Checked (20 page)

I go on. “We dated for about a year in high school and then tried the long distance thing during college. I was at Pierce, and he stayed home and went to school here. Over break we were finally able to spend some time together.”

“And you came here. For nachos.”

“Right. We’d done that many times before in high school. But it was different this time. Everything was different.”

“How so?” He says it in a way that makes me feel like I’m on the couch in his office, spilling out my problems.

“Well…college really changed him. Half a year of it, and he was totally different. Different priorities. Different interests.” Pause. “Different thoughts about me.”

“Different in what way?”

As I take a prolonged sip of my drink, the waitress arrives with our food. Already. The people upstairs must be doing a lot more drinking than eating.  

My first bite tastes just as I remembered. All two hundred calories of it.

He starts to eat his nachos too. After he swallows, he leaps right back into our conversation. “Okay—how was he different with you?”

One. Two. Three.

“He, um, Tony, wasn’t the generous, patient guy from high school anymore. I started to realize this during the few times he came to visit me at college, but I tried to ignore it.”

He continues to eat but keeps his eyes on me. Concerned. Patient.

“I think he’d had it with my whole OCD thing. In high school, he actually seemed to find it somewhat endearing, cute or something. Maybe he thought I was just making it up for his benefit—I don’t know. But he had infinite patience with me back then.” I pause to decide where to go next with my story, and he jumps in quickly.

“Eat, Callie. Please. I want to hear all of this, but please don’t forget to eat too.”

I nod and pick up a small pile of nachos, tomatoes, and melted cheese. Another couple of hundred calories, no doubt. He smiles his appreciation and nods for me to continue talking.

“When he came to visit me for the first time at Pierce, we fought most of the time. It was weird because we had spent months planning and looking forward to his visits, looking forward to being alone and being on our own, away from our parents. I never would have thought that our freedom would ultimately break us up.”

He nods his head toward my plate, and I obediently take another bite.

“We broke up shortly after that last trip to this restaurant,” I say in closing.

“I’m having trouble seeing how your trip here was instrumental in ending the relationship.” Well, that sounded rather doctory. “Callie, I’m glad you have been able to open up a little, but I need more so I can help you better.”

Fabulous.
Should’ve kept my mouth shut.

“Can you do that?”

I nod. Reluctantly.

He smiles. “All right. Why don’t you take another bite, a big one, and then tell me again about your last visit to this restaurant? No glossing over important details.”

UGH.
I have to talk AND eat. Aren’t we tackling too many things at once?

He’s still staring at me so I acquiesce. I said I would try. I take a slightly bigger bite than the last one, knowing I’m way over my calorie count now. After swallowing, I begin again, forcing myself to think back to my last few weeks with Tony.
{Next up, we have Gotye with
“Somebody That I Used to Know.”
}

“Like I said before, Tony really changed when he went to college. He met new friends who I really didn’t know but knew I didn’t like. From what I could tell from the stories Tony would tell and the new phrases he used, this group was pretty judgmental about people who were different from the norm. Their norm. Or what they thought the norm should be, I guess.

“They made not just little jokes but really cruel comments about people who didn’t fit into their vision of normal. Gay people. Overweight people. People who weren’t overly smart. And the list goes on. God only knows what they would’ve thought of me if we had ever been introduced.”

I take a sip of my diet soda. “Well, I guess I do know. They probably would have seen me the same way Tony had started to see me.”

“How was that?” he prods while simultaneously nodding toward my nachos.

I force another delicious two hundred or so calories into my mouth, chew, and swallow before continuing.

“He all of a sudden despised any part of me related to the OCD—and that equaled out to be, well, almost all of me.”

He finishes his nachos and leans back in his chair, all attention on my little fairy tale.

I continue. “I wasn’t even that bad back then. I mean, not like now. But it was still too much for him.

“During those couple of trips to Pierce, Tony tried to ‘fix’ me.” I meet his eyes with a small smile. “His immersion treatment consisted of screaming at me when he saw me checking something, reading me articles to try to disprove my religious beliefs, purposefully messing up spaces and items that I’d cleaned and telling me I needed to go to bed or leave my dorm room without fixing them…that kind of stuff.

“Oh, and making biting, sarcastic comments about my OCD in front of my roommate, friends, and family. He was bashing me, bullying me, to try to cure me. It was ridiculous.”

“How did your family and friends react to that?”

“You have all the right therapist questions just waiting to burst out of your mouth, don’t you?” I blurt out without thinking.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
He looks melancholy again.

I smile as quickly as my face will allow to show him that I am only teasing.

He smiles back.

Whew.
Quick fix.

“I’m pretty sure my family and friends didn’t like him. When Tony would start with the malicious OCD commentary, they would often try to change the conversation. Or at least lighten it up a bit.”

He looks confused.

“We’ve always laughed about my OCD. My parents, my friends, me most of all, probably. I think we have to laugh about it because we all know that some of the stuff I do is ridiculous. Again, probably me most of all.”

He still has a confused look on his face. I’m guessing he never found a lighter way of looking at his mother’s condition.

I can’t say that I’m very surprised.

“Come on,” I say with a grin. “It is ridiculous. Washing my hands until they bleed. Being afraid that I’ll catch diseases through the cuts on my hands. Washing my hands more to try to stop thinking about the diseases. It’s an ugly cycle. Absolutely ludicrous.”

He is still listening, seemingly surprised by my words.

I continue my list of absurdities. “The checking, the routines. I know they don’t make sense. But I also know that I can’t do anything else unless I go through them. So I have to do them.”

When I look at his face again, I can’t say that all of the confusion is gone, but he is smiling again. He also reminds me to keep eating.

I eat another mouthful of nachos before continuing.

“If you think about the ridiculousness of it, it really is a little funny.”

“It is,” he says slowly. “I just haven’t had too many patients who see it that way. Or at least I don’t get that impression from them.”

Yeah. But you don’t treat patients like me.

Thank the Lord my mind filters that thought before it heads to my mouth.

“I have to look at it that way when I can. If I took it seriously all of the time, I think I might actually go insane. The whole way.”

“It’s something for me to think about, I guess,” he says before AGAIN pointing to my nachos. “But for now, let’s get back to that charming ex-boyfriend of yours.”

I look him in the eye and pretend to gasp. “Dr. Blake, did you just make a joke about my situation?”

And he smiles at me. With his mouth
and
his eyes.

It feels like freaking Christmas morning. No—better.

{Damien—again.}

“You aren’t the only one learning during this therapy, Callie.”  He pauses. “Now, tell me about this guy.” He pauses again. “After you eat another bite.”

“Aren’t you bossy tonight?” I shoot back. But then I take another bite and delve back into my past.

“Tony wasn’t teasing or laughing. He was ridiculing, chastising. As though he thought I had the control to simply stop the checking, the routines, the thoughts.”

More soda. “He didn’t get it. That was very apparent during his visits to Pierce. It was also apparent that he was embarrassed by me.”
{Back to Gotye—the refrain now.}
“Looking back, I wish it would have ended then, before our holiday break. Because it only got worse.”

“How so?” he says while looking pointedly at my food.

I pretend not to notice his glance and try to answer his question. “Well, a lot of things were bad. He tried even harder to cure me, as he called it. He kept telling me that I needed to loosen up. I guess he was trying to make me as presentable as he could before introducing me to his new friends. That meeting never happened anyway.”

“More eating.”

As I begrudgingly take another nacho, he says, “Tell me what happened the night you came here.”

One. Two. Three.
Get it over with, Callie.

“Okay. It wasn’t the first time he did something like this, but it was the most memorable. Like I said before, his new friends were all concerned about being ‘normal’ and keeping up with their images.”

I take a minute to swallow the handful of rocks creeping into my throat, realizing that I’ve never actually said this aloud before.

Picking at my fingernails (secretly—under the table), I continue. “He was always talking about new college students gaining the ‘freshman fifteen.’ He’d even point out people around my dorm who looked bigger to him than they did during a previous visit. Sometimes, he also told me about running into friends from high school who’d gained some weight.

“I just kind of brushed it off when he mentioned it because I didn’t gain any weight during my freshman year. I weighed the same as I did in high school. And I wasn’t really concerned about weight back then because I was pretty thin, not a size zero or anything, but nothing to worry about.

“I guess I just ignored his comments because I assumed he was only making small talk about other people. Just strange, kind of obsessive conversation.”

The nail polish is gone on my left hand. I start on my right hand immediately.

“That night, though, the last time I was here, it seemed like a lot more than small talk. To me anyway.”

Here goes. And with only four more nails to pick.

“We were here with two other couples, friends from high school. They had all gone to nearby colleges so they stayed home and basically continued living as they had in high school. No long distance. No weeks and months apart. No growing completely apart from one another.

“We sat at a table upstairs. Tony and I were on one side with Kim while Jess and Luke were on the other side with Matt. Luke had his arm around Jess throughout the entire evening. Kim and Matt held hands across the table. Tony and I sat side by side, once in a while accidentally bumping arms or feet.

“When I ordered my nachos, like I always did, he stopped me. Right in front of four friends I hadn’t seen in months. With the waitress standing there taking our order. ‘Callie,’ he said, ‘are you sure you want to order those?’ Then he nudged me and used a singsong voice to say, ‘Don’t forget the freshman fifteen.’”

Only one finger left with nail polish on it. Gonna have to work at it slowly.

“I brushed it off as I always had and ordered my nachos. I was somewhat irritated, but I assumed he was just being stupid and trying to make the other guys laugh.

“The others didn’t laugh though, and Tony didn’t stop. After the waitress left, he elbowed me again and said, ‘Can’t have my Callie getting fat.’”

I pause. “Then he—” Deep breath. Nail polish is gone. Count. One. Two. Three. One. Two. Three. One—

“Callie? Do you want to stop?”

I shake my head, keeping my eyes down on the table. I want to get this over with, not start it all over again at a later session.

“Callie.” He says it again, even more delicately this time.

His hand appears in my line of vision. Upturned. Waiting for my hand
. {Your turn again, Mr. Rice.}
I move my hand out from under the table and place it in his hand. His thumb immediately rubs over my thumb nail and then pointer nail.

He knew I was out of nail polish. Of course.

“Go on, Callie.”

One. Two. Three.

“Then he, well, he pinched at the skin on the side of my stomach, as though assessing whether or not he needed to worry about fat on my body. He then made a sort of ‘tsk tsk’ sound to imply that, I don’t know, that he wanted me not to order nachos? To stop eating altogether?

“I really don’t know what he meant for sure. I was too busy being mortified. The girls with me, Kim and Jess, had incredulous looks on their faces. There was also some pity in their eyes, but I’m pretty sure there was something else too. Anger. They both looked really pissed.

“I didn’t blame them. They were both about my size.”

He squeezes my hand as he asks, “What did you do?”

“Nothing. Kim introduced a new topic of conversation, and I tried to ignore the whole situation. I sat a little farther away from him during dinner, and I didn’t eat more than three nachos.”

I pause, but I don’t look up. I don’t want to see what is in his eyes. Not yet.

“I made it through the evening without losing it. When I got home, I stared at myself in the mirror from every possible angle. Cried a little too. But then, like I said, we broke up soon after.”

“Who broke it off?”

“He did.” Pause. “But I should have. Every time he touched me after that night, all I could feel was him pinching the skin on my stomach.”

“And then you started the fourteen hundred calories a day thing, because of him?”

“Sort of. I guess I went a little extreme at first. Much less than fourteen hundred.”

“Like eight hundred?”

My head springs up before I can think to stop it. “Yes. Exactly.”

I search his eyes for an answer to my unspoken question, but I find no response. So I ask. “How?”
How do you know about this?
Did I write this in one of my emails and forget? Doubtful. Did his mom have this problem too?