About Jeffrey Zuckerman

Jeff Zuckerman is a freelance editor and writer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was an award-winning newspaper reporter, editor, and university writing instructor, and for many years he directed the writing center at Walden University. Jeff was a reviewer of the 7th edition of the APA style manual, and, over the past quarter century, he has read and edited more than 1,500 dissertations in the social and behavioral sciences. In an earlier career he was a social worker with migrant farmworkers and a community organizer.

A native of Pittsburgh, Jeff earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Penn State University and master’s degrees in social work and in journalism at the University of Minnesota. For the past several years he has volunteered as a support-group facilitator with the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Jeff and his wife Leah have two married children and one toddler granddaughter, who delights them with her wry sense of humor and commitment to social justice.

from Chapter 7, “Just Because You’re Paranoid”

I POPPED MY lid to Heshie, the whole shebang. I felt like a heel telling him the stories about how Leah had been acting—the car battery calamities, the Target ado, the marijuana pipe at the TSA debacle, the argument with the flight attendant incident. Good stories, in a way. Just weird enough that when you hear them for the first time and you’re Heshie Goldfarb, of course you laugh, that crinkle-fried girlie giggle of his. I smiled, too, and sniggered at the inanity, which made me feel guilty because we were yukking it up over my wife’s apparent nervous breakdown.

“Nervous breakdown,” I heard myself saying. Maybe Leah was having some kind of nervous breakdown. That got me going, all right, and I did my best to keep Heshie from seeing how my eyes were flooding.

I wasn’t done. I spilled the rest: the Chauncey Greene crisis, the email about Leah saving the depressed poet waiter in Tunisia from killing himself, about my mailing the guy a box of nicotine patches.

“Wait, what depressed Tunisian bellhop? Nicotine patches?” I could tell Heshie was about to bust. “Jeffrey, what in the hell are you talking about?”

“In Kerkouane,” I said. “This guy Tabek Taboubi. I mailed him a box of nicotine patches. Maybe he wasn’t the waiter. The waiter was a guy in Tunis. Tabek Taboubi was the bellhop. Or maybe there were two depressed poets. The whole thing was so convoluted—”

When he heard all that, Heshie finally shrieked, a sonic boom of convulsive laughter that blew across the restaurant patio, sent an umbrella flying, a fierce blast that would have thrown me from my chair if I weren’t hanging on to the edge of the table for dear life.

Uh-huh, I thought, shaking my head. What a pal. Ho-ho.

Heshie was beside himself, wiping his eyes, tears dripping into his brown ale, squealing to me he was wetting his pants. Jumped up, said he had to run quick to take a leak. I’ll be right back, Jeffrey, he said, waddling his penguin walk, laughing the whole way to the can.

Sheesh. Okay, so it was funny.

But the whole thing felt lousy. Heshie and I and our wives had known each other a long time. They cared about Leah, and I knew under the howling Heshie was astonished by how I described Leah’s personality transformation.

It felt so disloyal telling these stories. As usual, I had made it sound like everything was Leah’s fault, not mine, not that arrogant Chicago doctor and that tourist from Houston. I doubt Leah had blabbed to her friends about my personality “quirks,” like how I’d probably spent four years of my life looking around the house for my wallet.

Back from the men’s room, Heshie calmed down. He apologized for laughing, said he was truly sorry about what I had been going through, that it sounded horrible, that he and Judy loved the two of us, that the whole thing was a shock. Asked me if I was worried about my marriage.

Asked me if I was planning to move out or what.

Suddenly it got quiet out there on the patio.

“Move out? Really?”

“I don’t know, my friend. I’m an architect. You need a therapist or a lawyer.”

Heshie said he had a meeting with a client in the morning. Maybe he had heard enough.

“So,” I said, “do I sound like an asshole?”

“You’re not an asshole. There’s something wrong with Leah. There’s something wrong with you, too, but we’ve always known that.”

We laughed and paid the tab and headed out into the night. I checked my phone for the latest diatribe.

“Oh, my God, Heshie. Look. Look at this one.”

It was a six-page text message, an eight-hundred-character rant, the Fidel Castro of texts.

Heshie read the message and looked aghast.

“Jeffrey, she’s psychologically abusing you. I’d be a little scared if I were you. You better be careful.”

Wait, what? Psychological abuse? Are you saying I am an abused husband?

No way. No way, man.

“Thanks for listening,” I told Heshie, looking at him in the eyes. He was like a brother to me. “I’m glad you had a good laugh.”

I smiled with him. It was sort of funny, in a way. I walked down the block to my car and got in and drove home, choking the steering wheel so tightly it screamed at me, too.