Female intelligence, p.17
Female Intelligence, page 17
I winced again. This wasn’t fun. “Is that true?” I said, genuinely taken aback by her impression of me.
“Sure it’s true. Think about it.”
I tried to think about it but she was on a roll and wouldn’t be quiet.
“If you ask me,” she said, “you talk just like the men who come to you for help.”
“I most certainly do not!”
“Oh yeah? You interrupt. You order people around. You make me buy your Christmas gifts instead of getting out there and buying them yourself.”
“I did that once. Once! And only because I was away at that conference in Arizona.”
“Once, shmonce. The point is, you did it. Not only that, I never heard you say that a top I was wearing was a lovely color on me, the way Mr. Brock did.”
“Never?”
“Nope. And speaking of him, listen to how you call him Brock, instead of Mr. Brock or Brandon or whatever. Only men call each other by their last names, Dr. Wyman, which is more proof that the language you speak is Menspeak.”
Ouch! She was taking bluntness to a new level. But was it possible that she was onto something? Had I been so consumed with my work that I hadn’t practiced what I’d preached? Had my command of Womenspeak gotten rusty? Did I need to get back in touch with my own feminine side? My friends didn’t complain about the way I spoke, didn’t accuse me of withholding. They accepted the fact that my personality was on the reserved side and cared for me unconditionally. On the other hand, they were pretty self-involved and may not have even noticed that I wasn’t the most emotional person on the planet.
“But Diane,” I said weakly, reeling from the notion that my own communication skills might be flawed and, therefore, eager to stick up for myself. “Haven’t I at least been a good boss to you? Treated you fairly? Behaved professionally toward you?”
“Oh, you’ve behaved real professionally,” she said in a way that suggested there was more to her answer. I braced myself. “You kept me on here at the office, even though you hardly had any clients. You paid me on time, no matter what. You let me set my own hours, go to the gym, the tanning place, whatever. But on a one-to-one basis, you acted like I was your doormat. ‘Do this, Diane. Do that, Diane.’ Without any of the human stuff.”
“What kind of ‘human stuff’?” I said defensively.
“You’ve never asked me about my family or where I live or whether I’m a Republican or a—”
“I hardly think it’s my business to grill you about your private political beliefs.”
“See how you interrupted me just then, Dr. Wyman? Did you hear yourself?”
“Oh.” God, she was right.
“You’ve never stopped to find out who I am,” she went on. “And you never, ever shared your feelings with me.”
Yikes. What a cold, heartless bitch she was describing. But I wasn’t that bad. Cold, maybe. But not heartless. No, not heartless.
“Have you ever seen the movie All About Eve?” said Diane, who was a fan of “movies from the olden days,” as she put it.
“Yes,” I said. “Bette Davis was wonderful in it. But what does that movie have to do with my situation?”
“Plenty. Remember the speech Bette makes when she’s stuck in the car with Celeste Holm?”
“No,” I said, wondering where this was going.
“She takes a drag on her cigarette and says something like, ‘Funny business, a woman’s career. The things you drop on your way up the ladder. You forget you’ll need them again when you go back to being a woman. That’s one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later we’ve got to work at it.’ She paused, having done a pretty good Bette Davis. “Does any of that ring a bell, Dr. Wyman?”
“Well, yes,” I acknowledged. “Actually, it does.” So I had forgotten how to be a woman. How had I allowed that to happen?
“Getting back to the problem with Mr. Brock,” she said, leaning forward in the chair, my chair. “If you can’t share your feelings with a nobody like me, how do you expect to share them with him?”
“You’re not a nobody,” I said, wiping my eyes. “Don’t sell yourself short, Diane.”
“I won’t if you won’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you shouldn’t sell me short. You should let me put you through the Wyman Method.”
Now it was my turn to go monosyllabic. “You?”
“Why not? I can help you. I’ve been here long enough to get the gist of how the program works. You’ve had me transcribe zillions of tapes and type zillions of scripts. And I’ve read your book.”
“Have you? I didn’t know that, Diane.” A touching moment in an otherwise nightmarish interaction.
“That’s because you never asked me. You never asked me anything about myself.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Was I ever.
“Anyway, I think I can teach you how to talk Womenspeak, Dr. Wyman. We can do a shortened version of the program, just a quickie refresher course so you’ll be able to tell Mr. Brock how you feel about him by the time his last session comes around. Since you don’t have a lot of clients, we can work as much or as late as you want.”
“Diane.” I reached out to squeeze her hand. I was overwhelmed by her generosity, particularly in light of how I’d behaved toward her. “I’m very grateful to you for having the courage to say these things to me today and for offering to take me through an abbreviated application of the Wyman Method. But there’s a big difference between expressing my feelings—incorporating the ‘human stuff’ into my conversations—and actually telling a man I love him.”
“Yeah, but you can’t get the love part down until you’ve gotten the basics down. First things first, Dr. Wyman.”
“You have a point.”
“So how about it? I can help you, I know I can.”
I got up from the chair and hugged her—and not just because I was trying to win her over; because I felt like hugging her. “I accept your offer,” I said, tearing up again. “I think it would be very stimulating to undergo my own program, to turn my supposed female intelligence on myself. But I have to ask, Diane: What will you get out of this?”
“What will I get? A flesh-and-blood woman for a boss instead of an ice queen,” she said, then smiled for the first time since she came into my office. “And if I do a good job on you, maybe you’ll promote me,” she added. “You didn’t know this, but I’m much more ambitious than I look.”
18
My first session with Diane was scheduled for the very next morning, and my first taste of what it would be like to have her as my teacher hit me the minute I walked into the office. I stopped by her desk, as I always did, and said, “Good morning, Diane. Any calls?”
“No calls,” she said, handing me a piece of paper. “But here’s your script, Dr. Wyman. I came in early to type it up and print it out for you.”
“That’s very industrious of you,” I said, “particularly since our session isn’t for another hour.”
“True, but I think it’s important to get a jump on things. For example, did you hear what you said to me just before?”
“What I said?”
“Yeah. You said, ‘Good morning, Diane. Any calls?’”
“So?”
“So where was the ‘How are you this morning?’ or the ‘Did you get a patch for that nail you broke the other day?’ or the ‘I love where you pierced your left eyebrow.’ Nothing human.”
“Whatever was I thinking.”
“The point is, we should start right in with the script,” she said. “I’m going to speak one of the lines of dialogue in it and I’d like you to repeat it for me immediately afterwards. Are you ready?”
“Diane,” I said with a tolerant chuckle. She was a pretty decent mimic of me, I had to admit. “Let’s not go overboard with this arrangement. I haven’t even had my coffee yet.”
“Your coffee will have to wait,” she said firmly. “Look, Dr. Wyman. You only have a few more weeks until Mr. Brock finishes the program. That means you don’t have much time before you have to tell him how you feel about him. If I were you, I’d get off my high horse and get down to work.”
“ALL RIGHT!” I said, foregoing the coffee. “What’s the line of dialogue?”
“Listen carefully.”
“I’m listening with every fiber of my being.”
“There’s no need for sarcasm, Dr. Wyman.”
“No. Of course there isn’t.” I know. I sounded like Brock, when he was starting the program. Condescending. Defensive. A jerk, in other words.
“The line is: ‘Good morning, Diane. Did you have a good time with your boyfriend last night? I’m dying to hear all about it.’”
“I didn’t know you had a boyfriend, Diane.”
“Duh. You don’t know anything about me, but we’re going to work on that, Dr. Wyman. We’re going to teach you how to pay attention to the little girlie details that are the hallmark of Womenspeak, as you would say.”
“The little girlie details?”
“Yeah. Now give me the line.”
I shrugged. “Good morning, Diane. Did you have a good time with your boyfriend last night? I’m dying to hear all about it.”
“I didn’t catch the emphasis on the word ‘dying.’ That’s key. It’s the emphasis that tells me you really, really want to establish intimacy with me.”
I wasn’t sure I did. But okay. I said the line the way she instructed me to. “Now what?”
“Now I tell you about my date and after that you say the following line: ‘Since I don’t have a man in my life, thanks to my dirty rotten husband, who cheated on me and then ruined my career, I spent last night alone, watching Touched by an Angel, eating ice cream right out of the container, and crying my eyes out.’”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Why would I say a mouthful like that?”
“Because it’s something a woman would say.”
“Not this woman. I don’t watch Touched by an Angel. I don’t eat ice cream out of the container. And I don’t cry.”
“You don’t cry?” She smirked. “What about yesterday? Or was that somebody else snarking all over my shirt?”
“Fine. I do cry. But the bit about Kip is over the top.”
“Is it? Aren’t you mad as hell at him, Dr. Wyman?”
“Well, yes, but it wouldn’t be appropriate to—”
“To what?”
“Whine about it.”
“You wouldn’t be whining about it. You’d be expressing anger about it, sharing your feelings about it. Come on, Dr. Wyman. The idea behind the line is to let others see your vulnerability. We want Mr. Brock to see your vulnerability. Right now, all he sees is your masculine side.”
My masculine side. Not a turn-on.
I said the line, word for word.
And that was only the warm-up act. An hour later, Diane and I sat down in my office for the actual session—she in my chair, me in the client’s chair. She may not have looked the part I had played for so many years, but she knew what she was talking about when it came to the Wyman Method. And, most importantly, she understood the task at hand: to help me be more forthcoming about my emotions.
During that first session, which was a marathon, by the way, since my schedule was wide open, we practiced all sorts of scripts, covering everything from the deeply personal (“I wish my parents hadn’t gotten divorced”…“I’d like to kill my ex-husband for what he did to me”) to the mundane (“I’m mad at myself for finishing that whole turkey sandwich”…“I really love Celine Dion”).
In fact, we accomplished quite a bit that day, at the end of which I was thoroughly drained.
“We’ll do more work on you tomorrow,” she said as we were locking up the office.
“I’ve got Brock coming in tomorrow,” I reminded her.
“You’ve got Brandon coming in tomorrow,” she corrected me. “Say it.”
“What?”
“His first name. Say it.”
I clutched. It was difficult for me to say his first name. If I called him Brandon, I would be losing my professional distance—the wall I had so scrupulously erected between us. At least, that’s how it felt to me.
“Come on, Dr. Wyman,” Diane coaxed. “I know it’s a big step for you to call him by his first name, but it’s just the two of us and he’s not going to hear you and if you want to keep calling him Mr. Brock when you’re in a session with him that’s up to you. But let’s kill the last-name thing.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ve got Brandon coming in tomorrow.”
“Good job. So you’ll see him tomorrow and we’ll have our session after that. Or maybe we should have our session before you see Mr. Brock. That way you could practice some of our scripts on him.”
“Whatever you say, Diane. You’re the boss.”
She smiled and told me I was dismissed.
At eleven o’clock the following morning, I had my next session with Diane. She made me practice a script in which I was, yet again, forced to articulate my feelings, particularly my feelings of vulnerability. I repeated such lines as “I’m so embarrassed” and “I don’t know anything about that,” and “I feel bloated.”
“When Mr. Brock comes in today,” said Diane, “I want you to use each of these phrases in conversation with him.”
“I will not say ‘I feel bloated’ to him or any other client. Forget about it.”
“Maybe you’re right. Save that one for your friends. But say the other two.”
“I’ll try, but I think it’s highly unethical for me to practice my scripts during his sessions.”
“Listen, do you want this guy or not, Dr. Wyman?”
She was tough. “I want this guy,” I said, painfully aware that my days with him were numbered.
Brock—sorry Brandon—was a few minutes early for his noon appointment. He was chatting animatedly with Diane when I walked out to the waiting room to get him.
“Hey, did you cut your hair, Dr. Wyman?” was how he greeted me.
“Yes,” I said, pleased at how proficient he’d become at his noticing exercises. I was about to leave it at that and lead him back to my office, when I caught Diane giving me a disapproving look. “I—uh—was supposed to have a trim,” I improvised, trying to incorporate some of her “human stuff” into the conversation with him, “but it ended up being much shorter than I’d intended. I’m so embarrassed.” There, Diane. Satisfied?
She beamed and gave me a thumbs-up.
“Well, I think it’s very flattering on you,” said Brandon. “As a matter of fact, I could use a trim myself.” He fingered his golden locks. “When it gets this long, I can’t do a thing with it.”
Now, tell me: Was this a changed man or what? And not hard on the eyes, either. He was wearing a summer-weight khaki suit, with a pale blue shirt and dark blue tie, and the entire package just got to me. It’s not possible that I won’t see him again after he completes the program, I thought. I simply can’t let that happen.
Once in my office, Brandon and I got to work on a script involving Susan, the fictional Finefoods employee. I was totally engaged in helping him, really I was, but I was equally as conscious of wanting to follow Diane’s instructions, of needing to follow them. And so I said again, apropos of nothing this time, “I’m so embarrassed.”
“About your haircut?”
“No.” Enough with the hair talk. I had to think of something else about which to be embarrassed. “About my lack of knowledge of your company, Mr. Brock. Of the products that Finefoods manufactures and sells. I don’t know anything about that.” There, Diane. Another one.
“Oh,” he said politely. “What would you like to know?”
What would I like to know. Good question, since I truly didn’t know anything about the food business. “Let’s see,” I said. “I’ve always wondered about breakfast cereals.”
“Is that right? What have you wondered about them, Dr. Wyman?”
“I, well, there are so many areas, so many mysteries. I feel humbled by my ignorance when it comes to breakfast cereals.”
He smiled, rather affectionately it seemed to me. Perhaps the changes in me, although modest at this early stage, were having an effect on him. “I’d be glad to share,” he said in perfect Womenspeak. “Ask away.”
“Right. Okay.” Come on, Lynn. Ask him something. Anything. “Specifically, Mr. Brock, what, exactly, is riboflavin?” Sorry, but it was the first thing that came to mind. “It’s listed among the ingredients on every cereal box and yet I feel so uneducated about it.”
“Please. Don’t be so hard on yourself, Dr. Wyman.” He leaned toward me, cocking his head in an absolutely magnificent display of empathy. “Riboflavin is a growth-promoting member of the vitamin B complex.”
“Great, thanks.”
“Any other questions? Or should we get back to the Wyman Method? I don’t have many more sessions to go, don’t forget. Pretty soon, I’ll be on my own out there in that big, scary world full of women.”
So he, too, was counting down. He, too, was thinking how dismal life was going to be without me. Or was he simply eager to get on with the day’s session and then beat it?
“Yes, Mr. Brock,” I said, my mind racing. I wanted to reveal something of my emotional shift toward him, something that would prepare him for The Big Speech I was gearing up to deliver on his last day of the program. “Of course we should get back to the Wyman Method. But first, may I say that I feel—”
“Yes?”
“I feel—”
“Tell me, Dr. Wyman.”
“I feel—”
“You feel what?”
“Bloated.”
He laughed. “I know, I know. I’m supposed to say that sort of thing to Susan while we’re sitting in the conference room together before a meeting, right?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
Well? It was the best I could do. I wasn’t ready to articulate even a hint of my feelings for him. I wasn’t ready to say that I had enjoyed working with him, or that I had found him an occasionally contentious but always challenging client, or that I would miss him. I was, therefore, not remotely close to being able to tell him I loved him. But there was still time for Diane to whip me into shape. At least I hoped there was.
