Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) (32 page)

My dad had terrible, rotten, broken teeth. But every time I gently worked the conversation around to getting them fixed, he put me off by saying he didn't want any “welfare teeth.” I couldn't blame him. Now, however, he'd have his own set of beautifully handcrafted teeth made for him by Asmara's Bavarian stepfather, Norbert, who made teeth for a living. As my dad described how Norbert had made a mold for the teeth, he sounded doubtful about the whole thing.

Take the teeth! Take the teeth!
I thought.

“Dad, that's great! Bavarians are known for their handiwork. Those are probably some of the highest-quality teeth you could get anywhere. What a wonderful gift.”

“Yeah, but I'd have to get my teeth pulled out in America and travel to Germany, without any teeth, to get them put in.”

It wasn't my mouth, but that seemed like a small price to pay to repair a chronic condition that could have serious health implications if left untended.

“I'll go with you, Dad,” I said.

“What I really want is to take you and Asmara on a trip around Europe,” my dad said. “You and I could go to Paris to see the cafés where all the writers hung out. We'd take you to Bavaria to see where Asmara grew up. And then the three of us could go to Hungary to see where we're from.”

It was a whole lot easier to plan a dream trip than a trip to Germany, without any teeth. And so I let him change the subject, and I gave him my belief in his great European adventure.

Meanwhile, my dad remained serious about rehabilitating me. He gave me “homework,” to write down everything I wanted from my
dream relationship, and to answer questions about my sense of self from one of his self-help books. I dutifully considered the questions, answered them as honestly as I possibly could, and mailed them to him. I wasn't just doing it for my dad, though. I needed help, and I knew it. But, as for my dad, it was often hard for me to accept assistance, even when it was offered. I wanted to grow and become strong like my sister, but fearing I'd fail to reach my constant goal—perfection—it often seemed scary to even try.

E
ven though I had pushed myself and opened up my life by moving to Los Angeles, I felt stuck. My friends were buying houses, planning weddings, and I still couldn't even pay my bills without falling back on my credit cards. I was looking for help anywhere I could find it. I had become smitten with one of my dad's great passions—isolation tanks—and had written them into the first TV pilot I finished under my Los Angeles mentor's guidance. Now, as a way to support myself while I got my writing career up and running, I wanted to open a business where people could float in a spalike environment. A man had opened just such a space in a suburb of Boston, which I'd tried during one of my trips back home. I e-mailed with the owner about franchising his business in Los Angeles. At a networking event, I was talking about floating when a woman told me she went to a tank that was just a few blocks from where I was living. Not only that, but it was overseen by the son-in-law of the couple my dad often spoke of as the patron saints of
flotation tanks. They had even owned a float business in Beverly Hills in the seventies.

I went to float in the tank, which was the more common “coffin”-style tank. As the body-temperature water and the toxin-clearing saline soothed me, I began to feel a rising sense of possibility. In fact, by the time I climbed out of the tank and showered off the salt, I was euphoric. It was like a postworkout endorphin rush, magnified a thousandfold, and I was sure it could be the next big thing in LA.

I found a woman with a hundred thousand dollars to invest and took her to float, convinced it was all happening, and sure I would soon be running a business that could also provide a good source of income for my dad. The investor, however, was not as convinced as I was.

And so, still searching for a way to leap into the next stage of my life, I gave my father my full attention for the latest plan he was working on; he'd become convinced—by reading Dr. Goldberg—that he had the ability to manipulate the outcome of events in his life. He, of course, decided to apply this power to horse racing. He asked me to buy him books and videos on mastering the racetrack, and he studied them carefully. He was also rereading
On the Road,
and he'd become obsessed with a moment in the book when Kerouac had intuited the winner of a race but failed to trust his instincts. Maybe because writers I admired—Kerouac and Hemingway—wrote about the track, I was still able to find the romance in it, or maybe that was my way of not fully holding my dad accountable. Whatever the reason, I needed to trust in my dad, and so I did, still avoiding the possibility that there might be a reason not to at this point.

My dad was open with me for the first time about his regular trips to the track, because now they were research, and any money lost was kind of like a business expense. His plan was to hone his intuition to the point where he could pick the trifecta at the Kentucky Derby. He thought he might have to come out to LA to Santa Anita, the big track east of the city. My faith in his plan, which had been total, wobbled
slightly at this news. He wouldn't come to LA to visit me, but he would travel for the track.

No matter, though, I reasoned, his plan was for me as much as for him, so I forced myself to stay cheerful. He was going to win a hundred thousand dollars and give it to me so I could put a down payment on a property with a guesthouse where he could live. Intellectually, I knew it was a long shot, and I told almost no one about our plan. Before I dared to confess our dad-daughter undertaking to my friend Cathy, I stopped abruptly and said, “I'm going to tell you this, but you have to absolutely believe it's going to be true.” In my heart of hearts, I was still that little girl at the window.

More important, I still believed in my ability to believe. I had to: how else to justify my decision to stick with my writing, seventeen years after my first fiction class? Yes, I made my living as a writer, but whether it was as a journalist or a ghostwriter, I was still telling other people's stories, when I wanted very much to be telling my own.

Being in Los Angeles was both wonderful and maddening for all of this. On the one hand, unlikely discoveries did happen: writers who'd been reduced to living in their cars did go on to sell scripts that launched lifelong careers. It gave me hope. But on the other hand, it also made me wonder when, if ever, my time would come. It only seemed fitting that my always troubled relationship with my father might bear some sweeter fruit. I had friends whose fathers had helped them with their down payments. My version of the story might look different than the norm, but that suited me just fine anyhow. I was sometimes irked at the thought of him saving enough to place a big bet, but I believed in him enough to stay loyal. And yet, the day of the derby came and went, and my dad never even said a word.

Meanwhile, my financial situation was still so perilous that I couldn't afford to rent my own studio apartment. But I did land my second ghostwriting job that fall, to write a book with the actor Todd Bridges, who had played Willis on
Diff'rent Strokes.

As soon as I had my first payment in the bank, I took care of some necessities I'd been putting off due to lack of funds. One of these was
an appointment with a gynecologist. Since moving to California, I'd been exposed to more holistic approaches to health and well-being and met women who'd also been living with PCOS. Several of them had chosen to go off birth control pills because of concern about the long-term effects of being on hormones. Given the fact that I had never completely managed to quit smoking, I figured this was probably something I should look into. Because I'd regularly had my period since going on the pill, I assumed it had cured my PCOS, but I wanted to be sure. I sprung for an ultrasound.

I was surprised to see what looked like hundreds of tiny pearls all over both of my ovaries. There was, apparently, a big difference between masking symptoms and curing a chronic condition. I told the doctor I wanted to go off the pill.

“Oh, you shouldn't go off the pill, especially if you want to have kids,” she said.

“That doesn't make any sense,” I said.

“Your cycle will get so out of whack without the hormones to regulate it that you'll never be able to conceive.”

“But won't I have to go off the pill to get pregnant? What then?”

“We'll give you drugs to help you conceive.”

The idea of putting extra drugs into my system along with a tiny fetus concerned me. It was clear that this doctor was not going to be supportive of my attempts to take control of my condition, and I've always hated being spoken to like that. I was my father's daughter, so I decided to prove her wrong.

I went off the pill around the holidays. Based on collected advice from friends with PCOS and other chronic conditions, I did a cleanse in January that was twenty-one days of no booze, no cigarettes, no caffeine, no sugar, and for the final week, all liquid foods, including endless meals of what was called “energy soup.” At the same time, I attempted to repair any damage that had been done to my system by years of birth control and the antibiotics I'd taken to clear up my skin, and I adopted the Body Ecology Diet, which
involves specific food pairings and eating almost no sugar—even from fruits.

The first few days were really hard. I was groggy, and the cup of hot water with lemon I had in the place of my coffee was a weak alternative. Luckily, I was in the habit of running in the morning, and that helped to wake me up. By midafternoon, I was craving some sugar, anything, even just a piece of fruit. I was allowed fresh cranberries, which at least reminded me of my childhood in Maine, and dried currants.

Many people in my life thought I was crazy, but I knew it was something I needed to do. At least I got compliments, not just about the weight I'd lost but about my skin, which was perfectly clear and radiant, as it hadn't been since I was twelve years old.

“What did you do?” friends asked me.

“I went on a cleanse,” I said.

They all wanted to try it, until they learned what was involved, and that was even without my telling them about the colonics.

My dad's support was crucial. He was a devotee of fasts and juice cleanses, not just for their physical benefits but also for their mental and spiritual advantages. He was very sympathetic to both how difficult the experience was and how unwilling I was to quit before I'd reached my twenty-one-day goal. While I still had a bit of the teenager's desire to find things for myself rather than learn from my parents, I appreciated my dad's knowledge of these subjects and didn't allow myself to question how successful they had really been for him.

Even after the end of my cleanse, when I started reintroducing some items, I stuck to a strict diet designed specifically for women with PCOS. Because the condition causes insulin resistance and an inability to process sugar, this meant restricting anything that might turn to sugar in my system, including all grains, dairy, beans, soy, and corn.

I continued to drink very little, as alcohol is full of sugar. I was amused, though, by one health care provider who said it was a good
idea to eliminate most alcohol but also noted that because most women with PCOS have type-A personalities, it might actually be beneficial for them to occasionally have a glass of wine to help them relax.

For me, the possibility of drinking a little bit here and there was a total revelation. I knew I had been a lush in Boston and my early days in Los Angeles, and because of my dad's family history, I'd always known there was a possibility I was an alcoholic and would have to eventually stop drinking. When I cut out drinking temporarily, I made a breakthrough almost immediately. Often, when I was out, I was bored. I didn't like small talk. I craved the transcendent. Because such extreme experiences were not always possible, in their absence I often drank a lot to make things wild and fun. Now, when I wasn't turned on by what was happening, I just went home.

On the one hand, I was profoundly grateful. I had seen too many friends and lovers struggle with substance abuse to take it lightly. I was relieved I wouldn't have to tow the line that way, and that I would still be able to have a champagne toast when I sold my first book and at my wedding. But on the other hand, just as I'd been a little miffed when I'd found out I wasn't depressed, there was a part of me that was disappointed. If I wasn't depressed and I wasn't an alcoholic, why was I so unhappy? What was wrong with me? And if I never got diagnosed with anything, then how would I ever get cured?

I was meditating regularly and taking yoga classes at my gym. Some change was evident, at least. A less-than-tactful yoga teacher who had grown up speaking Korean and did not have the English vocabulary to soften her message came up to me one day.

“I don't know what happen to you, maybe you have bad husband, but you unhappy person before,” she said. “You change. You softer now.”

I couldn't help but laugh, but I was moved as I thanked her.

I kept it up. I started going to an acupuncture school, where a Chinese doctor who specialized in reproductive health treated me. I had
my period twice in a row—with a month skipped in between—but still, that was the most regular it had ever been.

And then it stopped. And we had no idea why. I was sticking to my diet without any cheats. I was running and meditating and doing yoga. I was monitoring my temperature and cervical fluid and charting it for the doctor. I was getting acupuncture done every week and taking the herbal formulas the doctor had mixed up for me.

In fact, it felt as if everything was getting worse. I didn't have any of the buffers I'd had before: booze, or cigarettes, or journalism deadlines, or boys, or the bars where I was a regular and could pop in for a distraction every night of the week.