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Authors: Cathy Lamb

The First Day of the Rest of My Life (21 page)

BOOK: The First Day of the Rest of My Life
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13
“T
hank you for joining us this morning, Madeline.”
“Thanks for asking me to be here.” I spoke into the microphone, adjusted the headphones over my ears, and smiled across the table at Conner Mills, Portland’s most popular radio show announcer.
White haired, six foot six inches tall, gruff and blunt, the man had a heart of gold and came to see me at my office because he secretly knitted baby booties and wanted my help in building his confidence and “Grabbing His Gumption,” my slang, to get out there and sell them. “I know I could market these, Madeline. I’m up all night making them, see here, I’m so careful with my stitches.”
The baby booties were not normal pink and blue baby booties. They were frogs, pigs, salamanders, worms, cows, cats, pigs. But the booties didn’t match. You chose two animals for your baby. “Kids like animals, right?” he said. “They can have a polar bear on one foot and a giraffe on the other.”
He had a point. Why limit the animals in your life?
“I’m thinking about making them for adults, too. I made them for myself and my wife. She likes wearing one dolphin because she likes swimming and one giraffe because she likes friendly eyes. Me, I wear a jaguar on my right foot because I like to think I’m fast and a gorilla on my left because I like bananas. See? You can personalize your feet animals. What do you think?”
“I think it’s brilliant. I’ll take a cat and a gargoyle.”
“A gargoyle? Hey. I can do it.”
“One animal purrs at you, the other eats you, Conner.”
All traces of animal baby booties were gone that morning at the radio station. The man was a pro. Work was work. Do it right or don’t do it at all.
“People,” he said into his microphone. “Madeline O’Shea lives here with us. She’s an Oregonian, graduated from Beaverton High, and is the nation’s most popular life coach. She’s a weekly columnist for the popular magazine
Boutique.
‘A Life Coach Tells You How to Live It’ is filled with advice from The O’Shea Principles, and any conference she speaks at sells out within hours. She’s a life coach who specializes in relationships, but Americans go to her for advice about every aspect of their lives from jobs, career paths, and marriage to enlightenment, fulfillment, and integrating a meaningful life into the life they’re living.”
Yes, I advise people, I thought, but I rarely follow my own advice. Should I announce that on air? “Yeah, I sling out O’Shea Principles and quotes but I am a lost cause.” Should I say that? Should I say that I’m a lie? It’s exhausting being a lie.
“Tell us how you got started, Madeline.”
“I was getting a degree in counseling, but I wasn’t doing very well in my classes because I spent so much time playing my violin in the university’s orchestra. I also stood on the street corner and played my violin for money for a few hours a day. Anyhow, I started writing an advice column for the university’s newspaper because it paid twenty dollars. Soon it was picked up by other newspapers and syndicated. Grew from there. I took on clients. I was asked to speak at various events, small ones, then larger. I started writing my column in
Boutique.
”
“You were young when you started advising people on how to live their lives.”
I was young when I started
listening
to advice. My momma in her pink beauty parlor was an overflowing fountain of it.
“I gave them the truth, Conner. I was young and blunt and saw through all the bull-arky that surrounded their lives and their relationships. I showed them a path out. Here’s how to deal with an ass at work, here’s how to widen your life, here’s why you gotta get rid of that person. I added acronyms like D.O.N.’T. B.E.A.W.U.S.S. and I was in business.”
Yes, I was young. At first I counseled a lot of young people. Then they brought their parents in. Grief, the gunshots, the trials, all of that made me waaaay more mature than I should have been. And I was angry, I was not sympathetic to whiners or sulkers, and I swatted my clients’ sorry butts more times than I can count. Funny enough, they bought into my tyrannical tirades.
“Your career is blazing hot and getting hotter, Madeline. Why do you think people need life coaches?”
I did not say, “Because they need someone to hold their hands when they launch their animal booties.” I said, “People need life coaches because life is a freakin’ mess.”
Conner laughed. “It sure is.”
“I can only compare life to being shot from a cannon into the middle of space and being bombarded by all sorts of debris—pieces of satellites and shuttles, asteroids, shooting stars, maybe an alien spaceship. We’re hit all the time and sometimes we can’t find Earth. We can’t even find the Milky Way galaxy. We’re lost. Running around, dodging this and that, trying not to get hurt or killed, and all the while we’re looking for home. That’s how life is. It’s a meteor shower. People call me to help them get recentered, to help them with their life relationships, whether it’s work or personal, so they can get back out there and do the three Fs.”
“What are the Fs?” He knew what they were. We had discussed them at length when discussing piggies.
I winked at him, and he chuckled. “The three Fs stand for fight, fortitude, and forgiveness. We all have to get out there and fight. Fact is, life feels like a fight sometimes. You have to fight for your job, your promotion. Sometimes you have to fight with your mechanic who thinks it’s okay to charge a woman twice as much as a man. Women have to show their balls, no other way around it.”
Conner slammed his mouth shut so he wouldn’t laugh.
“You have to fight for yourself, surround yourself with good people, positive people, so the negative spiders at the bottom of the barrel don’t bite you. You have to have fortitude, strength. Don’t whine. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Don’t pity yourself. On any day I can tell you that there are, literally, billions of people on this planet having a worse day than you. And forgiveness is to forgive people who have wronged you and let it go, and forgive yourself, and let it go. So three F it, Conner.”
“With the three Fs in mind, we’ll have our first caller on the air. He doesn’t want to give his name, but he wants to know what you think of open marriages because he wants to be in one.”
“Hello,” I said pleasantly.
“Hi,
Mad-e-line!
Wow. Sweet. Awesome. Thanks for taking my call. I saw a photograph of you and can I say that you are gorgeous?”
“You could say that, but we’re not on topic, are we? Would you tell a man that he was gorgeous? No. Okay, so you want to be in an open marriage. Are you in one now?”
“Geez . . . uh . . . blunt question there. . . . I’m married . . . yeah.”
“I hate when people are vague. Are you in an open marriage now?”
“Uh. Boy, uh, my wife isn’t in an open marriage, but I think I want to embrace that lifestyle. . . .”
“Which means you’re cheating on your wife, do I about have it?”
Conner’s expression was stamped with surprise.
Dead silence. Dead. “Uh. Ah. That’s a hard question.... I’ve met someone, but . . . I . . . I still love my wife.”
“But you’re sleeping with two women, right, and you want me to condone this?”
Conner mouthed to me, “How did you know?”
The caller’s voice came out spindly, winded. “I’m, professionally speaking, I uh, I just was wondering what you think of open marriages.”
“You don’t have an open marriage. You are cheating on your wife.”
I heard him suck in his breath.
“You are a slug. You are a dishonest cheat. You are cheating your wife, your kids, your marriage vows, and you’re cheating this woman you’re with, although I don’t care about her because she knows you’re married, so that makes her a hormone-flashing slug.”
He coughed, sputtered, his voice pitched. “Yeah . . . she knows.... We met at work and we can’t control our feelings for each other. You can’t stop yourself from falling in love, can you? But I still want my wife and the kids.... This gal is only for me, you know, to give me some relief, to help me get through my day, to offer sex and fun.”
“Yeah, bite me, you creep. You’re a liar. Your morals are in the mud. No, they’re beneath the mud. They are in a swamp of infested termites. This is not an open marriage. What do I think of open marriages? I think open marriages work until you realize that your partner is boinking someone else and has a whole secret other life without you and is comparing your performance, and the size of your thingie, with her new partner’s. I think open marriages are slimy and crude and beneath all of us. Kind of like you.” I looked up at the phone number on the reader board and the name of the caller. “Okay, Korbin Berndale of Southeast Portland, I hope I’ve answered your question.”
I disconnected the call. Conner said, “Thank you, Madeline !”
I winked at Conner. He laughed back. I had high hopes that his booties would sell. Monsters and chickens together! Zebras and King Kong!
“We’ll go to commercial and be back with Ned, who hates his in-laws, particularly his father-in-law who is constantly putting him down. This is Conner Mills for KBAM.” We took our earphones off. “Madeline, you gotta get your own radio show. You’d sizzle the wires off the damn poles.”
 
After leaving the radio station, I walked back to my office. On the way I passed a major chain bookstore. In the windows were his books.
I wouldn’t buy them.
I had an idea of what they were about, because I’d read the reviews, but I couldn’t go there, couldn’t read them.
He was famous for those books. He was a professor at a college. He lived on acreage in Massachusetts. He traveled. He wrote.
He knew. He knew what happened.
After we left Cape Cod, he tried to keep in contact. Letters, postcards, drawings. I never replied.
As adults, letters, e-mails, a postcard arrived, infrequent, friendly, cheerful, nonthreatening.
I shut down.
I thought of him often.
But I would not respond.
He was coming to Portland to speak.
I would not go and see him.
I wouldn’t call him.
I couldn’t.
 
Torey Oh growled at me.
“Good,” I said. “Do it again.”
He growled deep, flicked his tail. The long, brownish tail was attached to the back of his suit. It was not a real tail.
“Once more, with feeling. Growl! Grrr!”
He growled, arched his claws up, then hissed.
“Motivating, Torey. That was motivating.”
Deep-throated roar, scarily threatening.
“Outstanding. I think we’re making progress.”
“You do?” Torey settled on the floor, cross legged, and I joined him. Good thing I was wearing a blue suit jacket and pants, not one of my dull skirts.
I adjusted my armor. He wrapped his tail around his lap.
“Good releasing of your animalistic emotions,” I said. “And I like your suit.”
“Thanks. I got it from the tailor’s. I think this charcoal color matches with my tail, don’t you? The fabric of the suit, versus the fluffiness of the tail, but I think the tail is making a statement, too.”
“What is the statement of this particular tail?” I crossed my legs.
“The statement is”—he flicked his hands up and down, as if he was playing the drums—“The statement is: Animals.”
“I like animals. How is your company coming along?”
“Rippin’ like a raptor.”
“Rippin’?”
“Yeah, we’re all on board. Got a growly woman named Geraldine in charge. Vice president is Foresty Green. That’s not her birth name,” he hastened to add. “Her birth name is Cybil, but she didn’t like that name, so she changed it.”
“I can see why.”
“Foresty is groovin’ in my vision. See, all the profits are going toward organizations that help animals.” He stroked his tail.
I nodded. “I like animals.”
“Me too. Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“Will this make me happy?” He stroked his tail.
I thought about that. “Torey, you’ve been coming here to chat for a year.”
He nodded.
“First you came in your designer suits, and we talked, and I knew you were hiding something.”
“Yeah, you sniffed that out like a fox.”
“So we got to the center of you, and why you like the tails.”
“Because my dad always pulled the tails of our dogs so hard.” He sniffled.
“Yes.” I tried not to think of my hamster.
“He pulled them till they screamed and whimpered.” He whimpered, his face started to crumple, and he brought his tail up to hide it. His father seriously damaged him.
“Right. And, Torey.” I barked at him, softly, until he snapped back out of that memory. “You admitted you wore tails to relax and now you bring them with you here.”
BOOK: The First Day of the Rest of My Life
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