“My going to group therapy would help you do well in grad school?” I asked. This seemed to put the idea in a different light—going to group therapy to help Wendy rather than to help myself. I don’t know why this made group therapy more appealing, but it did, maybe because I didn’t need help and didn’t want to waste my time doing something that wouldn’t help anyone.
“It would help a lot, actually. More than you realize. I’m not doing very well in school lately.”
“If I go to group therapy, will you do something for me?” I asked, because I suddenly had a good idea.
“Sure! Anything!” Wendy said, practically leaping from her chair.
“Would you maybe give me lessons on how to impress a woman?”
Wendy made a lemon face and said, “What do you mean?”
“I want to know how to approach a woman so that she might want to have a beer at the bar with me.”
“You’re elevating the stakes of your goal, Bartholomew.”
“Is that good?”
“It’s very good!”
She seemed really happy. She is such a child. So easily pleased.
“Can you help me?” I said.
“Who’s the girl?”
“I don’t want to tell you.”
“Okay,” she said, smiling under those thin orange eyebrows. I made the heart constellation out of her freckles once very quickly. “I see how it is.”
“I’ve never been on a date before.”
“That’s okay.”
“You don’t think of me as a retard now that I’ve told you I’ve never been on a date?”
“I don’t think of anyone as a retard, because that’s a word that shouldn’t ever be used.”
I smiled.
“It’s an age-appropriate goal,” Wendy said. “I’m definitely in.”
“So?”
“So what?”
“How do I make it happen?”
“Why don’t you let me think up a course of action, and we’ll talk about it next week. We’ll fix you up and do our best to get you the girl, Bartholomew. I promise,” Wendy said. She wrote something down on a piece of paper, tore it out, and handed it to me.
Surviving Grief
Monday 8pm
1012 Walnut Street
Third Floor
Tell Arnold I sent you.
“You’ll go?” she said.
I looked at the piece of paper.
Surviving Grief
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”
Just then, the front door banged open. Father McNamee was standing there, his face red with cold. “Has our dear Wendy talked you into throwing me out on the streets yet, Bartholomew?” he asked as he charged through the living room.
Wendy took a deep breath—and then she exhaled audibly through her lips. She stood, met Father McNamee at the kitchen entranceway, and said, “Why did you ask me to help Bartholomew if you don’t respect my opinion?”
“I respectfully disagree with your opinion,” Father McNamee said. “But I still respect it very much.”
“I don’t understand what type of game you’re playing here,” Wendy said.
Father McNamee chuckled and winked at me.
“I’m reporting your whereabouts to Father Hachette,” Wendy said.
“I no longer answer to the Catholic Church. I defrocked myself.”
“I don’t understand what’s going on, but I don’t like it! Not one bit!” Wendy yelled.
She punched her way into her floral-pattern trench coat, grabbed her bag off the kitchen table, and then stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind her.
Father McNamee and I looked at each other.
Then Wendy stormed back into the house and said, “You will be at that meeting, right, Bartholomew?”
“What meeting?” Father McNamee said.
“Bartholomew?” Wendy said, ignoring Father McNamee. “Promise me.”
“I promise,” I said, but didn’t bring up her end of the deal. I didn’t want Father McNamee to know I was trying to woo The Girlbrarian. I don’t know why.
“Good,” Wendy said, and then she stormed out once more.
“She’s feisty,” Father McNamee said.
He reached up, squeezed my shoulder once, and then went into the living room to continue his praying.
I had no idea why Wendy didn’t want Father McNamee to live with me, nor did I understand why Father McNamee had asked Wendy to help me and then blatantly disregarded her opinions.
But I really didn’t want to think about any of that.
I sat in the kitchen trying to hear the birds, but they just wouldn’t sing on that day.
Wendy’s perfume lingered.
Apricot.
Lemon.
Ginger.
What was I going to do next, now that Mom was gone?
I kept thinking about you, Richard Gere.
In the biography that Peter Carrick wrote—on page 17, when he is discussing your relationship with Cindy Crawford, Carrick writes, “He [you, Richard Gere] admitted it was hard for him to make decisions and saw the process as something definite rather than transitory, a situation complicated because of his oppressive tendency to over-analyse.”
When I read that, I knew the you-me of pretending was no accident, because I have always been kept paralyzed by my obsessive thinking, which is why I began playing the you-me Richard Gere game when my mother got sick. When I was you, I didn’t have to think for myself, and this protected me from making mistakes. I wondered if you have ever played such a game, and then it hit me that you are an actor who plays this game all the time, right?