Kleenex. He took off his glasses and pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose.
“I’m a bad person,” I blubbered. He looked at me kindly.
“Why? Because you broke up with him? That’s silly. How could you know this was going to happen?”
“No,” I said. “I know I couldn’t. But now, it’s like… all I want is to be there for him, and love him, and he won’t let me, and I feel so… alone”
He sighed. “It’s hard when things end. Even if nobody dies, even if you part on the best possible terms, and there’s nobody else involved. Even if you’re the one who lets go first. It’s never easy. It always hurts.”
“I just feel like I made this huge mistake. Like I didn’t think things through. I thought I knew… how it would feel to be apart from him. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I never imagined anything like this. And all I do is miss him” I swallowed hard, choking on another sob. I couldn’t explain it – that I’d been waiting my whole life for a guy who would get me, who would understand my pain. I thought I’d known what pain was, but I knew now I’d never hurt this way.
He focused his eyes on a spot on the wall over my head as I wept. Then he opened a drawer, pulled a pad out of his desk, and started writing.
“Am I out of the study?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Of course, you’re going to have to start eating again soon. But I think it might be a good idea for you to have someone to talk to.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Not therapy.”
He gave me a crooked smile. “Am I sensing a little antipathy here?”
“No, I don’t have anything against it, but I just know it won’t help,” I told him. “I’m looking at the situation realistically. I made a huge mistake. I wasn’t sure that I loved him enough, and now I know that I do, and his father’s dead and he doesn’t love me anymore.” I straightened my back and wiped my face. “But I still want to do this. I really want to do this. I want to have one thing in my life I can feel good about. I want to feel like I’m doing something right.”
He sat me on the examination table again, his hands gentle on my back and my arms as he tied a piece of rubber tubing around my bicep and told me to make a fist. I looked away when he slid the needle in, but he’d done it so skillfully I could barely feel it. Both of us watched the glass vial filling up with my blood. I wondered what he was thinking. “Almost done,” he said quietly, before deftly removing the needle and pressing a piece of gauze over the wound.
“Do I get a lollipop?” I joked. He handed me a Band-Aid instead, and the piece of paper where he’d written two names, two phone numbers. “Take it,” he said. “And, Cannie, you’ve got to eat, and if you find that you can’t, you have to call us, and then I’d really suggest calling one of these counselors.”
“I’m so huge, do you really think a few more days is going to kill me?”
“It’s really not healthy,” he said seriously. “It can have an adverse impact on your metabolism. My suggestion is to start off with easy stuff… toast, bananas, flat ginger ale.”
Out in the lobby, he gave me a sheaf of papers easily three inches thick. “Keep exercising, too,” he said. “It’ll help you feel better.”
“You sound like my mother,” I said, tucking everything into my purse.
“And Cannie?” He put his hand on my forearm. “Try not to take it so hard.”
“I know,” I said. “I just wish things were different.”
“You’ll be fine,” he told me firmly. “And…”
His voice trailed off. He looked uncomfortable.
“You know how you said you were a bad person?”
“Oh,” I said, embarrassed. “Sorry. I just have this tendency to get a little melodramatic”
“No, no. That’s okay. I just meant… I wanted to tell you…”
The elevator doors slid open, and the people on it looked at me. I looked at the doctor and stepped backward.
“You aren’t,” he told me. “I’ll see you in class.”
I went home and lunged for the telephone. My one message was from Samantha.
“Hi, Cannie, it’s Sam… no, not Bruce, so get that pathetic look off your puss and call me if you feel like going for a walk. I’ll buy you an iced coffee. It’ll be great. Better than a boyfriend. ’Bye.”
I set down the phone, and picked it up again when it started ringing. Maybe it was Bruce this time, I thought.
Instead, it was my mother.
“Where have you been?” she demanded. “I’ve been calling and calling.”
“You didn’t leave a message,” I pointed out.
“I knew I’d get you eventually,” she said. “How’s it going?”
“Oh, you know…,” I said, my voice trailing off. My mother had really been making an effort since Bruce’s father had died. She’d sent a card to the family and made a donation to the temple. She’d been calling me every night, and insisted that I come to her softball league’s play-off series and watch the Switch Hitters take on Nine Women Out. It was all attention I could have done without, but I knew she meant well.
“Are you walking?” she asked me. “Are you riding your bike?”
“A little bit,” I sighed, remembering how Bruce used to complain that spending time at my house was more like triathlon training sessions than a vacation, because my mother was always trying to organize a walk, a bike ride, two-on-two basketball at the Jewish Center, where she’d gleefully body-check my brother under the boards while I sweated on a StairMaster and Bruce read the sports section in the Seniors’ Lounge.
“I’m walking,” I said. “I take Nifkin out every day.”
“Cannie, that’s not enough! You should come home,” she said. “You’ll be in for Thanksgiving, right? Are you going to come Wednesday, or the day of?”
Ugh. Thanksgiving. Last year Tanya had invited another couple – both women, of course. One of them wouldn’t touch meat, and referred to heterosexual people as “breeders,” while her girlfriend, whose buzz cut and broad shoulders gave her a disconcerting resemblance to my senior prom date, sat beside her looking embarrassed, then vanished into the family room, where we found her, hours later, watching a football game. Tanya, whose Marlboro habit had rendered her tastebuds defunct, spent the entire meal hustling from the kitchen to the table, bearing one bowl of overcooked, overmashed, oversalted side dishes after another, plus something called Tofurkey for the vegetarian. Josh had cut out early on Thursday night, muttering something about finals, and Lucy spent the entire time on the phone with a mysterious boyfriend, who, we would later learn, was both married and twenty years her senior.
“Never again,” I’d whispered to Bruce that night as I tried to find a comfortable position on the lumpy couch while Nifkin trembled behind a stereo speaker. Tanya’s loom occupied the space that had formerly housed my bed, and whenever we came home I had to camp out in the living room. Plus, her two evil cats, Gertrude and Alice, took turns stalking the Nif.
“Why don’t you come home for the weekend?” my mother asked.
“I’m busy,” I said.
“You’re obsessed,” she corrected. “I’ll bet you’re sitting there, reading old love letters Bruce sent you and hoping I’ll get off the phone in case he calls you.”
