Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [110]
I thought about Vince and Artis, how kind and supportive they’d been. I was still a little skeptical about Lily, their “teacher,” but I’d made an appointment with her for the end of the week.
I hoped she wasn’t going to shake chicken bones at me or throw a lot of blue powder into the air.
“Is everything we talk about private?” I asked Lily. I remembered that the act of merely buying a bucket of fried chicken had landed in the papers. I didn’t relish the idea of a gossip column reporting that I was seeking spiritual advice.
“Yes, of course,” Lily said, and there was something in the way she said it that made me trust her. She was a very petite woman with blond-silver hair, a beautiful heart-shaped face, and an easygoing, natural grace.
“I don’t know what to do,” I told her haltingly. “He wants me to change, so I’ve been trying to change. I love this man, with all my heart. The thought of leaving him kills me. I think I’d die without him.” And then I told her everything. Everything.
Lily gave me a gentle nod acknowledging that she’d taken this all in, that she got the picture. Serenity flowed from her eyes like water from a very deep spring, and I felt reassured and peaceful, even though she’d said very little. After a few moments, she finally spoke.
“That doesn’t sound like love,” she said softly.
That doesn’t sound like love.
The thought and the voice that uttered it echoed into the depths of my being and rang a freedom bell of truth that carried far more meaning than those five simple words could possibly bear on their own. For the first time in several years, the honking, screeching, clanging traffic jam in my head went quiet, and I could finally just be still and listen to a distant, delicate chime of redemption. It was far, far away, but I felt that if I could clear away the noise in my head once and for all and follow its sound, I could free myself from the anguish that had attached itself like a barnacle to my soul.
She didn’t give me advice or tell me how to proceed from there. She just looked at me with eyes that radiated compassion and that told me I had heard what I needed to hear.
There was a pool in the backyard, and the happiest hours of my day were spent in the pool with Jennifer and her swimming teacher. Frolicking in the pool with my daughter was the one activity that lifted my depression. I lived a lot of the time in a cavern of dread, and I knew that some way, somehow, I had to break out of it. My love for Jennifer was the one thing that kept me going.
Addie was insistent that I get back into action, and despite my lack of motivation, she took me by the earlobe and marched me to an acting class. I hadn’t worked in almost three years, and the idea of getting up onstage paralyzed me with anxiety. On the first day, I was overcome by a panic attack just doing warm-up exercises, and there in front of my fellow actors, I froze as stiff as a cold corpse with rigor mortis. I could not get a word out. My arms seemed glued to my sides. My feet were set in concrete. I had turned completely to stone. The instructor actually had to walk me back to my seat.
I collapsed in a chair as another student took my place. What had happened? I’d never in my life even experienced a shadow of stage fright, and here I’d turned into an ice sculpture, so mortified that I wasn’t even shaking. I was afraid I’d lost it, once and for all, and spent the rest of the class in a cold sweat, watching the others, thinking if I could just make it out the door, I would call the next day and drop out—which is probably what I would have done if I hadn’t called Addie first.
“Dyan, it’s been three years and you’ve been through a lot,” she said. “You can break through this and you will. You have to.”
“I can’t do it,” I said. “I—”
“You can do it, you need to do