The Pisces(64)

47.


Somehow, I found my way to group. Dr. Jude took one look at my unwashed hair, my skirt covered in sand, face drawn and skinny, and nodded knowingly as if to say, This is where the addiction takes you.

Yes, this was where you ended up: disheveled, lovesick, alone. Wherever you thought you would end up, wherever you thought the worst could be, was nothing like where you actually ended up. There was a reason they all kept coming back to group. Somewhere, in the backs of their minds, they must have remembered what the pain was like. They didn’t want it anymore.

But Sara was still seeing Stan and she seemed like she was doing okay. She chirped about how she was integrating her Stan life into her self-care life.

“This time, I’m still doing me,” she said. “I’m still self-dating. But it’s also nice to always have a partner now at salsa dancing. He does warm-ups with me before improv class too. True, I have to pay for everything. And technically he has nowhere else to go. But he’s here for me now. The way I see it, if he didn’t want to be with me he could still be sleeping at the Korean spa. Those floor mats are not so uncomfortable. He does have a choice. He’s not forced to live with me. He’s choosing me.”

Sara said she wanted to stay in group and also stay with Stan. Dr. Jude said she didn’t recommend it, but she wasn’t going to kick her out.

“You’ll see,” said Sara. “I’m really flourishing. I’m even thinking of getting into spoken word.”

I wondered if Sara was totally kidding herself or if she was proof that the seemingly impossible could be done after all: the mending of an old, unhealthy relationship into a new, healthy one that didn’t destroy you. Should I have been more responsive to Jamie when he had first started texting? Why had I ignored him to chase a relationship that was only sustainable when confined to a rock? Clearly I had made some kind of wrong decision or I wouldn’t be back here, head in hands, seated next to Dr. Jude’s framed poster of Jungian archetypes. What was worse, still, was that the others all seemed to have gotten better without me. Even Diana had been totally clean, off the tennis boys for over a week, and was paying more attention to her children.



“Regardless of how I feel about my husband, whether I lust after him anymore or not, my children are what I really live for. I’m doing this for them. So that I can be present. It wasn’t fair to be sitting at the kitchen table with them while they ate pizza, running off every five minutes to check my phone in the living room to see if a twenty-three-year-old had texted me. I wasn’t able to be there for them. And they could sense it.”

“How do you feel?” asked Dr. Jude.

“A little sad,” she said. “But so much better. I’m not as on edge as I was. My worth isn’t dictated by text messages.”

Brianne, too, had found some solace in her son.

“When I told my son about the OkCupid guy, he said, ‘Mom, that just sounds like a lot of drama. Do you really need that?’ And I thought, You’re right. Drama. It really is that simple. So I set some healthy boundaries. I told the guy that I would still love to see him when he got back to the States but that I wasn’t going to give him any money. I said that I wished him the best of luck and I believe in him: that he would be able to make it work to find his way back here.”

“Awesome,” said Sara, biting into a Bosc pear.

“But the strangest thing was, the very next day, my son and his girlfriend broke up. He said that he was sad, but he knew it was for the best, because now he could see there was drama in that relationship too. Then he said, and I’ll never forget this, ‘Mom, I’m so glad that we can have a nice relationship. It means so much to me that I can tell you these things.’?”



What a pussy, I thought.

But was he a pussy? He probably knew more than all of us. Maybe children weren’t the worst thing after all. They couldn’t be any worse than anything else. I had always judged these women who derived such satisfaction from their offspring. I thought they were weak and nauseating, like they had given up on their own lives. But I liked Diana. And Brianne, well, at least she had something to live for besides plastic surgery. Something to tether her to the Earth. Maybe she wasn’t totally lying when she said she had a full life. Or, at least, that her life felt full. Who was I to judge anyone? I certainly didn’t know any more than they did, crawling in here on my hands and knees.

I told them about Jamie and the pregnancy. I pretended that was the cause of my tears. It was something legible, a rejection they could understand. To recount the tale of Theo would be too far beyond their comprehension. What could I even say? I’m mourning a man I’ve been seeing secretly this whole time. He might be in his forties but he looks twenty-one. No, I didn’t meet him online, I met him in the ocean. By the way, he has a tail.

It was hard to grieve like this, to mourn one man while pretending to be mourning another. Why were some sadnesses so much more permissible than others? Why did it seem like everyone was going to be okay except for me? Even Chickenhorse was in good spirits, letting the group know that she had finally decided to try going on a date. She met a guy at the dog park and he invited her to a pit-bull rescue benefit.

“I assume he’s an asshole,” she said. “But I don’t think he’s married. So I’m going.”