Dear Abby:
Every time I ask my friend Sally if she wants to hang out
she says she has something else to do. A
few weeks ago she said she had to go out.
About an hour later while walking around the block I noticed her car was
there. I knocked on the door. Sally said she was getting ready to leave and
besides she was on the phone. Does it
take an hour to get ready to go out? I
don’t want to lose an old friend, but I’m not sure she really is a friend
anymore. If she is why does she keep
ditching me? My husband Lyle and I have
a fourteen-month-old child together. My
two children from an earlier relationship and Lyle’s son make up our family of
six. Lyle and I make good money and we
both collect child support from previous partners. What bothers me is Lyle won’t let me see his
paychecks or combine our joint incomes in a joint account. I contracted herpes-2 after a one-night stand
ten years ago. Since the age of
seventeen I have times when I feel really happy and I’m talking to friends on
the Internet all of a sudden I feel a wave of sadness. And I remember bad things, like when my best
friend died when I was little. I don’t
know why this happens all the time. What
do you think? My husband thinks my
herpes-2 is a constant reminder of my promiscuity. I get very angry at this, but then I remember
that stress can trigger an outbreak. I
try to remember that the virus doesn’t change who I am inside. I don’t think I’m a bad person, do you? I didn’t say anything about his gonorrhea,
did I? I was in the parking lot of a
shopping center when I noticed a woman two cars away yelling and hitting a
little girl. The girl seemed to be about
six or seven. I wrote down her license
number. I checked with several state
agencies and fund out that although slapping may be legal in Virginia the state
policy is open to interpretation. Should
I report her? I got into my car, pulled
up alongside them and called out, Are you okay?
The little girl was crying and straightening her dress. Yes, she’s okay, the woman snapped. This kind of behavior really bothers me. I frequently see adults slap, pinch and
berate their children—sometimes babies in strollers. These adults seem to be out of control and
everyone ignores them. Sometimes I walk
slowly by these people to let them know I see what they are doing. One time I reported a woman who was slapping
and scolding her Down syndrome daughter, who kept yelling, I’m your
friend. My mother died when I was
seven. She suffered bad depression
toward the end of her life. I actually
scare myself sometimes. But I don’t
think my depression is bad enough to see someone about. Do you?
My best friend Sheila was recently married and I was a bridesmaid. About two months before the wedding Sheila
called to say that the junior bridesmaid dress she had selected for one of her
attendants was too small—size 8 for a girl who was size 12. She wanted to know if there was anything I
could do to alter the dress because it was too late to get another one. After a lot or work and many long hours over
a four-week period I finished the alterations.
Neither Sheila nor the junior bridesmaid offered to pay me for the work
so I thought it was because I said I’d do it as a favor to Sheila. A few days before the wedding I was still
deciding what to give her as a wedding gift but everyone I asked said that
altering the dress was enough. Well
Sheila didn’t see it that way. On her
wedding night she called me several times demanding a gift of money. Even after her honeymoon she called and said
I’d been disrespectful not to give her a gift.
Was I wrong not to give her a separate wedding gift? My husband’s mother wants to spend a lot of
time with him. She likes us to have
dinner at her apartment only a mile away.
If we can’t then she still likes my husband to. If he can’t or doesn’t want to she gets very
hurt. She tries to make my husband feel
guilty. I tell him that’s what she’s
doing but he still feels bad. At my job
I get hit on right and left by men in their fifties. I’m not talking about cute or even simply
annoying remarks, but constant lewd suggestions and requests for my phone
number. Would it be right to report
these guys? I don’t want to risk my
job. And here is an embarrassing
problem: My job requires me to make
public appearances and often I am “dressed to the nines.” I admit for dramatic purposes I sometimes
apply too much makeup. I have always
been told I am beautiful and have even done some modeling. The problem is people think I’m a man. Once I was cornered at a festival by an angry
group of people who had been fired up by one drunkard’s insistence that I was a
drag queen. You know I’m a woman—I have
kids for heaven’s sake. The first few
times it happened I tried to brush it off and regain my composure—once I
stopped crying. But lately it’s getting
ridiculous. I am mistaken for a
cross-dresser even when I wear very little makeup. At five-foot-seven and a hundred and twenty
pounds I’m hardly manly. A week doesn’t
go by without this happening. My husband
says I should just blow it off that people are just jealous. But my confidence is in the cellar and I’m at
my wit’s end. I’d like to cower
somewhere but my job won’t let me. The
other night my Lyle brought home a male friend for dinner without letting me
know beforehand. They both drank a lot
of wine. Then my husband wanted me to go
to bed with the two of them. Of course I
declined, but I was really put out by this new wrinkle. And neither of them even offered to do the
dishes after I did my best preparing a nice meal for them. If my husband’s mother hadn’t called to
berate him for not visiting her who knows where this could have gone. My son wants a dog, but my husband says, No
way. He becomes enraged when I bring it
up. I said it would be good for our son
and he said he’d rather have a dog around than my son (who is my child with a
previous husband). Then he said it’s
either him or the dog. Now I feel I must
get a dog as my first priority is my son, isn’t it? It isn’t right for him to keep bringing up my
herpes—2, either. The other day I found
my son in bed with my husband in my son’s bed.
I don’t usually walk right into his room but I needed to get something. He said my son hadn’t been feeling well and
he was just taking a nap with him. My
son seemed upset. He asked if this
meant he couldn’t have a dog. I don’t
know what to believe Dear Abby. What
would you think?
Lynda Schor's most recent book, Sexual Harassment Rules, and an older one, Seduction, are out with Spuyten Duyvil press. A half-dozen of these are here, on the Truck. Her interview with Carol Novack can be found in The Mad Hatters' Review 7. Prints of her artwork are at Hamilton Stone Review, where she also serves as Fiction Editor. She lives, and writes, with Halvard Johnson, in San Miquel de Allende, Mexico.
-- Lynda Schor
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