Authors: Mad Dash
“Thanks, just put me
out
of business.”
“Well, really. Go back and look at pictures of yourself when you were a teenager.”
“I know,” says Greta. “It’s a wonder we survived.”
“Oh, please, you guys are talking about yearbook pictures. Don’t insult me, I’m an artist. And so are
you!
Greta—this girl has no idea how lucky she is. For the rest of her life she’s going to look back at the work we do today—
you
do today—and think, ‘God, I was cute.’ Or ‘
God
, I wish I’d known how pretty I was, I’d’ve been so much
happier
.’”
“Really?”
“Really. We’re going to take her in hand. That’s our job, it’s what they pay us for. We’re
magicians.
”
“Magicians of light.”
“Precisely!” Bright girl.
After lunch, we sip coffee with our elbows on the counter, staring out at passersby, cars, sparrows pecking at the ground under a stalky, municipal maple. At least that’s what I’m watching; if he’s still there, Mo is probably watching Leather Coat’s reflection. I wonder why I’m not more interested in good-looking men, more
personally
interested, not just as fantasies borrowed from Mo’s storied love life. For some reason that makes me think of Owen Roby. “You know what I’d love?” I say to my friends. “What I’m really longing for?”
“What?”
“A week off. One whole week away from everything. I want to hole up in the cabin with nobody but the dog and do nothing. Except whatever I want to do.”
“Don’t you do that already?”
I return Mo’s humorously snide look in kind. “No, honey, I’m always interrupting that to come
here.
”
“So you need a vacation,” Greta prescribes.
“It’s more than that. I need aloneness.”
“Yes.” Mo nods understanding. “I used to have to have that.”
“God, not me,” says Greta. “I hate aloneness. My roommate’s moving in with her boyfriend, she keeps saying. If she ever does, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“Because you get lonely?”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s scary and creepy, it’s boring. It’s, like, a total waste of time.”
“You’re single,” Mo says kindly. “You have to be married to understand the allure of aloneness.”
“That’s true,” I say. “But then it’s practically universal.”
“Men, too, or just women?” Greta asks—humoring us.
“Just women.”
“Men
hate
being alone,” Mo says.
“But we love it. My friend Amy, her husband takes the train to New York on Mondays and comes back Fridays. It’s
perfect.
”
“Perfect,” Mo agrees. “Although it only works if you’re married, because then you know they’re coming back. It’s not that you don’t love them
necessarily
—”
“No, no,” I say, “it’s not that.”
“It’s just that it’s so
great
when they’re gone.”
“Why?” Greta looks mystified. “If you love them and you have a good marriage, why is it so great when they’re gone?”
I’m not sure. I turn to Mo.
“Because you can finally hear yourself think. Gather yourself back together. You’ve been in a lot of little pieces because you’re always dealing with him, listening to him, checking on him, trying to find out what he thinks instead of what you think. Do that long enough, you can lose yourself. Just disappear.”
“Yes.” Well put.
Mo and Greta get up and go to the ladies’ room.
Outside, a woman walks by wearing a long red wool coat exactly like the one my mother used to wear. She wore it for years, all through my childhood. “Red goes with everything,” she said, which is true, even if that was the sort of bright, sunny screen she’d use to hide our chronic money worries behind. I myself have owned one red coat or another all my adult life. I make a point of it.
Yearbook pictures. Talking about them reminded me of eighth grade, the day we got our new yearbooks and I raced home to show mine to my mother. I was excited because I was in so
many
pictures, not just the standard class shot but all my various clubs and organizations, even some gratuitous extras like me at my locker, me in the cafeteria, me smacking a volleyball over a net. I was
everywhere
, and just thrilled about it, bursting with pride. I was thirteen, but to this day I haven’t outgrown the need to share moments like that with my mother. My biggest fan.
She never disappointed me. That day she was busy in her office—a section of the dining-room table where she did bookkeeping for a paint supply company. She shoved all her work aside, and I remember hanging over her, hugging her neck while she leafed through the pages of my yearbook. “Okay, now go to Chapter 8,” I’d say, and she’d look at the next picture of me and rave, “Oh, you look so
cute
, your hair is
darling
,” while I beamed, warm and satisfied, letting that mother-inspired complacency seep through me. That’s how it was with us, that’s how I remember my childhood: Mama telling me how wonderful I was and me believing her.
“What are you looking at?” Greta bumps me as she sits down, jarring me out of my memories. Sometimes she makes me smile just to look at her. She was the youngest person in yoga class, but not the most graceful. Ah, no. Her golden retriever ungainliness was on full display, her long white arms flailing around more like a children’s music conductor’s than a yogi’s. She wasn’t clumsy, though—that’s what we old folks are. Clumsy young people are coltish.
“Are you excited?” I ask her.
And sometimes she can look blank as a bison. “About what?”
“The
shoot.
”
“Oh! Yeah. Really excited.”
“Don’t be nervous, you’ll be terrific.” I consider going over the lighting design again, but no, that would be information overload at this point. “Where’s Mo?”
Greta makes an eloquent gesture with her forehead.
I turn around. “Oh.”
Maureen’s right, Leather-Coated Man does look familiar, like someone on a book jacket. He’s gotten off his stool to speak to her. They look smart and sleek against the bar, one in beige and one in gray, like gracefully aging protagonists in one of those world-weary Woody Allen movies from the nineties. Maureen cocks her head up, coquettish and serious at the same time, listening carefully to everything Mr. Leather Coat says.
“He has an art gallery around the corner, the Unicorn—I knew I’d seen him,” she tells me on the street as we’re about to part. Greta’s said good-bye already and gone on to the studio. “His name is Liam—he invited me to an opening tonight. Ceramics, some woman. Want to come?”
I laugh.
“What? I didn’t pick him
up
, you know.”
“No, I know.”
“No, you’re shocked.”
“I’m
not.
”
“I can see you are.” She slips an arm through mine and draws me close as we cross Columbia Road with the light. “But you know, I haven’t always been like this. You work up to it, it takes time. If you and Andrew, you know, if it doesn’t work out in couples counseling, God
forbid
, you’ll get a whole new perspective on men, too. You will.”
“Will I?”
“Being single changes everything, it’s like waking up from a long sleep. Everything’s possible, because nothing’s forbidden. Life
throbs
again, Dash—your eyes are
wide open.
” She opens her dark eyes wide, for a demonstration. I see alertness and nerves; I see no peacefulness. We hug, and Maureen moves away from me with long, muscular strides, her head up, pocketbook swinging.
I’m aware of setting off with much less confidence, practically tentatively in comparison. Owen Roby crosses my mind again, but only fleetingly, just his shadow. Am I sleepwalking? Without Andrew, would I have a rebirth? Do I
want
a rebirth? Well, of course. I suppose. In the crosswalk, I have a vision of a door opening; it’s the front door of a house, soft gold light falling through the crack and shimmering on the ground. What the hell does
that
mean? Nothing, is my hunch. And I can’t call it back to look more closely—I’m no better at visions than meditation.
Nothing to do, then, but huddle tighter into my coat and hurry. Don’t want to be late for my young protégé’s first solo shoot.
ten
N
either of us has ever been in therapy before. Which isn’t to say we exist in perfect mental health, ha-ha, far from it, especially Andrew. The truth is—and nobody knows this, not even our closest friends, because for one thing it sounds arrogant, and for another it might hurt their feelings—secretly we think therapy is silly. The quickest way to stop a quarrel between us is for one to say to the other, “What I hear you saying is…”
Nevertheless, long ago we made a solemn vow that if, laughably farfetched as it seemed, anything ever seriously threatened our marriage, we would bite the bullet and go for couples counseling. We wouldn’t go down without a fight.
How the mighty have fallen. But this is worse than either of us could ever have imagined. Dr. Fogelman, our new therapist, has just told Andrew it might behoove him to try to cultivate an attitude of gratitude. Andrew’s face—I couldn’t look at it, but then he pretended he’d misheard the doctor, and said, “A platitude of gratitude?” so then I
could
laugh. Dr. Fogelman even joined in.
“Don’t make any snap judgments,” Maureen instructed when she gave us his number. “See him at least twice before you decide.” “Why, what’s wrong with him?” “Nothing! Just don’t make up your minds about him right away.” We said we wouldn’t, but we’re both hoping he does better for us than he did for Maureen and Phil. They saw him for six whole months, then split up.
I think Dr. Fogelman is older than he looks, but it’s hard to tell. He has thin, whitish hair with a pink tint where his scalp shows through, and a round, boyish, almost whiskerless face. Bifocals. His slacks look like cashmere; his sweater definitely is. When we shook hands, his felt just-washed and unused, and precious to him somehow, like a surgeon’s hand. He’s a Ph.D., it says on a license over his desk. William B. Fogelman, Ph.D., Marriage and Family Therapy.
He doesn’t sit at the desk, though; he sits in one of three large black leather recliners, and Andrew and I take the other two. Dr. Fogelman uses the gearshift thing on the side to make his recliner go back and shoot out the footrest, but Andrew and I just sit in ours. You have to know someone a lot better than we know Dr. Fogelman to recline with him in matching La-Z-Boys.
“Let me tell you a little about myself,” he says, which is not the way I would begin a counseling session, but I’m not the one with a doctorate in marriage and family therapy. While he speaks he’s careful to look at each of us for the exact same length of time, not a second over, lest we think he’s already got a favorite. “I’m one of the half fulls, I’m the kind of guy who tries to make lemonade with the lemons,” he says between equal-opportunity glances, crossing his loafers, crossing his hands over his belt. “So far I haven’t met a couple I couldn’t help, and it’s not because I’m so great”—he holds his hands out in mock grandiosity; I assume it’s mock—“but because there’s never been a couple who couldn’t be helped. I believe that, and I hope you do as well, because attitude is everything. Attitude. And the foundation for what I try to give people who come to me, the basis I base my counsel on, is a concept I call—now, don’t laugh—the House of Love.
“The House of Love. We’ll use all kinds of things in here as we go along, we’ll do active listening, role-playing, clarification and communication exercises.” From the corner of my eye I see Andrew put his forehead in his hand. “But I always like to start off with some
orientation
, if you will, some locating of where we’re going to be spending most of the time during our time together, what
room
in the House of Love we’re going to be dealing with most. Or rooms, often it’s more than one, or sometimes each party has a different room, or rooms.
“Now, what do I mean by the House of Love? The House of Love has many rooms, and some of them are self-explanatory. The bedroom is self-explanatory—it’s where you express your physical affection for each other, it’s the physical intimacy place, so that one’s easy. The kitchen is the center of your domestic life—it’s where your day-to-day life occurs…”
And so on through all the rooms of the House of Love, including the attic, which is our past, and the basement, which is the past, too, I think, but also our subconscious minds or something. I know he’s going to wind the house tour up by asking us which room we’re having the most trouble in.
When he does, Andrew and I just look at each other.
But only for a second, because I am
this
close to cracking up. Andrew knows it, and he also knows that sometimes when I get started, I can’t stop. He clears his throat, but luckily I pull myself together and get out before he can speak—because who knows what he might say to baby-faced, optimistic Dr. Fogelman—“I don’t think it’s any particular room, really. No one room more than any other, anyway. Well…it’s not the bedroom, I think I can—Andrew, wouldn’t you agree? It’s not the bedroom?” If he says yes, it is, then all that stuff I told Mo and Greta was a hallucination.
He’s not going to answer. He’s thinking this question is insupportable on so many levels but primarily inanity, that he’s not going to respond.
“And not really the kitchen either,” I blather on. “Possibly the attic…But no…” I peter out. Even to save the doctor’s feelings, I have no more to say on the rooms in the House of Love.
Andrew raises one finger. I wait in suspense, thinking of our promise to Maureen. And promise or not, you should give your new therapist longer than twenty minutes before you walk out into the Corridor of Dismay and press the button for the Elevator of Pent-up Snickering. Dr. Fogelman’s expression remains pleasant as the silence lengthens; no doubt he’s used to waiting his patients out. But if he says, “It’s your fifty minutes,” there’s no telling what Andrew might do.
“I think it might be useful,” Andrew says at last, “if perhaps Dash talked for a bit about her mother.”
Dr. Fogelman’s nose twitches. He lifts his eyebrows at me for permission to be enthusiastic about this suggestion. “Your mother?”
“Really? I should talk about my mother?” Imagine Andrew taking the therapeutic initiative. He nods to me encouragingly. Maybe he’s just trying to postpone getting called on himself. Or maybe this is a subtle way to communicate to the doctor that the whole breakup was my fault and he’s an innocent bystander.
Or maybe he’s right and this is the logical place to start.
“All right, well. My mother…died last summer.” Incredible that it’s still hard to say that word. “It was sudden. And I have…grief, of course, but it’s mixed with so much guilt that it’s taking me longer than I think it should to get on with things.”
“There’s no timetable on grief.”
“No, I know, but—”
“Guilt?” Andrew interrupts. “You feel guilt?”
“She was sixty-seven years old and she was still working. She was a bookkeeper, she lived in North Carolina,” I tell Fogelman. “We were saving for Chloe’s college—that’s my excuse. I wanted her to retire, but I never did anything about it. She started working when I was nine because my father died, and she never stopped.” I yank a Kleenex out of the box between Andrew’s recliner and mine.
“She was my best friend. And she just…loved me. So much. She thought I was a riot—I could make her laugh till she cried, she’d put her hand on her side and go ‘Wooo!’ and beg me to stop.” I laugh through my tears. “She was so pretty. Wasn’t she, Andrew? She could’ve married again, but I was selfish, I kept her to myself. She could’ve started a whole new life after my father died, but I wouldn’t let her. She thought her main job was to take care of me, make sure I was happy all the time, and I…I just let her. And then I went off to college and never came back. I abandoned her.”
“You went back,” Andrew says.
“For visits. It’s not the same. I was
her
best friend, too. We should’ve brought her up here—
I
should’ve brought her up here. You said you wouldn’t mind if she lived with us.”
“I wouldn’t have.”
“I’m sure I haven’t thanked you enough for that,” I say, blowing my nose with another tissue. “You were always so nice to her. I just wish…” I wipe my eyes for Dr. Fogelman’s benefit, but he might as well know now, I’m a crier. “I wish I’d had more time. To thank her, to tell her I loved her. And everything.”
“She
knew
that,” Andrew says.
“She was planning to come up for our daughter’s high school graduation last June, but then she called and said she was coming down with the flu. And two days later, she had a heart attack.”
The men are quiet while I finish my cry.
Dr. Fogelman pats his palms together softly. “I suppose if we were to locate that experience in any particular room, we might say it occurred in the nursery. Because no matter what age we are, in many ways we’re always children in relation to our parents. Dash, I hear you saying you weren’t prepared to lose your mother, and in a very real sense you’re still dealing with her loss. But every ending is a new beginning. You’ve commandeered a room, and you’re not leaving, but can you imagine how that makes everyone else in the house feel?”
Andrew leans over with his hands up, palms out, making a barrier between us and Dr. Fogelman. “I didn’t know you felt guilty. It never even occurred to me. Because you were as close to the perfect daughter as anybody could be.”
“No, I could’ve done so much better.”
“How? You were the light of her life. Don’t you know that?”
“I’m having trouble hearing you,” Dr. Fogelman complains.
“Andrew thinks I was a good daughter,” I relay.
“And have you forgotten, you
did
invite her to move up here, and she said no.”
“I should’ve insisted.”
“She didn’t want to leave her friends and come north.”
“No, she didn’t want to be a burden.”
“Dash.”
“I should’ve called her more often.”
“You called her all the time. You sent photos, wrote letters, you e-mailed. No daughter could’ve been more devoted.”
This feels like balm on my sore heart. I want Andrew to keep talking, I could listen all night, but Dr. Fogelman starts saying something about how guilt is subjective and the point is that I feel it, not that I necessarily deserve it. There are 1,440 minutes in a day, he says, and it’s up to us how many of them we’re going to fill with negative emotion. The opposite of “evil” is “live.”
“Arlene was a wonderful mother, and you were lucky to have her,” Andrew goes on in the same soothing, urgent undertone, “but she was lucky, too. She used to say it all the time, how blessed she was.”
“Guilt, of course, is a great motivator. And often overlooked as a—”
“You’re a good mother, too. As Chloe would gladly testify.”
“Oh,” I say, hanging my head in modesty. I want to sit on Andrew’s lap.
“Probably because your mother was such a good role model.”
“Well, if that’s true, it makes the fact that you’re one of the world’s best fathers even more amazing,” I say warmly. “Andrew’s father was terrible, Dr. Fogelman. But he inherited
nothing
from him, thank God, not a single trait. Edward’s mean, Andrew’s kind; Edward’s narrow, Andrew’s generous and tolerant and open. Comparatively. Chloe adores him—everybody does. He’s universally liked. He’s been asked to be the chairman of his department.”
Dr. Fogelman can’t get any more out of us after that. What’s left of our fifty minutes we spend lobbing softballs to each other in the House of Love’s backyard. Our homework assignment is to write down three things that annoy us or we don’t understand about the other, then be prepared to reverse roles and defend the irritating behavior.
We lean against each other in the elevator, smiling at our reflection in the closed doors. I take Andrew’s wrist in both hands and squeeze the bones affectionately. “You know, Andrew, you can either be part of the problem or you can be part of the solution.”
“Too true. It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.”
Out on the sidewalk, we look up and down K Street, happy to be out in the fresh air. We decide to have dinner, since neither of us has eaten. We’re not far from Andrew’s old law school. “Remember that corner?” he says, pointing across the street.
“Which one?” Washington Circle is a maze.
“You don’t remember?” He takes my hand and we walk toward the lot where we left his car. (Why take two, he said, when we’re leaving from the same place, practically? Why pay for parking twice?) “The most important turning point in my life, and you don’t remember it?” He shakes his head in mock disappointment.
“
Which
corner?”
“The ultimate proof, if any more were needed, that you were the woman I should marry.”
I crane my neck, looking behind us. Pennsylvania and Twenty-third? New Hampshire and Twenty-second?
“A hot summer night. We were hungry. And broke.” Andrew sighs, as if the last clue pains him, it’s so obvious. “You had some guy’s guitar.”
“Oh!” I laugh, remembering. “
That
was the turning point in your life?”
“Most certainly.”
Hot and hungry, that I remember, and broke as usual, we were heading somewhere, me carrying the twelve-string guitar a guy in the band had been trying to teach me to play. We had about five dollars between us. “Let’s see something,” I said, and sent Andrew away to stand by the Walk/Don’t Walk sign. I got out the guitar and began to play the only song I knew, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” singing at the top of my lungs to be heard over the traffic. Lo, people hurrying by threw actual money in the open guitar case! That this was a significant moment for Andrew in our relationship surprises me, because I distinctly remember him pretending he didn’t know me.