Jo Piazza Read online

  Love Rehab

  a novel in twelve steps

  JO PIAZZA

  To all my ex-boyfriends for making me crazy and

  all my girlfriends for making me sane again.

  Contents

  Admit you are powerless and your life is unmanageable

  Find something greater than yourself to make you sane again

  Make a decision to turn your life over to a higher power

  Make a moral inventory of yourself (a.k.a. figure out what’s wrong with you) and keep the hell away from Facebook

  Admit to yourself and someone else all the crazy shit you have done

  Become entirely ready to have a higher power remove all these defects of character

  Humbly ask our higher power to remove our shortcomings (fix us, please!)

  Make a list of all the persons (exes) we have harmed, and become willing to make amends

  Make amends whenever possible, except when doing so might cause someone harm

  When we are wrong, promptly admit it

  Listen to that higher power (whoever she may be). She knows her shit.

  Having had a spiritual awakening, carry our message to others

  Acknowledgments

  Love Rehab

  Admit you are powerless and your life is unmanageable

  Annie and I hit rock bottom the same week. She sucked down enough tequila to incapacitate a three-hundred-pound sailor while I overdosed on a very bad man. Neither of us thought what we were doing was self-destructive until it became too, too obvious that it was.

  Too, too obvious started on a Tuesday night in July.

  I was curled into a human nest on the couch—legs crossed over each other, arms looped through bent knees, hair in a state of serious unwash—waiting for a reply text to a message I had sent hours earlier. I had resorted to playing childish games with the iPhone. If I turned off the ringer and flipped the phone upside down, then maybe I could force the appearance of a new message when I broke down and flipped it over … every thirty seconds.

  I cleared out junk mail (those near-daily quivers you get from Match.com if you’ve even glanced sideways at their site in the past ten years) and old texts from my parents in the irrational hope that by creating space on the phone something new would appear.

  The message I had sent, the one I was waiting for a reply to, was a pathetic kind of message begging for one more conversation to prolong the continuing breakup with my boyfriend, Eric—a breakup he desperately wanted and I didn’t.

  This breaking-up discussion began in person with me storming out of his apartment. It continued over exactly six and a half hours of phone calls that became increasingly more one-sided and had moved first to Gchats and now to text messaging—the devolution of a relationship in the digital age. It’s funny how they always end the way they start out.

  Our text messaging was all I had left.

  See, even though I was the one to storm out of his apartment, I didn’t want to break up. I thought the storming and the eruption would lead to some grand gesture or admission of undying love and devotion and a desire to move in together, buy rings, have babies.

  It was pathetic, because I should not have wanted these things with this man. I had found a litany of e-mails between him and his assistant—dubbed by Annie (who, by the way, is my best friend), Floozy McSecretary (actual name Lacey, a complete bullshit name, which will henceforth not be repeated … because it sounds like a hooker name).

  Why was I the one begging and pleading for our two-year relationship to continue another day when he was the one who cheated? I did tell you I was approaching rock bottom. I don’t actually know where the phrase “rock bottom” comes from. Because I design children’s books for a living, I have this tendency to illustrate certain phrases or situations in my head. I have always pictured “rock bottom” as a situation where your actual backside turns into a pile of rocks so heavy you can’t move and are stuck in one horrible, really bad place, with a big pebbly behind! That kind of thing would weigh anyone down.

  What I know now is that crazy “in love” people make bad decisions, and I was making my Eric decisions with my ass firmly implanted in a pair of bad idea jeans. I somehow convinced myself his cheating was my fault. I had been away from my real life in Manhattan for a whole month since my grandmother passed away. I was taking care of her estate back in my hometown in New Jersey (NOT THAT HE COULDN’T HAVE COME OUT TO NEW JERSEY!), trying to figure out what to do with a giant six-bedroom Victorian house with a widow’s walk and wraparound veranda that needed about as much fixing up as my self-esteem. Grandma’s entire block was like a lineup of discarded ex-girlfriends who had once been adored when they were shiny and new, and then turned in for something sleeker with more reliable plumbing. No one seemed to want giant six-bedroom old houses anymore in New Jersey. People in New Jersey all wanted the new style McMansion with its granite countertops, Sub-Zero fridges, and large breasts (I mean three-car garages). My parents had already semiretired to Florida and were clueless when it came to contracts and real estate. I think my grandmother’s last joke on me was to bring me back to New Jersey and turn me into a spinster in her former house.

  Grandma, who actually insisted that I refer to her as Eleanor in public because having a granddaughter meant you were old, was never a spinster even when she reached the proper age when one should actually be a spinster and surround herself with cats and crocheted things. Ever since my grandfather passed away when I was six, Eleanor was the Blanche Devereaux of our town, shacking up with every newly available widower as soon as they came onto the market. Men adored her. They simply doted on her with flowers and presents and trips to West Palm Beach.

  Growing up watching her I got the impression that dating should be all about the man courting the woman and showering her with limitless attention.

  That’s definitely only true for senior citizens.

  She would have hated the way I was plodding through the now dusty rooms like a modern-day Miss Havisham—if Miss Havisham had been partial to a hole-riddled Juicy Couture tracksuit that smelled like Doritos. A moth-eaten wedding dress would have been an improvement.

  But as a I wore a groove into the wooden floors with all my plodding, I had developed some theories about why my relationship ended—eleven different theories in all to be exact (only two of which were outlined to Eric in detail over a series of text messages). My latest brainstorm was that the blame couldn’t be put onto Floozy at all. I had seen enough episodes of Dr. Phil to know that cheating was always symptomatic of something gone wrong in a relationship. Floozy was a symptom. I was the problem. I was an absentee girlfriend. If only I had returned sooner and made my relationship a priority, then Floozy never would have been able to sink her acrylic French manicure into Eric.

  Objectively I did understand what a red-blooded American man saw in Floozy. She was blond to my brunette, blue eyed to my murky hazel, big boobed to my modest B-cups, and twenty-three to my thirty. She wasn’t shy about showing off her ample assets either. Before rock bottom swiftly approached along with the night of the unreturned text messages, back in the halcyon early days of our courtship, I would stop into Eric’s Midtown hedge fund office for lunch and there they would be, Floozy’s D-cups popping out of an assortment of unitards made of a material closely related to Saran Wrap. They were truly a wonder to behold. Given enough grappa I probably would have reached out and touched one. When I illustrated Floozy in my head—fairly often I caricatured the two of them together, often in peril—those boobs were so immense and disproportionate to her little blond head that she fell on her face, before being eaten by a lion.

  I contend that you can tell a lot about people and what is most important to them by the first question they ask you when you meet them. I’m
easy. I usually ask people how their day is going. It’s boring, I know, but I actually do care what kind of day most people are having. I genuinely appreciate people being happy and feeling good.

  There are the people who long for their teenage glory days, who always ask you what high school you attended. This is often very important for people who went to high school where things like football were a big deal or for people who went to very fancy boarding schools in western Massachusetts.

  Then there are the people who ask you where you went to college. This is more customary than high school and less specific (since who really cared that I went to Valley Green High in Yardville, New Jersey, home of the fighting Challengers, awkwardly named for the long-ago exploded space shuttle). College gives strangers a common ground. It lets people play the name game, which is always a nice icebreaker.

  “Do you know Susie Goldberg?”

  “Of course I know Susie Goldberg. She lived on my hall freshman year. She was so outgoing.”

  And then in hushed tones the other person adds: “Yeah, superoutgoing. Was she still a little bit of a … you know. Was she popular?”

  “Oh my God, Susie totally got around freshman year. One time at a Phi Delt rush event, two guys and a midget stripper … ”

  And then you were clinking beer glasses and becoming shot-doing friends with this random person all because you were able to bond over Susie Goldberg (now a mother of two, happily living in Greenwich, CT) being a whore. The college question is a good one, except when associating with people from Harvard.

  Harvard people like to say: “I went to school in Cambridge.” Of course, everyone knows that means Harvard because there is only one school in Cambridge. The not saying of Harvard somehow becomes more pretentious than the saying of Harvard and then you have to hate that person. I once had hate sex with a guy who did the whole “I went to Cambridge” thing. He gave me crabs.

  The first question Floozy asked me was where I went to the gym. I mumbled something about a Crunch, because seven years ago I had stopped in to activate a free monthly pass and taken an ill-fated Zumba class at the Crunch gym in the East Village. I don’t care what Madonna says about the benefits of Zumba—white girls from New Jersey with two left feet shouldn’t partake in the art of Brazilian dance. I could hardly sit down for a week.

  Floozy was also always supernice to me, which made the betrayal part of this whole thing a little bit worse. Since she organized Eric’s calendar, I knew it was her who remembered my birthday and sent daisies to my apartment (since I didn’t like roses) and who made dinner reservations for my parents’ anniversary.

  What a bitch.

  Around three in the morning, as my shame spiral was finally starting to settle in for the evening, and I teetered in and out of sleep, twitching at any vibration from the general direction of my phone, I was startled by the blue-and-red flashing lights of the town sheriff’s car on the front lawn.

  What time was it? Four a.m.? Shit. Eric had gotten a restraining order against me? I had only sent ten, maybe eleven messages in the last ten hours. One an hour. What’s the statute for texts? Is it like wine? You can send one every sixty minutes and not increase your blood crazy level above the legal limit? It was hardly restraining order–worthy. I peeled myself away from the plastic-covered couch I was too lazy to de-plastic and almost fell on my face, my left leg asleep. The police car was parked askew in the driveway, and it didn’t look like there was even anyone in it.

  This was the beginning of a horror movie. Sad, sad rejected girl with ratty hair lured outside by fake police officer to be killed by mad man with a hook for a hand. I wasn’t going to let that thought keep me from going outside. Captain Hook was currently the least of my adversaries. Mine were big-boobed, love-of-my-life-stealing administrative assistants. Besides, the pretty blondes are almost always the first killed in those kinds of movies. I was too dowdy to be taken out. If Floozy were here, she would have been fucked. I padded down the cobblestone walkway in bare feet without bothering to flick on the porch light. Getting closer, I saw a figure slumped over the steering wheel. Captain Hook took a nap before bludgeoning? Maybe he saw me in the window and decided I wasn’t worth a bludgeon? God, my self-esteem was in the gutter.

  Hook also had distinctive red curls that even in the streetlight screamed, “Fire, Danger, Step back or I’ll cut you.” I knew those curls. I had been braiding them into pigtails since I was seven years old.

  I met Annie Capaletti in the second grade when she saved me from what could have been a completely embarrassing and wholly defining moment for me as the new girl in town. My family had just moved to Yardville, New Jersey, from the Chicago suburbs. We had driven the fourteen-hour trip in a single day in our Ford minivan; our small family of four was helmed by a father who was too cheap to shell out $59 for an Econo Lodge. My brother and I were so cranky and ornery (remember this was back in the days before family cars had DVD players) that my mom broke her cardinal rule of not allowing us to eat fast food and let us have Happy Meals four times along the way. Those delicious burgers with their waxy yellow cheese and chicken nuggets in the shape of an old man’s thumb quieted us down but also wreaked havoc on our faux-food virgin bellies. And so I sat in my first day of second grade with a grumbly, fussy stomach and no idea where the bathroom was in this new strange school building.

  I held it in. I held it in all through the Pledge of Allegiance and roll call and when Miss Sherman called me in front of the class to introduce me. By that point I was shuffling from foot to foot as I smiled shyly, praying that Miss Sherman would pull me aside to show me around the school before we began the lessons for the day—making the bathroom tour a priority. But the completely clueless Miss Sherman just told me to take my seat.

  That’s when it happened. My stomach had different ideas than I did about how to impress my new classmates. Out escaped a low grumbly fart … the kind of fart that can brand you a freak from the second to the twelfth grade and ensure the boys call you something horrible like Flatulate Face, Air Poop, or Log Leaver into puberty and beyond. A cute redhead with pigtail braids and a smattering of freckles across her nose was the first to react. She looked at me for a split second just as the snickers began and she moved into action. She put the heels of her palms to the middle of her heart-shaped mouth and vibrated her lips against them making a Pfffffffffttttttttttt! sound almost identical to the one that came out of my other end. The entire class let out the laugh they had been about to release for the first noise and assumed Annie had just made them both. Miss Sherman stared down at the little redhead with a look of consternation.

  “Miss Capaletti, I believe you know your way to the principal’s office, don’t you?” she brayed down at the girl.

  “Sure do.”

  And with that Annie stood up, gave me a wink, and marched out of the classroom to collect her punishment. I later learned she was sentenced to an afternoon of clapping out erasers, a task she said she never really minded anyway because she got to snoop on the teachers in the lounge after class let out.

  That particular day she heard Miss Sherman declare her love for Principal Nailer to the school nurse.

  From then on I was completely indebted to and in love with Annie. We did everything together until I left Yardville for college at Villanova and she went to Boston for culinary school. But even after that we still saw each other on holidays and found ways to work together at the local waterpark on our summer vacations. Annie’s job was actually to tell larger women they were too fat to fit down the waterslide. She reveled in it.

  Annie was the first person I called when my mom told me the news that my grandmother had died from a prolonged battle with colon cancer, and she had visited me almost every day that I had been staying in town.

  How the hell did Annie end up in a police car? wasn’t the first question to cross my mind. This wasn’t even the craziest vehicle I had seen her commandeer for a joy ride—that would be Old Man Jenkins’s John Deere tractor the night of ou
r senior prom.

  When I opened the door to nudge her awake, her head teetered forward and she vomited all over my bare feet. It had been weeks since I had a proper pedicure, but this was gross all the same.

  The vomiting roused her a bit, which was good since I wasn’t game for wading through what didn’t end up on my toes to pull her from the car.

  “Hi, Sophie,” she said as if we were meeting for coffee on a Sunday afternoon and not four hours past midnight with one of us in a stolen municipal vehicle.

  “Hi, Annie,” I said back with the same nonchalance. “Whose car is this?”

  She looked back and up, and I realized she didn’t have a clue how she got there. She was just coming out of a blackout. Annie had been drinking a lot lately. She was the owner of the town’s most beloved bar, so it didn’t seem out of character for her to have more than ten cocktails in an evening and, unfortunately, more often than not, still drive herself the two miles home from the bar.

  Her job, after all, was to entertain customers and keep them happy so they came back and kept drinking. No one liked a sober bar owner. They were the pedophile priests of the hospitality industry.

  At that moment I finally felt the unmistakable buzz of my iPhone, coupled with my ringer, turned to loud, in case I had dozed off and nearly missed this last stream of communications. Now was not the time for “Rump Shaker,” in the classical stylings of Wreckx-N-Effect, to be playing at maximum volume. I yanked it out of my pocket and stumbled through the pool of puke that had started to harden a little around my feet.

  Eric (cell): You need to move on with your life. I’ve moved on with mine.

  I instantaneously thought of a dozen things I could reply with. I could tell him I didn’t need to move on with my life since I could forgive him and we could get through this and move on with our lives together. Before my fingers could stroke the buttons, an aftershock rumbled through Annie and she dry heaved—and then retched out of her mouth and onto my phone. Sometimes a higher power does give you signs.