In A Country Of Mothers Page 4

  Jody had said “I’m just a little nervous” in the same way Dustin Hoffman said “I’m just a little worried about my future” in The Graduate.

  “Do you know that when they made The Graduate,” Jody said, “Dustin Hoffman was thirty and Anne Bancroft was only thirty-seven. Isn’t that amazing?”

  “You’ll do very well,” Barbara said. “You really don’t need me anymore. You know who you are, what you need. You’re grown up.” She paused. “I have a friend in New York who’s very nice. She’s a therapist. I can give you her number if you feel you might need it. She’s in the Village. Isn’t that where you’ll be living?”

  “I thought I was graduating,” Jody said.

  “You’ll be fine, but if you want a name?”

  Jody shook her head. “I’d have to start all over again, and I’d never be able to convince a stranger that I’m not really crazy.”

  Barbara smiled. “I can just give you the number. You don’t have to use it.” She went to her desk, which was covered with things her children had made — they hadn’t even been born when Jody started seeing Barbara, and now one was almost six years old.

  Sometimes Jody thought she was special, not in the usual sense, but like the young women in television movies — girls whose tormented pasts keep them from living normal lives until they meet the good doctor who knows just how to fix them, schizophrenics who end up being only slightly learning-disabled, cripples who become concert pianists.

  Barbara wrote the name and phone number on a piece of scratch paper and handed it to Jody, who immediately jammed it deep into her pocket. For more than a year she’d kept it in her wallet like a condom, in case of emergency.

  “Thanks,” Jody had said to Barbara, putting her coat on without even thinking if the hour was up or not. It didn’t matter.

  “Stay in touch,” Barbara said.

  “Thanks a lot,” Jody said. “Really, thanks a lot.”

  Barbara smiled again and moved towards her, and for a second Jody thought Barbara might hug her. If Barbara hugged her, she’d die. Barbara put her hand out and quickly Jody did the same. They shook.

  “Goodbye,” Barbara said.

  “Yeah, see you later,” Jody said, thinking about what she’d do after this last session. McDonald’s, she figured — for lunch, not a career.

  And now, what seemed like a hundred years later, at two in the morning, Jody was sitting on the floor of her apartment — in Greenwich Village, in New York City, two hundred and fifty miles from Barbara, from her mother, from everyone — eating brownies. Why had she gone to see Claire — was she an idiot? Jody had graduated. She’d done it. She was proud of herself. Until she’d picked up the phone and called Claire Roth, she’d thought of herself as the strongest person alive.

  4

  During her afternoon break, Claire sat on Bob Rosenblatt’s extra chair. She didn’t lie on the couch because, as she saw it, she wasn’t a patient. She’d paid her therapy dues long ago. No, she was coming to a respected colleague for advice. Rosenblatt was older, wiser, a professor at Columbia who had Oriental rugs and good art in his office, all qualities Claire admired in a psychiatrist.

  The problem was her relationship with Jake. She was angry. She resented his sluggishness, which she was afraid might be the core of his personality. It had occurred to Claire that it might be best to ignore him and just assume that one day he’d become a highly motivated genius. At the same time she thought of sending him away to school — something regimented, perhaps agricultural in nature, where he’d be forced to work. Even if it didn’t help, at least she wouldn’t have to see him languishing on the sofa. The third possibility was that this period of absolute inertia was merely a resting place, the last quiet moment before his body was filled with the hormonal rush of adolescence.

  “Describe yourself as a child,” Rosenblatt said.

  Claire closed her eyes and tried to give Bob what she thought he wanted. “My mother was very fussy, everything had its place. In the living room there was a bookcase filled with china figurines. Our house was a sanctuary, a place where my father came to relax after work. Maintaining calm was the focus. My younger sister was the good one. They used to say I was filled with the devil. I left home when I was eighteen and a half.”

  “So,” Rosenblatt said, quickly, definitely, “you were a difficult child, a hell-raiser?”

  Claire was shocked. Hadn’t he heard what she said? God, what a lousy shrink. Why was he supposed to be so great? “Hardly,” she said, trying not to overreact. “Just because they thought I was wild doesn’t mean that I was.”

  Rosenblatt nodded. “You described how your parents saw you, but not what you were like.”

  “What was I like?” Claire said. “I tried hard.” She was so annoyed it was hard to think. She thought she’d made it clear on the phone that she wanted to talk about Jake. Five more minutes, that’s all he was getting.

  “So, what were you like?”

  “Frustrated, just like I am now,” she said, figuring there wasn’t much to lose. If she got into a huge fight with Rosenblatt, she’d go to fewer shrink parties, spend more time at home with Jake. Maybe that’s what he needed, anyway: his mother to bust his ass and drive him nuts.

  Rosenblatt laughed. “Just like you are now, exactly! Why?”

  “Because you don’t understand what I just told you five minutes ago.”

  “Good,” he said.

  Claire didn’t get it. She felt like a child, a dog being patted on the head. She didn’t have a clue where he was leading her. She looked around Rosenblatt’s office, bigger than hers, with more windows and a better view. It marked the difference between psychiatrists and psychologists. Money.

  “Do you think your son is frustrated?”

  “No,” Claire said. “I think he’s brain dead.”

  “Let’s get back to your family.”

  “I’ve made myself a life they can’t imagine.”

  “What do you mean, ‘they can’t imagine’?”

  “I live in New York City. I married a man who makes a living defending criminals and likes it. I have a career and two children and my parents still act as though I’m a failure, as though I’ll come running home any minute now. They live in a split-level house in northern Virginia with a two-car garage, and every Sunday morning my sister, her husband, and their three daughters pick them up, take them to church, and then out to lunch.”

  “Church?” Rosenblatt asked.

  Claire nodded. She knew what he was getting at but wasn’t about to give it to him. It came up everywhere — Adam’s preschool, whether to send Jake to Hebrew school — and affected the way people perceived her, how they acted. There was never a way around it.

  “Are you Jewish?” Rosenblatt asked. He meant, aren’t you? But this way, he thought he was being tactful.

  “By marriage,” Claire said.

  “Aha,” Rosenblatt said softly.

  You bet. Claire wondered exactly what it meant to him. Was she a whole new person, the blond shiksa, simultaneously despised and worshiped? Did Rosenblatt look at her and think everything came easily, that she was as simple, clean, and easily digested as white bread and mayonnaise?

  Rosenblatt flashed her a condescending smile: I’m the shrink, you’re the shrinkee. I’m the Jew, you’re the goy. I’m a medical doctor, you’re a Ph.D. You’re the girl, I’m the boy. I win. He shifted his weight around in the chair and crossed his legs.

  “My sister, Laura, the good one, got married when she was nineteen. She works with ‘special children’ because it’s the right thing to do. It doesn’t threaten her family or her husband. She manages her life as if it was a retarded child. We speak twice a year.”

  “Is that a loss? Do you wish you were closer?”

  “No,” Claire said. “But I feel like I have no family; no one who knew me as a child. I have Sam and the kids, but Sam doesn’t belong to me.” She paused. “And my children are spoiled slugs.”

  Claire almost s
tarted crying, but stopped herself. There were huge holes in what she said, but she knew Rosenblatt didn’t see them. She’d done a good job. All the same, as she sat in Rosenblatt’s big leather chair, talking, she felt as though she was starting to fall through. She wouldn’t tell him the whole story; she’d promised herself that.

  The silence made her uncomfortable. She looked at Rosenblatt. He was someone she knew. She knew a million people who knew him. On the phone, she’d made it clear she was coming in for a bit of advice, not a whole big thing, just some clues from a seasoned expert who had one kid at Yale and another at Harvard. Rosenblatt was staring at her knees — bony and poking out from the edge of her skirt — hiding his discomfort behind his glasses and the pose of the elder, a professional, a man. He could do it to her and get away with it.

  Claire told herself to keep it all a little more tightly wrapped. Talk to Sam, she told herself. Sam never seemed to think anything was all that strange.

  More silence. Claire pulled herself back to the surface and got angry. Her anger would save her. She tried to get really mad, but was exhausted from the effort of sorting her life into two piles, secrets and things that were all right to discuss. She’d done well. None of the really messy stuff had come out — not Baltimore, not anything about her life after she left home. The one saving grace was that it sounded normal enough to say you left home at eighteen. She never added that in her parents’ home, the expectation was that she wouldn’t leave until her wedding day.

  “We’re running out of time,” he said. “Where should we go from here?”

  Bob Rosenblatt had done her a disservice, opening everything up. One could argue that like certain types of surgery, it needed to be done; that it was necessary to release the pressure before it built into an explosion. All the same, the side effects included the loss of her good sense.

  “Would you like to come in again — say, next Monday at nine?”

  Claire took out her appointment book. That she also did this for a living seemed strange. She felt like a fraud.

  “Fine,” Claire said, getting up to leave, annoyed that she’d gone ahead and made another appointment instead of saying what she really thought.

  She walked down Fifth Avenue toward Sixteenth Street, trying to shake off the Rosenblatt effect, stopping to look in windows along the way. She was meeting Sam for lunch, something they did once every couple of weeks, often enough that it didn’t feel like a doomed occasion where one of them would confess to something horrible: I’m leaving, the test came back, I’ve done something you won’t forgive me for. Claire got to the restaurant a little early and had a glass of wine at the bar.

  “Whose fault is it?” Sam whispered in her ear, taking her arm and following the maitre d’ to their table. “If it’s genetic, it’s your side. Jews are never like that.”

  The restaurant was filled with good-looking, well-dressed men and women gorging themselves on expense accounts. When the waiter handed them menus, Claire hid behind hers. Over four-tomato soup with floating goat cheese she began to cry. Sam’s face wrinkled. He always cried when she cried. The people at the next table stared. Claire forced herself to stop, blotted her eyes, and then looked up.

  “A joke?” Sam asked, pouring her a glass of wine.

  Claire nodded.

  “Two guys, Abe and Louie. A promise: first one dies calls the other, tells him what heaven’s like. Twenty years later, Abe dies. Couple months go by, Louie’s phone rings. ‘Abe?’ ‘Louie?’ ‘Abe, is that you?’ ‘Louie?’ ‘So tell me, Abe, what’s it like?’ ‘You wouldn’t believe. Wake up in the morning, have sex, a little breakfast, a nap. Lunch, some sex, rest till dinner, a little nosh, more sex, then sleep all night like a baby.’ ‘Heaven sounds incredible, Abe.’ ‘Heaven, Schmeven — I’m a bear in Colorado.’”

  Claire only smiled, having sunk too far into herself to laugh. She ate her soup looking at Sam. It was normal to go back, to reconsider, to move backwards before going forward. She remembered that when she first met Sam, his hair had been thick, cut like a thatched roof — a Jewish Robert Redford. In her mind, the closest she’d get to marrying him would be sleeping with him two, maybe three times, and then he’d move on to someone more challenging, more sophisticated. Sam was too good for her. Everything was too good.

  They met at a demonstration at Columbia; she was getting her Ph.D. in psych and he had just finished law school. They were both watching friends get arrested. He grabbed her hand and pulled her away from the crowd. Together they went to the police station and waited for their friends to be released. Afterwards they all went out for Chinese food, and one of Sam’s friends explained in minute detail how carefully a male cop had searched her. “I had some dope on me and he was getting close, so I stated telling him how much he was turning me on and gave him a blow job to keep him distracted. It worked,” she said, pulling a baggie of pot out of her pocket and handing it to Sam. “I owe you this, for coming to get me.”

  Later, in Claire’s apartment on 106th Street, Claire and Sam smoked the dope. Claire wasn’t used to getting stoned, and freaked out, confessing everything. “I had a baby,” she told him.

  “You mean you had an abortion,” Sam said.

  “No, I had a baby. No one knows. Years ago, a little girl. My parents made me give her away. I never should have given her up.” The words repeated themselves in her head, and then, as if something in her had broken, Claire started crying and repeating “I had a baby, I had a baby” again and again, wailing, bellowing like an animal. She was crying so hard and so strangely that she scared herself. She started thinking that the dope had been laced with something, that this feeling would last forever and she would never be herself again.

  Sam got a cool washcloth and rubbed it over her face and arms. He found a Valium in the medicine cabinet and slipped it into her mouth. Sitting next to her on the bed, he held her hands until she fell asleep; and while she slept he cleaned the apartment, rearranged things so that the place seemed larger, took down the dark red curtains she’d made herself, and washed the windows. She woke up in a different world.

  Claire picked at the swordfish she’d ordered and watched Sam spin the tricolored pasta onto his fork. The older Sam got, the better he looked, the more relaxed he seemed. If she weren’t so miserable, she’d be happy.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, cutting a piece of her fish for himself.

  “I’ll be fine.” She reached under the table, pretending she’d dropped her napkin, and rubbed his crotch. “Do you want to come back to my office after lunch?”

  “Can’t,” he said, chewing.

  “I love you,” Claire said, her hand still under the table. Sam leaned across the wineglasses and kissed her. Out of the corner of her eye, Claire saw the two women at the next table watching.

  Back in the office, Claire told herself she had to focus on something. Work more. Being a shrink was lonely business; most of the people Claire knew were also shrinks who, between their practices and their real lives, were too busy for anything other than a quick breezy chat between sessions. And then there were her patients, but they weren’t exactly available for afternoon cappuccino. A little high from the three glasses of wine, Claire sat looking out the window, waiting for her next victim, thinking she should put a sign up: TODAY ONLY, HALF-PRICE SPECIAL, SPACED-OUT SHRINK.

  The buzzer went off. “Yes,” Claire said in a distant voice.

  “It’s Jody Goodman.”

  Claire had completely forgotten that she’d switched Polly and her would-be husband — if only he’d make a commitment — to another time. Good, she thought, pressing the button that unlocked the front door. Jody will make me feel better.

  5

  “My mother wants me to fly to L.A. next week,” Jody said.

  “And?”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “Because of the flying?”

  “Flight 206. It sounds like a number you hear on the news when they talk about the worst aviation disaster in h
istory. ‘Flight 206, originating in Washington, D.C., bound for Los Angeles, crashed today, killing all aboard.’ I can’t do it.”

  “The plane isn’t going to crash. You’re rerouting your anxiety.”

  “That’s really brilliant,” Jody said, and when she saw Claire looked hurt, she apologized. She’d never worried about hurting a shrink’s feelings before. She hadn’t figured they were exactly human.

  “What could you do to make this work?” Claire asked. “Could you take some Valium?”

  Jody shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t you know that’s why so many people die in these things? They’re too stoned or drunk to get up and walk out.”

  Claire laughed. “If you’re serious about going to school out there, you should definitely take a look. That way, if you decide to go, you’ll be more comfortable in the fall. It’ll seem familiar.”

  “I am going,” Jody said. “I have to go. Nine million people apply to film school and only about two get in.”

  “You must be very talented.”

  Jody shrugged. She usually hated it when people complimented her, but Claire had a way of doing it that actually made her feel good. When Claire said something, Jody believed it.

  “It’s nice of your mother to go with you. Is she always like that? Is she especially nice?”

  “Ellen says so,” Jody said.

  “Who’s Ellen?”

  “My friend. She lives in my building, grew up where I grew up. Like I was saying,” Jody said, pausing for effect, “Ellen says I should be happy that my mother and I get along.”