I’d been following my prescription to call Rory every night to tell her my food for a few weeks. I no longer cried after I hung up the phone, and my apple consumption was down to a modest five per night. It was time for another prescription.
“Can I have something for my insomnia. I can’t think straight.” My second year of law school was under way, and when I wasn’t sitting in group, I was interviewing with Chicago’s biggest law firms for a summer internship, which I hoped would lead to an offer for full-time employment. Not sleeping well for weeks meant that fatigue pressed against my skull, making it hard to stay awake for classes and interviews. At Winston & Strawn, I’d pinched the inside of my arm to stay awake while a white-haired managing partner described the time he argued before the Supreme Court.
I’d already confessed that my eating was a hot steamy mess; now I admitted I couldn’t sleep. I was a newborn baby stuck in a twenty-seven-year-old’s body.
Dr. Rosen sat up and rubbed his hands together like a mad scientist. “Call Marty tonight before you go to sleep and ask for an affirmation.”
“Before or after I call Rory to tell her what I ate?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“I’m going to the opera tonight, so call me before seven,” Marty said.
At six fifty that night, I stood on the train platform at Belmont, exhausted from the long day of classes and a five-hour interview at Jones, Day, where again I’d pinched in the inside of my arm to stay awake while talking to senior partners. I dialed Marty’s number as wind slapped my hair into my face.
“I’m calling for my affirmation,” I said into the phone as the lights of an incoming northbound train rose toward the platform.
“You have great legs, toots.” Marty wasn’t skeevy, like Colonel Sanders. He wept every time he opened his mouth in group and seemed genuinely astonished when we asked to know more about what made him so sad. He always said, “I just can’t believe anyone is listening to me.”
I laughed into the roar of the oncoming train and prayed his words would work like an extra-strength Ambien.
The next morning I hesitated before opening my eyes, afraid to see that it was only two A.M. I heard morning sounds. My neighbor’s door slamming. Birdsong. A car starting. I opened my left eye and saw the clock—five fifteen. I’d gotten an unprecedented seven hours of sleep. I pumped my fist like a champion.
Maybe Dr. Rosen was brilliant.
7
As winter descended on Chicago, I practiced bringing mundane issues to group. A prickle of shame skidded down my spine when I asked my group to weigh in on matters I should know how to handle as a reasonably intelligent twenty-seven-year-old, like whether I should use some of my financial aid money to go on a ski trip organized by my college roommate Kat. The group unanimously voted yes to the trip. Dr. Rosen pressed me for a good reason not to go.
“It’s all couples. I’ll be the eleventh wheel.”
“Be open,” Dr. Rosen said.
I can’t believe it! You never come to anything! Kat wrote when I accepted her invitation.
On the Tuesday morning between Christmas and New Year’s, I dialed Rory’s cell from a cabin in Crested Butte. It was my first time missing a session.
“Hi, sweetie, let me put you on speaker.” I heard a rustling and then Rory’s voice, slightly muffled: “Everyone say hi to Christie.” A chorus of hellos in the background.
“What’re y’all doing?” I asked, picturing each of them in their regular spots, the gray Chicago sky out the window.
“It’s boring without you,” Carlos said.
“Y’all miss me?” Weren’t they grateful to have a break from me and my pitiful stories of too many apples, too many worms?
“Everyone’s nodding,” Rory said. “Even Dr. Rosen.”
My heart soared up over the Rocky Mountains and zoomed across the plains to the fourteen-by-fourteen room where they sat, where there was an empty chair my body usually fit, where they held me in their minds.
As a kid, my siblings and I would take turns visiting our paternal grandmother, who lived in a big yellow farmhouse in Forreston, Texas. I loved those weeks—I could roam around her property, looking for treasures by the creek and picking through bones at the cow graveyard. Once, I called home halfway through my visit. I can’t remember why. I think I was testing my ability to make a long-distance call. The phone at 6644 Thackeray Avenue rang and rang. Maybe they’re at the neighborhood pool or in the backyard. I tried again that night. No answer. Where could they be?
When my dad called that weekend to arrange a time to pick me up, I grabbed the phone from my grandma. “Where were y’all? I tried to call two nights ago.”
“We went to Oklahoma for a few days.”
They took a vacation without me? My vision blurred as tears gathered. I’d never been to Oklahoma, and suddenly I was desperate to go—to see whatever they’d seen. Cool stuff like authentic tepees tended by women in long black braids and working oil rigs dotting a straight dusty highway. How could they travel—cross the state line!—without me? This clearly meant I wasn’t an integral part of my family, and the realization made me want to curl up and bawl.
On the other end of the phone my dad explained that they’d gone to pick up an antique armoire from a family friend in Ponca City. “The Howard Johnson’s a/c was broken, and your mother is still mad at me for making her eat at a Kentucky Fried Chicken, where we watched a dog eat a rat in the parking lot.” He spoke as if the trip was a disaster, but all I could hear was that magical, wondrous things happened in this land called Oklahoma. And I heard this: You don’t matter. We vacation without you,
