Patient’s name: Lori Bryant
Age: 25
Occupation: Hair stylist
Diagnosis based on initial evaluation: Patient suffers from abandonment issues that stem from parents divorcing when she was 7. Looks to romantic partners for the love and devotion she never received from her absentee father. Patient self-destructively chases men who are emotionally distant or unavailable and sabotages all relationships with her neediness and possessiveness. Prone to dramatic, emotional outbursts and mood swings.
Goal of therapy: Build patient’s self-confidence and provide her with the tools she needs to have a healthy relationship based on reciprocity.
“I just don’t understand what I did wrong!” Lori wailed pitifully, tears streaming down her swollen pink cheeks.
I opened a fresh box of Kleenex and handed it to her with a look of sympathetic concern. She’d already worked her way through the packet of tissues she’d pulled from her purse at the beginning of our session and balled-up wads of soggy white paper now littered the couch where she was sitting.
“We were so happy! I thought for sure that James was the one, that we had a future together.” She stopped to blow her runny nose, making a loud honking noise as she did so.
“I did everything to please him. He said he thought Cameron Diaz was hot, so I colored my hair blonde and started wearing stilettos to make myself look taller.”
And lightening her hair had been a tragic mistake. Lori’s curly red locks, which I’d always admired, were now a bleached-out, frizzy fright. She looked like she’d stuck her finger in a light socket. Surely, her new ‘do was bad for business? If I were a potential client of Lori’s and I walked into her salon and saw the mess she’d made of her own hair, I’d run screaming for the door.
“I did his laundry. I gave him foot massages. I made him a home-cooked meal every night. I even sent him love notes via text and e-mail every hour on the hour when he was at work. What more did he want?” She turned beseeching eyes on me as if I knew the secret to men’s hearts.
“Well . . .”
How could I put this politely? ‘Lori, you scared off James by smothering him with your so-called love? You’ll never hold on to a man if you continue to act so clingy and desperate?’ If I was honest with Lori, who was high-strung on a good day, I’d have to put her on suicide watch.
“He probably wanted some space.” I opted for a truthful, but benign, answer. “You’d only been together for what? Three weeks?”
“Two weeks and three days. The happiest 403 hours of my life!”
She was now counting how many hours her doomed romances lasted? Oh, dear. I made a note on my steno pad.
“In terms of a relationship, that’s not much time, and my guess is that James was feeling rushed, like things were getting too serious, too fast.”
“That’s exactly what he said! But I don’t understand, Dr. Alvarez. James and I were so compatible. Why take things slow when our love felt so right?”
“But was it really love? You barely knew each other,” I gently reminded her.
“Do you have to know someone in order to love them? What about love at first sight?”
“In that context, love is a misnomer. There can be lust or attraction at first sight, but not love.
What you feel for a man when you first lay eyes on him is based solely on his physical appearance. It’s a chemical reaction to aesthetics. Love is a deep and complicated emotion that grows over time.”
“Soooooo,” Lori slid forward to the edge of the couch, “you’re saying that if I could get James to take me back, he would grow to love me?”
“No,” I stated firmly, “that door is closed. James ended your relationship, and you need to move on.”
“To another man?” The idea seemed to perk her up. “There is this cute civil engineer who came in for a cut last week. I think he was interested. He did wink at me a few times, or that might have been a nervous tic.”
I resisted the urge to sigh impatiently. “I wouldn’t advise jumping into another relationship so soon. You need time to recover from this latest disappointment.”
Lori frowned. “How much time?”
“Let’s say, a month. I want you to avoid any and all romantic entanglements for the next four weeks.”
“A month!” She was incredulous. “I can’t live without a man in my life for a month.”
“You can and you will. You need this time for self-reflection. Think of it as a therapeutic exercise.”
“What am I supposed to be reflecting on? Why nobody wants me? How I’m going to die alone? I can’t do it! I can’t be by myself for a month. I need someone to love, someone to take care of,” she whined.
“Then get a puppy.”
Lori’s jaw dropped, and her heavily made-up blue eyes widened. “Are you serious?” she wondered.
“Absolutely,” I enthused. “A pet will give you the unconditional love you crave. It will keep you company and give you something to nurture. Studies have shown that people who have pets live longer, happier lives.”
Lori chewed on a hangnail while she considered my suggestion. “There is a park near my apartment complex. If I had a dog and I walked it there every day, I’ll bet that I could meet a lot of guys.”
Freud, give me strength! Did this woman have to relate everything back to men?
“You may make new friends through your pet; animals do tend to make their owners more sociable. But don’t forget your month-long moratorium on dating. I want you to focus on yourself and the new addition to your household, not men.”
“Okay, I’ll try.”
“Good.” I glanced over at the small crystal clock located on the end table next to the couch and was relieved to see that it was 4:49 p.m. “I’m afraid our time is up for today.”
“Already?” Lori looked down at her watch as if she thought I was lying. “Wow! Time really does fly when I’m here.” She stood up to leave. “Thanks so much, Dr. Alvarez. I feel a lot better.”
“I’m glad,” I replied with a smile as I stood and smoothed out the wrinkles in my linen skirt. “Let me walk you out.”
I led her out the door of my office into the small waiting area, which was empty since Lori had been my last appointment of the day. Stopping at my receptionist’s desk, I asked, “Margo, would you write down the number and address of the Humane Society for Ms. Bryant?”
“Sure thing.” Margo lifted her reading glasses, which were attached to a gaudy red-and-purple beaded tether that hung around her neck, and placed them on the tip of her nose. She turned the knob on her rolodex until the F-tab came up, then spent a couple of seconds flipping through the cards in that section. She stopped when she found the one she wanted and scribbled a few lines on a fluorescent pink post-it note.
“Here ya go, honey.” She handed the information to my patient. “Good luck.”
“I’ll see you next Tuesday at the same time, okay?”
“I’ll be here,” Lori assured me as if there were any doubt. I was confident that her appointment with me was the highlight of her week. In our first session, she’d told me that her girlfriends, as well as her mother, steadfastly refused to discuss her man problems anymore. And so, she’d had to turn to me, a paid professional, to listen.
“Poor thing,” Margo remarked after Lori was gone. “She gets dumped more often than my garbage, and I have a twice-a-week pick-up.”
“Hopefully, adopting a dog will bring some love and happiness into her life. Why did you have the Humane Society filed under the Fs?”
“Furry friends,” she explained.
“Ah.” My receptionist was what we in the psychology biz called ‘an abstract-random thinker.’ She was orderly in her own way, but things that made perfect sense to her left other people scratching their heads. If Margo ever quit and I had to figure out the method to her filing system madness myself, I was in deep trouble.
“What do we have on the schedule for tomorrow?”
With a few keystrokes, Margo pulled up a list of Wednesday’s appointments on her computer screen. “A new patient in the morning, and the Ortegas and Mr. Campbell in the afternoon.”
“Three appointments for the whole day!” I groaned and sank down in defeat on the corner of Margo’s desk. “That’s awful. I should be booking 7 or 8 sessions every day of the week.”
“You’re seeing 6 patients on Thursday.”
“It’s not enough.”
Margo gave my knee an encouraging pat. “Honey, you’ve only been in this office for 3 months. It takes time to build a practice.”
I looked down at the liver spots on the back of her 67-year-old hand. “I know, but I’ve got bills to pay. Maybe I should do more advertising? Of course, that would cost money.”
“So, ask that nice father of yours to help you out.”
“He’s already done too much.”
Not only had Papá found me a beautiful office in South Beach, he’d had it furnished and decorated by some trendy interior designer and paid the first month’s rent. I was blessed to have such a financially-solvent and generous father, but now I wanted to stand on my own two feet.
“Helping out is what families do. Where would my Saul be if I didn’t work? He couldn’t survive on his Disability.”
I smiled. Margo and Saul Rabinowitz were the cutest couple I knew. They’d been married for 42 years and were still, quite obviously, very much in love. Their faces lit up whenever they saw each other, and they were always so affectionate, a kiss on the cheek here, a tender caress of the shoulder there. They gave me hope for couples everywhere.
“He’s lucky to have you.”
“No, I’m the lucky one,” she insisted. “Oh, look at the time! If I don’t get home by six to get the brisket out of the oven, Saul will forget and leave it in. Then, our dinner will taste like old shoe leather.” She pulled a big straw handbag out of her bottom desk drawer.
I rose to my feet. “I should get going, too. I’ve got a date tonight.”
“Good for you!” Margo squeezed my arm on her way to the door. “A pretty girl like you shouldn’t be sitting at home by herself every night.”
I didn’t know whether to be flattered that she’d referred to me, a woman pushing 30, as a “girl,” or offended that she thought my social life was so pathetic. It wasn’t like I was some unpopular recluse who stayed in every night eating a tub of Rocky Road while I carried on meaningful conversations with my cats. I didn’t even have any cats. What I did have was lots of friends and a big family who kept me busy when I wasn’t at work. Maybe I had been going through a bit of a dry spell with men, but it wasn’t like I wasn’t open to going out or developing a relationship with someone special.
“You’ll have to give me all of the juicy details tomorrow. Have fun, doll!” Margo disappeared out into the corridor, leaving a trail of White Shoulders perfume in her wake.
I went back to my office, grabbed my purse, and turned off all the lights and office equipment. The last thing I needed was another $298 bill from Florida P&L. If I hadn’t been sitting when I’d opened my last statement from that price-gouging utilities company, I would have keeled over from the shock. Damn air-conditioning! In South Florida’s sultry climate, you couldn’t live without it, but living with it would almost bankrupt you.
Shutting the outer office door behind me, I reached into the maw of my Louis Vuitton handbag and began to rummage around in search of my keys. The expensive leather purse, which had been embellished with a whimsical cherry print, was something I never would have bought for myself, but I’d had no compunction about accepting it as a hand-me-down from my older sister, Ana, the lawyer’s wife, who’d carried it as a status symbol for one season. Whether the bag was out-of-style or not didn’t matter to me, I only cared that it was big and sturdy since I had a habit of using my purse to haul around things as disparate in size and weight as my old psych textbooks and cartons of Chinese.
After locking my office door, I stood back for a moment and gazed at the name plate that adorned it: Pilar Alvarez, Psy.D. Seeing those four letters after my name never ceased to thrill me. They had been hard-earned. Years of school, supervision by my mentor, Dr. Fields, for countless hours while I gathered experience, the EPPP examination, the state laws and rules test, and finally, my license to practice psychology in Florida. It had been heady stuff when I’d first held that all-important piece of paper in my hands. There was so much power in it, power to help people, to shape their lives, to make a difference in the world. And being called “Doctor” wasn’t a bad bonus.
I scampered down the stairs that took me to the lobby of the almost 80-year-old Mediterranean Revival-style building where my office was housed. It was a beautiful building, fully restored with stone floors, stucco walls, and a clay barrel tile roof. There were three offices on the ground floor (a CPA, travel agency, and graphic designer) and three on the second level (a wedding planner, me, and an empty suite that had been vacated by an architect the previous month - he had run off with one of the wedding planner’s brides-to-be two days before she was supposed to walk down the aisle. It had been quite a scandal.)
I had gotten to work early that morning, so I’d scored an excellent parking space directly across from my office building on 11th Street. I jaywalked over to my car, which probably wasn’t the smartest move since the City of Miami Beach Police Station was less than a block down on the left, but I was too lazy to hoof it up to the next crosswalk at Jefferson. My silver Miata was right where I’d left it; its metallic paint glistening in the late afternoon sun. I took down the black vinyl convertible top so that I could enjoy the nice weather on my ride home, then climbed into the driver’s seat.
Removing the tortoise shell clip that I had my hair twisted up with, I ran my fingers through the long, wavy tresses. I have nice hair; it’s thick and healthy, and I can wear it curly or straight (of course, that would require a ton of product, an hour of blowdrying, and a non-humid day, which was something of a rarity in what I affectionately called “the sweatbox.”) The color of my hair is unremarkable - medium brown, I guess you’d call it, but I have pretty caramel highlights (courtesy of the sun) that most women have to go to a salon and pay good money to get.
I strapped myself in, put on my Ray-Bans, and started the Miata’s engine. My car was almost 5 years old, but it didn’t have a lot of mileage and it ran like a dream. Cruising up the Macarthur Causeway on my way home from work was the most enjoyable part of my day. Katy Perry on the CD player, the wind in my hair, the Biscayne Bay on either side of me, who could complain? Although I lived only 10 miles from my office, it took a good 30 minutes to cover that territory during rush hour because of the slow-and-go traffic on I-95. Bitching and moaning about our clogged freeways was a favorite pastime of many South Floridians, and the frustrated expressions I saw on the faces of my fellow commuters every day made me very glad that I didn’t have to trek back and forth from Fort Lauderdale or Boca.
At five past six, I pulled into the concrete ribbon driveway outside my house. House might be a slight exaggeration. It’s really a bungalow, an adorable yellow bungalow with palm trees in the front yard and avocado trees in the back. With the help of my father, who’d given me the $30,000 down payment, I’d bought the property two years ago and had loved every minute of living within its cozy confines.
As per my daily routine, I removed the mail from the black metal box attached to the wall next to my front door, then let myself in.
“I’m home!” I shouted over the sound of the screen door crashing closed behind me.
No response. It wasn’t like my house was so big that you could be out of earshot in any part of it. She was ignoring me.
“Izzy!”
Izzy was my younger sister, Isidora, and my sort-of roommate. Sort-of because the term “roommate” implied that the person paid rent, and Izzy never had. She’d moved into my place “temporarily” after graduating college the year before because she couldn’t stand living with my parents, who were “too controlling,” and had never left.
The relationship between my parents and their youngest child was a complicated one. Izzy had been their “Ooops!” baby. Ana had been born ten months after my parents’ marriage (both grandmothers had actually brought calendars to the hospital and counted back from her day of birth to confirm that she’d been conceived in holy wedlock.) I’d arrived the following year, and my parents had thought that they were through with procreating. Then, six years later, “Ooops!” Mamá became pregnant with Izzy. My parents loved Izzy just as much as their other daughters, but she’d always been a trial for them. It was almost as if she’d sensed in the womb that she was an accident and so, she’d come into the world with a “Here I am, deal with it!” attitude.
“Hey.” Izzy padded into the living room on bare feet. She wore her standard uniform of short shorts that sat obscenely low on her lean hips and a midriff-baring halter top that exposed her pierced belly button. I couldn’t look at it without feeling queasy.
“How was your day?” I asked conversationally as I sorted through the mail. Phone bill. Visa statement. Victoria’s Secret catalog. “Any luck with your job search?” She’d been fired from or “quit” so many jobs in the last year that I’d lost count.
“Not really.” She picked up a half-eaten Snickers bar that she’d left sitting on the coffee table and took a bite of it.
“Did you go on any interviews today? Look at the job listings online?”
“I checked Simply Hired and Monster. There wasn’t anything new.”
She was probably lying, but I let it slide. “Any phone calls for me?”
“Yeah.” She plopped down on the couch, tucking her long, tanned legs underneath her. “The psycho called.”
“You’re going to have to be more specific than that. I meet a lot of psychos in my line of work,” I said with a playful smirk, then handed her a piece of junk mail that had her name on it.
“I’m not talking about one of your patients. I’m talking about your psycho ex, Victor.”
I made a face. I hadn’t heard from Victor in almost a week, and I’d been hoping that he’d finally gotten tired of pursuing me. I’d given him his walking papers a month ago, but he didn’t seem to understand the concept of breaking up. “What did he say?”
“He said he missed you and wanted to know what you were up to. I told him that you’d moved to a remote island in the South Pacific so that you could provide psychological treatment to a tribe of cannibals there.”
I chortled. “I don’t suppose he believed you?”
“‘fraid not.” Izzy balled up her candy bar wrapper and tossed it in the general direction of the coffee table. The wrapper missed by a few inches and fell to the ivory throw rug beneath it. “He said that no matter where you went, or what you did, he wasn’t giving up on you. Your love was destined to be . . . or some crap like that.”
I rolled my eyes. Funny that Victor had never said anything about his undying love for me when we were together. Like most men, he just wanted what he could no longer have.
“You should take this seriously, Pilar,” my sister warned. “I think that Victor’s loco. He’ll probably come here in the middle of the night and murder us in our sleep.”
“You watch too many movies about serial killers. In my professional opinion, he’s harmless. Annoying, but harmless.”
“If you say so . . . I’m hungry!” She abruptly changed the subject and jumped up from the couch. “I’m going to heat up some beans and rice. Want some?”
I followed her into the kitchen. “No thanks. I’m going out to dinner with Sara. Our double date, remember? She’s setting me up with a friend of Matt’s.”
“Who’s Matt?” Izzy wondered as she peeled off the lid of some Tupperware she’d taken out of the refrigerator.
“Ugh!” She crinkled up her nose with disgust when she got a whiff of its rotted contents. “This is nasty. I don’t even know what kind of meat it was.” She threw the open container into the sink, where it would most likely stay until I scrubbed it out.
“Matt’s the PR guy Sara’s been seeing for the past month. He’s cute. Hopefully, his friend will be, too.”
“A double date and a blind date? That sounds like a fun evening . . . not.” Izzy popped another piece of Tupperware, this one full of leftover black beans and rice, into the microwave.
“Well, it’s not like I’m meeting anyone on my own, so I can’t turn down an opportunity. I’m sure it’ll be fine. Sara knows my taste.”
“You don’t even know your taste.” Izzy opened the silverware drawer and pulled out a fork.
Good point. I really wasn’t sure what I was looking for in a man. I only knew that I’d recognize that indefinable something when I came into contact with it.
“I’d better get ready. I have no idea what I’m going to wear. Clean up after yourself, please.” I waved at the mess she was making on the kitchen counter.
Izzy used her hand to scrape up a forkful of beans and rice that she’d just dropped. “Wear your coral top!” she yelled after me. “Guys love a bare back.”