If You Could See What I See (24 page)

Pop Pop grinned. Jeepers hissed.

I thought of Aaron.

I thought of Josephine.

My fault.

 

Black rats were running over my body. I was trying to escape, but the rats kept leaping on me, climbing on my shoulders, biting my ears, biting my ankles.

I was back in our apartment in Los Angeles, bleak and small. Aaron walked through the door and I called to him, I screamed at him, to help me, help me.

He saw the rats jumping and lit a joint, then turned into a huge rat himself. He lumbered over to me, opened his mouth wide, and bit my head open. I could see my brains being eaten, chewed. He pushed his joint into my squished brains, then used a sponge to fill the gap.

I could feel myself dying, falling, smashing to the floor, while a massive group of black rats, tails swishing, ate the rest of my body.

When they were done, one black, broken feather floated down to my corpse.

 

I could hardly concentrate at work. I felt off, lost, lonely. Deeply hopeless.

I had meetings. I worked on our complicated Fashion Story. I checked on the revamping of our website, evaluated our order history, and took a serious look at how our call center was performing when people ordered from our catalog.

I was half there. I faked it, but I was half there. I liked Blake. I could trust him. I could love him if I let myself. But no falling in love. No commitment. No future.

Could I have slept with him and not become emotionally involved? I could have tried. I would have tried as hard as I could. Would it have worked?

Maybe.

Probably not.

Now it was over.

I was not going to crash into a wall again headfirst, like I had with Aaron. I couldn’t do it. I was not ready for what Blake wanted.

A well of rage erupted in me. Searing hot, hurtful, all consuming. It was Blake’s way or the highway, and I guess I was stuck on the highway. I picked up a stapler and threw it across my office. It banged a hole in the wall.

Abigail ran in. “Are you all right?”

I was breathing hard, trying to get control. “Yes, I’m fine. Dandy.”

“Can I . . . help you?”

“No. Thank you.”

She left.

I threw another stapler. It made a second hole.

“Still okay?” Abigail shouted.

“Yep.”

No, I wasn’t.

 

Pop Pop got in a fight at doggy day care. I had to leave work to get his ear sewn up at the veterinarian’s. I had to plead with the irritated owner, Hildee, to let him come back. Now he’s on “probation.” Hildee told me, in a serious way, that I had to “talk to Pop Pop about his aggressive behavior.” Pop Pop is now on dog probation. I hardly know what to say.

In the interest of peace, and to get out of the office, I took Lacey and Tory out to dinner at a fish house. Over buttered clams and baked salmon we hashed out the details of The Fashion Story, which Tory called “almost cataclysmic in its strangeness” and Lacey called “visionary. Let’s hope we don’t scare our employees so much with our vision they all quit at once.”

I drank my beer to quell my nerves. Lacey poked at her salmon. Tory ordered another martini.

“Are you crying, Tory?” I asked when she sniffled after dinner.

“No. Yes. But not about The Fashion Story.”

“You miss him a lot, don’t you?” I said it quietly so she wouldn’t screech.

“Yes, I miss Farmer Scotty.”

I put my hand on her fist. Her nails were bright red. “Tory, maybe you should write him an e-mail, a nice e-mail about how you want to start over.”

“No, I can’t do that.”

“Has he filed any divorce papers?” Lacey asked.

“No. He’s probably waiting for me to do it. He’s a nice, nice man, and he knows it will hurt me when the papers come, so he’s waiting for me to do it.” Sniffle, sniffle. “He’s sweet. He’s calm all the time. He always listens and hugs me. He never says anything mean back to me.”

“With one hand you’re pushing him away, and you wave a sledgehammer and a buzz saw to get his attention, and with the other you’re pleading with him to come get you. When he comes, you push him away again,” I said.

“You’re like a great white shark,” Lacey said. “You want more than one husband can give.”

“Why can’t I be with Scotty and not push him away?” Tory cried. “Why can’t I be normal? Why can’t I settle into my marriage and be comfortable?”

“It was your childhood,” Lacey said quietly. “Your loss. Your grief, the feelings of being abandoned, moving in with us. You’re afraid you’ll be abandoned again. It’s part of your genetics now.”

“I know. Intellectually, I get it.” Tory’s lips tightened. “I never felt like I truly belonged anywhere after my parents died. They were there for my birthday party, and a week later, they weren’t.”

I tried to imagine that, I tried to imagine a
five-year-old
dealing with that.

“I know I push you two away by being a mean, blunt, fire thrower before you two can push me back and leave me all alone again.” Tory bit her lip. “I’m so flippin’ brain mangled.”

“I’m flippin’ brain mangled, too, Tory,” I said. “Let me tell you about my nightmares again and how I thought I saw Aaron drinking coffee the other day at a café and I actually went into the café to check. I think I scared that poor man.”

“And I feel like my brain has been divided into five parts,” Lacey said. “For Matt, each of the kids, and the baby, and there’s no brain left over for me to think with. I push, you push. We’re still sisters, Tory. Always.”

“We love you, Tory,” I said. “We’re a family.”

“I love you, too,” Lacey said. “We fight, but I always love you underneath.”

“You do?” Tory asked.

“Yes,” Lacey and I both said. I leaned over and hugged Tory, then Lacey hugged her.

“I worry about you two giving up on me and deserting me. I didn’t like it when you were gone, Meggie,” Tory said. She drank her martini. “I chronically worry about Scotty leaving me, too. During our whole marriage I would wake up in the middle of the night, scared down to my toes, and I would hug him tight, but whenever there’s the slightest problem, I blow up and I tell myself I’ll leave him before he leaves me, and before I know it I’ve slammed out of the house and end up wondering how I landed on the sidewalk with my suitcases and Jimmy Choos.”

“But you understand how screwed up you are,” Lacey said. “Can’t you work with that?”

“Tory, try to date him.” I thought the words
screwed up
were inflammatory. “Go after him.”

“Too scared to do that. What if he rejects me, decides he’s better off without me? Then what do I do? Build another penis?” Tory sniffled. “Back to The Fashion Story. I can’t take any more of this irritating sentimentality and cheesy emotion. It’s making my liver hurt. I need to bash my punching bag.”

The Fashion Story meeting continued. One question was when to tell the employees what we were planning. The conversation between Lacey and Tory was so much softer this time around.

I think it was the “I love yous.”

 

Tory remembers both her parents, she remembers their love for her.

I wondered about my own father, Sperm Donor Number Two, that night. I knew that Lacey sometimes wondered about Sperm Donor Number One.

My mother said they were romantic quickies and she “hardly knew a smidgen of a thing” about them. Yet she’d had a goal: get pregnant.

Brianna O’Rourke is an original.

For the hundredth time, though, I thought: What right did she have to do what she did? She found two men that appeared to have everything she was looking for. She checked them out as one might check out a horse—hair, teeth, tail, brains, genitalia. She bopped into bed at a time when she knew she would get pregnant. She walked away. She didn’t tell them about the babies.

What right did she have to do that to them? Most men would desperately like to know if they have children. She took that choice away from them. She took away the opportunity for Lacey and me to have fathers.

I love my mother but, like all of us, including my deeply flawed soul, she is not perfect.

Sperm Donors One and Two were out there somewhere.

Where?

Who were they?

And why did I care at this point anyhow?

She left another message on my phone. This time she swore at me and called me lots of graphic names. “You’re trying to hide from this, Meggie, but it will never work. Everyone will know what kind of person you are. Are you stupid enough to think you can get away with this?”

She told me what kind of person she believed me to be in another hail of swear words. Her vocabulary was impressive.

I felt nauseated and lay down on the floor of my tree house. I watched the maple leaves fluttering until I stopped trembling. Pop Pop licked my face.

I deleted the message.

 

“I have an idea for you, Aunt Meggie.”

“Great, Hayden. What’s the idea?” He was wearing red jeans and a white T-shirt, his hair pulled back in a ponytail.

“Tassels.”

“Tassels?”

“Yes, swinging tassels. Glittery, snazzy. We can attach them to the middle of the bra cup, the sides of the panties, the butt cheeks of the panties, the tops of garters, all for fun. They could be gold or silver or sparkly. You know, add some swing and pizzazz. See? I drew some pictures.”

Hayden had used a black charcoal pencil to outline a woman’s form and then had added the lingerie and tassels.

“We could call them Nipple Tassels, Hip Swingin’ Tassels, and Tail Tassels.”

“Tail?”

“Yes. Look at this drawing.”

I looked. The woman had a tail tassel, starting midbottom and hanging down about a foot. It was gold. There were other tassels, about six inches long, that could be looped through a tiny plastic clasp, one for the center of each bottom cheek.

“So if they’re dancing in front of their husbands or boyfriends or girlfriends, the tassels will swing, too, like twirly birds, you know? Like a pinwheel.”

“I like it.”

“You do, Aunt Meggie?” His face was so hopeful.

“Yes. I do. It’s kinky, but a kick.”

“Totally fab. And they’re pretty. I like the pretty part. We can make them sparkly if we want to. Shiny. You can pick out your bra color, then your tassels. They’re for romantic rendezvous, but when she’s not on the romantic rendezvous anymore, she can slip the tassels off the tiny hooped claps and go to her job as a lawyer or a doctor or a painter or a mom, whatever she does.”

“Duo-function.”

“Yes. Then ladies don’t feel like they’re wasting money. We’re respecting her wallet.”

“We’d have a whole other market with the strippers.”

He blushed. “I was thinking that. We could also sell to Vegas. . . .”

“You betcha. Vegas, here we come!”

“Woo-woo!” He put a fist in the air.

“Woo-woo!”

We had a plan for tassels.

I think there’s a market for ’em.

16

I
s there a phrase called “personal fraud”? That’s what I think was committed against me by Aaron.

Aaron did not tell me about his mental health history before we were married. I, as his fiancée, had a right to know. To me, that was fraud.

To me, that was very personal.

Which made it, in my mind, personal fraud.

Should I have waited longer to marry him? Absolutely. I was completely at fault there. I was swept up in love and lust, my brain nonfunctioning.

When I dated Aaron, twice during the six months we dated, he wouldn’t see me. He told me he had “the bluesy blues,” then sang a humorous song about it over the phone. He didn’t see me for about a week after the song, then apologized, saying he didn’t want his “bluesy blue” mood to bring me down. “You don’t deserve that, My Meggie.”

The next time he sunk into a depressive pit, he told me he had the flu and didn’t want to get me sick. I had to go out of town the next day for three weeks for work, so I was not around to see that he had to be recommitted to a clinic by a friend of his. I was never told of the straitjacket, or how he pounded his head against the wall in the seclusion room.

Aaron finally told me, after attempting to jump from the building in L.A., with huge impatience, as if my questions were an affront to his sensibilities, that he had a problem with depression. “Had a problem with it comin’ after me since I was a kid. My dad yelled all the time, choked my mom. He went to jail for a few years, had a drug record before that.... I haven’t seen him for twenty years, he didn’t care about me. . . . Don’t ask me anything about my mom, I don’t want to talk about that bitch, I hate her, she’s a drunk loser, I’ve got some bad secrets about her, and I’m not sharing them, Meggie. Those secrets were her fault....

“Yeah, I tried to kill myself twice in high school . . . once in college, with pills . . . too much alcohol . . . I had to go to the hospital . . . a clinic a few times, stayed for weeks . . . I’m not a mental whack job like the guys in there . . . I didn’t belong there. . . .”

I drove him to the hospital one night in our second year of marriage when he was raving. It was the second time I’d done it. I thought he’d lost his mind. He’d taken painkillers chased with vodka.

They committed him.

I cried.

Cried for him, cried for me.

I felt selfish for crying for myself, but I couldn’t help it.

I had a right to know Aaron’s mental health history before I married him. What was my obligation to him as his wife? Would I have to spend the rest of my life with him in depressed chaos? Did my wedding vows extend to this? What about his lies of omission before the wedding? I was no longer in love with him. I didn’t love him. Most of the time I didn’t even like him, couldn’t stand to be with him, but I was afraid to leave him. I knew he’d try to kill himself if I did.

I felt tremendously sorry for him, for his acute suffering.

But he was a mean terror to live with, and I went from a funky, happy, productive filmmaker to a woman who would look up at the sky and wonder if the last thread of her own sanity was slowly being pulled out of her head.

 

I wanted to talk to Blake.

I wanted to laugh with him.

I wanted to see him.

My wish partly came true on Saturday night. It was dark, the trees swaying in a gusty wind. I was chasing after Pop Pop, who was out on one of his “adventures” Regan had told me about. He was not obeying my commands to stop, but he was smiling back at me.

Blake drove by. He waved, but he didn’t stop. I wondered if he’d been on a date.

I did not bother wiping off my tears.

Blake’s rejection hurt right through to the core. The problem with people like me who are emotionally unhinged is that we think with a tsunami of bad experiences flooding our brains. We think with insecurity, and raging pain, all triggered by what has come before. We see threats to us personally lurking around corners, curves, and right angles.

I am not taking his rejection well or rationally.

Too screwed up for that.

I miss him.

 

“Mom’s on that talk show,
Four o’Clock with Chloe and Charles
.” Lacey walked into my office, a hand on her stomach. Tory and I had actually been trying on new lingerie that we hoped would sell well. She was in purple, I was in light pink.

Lacey stopped, hands on her hips. “Both of you are so pretty you make me sick. Your stomachs are flat, you have skinny hips. Look at me.” She spread her arms out. “I think I have three babies in there and one in my butt.” She turned on the TV. “Let’s see what outrageous things Mom has to say today.”

Tory said, “What am I going to learn from the world’s greatest sexpert today?” We sat on the couch together. Hanging out in lingerie is something the three of us have done since we were teenagers.

The hosts, Chloe and Charles, were like Barbie and Ken. Plastic. Overly groomed. Blinding white teeth. Cheshire cat smiles.

“Brianna,” Chloe said, “people say you are the best sex educator in the country.”

“Thank you, Chloe, that’s lovely to hear.” Our mother was dressed in a bold, clingy purple dress and red heels, her red curls pushed off her face and down her back.

“You’ve taught all of us a lot about . . . sex.” Chloe was an uptight blonde. She did not look like she would enjoy sex.

“Sex is a natural and normal part of life. So are orgasms, which is what we’re going to talk about today.” Our mother grinned, tilted her head, so innocent.

The audience clapped and hooted.

Chloe visibly cringed. “We are?” She shuffled through her paperwork. No! No way! That
couldn’t
be the topic. “Who told you—”

“I don’t think that’s on our agenda . . .” Charles said, alarmed, but smiling gamely. “I don’t think we’re allowed to say that O word . . .”

“Charles is a blowhard,” Tory said. “Looks like he’s talking with his balls in his mouth.”

“Thank you for the graphic, Tory,” I said.

“He does look like that,” Lacey mused. “Those chipmunk cheeks . . .”

“A good question is, how do you know that a man or a woman will be your perfect orgasmic match?” my mother asked, overriding both of them. “It’s quite simple: Look for qualities in their personality that would transfer well to an orgasm. Are they thoughtful? Protective? Giving and generous? Is there a desire there to please you? Do they love and care about you? Are they confident and adventurous? Passionate, humorous? Or, are they critical, selfish, narcissistic, egotistic, overly macho, rigid, boring, nonreflective? If so, you’re going to be nonorgasmic. A nonmatch.”

“She is so blunt,” Lacey said.

“She’s right though,” I said.

“Scotty always did it for me,” Tory said. “Always. I never missed an orgasm. He always had me go first. Ladies first.”

“Not having orgasms in life will dry you up,” our delicate, Southern belle/Irish elf mother said. “Not only will it dry up your vagina, it will dry up your mind, your soul, your creativity, your joy, your sense of vitality and spirit. Sex is not fun without orgasms—can we all say that aloud?”

The audience tittered as my mother turned to them.

“Don’t be embarrassed! Let’s be truthful, let’s be honest, people. Say it with me. ‘Sex is not fun without orgasms.’ ”

The audience dutifully said, “Sex is not fun without orgasms,” then laughed. “One more time!” my mother encouraged. The audience repeated themselves, this time with more gusto. The camera panned their faces. Oh, this was fun! Brianna was fun!

“We women might say to ourselves, well, I do still enjoy sex even without the orgasm because I like the closeness. But that’s bull-
beeeeeppp!
” Our mother waved a finger. “That isn’t true and the woman is deceiving herself. She must tell her man what she needs in order to achieve orgasm. She has to gather her womanly courage together.”

Chloe and Charles wriggled uncomfortably. The censors!

“Now, here is what not to do. One of my clients had not had an orgasm in two years and she was absolutely furious with her husband for not noticing it. He was blind to her and her successful sexual health, so one night, when he’s done and rolls off, she picks up a broom and starts hitting him with it. She actually chased him around the house, screaming that she hadn’t had an orgasm in two years and he hadn’t noticed or cared. Don’t do this. What should she have done?”

Next came a surprise.

“She should have told him to keep going until she had her orgasm,” Chloe said, with a snarky snip to her voice. “What, it’s only for him? Get your kicks in and go to sleep? She should have told him to man up, put some effort in, and get the job done. She’s not a plastic blow-up doll. She’s a woman!” As soon as the words were out, Chloe looked like she wanted to melt into the floor and disappear.

Charles said, “But he would never forget the broom incident, so that’s good, right, Brianna?”

“She should have told him what to do to make her have an orgasm a long time ago,” my mother said. “She should have sat him down at the kitchen table and, using a banana and a circular rind of orange peel, a cherry, and an olive, showed him. Then she should have led him to the bedroom for his first lesson. It’s partly her fault for being spineless and not speaking up, demanding her orgasm, and it’s partly his fault for being a selfish monkey and bad in bed.”

“A selfish monkey!” Charles said, then laughed, a tiny and scratchy laugh.

“You notice when your wife has an orgasm, right, Charles?” My mother turned to him in her clingy purple dress.

Charles blushed. “Uh, oh, yeah. Yeah. I know. She makes it . . . uh . . .
clear.
”

My mother looked at him skeptically. That would be the word: skeptically.

Tory said, “He’s a hopeless fool, obsessed with his pecker and his pleasure.”

Lacey said, “Clueless. Totally clueless.”

I said, “Arrogantly ignorant. The worst type.”

“Charles, you need to take more time with your wife,” my mother said. “Remember: foreplay. But you need foreplay before the foreplay. Nothing is sexier than a man vacuuming or unloading the dishwasher, unless he’s doing both nude. Let me be bold and blunt. Most women will take bad sex for only a certain amount of time, then they’ll turn off and tune out. You men won’t be getting laid much anymore. She’ll have her excuses, like a headache or fatigue, but basically, she doesn’t like sex with you. You men have to pay attention to the orgasm. You do that, don’t you, Charles? It’s not all about you, right?”

Charles went pale, then red. “I pay attention! I do! Good attention!”

“See, an orgasm is not simply a culmination of the sex. It’s the pinnacle of the relationship in bed. There can be multiple orgasms, multiple small ones, then a larger one, or a large orgasm. It will be different each time, but what there can’t be is
no
orgasm.”

“Charles looks like he wants to choke on his chipmunk cheeks,” I said.

“Yep, he does,” Tory said. “He’s reviewing his last encounter and is probably realizing that he was as lame as a limp snake in bed.”

“No orgasm,” my mother said, “is bad.” She turned to the audience. “We don’t want to be bad in bed, do we?”

“No!” the audience said.

Charles swallowed hard, eyes darting. Chloe looked pissed.

“Sex is not fun without an orgasm, right, audience?”

“Right!” the audience yelled back to her. Fun fun, Brianna!

“Right!” Chloe said. She glared at the camera.

“I know we’re running out of time, but if I can add that lingerie does make bedroom time special time,” my mother said. “A woman is much more likely to orgasm if she feels fabulous. Take a peek at the lingerie I have on under my dress.”

My mother stood up, unsnapped her purple dress, yanked it wide open, stuck out a hip and a knee, and smiled. She was in a red bustier, red lacy underwear, and a matching gauzy miniskirt. The audience went wild at this semiflashing.

Chloe’s mouth dropped. Charles fidgeted.

“My mother owns a lingerie business called Lace, Satin, and Baubles. This is from the Tory’s Temptations line. See how this bustier lifts the girls right up? See how there’s a skirt to cover the tops of the thighs? Isn’t the top of the thigh a problem place for women?”

“Yes!” the audience shouted back to her.

“Note the color. Bright red. Flirty. Naughty. And don’t forget the heels. They give you a sleek and curvy line, and we feel powerful in our heels, don’t we, ladies?”

“Yes!” the audience agreed, even the men.

She put her purple dress back together. “Now, the next time I’m on your show I’m going to talk about sex toys, but let me leave you with this: An orgasm a day keeps you ready for play! Can we say that, audience?”

“An orgasm a day keeps you ready for play!” We love you, fun Brianna!

“Ladies and gentlemen, our favorite sex therapist, Brianna O’Rourke,” Chloe announced, smiling and clapping. Charles was still blushing, but he appeared contemplative, baffled, confused.

The audience was on their feet.

Tory in her purple lingerie, Lacey in her maternity dress, and I in my pink lingerie sat back and cackled.

“I love you, Mother!” Lacey said, blowing a kiss to the screen.

As if on cue, our mother kissed her hand and blew a kiss to the audience, waving her hand.

She does that every time, and you know who the kiss is for?

Lacey, Tory, and me.

We blew a kiss back to her.

Tory’s Temptations sold thousands.

Gave us more time.

 

My mother called me about an hour later. I complimented her on her appearance on Chloe and Charles while I had a slice of peach cobbler. I smeared peanut butter on the top of it. Yum.

“Thank you, dear. I am e-mailing you a photo of Lacey’s baby’s blessing quilt. I’m having a difficult time with the colors. Can you help me with it? Are you eating vegetables?”