Cook the Books

“I’LL take it,” I said to the salesgirl. I smoothed my hands down the luxurious fabric and checked myself out in the three-way mirror. Josh could eat his heart out when he saw me. He was bound to be at the restaurant opening on Friday, and there was no way I was wearing something less than spectacular to the event. And this form-fitting navy number was exactly what I needed to make a smashing entrance. It was Thursday, and I had a two-hour break between classes in the middle of the day, giving me enough time to shop before my supervision class.

“It really suits you perfectly.” The salesgirl nodded her approval. “Are you going somewhere special?”

I’m going to see my ex, and I need to look like a sexy love vixen and make him drop to the floor, overwhelmed by his stupidity for ever leaving me. “Just a restaurant opening tomorrow.”

“Well, you’ll look great. Do you have a nice coat to go with this? You can’t throw any old winter coat over this designer piece.” She frowned at the contemptible image.

Twenty minutes later, I left the upscale shop with the dress and a matching faux- fur-lined coat. More purchases to pay off, but it would be worth it. I called Kyle from the car. “Did you get your invitation to the Penthouse’s opening on Friday? I thought maybe we could go together. Adrianna and Owen are going, too. I called to RSVP and managed to get Ade and Owen in with me.”

“You bet. It looks great. But do you think it’ll upset you because of your friend Digger? It was supposed to be his opening.”

“I think it’s important for me to be there for his sake. Besides, I know Snacker, who’s taken over as the executive chef, and I’m sure he could use the support.” I failed to mention my intention to pass Kyle off as my date in front of Josh, but Kyle didn’t need to know everything.

“Why don’t I pick you all up at seven on Friday night?” Kyle offered.

“Wonderful. And I’m making excellent progress on the book. I can update you at the opening.” It was a small lie. My progress on the book wasn’t exactly excellent, but there were only so many recipes that I could test myself. I had to fight to fit in classes, homework, and cookbook work, and I certainly didn’t have the energy or the drive to stay up until three in the morning cooking delicacies. There was just too much testing for one person to accomplish, and I’d been brainstorming about whom to enlist to help me. I could probably get my parents and my sister to test a few recipes, but even with their help, the amount of work felt overwhelming.

I loaded my bags in the car and headed back to school. The supervision group was my least hateful class, so I wasn’t dreading this afternoon as much as I dreaded the rest of school. It was a small class, made up of ten students and one teacher, and we met in one of the comfortable lounges on campus, where we all got to spread out on couches and cushy chairs and sip coffee from one of the vending carts. This class was our opportunity to present our cases to our peers and to get feedback on our performance and input from others about treatment options. Somehow, it felt sort of gossipy to trade stories about other people’s lives, but I admit that I enjoyed hearing other students’ anecdotes. Slipping into the lounge just as the professor was about to shut the door, I grabbed the end seat on my favorite couch.

I listened to students present several cases that made mine look like a walk in the psychotherapeutic park. Julie was doing her field placement in the foster-care system, a setting that not only required her to navigate a nightmare tangle of red tape, but also involved challenging, emotionally demanding client work as well. Robert and Ann Marie were both at a geriatric home, and Simon was working at a community outreach program for teens. When it was my turn to present, I pulled my case files out of my folder and set them on my lap. I also had handy a rather sizeable stack of recipes that had to be tested. The recipes didn’t exactly need supervision, but should there happen to be any volunteers…

“So, Chloe, tell us about this week’s session with Ms. A.” Professor Ruiz adjusted his nearly invisible glasses and crossed his legs, raising his pant legs to reveal mismatched socks.

We never used clients’ real names. Instead, we referred to a client by the first letter of the person’s first name, or we made up a name. Julie always named her clients after celebrities. We’d spent last week’s class hearing all about “Bono’s” struggle to find a loving foster family to take him in. The week before it had been “Mark Wahlberg’s” suspension from high school for smoking pot in the girls’ room. My professor had cut Julie off when she’d launched into a speech about how poor “Colin Powell” had caught gonorrhea from “Bruce Springsteen.” I just stuck to letter names.

I scanned my notes. “Well, Ms. A continues to remain unsatisfied in her current relationship with T. She claims he is dull and unexciting, and she now has her sights set on a professor who is more than twice her age. It’s my impression that she may have concocted his attraction to her and that she has created a romantic connection between herself and the professor as a way to escape her reality. Her current boyfriend actually sounds like a really decent guy who adores her, and I wonder if she has fabricated a relationship with this new man as a way to avoid intimacy.” I paused. “As a way to protect herself from getting hurt.” The picture I was painting suddenly started to sound all too familiar. I hadn’t deluded myself into believing that I had a romantic relationship with Kyle, but there was, I had to admit, a genuine possibility that, in fantasizing about him, I was avoiding real intimacy. “Um, let me move on to D, whose father continues to put unreasonable demands on him leading D to push himself further and further to impress his father. An impossible task, if you ask me. I cannot get D to see that he needs to recognize his own wishes and goals and not to live his life according to this asshole’s… er, excuse me… the unreasonable paternal expectations.” When I shared Danny’s hand injury with the class, everyone was as visibly horrified as I was. Shared. In supervision, we were encouraged not simply to describe or report or tell things; rather, we were supposed to share them. “And yet, even with incidents like that, D continues to want to please his father.”

Julie whipped out a pencil, stood up, and paced the floor in front of me. “I think there is an important angle to look at here. Let me take a guess. The more this father pushes his son, the more the son screws up, correct?”

“Yes, actually, that’s true.” I nodded emphatically.

“Okay, so D’s image of his father is one of an important, successful, almighty power, essentially. That only serves to increase the son’s sense of incompetence, thereby making him genuinely incompetent. Like the accident with his hand? Probably a result of his nerves and his fear of failure. He’ll never feel whole and develop positive self-esteem until he stops believing everything his father says.” Julie sat back down, clearly pleased with her insight.

“You’re right,” I said. “But how in the world do I help him see what’s so obvious to us?”

Professor Ruiz leaned forward, intertwined his fingers, and looked thoughtfully at me. “If I were D, I would be pretty angry at my father. But it sounds like your client has turned that anger onto himself. See if you can get him to acknowledge that feeling. It’s okay to love someone and also hate some of the person’s behavior and words. That’s a tough dichotomy to balance, but we are allowed to have mixed feelings about the important people in our lives.”

There’s a fine line between love and hate. I thought of Josh. I was furious with him for leaving me, of course, but Adrianna had been right when she’d said that I still loved him. Damn. Why couldn’t I just be done with him and let that relationship go? There were other men in the world, right?

But there was only one Josh.

“Oh, while I’m here,” I said as nonchalantly as possible, “and since I really appreciate all the help the group has given me this semester, I thought of a way to thank everybody. I’m working on a cookbook with a very famous chef, and I’ve brought some of the secret recipes that will be in the book.” I stood up and began handing out sheets of paper to the mystified students. “Julie, you look like a tiramisu girl, am I right?”

“I guess so,” she said.

“Come on. It’ll be fun,” I begged.

“I like to cook,” Robert said. “What else do you have?”

“Open ravioli with spinach, tomato, and cream?”

“Yup, that’s mine.” Robert snatched the paper out of my hands.

“So you all get to test a recipe for the book, and your names will be in the acknowledgments. Isn’t this cool?” I said enthusiastically. “Simon, how about I give you lamb? And for you, Ann Marie? Chicken Creole!”

“I love anything Creole.” Ann Marie rubbed her stomach. “That’ll be dinner tonight, for sure.”

“Chloe, I don’t think this is really-” Professor Ruiz began.

“You’d like one, too? Of course.” I beamed and handed him Vietnamese fresh wraps with chili-peanut sauce. Then I hurriedly distributed the rest of the recipes. “Thanks for all the great work, everybody! Oh, looks like class is