you’ after sex. That’s when we’re lying to you. When we tell you we’re not emotionally available and we don’t want a girlfriend, that’s all true. And you know what, you probably can’t fix it. Maybe we do want a girlfriend and maybe we don’t but if we tell you we don’t want one, then we certainly don’t want you to be our girlfriend. This isn’t hard. It doesn’t have to be hard.”

At this Prithi fully burst into tears. It was either the honesty or her hormones or a combination of the two, but suddenly her giant prego body just started shaking with sobs. And Dave, the guy who had always been my friend even while he was making women cry across the tristate area, proved again that he had a heart, just not for women he was sleeping with. He walked over to Prithi and sat on the floor and just hugged her, from the front, not the side in some pussy “I don’t know what to do” man hug, but a good old-fashioned bear hug, moving her head onto his shoulder and letting her cry it out. He turned around.