The Pisces(10)
From what I gathered, Sara had been in love with a man named Stan—a researcher at the hospital where she worked—for over twelve years. Unfortunately, while Stan was happy to have sex with her, he couldn’t commit to a relationship. Then Sara woke up at fifty-one—childless, husbandless—and decided that enough was enough. She entered group and began a “detox” from Stan.
Was Jamie a Stan? Worse yet, was I a Sara? Unlike Chickenhorse’s ex, Stan wasn’t married to anyone else, but somehow he was still “unavailable.” This was a word I heard repeated by all of the women during the session, echoing throughout in chorus. The plight of the available woman and the unavailable man! But somehow, each of these women convinced themselves that they too were emotionally unavailable. As encouraged by Dr. Jude, they’d come to the realization that their choice of unavailable men actually reflected an unavailability within themselves. Well, they all looked pretty damn available to me.
In her attempts to detox from Stan, Sara was taking a ninety-day break from contact with him. She was now on day forty-three and claimed to be doing pretty well. In fact, she said, she barely pined for him at all.
“I’m doing me,” she said. “And tonight, I’m going salsa dancing.”
Salsa dancing—now, that was the kiss of death, the evidence that Sara wasn’t doing quite as well as she claimed. Who salsa danced? Salsa dancing was the last stop on the suicide express. Whether or not she wanted to admit it to herself, Sara was clearly destined for a crash.
But maybe the worst part about Sara was her feet. She wore a pair of ugly white “athletic sandals” that she removed as soon as she sat down. Her feet were small, yet crusty, with one yellowing toenail. Throughout the session, she gave herself different iterations of foot massage: caressing, stroking, rubbing. She also picked at her calluses and between her toes. What a luxury to think that your feet deserved to be rubbed, in front of other people, so languidly! How amazing to be so utterly unselfconscious that one didn’t worry what other people thought. I wondered if her feet were even sore or if she simply enjoyed stroking something. Maybe she was trying to gross us out on purpose? I vowed to never touch her hand or receive anything from her. The whole thing, for some reason, filled me with anger. I felt that it wasn’t fair to us. I wondered if I could call out her behavior, let the group know that it made the space feel “unsafe” for me. A shoe rule should be imparted. But was she the freak for massaging or was I the freak for caring?
How had I ended up with these losers? I hated the words they used: inner child, self-care, intimacy, self-love. We were Americans, how much gentler could life be on us? All we had received was coddling. What had Annika done to me? Did I want to assuage my suffering? Absolutely. But sorry, I was not about to learn to love myself here. It was as though they were each in competition with the other to see who could be grossest while simultaneously loving themselves the most. Is that what it meant to love yourself? To be repellent?
Seated next to Sara was Brianne: a native Los Angeleno, who I guessed was also in her early fifties but had shot her face up with so much junk that she no longer existed in time. Instead of growing old, Brianne’s face just kind of grew out: puffy fish lips, cheek skin stretched and shiny—straining to contain all the filler. Somewhere along the line she’d had a botched nose job that left one nostril flaring widely and the other in a small triangular shape. She also appeared to have a skin condition, some kind of rash creeping across her face, neck, and chest, her skin so thin from whatever she was doing to it that you could see all the capillaries in her cheeks.
From under her wide-brimmed hat, hair in two long black braids like a doll, Brianne said that she hadn’t had sex or dated anyone since the birth of her son fifteen years ago. From what I gathered, her son’s father still came around sometimes—and was maybe even interested in her—but they had never been married. While they usually got along, there had been a recent incident involving an attempted neck massage that did not go well. Now he was persona non grata.
At the encouragement of Dr. Jude, Brianne had been going online since last year to meet men. The websites she chose were Match.com and Millionaire Match, and she repeated them as though reciting a mantra: “Match and Millionaire Match, Match and Millionaire Match.” She seemed to be having a rough go of it on both sites, as the men kept disappearing. She would find someone who seemed promising, message with him for a few weeks, and then he would just vanish. On the rare occasion that one of the men didn’t disappear and actually asked her for a date, he would suddenly seem strangely repulsive to her. But mostly, they absconded.
The most recent disappearance was a man who claimed to be a retired fighter pilot. She said she liked that, as she liked military men, and he seemed handsome. For two weeks he had sent her messages every day: never saying anything uncouth or sending a picture of his penis. Then, one day, she asked if he might like to meet in person. He deleted his account.
“But if it’s meant for me, it’s meant for me. And if it’s not, it’s not,” she said quietly, adjusting the strap on her babydoll dress. She was wearing knee socks and Mary Janes too. “I have a very full life. Very full. I don’t even know if I really want anyone else in it.”
Then she sighed.
The only person I liked was a woman named Claire. She was British, crass, and irate, with long fiery-red curls. Claire kept saying “Fuck this bullshit” over and over. She had left her husband two years ago when she met a younger man at a juice bar and realized, as she put it, that she hadn’t had a proper dick inside of her in twelve years. The younger man was happy to fuck her, but he never encouraged her to leave her husband. It was she who assumed they would have a life together. For six months they were off and on, until finally, she threw a plate of pesto kelp noodles at him at Café Gratitude and broke it off for good. Clean and sober for nine years, she was afraid the drama would make her drink. Most recently, though, she was hurt and enraged again by a man named Brad. He sounded pretty bad—bald, baseball capped, and litigation lawyery—but she really liked him. She said that they had begun to get really intimate around his mother’s death, then he just disappeared. She wasn’t drinking, but she was taking up a lot of bad behaviors again to cope with her depression.