I'm Sorry You Feel That Way Read online

  Wanda, the dog trainer at the obedience school, said under no circumstances should one ever, ever hit a puppy. She said it’s unnecessary, and there is no reason to, ever.

  Instead, according to Wanda, one needs to get inside the puppy’s mind. One needs to think as puppies think. One needs to psychoanalyze the puppy.

  I myself had given psychoanalysis a try—twice—and I had been kicked out of psychoanalysis—twice—so I was resistant to trying it again, though my family doctor kept enumerating the ways I might find it useful. The idea of psychoanalyzing the puppy sounded wacky to me.

  Wanda was a trim, fit woman who wore her hair in a tidy gray bob. She wore high-waisted jeans and a tucked-in T-shirt that said If only there was a man as smart as my dog! When I told her about the yellow dinosaur and the puppy’s habitual humping of it—“Like he’s got a sex addiction!” I joked. “He needs a Twelve Step Program!” —she didn’t laugh or even smile.

  Instead, she explained some things to me. Dogs are pack animals, she said. They establish hierarchies, and if they’re wired to believe they should be at the top of the hierarchy, you have to show them the error of their thinking, but you must do so in a way that’s gentle and patient and loving. A neutered dog who humps is expressing his dominance, Wanda gravely informed me. Humping him expresses yours.

  “So to clarify, what you’re saying is that I should dry hump my dog?” I said. “I mean, I’m not misunderstanding you here, am I? I don’t want to misunderstand or misinterpret or misconstrue.”

  Wanda was wearing sensible shoes, she had liver spots on her hands and clear blue eyes in a tanned face. She looked like a divorced high school English teacher or somebody’s spinster aunt. “What you’re saying is,” I asked her, “if I want my dog to stop humping—which I do want, I want that very much—the only way I can make that happen is by me dry humping him. My dog.”

  “Yes.”

  That night, as my son and I were eating dinner, the puppy crawled out from under the dining room table. He had with him his friend, the yellow dinosaur. He humped it and humped it, his mouth slightly open, while the boy and I ate dinner, and we tried not to giggle, we tried not to watch, we tried to act like everyone is this crazy. This is how life is at everyone’s house.

  When I brought home a prescription for Paxil, the people who love me weren’t surprised. “Welcome aboard!” they said. “We’ve been waiting for you!”

  Some of them were on Paxil. Some of them took Prozac. Others took Sepram. Or Sarafem. There’s Lexapro, Luvox, Lustral. There’s Zoloft. It was like being in a club, it was like being in with the in crowd.

  We talked about our doses. We chatted about serotonin levels. We sympathized with one another about our various side effects: nausea, drowsiness, headaches, fluctuations in weight. Those who lost weight said, All right! Those who gained weight said, What the hell. A lot of us said, Get me to a convent, I am about as horny as a nun, alas, my private parts are of no use to me anymore.

  Paxil worked for me in that it stopped all that chaos in my head. It made my mental hiccups go away, and while I appreciated the strange silence it brought and the rest it granted, I didn’t care for how Paxil pressed flat all of my feelings. It was like my mind was a chalkboard, and Paxil wiped it clean with a sponge instead of an eraser—perfectly empty, perfectly blank. It was like Paxil snipped off the tip of my tongue and all my words were blunted, no edges. When September 11 happened, I understood, intellectually, that it was sad, horrible, tragic, but I didn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel anything anymore. And I knew that wasn’t good.

  Not long after, I didn’t go to the drugstore to pick up my prescription. The drugstore called to tell me it was in, and I said I’ll pick it up tomorrow. But I didn’t. I didn’t go to that drugstore ever again, I went off Paxil cold turkey, I haven’t seen a doctor about my OCD since.

  The severity of it comes and goes. It got bad when I quit smoking, it got bad when I changed jobs, it gets bad when I watch too much news. Exercise helps, though there’ve been a few times when it’s taken three or four hours of walking to quiet my thoughts. Cutting refined sugar and processed foods out of my diet helps, and getting eight hours of sleep helps, and avoiding stress. But I don’t think it’s ever going to completely go away. I’m not sure I want it to. Because then who would I be? What would I think about? How would I spend my time?

  I’d been napping on the couch, one of those late-afternoon naps I always regret because I wake up crabby and still tired. Even though I was groggy, even before I opened my eyes, I knew the puppy was standing there. I sensed him. He was staring at me.

  He locked his gaze on mine. I saw there was a yellow dinosaur pinched between his teeth. He kept his eyes on me as he drew that thing up between his legs and humped it.

  I’m the baby, I’m the baby, I’m the baby, the yellow dinosaur squeaked, and as the puppy humped it, he maintained eye contact with me. I felt like he knew my shyest secrets.

  I leapt off the couch, and in a fury, I yanked it from him, and I beat him with it, and I’m embarrassed to admit what else I did.

  It’s not like afterward the puppy took a nap while I smoked a cigarette, though that is indeed what happened. The puppy snuck off to his hiding spot under the dining room table while I flipped through the yellow pages, chain smoking and calling strange veterinarians. I couldn’t call my own. Not after what I’d done.

  I finally got one on the phone who didn’t act like I should be reported to the SPCA or PETA. His name was Dr. Kronkite. He said he’d talk to me for as long as I needed. He wanted to know where is the yellow dinosaur right now. He said, “Why don’t I wait right here on the line while you go get it and throw it away?”

  As I chatted with Dr. Kronkite, describing for him some of the puppy’s behaviors, offering up my theories—separation anxiety, fear-aggression, low serotonin levels—the puppy came out from under the table. He gave me a sly look, then trotted off in the direction of the boy’s bedroom.

  Dr. Kronkite was saying something about doggie Prozac, its effectiveness, when I heard the puppy yelp. He came crashing out of the boy’s room and went flying back under the table.

  I got off the phone to get the story: The boy had caught the puppy rubbing his stinky, musky body all over the bedsheets again. But this time, the boy was prepared. He sprayed the puppy with perfume. Lots of it.

  I coaxed the puppy out from under the table. “Come here, you,” I said, and I held out my arms.

  He sniffed my hands, whimpered, licked my fingers. The puppy army-crawled himself out from under the table and turned around twice in my lap before settling down. He smelled like decaying roses or a French whorehouse. He smelled like me. He’d eat a pound of rotten hamburger, a stick of butter, and a tampon. He’d bark at a Rottweiler, but avert his gaze from a poodle. He’d tug a pair of my dirty panties from the hamper and trot them out during a dinner party. He’d gloat about having a bone, a stick, a piece of rope, an empty Diet Dr Pepper bottle he found in the street. I’d have a doctor remove that brown spot from my big toe, I’d ask for a biopsy, I’d ask for a second opinion. I’d count to seventy-seven seven times in a row, I’d touch that spot on the back of my head where my brain is attached, I’d come home from the doctor’s, the chiropractor’s, the bar, and hug my dog. I was obsessed with this puppy. I still am.

  Mary, Queen of Arkansas

  At age fourteen, what I wanted to be most of all was applauded, and if that wasn’t possible, I wanted to be a girl in a Bruce Springsteen song. A Jersey girl. A girl named Sandy or Wendy or Candy or Cindy or Sherry, Rosalita or Crazy Janie or Mary, Queen of Arkansas. A girl idolized by an intense and poetic man who had curly dark hair and brooding dark eyes and who wore a clean white T-shirt every day. I spent hours in my bedroom, kneeling as if in supplication before my Emerson stereo fully equipped with AM/FM radio, cassette player, and turntable. I played the warped and scratchy Springsteen albums I bought at a garage sale.

  Since the albums mo
st likely to be found at a garage sale are The Mormon Tabernacle Choir Sings Christmas Carols; Midnight, Moonlight & Magic: The Very Best of Henry Mancini; and Bagpipes of Scotland, Volume 4, Springsteen albums are a major score even if they are, as these were, in rough shape. But I didn’t care because, to me, that made them seem more real, more true, more authentic. More like the kind of records Springsteen himself would own. These records were naked. They weren’t in sleeves, and they didn’t have covers, and the name Jack was written in black marker on the red Columbia label. Jack left his albums behind because he’d moved out in a hurry, but such haste was necessary because Jack had been caught cheating. His wife, a woman I’d never seen before and would never see again, told me about it. The consequence of Jack’s adultery was that his wife wrote 10 cents on jagged pieces of masking tape, then sold for dimes the things Jack loved best.

  As I flipped through Jack’s record collection, Jack’s wife, a pudgy brunette who was setting up their baby’s playpen in the driveway, called out that her soon-to-be ex just loved Springsteen, but since she hated Springsteen almost as much as she once loved her cheater-for-a-husband, she would let me have all five records for a quarter.

  Jack’s wife was gabby. She asked me how old I was, and what grade was I in, and where did I go to school, and did I have a boyfriend. She told me to guess how old she was. When I guessed thirty, an answer that never failed to flatter any adult who was being coy about age, she said not for three more weeks.

  The albums included Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.; The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle; Darkness on the Edge of Town; Born to Run; and Born in the U.S.A.

  Jack’s wife was also selling the contents of her junk drawer, but she hadn’t bothered to dump the odds and ends in a box; she’d just brought the junk drawer itself outside and put it on the ground next to the mailbox and beside a wooden coat hanger. A geezer and a blue-hair, obviously married for a hundred years or more, were rummaging through that drawer. Otherwise, it was just me and Jack’s wife.

  “You’re still young, so you don’t know anything,” Jack’s wife said, plopping her fat bald baby in the playpen. “So I’m going to give you some advice. You want my advice?”

  I said okay. I was sure there was nothing this lady could say that would ever have anything to do with me. Jack’s wife and I had nothing in common, and I didn’t see how we ever could. Love had let her down, and she’d let herself go. She had a droopy chin and a lot of black eyeliner around her eyes and she was wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers T-shirt that was much too big for her. It hung past her shorts, like a little girl wearing a nightgown except she looked too tired in the face to be a little girl. When her bald-headed baby spit out its pacifier, and the pacifier landed on the driveway, Jack’s wife picked it up, popped it in her own mouth, then plugged it back in her baby’s.

  “Two things I want to tell you,” Jack’s wife said. “First of all, take your Pill. Always. Don’t be sloppy! Take it at the same time every day. Don’t forget to take it!” She lit a cigarette. “Second, don’t get married. If you do the first, then the second should be no problem.” She took my dollar, handed me my change, then asked did I know anyone who liked to read because if I did there were a whole bunch of paperback James Bond books on that table over there. “For cheap,” she said.

  For a girl like me—a girl growing up in a western Pennsylvania Rust Belt town; a girl whose old man goes to work clean but comes home dirty, whose mother keeps one eye on The Young and the Restless while folding the laundry and running the sweeper; a dreamy and moody girl, melancholy and full of angst; a girl with a talent for histrionics, sentimentality, and exaggeration, who knows in her heart she’s too lyrical for the nitwits tugging at their testicles and sniffing their fingers in English class but too ornery for the mama’s boys who would never dream of changing their own spark plugs, not that they’d even have at hand the tools necessary for performing such a task, not that they’d even know how to change their own spark plugs let alone their oil or their brakes—a honey-tongued, blue-collar bastard like Bruce Springsteen is hard to resist. At age thirty-two, I would proclaim that it’d take a whole lot more than pretty words to make me lay down, but when I was fourteen years old and kneeling as if in supplication before my Emerson stereo, I listened to Springsteen in the privacy of my bedroom, the curtains drawn, the shades down, my heart pounding. Behind a door that was closed, then locked, Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen demanded to know if love is wild and if love is real. He was pleading to give him one last chance to make it real. He was promising to liberate me, to confiscate me, he said, “I want to be your man,” and even if I wasn’t perfect, I wasn’t a beauty, I didn’t need to feel bad about it because in his eyes, hey, I was all right. He accepted me just the way I am. Springsteen swore he loved his girl so much that he wanted to die with her on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss. There was something dynamic and sexy, beautiful and brave, about such a man. I wanted to marry him or someone exactly like him. At age fourteen, I wrote down the things Springsteen said in my diary, then I lifted the needle so I could hear him say them again.

  By age thirty-two, I had some things in common with Jack’s ex-wife: motherhood, divorce, part-time income generated from garage sales. What happened to the girl I used to be?

  Love had let that girl down. She’d been sloppy about taking her Pill, which meant she ended up married, then divorced. She didn’t believe in Springsteen anymore. In fact, she thought Bruce Springsteen was full of shit. For many years, she could only listen to him if she was drunk.

  The girl and I both knew this was pathetic. So did our friends who would agree to come to a party at my house only on the condition that the girl I used to be didn’t get drunk and weepy and play Springsteen, but if she did, she didn’t dance that hump-the-wall dance she always dances to Springsteen, but if she had to, she didn’t, under any circumstances, sing along with Springsteen.

  “Especially ‘Rosalita,’ ” the man in my life said.

  Al is usually indifferent to Bruce Springsteen, though there have been times when he’s allowed me to put Born to Run on the turntable, and he’s sat patiently while I insisted he listen to the words, man, just listen to the words. “I like him okay,” Al said, “and other people might like him, too, if you weren’t always trying to cram him down our throats.” Like Springsteen was a horse pill or my boss’s homely daughter that I was trying to find a date to the senior prom.

  “That dance you did to ‘Rosalita’ last Thanksgiving?” Al said. “When you humped the wall? I thought it was kind of cool, but I think it made some people feel uncomfortable. I’m pretty sure that’s when people started putting on their coats. And your singing? Well, I thought your singing was awesome, just hilarious, but that’s just me.”

  I told Al that he wasn’t exactly someone who’d be mistaken for Bruce Springsteen, either. But I shouldn’t have been insulted. Because it’s true: I’m a terrible dancer, awkward and noodle-armed, lascivious and likely to stumble, to trip, to fall down, and I’m a horrible singer, warbly and wobbly and quivering, breathy and giggly and off-key. My performances don’t bring anything positive to anyone’s Springsteen experience, except maybe alcohol and enthusiasm.

  “I am so much cooler than Mr. B.S.,” Al said, “you just don’t know it yet.”

  What then occurred to me was this: maybe I couldn’t be a girl in a Springsteen song, maybe I’d never be loved by an intense and poetic man, but I could be the mother of a Springsteen. I could live with that. I could live through it. At age thirty-two, I decided what I wanted most of all was to be the mother of a guitar-playing boy.

  Bruce Springsteen’s mother may have taken out a loan to buy her son his first guitar, but I would do my son even better, I would use my MasterCard to buy him one. It wasn’t cheap, but the kid at the music store said it was called a Baby Taylor, and he seemed excited that a mother would purchase such an instrument for her ten-year-old. This kid was pierce-lipped and unnaturally pale, he’d p
ainted his fingernails black, but his approval convinced me I had done right by my boy.

  In my daydreams, a guitar son would be the most fun kind of son to have, not so oafish and hungry like a football son, not so in need of money for computer chips and space camp like a brainiac son. Besides, sports and nerd things are boring, while rock and roll, as a guitar boy could provide, is cool. He would rev his motorcycle in front of my house, guitar strapped to his back, and tucked away in his back pocket, he’d keep a notebook in which he scrawled poems about the beauty of a mother’s love that he would later turn into songs about the beauty of a mother’s love. His hair would be moppy and his face would be unshaven, but this would not detract from his moody-but-vulnerable handsomeness. He’d wear a white T-shirt every day.

  One day, my guitar son would come to me, he would tell me this is his one last chance to make it real, he’s moving to New York or to Los Angeles or to whatever American city is most important to the music scene at that time, and he’d express his gratitude for all the support and encouragement I’d given him over the years. “It’s really meant a lot,” he’d say, and that’s when I’d tell him I have a little something for you. I’d hand him the big pile of cash I’d been setting aside for years and years, money I’d scrimped and sacrificed to save so he could follow his heart, chase his dream, know his destiny.

  Furthermore, I believed starting my son with guitar lessons now, at age ten, would make him popular with girls once he got to high school, and I knew it would win him the favor of people sitting around the fire on camping trips.

  “I hate to butt in,” Al said, “but maybe you should ask him if he wants to take guitar lessons. It wouldn’t hurt to have his input.”