NOTES FROM ELLEN WASSERFELDMAN
August 2011
Copyright © 2011 by Alisa Steinberg
Smashwords Edition
Books by Alisa Steinberg:
Notes from Ellen Wasserfeldman
Rantalicious: Spring has Sprung (Thrifty eBook Series)
Rantalicious: True Tirades from a Woman on the Edge (available in both eBook and print edition)
Text Me, A Tale of Love and Technology (available in both eBook and print edition)
Contact me online at: http://twitter.com/AlisaWriter
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from this author/publisher, except for brief quotations in critical reviews and articles.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover Photo: © IKO/Fotolia
∞
For my my mother and father, whose independent spirit and supreme sense of humor made me the person and writer that I am. (See what you did!)
∞
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
~Jorge Luis Borges
Spin fiction: comic fiction that is uniquely imaginative, having been turned on its head and spun at an angle outside of formula literature and some aspects of reality … Oh hell! … Take a standard theme or style and then throw in the psychedelic monkey wrench! ~ Alisa Steinberg
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CONTENTS
BEFORE THE STRESS …
ABOUT 7 WEEKS UNTIL THE WEDDING: EXAMINING MY OPTIONS …
ABOUT 6 WEEKS UNTIL THE WEDDING: GRABBING AT STRAWS …
ABOUT 5 WEEKS UNTIL THE WEDDING: LOSING THE HAIR ON MY HEAD …
About 4 Weeks Until the Wedding: Developing a twitch …
About 3 Weeks Until the Wedding: Getting acne breakouts …
About 2 Weeks Until the Wedding: Having emotional outbursts behind closed doors (in my office) …
About 1 Week Until the Wedding: Have aged a couple of decades …
∞
CHAPTER 1
My Psyche, My Life as a Psychotherapist, and My Psychotic Friends
So I ask myself, Ellen, how do men and women ever get together when there’s so much confusion going on between the genders?
I can only come up with one answer: I think it’s because the same feelings of confusion that polarize and madden also attract and intrigue. And eventually, it all leads to one goal – sex.
Mental Note #1: If it wasn’t for the hopeful probability of sex, men and women would have nothing to do with one another.
(Okay, so this may be truer for men.)
“Hopeful Probability” – the theory that anything is possible if you just keep on persisting, even after a long period of failures – is what the stuff of life is made of.
Actually, hopeful probability seems to be the ongoing theme of my life.
***
“Persistence, Ellen, is no good without knowledge. Especially when it comes to dating,” Sharon said as she passed me some of her self-help paperbacks while I sat innocently on her sofa. The both of us had been best friends since junior high school, and now that we were deadly close to reaching the hallmark age of thirty-five, Sharon was questioning why two eligible women such as ourselves were still unmarried. Hence the special literature she brought into her home.
My eyes scanned one of the titles, and I read aloud, “Women Who are Heavy Who Love Men Who Love Super Skinny Women.” I went onto the next book, “Women Who Love Politics but Need to Find a Man: How to Shut-Up about Global Warming, Mideast Conflicts, the Death Penalty, and Presidential Candidates - Past and Present.” I sighed and squinted at some small print on the very bottom of the cover. “Warning: Do not talk about reading this book or any other book with your man … This could be hazardous to your relationship.”
I turned around to Sharon. Her long, chestnut colored hair was flying all around her as she tried to sweep clean every inch of every object in her apartment with a dust rag. “Sharon, enough with these books already,” I said to her, annoyed about being exposed to dime store psychology. After all, I was a practicing psychotherapist. I had a dime store of my own.
“We need all the help we can get,” she commented. “The books give great advice on how to find and keep a man.” She pointed to the two books I held. “Those have been on the bestseller list for about a hundred weeks.” There was a light in Sharon’s eyes that I had recognized from previous times when she sought and vested in the counsel of those she didn’t know; namely, these self-help writers, astrologers who wrote the horoscope sections in dailies, and overzealous sales people at various cosmetic counters. A person could wonder how Sharon, an elementary school teacher who molded young minds, would muddle her own brain with such a cornucopia of garbage opinions. But I understood her thought process having known her for years. Sharon clutched to her right to wear rose-colored glasses until the end of her days, looking for anyone or anything that could deliver to her simple solutions for a chaotic world in a neat and shiny package, tied up with a nice pink bow.
With cloth in hand, Sharon repeatedly sprung from floor to table and then floor to highest shelf, working hard to make sure her apartment was immaculate for her long anticipated date with Ken, the doctor. And not just any doctor, she told me. He was a surgeon doctor. A doctor who held hearts and livers and other disgusting organs in his hands for a hefty and secure salary. This made him a member of the upper echelon of MDs and the ultimate catch for women who strove to climb up the ladder of economic and societal ranks into the windows of country clubs and destination spas.
“One-hundred weeks on the bestseller list?” I was amazed. “A whole lot of stupid women are reading these books.”
Sharon stopped in her tracks and stationed her hands at her hips. “Well, I guess you could include me as one of those stupid women then!”
I tried to save myself. “I didn’t mean it that way,” I said without devising an explanation to back up the statement.
“Don’t be so judgmental. Those books have helped me.”
“Oh yeah?” I reacted, eying the fashion magazines and romance novels on her coffee table. “You’ve been trying not to talk to Ken about global warming, have you? … How are things going with offshore drilling in Alaska, anyway?”
“Stop it!” she yelled and brushed my shoulders with her rag, cleaning me like I was a lamp. Startled and irritated, I jumped up.
“That sarcasm is why you’re having problems meeting men,” Sharon told me. “You’re too sarcastic.”
I couldn’t figure out what was so wrong with a woman being sarcastic. After all, there had to be some men out there who appreciated sarcasm in their women. Mental Note #2: There’s a cover for every pot, but I’ve never seen so many mismatched pots and covers in all my life.
A moment of silence passed between us and then – “What’s going on in Alaska?” she asked. I was about to tell her but she stopped me, saying, “Never mind. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to risk discussing it on a date.” She continued cleaning, attacking a plastic knick-knack with the rag and some Endust. The objects were now cleaner than the cloth.
“Yes, we wouldn’t want to do that now, would we?” I threw the books to the side and rubbed my eyes, exhausted from my Saturday morning activities, which consisted of getting out of bed, a manicure, and window shopping. “Sharon, I really can’t read these books. They’re nonsense to me.”
Sharon pointed to another book on the table. “That’s good. I think you’d like that one.”
Picking it up, I mumbled the title, “Standards and Guidelines: How to Get to I Do by Saying I Don’t.” I flipped through the pages of what was an impressive work of nonfiction that informed a woman to be disagreeable with her dates. More to the point, it advised women to have a bad attitude with men.
I reached over for the “Women Who Love Politics but Need to Find a Man” book, and then, holding up one book in each hand as if I was Atlas weighing worlds of ridiculousness, I asked her, “The Women Who Love Politics but Need to Find a Man book says you can’t talk about politics or life, or that you can’t read at a level beyond third grade. The other book, the Standard and Guidelines one, tells you not to talk at all with the guy you’re with.”
“Right.”
“I’m just curious-what’s a girl doing on a date if she follows the instructions in these books?” Obviously not eating if she was reading the book about men who love super skinny women.
“Nothing.”
“So why is she on a date?
“To get married of course.”
“Of course,” I responded and rolled my eyes. “But what happens when they get married? Does she say or do anything then?”
“Sure. Once she’s married. Then she’s got the ring and license.”
“What we all live for, I suppose,” I reacted with cynicism. I looked briefly through the “Standards and Guidelines” book which had been thoroughly read as told by pages folded at corners and underlined sentences. I read one of the underlined sentences aloud, “Never call a man first, even after a successful date … Or you will burn in hell.”
***
NEW YORK POST
NEWS BRIEF
October 2, 2010
Mr. Spencer Cavanaugh, 35, committed suicide by crashing into a tree on October 15 at 6:30 pm on the corner of Union Avenue and Grand Street in Brooklyn, NY. Mr. Cavanaugh left a suicide note. In the note, he said he didn't want to live anymore due to a recent date.
Mr. Cavanaugh’s mother, Nancy Cavanaugh, was questioned concerning the tragedy. She said, “He went out with a girl two weeks ago, and he fell for her the minute they met. By the end of the date they exchanged phone numbers,” but then Mrs. Cavanaugh explained that her son had lost her number. “He prayed she would call him, but she didn't. He couldn’t figure it out. He thought the date went well.”
Mrs. Cavanaugh reported to the police that when her son hadn’t heard from the woman, he told her “he’d do something about it.” Overcome with grief, she said to the press, “I guess this is what he did.”
Police went to the home of Ms. Gale Snyder, 30, who had been the woman on the date. When asked what happened, Ms. Snyder stated, “But he was supposed to call me first.” - New York Post Staff
Mental Note #3: Don’t read books that could cause your future husband to kill himself.
***
It’s funny when I tell people that I’m a psychotherapist. Suddenly I’m seen as a mental health cop, and then people become afraid of me, because I might arrest them for impersonating a sane person. Meanwhile, I’m not too sure about my own sanity, and many of my fellow mental health professionals, I can guarantee, feel the same way.
In fact, most people who go into the counseling field do so to work on their own problems. They learn as much as they can about psychology, apply it to themselves, and later on, throw the same psychology onto their patients but with their own issues still attached. For the therapist, it’s a sort of personal catharsis. But these psychotherapists would never admit what they do to others, because they can’t admit it to themselves, pushing their motives back into their subconscious, displaying more acceptable substitute reasons for why they’re mental health professionals. So they start out with something like this…
Goals of Conscious Altruism:
• I would like to contribute to the world by helping others.
• I would like to help my clients better themselves.
• I would like my clients to experience genuine acceptance through their therapeutic experience, so they can pass it onto people in their own personal relationships.
• I would like to help in assisting the mending of personal relationships whenever warranted by my clients.
• I would like to assist my clients in solving their own problems in therapy, providing them direction towards insight, so they can depend on themselves and can eventually be independent of me, the therapist.
But this is closer to the truth …
Goals Buried in the Deep Recesses of the Psychotherapist’s Mind:
• I am the world - so let me solve my own problems by solving my patients’ problems.
• Let me give advice to my patients and get very involved in their lives so I can compensate for my own dysfunctional life.
• Let me lean on my patients for acceptance that I’m not getting from people outside the therapy room.
• Let me do couples counseling with my patients by identifying their lover or spouse with my lover or spouse, and then try out certain techniques to see how it can work in my own relationship.
And then there’s really, really this …
Truth Traveling to the Core of the Universe and then to the Outer Reaches of Infinity:
• Let me nurture my patients’ dependence on me concerning every aspect of their life, so they can stay in therapy and I can continue to pay my rent or mortgage.
***
I always liked patients who were challenging. Lindsay Cobb was a superlative example of this type of patient.
Lindsay was a twenty-four-year-old woman who’d been diagnosed with having Delusional Disorder-Erotomanic Type and Schizoid Personality Disorder, which meant she was more than just a fan of some television and movie stars, and that she had the emotional expression of a rock.
Basically, she functioned but got nothing out of functioning.
“So Lindsay,” I said to her, “how is everything?”
I didn’t have a pen and pad in my hand. I was working on transcribing everything in my brain while keeping my eyes attentive on my clients, so they’d feel they were being listened to. Though, I do admit during some sessions I traded in the transcribing for going over a mental checklist of grocery items that I desperately needed.
Lindsay sat across from me, sinking into my comfy couch. “Okay, I guess.”
Lindsay appeared not of this era, and one can probably argue, maybe not of this world. She was about five foot two, rail thin, and wore all the paraphernalia from the seventies she could get her hands on. She donned the long flowing skirts and dresses, the beaded necklaces with the peace signs hanging from the end, and sandals and sometimes earth shoes. Her hair was long and stringy, and the glasses she wore were horn rimmed and black. She frequently pushed her glasses up on top of her nose when she spoke to me.
“I had a dream about Keith again,” she told me. The “Keith” that Lindsay was referring to was Keith Partridge of the Partridge Family, who, in reality, was the 1970s televison and music star David Cassidy.
“Mmmmm,” I responded to her like many times before when she spoke of celebrities. I didn’t have any desire to react with any words until I had knowledge of what was going on in her mind. I was afraid that I would mistakenly encourage her. Also, in most instances, I just had no idea what to say.
I briefly looked out the office window and saw the trees on the street. It was early autumn in New York City, and the leaves were turning a slight tinge of burnt orange.
Lindsay continued, “Keith and I were writing music together, and he was begging me to stay and live with him in Los Angeles.”
“And how do you remember feeling in the dream?”
“Well … I remember not knowing if it was a dream or not and hardly feeling anything.”
Sounds about right considering her diagnosis.
“But you are aware that it is a dream. Because you just told me-”
“Of course it was a dream,” she quickly responded.
I smiled.
Good. She’s making progress.
Lindsay then added, “Anyway, Keith travels too much with his family. I'd just be in the way.”
Well, some progress is better than none at all.
“Do you feel you get in the way a lot?” I inquired, hoping I could get Lindsay to apply her comment to the real world.
“Sure … They don’t have much room on that bus.”
Okay. Back to square one, and back to Lindsay drawing pictures of the Partridge Family bus instead of doing the mental health homework I’d assign her.
The therapy session with Lindsay went on. I tried to listen and simply reflect what she was saying, but she was so involved in her delusions that I found myself challenging Lindsay on every statement coming out of her mouth. I argued that Jimi Hendrix wasn’t alive and living well under the George Washington Bridge, that she wasn’t related to Janis Joplin, and that she wasn’t just asked to join the Flower Children in San Francisco to march for free love in the nude. Of course, delusions about Keith Partridge were sprinkled all over the psychopathological stew that Lindsay has concocted for the session.
By the end of our strenuous conversation, I felt as though I'd done a twenty-mile run, even though the closest I ever actually came to a twenty-mile run was a fifty-yard potato sack race at summer camp.
As I sat there, I noticed my poker face was hurting.
I had to keep a straight face during the time I spent with Lindsay, because after all, I was the therapist and had to appear as a non-judgmental, helpful party. Lindsay kept an equally straight face on because after all, she was the “flat affect” expressionless woman.
My phone buzzed and I picked up.
“Lindsay’s grandparents are here,” my receptionist said.
Lindsay’s maternal grandparents were her legal guardians. Lindsay never knew her father, and her mother was a coke addict who had walked out a couple of years back, never to be seen again.
“All right, I'll send her right out.” I hung up the phone and turned to her. “Well, it's time to end this session.”
Opening up my appointment book, I examined the squares on my calendar. “Our next session is scheduled for next Wednesday, the eighth,” I reminded her.
“Ellen?”
I raised my eyes from the book. “Yes, Lindsay?”
“I know we've only been with each other for a couple of months, but I just wanted you to know I think you’ve done a great job in helping me,” she told me, and there was still no expression on her face.
What she said was so unexpected, and all I could think of saying at the moment was, “Mmmmmm,” and then, I replied, “Thank you, Lindsay. I hope I am helping you.”
She got up from the couch and headed for the door. She opened it a crack and then turned around to me and said, "Keith thanks you, too. He's seen a great deal of improvement."
Wonderful.
And she slammed the door behind her.
***
“Oh my God!” I screamed in a Macy’s dressing room.
Reality hits most of us at different times in our lives. And reality slammed me with a big bat when I ventured to examine my body in a full length mirror in a harshly lit dressing room.
People were always telling me I looked young for my age. If this was true, it was because the aging meant for my face fell down to my behind.
Welcome to the world of cellulite.
It was time for drastic measures.
It was time to go to the gym.
***
I met my best friend Jane at the gym.
Just like with Sharon, Jane Phillips and I had been close since junior high school, yet no one could figure out why. Jane and I were so blatantly different.
I was always pretty conservative in the way I lived my life. I was never much of a drinker, never smoked, and always managed to wait about two months into a dating relationship before having sex.
My appearance was also very conventional. I kept my light brown hair pin-straight, falling over my shoulders, or swept up in a tight ponytail. My attire to go to work consisted of professional looking dresses and for play it was mostly jeans and a nice blouse or sweater.
Jane went to the other extreme. Jane loved her "booze," as she put it, and did shots of Tequila at a bar that doubled as a tattoo parlor. She was a chain smoker and consumed every cigarette like it would disappear in its entirety if she didn't smoke fast enough to butt’s end. And as far as sex went, Jane was certainly no stranger to it. In fact, she was the welcome wagon for strangers and then some.
Her appearance was also as interesting and violently cutting as she lived her life. Her drastically bleached blonde hair was sheared extremely short, close to a buzz cut, and her make-up was heavy and bold, especially around her eyes where the darkest black eye liner and the most shimmering, aqua eye shadow were the staples of both her days and nights. Jane also had a posture and walk that gave her an aura of toughness if the other aspects of her appearance didn't give an observing eye a clue to this disposition.
Meeting Jane at the gym was very unintentional. I was figuring on silently sliding into the gym and then slipping out or crawling out, all depending on what equipment I’d been using. But there Jane was, leaning against the wall, taking a deep drag of her cigarette, watching people work out on the treadmills and stairmasters, and what not. She was wearing a raggedy looking t-shirt that had "TRUCKIN" on it with a huge illustration of a thumb positioned as though it was hitchhiking. Last time I saw her at the gym, many eons ago, I scolded her for wearing a t -shirt that said “HE CAN EVEN SEE YOU’RE FAT!” with a graphic of Mr. Magoo with his eyeballs darting out of his head, having the largest grin ever drawn on a cartoon character.
Jane spotted me and waved for me to come over. I did, and together we rested our beautiful, flabby bodies against a wall. She inhaled from her cigarette, then slowly exhaled and asked, “What are you doing here?”
“Well … I figured I needed to work off some stress.”
There was quiet for a moment.
“You went clothes shopping today, didn't you?”
“Yep.”
We both nodded.
I glared at Jane and her cigarette. “When are you going to understand that you can’t smoke in public places anymore? And this is a health club, this is one place you really shouldn’t be smoking.” I looked around. “Hasn't anyone come over and asked you to put it out?”
“Hey, I pay my bill every month to be a member. I have a right to smoke in this club.” She was defensive and then continued with more justification of her smoking activity – “Anyway, this is a health club, and this cigarette right here keeps me healthy.” She poked the side of her head with the index finger of the hand that held the cigarette and said, “Mentally healthy.” The cigarette was so close to Jane’s head that I thought her hair was going to go up in flames. Whatever there was of it.
But Jane hadn’t set her hair afire, and she lowered the cigarette to her mouth, inhaling and then puffing out a perfect smoke circle. “Without this I would lose it."
Looking around, I was amazed. Gym members kept shooting dirty looks at Jane, but the gym’s staff hadn’t said a word to her. “You paid off the club manager, didn’t you?”
“Yep.”
We both nodded.
Strangely enough, Jane was also a psychotherapist – a Rational Emotive psychotherapist; Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) involves a therapist confronting certain definitive statements of their clients which contain shoulds and shouldn’ts and musts, and so on. In the world of RET, these words are considered too strict to live by and are believed to cause anxiety. The therapist challenges the client not to use the words to decrease the anxiety and mental anguish.
Jane studied and followed in the footsteps of RET’s creator, Dr. Albert Ellis. Dr. Albert Ellis was famous for RET, but he was equally as famous for his unorthodox way of practicing his own therapy, having supposedly yelled and spewed obscenities at some of his patients.
One high-noon that Jane and I had planned to go to lunch, I had the opportunity to see the results of Jane’s RET therapy. I was sitting in her office waiting room while she was still leading a group therapy session behind closed doors, half flipping through a magazine and half patting my stomach trying to get the hungry grumbling-rumbling to stop. Then suddenly, all ten of Jane's group therapy clients flew out of her office at top speed; all had looks of horror on their faces.
At the time, Jane’s receptionist was coming out of the bathroom, still adjusting her pants zipper, and then, one of the group therapy members, a middle-aged, heavy-set woman in powder blue, polyester pants, and hair net and curlers, almost knocked the receptionist down for the count, as she rushed to make an exit.
The office receptionist wavered back and forth a few steps before steadying herself and resting her hand on the edge of her desk for further stability. Appearing still dizzy and downtrodden, she sighed and stated, “This always happens.”
Mental Note #4: Remember where you are and adjust yourself accordingly, not vice-versa.
Otherwise, you might be toast.
“Look at these people,” Jane said as a buff man in a sleeveless muscle shirt and spandex shorts stomped by. “I come here and I watch people on these machines. People on stairmasters, tread mills, rowing machines. All these people moving and moving, but they’re not going anywhere.”
“Did you ever think of going on a machine? Do some actual exercising?” It was a suggestion disguised as a question.
Jane's eyes immediately grew large, and she looked at me as though she was struck with the fear of God. “Are you kidding me? Those machines are dangerous!” She directed my sight to an empty stairmaster on the floor using two fingers that held her smoldering cigarette between them. “You see that stairmaster?”
“Uh-huh.”
“There was a girl who was a regular here who used that stairmaster for hours at a time. I kept watching her, and I kept thinking - today she's climbed the Chrysler Building, and today she’s climbed the Empire State Building, and so on.”
“So this is how you spend your spare time."
"Follow me now,” Jane said. “Last week I come in and I figure she’s climbed so much that she must be in outer space or something - fucking Neptune or Mars -when suddenly she pushes down with so much force that when the step comes up she...," and with that, Jane directed my sight again with the same two fingers with the affixed cigarette in the middle. This time she referred me to the railing a few feet away from the stairmaster, overlooking the first floor of the gym. She continued with all seriousness. “Her body leaps in the air and over the railing." Jane ended her story with a raised eyebrow. She made the sound, “Ahuhm.”
“What?”
“They couldn’t find her, and they still can’t.”
I just stood their dumbfounded and silent, staring at her, and then I sarcastically said, “"Maybe she fell into a black hole.”
“That’s what everyone’s thinking.”
Jane noticed I wasn’t taking her bait. “Ellen, I’m not lying to you.”
“Uh-huh. Sure Jane. Sure,” I said, and I began to walk away.
She followed me. “This is no joke. I saw it with my own eyes!” I did a sideways glance and saw a cigarette butt fly next to a helpless wire.
“What ever. Listen, I don't know about you, but I came here to work out. Not to watch other people work out.”
Heading for the empty, tale-spun stairmaster, I could hear Jane’s warning from behind me, “Not that one, Ellen.”
Shirking her off, I touched the stairmaster with a free and easy hand.
In a matter of seconds, a man getting on the rowing machine next to me gasped and then let out a short lived shriek. Members and gym staff alike turned to look at me as I climbed onto the machine. The owner, who bore an amazing resemblance to Mr. Clean, went stark white in the face.
I eyed the entire room. The gym’s activities had come to a screeching halt.
I pulled my foot off the machine and mumbled, “Well, maybe some other time.”
***
It seems as though some other time never comes. Especially for exercise.
“Some other time” tends to be an expression of couch potatoes. “Which is not the real me,” I tell myself, “And this is truly not my body,” and then I explain to all my friends – inside I’m actually a modelesque, five-foot-nine woman with a twenty-six inch waist and thirty inch hips.
I passed this important information onto Jane as we sat in our favorite coffee shop down the block from the gym. We’d left the gym ten minutes beforehand after starving for a half an hour while trying to decide what equipment and machines we were going to use, and damn it, wouldn't you know, every single machine and piece of equipment we wanted was already taken.
“Oh well,” we said, appearing sad, but I could see Jane had a twinkle in her eye.
Down the street to our favorite coffee shop! Our spirits were suddenly lifted at the thought.
As we left the gym, the owner, as he always unfailingly did, pointed to some extra work-out machines hidden in the corner. Jane and I made like we didn’t hear or see him, scurrying off like school children after the last bell of the day had rang.
At the coffee shop, I continued purging my inner self to Jane while I picked on a chocolate chip muffin. “So you see, Jane, if I was to be the way I really am – height, waist, and hips and all – no one, not you or any of my other friends, would want to be around me. It's really all for the best.”
Jane stared at me and rolled her tongue against her teeth, making a funny squishy sound, “Gee, Ellen, I feel I can speak for all your friends, since they’re not present, that we appreciate your sensitivity. We also appreciate you paying tonight's check for having us listen to all your bull.”
I smiled and took a large bite of the muffin’s crunchy top. The chocolate chips slowly melted on my tongue.
“Talking about great figures, how's your sister?” Jane questioned.
What a kill-joy Jane was being bringing up my beauty queen, sterling, high-level executive sister while I was eating the world’s most wonderful chocolate chip muffin.
My stomach turned sour. I rested the uneaten portion of muffin on a small saucer.
Jane grinned broadly.
Goddammit. She wasn’t just being a kill-joy. She was also being an asshole.
My hand and mouth returned to the muffin in retort.
“Susan’s doing fine,” I said, squeezing out as much enthusiasm I could muster. This was about a tenth of a centimeter of enthusiasm. “She's always doing fine.”
“That's her job, isn't it?” Jane asked as she sipped her coffee.
“What do you mean that's her job?”
“It's her job to be always doing fine. She's the oldest.” She swallowed her coffee. “Older siblings are supposed to be more stable than their younger siblings. They're supposed to be the most successful members of society. You should know that.” Jane reached around to her handbag and searched inside for something. Probably another cigarette. She found one and said, “And this is not just a psychological theory, Ellen. It’s the law of the land. The law of nature.” Jane rummaged through her handbag again, only this time she extracted a lighter. She held the lighter in one hand and the cigarette in the other.
“And so-what am I supposed to do?”
“Ah-hah!” she exclaimed with her arms spread out. She brought her arms and hands together and lit the cigarette. The restaurant workers paid no attention to her, and I figured she had paid the owner of the eatery to smoke, as well.
She continued, “It’s only you and your sister, so, you’re the youngest. You're supposed to be reckless and free wheeling, and the most rebellious member of society!”
“But I’m none of those things.”
“Exactly!” Jane yelled out, flinging her arms from the table, up over our heads. Jane almost lost her cigarette to the floor in all her excitement, and her coffee cup, as if she had arrived at a monumental point. “Exactly!” she repeated with less volume and more composure. “You’re not living up to your full potential. If you don't live up to your full potential, you’re screwed. You'll be miserable for the rest of your life.”
I immediately lost interest in the chocolate chip muffin, which took some doing. Jane’s theory was too interesting on a really warped level. “So? What do you suggest I do?” I asked her. “I'm not going to sleep around and-”
“No,” she responded quickly. “No, wait. I understand you, Ellen. We have to start slowly.” Jane held her lit cigarette in front of my face.
Annoyed, I pushed her hand away, “Get outta here!”
“Take it!” she insisted.
Looking up, sighing, and then looking down, I took the cigarette from her. I went to put it in my mouth when I realized I was having a problem holding it in either hand. I almost dropped it and then I caught it, then it kept jumping back and forth from palm to palm.
I noticed Jane was watching me with real concern. "Okay...Okay,” she said nervously as the cigarette popped from my hands like a crazed Jack-in-the-Box. During a third or fourth pop, she finally intervened, grabbing the cigarette from the air.
Jane inhaled deeply and followed-up with the equivalent exhale. “Listen, Ellen. Refresh my memory. Was it you that couldn't handle chopsticks at Aji’s on my last birthday?”
“Well, not exactly. I did use training chopsticks. You know - the ones with the rubber band?”
“Okay, that's all fine and good, but there’s no such thing as a training cigarette. Unless you count a candy cigarette as one,” she remarked sarcastically. “And I don’t even think they’re around anymore.”
There was a lengthy silence before I asked, “So now what do I do?"
“Just pray something happens,” she told me, “that you’ll get the opportunity to be more reckless than you’ve ever been.”
And at that very moment, I reviewed my life, and I couldn't fathom how I would attract such an opportunity. Suddenly, I was frightened. Maybe the opportunity had presented itself and I never recognized it was there. How would you know when such an opportunity was in front of you?
I gradually collected myself, remembering I was speaking with Jane and not Dr. Phil or Dr. Joyce Brothers, or even Dear Abby. Who was Jane to tell me I had to change myself because of the order in which I was born? Who was she? Who?
Jane peered into her coffee cup as these questions swarmed through my mind, and I studied her intently, suddenly being able to summon a bit of memory. “Hey, you're reckless and rebellious, but aren't you the oldest in your family?”
Jane answered, unflinchingly, “No, I'm not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I'm not.”
“Have I forgotten some member of your family? If I have this right, Tom is twenty-eight, Anne is thirty-one and of course, you’re thirty-four. That makes you the oldest.”
“My mother had a miscarriage before I was born.”
“What! Are you trying to tell me that counts?” I yelled out in disbelief.
“Sure it does,” Jane said matter-of-factly, drinking her coffee.
My eyes scoured the people in the shop. All of them were just sitting around, gazing blankly at the walls and drinking their coffee. I looked back at Jane slurping her Java, her eyes glued to the ceiling, “How many tiles do you think make up that ceiling?” she questioned me, ready to stick another cigarette in her mouth.
Our waitress walked over to me with her kettle. “More coffee?” she asked.
“No,” I answered emphatically, covering the mouth of my coffee cup with a hand. “I really don't think so.”
Mental Note #5: Search for the most common variable present in situations of loss of brain cells, and abstain from variable immediately.
CHAPTER 2
The Psychotherapist and Her Psychic Advisor
I repeatedly seek guidance from Madame Horowitz, a tarot card reader at a nearby mall. Madame Horowitz claims that in addition to her talent for reading the cards, she’s also modestly psychic when there’s no static in the air. She tells me she was more psychic before the advent of cellular phones and the internet.
I won’t go to a therapist with my problems, because being one myself I know most of them need more help than their patients. Also, because a therapist counseling another therapist is like being on a game show rather than being involved in a true counseling session – “Name what technique your therapist utilized for your particular problem and then, for one hundred dollars, tell how you would better use the same technique.” Then there are times when everyone forgets who the actual therapist and client are and the person who’s supposed to be the client starts out saying, “So how is everything going? I’m listening” to the person who’s supposed to be the therapist. No, not for me. Madame Horowitz and I have a relationship based on her expertise of mysticism and my acknowledgement of how important it is to have advocacy in other worlds when you can't obtain it from your own.
Madame Horowitz was definitely an eccentric character. Her hairstyle was straight out of the sixties - always kept in a bouffant style, teased and put up in a high bun, and you could tell Clairol knew Madame Horowitz very well by her multi-hued strands. She had long and large fake eyelashes and her lipstick was a certain shade of bright red, which was also reminiscent of days long past.
After being around her long enough, there was no doubt in my mind cosmetic manufacturers should be required to put their products’ first year roll-out dates on the labels. They would have to include a warning – You are now purchasing Fire House Lipstick first produced in 1961, before man walked on the moon, and before color television. Even then maybe an extra blurb – When wearing this product, this company is not obligated to compensate for emotional abuse and societal prejudice that prevents relationships and job opportunities. We are also not responsible for screaming children running into the night. Mental Note #6: Some things never die and they really should.
“What’s going on?” Madame Horowitz asked me in the Psychic Emporium, where she worked. It was a room filled with parapsychology professionals in makeshift booths surrounded by crystals, totems and resin fairies designed to hang on the dashboards of cars. She looked at me with one keen eye. Her other eye – her right eye – was stuck closed; obviously due to some globs of eyelash glue wedged in her eye socket.
“Nothing is going on, that’s the problem,” I answered.
“Well, Stella…”
“Ellen. My name is Ellen,” I corrected her, wondering why a person who could look into the future couldn’t even remember my name.
She chuckled and took out a moist towelette to clean her crystal ball. “Oh, my mistake,” she said, “but not really a mistake. I’ve always sensed your name was Stella in a past life.”
“Really?” I responded, skeptical.
“Would you like to know about your past lives, Ellen?” Madame Horowitz took out a piece of gum, shoved it in her mouth, and then chewed it like a cow. I noticed her teeth moving as she chomped, and she tried to speak as she chomped and chewed. Mental Note #7: Never chew gum if you’re wanted by the American Dental Association.
“Why would I want to know about my past lives?” I grumbled. “I’m having enough trouble with this one.”
Madame Horowitz raised her arms up in the air and then spread them out. She looked like Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea. But the holy spectacle was ruined by the enormous amount of cheap bracelets that jingled as her arms moved about. This caused people to turn around to see where all the commotion was coming from. “Ah, Stell - Ellen. We could learn many things from the karma left over from our past lives,” she announced and then brought her arms down. “In fact, many of the troubles you’re having now are from problems you had in your past lives.”
“You’re joking,” I said.
She shook her head. “And it’s always so interesting to find out what you were in your past lives.”
“Madame Horowitz, I don’t even know what I am in this life.”
Madame Horowitz went on. “I did a reading for this woman once and we found out that she was an emu in her past life.”
“You’re joking.”
“No.”
Before she continued, I searched through my mind for a definition of an emu, beyond it being a bird, but I came up empty. “What’s an emu?”
Madame Horowitz thought about it, biting down on her gum. “I think it’s almost like an ostrich.”
I shook my head.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I don’t understand,” I told her. “If you had a choice between being an emu or an ostrich, why wouldn’t you pick being an ostrich? Everyone knows what an ostrich is.”
“You don’t have a choice. The higher power picks for you.”
I sighed. “Well, that makes sense,” I complained, “I’m sure I wanted to be a supermodel in this life, but did that happen? Nooo. I don’t think so.” Obviously, emus and I had more in common than I would have once realized. Nice to be clobbered by the higher power.
“Whatever,” she continued on with her tale, cracking her gum, “I sent this woman to a past life regression therapist, and he helped her work out some problems from the past life.”
I stared at Madame Horowitz. “What problems can an emu possibly have?” Other than wanting to be an ostrich. “Forget it,” I said to her before she had a chance to answer. “I glanced down at my watch. “Listen, I’m on the clock right now and so are you. So can we just forget about this conversation and get on with the reading?”
“You don’t want to know about your past lives?”
“To find out that I was an emu?” Or maybe a cow or a chicken? Then I would have to become a vegetarian. Say good-bye to barbecued ribs and General Tso’s Chicken. “No way. I pass.”
“Oh, you weren’t an animal. Not in your most recent past life, anyway. I can tell-just by the look of you,” Madame Horowitz replied, and I eyed her from across the table, thinking she had the physical characteristics of a big, sweaty toad. But I kept this to myself.
“No, I still don’t think so.”
“Well, if you change your mind …” said Madame Horowitz, reaching into her dress pocket and pulling out a business card. She handed it to me. “He helped the woman I just told you about resolve her problems.”
I glanced at the card. It read: Sherwood Kaplan, Hypnotist and Past Life Regression Therapist, Licensed in Hypnotherapy and Past Life Regression, 1-800-Pre-Life. See Today Through Yesterday’s Eyes. There was a little clause on the bottom of the card – Pay is standard and not subject to change according to therapeutic time spent in a certain decade and/or century.
Interesting.
I slid the card into my back pocket. Where it exactly belonged.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, “but for now let’s talk about my future. I need some advice about it. I want to know if something exciting is going to happen to change my life… Because absolutely nothing has been going on.” I became fidgety. “What do you think Madame Horowitz? Is anything exciting going to happen soon?” I questioned her, “How about in my love life?”
Madame Horowitz nodded, reached under the table, pulled out a tea cup, and said, “For this question, I will read the tea leaves.” The gum had somewhat disappeared into the unknown of Madame Horowitz’s abyss of saliva and rotten teeth. “But first,” she said and took out a tissue and blew her nose, “there,” and she threw the tissue back over her shoulder. She took a minute away from the table and came back with a tea pot. She poured hot liquid into the cup and then dropped in some tea leaves. She immediately looked into the cup and then looked up at me, “Don’t worry, I was taught to do this by the Dalai Lama himself.”
“The Dalai Lama?” I inquired, sarcastically. “The Dalai Lama, the holiest of Buddhists, taught you how to read tea leaves?”
“Yes …well…he drank tea with me once.”
“Ah-huh.”
“Well …I saw him drink tea at a seminar I went to.”
“Ah-huh.”
Madame Horowitz looked down in the cup with her earrings dangling, her toad face pursing, and her teeth floating. “I see your life will be changing….and that your health will be good……and your love life will be much, much better…..your life will be definitely moving ahead. See!” she pointed into the cup and I saw a single leaf hurrying past the others.
“Wow!” I exclaimed, and then I suddenly saw a fly emerge from under the leaf, “Madame Horowitz,” I said, “You have no idea what you’re-” and then she gasped and closed her eyes abruptly, “What?” I asked, because when Madame Horowitz did this gasp and such, it meant she was going into a trance, “What?” I repeated.
“I see, I see, I see-cake!” Madame Horowitz cried out with both eyes now shut and her body moving from side to side.
“Cake? What do you mean cake?”
All Madame Horowitz kept saying was “cake” and “cake,” and I kept prodding her about what it meant, trying to get my money’s worth. After all, what was I supposed to leave the session with-cake? That’s it? “What kind of cake, Madame Horowitz? What kind of cake? What does it mean?”
Her head started to wave around, and her body moved again from side to side. Her left eye was now half way shut and began to flutter, while the closed right eye seemed to move a bit behind her eyelid. Madame Horowitz suddenly took a deep inhale and then, on the exhale, her right eyelid popped up, and from her bottom eyelash, mascara flakes flew out and scattered all over her cheek. Madame Horowitz yelled, “Ow!” and dropped her head down on the table with a big thump! Under her breathe she mumbled, “Pineapple, pineapple.”
“What about pineapple?” I asked, obviously feeling no pity for this woman’s optic condition.
“Pineapple in the cake,” she said in a hoarse yet quiet voice. “Pineapple cake.”
“Pineapple?” I questioned her fearlessly, saying my thought aloud, “What kind of disgusting cake is that?” I despised fruitcakes. It was nothing personal. They just tasted like crap.
Her egg timer went off.
“Time’s up!” yelled a faceless person on the other side of the booth’s curtain. I sighed a sigh of dissatisfaction and watched as Madame Horowitz tried to pull herself together from the exhausting episode.
I cleared my throat, “Bye, Madame Horowitz. Thanks…..I guess.”
As I pulled the curtain away and left the booth, my eyes wandered around to the faces of the people who were waiting on lines to see a psychic. I passed them by and took a good look. Many faces seemed to express feelings of confusion and fear. At the end of one line, I saw a male customer who appeared to have a tic of some sort which caused sudden, sharp movements of his head, and whose posture was excruciatingly straight. He held onto a leash, and at the end of the leash was a dog – a Boxer. The Boxer’s head and body rested lazily on the floor while its eyes were patiently tracking the movements of an ant. Mental Note #8: Once an emu stay an emu.
CHAPTER 3
Past Issues Equal Present Neuroses
The Invitation
It was an uneventful Wednesday night at my apartment.
I was spending my time scrubbing the kitchen counter while Jane was watching me with a smirk and a cigarette. How Cmuch more uneventful can you get? It was quiet except for the sounds of the hard sponge grating against the counter and a squeaking chair. Jane sat on a chair at my kitchen table, leaning back with all her weight on one wooden leg. She wore a T-shirt that had I’m with Stupid on it with an arrow pointing to the edge of the shirt, so it would be mocking anyone who stood next to her on that side. Time and again, I told her I didn’t like the T-shirt. It was completely rude and tasteless. But Jane would only say it was the truest statement ever made in the history of mankind since ninety-nine percent of the world was stupid. How smart to put it on a T-shirt, she would say, what enormous chances there were to be next to someone with the brain capacity of a pea.
The cigarette smoke started to fill up the air as I furiously and futilely tried to scrub out a red stain that had its historic roots in tenement housing. I finally got aggravated. “Jane, would you please put out your cigarette?” I yelled, throwing the sponge in the sink. I turned around to her, “This is my apartment! And I don’t want
my apartment to smell like cigarettes, thank you very much!”
While I foamed at the mouth like a mad dog, Jane kept her cool, lowering her cigarette and cocking an eyebrow, “Hey, I know your undies are in a knot because you can’t figure out the big mystery behind the pineapple cake, but don’t take it out on me.”
“My undies ARE NOT in a knot!” I yelled and picked up the sponge from the sink and hurled it at the prehistoric counter stain. “I can’t get this friggen thing off! It’s been here since I moved in three years ago and no matter what I do…” It was made by a Cro-Magnon man, I surmised. It was evidence that there had been steak sauce even then, used to offset the rankness of rancid, days old Sabertooth meat.
I looked down into the sink, shaking my head. I began to think out loud. “Pineapple Cake …Pineapple Cake …what could it mean?” And then, in my mind, I went over the details of my meeting with Madame Horowitz. “The last thing I asked her about was my love life. So maybe it’s about that.”
“Or maybe she was hungry.”
“She was in a trance.”
“What? The spirits don’t get hungry?”
Glaring at Jane, I accused her – “You’re not taking this seriously.”
“No, I’m not,”” she laughed and then saw the despondent look on my face. “All right. What can I do to help?”
“You can put out your cigarette,” I answered her with sponge in hand, ready to shot-put it at the Cancer monger.
Jane got a little uppity and said, “Fine. You don’t want my cigarette here then I guess you don’t want me here,” and she put out the cigarette on top of a plastic pear in my plastic fruit plate, and then made a long distance shot into the kitchen trash bag.
“Why do you treat cigarettes like they’re your friends?” I asked her, “They’re inanimate objects for God’s sake!”
There was a knock at the door.
“Are you expecting someone?” Jane questioned.
On the second knock, I threw the sponge into the sink again. “Yeah. Smokey the Bear,” and headed for the door.
I opened the door to find Sharon standing in front of me with a furrowed brow and her hair messed. She wore her new Donna Karan black, woolen jacket awkwardly; the jacket’s belt cinched to one side causing the whole of it to follow suit. “Sharon,” I said, giving her a disconcerted once over. I heard an “Oh God” from behind me, and a quiet clicking from what I assumed was Jane playing around with her lighter.
Her reaction was no surprise.
Jane and Sharon were true adversaries, having disliking each other since junior high, probably because their personas were so different from the start. Nevertheless, they were thrown together in a (strange) friendship because they shared the same close friend – me.
Their forced friendship consisted of bickering and snide little comments, usually delivered by Jane. And I couldn’t really take sides. I had to be an ally of both, being neutral like Canada, which was difficult when they got into real snits and I felt like blowing them up with a couple of nuclear missiles.
Sharon slowly made way into my apartment, “Hi, Ellen,” she said with a whimper and then glanced over at Jane and said in nasty, low tone, “Oh … hi, Jane,” and she flipped back her long disheveled mane, an action of a lioness looking to show ownership of the territory.
“Hey, Sharon,” Jane said, her eyes fixed on my kitchen table, puckering at another cigarette.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Sharon whipped out a glossy gold envelope with pen scribbling on it and held it above her head.
Jane finally took notice of her. “What’s wrong, Sharon? Did they recruit you into the service? The neurotic division where you nag the enemy to death until they commit suicide?” She continued, “Looks like your ex- boyfriends must’ve had a talk with the government.”
“Shhh!” I said to Jane, and she just flinched a little and went back to smoking and rolling her eyes.
Opening up the envelope, Sharon pulled out what looked to be an invitation of some sort, and then shoved it in front of my face. I read aloud, “You are invited,” and then I mumbled a little to myself the next words, and then I spoke those words, “to the wedding of Maxine Ferber to Richard Romero –Maxine Ferber is getting married? … And you’re invited?” I cried out, astonished.
My utter surprise was not unfounded. Maxine Ferber had been the most popular girl in our grade throughout junior high and high school. But Sharon, along with myself, had not been part of the popular group, instead having been relegated to the crowd of the “anonymous.” Not the “braniacs” or “nerds” as they were sometimes called, who walked in the hallways with encyclopedias and pocket calculators; not the female “jocks” who played on the girls basketball or baseball teams, and who would punch your head in if you showed them the slightest hint of disrespect; and certainly not the “sidekicks” who were second in ranking to the popular crowd, hanging out with them every chance they got, waiting at the fringes for one of the popular people to be dethroned for maybe being caught in casual conversation with a nerd or maybe even getting pregnant, which wasn’t as bad as the former. Being in the “anonymous” group was far worse than all the groups mentioned. It meant you had no identity with in the walls of our school, a place that didn’t just provide a scholastic education, but more so, provided a forum for learning the basics on social interaction and along with it, a caste system you either applauded or scorned, depending on what level you resided in. And if you were the “anonymous,” like Sharon and I, there was no level. You were outside of the system, looking on, wantonly.
Sharon explained the situation as I turned over the envelope to read the blue ink scrawls where her name and address had been both plainly and haphazardly written. “Remember that my mother and Maxine’s mother have been good friends for years. From the salon.” Sharon’s mother owned a beauty salon in the eighties where they did the standard aesthetic improvements of the day – bad perms a la Flashdance and blanching bleach jobs a la Debbie Harry. “So my mother was invited to Maxine’s wedding, but at first I wasn’t, until all these people said they couldn’t show up for some reason or another, and the seats were already paid for. So, my mother, without even asking me, suggested that I be invited.” Sharon huffed, “And when I got this letter-I didn’t even know about this! And I called my mother, and it was as if she regained all her memory, telling me the whole story. She didn’t even consider my feelings about it! If I wanted to go or not!”