I Know What I'm Doing (2 page)

Yeah, guess what? Life is work. I’m majorly under construction right now. I hate admitting to that. I feel like I’m a chewed-up area of road and everyone is staring at the yellow caution tape that surrounds me wondering,
Why is she taking so long to fix?

Newly divorced and happy, my friendships came back to life and my relationship with my family improved. As my mother said, “I don’t know what it is, Jennifah, but you look younger this year than you did last year. You seem to have less baggage.” (Mom, are you calling my ex-husband “baggage”?)

I spent most of my life trying to fit in—whether it was lying to the rich girls at school that my parents’ house had three bathrooms when in fact we had only one tiny bathroom adjacent to our kitchen, or lying to my friends when they all got their first menstrual periods within a few months of each other and I told them I’d had it since age twelve. I didn’t even want to fit in to make myself comfortable—I wanted to fit in to make everyone
else
comfortable.
Don’t worry
, my little codependent brain thought,
you can still talk to me. I’m just like you!
I even wore a tampon before I started getting my period just to trick myself that I hadn’t totally lied to my friends.

Growing up, I always felt like I was looking over my classmates’ shoulders—not to cheat, but just to make sure I was getting the answers right. Whatever
it
was, I wanted to be doing
it
just like everyone else. I got so concerned with doing my life “right” that I assumed my own instincts sucked and learned not to give in to them. And I think that’s what most adults do too, except that instead of looking at their neighbor’s math test, they are looking at their neighbor’s house, and spouse, and kids, and car, and thinking,
Oh shit, I’m not doing it right!

The first time I went to therapy was over ten years ago; I said to my shrink, “I don’t relate to anyone my age. All they do is wonder when they’re going to settle down. Who cares?” Then I proceeded to pay her every week to talk about how I was beginning to worry about when I was going to get my life together.
I
started to care—based on what
other
people wanted.

The thing is, I don’t relate to most people my age. I’m not some forty-year-old married woman spending my nights drinking chardonnay and pretending to like Rihanna music. I’m not a cougar hanging out at dive bars, doing shots, and hoping to attract the attention of some twenty-five-year-old ukulele player/artisanal cheese store clerk. (Although I have made out with two twentysomething men in the last few years. I’m done now. I promise. I’m not going to end up like Madonna, where people wonder if the boys in my Instagram photos are my backup dancers/lovers or adopted sons.)

I’m not a woman who stopped at forty and realized that she never pursued her dreams. I’ve always pursued my dreams and my career is where I want it, although I’m also happy to admit when I want more. I’m single but I’m in love with me. It sounds defensive and corny, and I know that most people already know that they’re supposed to love themselves, but I don’t think I always really got what that meant. I grew up in the suburbs of Boston. There was no talk of loving oneself. If you did, someone would get in your face and say, “What? You think yah so fahkin’ great or somethin’?” Yeah. I guess I finally do think I’m so fahkin’ great . . . or something.

I have pecked and poked away at writing this book on airplanes, in hotel rooms, and in coffee shops heading to, away from, and in the following cities: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Buffalo, Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Dublin, Eugene, Grand Rapids, Halifax, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Lund, Madison, Melbourne, Miami, Minneapolis, Nashville, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Omaha, Palm Springs, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco, St. Louis, St. Paul, Stockholm, Tacoma, Toronto, Tuscon, Vancouver, Washington, DC, West Palm Beach, and Winnipeg, and I’ve been putting the finishing touches on it in every coffee shop in New York City. I abandoned sunshine and swimming pools in Los Angeles to go live in New York for a few months of winter. Why? On one silly level because I lived in Brooklyn for four years back in 1998 to 2002 and I found it poetic that twelve years later I was back writing my second book and not having to temp for a crazy stockbroker who used to throw his phone at me—his
landline. Ouch.

It had been a long time since I’d asked myself,
Where would I
like
to be right now?
and not
Where do I
have
to be right now?
It’s been over a decade for me on the West Coast and there’s something about never having to check the weather before you walk outside that makes you soft. I don’t feel like comedians should get too comfortable. The other day on the subway there was an empty seat at rush hour. There was some water pooling right under the seat—probably the result of some melted slush from someone’s snow boots before me. I sat down, my boots just centimeters from the unknown moisture. An expressionless older man sat across from me. He pointed at the water. He looked at me and said, “Honey, that some urine right there.” It made me laugh. When I was just twenty-four that would have undone me. Urine? How dare urine be on the subway? How dare anything not be perfect, including that guy’s grammar? My life already isn’t perfect and now I have to contend with reality? Other people’s bodily fluids? But now—even though I quickly changed seats—I pondered,
Who am I to not see some urine once in a while?

Also, Bill told me that I should go to New York City. Oh, Bill is a palm reader in New Orleans. He’s about seventy-five years old; his white skin clashes with his oil-black, not-very-secure toupee. Bill is also mostly deaf and very effeminate—very stereotypically gay with dashes of Southern gentleman and RuPaul.

I was vintage dress shopping on Chartres Street in the French Quarter when the woman selling me the dress told me that she thought I seemed like I had some questions. I said, “No. I don’t. It fits perfectly and I’m ready to buy it.” She leaned in. “No. Not questions about the dress. Bigger questions.” She told me that her friend Bill could help. I looked around the store thinking that maybe Bill was hiding behind a shoe rack. She walked me outside and pointed me to the place next door, a shop that sold incense, candles, tarot cards, palm readings, and hope—false and otherwise.

I’m not naive. I know that Bill and Dress Shop Woman probably have a little mutual agreement. She sends him women who seem to be seeking more than a dress and his readings probably end with, “I don’t know if I see a husband in your future but I see a beautiful pair of vintage earrings, honey.”

I walked into the voodoo shop and asked for Bill. The woman behind the counter shouted his name multiple times as Bill and his bad ear continued to peer out the window. Finally, Bill turned around and fanned himself with his hand. “My goodness, I
thought
I sensed someone there.” I followed Bill to a back room. (Yes, of course there were hanging beads that I had to push aside.)

Bill held my hand and gave me the full report in his Creole-esque drawl. He gasped. “Oh, honey, your life line? It don’t stop, girl. This thing goes into your wrist. Your life is lonnnnng.” He seemed burdened by this. He perked up. “Long is good. If you like it long. Some people can’t handle it when it’s too long.” I wasn’t sure if we were still talking about life.

He stopped examining the lines in my hand and instead just held on tight. He pressed a button on an old-fashioned tape recorder, as though he were going to interrogate me at the county jail in 1984. He said, “With your permission, we will make a recording of this. You can play this back when you need a reminder of what we talked about.” I haven’t played the tape since, and not just because I can’t get my hands on a tape recorder (though oddly I still have a pair of underwear from 1990).

He held my hand and said, “You can do anything. You’re free. Now, do you like where you live?” I told Bill—even though I didn’t think I should be the one talking during my palm reading—that I was experiencing a little bit of a Los Angeles malaise. “So go somewhere,” he said. Very reasonable. Then he gave an obligatory glance at my palm and said, “I see you living in London.” I told Bill that I missed New York. He said, “Okay, so go to New York. Honey, we don’t always have to do what our palms say. We have free will. New York City isn’t for everybody but if it’s for you, go. My God, some people need that fast pace. And some people like it given to them nice and slow.” I still wasn’t sure if he was still talking about life.

Okay, so Bill probably isn’t psychic, but he was
really good
at repeating back to me what I already said. But what I’m saying here is, I learned a lot of lessons these past few years. I’ll hold in my heart that even though I have no answers, life is imperfect and funny and sometimes you think something is just water but then you find out
that some urine right there.
But that’s okay. We can step over the urine. We have free will.

1

THERAPIST, MAY I?

Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not. So each is inevitably disappointed.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

I
n the spring of 2011, Matt, my husband of less than two years, and I were sitting in an overpriced-and-not-covered-by-insurance couples therapist’s office in Beverly Hills. Even deciding who to choose as a psychologist had been the subject of a few bickering sessions as we each wanted to make sure that we were going to get absolutely fair treatment.

“We can’t go to the therapist that your therapist recommended, Jen, because your therapist told you that she’s also writing a script in her spare time. Does she say things like, ‘You’ll have to make changes to your Act Three of life’? Her judgment can’t be trusted!”

“Well,
your
therapist took you on a walk to CVS one day so that he could
run errands
during your session! Are we going to end up at a marriage counselor who specializes in picking up dry cleaning?”

So, we mutually decided to go out of network and pay out of pocket. Three hundred and fifty dollars per hour (technically per “fifty minutes”) to sit in a room with a woman we knew nothing about—except that she had a PhD and possibly an eating disorder. She had six Venti cups of Starbucks on her desk and even her skin seemed too thin. We sought her expertise in relationships but deep down we were looking for permission from someone other than ourselves to end our marriage.

During the planning of a wedding there are more than enough people willing to hover around or crawl up your ass to give unsolicited advice or ask endless questions. Mothers-in-law call with requests like, “Is it okay if I invite my best friends Charles and Linda from my college days? I know they don’t know either you or Matt and I’m actually not sure if they’re still alive, I’ll have to check. But if they are alive, they’ll be really proud.” Friends call to ask you where you’re registered because they lost the wedding invitation. Other married friends e-mail you links upon links to places that they honeymooned that you’ll absolutely love. “Don’t forget to get up early for the pineapple pancakes and you have to go on the whale watch even though the waters are so choppy you’ll leave a blazing trail of fruit chunks over the side of the boat.”

But when you’re the first of your group to get a divorce, nobody with any experience is around to offer any guidance.

After listening to us describe a typical week together as a married couple, Dr. Boney-Venti concluded that Matt and I were more like roommates than husband and wife. This made sense. What was so maddening about feeling like I had fallen out of love was that I hadn’t fallen out of every
kind
of love. I didn’t hate Matt. When I walked in the door and saw him on the couch I was always so comforted and happy. He was my best friend. We talked to each other all day long. I ran everything by him. He ran everything by me. He was so easy to be around. I truly loved him. He was family. But that was the problem. He felt like my brother. And the one time I didn’t feel like having my “family” around was when I was in bed at night. It felt so strange and schizophrenic to care for and love a man so much but not exactly want to share a mattress anymore. I started going to bed earlier and earlier just to read—which sounds relaxing but that shouldn’t be the life of a thirty-seven-year-old woman living in Los Angeles. I know people who are dead who don’t even retire to their rooms at eight thirty to read.

Matt revealed to Skeletor, PhD, that sometimes he felt like I didn’t even like him as a person. He felt picked on. The way I made comments about his ill-fitting pants or why can’t he walk more quietly to the bathroom in the middle of the night? He was right. I did nitpick, but I never thought it hurt him. I never thought about it at all and
that
made me feel shitty. How much had I not thought about him? And for how long?

Dr. Ann O. Rexia turned her attention to me. What did I want from Matt that I wasn’t getting? I said that we don’t have fun together. Sometimes I think he just tolerates me, but doesn’t truly get me.

HOLD ME CLOSER . . .
FAN
DANCER

Matt and I spent Fourth of July 2008 away from the loud, overcrowded fireworks display at Venice Beach or any parties that could involve errant bottle rockets and subsequent missing fingers. We opted for a quiet outdoor dinner at the home of our friends Margaret and Andrew. Six couples sat around emptying six bottles of wine. It was unusually humid and Andrew brought out an industrial-size fan. We tried to eat corn on the cob while all of our hair blew in our faces. We looked like the
Saturday Night Live
spoof version of a Victoria’s Secret Angels push-up bra photo shoot. That’s when I got an idea and shouted out, “We should fan dance!”