Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,73

her foot massages, Rita says, “are heaven.”

When she got divorced for the third time, Rita didn’t know how to live without being touched even for a week. She’d get antsy, she says. Then it was a month. Then years turned to a decade. She doesn’t like to spend the money on a pedicure nobody will see, but what choice does she have? The pedicures are a necessity because she’ll go crazy with no human contact at all.

“It’s like going to a prostitute, paying to be touched,” Rita says.

Like John does with me, I think—I’m his emotional hooker.

“The point,” Rita is saying about the eighty-year-old, “is that I thought it would feel good to be touched by a man again, but I think I’ll just stick with my pedicures.”

I tell her that the choices aren’t necessarily limited to either Connie or an eighty-year-old, but Rita shoots me a look and I know what she’s thinking.

“I don’t know who you’ll meet,” I concede. “But maybe you’ll be touched—both physically and emotionally—by somebody you care about and who cares about you. Maybe you’ll be touched in an entirely new way, one that’s more satisfying than your other relationships have been.”

I’m expecting a click of the tongue, which I’ve come to recognize as Rita’s version of an eye roll, but she goes quiet, her green eyes filling with tears.

“Let me tell you a story,” she says, fishing out a crumpled, used-looking tissue from the depths of her purse, even though a fresh box sits right beside her on the end table. “There’s a family in the apartment across from mine,” she begins. “Moved in about a year ago. New to town, saving up for a house. Two small children. The husband works from home and plays with the kids in the courtyard, hoisting them onto his shoulders and giving them piggyback rides and tossing a ball with them. All the things I never had.”

She reaches into her purse for more tissues, can’t find any, and dabs her eyes with the one she’s just blown her nose into. I always wonder why she doesn’t take a clean tissue from the box a few inches from her.

“Anyway,” she says, “every day around five p.m., the mother comes home from work. And every day the same thing happens.”

Rita chokes up here, stops. More nose-blowing and eye dabbing. Take the damn tissues! I want to scream. This pained woman, whom nobody talks to or touches, won’t even let herself have a clean tissue. Rita squeezes what’s left of the snot ball in her hand, wipes her eyes, and takes a breath.

“Every day,” she continues, “the mother unlocks the front door, opens it up, and calls out, ‘Hello, family!’ That’s how she greets them: ‘Hello, family!’”

Her voice falters and she takes a minute to compose herself. The children, Rita explains, come running, squealing with joy, and her husband gives her a big, excited kiss. Rita tells me that she watches all this through the peephole that she secretly had enlarged for spying purposes. (“Don’t judge,” she says.)

“And do you know what I do?” she asks. “I know it’s horribly ungenerous, but I seethe with anger.” She’s sobbing now. “There’s never been a ‘Hello, family!’ for me.”

I try to imagine the kind of family Rita might fashion for herself at this point in her life—perhaps with a partner or a rapprochement with her adult children. But I wonder about other possibilities too—what she might do with her passion for art or how she might form some new friendships. I think about the abandonment she experienced as a child and the trauma her own children experienced. How all of them must feel so ripped off and full of resentment that none of them can see what’s actually there and what kind of lives they might still be able to create. And how for a while, I haven’t been able to see it for Rita either.

I walk over to the tissue box, hand it to Rita, then sit down next to her on the couch.

“Thank you,” she says. “Where did those come from?”

“They’ve been there all along,” I say. But instead of taking a fresh tissue, she continues to wipe her face with the snot ball.

In the car on the way home, I call Jen. I know she’s probably also in the car driving home.

When she picks up, I say, “Please tell me that I won’t still be dating in retirement.”

She laughs. “I don’t know. I might be dating in retirement. People