on the couch. “Are you going to put that in your next book?” I asked. “It’s pretty cheesy, if you don’t mind me saying so. Oh, but that reminds me—I’ve been meaning to tell you this—since it doesn’t look like I’ll be writing my book any time soon, I thought maybe you could immortalize me by using me as one of your case studies. Whaddya think?”
“I think you’re using humor to avoid a difficult topic.”
“…maybe something like, ‘Holly H., moderately insane twenty-eight-year-old brunette with flat hair and obsessive-compulsive tendencies including but not limited to a fear of free-falling anvils and severe stove-checkitis?’ That would be fine with me, if you want. And maybe you could also mention that I’m cute and not currently seeing anyone.”
He smiled broadly. “Is it really any wonder why?”
Even my own shrink didn’t think I was relationship material.
“Careful…” I told him. “I know you have a son, and I know he’s single. You don’t want me looking him up now, do you?”
“He doesn’t go for pretend-crazy, Holly. He prefers the real thing,” he said without skipping a beat. “And if you want me to use you as a case study, you’re going to have to give me a little more than just garden-variety phobias and general wishy-washiness. Not if it’s going to be a page-turner.”
“I’m sorry my misery bores you, Doctor M.”
“Not always. Have you had any more poodle fantasies lately?”
“Huh?”
“Oh…sorry,” he said, flipping back through his pad. “That was my eleven o’clock.”
Nice. How could I beat that?
“I do have a recurring nightmare about Phil Collins. I think it might be sexual. Does that help?”
“Not so much, no.”
“Well, I’ll see what I can do.”
Dr. David Martindale is a very well-respected and widely published psychologist on the self-help circuit, and I was lucky to count myself among his patients. Still, I wasn’t so sure it was going to work out between us. The butterflies were gone, so to speak.
Yeah, yeah, so I’m a therapy junkie. I’ve been to twelve different psychologists and psychiatrists over the past five years and I’ll make no apologies for it. I see the entire mental health profession as a sort of sanity buffet from which I can pick and choose what I like and pass over the rest. The breadth of my phobias and anxieties demands a holistic approach.
Hmmm…
Okay. So maybe I’m making it sound a little worse than it actually is. I am in fact quite a normal person. A normal person who simply has no luck with men, feels underappreciated at work and whose self-esteem just so happens to be in free fall at the moment. That’s the problem, I guess. I figure if I keep digging a little deeper, I’ll find something fascinating behind my averageness. Something less mundane than the truth, which is that growing up being relentlessly teased by my three older brothers and for the most part ignored by my beaten-down parents has turned me into one of those self-deprecating panicky types looking for love and appreciation in all the wrong places.
I know it may seem self-indulgent on the surface, since I don’t have any real problems to speak of, but therapy has changed my life. It has helped me learn who I am—privately quirky, a little bit dark, but ultimately hopeful—and imparted to me the gift of self-awareness. You see, monitoring my own thoughts and feelings saves me from the thing I fear the most: Limping through life like a mindless automaton. The woman in the gray flannel suit. The lovesick puppy dog. The enthusiastic imbiber of cyanide-spiked Kool-Aid.
The problem, I’m beginning to realize, is that all this heightened consciousness comes at a price. When you finally start to see yourself as the universe sees you—one of roughly six billion ants living beneath a perpetually upraised foot—desperation and apathy cannot be far behind. So, to take the sting off the inexorable march to the grave, I sometimes enlist the services of other ants with medical prefixes to help me turn my frown upside down.
I’m currently involved with two therapists. They don’t know about each other, but I’m thinking of telling Berenice about Doctor M., just to spice things up. Since she sees all psychiatrists and even most psychologists as pill-pushing whores in cahoots with evil pharmaceutical conglomerates, it’ll give her some incentive to come up with something a little more inspired than Saint-John’s-wort and a bubble bath, those panaceas of the antiProzac set.
Despite my misgivings about Martindale’s commitment to the seriousness of my complaints—I had to admit that his obituary exercise sounded a lot more promising than Berenice’s solution (which involved some sort of birth reenactment), so I decided to throw caution to the wind and give the obituary thing a shot. There was just too much junk swirling around in my mind, and it seemed like a decent way to start clearing it out.
As I reread the news of my passing, one possible path laid out before me, I have to wonder: What would it take to rewrite this life? Defined by one horrible crime and faced with years of boredom and loneliness and regret on death row, John Michael Whitney clung hopefully to his pine cones and glitter glue. I’m sure, in his own mind, he saw himself not only as a murderer, but as an artist, with something positive to offer the world. But what about me? Is there anything out there to redeem my existence, before it’s too late?
The prospect of emerging from Berenice’s giant plastic womb a brand-new person suddenly sounds a whole lot easier than figuring that out.
chapter 2
Writer’s Block
Even though I knew George was probably busy—Fridays being the day she rips the covers off mercifully unsold fantasy novels at the Book Cauldron and sends them back to the publishers—I called and asked her to meet me for an emergency lunch. I calmly explained that if she didn’t come and rescue me from myself, I was bound to dash immediately across the street and buy seventeen cartons of cigarettes, after which I would be only too happy to ditch work and spend the rest of the afternoon in the park, smoking one after the other until there was nothing left of me but a bit of charred lung and one diamond earring. (I’d lost the other last week, and was hoping that the remaining stud, in its loneliness, might magnetically guide me to its partner’s hiding place.)
“Why all the doom and gloom?” George asks as she plops down into the booth.
“Look, you know me,” I say. “I’m an optimist.”
“Mmm, I wouldn’t say that. You’re too superstitious.”
“Fine. Then I’m a guarded optimist….”
“More of a fatalist, I’d say. But a cheery fatalist.”
“George! Just listen. The point is, I think I’m losing my grip on happy thoughts. Something’s got to be done.” I pull the tattered obituary out of my purse and slide it across the table.
“What’s this?”
“Just read it,” I tell her, exhaling dramatically.
As she does, I signal the waitress. “I’ll have a bacon cheeseburger, a double order of fries, and a Jack and Coke.”
She looks up from her pad and pushes her sliding glasses back up her nose with her pencil. “We don’t have a liquor license here, ma’am.”
Nice. The one day when I could really use a bit of liquid lunch.
“Fine. Make it a milkshake, then. Chocolate.”
“I’ll have the Nicoise salad,” George says. “With the dressing on the side, and no potatoes. Oh, and are there anchovies on the salad?”
The waitress nods.
“Were they packed in oil?”
“I would say so, miss.”
“Hey!”