The Last Time I Was Me. Cathy Lamb

days was to kiss that woman. We always ended up in bed after that. Couldn’t help ourselves. Passion and love crosses cultures and language barriers, dear girl, don’t forget that, and your grandma and me were soul mates whose souls talked to each other even though our languages didn’t. But, dear God, she was a talker. Constantly talking, talking, talking.”

      My grandparents’ black-haired daughter, my mother, married my father, a white American with British roots and blond hair. I grew up speaking Spanish to my grandma and to my mother, although my grandma spoke English, too. She said she loved this country, she was an American woman now, and she wanted to be able to talk to her neighbors, but she talked Spanish to me so I would never forget where my family was from, what they came from.

      And even though my grandpa said Grandma talked all the time, my grandpa decided he couldn’t live without all that talk. One week after my grandma died, after he’d given her a beautiful funeral, he laid down under the giant cherry tree on their land, right where he said they’d made every one of their four children, closed his eyes and died.

      After sixty years of marriage, he was done without his wife. He had been in perfect health until that point, too. The doctors said he’d had a heart attack.

      How silly. He died of a broken and lonely heart and he willed it upon himself.

      As I thought of my grandpa’s love of my grandma and I thought of my grandma bent over double picking strawberries for hours on end as a child and of her poor mother being attacked by some sick landowner who thought her mother was his property, I made a vow to myself: I would get those people out of those sheds.

      I swore it.

      CHAPTER 5

      Anger management class is located in Portland, so I had to drive about fifty minutes west to get there. I go from towering fir trees, homes scattered along a river, and a main street that moves about as fast as melted taffy, to a city filled with rushing people, darting cars, skyscrapers, and a bunch of preposterously high and mind-numbingly scary bridges spanning the Willamette River.

      I cried my way into the city, because I felt like it, shoulders shaking, sounding quite like a dying warthog. How I am relishing my nervous breakdown!

      I slowed way down when I went over a bridge. The car behind me honked and the driver flipped me the finger, but I ignored him, eyes straight ahead, not looking down, down, down into that river below filled with who knew what kind of eight-headed human-eater or monster shark. (I do not like heights or bridges.)

      By the time I reached the Diamond District my face was red and blotchy and pale, my lipstick smeared. My mascara had trickled across my face and it looked as if dead ants had been buried in shallow graves across my cheekbones. I am a multicolored freak, I told myself, looking in the car mirror, a multicolored freak.

      I cleaned up as best as a crybaby can, running my fingers through my gold curls and adjusting my clothes. I was wearing jeans, a purple, lace-lined camisole, a lavender-colored silk blouse, some cool gold hoop earrings, and about three inches of bracelets. I also wore black heels with a strip of lavender on the toe that exactly matched the camisole. They are completely cool.

      Anger management class was located in a building that used to be a warehouse. In fact, this whole area of town, dubbed the Diamond District, used to be an industrial wasteland, according to Rosvita. Lots of rundown factories, warehouses, old stuff. But the location was too cool-close to the river, to downtown, to shopping and work-to stay that way.

      So one by one the factories were either bulldozed or converted and glass-walled buildings shot up. But the Diamond District had not yet been perfected, which probably lent to its appeal. Streets weren’t always paved right, tired factory buildings butted up to new, sleek structures, and there was a bit of a rough edge to it. I found parking near the address, crossed one street with potholes the size of Denver, and dodged a huge dump truck and an earth-mover.

      I looked at the address in my hand again. The anger management woman had told me that when I could smell beer, I was there. I could smell the beer. In fact, as I circled the building, I knew I was looking at, and smelling, a brewery.

      The temptation was almost too much for me. Beer and me have a long and golden and messy history and to slug one down right at that moment, or three or four, had vast appeal. I had heard that Oregon was home to a bunch of brothers who knew their beer, and I was anxious to taste the products of those bros.

      Two things held me back: One, I had been told to be prompt or else. Two, I was driving home. I have often been drunk in the last twelve years of my life, but I have never, ever driven after drinking.

      It’s like my other rule: I have been a bit slutty at different times in my life, and the sex left me colder and lonelier and more withered inside than I was before, but I don’t mess with anyone else’s man.

      Those are about the only two hard and fast rules I have, but they’ve worked for me thus far.

      I circled the building, trying to banish the thought of pouring gold beer down my throat, and looked for the double doors. Finally, I saw them. Painted green with a gold sign to the left that said, EMMALINE HALLWYLER, COUNSELOR.

      The entry was dark when I stepped in, but I saw stairs to my right and started to climb. The building, by my deductions, was probably one hundred plus years old with dust the same age, and dark as a caveman’s cave.

      I reached one landing and saw another gold sign that said EMMALINE HALLWYLER, COUNSELOR, and pointed up. This led to a hallway painted bright white. The white paint was thick, like frosted icing. At the end of the hallway, there were black and white photographs on both sides. All featured close-ups of people in the throes of one acute emotion or another: Joy. Surprise. Grief. Despair. Exhaustion. Depression. Panic. There must have been thirty pictures, all framed in black.

      The sign above the photographs said, PHOTOS TAKEN BY EMMALINE HALLWYLER. Super. She could photograph me when I was screaming, my face puffed like a red marshmallow, my mouth twisted like a red snake. I glanced at my watch. It was exactly 12:00.

      I was prompt. I looked like hell, but I was prompt and had not succumbed to golden beer, and guzzling.

      I turned one more corner and faced about twenty stairs.

      When I reached the top of the stairs, I had to blink. Light shone from all corners of the huge room from a multitude of windows. The floor and the walls were bright white, too. In one corner of the room, there were five red boxing bags suspended from the ceiling.

      In another corner, there looked to be a craft area. It was filled with glue and ribbons and tape and Styrofoam and wood. Scraps of metal, cardboard, egg cartons, and piles of stuff that looked like it came straight from the dump.

      In the third corner there was a number of huge pillows. A large sign above the pillows labeled it as the SCREAMING CORNER.

      In the fourth corner was a piano, a set of drums, guitars, and other musical instruments. I saw a violin. My heart squeezed real tight over that violin.

      In the middle of the room were seven beanbags. They looked like a rainbow-purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red. In the center of the beanbags was a bigger-sized black beanbag and in the center of the black beanbag sat a woman.

      Now, I was expecting Emmaline Hallwyler to be about as wide as the Amazon jungle, with perhaps a black panther curling behind her and a venomous snake wrapped around her neck.

      There was no black panther, no venomous snake, and Emmaline Hallwyler was positively tiny. I could tell because when I looked in her direction she stood up.

      She was dressed all in white. White pants, white blouse, white high heels. It would have looked ridiculous on anyone else. Me, I would have looked like a gawky, temperamental angel who had had her wings taken away for punishment for some lousy offense.

      Emmaline, with her brown bob of hair and huge brown eyes and finely cut features, looked positively elegant. I would later learn that under the fragile elegance was a she-demon quite capable of knocking heads together and ripping people down to the size of pesky mice.