Straight Up and Dirty: A Memoir (26 page)

GOODBYE OLIVER. HELLO OVERINDULGENCE. I WAS NOW
single, which would mean drinking. A lot. Everyone is suddenly parched come mid-November, thanks to the approaching “Triple Jump.” Thanksgiving. Christmas. New Year’s. 1-2-3, drinks on me! Okay,
for
me. Same difference. It’s less to do with the stacks of red polyester blends or heat-blasted stores, and more to do with nerves. Oh, and you can bet our treasured Starbucks would be monetizing on our jitters.

My cherished “Fourbucks” went ahead and busted out with the Gingerbread and Eggnog lattes, at four bucks and change, planting the early morning pumpkin seed that they’d be there to comfort and console, the salve of the season. I was about to start spiking my
A.M.
latte with hot, buttered rum. The commencement of the holiday months made me more nervous than my quivering dog. It meant plans. “Actually, make that a decaf.”

When you’re in a relationship, come the Triple Jump, no matter how bad it is, you grind it out and wait for the last string of lights to return to their box before ending things. You bide your time fretting about gifts. You stress over how much to spend, what’s too extravagant, and what kind of heft your plastic can bear. You worry about thank-you notes for his parents, or upsetting relatives if you choose one family over the other to celebrate the festivities. If you’re female, you search for touchable outfits dressier than sweats. Cashmere pants and sweaters, ladylike silk, rabbit fur, and mesh panties. You want to wear a wife beater with no bra, but it’s too cold. Sexy isn’t about visibility, it’s about accessibility. It’s not about cleavage if you’re in a corset with strings that looks too complicated to get at the good bits. That’s work. It’s about accessible and touchable. And when a guy sees you in a wife beater, he feels as though he’s being let into your world. He’s in a zone, behind a curtain, and he likes it. So you wear one beneath the angora sweater.

The stores sing to you, luring you inside with their music, cheery mannequins, and twinkle lights. Each small shop looks as if it smells of pine and wraps its goods in brown paper with red ribbons and old-fashioned wax stamps. Suddenly, you’re asking, “Do you have a box with that?” even though it’s for you. You’re wearing red, for chrissake. Too many holiday outfits are embellished with sequins. While they ignite a bit of holiday sparkle and delight, they’re dreadfully untouchable. Holidays are for mittens and snuggling, for Maker’s Mark–spiked hot cocoa and seeing each other’s breath. Holidays are not for the single. And they’re certainly not designed with the recently broken-hearted in mind. ’Cause there’s nothing quite like breaking up with someone just before the holiday season. It’s like asking for an extra serving of poop, left only to decide which fork to use to eat it. Though it can always be worse. You could, for example, during this harrowing holiday season, have a therapist whip out the word
rejigger
and place it beside
your habits
, shrink code for,
you need to change
.

“I hear what you’re saying,” I responded to Phone Therapist, “but I don’t know how to do that. I mean, I don’t even want to leave my bed. Rejiggering sounds like a gym class.”

“Stephanie, you’ve survived much worse than a breakup,” she reminded me. Yes and no. I never fully dealt with the end of my marriage. I was dating a month after the abortion. Now, after my break with Oliver, the “deal with it” part meant me. I had to make me whole, figure out who the hell I was and what would fulfill me. And I’d need to do it alone, which scared me more than the word
malignant
.

So how do you begin to face something so scary? In a word: therapy. Oh joy. I upped my sessions with Phone Therapist to twice a week. Double joy.

“You have to learn to love yourself,” she said plainly, as if mentioning there was a ninety-five percent chance of precipitation. Okay. “Love yourself.” Sounds as simple as rain. Who can’t do that?

“I’m too sick to love myself,” I sniffled.

“Sick how?”

“My body feels shut down, like I’m just going through the motions every day. Like I’m sleepwalking through my life. I’m sick of this, all of it.”

“You know, you’re right.”

“What?”

“You’re right.” What in the hell was she talking about? “You just said, ‘I’m sick of this,’ and you’re exactly right. You are literally sick of
this
.” I imagined if we were together in person she’d point at my body, up toward the thick arteries running through my heart. “Your body is telling you something, Stephanie. During our past few sessions you’ve been complaining about your health—about colds, the flu, you name it. It is my estimation that your body is literally breaking down to stop you from running out there and dating again.” Oh, come on. My sickness wasn’t about a polluted aura or misaligned chakras. “The mind is very powerful. And yours is very stubborn. Your body is breaking down, so you’ll wake up. You need to try something else.”

“Something else? Like what? Look, I like taking care of someone, cooking, and doing sweet things for them.” As soon as I said it, I knew she’d hurl back a “and why can’t that someone be you for a change?” Yes, I knew I could now do that for myself, but the idea of Cooking for One had me running toward the knife block, and it wasn’t to quarter a chicken. I was on a mission. I had to learn to comfort myself, to see what others saw in me and believe it. I needed to discover what the hell made me happy other than being in love. Mission impossible.

When did figuring out what makes you happy become work? How had I let myself get to this point, where I had to learn
me
at twenty-eight years old? It was embarrassing. In my college psychology class, I had studied theories of adult development and learned that our twenties are for experimenting, exploring different jobs, and discovering what fulfills us. My professor warned against graduate school, asserting, “You’re not fully formed yet. You don’t know if it’s what you really want to do with your life because you haven’t tried enough things.” Oh, no, not me. I went ahead and got married at twenty-four years old. “And if you rush into something you’re unsure about, you might awake midlife with a crisis on your hands,” he had lectured. Hi. Try waking up a whole lot sooner with a pre-thirty predicament worm dangling from your early bird mouth.

“Well to begin,” Phone Therapist responded, “you have to learn to take care of yourself. To nurture and comfort that little girl inside you, to realize you are quite capable of relying on yourself. I want you to try to remember what brought you comfort when you were younger.”

Bowls of cereal after school, coated in a pool of orange-blossom honey. Dragging my finger along the edge of a plate of mashed potatoes. I knew I should have thought “tea” or “bath,” but I didn’t. Did she want me to answer aloud?

“Grilled cheese?” I said hesitantly.

“Okay, good. What else?”

I thought of marionette shows where I’d held my mother’s hand and looked at her after a funny part to see if she was delighted, of brisket sandwiches with ketchup, like my dad ordered. Sliding barn doors, baskets of brown eggs, steamed windows, doubled socks, cupcake paper, and rolled sweater collars. Cookouts where the fathers handled the meat, licking wobbly batter off wire beaters, Christmas ornaments in their boxes, peanut butter on apple slices, the sounds and light beneath an overturned canoe, the pine needle path to the ocean near my mother’s house, the crunch of snow beneath my red winter boots, bedtime stories. “My parents,” I said. Damn. I felt like she made me say the secret word and just won extra bonus points on the Psychology Game Network. It always comes down to our parents in therapy.

“Okay, good. Before our next session, I want you to pick up the book
Finding Your Own North Star
by Martha Beck. Are you writing this down? Write it down. You can find a lot of these exercises in the book, so it will tide you over until our next session. Remember to think over what has comforted you in the past and see if you can recreate that comfort on your own without refreshing your online dating profile. Okay?”

Shit. She had to go there. “Yes,” I responded aloud, but truth be told, before our session, an intriguing nerve.com e-mail arrived in my inbox from a thirty-seven-year-old man with the handle, “AperturePriority.” I
had
to respond because he’d suggested a photography outing as our first date. I thought it was a sign, and was about to respond with a “What the hell, why not?” But then I thought better of it and replied, “Too busy right now, but how about a rain check?”

“Stephanie, that ‘yes’ doesn’t seem very convincing,” Phone Therapist said.

“No, I know I can’t be dating right now. I know because I’m sick of this pattern, sick of cobbling esteem from one date to the next.”

“It’s so important for us to listen to our bodies. I also want you to think of situations where you’ve suddenly felt sick.” Yeah, like that would be really tough to do. Just mentioning Rome’s name gave me the spits.

“The morning I had to run in a race with Oliver, I got ’rhea.”

“Good. I want you to think of two different situations. First, remember times when you’ve felt your best, at the top of your game, alive and vibrant. Pay attention to your posture, the muscles in your face, your breathing. Then, I want you to think of occasions where you’ve felt sick or anxious. Don’t just think of people. Think of activities. This will help us reveal what makes you happy. Pay attention to how your body responds to these scenarios—it will serve as your biggest indicator in the future when you’re actually doing things.” This woman was damn brilliant. “And remember, it’s okay to feel sad, but just try to limit your bouts with it to an hour a day. Let it all out, give yourself that time to heal, nurture, and comfort yourself. You won’t heal unless you grieve. Grieving is good.”

“Good grief?”

“Yes. It takes courage to grieve.” She might have added, “The only way out is through.” Good grief, indeed.

After hanging up with her, I began a list. Okay, I’m lying. I began with the very new, very now, and not at all cliché, but oh so chic, Weep, Whimper, and Wail. Full blast. The list would come later. This time, instead of scrambling toward the laptop for a bit of man shopping via dating sites, I lunged toward my sofa and wrapped myself in the cashmere throw Smelly had given to me as a wedding gift. The tags were still on; I’d been saving it. Too good, I thought. I’ll keep it for when I have a house. Fuck that noise—too good was NOW. I snapped those suckers off, adiosed them in the trash, then culled the most rueful music I could find and played that shit loud. Yours truly hammered out an off-key rendition of Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better” until my throat hurt, until Linus pinned me down to lick my tears, until the neighbors complained. Okay, really? Until the nobody who’d do it better became me, on my way toward becoming a somebody. All right, it was the drama in me. Get over it!

I DID.

The comfort homework helped. I hugged my knees to me and withdrew into thoughts that made me feel less alone.

Every morning of my life in my parents’ house, I awoke to the sound of my father’s footsteps. He drummed down the stairs, deactivated the alarm, unlocked our front door, and then I’d hear his weight in the gravel driveway as he claimed the morning paper. I didn’t see him but knew he was in his sweats with the brown boat shoes he never wore on boats.

In the evenings, I’d know his return with the sound of the garage booming open like a heavy crane, swallowing his car whole. His voice would charge up the stairs and fill the blue kitchen. “Hello, anybody home?” Upon seeing me he’d ask, “And how was school today, Miss Stephanie Tara?”

“The same,” I’d say, shrugging.

And I’d follow him to his room with my half-finished homework, clawing my way up the carpeted stairs. I’d finish my homework beside him as he watched a ballgame on the television.

On my sofa, wrapped in a wedding present, I wished I could regress and climb into his closet of warm brown leather and starch smells, or lie on the floor near his bed with a pillow and a blanket listening to sports as I fell asleep. But wishing is for little girls with magic wands and chests filled to the brim with pretend. Fairy tales are for children.

I turned off Carly and clicked on the Giants–Redskins game. Don’t go getting ahead of yourself. I don’t follow sports, but the sound of them puts me at ease, even football, a sport that deeply wounds me. My father claimed I despised football because I didn’t understand it, but please. I knew the rules, had to learn that crap with a dose of powder-puff football in high school. I knew “the kickoff” wasn’t a rejection technique, that “fielding the punt” and “letting the ball go” weren’t positions I’d find in my Tantric sex book, and that a “snapped ball” wasn’t nearly as painful as it sounded. What I didn’t know was why anyone would watch it. It’s clumping. Nothing ever happens.

“Oh my God! Did you see that fucking pass? Jesus Christ!!” What happened? Oh, someone threw a ball, and someone actually caught it. Wow. That’s the big excitement? East Coast football is defensive, all right. No one moves. It’s like watching George Foreman. He’s cumbersome and heavy, moves like a slug on slow. Give me a lightweight fighter who darts and makes you look. Jab. Jab. Now, that is interesting. There’s movement, gesture, and play. Watching East Coast football is nearly as absurd as Carly Simon shot up to the loudest decibel. So the boys have theirs. I have mine.

“HOW ARE YOU FEELING, CHICA?” IT WAS DULCE, AT MY
door with a container of matzo-ball soup and a stack of Meg movies.

“Oh, come on in. Apparently, I’m not contagious, just corruptive.”

“Clearly you’re just off the phone with your shrink. Very nice mood you’re having.” She twirled in and set the goods on my coffee table. Dulce loved hearing what Phone Therapist had to say to me. Regularly, she’d ask me to share my session findings with her. It was her idea of cost-effective therapy for herself. “I love your hair curly. It’s so much more you.”