Jo Piazza (8 page)

“Let’s stop watching
The Husband
,” I suggested. There were nods. We had made our second rule!

That seemed like as good a note as any to end the meeting on. I suggested we all stand in a circle and hold hands. I had printed out the serenity prayer on a piece of paper and passed it around. We all said it together and then erupted again in applause. Some lingered and had coffee and donuts. Annie showed Prithi to one of the spare rooms and I clucked after everyone, pleased at how well the meeting had gone and surprised again at how much lighter and happier I felt for sitting and talking about my problems and recognizing the same problems and patterns in other women. Finally, just as I said good-bye to the last guest and told her the meeting would be held at the same place, same time the following week, the phone rang. It was Joe. He wanted to hear all the details about the day, and I was eager to divulge what a success it had been. He said he would be over in a few hours to check on Annie, and I started thinking that maybe he would think Prithi was pretty. She did have a thing for doctors after all.

I greeted Joe wearing sweats and no makeup. For some reason I didn’t feel like I needed to put on airs or try to impress him. He had instantly been relegated to the category of buddy. We sipped Diet Cokes in the backyard, watching Tito, the grandson of my grandmother’s longtime gardener and landscaper, Enrique, fight with a recalcitrant rosebush he was trying to relocate to the opposite side of the yard.

“So meeting number one went well, it sounds like,” Joe said.

“I think so,” I said eagerly. “Everyone was so excited to finally have a place to talk and share and open up. It was wonderful.”

“Are you following the steps?” Joe asked.

“The steps?” I drew a blank.

“The twelve steps. That’s what AA and most of the As are based on at least. There are twelve steps to conquering addiction. First you admit you have a problem and that you need something extra in your life to help restore your sanity, then step two is to surrender yourself to a higher power.”

“A higher power? That sounds like some cult-talk mumbo jumbo.”

“It’s not like God or anything. Or it doesn’t have to be. What religion are you?”

I recounted my family’s failed experiment at being Presbyterian.

“OK, well, I grew up Catholic and we went to church every Sunday. After church we went to the local bar with all my Italian cousins, and starting at the ripe old age of fourteen, we were all allowed to have drinks. I always equated church with getting a little bit wasted, so the idea of embracing a higher power to get sober was kind of alien to me, too.”

“So what do you do? Pray to be sober?”

“It’s not about praying; it’s more about accepting that something greater than your own will is helping you out. That there is something guiding you on the right path if you just let it and stop getting in its way.”

“So it’s more about relaxing and surrendering to the universe?”

“Exactly.”

“It’s like yoga! Like when you can’t get into a particular pose, like that hard one where you’re supposed to get your leg over your shoulder. The instructor always says to breathe and surrender, breathe and surrender.”

Joe laughed. “I think it is something a little like that.”

We chatted for an hour or so. I finished filling Joe in on all the women who had come to the meeting. He said he wouldn’t mind stopping by to see if any of them wanted to chat one-on-one with him. I was reminded that he still had hundreds of hours of community service to fulfill before they would let him be a real-life practicing doctor again.

That night as I prepared for another bout with insomnia, I tried to think of ways to submit myself to some kind of higher power. First I got into child’s pose like I do in vinyasa class, but that didn’t feel right. It was too easy and my face was buried in the bed. Plus all I could think about was how my hips weren’t very open, or so my yoga instructor was constantly telling me.

So I got down on my knees and prayed the way people do in old movies.

“Dear God,” I started, which sounded silly. “Dear higher power” didn’t sound right either. “Hey, you!” I yelled before I realized that the serenity prayer I had printed out at the meeting seemed to be the perfect thing to say here. I tried saying it three times and then crossed myself and gave a fist pump into the air.

Having Prithi around became a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because even though I did try hard, I was a terrible cook. I often forgot key ingredients like salt or eggs, making things flat and bland and inedible. It was a curse because Prithi’s curries were so delicious that only two weeks after she arrived, I couldn’t button my skinny jeans.

For a pregnant person Prithi was surprisingly without quirks. She never had cravings or got morning sickness and she never complained. In fact, somehow it was Annie who managed to get Prithi to give her a foot rub one night, which Prithi happily obliged. She said she used to do it for Dr. Mehti, and it made her feel good to be needed.

Prithi was our first houseguest, but she wasn’t the last. On the Wednesday after the first meeting, Annie’s college roommate Melinda brought her cousin Stella over. Melinda explained that she had to get Stella out of the city due to her latest man drama. It seemed absurd to me that anyone who looked like Stella would have any kind of trouble. She had dark brown hair down to her butt, and her eyes were a bright green that didn’t look like any kind of color eyes should be. Even rimmed red and swollen by tears, they were gorgeous.

Stella was speechless so we let Melinda do the talking for her.

“You don’t have a TV here, do you?” were the first words out of her mouth.

“We do, but the cable is out and it’s pretty old, so we just use it to watch DVDs.”

“Good, good; so you don’t get ABC?” This line of questioning seemed odd. Was Stella in love with a character on a television show?

“No, it comes in all fuzzy.”

“OK, good,” Melinda nodded. “These questions must seem so strange. I’ll get to the point. Stella’s boyfriend broke up with her because he didn’t want to marry her.”

“Commitment phobes. Common problem,” Annie said, shaking her head. Participating in just one meeting of LAA seemed to be giving Annie a new glimpse into the trials and tribulations of heterosexual dating. “A lot of commitment phobes out there.” Annie, who came out of the closet at age sixteen and had never lacked for female or male attention, didn’t know anything about anyone not wanting to commit to her. If anything, Annie was a commitment phobe herself.

“Right, right, of course there are,” Melinda said. “But the problem is Stella’s boyfriend didn’t just
not
want to marry her. He wants to marry someone else.”

“How do you know? Does he have a fiancée already?”

“He has twenty-seven of them.”

“That’s ambitious,” Annie said.

“And illegal, I think,” I added. “Well,
maybe
not until he marries all of them. And if it isn’t illegal, well, it is awfully shitty.”

“You guys aren’t getting it. He’s the new Husband.”

“As in progressive? Like the new kind of husband, the kind you can only find in Sweden, home of mandatory paternity leave?”

“No. As in the contestant on the reality show
The Husband
. He’s down to the final eight. Stella stopped talking after the third tulip ceremony.”

“That would drive me fucking crazy too. No wonder she’s catatonic.”

“She read about it in
US Weekly
,” Melinda nodded. “He didn’t have the balls to tell her himself.”

Annie informed the ladies that we had already banned
The Husband
because of its deleterious effects on women’s general self-esteem and the unrealistic expectations it set on our dating lives. Stella, obviously beaten down by her circumstances, just gave us a small smile, revealing two rows of gorgeous teeth, and trudged upstairs to join Prithi.

Then Friday night I opened the door to find a perfect butt facing me. It was just the right amount of round and high and pert and adorable. It was the kind of butt I always dreamed about having, but years of yoga had still failed to give me what nature had so obviously given this butt from birth. My eyes wandered up to a lithe frame and a mane of honey-blond hair that almost reached down to that perfect tush.

The perfection ceased when the butt’s owner turned around to reveal swollen eyes, a mouth covered in powdered sugar, and a hand clutching a jelly donut like a life preserver.

“Jordana?” I asked, not believing that the flawless being I had been taking yoga from in New York for the past two years was standing on my doorstep binge eating Dunkin’ Donuts and crying her eyes out. Yoga instructors are a little like models. We get these girl crushes on them, hold them up to an ideal, and never imagine that they have real people problems, the kind of problems that fleshy people who can’t put their leg behind their head have. You never picture them crying or drinking or eating something with more than five hundred calories. They’re simply not human—until that moment on your doorstep at two a.m. when they are.

“What are you doing here? And why so late?” Jordana and I weren’t exactly friends, even though I had attended her Monday night class faithfully for twenty-four months. We had a teacher-student thing. Sometimes she moved my hip into a correct position as I blanched, trying to remember whether I properly applied deodorant that morning when her nose got uncomfortably close to my armpit. We said hello before class. I thanked her afterward with a head-bobbing, mumbling “Namaste,” and that was about the extent of it.

“Amy McAlexander told me that you were holding this little thing here for women who are going through something uncomfortable,” Jordana said in Oxford-perfect English. I did happen to know that she had grown up in Leeds and was a philosophy major at the British University before seeking spiritual growth by way of the New York City yoga scene. Amy McAlexander was one of the girlfriends I regularly went to yoga with, who must have heard through the grapevine what was happening in Yardville, New Jersey.

“It’s two a.m. You could have come in the morning.”

“It’s New Jersey. I got bloody lost. How anyone gets anywhere in this damn state with all your roundabouts and whatnot I don’t know, and I was starving by the time I finally got to where I thought I should be going, but thankfully there was this delicious little boutique pastry shop open twenty-four hours.”

Of course she had never stumbled across a Dunkin’ Donuts chain store before. I ushered her in and realized everyone else had been awakened by the door and was gathered Brady Bunch–style lining the stairs.

There was no point in beating around the bush, even though I couldn’t imagine anyone breaking up with that butt.

“Did you … get dumped?”

This prompted a torrent of tears, obviously not for the first time this evening.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

A nod sent snot running down her face, which prompted Stella to silently run for a tissue.

“Hey, Prithi, do you have any more of those cookies you baked?” I yelled over my shoulder as I guided Jordana to the couch. In a lower voice I explained, “Cooking is her therapy.”

“That’s so smart,” Jordana said, obviously uplifted by the thought of having cookies. I was worried her yoga instructor’s body was going to go into sugar shock after years of healthful eating and it would be all my fault when that perfect butt ballooned up to the size of a very normal butt. As all us ladies with normal butts know, once you cross that threshold there really is no going back.

Cookies on the table and everyone seated Indian style in a circle as if we were preparing for a campfire, Jordana let loose her story.

“Well, I have been dating Paul for three years. We were living together in the West Village. We had a dog together, a rescued English bulldog named Elvis.” At this point it was hard to feel sorry for Jordana since she did indeed seem to have the very perfect life I had always imagined as I glimpsed her through my downward dogs.

“He is a rolfer.” Maybe not so perfect.

“Oh, honey,” Prithi said. “They have over-the-counter drugs for that.”

Annie nodded. “My pledge name in college was Ipecac since I used to ralph so much.” She got a room full of blank stares. “You know, ipecac. It makes you throw up.”

Jordana now looked horrified. “No, he practices rolfing. It’s a form of bodywork and massage. It gets deep into your tissues. It is like a deep tissue massage on steroids. He rolfs.”

The explanation didn’t make the word any less funny, and titters continued around the circle until Jordana continued.

“One day I checked his e-mail.”

A collective groan through the room.

“Snooping is public enemy number one for anyone in a relationship,” I said from experience.

“As well it should be. Anyway, so I checked his e-mail and there were notifications from Nerve.com … so I tried to log into his Nerve.com account. And, well, it wasn’t terribly hard since Elvis was his bloody password. Anyway he had been searching Nerve for dates.”

“Nooooooo.”

“But that’s not the worst part. He was searching Nerve specifically for women who were into threesomes … something I told him I just wasn’t into. You know, there are enough limbs flailing about in the bedroom as is; why do you need to add four more?”

I agreed with her. I had always found the intrigue over the threesome completely confounding.

“So you confronted him?”

“No, not then. I was about to when he decided to break the news to me.”

“He admitted he was a dirty, lying cyber cheater?”

“No, he told me he was a dirty, lying, actual, in-real-life cheater. With a Pilates instructor, no less.” Jordana said
Pilates
the same way most refined English ladies would say
poop
.

“Is that a little like defecting to the dark side?” Prithi asked.