“Do you want my take?” Dr. Rosen said. “Eating ten apples after dinner—”
“I’m down to four—”
“Okay, four, but eating those apples wasn’t pleasurable. You wanted it to stop. Stopping a negative behavior is radically different than getting support for starting a pleasurable one. You are more resistant to pleasure. That’s why I’m giving you this prescription—”
“Which I cannot do.” I should quit group.
“You have other choices,” Dr. Rosen said.
Rory tapped my foot with the tip of her boot and suggested I ask for something gentler. I took a deep breath. Was I going to drown in despair or was I willing to ask for what I needed?
“Can you dial it down?” I whispered.
Dr. Rosen smiled and paused. “How about this? You bookend taking a bath with Patrice.”
“No requirement that I do or touch or rub anything while I’m in there?”
“Strictly utilitarian.”
“Done.” My whole body relaxed. I could take a goddamn bath. I was back in the game.
Dr. Rosen stared at me.
“What?” I asked.
“When was the last time you told someone that you weren’t ready for what they were asking you to do?”
Senior year of high school, I dated Mike D., a basketball star who smoked pot daily. He was my first real boyfriend, and I wanted desperately to be a good girlfriend, whatever that meant. Before me, Mike dated a cheerleader who, apparently, gave amazing head. When he hinted he missed her deep throat, I felt summoned to suck his dick. But at seventeen, I’d only visited first base briefly, three years earlier. Blow jobs were third-base territory, and my ignorance about them made my throat constrict with panic. Where would my hands go? How long would I have his penis in my mouth? What would it taste like? When he pushed my head under the blankets, I shoved my fear down my throat and into my belly. When I tried to come up for air to ask for a performance review, Mike pushed my head back down. I’ve revisited my sweaty head under that blanket thousands of times, always wondering why I felt bereft of choices, words, and the right to lift the blanket and take a breath. Or to not suck his dick in the first place. I did it because I wanted to be a good girlfriend and good girlfriends say yes.
In college, my roommate Cherie graduated a semester ahead of me. Free-spirited Cherie’s postcollege plans entailed couch surfing in Colorado until she started graduate school. When she asked me to drive her Jetta to Denver after graduation, I should have said no. I was supposed to be in Dallas visiting family and working a part-time mall job. Driving Cherie, her bike, and her duffel bag full of tie-dyed shirts to the Mile High City was inconvenient and expensive. But I said yes because the thought of saying no made my stomach clench. I wanted to be a good friend. Good friends say yes.
Before moving to Chicago for graduate school, I got a job at Express in my college town, selling skorts to sorority girls. I got promoted to assistant manager after a few months. My supervisor often showed up to work with long, bloody scratches on her forearms—either from a feral cat or a serious self-harm habit—and would ask me to cover for her several times a month. Saying yes meant I had to work ten hours without a break—assistant managers were not allowed to leave the store unattended, even to run over to Chick-Fil-A for a snack. My supervisor would be at home engaging in mysterious physical behavior, and I’d be asking a stock boy to cover the registers so I could pee. It never occurred to me to say no, though. I wanted to be a good employee, and good employees say yes.
Yes was who I thought I was supposed to be as a girlfriend, friend, employee. A girl, and then a woman, in the world. When someone asked me to jump I prepared to leap without thinking about whether I was hungry or knew the route to Denver or knew what the fuck to do with a penis in my mouth.
I told Dr. Rosen I wasn’t in the habit of saying no. He asked if I knew what that cost me. I shook my head. Costs? People liked me because I was a Yes Girl. If I went around saying no, then what? They’d be mad at me. Disappointed. Unhappy. I couldn’t tolerate that. That kind of audacity belonged to other people, like guys and hot women with no emotional baggage.
“If you can’t say no in relationships, then you can’t be intimate,” Dr. Rosen said.
“Say that again.” I held still so that each word would seep inside me, past my skin and muscle, and settle in my bones.
“If you can’t say no, there can be no intimacy.”
People said no to me all the time, and I still loved them. Is this what people were learning in high school when I was bingeing on Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies and making mixtapes with Lionel Richie and Whitney Houston songs?
As my old claw-footed bathtub filled with sudsy, lavender-scented water, I left Patrice a voice mail completing part one of the “bookend.” I’d purposely dialed her cell phone because she turned it off at night. I held my breath as I slid into the nearly scalding water. The bubbles made tiny rustling sounds. I leaned my head against the hard porcelain edge and exhaled. My breath hitched—a hint I might cry, but I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head. I didn’t want to blubber through this—I wanted to be a normal fucking woman taking a bath to relax. After two minutes, I wanted to get out. I’d filled the prescription, swallowed the medicine. Now I had things to do, like make three phone calls to three different group members.
But then I put my palms over
