Ordinary World (6 page)

“My brothers are musicians,” I answered wryly. “Never did drugs, though. At least not that I know of. But my brother Tony sometimes talks to his guitar and speaks of it in the third person.”

“As long as he doesn’t leave his estate to it, I’d say he’s fine.”

Nice comeback.

I wondered if we were gonna get to any therapy anytime soon. Finally, she finished the inquisition.

“Well, I’m looking forward to working with you. Is there anything in particular you’d like to work on? I mean, would you like to set some long-term goals?”

Set some long-term goals!
Was she nuts? I had enough trouble getting up in the morning.

“Well, I’d like to not scream obscenities at my students anymore.”

“Anything else?”

I stared at the floor, searching for an answer. What could I possibly want that didn’t involve going back to that crucial moment and handcuffing Sam to the staircase banister rather than letting him walk out the door?

“Will I ever feel normal again?” I asked.

She answered, “You’ll never go back to the way it was before Sam was killed.”

Great. My hopes, the size of a hot-air balloon for the split second after my question, deflated and bitterly collapsed after her answer. Why bother, then?

Melody read my body language and empathized. “But you will find the ordinary world again. If you choose it, that is. Everything is a choice.”

“Not everything,” I argued. “I didn’t choose
this.
I didn’t choose to lose my husband.”

“But you can choose the way you respond to it. You’ll see.”

I looked at her skeptically. What did she mean by ‘the ordinary world’? I wondered.

Time was up. Melody opened the office door and escorted me out, just like the previous client. The waiting room was empty.

Later that evening, Miranda called to see how it went.

“Okay, I guess. A lot of questions. I thought there’d be more…I don’t know…more therapy, I guess.”

“That’s just the first day. It’s like you with your students, doing ice breakers and asking them to write about where they went to high school and stuff. She just needs to figure out where you’re at. You’ll see. It’ll get better.”

“I hope so.”

“It really does get easier,” she said. “I know it sounds like I’m patronizing you right now, but trust me.”

“I guess,” I said, not wanting to show Miranda the depth of my disbelief. Sam was more than a best friend. He was my lover, my partner, my
husband
. Aside from the loss of a child, could any loss feel worse? Could it really get easier? I so longed to go back to a time when I at least believed that such things did.

“In the meantime, just fake it ‘til you make it,” said Miranda.

If she only knew what crappy advice
that
was.

Chapter Seven

June

           
S
INCE LEAVING SCHOOL, I’D GAINED TEN POUNDS and couldn’t get out of bed before eleven o’clock, so I’m not sure how well the therapy was working. I liked Melody, though, and seeing her gave me something to do once a week. The rest of my time consisted of going to the lake on the Edmund College campus and feeding the ducks, sitting in Perch (Sam’s and my coffee shop hangout), re-reading all the books we’d read together, and watching a lot of TV. Neither of us had ever considered ourselves couch potatoes, but we had our must-sees: episodes of the British version of
The Office
on the BBC, box sets of
The West Wing
and
Boston Legal
series,
The Daily Show
and
The Colbert Report
right before bed, baseball and football games, especially during the playoffs, and tennis Grand Slams. Now I watched marathons of sitcoms, talk shows, reality competition shows, just about everything but Fox News. I hadn’t realized how much crap repeated itself, as if all TV viewers suffered from short-term memory loss. Over and over and over and over again.

            Maggie and I called each other at least twice a week, and she often tried to coax me to do more productive things with my time.

            “Make something good come out of this,” she’d say. “Travel. Go see your mom or your brothers. Hell, come see
me
. Or write. Start those journal articles you’ve been wanting to write. Talk to your editor and work on that new collection of essays.”

            “I just don’t have the desire to write anymore, Mags. All my energy has been sucked out of my body. There doesn’t seem to be any point to it.”

            “What does your therapist say about it?”

            “She’s very into goal setting. And lists. She tries to get me to make a list of things to do for the day, the week, the month…that sort of thing.”

            “And are you doing it?”

            “What’s on the list? Sometimes.”

            “What’s the point of you going to therapy if you’re not going to apply it?” she asked, a hint of frustration lingering.

            “Well, we talk. She asks me a lot of questions.”

            “What does she say about your lack of motivation?”

            “She hasn’t really said anything yet.”

***

            The operative word was “yet.” Sure enough, at our next session, when Melody asked me if I’d achieved anything on my goal list, I’d answered her with the same blasé attitude as I had with Mags.

            “Andi,” she said in a professional tone. “I’m growing concerned about your lack of activity and effort.”

            I gave her the same excuse I gave Maggie.

            “That’s what goal-setting is for,” she said. “It’s to get you over that hump and recharge your batteries. You have no energy because you’re working so hard to avoid the pain of grieving. You’re shutting yourself down as a form of damage control. The leftover is for survival—just enough to get through the day.”

            My insides tightened and felt heavy. “So what am I supposed to do—have another meltdown? I’ve already had at least one, thank you very much. And that one was in the classroom.”

            “And why did you have that meltdown?”

            “I already told you what that was about,” I said, agitated. “My students were talking about getting tanked like it was something glamorous. I couldn’t stand there and let them dis my husband like that.”

            “But they weren’t dissing your husband. They were being young adults getting a taste of freedom for the first time. They were looking for validation to justify their behavior. And they were behaving that way in response to the fear of all the change taking place in their lives.”

            “You sound like
them
.”

“Who is ‘
them
’?” Melody asked. “The students?”

“You’re rationalizing using the ‘kids will be kids’ logic. It doesn’t fly with me. I didn’t need to get tanked at their age. I didn’t need booze and pot to be validated.”

            “What did you need?”

            Her question cut off my fury. What did I need?

            I traveled back to my nineteen-year-old self:
A girl with big hair and little confidence, yo-yoing with her weight. A virgin submerged in the shame of her sexual inexperience, gone into hiding.  Forlorn, hidden, hardly recognizable. God, she looks so desperate, so lonely, so…

            “I needed to be touched,” I answered, my head down, voice withdrawn and regressed, surprised the words came out at all. Melody didn’t respond right away. She seemed to be waiting for me to cry; and yet, even though I felt the urge to do so, my eyes didn’t water.

            Finally, she spoke in a soft, placid tone. “Andi, the response to loss is a response to whatever is unresolved in
us
, whatever losses are called up from our unconscious to be re-lived.”

            “What does that mean?”

            “It means you’re not just grieving the loss of Sam.”

            “Great,” I said. “As if that’s not enough.”

            “All the losses of your life—even the ones that seemed insignificant at the time, like losing a competition or a favorite toy—are going to resurface.”

            “Should I start making a list?”

“This is an opportunity for you. It’s a wonderful opportunity, really. You can finally acknowledge those losses, and
choose
how to respond to them. And you can make choices other than
not
responding, or pretending like everything’s okay.”

“You mean, faking it.”

“Yes. I don’t think faking it works for you.”

“Tell Miranda that,” I said.

            “So, what’s another choice you can make?” She sounded like a school counselor.

I didn’t answer her. The responsibility of choosing was too big, too overwhelming.

            “Think about it,” she said. “Why did you react the way you did to those boys? It was completely out of character for you, yes? You told me that you’re the one who fights for students’ rights and respect, that you took pride in that. So why would you, in turn, choose a response of complete disrespect? What were you really reacting to in that moment?”

            I stared at the floor, my head swimming in confusion, trying to access the answer that lay in waiting on the tip of my tongue. Did I not know it, or did I not
want
to know? In that moment, a wave of terror broke on top of me, and I gripped the sides of the boat-like chair.

            “Oh God, Melody. How could I have done it? How could I have fucked up like that? I mean, my career was the one thing that I always held together. Before Sam, my love life was a train wreck. But my career was always on track. I had complete confidence. And I was
good
at it—my I’m cited in conference papers and scholarly articles. Nedra Reynolds would come up to me after a conference session and say, ‘Great stuff!’”

As if Melody knew these people.

“Even Peter Elbow, the Paul McCartney of rhetoric and composition, once introduced me as ‘The Next Big Thing’. I was trying so hard to get that back.”

            “The important thing is not to get stuck in what I call ‘The One Wrong Move’ syndrome,” she said. “You’ve got to accept it, forgive yourself, and move on. Don’t let it paralyze you. Otherwise you’ll never heal.”

            I looked at her, dejected, my insides fluttering with fear. How was movement possible when I’d all but thrown my career away, and the one who’d turned my love life into just plain ol’ life was gone?

            “I’ve lost everything,” I said, defeated.

            Melody nodded as if I’d just told her it’s raining outside.

            “So,” she said, a hint of optimism in her voice, “what are you going to do about it?”

            Later that evening, I sat in Sam’s study with yet another draft of his eulogy in my lap. Donny Most curled his plump, orange and white body beside me on the sofa and purred lackadaisically. He too now spent the majority of his time in this room. As I read through the draft and re-wrote above crossed out words and sentences and crammed notes in margins, I thought about what Melody said about getting stuck in One Wrong Move. No matter how many times I revised it, even if I turned the eulogy into a prize-winning piece of writing, it could never make up for the crappy draft I’d written and read at the funeral, no more than a leave of absence or a lifetime of therapy could make up for what I’d said to those students that day.

            I could almost hear the thunder of powerlessness so heavy I thought it would bury me alive as it collapsed on me yet again, while the incessant ache for Sam tortured and wrenched every muscle in my body.