Odelia's Case

Herewith the beginning of Odelia’s case fiction.

Odelia was proud that she had managed to squeeze her appointment with Percival between her bodywork class and the evening concert by the Beirut Philharmonic. In truth, she quickly confessed, she did not really want to be there. She had taken up a challenge by her friend Desiree. After having patiently absorbed hours of Odelia’s stream of consciousness about her bad experiences with therapy, Desiree had dared her to try a life coach, the dread Percival.

Odelia had been on something of a therapy shopping spree. She had interviewed ten therapists-- all of them in and empathic, most highly recommended-- only to reject them all for one reason or another. 

She was a veteran of the recovery movement, but thought she needed more individual treatment to work on her unsatisfactory relations with men. She quickly told Percival that she was afraid of being abandoned and thus was a classical borderline personality disorder. 

Desiree had recommended a life coach, because Odelia was already far too involved with her psyche. She needed to get out of her mind and into her life. 

Odelia was a woman on the run,  female Rabbit Angstrom. When she began her monologue she was still slightly out of breath from dashing to his office.

Odelia liked Percival’s modernist office; white walls, black leather and chrome furniture, a glass-topped desk on which a suitably black LeNovo laptop was perched. But quickly she shifted keys and declared: “Let me tell you about my case.”

Percival braced himself. 

Odelia had issued from an upper East Side family of real estate developers. As a child she was a hyperactive overachiever. Her father loved her to distraction; her housewife mother was somewhat more distant, saving the better part of her affection for Odelia’s three younger brothers. 

Her father preferred her to his sons and had always wanted her to take over his development and property management companies. Given how hard she worked in high school-- at Brearly-- the adolescent Odelia had little time for boys or parties, something that pleased her father no end. 

Her hard work paid off handsomely, and shortly after her eighteenth birthday she was settling in to her new dorm in Harvard Yard. Between the stress of the new environment and her wish to fit in with some rather alien students, Odelia had a difficult time in Cambridge. 

It began during the second semester of Freshman Year when she developed a raging case of bulimia. At first, she had looked with detached bemusement at the barf squads in her dorm. Girls would binge their way through pizza and pudding and Lorna Dunes, and then march off to the communal toilets to apply their digital emetics.

After a few months, she was drawn into their unholy alliance. First, she began thinking that she was too fat. Then she thought she might try joining the party just to see what it was like. Then she began competing for the honoring of scarfing down the maximum number of Mallowmars in the minimum time. In time she discovered that she was addicted. She could not go two days without stuffing herself like a Thanksgiving turkey and then expelling it all while kowtowing to a commode.

Promptly, she told Percival that she had licked the problem and had not binged or purged in years. 

Odelia explained that the bulimia had vanished when she fell in love with Preston at the beginning of her sophomore year. Preston was her first love and she was convinced that he would be her only love. She wanted to possess him; to own all of him; and she yearned to give herself to him entirely, 

Now, looking back at it she was none too proud of her behavior, but she was young and in love, and perhaps because this was the first time she had such feelings, she was abnormally jealous. 

Preston was a Harvard senior. He was a shoo-in for a Rhodes or maybe a Marshall scholarship. Then he would go to law school and would have a shining future. Moreover, she continued, he was incredibly handsome, with a perfectly sculpted body, broad shoulders, with an unbelievable butt. Every woman on campus wanted a piece of that butt. 

As soon as Preston and Odelia became an item, she started receiving envious looks from women she did not know. With this man at her side she had risen from mousy Freshman to the top of the Harvard heap. Preston told her that she was the one for him and she drank it in as though it were holy water from the Holy Grail. Her self-esteem was in the stratosphere.

From there things plummeted. They would go to a party and half the women in the room would flirt with Preston-- offering their phone numbers, drooling at his every word. Preston would become so enraptured that he would lose sight of Odelia.

She did not take it passively. A couple of times she made awful scenes to get his attention; once he even grabbed another man’s crotch in full view of the assembled festivants. Another time she had gotten so drunk that she threw up all over herself.

And then she started throwing fits of jealousy. She was convinced that he was cheating. She knew that he had been unfaithful with Philomena-- she saw the way she looked at him. And why would they make moves on him if they knew he loved Odelia. To vent her rage she hurled shoes, ashtrays, and textbooks through the air. It was a miracle that she never hurt him seriously.

Then, one day she was walking down Mass Ave. when she espied Preston engaged in fervent conversation with Philomena. Without a moment’s thought, she threw herself in front of a moving car. Only the driver’s quick instincts saved her life. The mystery was why Preston stayed with her as long as he did. She was acting like a certifiable maniac.

Nothing Preston did or said could mitigate her feelings of being abandoned, of having lost the man that the gods had chosen for her. From feeling like the queen of the campus she started thinking that she was a complete failure as a woman. She began to binge and purge again; she went on a shopping spree. Finally, when Preston was busy or away she would take the MTA to Beacon Hill, pick up a man at a bar and go home with him to have sex. 

“I was an addict,” she explained. “I had to get my fix.”

Get it she did, until the campus found out about one of her conquests. When Preston received the information he dropped her like a stone. She was so distraught she could not study, and nearly flunked out of Harvard.

Odelia had managed to hide all of her behavior-- excepting the credit card bills-- from her parents. Once the grades for her first sophomore semester came in, however, they became alarmed and pressed her to tell them what was wrong. Eventually, she confessed the whole sordid tale and her parents, on advice of a neighbor, decided that she needed to go into recovery. If she refused, they promised to cut up her credit cards. Unable to imagine a worse fate Odelia begrudgingly started attending meetings of the local chapter of Lovers anonymous (LA), which was modeled on AA.

Without her five LA meetings each week she would not have gotten through Harvard. With them her grade point average rebounded and she graduated Magna Cum Laude. She had followed her sponsor’s advice and had sworn off men for the duration. After college she had had numerous relationships, some better, some worse, none of them lasting for more than six months. None were marriage material and she did not allow herself to fall in love. Thus, she did not fear that she would be abandoned. 

The more he heard the more Percival recognized that Odelia was suffering from a special condition. She was her father’s favorite child. Worse yet, as her father’s favorite son,

Yet, being in love made her feel, she would later say, like a woman, perhaps for the first time, perhaps for the only time. Unfortunately, at the moment when her true self should have flowered, her instincts, impulses and emotions failed her. They made her do the wrong thing with the wrong person for the wrong reason at the wrong time. LA had taught her to avoid falling in love, but it was not, she would confess, a very good way to conduct one’s life.

As Odelia disclosed more of her experiences with therapy, another story began to unfold. This one focused on her family and especially on her dealings with her brothers. 

Odelia was her father’s favorite. She had gone to work in his business just after college. Two of her brothers had also joined the firm, but her father had announced that he planned to leave the majority of his shares to his daughter. He was a modern man and liked the idea of having a woman inherit his company. Besides, she was smarter, a harder worker and largely more competent.

Barely out of college Odelia found herself on the fast track to corporate glory. She was becoming a player in the world of New York property development, She and her father were converting a large downtown office building into upscale condominia. 

While she had no worries about a glass ceiling, Odelia quickly discovered that real estate development was no place for a woman. Her brothers resented her success, especially since they thought it was rightfully theirs. If the term “evil eye” means anything, her brothers were casting it at her incessantly. Her father knew about it but felt powerless to influence his wayward sons. He told them to get over it.

Some of the men at the conversion site treated her with respect, but there were always a few who would make remarks behind her back about various features of her anatomy. Sometimes it felt as though they had x-ray vision. On those few occasions when she went out for a drink with the contractors, she found herself surrounded by demeaning conversations about wives and girlfriends. 

Odelia was not handling it well. As the emotional toxins accumulated in her she thought she should release them. Yet, when she did, she was mortified to make such vulgar displays. And she was totally put off the notion of being involved with a man. If that was what they were like, best to avoid them. 

Percival had worked with other women who had had similar experiences. Most often they had quit and started working in a more female friendly environment. Odelia did not seem to have that option. Her father had placed his company’s future in her hands. She felt she had nowhere else to go.

To be continued.

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