The Silver Linings Playbook (7 page)

I knock on my parents’ bedroom door, and then I knock again.

“Pat?” my mom says.

“I have to work in the morning, you know?” my father says, but I ignore him.

“Mom?” I say to the door.

“What is it?”

“Where’s my wedding video?”

There is a silence.

“You remember my wedding video, right?”

Still, she does not say anything.

“Is it in the cardboard box in the family-room closet with all the other videos?”

Through the door I hear her and my father whispering, and then my mother says, “I think we gave you our copy of the video, honey. It must be in your old house. Sorry.”

“What? No, it’s downstairs in the family-room closet. Never mind, I’ll find it myself. Good night,” I say, but when I get to the family-room closet and go through the box of videos, it’s not there. I turn around and see that my mother has followed me down into the family room. She is in her nightgown. She is biting her nails. “Where is it?”

“We gave it to—”

“Don’t lie to me!”

“We must have misplaced it, but it’s sure to turn up sooner or later.”

“Misplaced it? It’s irreplaceable!” It’s just a videocassette, but I can’t help feeling angry, which I realize is one of my problems. “How could you lose it when you know how important it is to me? How?”

“Calm down, Pat.” My mother raises her palms so they are both in front of her chest and then takes a careful step toward me, as if she is trying to sneak up on a rabid dog. “Relax, Pat. Just relax.”

But I can feel myself getting more and more angry, so before I say or do anything dumb, I remember that I am close to being sent back to the bad place, where Nikki will never find me. I storm past my mother, go down into the basement, and do five hundred sit-ups on the Stomach Master 6000. When I finish, I am still angry,
so I ride the stationary bike for forty-five minutes and then do shots of water until I feel hydrated enough to attempt five hundred push-ups. Only when my pecs feel like they are filled with molten lava do I deem myself calm enough to sleep.

When I go upstairs, all is quiet and no light is leaking out from under my parents’ bedroom door, so I grab my framed picture of Nikki, take her upstairs to the attic, turn off the ventilation fan, slip into my sleeping bag, set up Nikki next to my head, kiss her good night—and then begin to sweat away some more pounds.

I haven’t been up in the attic since the last time Kenny G visited me. I am afraid he will come back, but I also feel sort of fat. I close my eyes, hum a single note, silently count to ten over and over again, and the next morning I wake up unscathed.

Maybe Puritans were simply dumber than modern people, but I cannot believe how long it took those seventeenth-century Bostonians to figure out that their spiritual leader knocked up the local hussy. I had the mystery solved in chapter eight, when Hester turns to Dimmesdale and says, “Speak thou for me!” I know we were assigned Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter
back in high school, and if I had known the book was filled with so much sex and espionage, I might have read it when I was sixteen. God, I can’t wait to ask Nikki if she hypes up the racy stuff in her class, because I know teenagers would actually read the book if she did.

I didn’t care much for Dimmesdale, because he had such a great woman and he denied himself a life with her. Now, I understand that it would not have been easy for him to explain how he knocked up another man’s teenage wife, especially since he was a man of the cloth, but if there’s one theme Hawthorne hammers home, it’s that time heals all wounds, which Dimmesdale learns, but too late. Plus, I’m thinking God would have wanted Pearl to have had a father, and probably counted Dimmesdale’s disregard
for his daughter as a greater sin than having sex with another man’s wife.

Now, I sympathize with Chillingworth—
a lot.
I mean, he sends his young bride over to the New World, trying to give her a better life, and she ends up pregnant by another man, which is the ultimate slap in the face, right? But he was so old and nasty and really had no business marrying a young girl anyway. When he began to psychologically torture Dimmesdale, giving him all those strange roots and herbs, Chillingworth reminded me of Dr. Timbers and his staff. I realized then that Chillingworth was not ever going to practice being kind, so I gave up hope for him.

But I absolutely loved Hester, because she believed in silver linings. Even when that nasty throng of bearded men in hats and fat women were against her, saying she should be branded on the forehead even, she stuck to her guns and sewed and helped people when she could and tried her best to raise her daughter—even when Pearl proved to be somewhat of a demonic child.

Even though Hester did not get to be with Dimmesdale in the end—which is a flaw, if you ask me—I felt like she lived a fulfilled life and got to see her daughter grow up and marry well, which was kind of nice.

But I did realize that no one really appreciated Hester for who she was until it was too late. When she needed help most, she was abandoned—and only when she offered help to others was she beloved. This sort of suggests that it is important to appreciate the good women in your life before it is too late, which is a pretty good message to give high school kids. I wish my high school teacher had taught me that lesson, because I certainly would have treated Nikki differently when we were first married. Then again, maybe this is the sort of thing you have to learn by living your life—failing like Dimmesdale did, and I guess like I did too.

That scene when Dimmesdale and Hester finally stand together in town for the first time made me wish apart time was over already so I could stand with Nikki in some public place and apologize for being such a jerk in the past. Then I would tell her my thoughts about Hawthorne’s classic, which would make her happy for sure. God, she is going to be so impressed that I actually read a book written in old-fashioned English.

Cliff asks about Veronica’s dinner party in a way that lets me know my mother has already discussed it with him—probably in an effort to get me to wear the collared shirts she bought me at the Gap, which Mom loves and I do not love. As soon as I sit down in the brown recliner, Cliff broaches the subject, pinching his chin the way he does every time he asks me a question my mother has already answered.

Even though I now recognize Cliff’s tell, I am excited to let him know he was right about wearing the shirt my brother had given me. Surprisingly, he does not want to talk about what clothes I wore; he wants to talk about Tiffany, and he keeps asking what I thought about her, how she made me feel, and if I enjoyed her company.

At first I am polite and answer by saying that Tiffany was nice and well dressed and had a pretty good body, but Cliff keeps pushing for the truth like therapists do, because they all have some sort of psychic ability that allows them to see through your
lies, and therefore they know you will eventually tire of the talking game and will offer up the truth.

Finally I say, “Well, the thing is—and I don’t like saying this—but Tiffany is kind of slutty.”

“What do you mean?” Cliff asks me.

“I mean she’s sort of a whore.”

Cliff sits forward a little. He looks surprised, and uncomfortable enough to make me feel uncomfortable. “On what do you base your observation? Did she dress provocatively?”

“No. I told you already. She wore a nice dress. But as soon as we finished our dessert, she asked me to walk her home.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. But at the end of the walk she asked me to have sexual intercourse with her, and not in those words.”

Cliff removes his fingers from his chin, sits back, and says, “Oh.”

“I know. It shocked me too, especially because she knows I’m married.”

“So did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Have sexual intercourse with Tiffany?”

At first Cliff’s words don’t register, but when they do, I become angry. “No!”

“Why not?”

I cannot believe Cliff has actually asked me such a question, especially since he is a happily married man himself, but I dignify the inquiry with an answer anyway. “Because I love my wife! That’s why!”

“That’s what I thought,” he says, which makes me feel a little better. He is only testing my morals, which is perfectly understandable,
because people outside of mental institutions need to have good morals so that the world will continue to work without any major interruptions—and happy endings will flourish.

Then I say, “I don’t even know why Tiffany would ask me to have sex with her anyway. I mean, I’m not even an attractive guy; she’s pretty and could do a lot better than me for sure. So I’m thinking now that maybe she’s a nymphomaniac. What do you think?”

“I don’t know whether she is a nymphomaniac or not,” he says. “But I do know that sometimes people say and do what they think others want them to. Maybe Tiffany really did not want to have sex with you, but only offered something she thought you would find valuable, so you would value her.”

I think about his explanation for a second and then say, “So you’re saying that Tiffany thought
I
wanted to have sex with
her?”

“Not necessarily.” He grabs his chin again. “Your mother told me you came home with makeup on your shirt. Do you mind if I ask how that happened?”

Reluctantly, because I don’t like to gossip, I tell him about Tiffany’s wearing her wedding ring even after her husband died, and the hugging and the crying we did in front of her parents’ house.

Cliff nods and says, “It seems like Tiffany really needs a friend, and that she thought having sex with you would make you want to be her friend. But tell me again how you handled the situation.”

So I tell him exactly what led us to the hug and how I let her get makeup on my Hank Baskett jersey and—

“Where did you get a Hank Baskett jersey?” he asks me.

“I told you. My brother gave it to me.”

“That’s what you wore to the dinner party?”

“Yeah, just like you told me to.”

He smiles and even chuckles, which surprises me. Then he adds, “What did your friends say?”

“Ronnie said that Hank Baskett is the man.”

“Hank Baskett
is
the man. I bet he catches at least seven touchdowns this season.”

“Cliff, you’re an Eagles fan?”

He does the Eagles chant—“E!-A!-G!-L!-E!-S! EAGLES!”—which makes me laugh because he is my therapist and I did not know therapists could like NFL football.

“Well, now that I know you too bleed green, we’ll have to talk Birds off the clock,” Cliff says. “So you really let Tiffany cry her makeup onto your brand-new Hank Baskett jersey?”

“Yeah, and it’s one with stitched-on numbers, not the cheap iron-ons.”

“Authentic
Hank Baskett jersey!” he says. “That was certainly very kind of you, Pat. It sounds like Tiffany only really needed a hug, which you gave her because you are a nice guy.”

I can’t help smiling, because I really am trying hard to be a nice guy. “Yeah, I know, but now she’s always following me all over town.”

“What do you mean?”

So I tell Cliff that since the dinner party, whenever I put on a trash bag and leave my house for a run, Tiffany is always waiting outside in her little running outfit and pink headband. “Very politely, I told her that I do not like running with other people and asked her to leave me alone, but she ignored my request and simply jogged five feet behind me for my entire run. The next day, she did the same thing, and she keeps on doing it. Somehow she’s figured out my schedule, and she’s always there when I leave my house an hour before sunset—ready to shadow me wherever
I jog. I run fast, and she stays with me. I run on dangerous streets, and she follows. She never tires out either—and just keeps running down the street when I finally stop in front of my house. She doesn’t even say hello or goodbye.”

“Why don’t you want her to follow you?” Cliff asks.

So I ask him how his wife, Sonja, would feel if some hot woman shadowed him every time he went for a run.