In A Country Of Mothers Read online

  A. M. Homes

  In A Country Of Mothers

  For my mother, Phyllis Homes

  Substitute me for him,

  Substitute my coke for gin.

  Substitute you for my mum,

  At least I’ll get my washing done.

  — PETE TOWNSHEND

  BOOK ONE

  1

  Jody was already dialing when Harry came up from behind and put his fat thumb down on the hook, disconnecting her.

  “No spy reports,” he said.

  “I was making a shrink appointment. You’re driving me crazy.”

  “I’m flattered,” Harry said, plucking the quarter from the coin return, dropping it into her open palm. “Try again.”

  Once more Jody put the quarter in and dialed. She turned to face Harry. The short metal phone cord pulled close against her throat. Later, she would notice it had left a thick red mark like a scar across her neck, as though someone had tried to strangle her. But then, waiting for the call to go through, she ignored the pressure at her throat and fixed on Harry. Fat, swollen up like a dead whale, Harry’s stomach started at his collar and went down to his knees, jutting out in front of him in one solid lump. His thick, pink lips were pulled down by age and too many years of pretending to pout. She imagined his skin was cold and clammy to the touch.

  When Claire Roth’s answering machine finally beeped, Jody smiled at Harry and left the following message:

  “Hi, this is Jody Goodman, you don’t know me. I’m having some trouble making career decisions.”

  Harry’s face curled into a scowl.

  “Barbara Schwartz gave me your number. I think I should make an appointment. I can’t be reached at work, but my number at home is 555-2102. Thanks.”

  “Taking to the couch over me?” Harry asked when Jody hung up. “How wonderful.”

  “You’re an asshole,” Jody answered, loud enough for the crew hovering around her to hear.

  “And you, good girl,” Harry said, blushing, “are an angel.” He kissed her forehead and drifted back onto the set.

  Jody dropped another quarter into the phone and called the office.

  “Michael Miller Productions, can you hold?”

  “It’s me,” Jody said. “Is he there?”

  “Hold, please.”

  There was a buzz, then the clattering of Michael Miller picking up his prized Lego phone.

  “What?” Michael said.

  “‘What?’? No ‘Hi, hello?’” Jody asked.

  There was silence. After spending two years as Michael’s assistant, Jody was often spoken to in a kind of small talk that was sometimes no talk.

  “Fine,” Jody said. “I guess when you’re losing millions of dollars, the little niceties are the first thing to go. Well, he knows I’m checking in. He just kissed the top of my forehead. A saliva ball remains in my hair. I think I can feel it.”

  “Aside from your personal injury?”

  “He’s taking his time. Going over everything again and again. There’s no way he’ll finish on schedule.”

  “Let me know more as soon as you can. I may have to try and bring in some new money. Speaking of which, where did you put that European check?”

  “In the production account. By the way, I think I’m on to something. I just called Harry an asshole and he blushed.” She hung up quickly before Michael could respond.

  “Lock it up,” the production assistants screamed down the street. Within minutes traffic was stopped, pedestrians held behind barricades, and a rented police car, sirens wailing, raced up a side street past the first camera position, turned wide onto Broadway, spinning a little in front of a bank of lights and a second camera, then came to a screeching halt in front of Zabar’s, third position. An actor dressed as a cop jumped out of the front seat, opened the back door, and a woman in a thick wool coat, played by the legendary Carol Heberton, stepped out.

  “Do you want anything?” Jody said, mouthing Heberton’s lines in synch with the action. “I won’t be more than a minute.”

  “Cut,” someone shouted into a megaphone. “Once more, positions.”

  Jody pushed her way through the crowd, mentally calculating the cost of another take. Film was money; cost was associated with everything.

  As she started to duck under one of the barricades, a real cop stopped her. “You’ll have to cross on the other side.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jody said, and went forward.

  The cop caught her by the shoulder and held her until a production assistant came to the rescue. “She’s okay,” he said. “She’s okay, she’s one of us.”

  Jody dusted herself off.

  “Harry’s been asking for you,” the PA said, “barking ‘Good girl, good girl,’ into someone’s walkie-talkie.”

  “Great,” Jody said, turning to look at the crowd of hangers-on, thinking the whole thing was ridiculous. Michael Miller Productions — a.k.a. Forgettable Films. She’d taken the job with the idea that if she wanted to be a filmmaker she ought to learn something about the business. For the entire two years she’d been there, Michael had been scraping money together so that old Harry Birenbaum, creator of hybrid, sweeping, pseudo-European romantic epics, could try his hand at a new kind of movie, one that had commercial potential, and ideally would earn back all the money Michael had begged, borrowed, and worse. If the film failed, Michael Miller Productions would probably become Michael Miller Lawn Service: WE CLEAN GUTTERS.

  A homeless man appeared out of nowhere and scurried up to the food table. Jody watched him pile bananas, oranges, and apples into the crook of his free arm. He was almost at a dozen when a technician startled him—“And don’t come back!” The last orange fell, bounced on the sidewalk, and rolled into the street.

  Michael had talked Jody into loaning herself out to Harry during the New York location work by describing it as a unique opportunity to see one of the masters in action. So far, all she’d learned from watching the great one was that maybe she should have applied to UCLA’s law school instead of the film department.

  Jody knocked on Harry’s trailer door, marked COSTUME to deter celebrity maniacs.

  “Please,” Harry called.

  The door opened and Karl, Harry’s assistant, came flying out as if he’d been fired from a cannon.

  Harry himself was sitting sideways at the table, too fat to fit in facing front. “Come and have lunch with me,” he said.

  Jody didn’t answer.

  “Well, come on. Can’t leave the door open like that. Someone might see.”

  Jody climbed in and sat across from Harry at the dinette.

  “What do you think — A or B?” He aimed a remote control at a television set built into the wall and played two video versions of a scene they’d shot the day before. The A sequence was neither here nor there, acceptable but boring, definitely not the stuff of Academy Award nominations. The B shot was classic Harry, so tight that the images overflowed the frame. Instead of Carol Heberton from fifteen feet, it was Heberton’s left eye, a subtle shift in the pupil, a dilation that registered her having seen something, consciously or unconsciously. Playing the known against the unknown, that was Harry’s strength.

  “A or B?” Harry asked again.

  She didn’t want to answer. Harry really was one of the great filmmakers, but he was slumming. His last three films had lost fortunes, his shooting style of rehearsal, take, and retake was so expensive that producers wouldn’t go near him. Regardless, he wasn’t someone you pictured behind the wheel of a cop-and-robber flick.

  “Sweetheart,” he said. “You want to be a director? Directors make decisions.”

  “B,” Jody said.

  “And why?”

  “It builds ten
sion, reveals more without giving anything away. The other one is too diffuse, there’s too much in the background, it’s distracting.”

  “A-plus, little one, A-plus. Do you know what that boy who was in here said?”

  Jody shook her head. Karl had to be at least forty years old.

  “He said A, because Carol looks old in the B shot. But she is old. For weeks I’ve been trying to make her look exactly like this, and suddenly he’s complaining. Old is nice, isn’t it?”

  “Lovely,” Jody said, standing to leave.

  “This isn’t a beauty contest,” Harry said.

  There was a knock on the trailer door. Karl slipped in and deposited a huge tray of food in the middle of the table.

  “That’s all for now,” Harry said.

  After Karl turned and left, Jody also started for the door.

  “You don’t expect me to eat alone?” Harry asked.

  Jody shrugged and lied. “I’m not a food person.”

  “But I am.”

  And so Jody sat and watched Harry suck up his lunch like a vacuum cleaner, thinking about her own life, past, present, and future. She envisioned a high crane shot beginning inside the trailer: Harry chewing on the small bones of a roasted baby something — chicken, lamb, child; the crane pulling up through the skylight to reveal the set outside — technicians scurrying for lights, gaffer’s tape, the cinematographer riding his camera back and forth on dolly tracks, Heberton repetitiously rehearsing her lines, the pedestrians tripping over one another to get a closer look; and then the camera pulling away even more, sweeping past Michael in his office crunching numbers, and moving still farther away to an aerial view of Manhattan — New York from a distance, earth as seen from space.

  By the time Harry was finished, Jody was nauseated as hell, partly from the sight of the great man with carroty flecks of cole slaw at the corners of his corpulent mouth, a wide yellow slap of mustard across his cheek, and partly from the anxiety of her own thoughts. Who did she think she was that she could make it in this business, where the recipe for success seemed to be equal amounts of arrogance, assholism, and unbridled brilliance? All she had for sure was curiosity and a peculiar little vision. When Karl returned with a huge pot of coffee and a tray of cookies, Jody immediately drank four cups, ate a dozen cookies, and spent the rest of the afternoon wishing there was a convenient building tall enough to jump off of.

  2

  Between patients, Claire napped on the sofa in her office. Something — perhaps a dream, the sound of the phone ringing, or the young woman’s voice on the answering machine — woke her. Whatever it was came like a flash, a fleeting electrocution that left her with the sensation of having been ripped back and forth through time.

  She sat up, convinced something horrible had happened. If she hadn’t been expecting a patient, Claire would’ve gone home and examined her children for signs of damage. She would’ve told them to open their mouths and say aah while she shined a flashlight in. She’d press her ear to their chests, her hand to their backs, and ask them to breathe deeply. Instead she went to her desk, and called the apartment.

  “Everything all right?” Claire asked Frecia.

  “Adam and I are making cookies, Jake’s watching TV,” the housekeeper answered, her voice a comforting singsong.

  “Don’t let him get too close to the oven. He likes to look in.”

  “His head won’t catch fire,” Frecia said firmly. She’d been with Claire for years. She was used to this.

  The buzzer in Claire’s office went off.

  “Sam called and said he won’t be home until after eleven,” Frecia said.

  The buzzer sounded again. It reminded Claire of the air-raid test sirens in elementary school: the first Wednesday of every month, from 11:00 a.m. until 11:03—every month of every year, and always it came as a surprise. She looked out the window. A woman was crossing the street with a stroller. The light was changing, and a bus was about to force its way through the intersection. Claire held her breath until the woman and the stroller were safely on the other side.

  “My four o’clock’s waiting,” Claire told Frecia. “See you later.” She buzzed the patient in and turned the volume on her answering machine all the way down.

  It wasn’t until she was saying hello to her six o’clock that she remembered the phone ringing during her nap. She tried to focus on what the client was saying, but her mind kept circling back to the phone call. Somehow she thought it was from someone she knew.

  “It’s really wonderful that you just sit and listen to me blabber,” the patient was saying. “You never judge me. I like that. Thank you.”

  Patients were always thanking Claire, telling her how wonderful she was, how much she’d helped them. And while she appreciated these thoughts, they didn’t really count. They weren’t thanking her; they were thanking a little piece of her that, in terms of the whole, wasn’t much. They thanked their fantasy of Claire. If her patients really knew her, Claire figured, they’d never come back.

  She smiled, nodded. “See you Thursday,” she said fifty minutes later, leading the patient to the door.

  Alone at her desk, she pressed “play” on the answering machine and listened.

  “Hi, how are you?” It was her friend Naomi. “Do we have theater tickets for Saturday? If you’ve got a sitter maybe we should leave our kids at your place — two for the price of one.”

  Claire fast-forwarded.

  “This is Jody Goodman, you don’t know me. I’m having some trouble making career decisions. Barbara Schwartz gave me your number. I think I should make an appointment. I can’t be reached at work, but my number at home is 555-2102. Thanks.”

  Claire rewound the message and played it again, writing down word for word what the girl said. Years ago, when she got her first answering machine, Claire had started transcribing phone messages from patients or would-be patients. The way she saw it, the calls were filled with clues: what the callers did or didn’t say, their tone of voice, the way they dealt with the machine. She’d never told anyone. The transcriptions would have seemed like a peculiar habit, the kind of tic only a shrink would have.

  In session, listening as intently as she could, Claire often felt as though she heard nothing. Writing it down gave her the sensation of studying something, making it tangible. If she’d thought her patients would stand for it, she would have taped their sessions. But then the tapes would just be there, piled up in a closet she would have to keep locked. When the therapy was terminated, what would she do — give the tapes back to the patient? Or would she be expected to erase them, as if the person had never existed?

  She dialed Jody Goodman’s number. A machine answered, and as Claire started to leave a message, someone picked up. “Hello? Hello?”

  “I’m trying to reach Jody Goodman,” Claire said.

  “It’s me.”

  “This is Claire Roth, returning your call.”

  “Oh, hi,” Jody said. “Sorry if my message sounded a little strange, my boss was standing over my shoulder. Literally.”

  Claire didn’t say anything.

  “I think I should make an appointment with you,” Jody said.

  “Could you tell me why?”

  “Graduate school,” Jody said.

  A simple answer. She didn’t say she’d been seeing spotted elephants walking down Broadway. She didn’t say her boyfriend had threatened to kill her and had just gone out for pizza but would be back any minute. In other words, it wasn’t an emergency. Claire relaxed. She hated talking to strangers.

  “How do you know Barbara Schwartz?” Claire asked.

  “She used to be my shrink.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Two years. I stopped when I moved to New York.”

  “Would you like to come in tomorrow? I could see you at twelve-thirty.”

  “Yeah, sure. I think that’ll work.”

  “See you then,” Claire said, and hung up.

  She flipped through her Rolod
ex, found Barbara Schwartz’s number, and started to dial, but then stopped herself. She didn’t want anyone’s impressions to interfere with her own. If she needed to talk to Barbara, she’d do it later.

  Barbara Schwartz. Whenever the past crossed into the present, Claire got nervous. All day she saw what memory was for people: a stomping ground for bad feelings, frozen worst moments, gone over again and again until they were smooth and hard like calluses or beach glass. When things got bad for Claire, Sam tried to make her feel better by saying, “What happened, happened. Look at it this way: if you had to do it over again, you’d do it differently — who wouldn’t?” Claire accepted it. She accepted what had happened with the kind of resignation that was in some way expected of her. There was no reason to discuss it. What happened, happened. Past is past.

  Barbara Schwartz, an immigrant from Tucson, Arizona. “The onliest Jew in the West” was what she’d called herself. Nineteen sixty-seven. Little Barbie in Baltimore, with her frizzy brown hair dyed blond. A row house subdivided into apartments; Barbara, the young social worker with her first grown-up job, downstairs, and Claire, depressed, upstairs. Barbarella Schwartz, who borrowed Claire’s cashmere sweaters for dates. Claire lent them, not caring that they came back with stains or cigarette burns. Somehow, if her sweaters went out on dates, it counted for Claire too. She’d sit up watching television, waiting for her sweater to come home. And when it got back, Claire would carry the contents of her refrigerator into her bed, and she and Barbara would lie there watching the late movie and saying nasty things about men. It was on one of those nights that Claire almost told Barbara her secret — the truly worst thing about a man, the reason she was in Baltimore. But she chickened out, afraid the story would ruin their friendship.

  Baltimore was more than twenty years ago. Claire had arrived almost a year before Barbara, and stayed two years after she left. The whole time, the whole four years, she’d waited there in that same apartment, secretly hoping that what had been done would somehow, of its own volition, become undone. If only she waited long enough.