I'll Be You(66)

“Good girl.” Dr. Cindy’s approval melted over me like warm butter. “So you say that, and then what happens?”

My eyes were closed in the velvet darkness, my nose tickled from the smoke of a vanilla candle burning in the corner. I cast my mind toward an alternative reality, tried to bring it into focus. “The opportunity goes away. We don’t call Harriet and we never see her again. Life continues in Santa Barbara and Sam and I drift a little bit—because we are unique individuals—but that’s OK. We aren’t driven apart by Hollywood or her partying or her neediness. Sam doesn’t become an actress, or maybe she does, but later, when she’s older and has the emotional tools to resist temptation. She doesn’t become an addict. She doesn’t end up…” I trailed off.

Dr. Cindy whispered, “She doesn’t end up what? We’ve discussed this.”

“A loser,” I whispered. It didn’t feel good to say this, it felt like a betrayal. But Dr. Cindy taught us that if you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not doing the Method right. Comfort is laziness; it’s complacency. If you want to grow, it has to hurt.

Dr. Cindy leaned in closer. “Good girl. But we don’t care about Sam. This is about you, remember? What happens to you? How is your life better, beyond your sister? What bold steps do you take toward actualizing your true, unacknowledged desires?”

At this, I drew a complete blank. “I don’t know,” I whispered. “I can’t see it.”

And this is when Dr. Cindy slapped me, hard. “You can see it,” she said. “You just haven’t mastered the IAS Method yet. Identification, Articulation, Self-Determination. We’ve identified the Trigger Moment, you’re starting to articulate what went wrong, but you haven’t yet found your self-determination. You haven’t broken the pattern because you’re still not strong enough. You haven’t let go of Sam yet, and until you do you won’t be able to move past her.”

She gave me an ice pack for my cheek and a Sufferance—six hundred calories a day for the next three days, no sugar, no caffeine—and when I came back on the third day, light-headed and shaky with hunger, we ran the Reenactment again. And again, and again, day after day, until finally one day I saw what should have happened after that day at the beach. By this point, I wanted them all gone, all the irritants that lived in my mind: the irresponsible sister who broke my heart, the husband who I’d once loved for his placidity but who now just seemed stubbornly inert, the failing florist business that kept me dependent on him, the parents who expected me to make up for my errant sister by being doubly responsible. Everything that I had annoyed me. Everything that I possessed felt like an onerous weight that was keeping me from lifting off and taking flight. My body already felt half-gone; why not just jettison the rest?

“I say no to Hollywood and then I grow up and cut Sam out of my life because she’s toxic for me,” I said that day, thinking my bones might snap in Dr. Cindy’s grip. “Just because she’s my twin doesn’t mean that I have to help her. I do not spend the next twenty years bailing her out of trouble. And I have more confidence because of this and so I solve all my own problems. I marry a different husband, who doesn’t balk at my infertility; and we adopt a child, or two, or three; and I don’t have all these emotional issues about having been famous as a kid. I begin a whole new life that allows me to succeed in ways that I haven’t even imagined yet. All because I let go of my sister.”

Dr. Cindy’s grip loosened. She leaned in and pressed dry lips against my forehead. “Good girl,” she said. “I’m so proud of you. You’re ready to level up.”

I opened my eyes and saw her beaming at me, little fires from the candle flickering in her gray eyes, reflecting off the solitary tear of pride that glistened on her cheek. Outside our velvet space, I could hear the murmurs of the other women, doing their own Reenactments with their own Mentors in the little curtained rooms that lined the back of the GenFem center.

“So now what happens?” I asked Dr. Cindy. I felt weightless, as if the only thing now holding me to the surface of the planet was her hand on mine. This giddiness must be happiness, I thought. The happiness I haven’t felt in quite some time. What else could it be?

“Now we get you those things,” she said.





21




WE HAD TRIED TO conceive for four years, Chuck and I. Our attempts to make a baby were an experience that slowly stripped the joy from our marriage, like peeling the petals off a flower until you are left with nothing but a naked stamen. Haphazard optimism—birth control gleefully tossed in the trash—had eventually led to scheduled sex, which then led to ovulation kits and learning terms like mucus consistency and basal temperature.

By year three, things had grown more serious. But since I was still in my twenties, interventions like IVF felt unnecessary—or so Chuck, always fiscally conservative, argued. “It’s such an ordeal, and it’s so expensive,” he’d mused when I broached the subject. “You still have youth on your side. It’ll all work out.” Instead, I started in on noninvasive therapies: acupuncture, stress-relieving massages, and aromatic balms for my belly that were prepared by a Chinese herbalist in Ventura. I ate sunflower seeds and drank bone broth and buckets of pomegranate juice.

Eventually I started lurking on fertility message boards, jotting down obscure treatments that other women swore had gotten them pregnant. I made an appointment for Mayan abdominal therapy, which was supposed to guide my misaligned organs into their optimal positions, but that mostly just made me feel constipated. I went to a crystal fertility healer that my mother had heard about; the healer placed carnelian and moonstone rocks on my stomach and then left me lying in the dark for two hours, listening to whale songs. A college friend dragged me to a fertility rite at a beach house in Malibu, where a group of panicky-looking women sipped on raspberry leaf tea and swapped phone numbers for their dermatologists.