Dog Training The American Male (2 page)

“Dr. Beach, how many years have
you been married?”

“Oh, I’m not married.”

“Engaged?” asked Kathy Lee.

Nancy’s pulse pumped faster. “I
was
engaged. Twice. Suffice it to say, neither relationship worked out.”

“Sounds to me like you could have
used a relationship and intimacy counselor. Am I right?” Hoda turned to the
audience for support.

The audience applauded.

“Oh, stop it, Ho-woman. I’m sure
Dr. Bitch . . . 
oops;
did I really just say that? I
meant Dr. Beach—”

“Were they sleeping around on
you?”

“Huh?”

“Your two fiancés,” Hoda asked,
continuing her cross-examination. “Did they cheat?”

“Been there, sister,” Kathy Lee
chimed in. “Of course, you don’t toss the baby out with the bath water. Not if
you really love one another.”

“Or if you’re planning someday to
run for President,” Hoda added with a snarky smirk.

Nancy casually dispersed a sweat
bead touring her right cheekbone. “It’s funny you should mention that. In my
women’s counseling seminars—”

Kathy Lee interrupted point four.
“Are you dating anyone special now?”

“Dating? No. I’m sort of between
boyfriends.”

“Oh. What about women? Ever think
about playing for the home team?”

 “No. But my older sister, Lana—”

“Forget your lesbian sister,”
said Hoda, cutting her off. “How long since
you
had any?”

“Since I had any what?

“Sex. And no counting vibrators
or dildos.”

“Oh, they never count vibrators
or dildos,” Kathy Lee chirped, addressing the studio audience. “Why is that, I
wonder? And who exactly is
they
?”

“Shh. I want to hear her answer.
C’mon, Dr. Beach . . . when’s the last time you felt a
man’s sausage squeezed between those silky twenty-six-year-old gymnast thighs?”

Nancy’s pulse danced along her
neck, her rattled psyche seconds from a full-blown meltdown.
How would
Hilary Clinton handle the assault? Would Sheryl Sandberg dignify the
inquisition with a response?
“Hoda, for now I’ve chosen to prioritize my career
over my social life.”

 “Don’t avoid the question; just
give us a time-frame. Six months?”

 “I, uh—”

 “Longer?”

 “I don’t know. Maybe a year.”

Kathy Lee’s eyes widened. “A
year? You’re twenty-six and you haven’t had sex in a year? Good God, did you
join a convent?”

 The audience roared, encouraging
another assault by Hoda. “Listen, sweetie, take some advice – use it or lose
it. Youth is like a man who has hit thirty – it only comes around once. Before
you know it you’ll be forty, injecting Botox like it was heroin. Then you’ll
hit fifty and you’ll be waking up every hour with night sweats and hot flashes . . . am
I right, Kathy Lee or am I right?”

Kathy Lee nodded. “Menopause. They
should call it women-o-pause.”

“Wait, wait, I just realized
something,” Hoda said, facing her audience. “How can a talk show radio
therapist advise her callers about marriage when she’s never been married,
relationships when she isn’t in one, or sex when she isn’t getting laid? That
seem strange to you, Kathy Lee?”

“Like a three-input ding-dong . . . can
you imagine? Hey sex-doctor, my birth canal is a two-lane highway compared to
your unused twat.”

 Nancy’s retort caught a dry spot
in her throat – and suddenly she couldn’t speak!

“Good one, Kathy Lee, I bet blondie’s
vag is so tight, she uses it to store loose change.”

“Unlike you, Ho-Ho. You could
hold two
Gucci
purses and a
Dooney and Bourke
handbag in that man
cave of yours . . . oh hell, I just peed my pants.”

“Aaaaahhhh!”

* * * *
*

Nancy Beach shot
up in bed, her heart
pounding, her
Penn Quaker Athletics
tee-shirt soaked in sweat.
Hyperventilating, it took her a full thirty seconds to realize that she was in bed
in her sister’s apartment, that it was all just a dream.

Wow.

The emerald glow from the digital
alarm clock read 5:13 a.m. Reaching for a clothing drawer; she pulled out a
clean tee-shirt, stripped and changed, then resettled herself beneath the quilt,
her “inner Freud” providing a post-game analysis of her dream.

 
The blonde kid . . . obviously
that was me – a child prodigy destined for mediocrity. And Hoda and Kathy Lee . . . their
barbed responses -- a window into my own neurosis. The biker – another man
waiting to take advantage of my kindness . . . unless it
was Dad? The eight-year-old telling the adult me to kick him in the balls, to
take control of my life.
I really had it together when I was a kid . . .God,
what the hell happened to me?

Stop!

That’s victim-speak. So you
went through a few bad relationships . . .big deal. You’re
focusing on your career now . . .it’s definitely needed. Only my
career as a radio host and relationship counselor deals with relationships, rendering
my advice more theoretical rather than organic – which is why my ratings suck.

Stop!

You’re a Penn graduate, a
qualified psychologist with an MBA. You don’t need a Y in your life to teach
women how to secure a place for themselves at the workplace table; you don’t
need to be groped on a blind date by a junior partner in a law firm in order to
teach women how to speak up more in board meetings . . .and whoda-hell
names their kid Hoda anyway?

It took ten minutes before Nancy’s
toxic thoughts yielded to exhaustion, her breathing settling into a soothing
rhythm . . .

The heart-stopping
whrrrrrrrr
of a blender violated the early morning silence, reigniting Nancy’s pulse. Eyes
wide open she stared at the ceiling, her blood simmering as she waited for the cursed
food processor to cease. When it continued into a second minute, Nancy kicked
off the blanket and leaped out of bed, her bare feet striding toward the door—

—her right foot planting itself firmly
in the plastic container of kitty litter; a gravel-coated nugget squeezing
between her big toe like silly putty.

 She looked up at God,
exasperated. “All right already, I get it. Enough with the stupid metaphors!”

Her sister’s tabby poked its head
inside the tiny bedroom, the cat’s audible protest obliterated by the blender.

“I hate you too, Madonna.”

Walking to the bathroom on her
heel, she stepped inside the bathtub and rinsed off the cat turd from between
her toes. Drying her foot, she headed for the kitchen, intent on silencing the
annoying blender.

Poised before Nancy, back to her,
was a shirtless bodybuilder possessing the deeply-tanned steroid-enhanced posterior
physique of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger. The top of the bodybuilder’s red unitard
remained rolled down around the sculpted hourglass waist to the matching
sweatpants. Powerful rear deltoids rippled as the Adonis’s arms swung back in a
slow stretch, causing the wing-like Latisimus dorsi to dance.

“Jeanne?”

No response.

“Jeanne!”

The athlete-in-training turned,
revealing a pair of naked surgically-enhanced breasts—two pale-white silicon
grapefruits dangling from the trunk of the wrong tree.

The female bodybuilder shut off
the blender. “Morning, Nance. Did I wake you?”

“You woke half of Boca.” Nancy
attempted to focus on the woman’s chestnut-brown eyes, but the boobs were
bobbing and weaving above the six-pack abs like two mutant glands in a bad
horror movie. “Jeanne, no offense, but do you think you could sling the twins.”

“Why? Do my tits make you
nervous?”

“Your camel toe makes me nervous,
the rest I don’t want to think about. I mean, you are my sister’s . . . you
know.”

“Come on, you can say it . . . lover.”
Jeanne pulled the top of the unitard up over her breasts . “You’ve shared our
apartment for over a year now and you still can’t accept that.”

“I accept it. I just don’t want
to see you naked.”

“See who naked?” The bedroom door
across the hall opened and Lana joined them, the thirty-one-year-old brunette
wearing only a towel. Nancy’s big sister snuggled in Jeanne’s massive arms, her
hands reaching around to grope her lover’s buns of steel.

“Eww, so hard. Like tortoise
shells. Am I the luckiest bitch in Boca?”

“No, I am.”

“Unh unh, baby. I am.”

“No, I am.”

“Will you two shut-up!”

Lana winked at Jeanne. “Looks
like somebody got up on the wrong side of the bed.”

“Up? This isn’t up. This is me
sleep-walking with menstrual cramps. It’s five-forty in the morning.”

“Damn, I’m gonna be late for my
Sand
and Six-Packs at Sunrise
class. Gotta run, sweet cakes.” Jeanne poured the
blender’s green sludge into a thirty-two ounce cup, and then offered Lana a passionate
good-bye kiss from her sun-chapped lips.

“Baby, don’t forget your doctor’s
appointment.”

“Aw, Lana, you know how I hate
visiting the gynecologist. They look at me like I’m some kind of freak.”

“Please, baby. This one comes
highly recommended. Dr. Vincent Cope . . .I texted you his
address. Be there by nine-fifteen.”

“I’ll do it for you.” Jeanne
grabbed her car keys from a peg and bounded out the front door of the apartment
like Hercules’ twin sister.

Nancy locked the door behind her.
“We need to talk.”

Lana turned on the coffee maker,
filling the glass pot with water. “I told you about Jeanne’s new training
schedule, so don’t start complaining.”

“I’m not complaining. Okay, I am
complaining. I’m exhausted, Lana. These walls are paper-thin and the two of you
go at it every night like a bad episode of
Animal Planet
.”

“Can I help it if we’re back in
the honeymoon stage?”

“It’s not normal.”

“Who cares about normal? We’re in
love. And since when did you become the standard bearer of normal . . . the
relationship counselor who no longer believes in relationships.”

“On that note, I’m going back to
bed.” Nancy escaped to her bedroom, Lana in pursuit.

“Don’t just walk away—hey, what
happened to Madonna’s litter box?”

“I stepped in it . . . again.
Can’t you find a better place for it than in my bedroom?”

“Technically, it’s Madonna’s
bedroom, she was here first.”

“Madonna doesn’t pay a third of
the rent, I do. Then again, I’d rather smell cat shit than your girlfriend’s yeast-infected
thongs.” Nancy climbed back in bed.

“Aw, poor little victim. Why
don’t we talk about what’s really bugging you.”

“My ratings will climb. I’ve been
working my ass off to build an audience.”

“I’m not talking about your radio
show, Nancy. You have no social life. It’s been fourteen months and three
Adele
CDs since Sebastian cheated on you.”

“It’s been fourteen months since
I
caught
Sebastian cheating on me; the little bastard was banging my
roommate right up until her second trimester. And leave Adele out of this; the
woman’s a saint.”

“Yeah, the patron saint of
misery. Enough with the cry-fests. Get back in the game.”

“What? Dating? How many times
must I tell you, I’m in career-building-mode. I don’t have time to devote to a
relationship.”

“Then how about a few one-night
stands, just to keep the vag from sealing up? Just make sure he wears a rubber,
and don’t give him the password to your computer.”

“I never gave Dan my password.
Okay, I sort of gave it to him when his computer went down; I never thought he’d
access my on-line banking and steal Dad’s inheritance.”

“Maybe you’re just sick of the male
form. Don’t look at me like that, it happens. Being bi-curious was the best
thing to happen to me.”

“I’m not into women, Lana. And
seriously, Jeanne’s got more testosterone in her than half the Miami Dolphins.”

“Don’t let those muscles fool
you. Jeanne’s all woman where it counts. She thinks like a woman, she loves
like a woman—”

“And she screws like a teamster.”

“Listen to you, you are so angry.
Jeanne makes me happy. Remember happy? You haven’t smiled since Dad died.”

“Don’t go there.”

Lana sat on the edge of Nancy’s
bed, brushing her sister’s blonde hair using her fingertips. “I miss him, too.
As for your two loser fiancés, learn from your mistakes and move on. Next time
around, don’t lose your emotional compass. You did the same thing with Fred.”

“Fred?” Nancy rolled over to face
her sister. “Fred was our dog. All he ever did was bite me.”

“That’s because you used to hug
him so tight around his neck he couldn’t breathe. You may be a relationship
therapist, but you know dick about men. Guys are like dogs, Nancy. They need to
learn the rules when they’re puppies. You went from zero to sixty with Dan; you
practically put Sea-Bass through law school. Next time you fall for a guy,
instead of jumping up and down on Oprah’s sofa like Tom Cruise trying to
convince the world he’s not gay, teach that dog not to get up on the sofa. Set
some boundaries; house train the little prick.”