The Pisces(9)

“Fuck me,” I said to the palm trees.

When I was on Abbot Kinney, the long yuppie strip of contemporary blondewood-and-metal shops that cut across Venice diagonally, I felt out of place, more aligned with the homeless. Here were so many beautiful women: ombre-headed twentysomethings in boho-chic dresses, minimalist French women clad in black leather with angular jewelry, models even, who made me look at my toe hair and fuzzy legs in disgust. I had stopped shaving since the breakup. My hair, which had always been frizzy, was now even more coarse thanks to an infestation of gray. I was no longer even using henna. The cottage cheese on my hips stood out against my skinny legs. I had stopped giving a fuck.

Looking at these women now, I thought, What if I could get really hot while I was here? What if I became the old me, or the very old me, or someone entirely new? When I get back home, maybe Jamie would want me again.

What would I do? Maybe dye my hair auburn, start wearing lipstick again, wax my vagina into some sort of formation. I had always been more of a natural woman, and I assumed that Megan the scientist was low maintenance in the pubic realm, but how natural was too natural? I had gotten so natural that I was naturally dead.





7.


After a few days in Venice I went to my first group therapy session: a specialty group for women with depression, and sex and love issues. There were four women in the group, plus the therapist and me. But they all blurred together into a multiheaded hydra of desperation.

Judith, our therapist and leader, was definitely unmarried. With her unringed hands she held a ceramic mug of steaming green tea and said very little, periodically murmuring sounds of “mmmmm” and “ahhhh.” Occasionally, she asked how some event made a person feel. Everyone called her “Dr. Jude.”

Dr. Jude was a collector of things—her office stuffed with tchotchkes: Buddha statuettes, a small Freud action figure, licorice pastilles, air plants, an old gumball machine, angel cards, little signs with sayings like “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” and “Trust yourself! You know more than you think you do!” Clearly none of us could trust ourselves or we wouldn’t be there.

Alas, our fearless leader was deeply single and trying to be at peace with it. I wondered if she even had a boyfriend. How could she lead a group on sex and love issues? Who would want to take love advice from a single woman who convinced herself she was happy using store-bought sayings she posted on her wall? And what kind of doctor was she anyway? I didn’t see a PhD next to her name. Was she a doctor of love?

Dr. Jude had yellowish teeth and a Dorothy Hamill haircut. I guess the yellow teeth meant that she accepted herself and would not be changing for anyone. I was oddly intrigued by her positivity in the face of the abyss, as though I were an anthropologist encountering a new culture for the first time. But when she quoted E. E. Cummings in an attempt to say that we could only be ourselves, I decided she was stupid. Also, she used the words radical acceptance a lot. I didn’t want to radically accept anything. When I returned to Phoenix I wanted everything to be radically different. I didn’t like her. But compared to the disaster that was the rest of the group, Dr. Jude seemed like a winner.



Our youngest member was Amber: mid-twenties, built like a female wrestler, sweatpants covered in dog hair. Amber had been in the group longest and was furthest along in terms of “doing the work” in the personal growth and love department. She made sure we all knew that. Immediately, in my mind I called her Chickenhorse, as her head was long and horse-shaped but she had a beaky nose and big pink gums that resembled a chicken’s comb and wattles. She seemed to get aroused by telling all of us we were wrong.

Dr. Jude had encouraged Chickenhorse to start dating again, but she had not yet begun. Instead, she focused on problematic interactions she had with people in her life.

“My boss is emotionally abusive. He’s victimizing me,” she said.

“Can you tell us more?” asked Dr. Jude.

“I can’t explain it, it’s just a feeling,” she said. “And as the victim, I don’t think I should have to explain myself.”

“Understandable,” said Dr. Jude.

“It’s my truth. And I’m afraid to bring it up to his supervisors, because this is what happened with my last boss too. He was another abuser; there’s a pattern of abuse. When I came forward about it at my last job, everyone started gaslighting me by acting like I’m the crazy one.”

Chickenhorse also found herself in a similar altercation at home. Apparently she had “tattled” on her neighbors to the landlady for playing their music too loud. She left voicemails for the landlady every day for two weeks in addition to knocking on their door every night and yelling that nine p.m. was too late to make any noise of any kind. Now her landlady was accusing her of trying to start a rift in the building. She was trying to evict her for harassment, which was unfair, because it was she who had been harassed by their music. This, too, was her truth.



I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened to get Chickenhorse in here—only that it involved a married man and a restraining order. I wondered if she’d ever broken anyone’s nose. She seemed more the type to burn your house down.

Seated next to Chickenhorse was Sara, who, apparently, was not only sensitive to men but also to light, cleaning products, mold, pollen, gluten, dairy, and sugar. She had fibromyalgia, chronic migraines, and, as a result of her hypoglycemia, was given special permission to eat during group. She said that made the room more of a “safe space” for her. Throughout the ninety minutes she consumed two bananas, a nectarine, one dried fig, a large box of raisins, and an entire two-liter jug of water. Her emphasis on hydration annoyed me.