Good in Bed (19 page)

“Just get your education,” my mother would say wearily, after the latest recitation of how my father's checks were late again, of how her car had broken down, of how my sister hadn't come home for two nights in a row. “Just finish up. We'll be fine.”

Then—finally—it was the June of my graduation.

Except for a handful of strained lunches during the summer and Christmas breaks, I hadn't seen my father. He sent birthday cards (usually on time) and tuition checks (almost always late), usually for about half of what they were supposed to be. I felt like I'd become just one more unremarkable item on his to-do list. I hadn't expected him to come to my graduation. I never thought he'd care. But he called me a week in advance of the much-longed-for date, saying that he was looking forward to it. Him, and his new wife, whom I'd never met.

“I'm not sure … I don't think …” Istammered.

“Cannie,” he said. “I'm your father. And Christine's never seen Princeton!”

“So tell Christine you'll send her a postcard,” my mother said sourly. I had dreaded telling my mother that he'd be there, but I couldn't figure out how to tell him no. He'd said the magic words, the
pellet words.
I'm your father
. After everything—his distance, his desertion, the new wife and new kids—I was, it seems, still starving for his love.

My father, with new wife and kids in tow, arrived during the English Department's reception. I'd won some small award for creative writing, but they came too late to hear my name called. Christine was a petite little thing, with an aerobicized hard body and a blond perm. The children were adorable. My floral Laura Ashley dress had looked just fine in the dorm. Now it looked like a slipcover, I thought dismally. And I looked like a sofa.

“Cannie,” said my father, looking me up and down. “I see college cuisine's agreed with you.”

I clutched my stupid plaque tightly against me. “Thanks so much,” I said. My father rolled his eyes at his new wife as if to say,
Can you believe how touchy she is?

“I was just teasing you,” he said, as his new adorable children stared at me, as if I were an animal in a zoo for the oversized.

“I, um, got you tickets for the ceremony.” I didn't mention that I'd had to beg, borrow, and finally pay $100 I couldn't spare to score the tickets. Each senior was issued a total of four. The administration at Princeton hadn't yet made accommodations for those of us struggling with reconstructed families that included stepmothers, stepfathers, new half siblings, and the like.

My father shook his head. “Won't be necessary. We're leaving in the morning.”

“Leaving?” I repeated. “But you'll miss graduation!”

“We've got tickets to Sesame Place,” chirped his little wife, Christine.

“Sesame Place!” repeated the little girl for emphasis.

“So Princeton was sort of on our way.”

“That's … um … well.” And suddenly I was blinking back tears. I bit my lip as hard as I could, and squeezed the plaque against me so tightly that I had an eight-by-twelve bruise on my midsection for the next week and a half. “Thanks for stopping by.”

My father nodded, and moved as if he was going to hug me, but wound up merely grasping my shoulders and giving me the kind of
shake that coaches routinely administer to underperforming athletes—a “buck up, camper” kind of shake. “Congratulations,” he said. “I'm very proud of you.” But when he kissed me, his lips never even touched my skin, and I knew the whole time that his eyes were on the door.

Somehow I made it through the ceremony, the dismantling of my dorm room, the long ride home. I hung my diploma on my bedroom wall and tried to figure out what I'd do next. Graduate school was out of the question. Even after all those breakfasts I'd worked, all those drooly pieces of bacon and curdled scrambled eggs, I was still $20,000 or so in debt. I couldn't see borrowing more money. So I lined up job interviews with the handful of small papers who were willing to even consider a college graduate with no real-world experience, in the middle of a recession, and spent the summer driving up and down the Northeast in the thirdhand van I'd bought with some of my food-service dollars. When I loaded up the van to head out for my job interviews, I made myself a promise—I wasn't going to be my father's rat anymore. I was going to walk away from the pellet bar. He could bring me nothing but unhappiness, and I didn't need more unhappiness in my life.

I heard from my brother that our father had moved out west, but I didn't ask for specifics, and nobody offered them. Ten years after the divorce, he no longer had to pay child support or alimony. The checks stopped coming. So did the birthday cards, or any acknowledgment that we even existed. Lucy's graduation came and went, and when Josh sent a card announcing his, it came back returned to sender. Our father had moved on, it seemed, without telling us where.

“We could find him on the Internet or something,” I offered.

Josh glared at me. “Why?”

And I couldn't think of an answer. If we found him, would he come? Would he care? Probably not. We agreed, the three of us, to let it be. If our father wanted to stay gone, we would let him.

And we struggled into our twenties without him. Josh overcame his fear of the slopes and spent a year and a half drifting from one ski-resort
town to another, and Lucy ran off briefly to Arizona with a guy she claimed was a former professional hockey player. As evidence, she had him remove his bridge in the middle of dinner and show that he was missing all his teeth.

And that was that, pretty much.

I know that what had happened with my father—his insults, his criticism, the way he made me feel that I was defective and deformed—had hurt me. I'd encountered enough of those self-help articles in women's magazines to know that you don't go through that kind of cruelty unscathed. With every man I met, I'd watch myself carefully. Did I really like that editor, I'd wonder, or am I just searching for Daddy? Do I love this guy, I'd ask myself, or do I just think he'd never leave me, the way my father did?

And where had all the care I'd taken gotten me? I wondered. I was alone. A man who'd liked me enough to want me in his family was dead, and I couldn't even say how sorry I was properly. And now that it was possible—now that it was likely, even—that Bruce had finally gotten to the point in his life where he could understand me, where he could sympathize with what I'd been through because of what he'd gone through, he wouldn't even talk to me. It felt like the cruelest joke, like a rug being yanked out from under me—in other words, like the way my father made me feel, all over again.

The scales at the University of Philadelphia's Weight and Eating Disorders Center looked like meat carts. The platforms were about four times the size of normal scales, with railings all around them. It was hard not to feel like livestock when you climbed aboard, as I had every other week since September.

“That's very unusual,” said Dr. K., gazing down at the red digital printout on the scale. “You lost eight pounds.”

“I can't eat,” I said numbly.

“You mean you're eating less,” he said.

“No, I mean every time I put something in my mouth, I puke.”

He looked at me sharply, then back at the scale. The numbers were the same. “Let's step into my office,” he suggested.

And there we were again: me in the chair, him at his desk, my ever-thickening folder spread in front of him. He was tanner than when I'd seen him last, and possibly even thinner, floating in his white laboratory coat. It had been six weeks since I'd last seen Bruce, and things were not proceeding as I'd hoped.

“Most patients gain weight before we start them on the sibutramine,” he said. “They have a kind of last hurrah. So, as I said, this is unusual.”

“Something happened,” I said.

He looked at me sharply. “Another article?”

“Bruce's father died,” I said. “Bruce, my boyfriend … ex-boyfriend. His dad died last month.”

He looked down at his hands, at his folder, then, finally, up at me. “I'm sorry to hear that.”

“And he called me … and told me … and asked me to go to the funeral … but he wouldn't let me stay. Wouldn't let me stay with him. He was so awful … and it was so sad … and the rabbi said how he used to go to toy stores, and I feel so terrible …”

I blinked hard against the tears. Wordlessly, Dr. K. handed me a box of Kleenex. He took off his glasses and pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose.

“I'm a bad person,” I blubbered.

He looked at me kindly. “Why? Because you broke up with him? That's silly. How could you know this was going to happen?”

“No,” I said. “I know I couldn't. But now, it's like … all I want is to be there for him, and love him, and he won't let me, and I feel so … alone. …”

He sighed. “It's hard when things end. Even if nobody dies, even if you part on the best possible terms and there's nobody else involved. Even if you're the one who lets go first. It's never easy. It always hurts.”

“I just feel like I made this huge mistake. Like I didn't think things through. I thought I knew … how it would feel to be apart from him. But I didn't. I couldn't. I never imagined anything like this. And all I do is miss him. …” I swallowed hard, choking on another sob. I couldn't explain it—that I'd been waiting my whole life for a guy who would get me, who would understand my pain. I thought I'd known what pain was, but I knew now I'd never hurt this way.

He focused his eyes on a spot on the wall over my head as I wept. Then he opened a drawer, pulled a pad out of his desk, and started writing.

“Am I out of the study?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Of course, you're going to have to start eating
again soon. But I think it might be a good idea for you to have someone to talk to.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Not therapy.”

He gave me a crooked smile. “Am I sensing a little antipathy here?”

“No, I don't have anything against it, but I just know it won't help,” I told him. “I'm looking at the situation realistically. I made a huge mistake. I wasn't sure that I loved him enough, and now I know that I do, and his father's dead and he doesn't love me anymore.” I straightened my back and wiped my face. “But I still want to do this. I really want to do this. I want to have one thing in my life I can feel good about. I want to feel like I'm doing something right.”

He sat me on the examination table again, his hands gentle on my back and my arms as he tied a piece of rubber tubing around my bicep and told me to make a fist. I looked away when he slid the needle in, but he'd done it so skillfully I could barely feel it. Both of us watched the glass vial filling up with my blood. I wondered what he was thinking. “Almost done,” he said quietly, before deftly removing the needle and pressing a piece of gauze over the wound.

“Do I get a lollipop?” I joked. He handed me a Band-Aid instead, and the piece of paper where he'd written two names, two phone numbers. “Take it,” he said. “And Cannie, you've got to eat, and if you find that you can't, you have to call us, and then I'd really suggest calling one of these counselors.”

“I'm so huge, do you really think a few more days is going to kill me?”

“It's really not healthy,” he said seriously. “It can have an adverse impact on your metabolism. My suggestion is to start off with easy stuff … toast, bananas, flat ginger ale.”

Out in the lobby, he gave me a sheaf of papers easily three inches thick. “Keep exercising, too,” he said. “It'll help you feel better.”

“You sound like my mother,” I said, tucking everything into my purse.

“And Cannie?” He put his hand on my forearm. “Try not to take it so hard.”

“I know,” I said. “I just wish things were different.”

“You'll be fine,” he told me firmly. “And …”

His voice trailed off. He looked uncomfortable.

“You know how you said you were a bad person?”

“Oh,” I said, embarrassed. “Sorry. I just have this tendency to get a little melodramatic. …”

“No, no. That's okay. I just meant …I wanted to tell you …”

The elevator doors slid open, and the people on it looked at me. I looked at the doctor and stepped backward.

“You aren't,” he told me. “I'll see you in class.”

I went home and lunged for the telephone. My one message was from Samantha.

“Hi, Cannie, it's Sam … no, not Bruce, so get that pathetic look off your puss and call me if you feel like going for a walk. I'll buy you an iced coffee. It'll be great. Better than a boyfriend. 'Bye.”

I set down the phone and picked it up again when it started ringing. Maybe it was Bruce this time, I thought.

Instead, it was my mother.

“Where have you been?” she demanded. “I've been calling and calling.”

“You didn't leave a message,” I pointed out.

“I knew I'd get you eventually,” she said. “How's it going?”

“Oh, you know …” I said, my voice trailing off. My mother had really been making an effort since Bruce's father had died. She'd sent a card to the family and made a donation to the temple. She'd been calling me every night, and insisted that I come to her softball league's play-off series and watch the Switch Hitters take on Nine Women Out. It was all attention I could have done without, but I knew she meant well.

“Are you walking?” she asked me. “Are you riding your bike?”

“A little bit.” I sighed, remembering how Bruce used to complain that spending time at my house was more like triathlon training sessions than a vacation, because my mother was always trying to organize a walk, a bike ride, two-on-two basketball at the Jewish Center, where she'd
gleefully body-check my brother under the boards while I sweated on a StairMaster and Bruce read the sports section in the Seniors' Lounge.