Jo Piazza (11 page)

The camp counselor in me (TRUTH: I only survived one summer of camp counseloring due to my aversion to bugs, an extreme allergy to poison ivy, and Annie not being invited back after canoeing to the boys’ side of camp to buy some bootleg tequila) came out.

“This is a good thing, ladies,” I blurted out with a tad too much contrived enthusiasm. “We don’t have to feel like shit because of what we’ve done in the past. The point of this exercise is to own our faults and try not to repeat them. I have an idea if everyone can stay just a little bit longer.”

Everyone agreed they had nowhere better to be on a Sunday night. I left them to their devices while I scoured the garage for Eleanor’s personal guilty pleasure—hoping that no one had moved it since the funeral.

It ended up being pretty easy to find. Covered by a sheet in the far back corner of the car port was a karaoke machine complete with two microphones. It took me only a few minutes to set it up on the television in the basement, thanks to Eleanor’s detailed cursive instructions left for her nurses on how to make the thing work. I remembered that when she was on her last legs, she demanded to karaoke with her support staff on Sunday nights, singing mainly show tune staples. Tito, Eleanor always said, did a wonderful baritone “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”

My grandmother was partial to Pat Benatar.

I called everyone to the basement.

“Here’s what we’re going to do. Everyone pick a song that you think represents your worst moral failing and sing it.”

There was a groan, but I decided to translate it as a groan of delight. Of course I could have been deluding myself. Maybe I was also a karaoke pusher. But if I was, I didn’t care. I couldn’t imagine how anyone wouldn’t be happier after a few rounds of karaoke.

Katrina went first, choosing Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” since high on her list was the fact that she didn’t think she respected herself enough to search for a man who loved her for the right reasons. Stella hummed along to Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” since her biggest failing, conveyed to us through a series of notes, was that she was unable to appreciate herself as much as the boyfriends she always put on a pedestal. Prithi sang “Papa Don’t Preach,” natch.

I went through the list of thousands of songs stored in the machine until I came up with the perfect song for my personal moral inventory.

I was so into “I Would Do Anything for Love” that it wasn’t until I was to hell and back about four times (who knew the abridged version of the song was seven minutes!) before I realized that Joe had crashed our meeting and was standing on the stairs holding his lighter aloft in the air and waving it back and forth. I blushed but finished the last two and a half minutes, totally breathless, to cheers and applause, delighted that I had jarred the room out of its self-inflicted depression. Two hours later a very happy crew dispersed in a haze of melodic humming, with an extra bob in their steps.

Joe stuck around to help clean and chatted with Annie about her upcoming court appearance where she had to chat with the judge about her progress in therapy.

“Karaoke, huh?” he said when we were momentarily alone in the kitchen.

“We did a moral inventory of our flaws and everyone was so bummed that I had to do something to brighten the mood,” I explained. “Karaoke makes everyone happy.”

“Not if you can’t carry a tune,” he said.

“Especially if you can’t carry a tune.”

“Not me. I hate doing anything I am bad at. I’m awful at just letting go if I know I can’t do things perfectly. I’m actually awful at letting go altogether except when I drink.”

“Is that why you drink?”

“I think that alcoholics and addicts are predisposed to their drug of choice but, yeah, I think I drank when I wanted to loosen up and that it got out of control.” Joe seemed ready to shift the topic away from him when he asked, “What was on your moral inventory?”

I paused before letting it spill.

“I’m a love pusher. I make men tell me they love me before they’re ready and then when they don’t end up actually loving me, I am all the more hurt because we were supposed to be in love. Does that make any sense at all?”

“Have you ever watched a pelican eat?” Joe asked.

“Way to change the subject, but, OK, I’ll bite. No, I don’t think I have ever watched a pelican do anything. So eat, pelican, no.”

“Well, pelicans eat fish and they fly over the ocean watching the water until they see the perfect fish that they want for their dinner. If you watch them when they make their decision, it looks like they’re falling out of the sky. They literally drop into the ocean like dead weight and plummet headfirst into the water. But they always get their fish.”

“Always?”

“Ninety-eight percent of the time.”

“Wow.”

“It’s a little like falling in love. They see what they want. They throw caution to the wind and they go for it. They literally fall head over heels from the sky.”

“But they always know they’re going to get their fish.”

“That’s why I wouldn’t want to be a pelican,” Joe said.

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“They know things will work out every single time they let themselves go. It’s got to get boring after a while. There’s no challenge in it after the first ten times. I would rather fall and miss that fish a dozen times and then finally catch the right one. The fattest, juiciest, fishiest of the fish. Because then I would feel like I really deserved that fish. Like I worked for it.”

“Why do you know so much about pelicans? Were you a middle-school science teacher in a past life?”

Joe laughed. “I was a nerd. A serious nerd all through high school. I had acne and glasses and was shy as hell, so I watched a lot of the History and Discovery Channels.”

“Better than Dungeons and Dragons.”

“I did that, too. I also built my own computers.”

“So back to the pelicans. I don’t get it.”

“You dove after every fish, Sophie. You wanted all the fish to be a great catch and since not every fish can be a great catch, you tried to turn the bad catches into good catches by convincing yourself that the two of you were in love. The pelicans may catch every fish every time, but some of those fish are rotten or bony or just swallowed a syringe and now they have fish AIDS. If you just wait, then one of these days that fat, juicy fish will be right under you waiting for you to fall for it.”

“And then I’ll eat it?”

“It isn’t a perfect metaphor.”

For the first time since the AA meeting I was nervous around Joe. He seemed like such a good fish.

But then I realized, as per usual, I was likely getting ahead of myself.

“I’m Cameron, and I’m a love addict. This week I booty texted three ex-boyfriends.”

Cameron had gone off the deep end after running into Vegan Biter with his new fiancée. I pointed out that the silver lining of that particular run-in is that there is indeed someone for everyone.

To save time, Cameron texted all three at once.

I miss you. Come over.

Well, all three came over. In fact, they all met in the elevator and drunkenly chatted about the proximity of a very delicious underground hot dog shop around the corner that fried their hot dogs before wrapping them in bacon and frying them again before covering them in both chili and cheese. A sad truth is that at three in the morning many a man will choose greasy food over sex that he likely can’t see through to completion. So they all set off together, and Cameron was left alone in her apartment. She was given the information from Maxem, her faithful doorman, whom she had also once tried to make out with after seeing her college boyfriend pushing a baby stroller down the street.

“Why did I let Vegan Biter upset me so much?” Cameron wailed. “Why did I care? I didn’t like him when he bit me, but when I thought I couldn’t have him anymore because he belonged to someone else, all of a sudden I can’t get him out of my damn head.”

We all admitted to having a hamster wheel in our head.

“I think I do it because I watched my parents and their really unhappy marriage,” Cameron volunteered. “In the back of my mind, that seems normal, because I don’t really have positive role models for how love should be. I think drama equals love so I just chase the drama instead of trying to find someone who can make me really happy. ”

“Low self-esteem,” Katrina chimed in, adding the caveat, “I’ve been asked this before.”

“Bloody romantic comedies,” Jordana blurted out. “I mean, all they do is tell us that true love is simply one hilarious misunderstanding away and once that hilarious misunderstanding is overcome, then you will live happily ever after. It is bullshit. I didn’t find a hilarious misunderstanding in my boyfriend’s e-mail. I found a fucking pervert! There is no misunderstanding that. But if this were a romantic comedy, those e-mails would all be part of an elaborate hoax he was staging for a buddy for his stag night. Did that thought run through my mind? OF COURSE IT DID. That is why these romantic comedies are ruining our lives.”

Stella applauded and snapped her fingers.

We all agreed. Romantic comedies had in some way contributed to all of us obsessing over the idea of romantic love. But how could we break that cycle right now? We really had no choice but to do what we did next. In order to debunk their lies, we had to expose ourselves to them—all of them.

And so the next twenty-four hours straight were spent watching every romantic comedy we could order up on Netflix. We laughed and groaned and discussed (ad nauseum) why these movies were absolutely nothing like real life.

This was aversion therapy. Anytime one of us got too into one scene or cried a little too much, someone would pinch her—hard enough to leave a mark.

Along the way we made a list debunking all the lies that romantic comedies have told us—a kind of treatise or “mission statement” (fuck you,
Jerry Maguire
, for trying to have us at hello) of what we should believe to replace what decades of chick flicks from
When Harry Met Sally
to
Letters to Juliet
had programmed into our brains.

We printed up these dictums and we decided to read them at the opening of our meetings. It was our version of the serenity prayer to ensure there would be no more hilarious misunderstandings. And then we added a new rule.

The Sunday after our emotional hara-kiri via John Hughes and Nora Ephron, we were again cross-legged on the floor like a kindergarten class alert after nap time. We had a guest speaker. Suze Heart stood in front of us, her platinum-blond hair so bright it practically reflected the light back at us or at least bounced it down to her shiny powder-blue tracksuit.

Within a minute of silence she had managed to elevator eye every one of us from our sneakers to the crowns of our heads.

Another division of my publishing house was publishing a self-help book by the self-made love coach Suze. Called
Tough Love: Take It or Be Sad and Lonely Forever
, it was poised to enter the bestseller list at number three just like Suze’s past books,
You’re a Whiner
and
Get the Hell Out of My Bed
.

During her last book tour, Suze had come off too strong and actually made two men in the audience of an author talk and book signing cry by telling them their mothers had ruined them for all other women. Since then she had been working to soften her image, so Megan thought it would be helpful to give her some practice by sending her out to New Jersey for the day to speak to our motley crew.