“How about an honest answer?” Dr. Rosen said. His grin broadcast a challenge, like he knew without a doubt I’d begun my group career masquerading as a sexually healthy woman.
“Such as?”
“That you don’t like having sex at all.” My face flushed. That was not how I would have described myself.
“That’s not true. I love having sex, I just can’t find anyone to have sex with.” I’d had orgasms and toe-curling sex before—in college there was that Colombian alcoholic who touched my face as he kissed me, lighting me up like a supernova. And I genuinely liked being on top those few times with my high school boyfriend, tilting my pelvis just so, charging forward into my sexuality as only a drunk-on-Zima seventeen-year-old could. I didn’t know where those buried parts of me went or why I couldn’t hold on to them.
A grandpa-aged guy with a military buzz cut and a Colonel Sanders goatee—a retired proctologist—piped in. “A pretty girl like you? That can’t be true.” Was he leering at me?
“Guys don’t… respond to me.” Tears threatened. Two minutes into the session, and I was cracking. I remembered when my all-girls Catholic high school sent us on a spiritual retreat sophomore year, and my retreat leader opened with a story about her bulimic past. I responded by bursting into tears and confessing my bulimia to a roomful of fourteen-year-olds, whom I then swore to secrecy. It was the first time I’d told anyone about my purging. Sitting across from Colonel Sanders, I felt the confusion from the retreat sidle up next to me, hovering: Would opening my mouth to spill the truth to strangers salvage my life or would it destroy me as my mother predicted?
“What do you mean, ‘respond’?” Colonel Sanders was definitely leering.
“Guys always approach my friends, but never me. It’s been like that since high school.” In co-ed groups at bars or parties, I would stand slightly off to the side, never sure what to do with my hands, finding it impossible to laugh in my normal pitch or join the conversation because I was trying to imagine how to get the guys to like me. It wasn’t just American guys. My college roommate Kat and I traveled all over Europe after college, and not one single guy hit on me. Not even in Italy. Meanwhile, guys from Munich, Nice, Lucerne, and Bruges fell all over Kat and ignored me.
A buzzer rang, and Dr. Rosen pressed a button on the wall behind him.
Three seconds later, a smiling woman in her late forties with chipped turquoise nail polish, overprocessed orange hair, and a raspy smoker’s voice walked in. Her fringy rayon shirt was more Woodstock than downtown Chicago. I’d seen her a few times in 12-step meetings. “I’m Rory,” she said to me and another older guy sitting across from me, who was apparently new to the group as well. Like a den mother, she pointed everyone out and told us their names and occupations. Colonel Sanders’s given name was Ed. Carlos, a dermatologist. Patrice, a partner in an obstetrics practice. Rory was a civil rights attorney. The new guy, Marty, had Groucho Marx eyebrows and a habit of sniffing every ten seconds. He introduced himself as a psychiatrist who worked with Southeast Asian refugees.
“So you’re here to have more sex?” Colonel Sanders said.
I shrugged. Literally, moments before I admitted as much, but now I was backing away because of messages embedded in my marrow: Nice girls don’t want it. Feminists don’t need it. Good girls don’t talk about it at all, especially in mixed company. My mother would die if she knew I was talking about it with these strangers.
From there, the conversation ping-ponged to Rory, who mentioned she’d asked her father for money to pay her bills. Dr. Rosen steered Rory to her father’s Holocaust survival story, which involved hiding in a trunk in Poland for several years. Abruptly, the conversation pivoted to Carlos’s patient who refused to pay his bill.
As the group zigzagged from issue to issue, I shifted from butt cheek to butt cheek on that hard-ass chair. I sighed and cleared my throat in frustration. Nothing was resolved. Didn’t anyone want any answers? Resolutions? Worse, as the newcomer, I had no context for any of the stories. Why did Carlos’s assistant quit? Why did Rory seem so anti-Semitic when her dad survived the Holocaust in a footlocker? What was the deal with her overdue Visa bill?
At some point in the session I fingered the beads of my pearl bracelet like a rosary strand to soothe myself. Dr. Rosen watched me, his newest lab rat. Would he later write a note for my file? CT manipulates jewelry with her digits during group discussion. CT demonstrates all the classic signs of someone with major intimacy issues, severe repression. Tough case.
I’d left my three individual sessions feeling that, despite his cockiness and strange sense of humor, Dr. Rosen and I had a bond. I believed he understood me, but now it felt like we were total strangers. I called him an asshole in my head.
There were unwritten group rules.
“You crossed your legs,” Colonel Sanders said. I stared down at my right thigh crossed over my left. Everyone turned toward me.
“So what?” I asked, defensive.
“We don’t do that here.” Colonel Sanders eyed my legs. I uncrossed them quickly.
“Why not?” If making me feel stupid was a way to get better, I’d be cured by Christmas.
“It means you’re not open.” That was Carlos.
“It means you’re ashamed.” That was Rory.
“You’re shutting down emotionally.” That was Patrice.
The group room was a fishbowl. There was nowhere to hide from the six pairs of eyes around the circle.
