My therapist’s office is painted the color of unsalted butter. Sitting in that office on the couch with the one broken spring that made it just maddeningly shy of comfortable, I have often thought of shoving the whole room into a mixing bowl with brown sugar and flour and vanilla and chocolate chips. I crave cookies when I’m annoyed, when I feel I know better than those around me. Crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside, fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies warm from the oven, with the chocolate soft but not melted. I don’t know the derivation of this comfort craving, but there’s a quote from Cookie Monster that’s always inhabited my head: “Today me will live in the moment, unless it’s unpleasant, in which case me will eat a cookie.” While I don’t take all of my mantras from goggle-eyed blue monsters with questionable grammar, this one has taken root. Lately I’ve been craving cookies a lot.
My therapist’s name is Jenny, which is not a name you should accept for a therapist. Ever. A gymnast, perhaps. Forrest Gump’s wife, sure. A worker at one of those frozen yogurt places where you pump your own yogurt and all they have to do is weigh it and they still think their job is rough. But not a therapist. I just don’t think people take Jennys seriously. Case in point: My name is Edward Flask, but people call me Ted—something I insisted upon after the unfortunate nickname “Special Ed” followed me through grade school because I was so shy. I can see my name scrawled in Jenny’s handwriting across the top of a legal pad on her lap, but the T in Ted is bolder—clearly an addition she made after remembering no one calls me Ed. And I’ve been seeing her for months! Still, Jenny takes my insurance and has an office that is adjacent to my neighborhood (at least by Los Angeles standards). The conclusions she draws are always the wrong ones, but I’ve gotten good at taking her dimwitted advice and filtering it through the mind of an imaginary and much smarter therapist to get the insight into my life that I need. That by itself sounds dysfunctional, but it happens to work for me.
I entered therapy after I ended my last relationship eighteen months ago, six years in and maybe two years after I should have. It started out strong. We met at the New Beverly Cinema after a screening of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment and we argued about its merits. Jeffrey was smart—scary smart—and passionate. When I blanched at The Apartment’s themes of infidelity and adultery, Jeffrey pressed me on my professed love for another of Wilder’s films, The Seven Year Itch.
At first, his charisma made it addictive to be around him. But over time, I recognized it was also a fa?ade; there was a wounded boy inside of him. He had grown up without a dad, so it made sense to me that he sought constant validation. I found it endearing. Humanizing. Until he started to indulge that little boy. There were tantrums. There was acting out. There was his need to control things that he had no business controlling. But he was still that boy, and I loved him, so I stayed, thinking it would get better. And then one morning I woke up to one of life’s clarion calls: I deserved better than this. That night I said I was leaving.
After more than a year off from dating, I’m finally putting myself out there again. Dipping my toes in old waters from which I thought I had long since sailed downstream. Jenny asks me about this.
“How is that going?”
“That?”
“Yes.”
“Dating?”
“Uh-huh.”
It’s the last thing I want to talk about. The octopus has almost as tight a grip on my head as it does on Lily’s. And yet I can’t bring myself to tell Jenny about our unwanted visitor. At least not yet. I can’t show my hand, expose the fear that the octopus brings and have her say all the wrong things, as she’s all but guaranteed to do. Jenny. I can’t do her work for her—not on this. I would rather do her work without her, which means, for now, holding this one close to my chest.
I shouldn’t even have come, shouldn’t have left Lily alone with the octopus, but the sunlight was streaming through the kitchen windows in the exact way that she likes, and the long beams of late afternoon would provide her ample warmth for a long nap. I couldn’t get an appointment with the veterinarian until Monday, and something in me thinks the sun could be healing. That it might irradiate our visitor, desiccate our fish out of water.
“Are octopuses fish?” I ask it out loud without meaning to.
“Are octopuses what?”
“Fish. Are they considered fish.”