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  Rio laughs. “Best guess? Your mother knew all along and was happy as a pig in shit that someone else was seeing to old Marty’s needs so she didn’t have to.”

  “That is ridiculous,” I shout at him. My voice sounds especially loud because he refuses to shout back. I hate it when people do that. It makes me feel as if I am overreacting. Can you overreact to finding out that your father has been sleeping with both your mothers?

  “Which is more likely—” he asks me, throwing an eye toward the doorway to make sure the kids aren’t listening “—that June would mess that pink hair of hers or that Marty would mess around?”

  “What if Angelina got pregnant? I could have a half sister who’s younger than my daughter! Did he ever think of that? And Angelina! What was she thinking? All those years of telling me about respecting myself and saving myself—do you know what she used to say about you?” I ask, rooting around in the cabinet.

  “That I wanted to jump your bones?” Rio teases, clearly trying to lighten the atmosphere, to make a joke out of the whole thing.

  “Oh, my God!” I say, turning to him with a Spode china teapot in my hand. “She said you’d cheat on me. That all men cheat.”

  “Well, she’d know, huh?” Rio says, apparently hoping to end the thing right here. “What are you looking for, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Anything she gave me so that I can give it back.” I hold up the Spode teapot. “Did she give me this or did your mother?”

  “You’re driving yourself crazy,” he says.

  But that particular car has left the lot.

  I see the two Teddis, in yellow sequins with feather boas like the Supremes’ backup singers, dancing across the kitchen singing “Stop in the Name of Sanity”!

  “Just stop this whole business, Ted. Now.”

  I slam the teapot on the counter and pull out a cut-glass pitcher. Carefully, I put it in a Ziploc bag and then in a brown grocery bag. I hold it at arm’s length, and despite the warnings from the Supremes, their hands stuck up like crossing guards, drop the package onto the tile floor. It thuds rather than tinkles as it shatters.

  Dana pokes her head into the kitchen. “Is everything all right, Mom?”

  “Peachy keen,” Rio says sarcastically. “You remember this, Dana, when your mother says she’s feeling better, or when your grandfather says there’s nothing wrong with her. You’re watching your mother lose her mind.”

  “Mom?” Dana asks, and the fear rattles her voice.

  “Don’t bother her now,” Rio says, shooing her away from the doorway. “She’s busy going off her rocker.”

  “Haven’t I been good to you,” I sing, waving my arms like Diana Ross while Dana backs out of the room. “Haven’t I been sweet… Make sure Jesse isn’t killing Alyssa, honey, would you?” I shout after her.

  The old oak clock in the kitchen ticks loudly, as if it is counting the seconds before I explode.

  “You gotta stop this,” Rio says, picking up the paper bag and gingerly putting it in the garbage. “Or I’m warning you, you’re gonna wind up sharing a room with your wacko mother at South Winds.”

  “How? I mean, what do you suggest?” I ask him. “Forget what my mother told me? Forget being so sure she was wrong, racing over to my parents’ house and finding Angelina’s nightshirt on the back of their bathroom door?”

  He shakes his head at me, shrugging as if he’s out of suggestions. Maybe, he suggests, I need some kind of help. He mentions tranquilizers, alludes to shock treatments. “Or maybe all you need is a little time away from the kids, like you say, away from being a mommy.”

  “A vacation?” We haven’t taken a vacation alone, without the kids since…well, since ever.

  “Well, not a vacation, per se. I can just see you on one of those. You’d spend the whole time worrying about the kids. I mean, it’s not like we could leave them with your mom, and now, with this business with Angel—Hey! What would you say to a week or two at South Winds? You know the staff there and you know—” he starts.

  I pull away from him and get to my feet. “Stop saying that!” I shout, grabbing the dishcloth from the counter and throwing it at him. “South Winds is not some kind of resort, for Christ’s sake. And I am not crazy!”

  He fields another towel and a box of Jell-O. “No?’ he says.

  And then he has the nerve to laugh.

  CHAPTER 5

  I am so certain that seeing a psychiatrist is a bad idea that I nearly bolt from the waiting room. What does my mother’s doctor know about my needs that he’s sent me here to open a vein for this stranger? Why am I the one seeing a doctor? Why don’t they instead make every man who cheats on his wife go to therapy? I imagine a room crowded with men in leisure suits. I don’t want to make adultery seem fashionable, after all. The door opens and in comes my father, Marty Bayer. In comes Mike Lyons. In comes Michael Douglas. Hmm. This appears to be the M adulterers room. For a second I thank God that Rio’s name doesn’t start with an M.

  And then I remember that Rio is short for Mario.

  I am doomed.

  I begin to gather up my things, intent on leaving, when the door to the inner office opens and I am trapped. A woman who looks my age, my weight—a normal, everyday sort of woman—looks directly at me and speaks in a normal, everyday voice. I don’t know what I expected, but she isn’t it.

  “Mrs. Gallon?” she asks, glancing at the name on the folder before extending her hand. “I’m Dr. Benjamin. Won’t you come in?”

  I am frozen in my seat. Until I walk through that door, I am not someone who is seeing a psychiatrist.

  “Mrs. Gallon?”

  I rise and offer her a limp hand before correcting her. “It’s Gallo, like the wine.” I cross the threshold into her office and turn to add, “Not that I do. Whine, that is. As in complain.” I want her to know that I’m not one of those women who’s come to a psychiatrist because no one else she knows is sympathetic enough. “I never whine. It’s very unattractive—according to my mother—and besides, I have nothing to whine about. After all, I’m married, aren’t I? My life is perfect. I don’t even know why I’m here. I’m probably wasting your time and the insurance company’s money. It’s covered, I checked.”

  With that, I perch on the edge of the oversize leather chair on the opposite side of a solid-looking oak desk cluttered with files and photos and a model of a brain. I put my mother’s Louis Vuitton bag (Bobbie insisted I use it so that Dr. Benjamin will know I am a woman of substance) on the floor beside me, but I keep a tight grip on the strap so that if the necessity arises I can make my escape in one motion.

  “So, anyway, it’s not Gallon. It’s Gallo. He’s Italian. I’m Jewish. You used to be able to tell from my nose, but my mother insisted we fix that. Luckily the kids got Rio’s nose, which was a good break, because I would have had to watch my mother like a hawk to make sure she didn’t steal my children from their beds at night and have their noses bobbed. So you already think I’m crazy, right?”

  To my horror, I can’t stop myself from babbling. Of course she thinks I’m crazy. I’m talking a mile a minute about my mother stealing my children. What else can the poor woman think?

  “You know what a Jewish American Princess’s favorite wine is?” I ask, stalling for time. She gestures for me to go on. I do, in a nasally, obnoxious way. “But why can’t we go to Florida?”

  She smiles indulgently.

  “You know Postcards from the Edge? Well, my story is more like Missives from Just Over the Edge. Though I suppose it really doesn’t matter, since it’s Mrs. Gallon you think is crazy, anyway.”

  At least let her think I have a sense of humor.

  She looks as if she may be about to laugh, but she doesn’t. It is merely an acknowledgment that I am trying. Very trying, as my mother always says. Well, I can’t just let things sort of hang out there, so I ask if we can start over. “So you say ‘Mrs. Gallon?’ again, okay?”

  I guess she’s used to dealing with basket cases
, because she seems willing enough to indulge me—even mildly amused, if the little laugh lines crying for Botox by her eyes are any indication. She starts to rise, but I wave her back into her seat.

  “No, no. That’s okay. I’ll pretend you got up. And you can pretend there’s nothing wrong with me.” I find myself nervously licking my lips, and glance at the closed door, which prevents my sort of slipping out if she happens to look away, which she doesn’t. I apologize and explain that I am nervous. “So, what do you think?”

  She patiently waits for me to finish making a total idiot of myself, which I must say I have accomplished rather deftly, and in record time. Finally I decide my best move is to simply shut up.

  “What do I think? That my secretary hit the n instead of the comma. But it was a good icebreaker.” Her voice is warm, friendly, inclusive, as is her smile. “Usually I can’t get people to start talking right away.”

  “So then you don’t think it’s a sign I’m crazy?” I ask her. “All this babbling?” Maybe I can just leave then, having been pronounced all right. I begin to get up, but she motions for me to sit.

  She leans back, lacing her hands together, and says very quietly, very calmly, “Why don’t you tell me what brings you here today.”

  Where to start? There’s my mother. There’s the fact that I am turning thirty-seven, and that is exactly how old my mother was when she went blooey. There’s Mike leaving Bobbie, and the business with my father that I can’t even give a name to without feeling dirty and…

  “I almost hit my daughter,” I blurt out. It is as good a place to start as any. After all, it was a box of Cap’n Crunch sailing out of my hands toward Alyssa’s head the night of the osso buco disaster that made me realize I need help. “With a box.”

  “An odd weapon,” she says, leaning back in her chair as if people tell her every day that they beat their children. How can she be so nonjudgmental about a thing like hitting my baby? I decide I don’t like her at all when she asks, “Why did you choose a box?”

  “I didn’t choose a box,” I say, my voice ripe with disgust. “I mean, I didn’t set out to hit her. I’m not some child abuser, you know. I was throwing the box at my husband and she came into the kitchen at the wrong moment and…” I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Now I am not merely an admitted child abuser, I am a spouse abuser too. One more admission and they can book me on Jerry Springer—“Carton Hurlers Who Hurt,” or something equally awful. “Can I start over?”

  She doesn’t snidely ask “again?” Instead, she stares at me as if she can see right through my white man-tailored shirt and straight into my soul. Amazingly, there is no shock in her gaze, no condemnation. “By all means.”

  “I was very angry,” I say, trying to clarify things but stymied by the fact that I don’t want to tell her what shattered my ability to cope. “I found out something terribly upsetting and I wasn’t taking it very well. And so I broke a pitcher, which had been a gift from this person—the one I found out something about. Only it might have been from my mother-in-law, but I think it was from this person, and my husband suggested that I needed help. So, to prove I didn’t, I threw the dish towel. And that’s really all there was to it.”

  “I thought it was a box,” she says.

  I nod. “After the dish towel,” I tell her. Which was after the Minute Rice, which followed the box of Jell-O, which followed the towel, which was all in the house that Jack built.

  “Why were you so angry?”

  “I was upset, not angry,” I correct her.

  “You said angry.”

  “No,” I say. “I wouldn’t say I was angry. I was upset—about this…thing, but I wasn’t angry.” I don’t know why she is belaboring the point. I know I shouldn’t be arguing with her. She’ll only decide that I am belligerent and not like me.

  “Why don’t you think it was okay to be angry?” she asks. She squints slightly, maybe because the sun is shining brightly into her office, or because she can’t see without straining every last dark secret I am hiding.

  “I didn’t say that.” Honestly, I don’t remember saying it.

  She makes a note in my file (probably that I am argumentative, or repressed or have one foot on the bus to the funny farm), but she lets it slide and asks me how often I am upset enough to throw things, and she emphasizes the word upset as if it is some code word with which she is humoring me.

  It is my own fault, her getting me all wrong. After all, she only knows what I’m telling her. “I never throw things,” I try to explain. “It was just that I learned this terrible thing—”

  “The one that you don’t want to talk about?” And then she asks me if there is anything I do want to talk to her about. I ask her how you know if you’re really going crazy. And I admit that Rio seems to think I am. She is unimpressed with my husband’s diagnosis and tells me that one outburst hardly constitutes a diagnosis of any extraordinary problem that would require psychiatric care.

  I ask if maybe she can write that down so that I can show it to my husband. “Or tattoo it on the back of my neck like a care label? ‘Do not put in the washer or the funny farm.’”

  When she is done laughing, which I’m sure is out of kindness, she tells me that I have a good sense of humor. “The ability to laugh at yourself and your predicament is a gift, you know. And a sign of a sound mind.”

  I tell her that not everyone feels that way—especially my family.

  She caps her pen, smiles and says, “So then, if it was only that one episode…”

  And what do I say? “If only.” I can’t believe it when the words pop out of my mouth. She’s all but dismissed me with a clean bill of mental health. What am I doing? Getting my money’s worth?

  “There’s something else?” she asks.

  And I tell her about how I’m having trouble remembering things.

  “So then you’d say you’re distracted?” she asks, making notes on her pad.

  “I could live with being distracted,” I say, and I can feel the itch inside my nose that means tears may be unavoidable. “But I also remember doing things that I apparently haven’t done.”

  She asks if I can give her an example.

  “I can give you a hundred. Like I go to pick up the dry cleaning, and they say I’ve already picked it up. I argue with them, tell them that they’ve lost my favorite pair of jeans, and then when I get home, there they are, hanging in my closet. There’s planning my daughter’s bat mitzvah, which is a whole other can of worms, and the fact that I know I never canceled those invitations, and then there’s my husband’s suit, which I know I didn’t pick up…”

  Her expression is sympathetic, but she seems noncommittal. I suppose when you’re talking with a psychiatrist, that’s better than being committal, if you get what I mean.

  Anyway, I tell her that all I want is to be in control again. “I want to take care of my children and house and husband. I don’t want to do to them what was done to me.”

  She says we’ll take it one step at a time, then gives me prescriptions for medical tests. Sometimes memory problems can be attributed to physical causes rather than emotional or psychological ones.

  “Are you going to test for Alzheimer’s? I read an article in Good Housekeeping and…”

  She cuts me off, apparently not wanting to hear how I scored on their self-test, and assures me she will rule that out, along with any other possible physical causes. She adds that down the road she may want to do a PET scan, and possibly send me to a good neurologist. But she says that in her honest opinion there is a psychological component that needs addressing.

  And then I untangle my purse and take it on my lap, as if I don’t want to die without it, and I ask the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. “So, do you think I might have a brain tumor or something?”

  She tells me no, flatly, though I notice she doesn’t laugh at the idea, either, but promises not to ignore or rule out any underlying organic cause for my situation, to which I respond with th
e ultimate question. Would something like that be fixable, like if it was a tumor, or something?

  She refuses to allow me to get on that train and tells me that in her office no hypothetical fears are allowed. She says again that she’ll do some routine tests, and then adds that she wants to check my hormone levels and things of that nature. Then, unbelievably, she tells me it could be as simple as early menopause.

  I look down at myself. I’ve had better days. For example, that time when the kids all had the flu and I was going through a super Tampax an hour and I had to run to the drugstore because the Genovese delivery boy was out sick and they couldn’t get the baby aspirin to me. I looked better that day. “I know I look, like, totally crappy,” I admit. “But I’m not anywhere near old enough for menopause. I’m not even sure I’m done having children.”

  “Some women—” she starts, as if it’s all over from here, all a giant downhill skid.

  “Are you saying I can’t have anymore children?” I ask, jumping up from my seat and grabbing my purse all in one motion. “Because I am still a very young woman! I have a five-year-old daughter!”

  “Mrs. Gallo,” the doctor says, and I could swear that she is actually amused by the whole thing. “No one said you were old or that you can’t have more children. Many women have children during perimenopause and often during menopause itself. Sit down and let me explain.” She waits, and when I don’t sit back down, she adds, “Please.”

  “How old are you?” I ask her snidely. “Past childbearing?”

  “Okay,” she says. “Perhaps I should have said premature perimenopause.” I think she is actually smirking at me.