In A Country Of Mothers Page 5

  “And?”

  “That’s it. Mostly Ellen talks about herself.”

  “Oh. I was hoping you’d tell me a little bit about your mother, your family.”

  “The family’s a push-and-pull thing,” Jody said. “They want me to grow up and be independent, but they also want me to stay with them — not at home, just on their level. Then there’s the idea that I should go off and do everything, fulfill all of everyone’s undone dreams. But they’re also afraid I’ll go too far and I won’t need them anymore.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “I dunno, I haven’t gone anywhere yet.”

  “You’re here.”

  Jody laughed. “I have this vision that I’ll be called home like a kid out late on a summer night. My mother will open the front door to New York City and yell, ‘Jody, come home.’ I’ll be outside playing. I won’t turn around. I won’t answer. She’ll call me at the office. ‘Jody, come home.’ I’ll be waiting in a movie line. ‘Jody, come home, it’s eight-thirty, I’m running your bath.’ At a restaurant. ‘Jody, get in this house right now.’ After a while, I won’t have any friends left, they’ll be repulsed by me and my family. No one will want to play with me. And I’ll be torn between staying with my ex-friends, even though I’m unwanted, and going home to be plunked into a vat of Mr. Bubble and left there till I’m all shrivelly.”

  “What an imagination,” Claire said, clearly enjoying herself. “Now, tell me something else about your family.”

  There was a shift between Claire’s listening for pleasure and her determination to gather information for purposes that weren’t entirely clear.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Jody said, instinctively withdrawing, shrugging in apology. “Sometimes, with people I like or people who I want to like me, I get very quiet. With people I don’t care about, I’m a regular Chatty Cathy.” Jody was quiet.

  “Does that mean you care about me?” Claire asked.

  Jody glared at her. She didn’t care about her, didn’t know her well enough to have any particular feelings about her. Shrinks always did that — insisted that you care about them, that you secretly loved them — but Jody never had. Maybe that’s why she was still the way she was.

  “You don’t have to worry about saying something that will scare me away.”

  “Yeah, right,” Jody said.

  Claire smiled. “It’s true. I can take it.”

  Jody allowed herself to make eye contact for a fraction of a second. Claire’s eyes were green and encouraging. She looked, and like an idiot let herself be seduced. Claire actually could take it, she thought. She felt like she’d never been in a room with a woman so strong. Jody had the urge to say “Here’s my life” and dump it on her lap like a knotted necklace. Here, fix it for me, make it good again.

  “When you tell someone something,” she said, “what you tell them doesn’t just belong to you, it also belongs to the person listening. People say certain things because they want something back from the listener, something in exchange.” Jody stopped herself.

  “If you’re right, then you must want something from me,” Claire said. “The question is what.”

  Jody shrugged and ignored her. “Most people give what comes easiest.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. What do you want from me?”

  “Nothing,” Jody said. “I wasn’t talking about you. It has nothing to do with you. You’re the shrink, not a person. You can’t want something from a shrink.”

  “Hostile,” Claire said. “Very hostile.”

  “Maybe.”

  “People want things from their therapists all the time,” Claire said. “Approval, love, attention.”

  They were silent. Jody stared at the tan wall. Like everything else in the office, it was the color of a desert — a person could get lost.

  “We were talking about your family,” Claire said.

  “Yeah, I was about to tell you a secret. It’s not really a secret,” Jody said. “It’s something everyone knows, everyone except you.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I had a brother,” Jody said. “He died six months before I was born. There was something wrong with his heart, a defect. He’d been sick since he was a baby.”

  “That’s very sad.”

  “I was adopted,” Jody said. “After my mother had him, she couldn’t have any more children, so they brought me in to replace him.”

  Claire lifted her eyebrows as if to ask whether this was fact or fiction.

  “It’s true,” Jody said, surprised that Claire was looking at her like she didn’t already know. She’d imagined that as soon as she’d called for an appointment, Claire had called Barbara, who’d told her everything. What did shrinks say to each other? It sounded like a joke, but what was the punch line? Time’s up for today.

  “Tell me again,” Claire said, picking up her legal pad. “How old was the child?”

  “Nine,” Jody said.

  “And how old were you when you were adopted?”

  “Brand-new.”

  “Months, weeks?”

  “Days.” Jody glanced at Claire, whose eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. Jody made the shrink cry. She’d hardly said anything. “It’s nothing, I swear,” she added, laughing nervously.

  “I’d like to see you again tomorrow,” Claire said.

  Jody couldn’t believe it. She’d thought she’d been torturing Claire, and now Claire wanted to do it again tomorrow. Why not? There was something about throwing all this emotional information around without having any idea where it would land that was invigorating and kind of scary. Cheap thrills, only it wasn’t so cheap.

  “Three o’clock?” Claire asked.

  “Sure,” Jody said, worried about sneaking off the set again. Most people who had jobs went to work and stayed there. That was the basic premise, or didn’t Claire know that? Should she remind her?

  Claire took a card off her desk, wrote something on it, and handed it to Jody. “It’s my home number. I want you to call me if you need to.”

  “I can’t,” Jody said, handing the card back to Claire, who refused to take it.

  “What do you mean you can’t?”

  “I just can’t, okay? I can’t call anyone, my friends always call me. Even my mother calls me every night at eleven,” Jody said. “I have a special phone that doesn’t even have a dial on it.”

  “If you don’t want to call me at home, you can always leave a message on the machine here. I check in quite often.”

  Barbara hadn’t given Jody her home phone number until she’d been seeing her for a year and a half. In the whole seven years Jody had used it once, and regretted it. She’d had a huge fight with her mother, and when she called, Barbara had spoken in little clipped sentences. Then one of her kids walked into the room, and Barbara put her hand over the receiver. Jody felt like a leper. She could hear the sound of a kid crying in the background, a reminder that the shrink had her own private life. No, Jody thought. No way, no thanks.

  “You can call me,” Claire said. “I want you to.”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not? You did it before. You called me to make an appointment.”

  “I was crazy then,” Jody said. “I’m better now.”

  Claire laughed, and Jody headed for the door.

  “By the way,” Claire called after her, “you’re going to California.”

  Jody had the cab drop her at Seventy-second Street and then walked along the park toward the Seventy-ninth Street location.

  “You,” Harry said, shaking a fat finger at Jody from halfway down the block.

  Jody went white.

  “You,” Harry said, wagging the finger again as she got closer.

  “I’m sorry,” Jody blurted. She’d have to call Claire and cancel.

  “You are a fool.” Harry took Jody’s hand and guided her down the street, along the lines of cable leading toward the Museum of Natural History. “This morning Michael told me I�
�m losing you to UCLA. Do not go to school, good girl. You’ve done that already. That’s finished. I know about these things.”

  “Why do you even care?” Jody asked, still thinking about the appointment with Claire.

  “I like you, good girl. You’re tough — you’ve got a little extra heart where most people keep their credit cards.”

  “On my ass?”

  “No, here,” Harry said, patting his breast pocket. “I’ve been to film school on many occasions.” He then did an elaborate impression of an overzealous grad student. “‘Excuse me, Mr. Birenbaum, but in your work, like that of da Vinci or van Gogh, the shades of the palette seem to carry such significance — especially for me in Shadows from Fall, which was albeit a little heavy-handed; the house was white, her dress was red, and the car they drove away in was blue. But could you tell us something about that, about your relation to color as political statement?’ Actually, I’m color-blind,” Harry mocked, shrugging off the question.

  He slid his arm under Jody’s so it rubbed against her breast, the better to guide her. “You,” he said, “should know better. If you want to make movies, make movies. Don’t get a degree in it.”

  “But—”

  “Dear one, nothing can convince me it’s not injurious to the process. Film students are retards.”

  Jody didn’t say anything.

  “Now that I’ve depressed you, let me make you happy again. I’m invited to something tomorrow night, I don’t remember what, but I have to go. I’m hoping you’ll be my date?”

  Jody still didn’t say anything.

  “You’d have to wear a dress,” Harry said. “You do have at least one dress, don’t you?”

  Jody nodded.

  “I’ll pick you up at eight.” Harry took a large book out of his pocket and had Jody write her address and phone number on a page already thick with names and numbers.

  6

  After Jody left, Claire had an attack of paranoia. She decided that Jody was afraid of nothing — a laser beam, a nuclear warhead. Her fear of flying, her anxieties were affectations to make her seem less powerful, less overwhelming, more normal. Claire conjured Jody’s image: the smooth, open face needed no makeup, no correction; wavy brown hair, stylishly cut; cerulean blue eyes, quick to look and then to look away; shoulders back, neck extended, the posture of confidence — someone you’d notice. Despite what Jody said, how she hemmed and hawed, pretended to suffer crushing self-doubt, her appearance was that of someone who knew where she was going and exactly how she’d be getting there; the sort of young woman who caused people to ask “Who is that?” in sweaty, eager tones.

  Jody was toying with Claire. She never had a brother. She wasn’t adopted. She’d come to undo Claire, to dismantle her. She could see right through Claire and was playing with all the weak links, reducing her to nothingness.

  Claire flipped through her Rolodex, found Barbara Schwartz’s number, and left a message on her machine. The second she hung up, Claire regretted having called. She had nothing to say to Barbara. Past was past. Certainly Claire couldn’t call out of the blue and discuss the idea of her patient as a demon, the devil incarnate.

  She had two back-to-back cancellations and a free hour. Instead of lingering in the office, filling out insurance forms and writing up bills, she went shopping.

  In Macy’s, the salesclerk asked, “For your grandchild?” as Claire picked up a new stuffed animal for Adam.

  “My son,” Claire said.

  When Adam was twenty-eight, Claire would be nearly seventy. She would wear her white hair in a bun, her pull-on pants too short, adult diapers bunched up underneath. Adam wouldn’t allow himself to be seen with her, and Claire wouldn’t blame him.

  “Can I ring that for you, ma’am?” the clerk asked. In her daze Claire thought she’d called her “Mom.” She glared at the girl, handed her the stuffed animal and her Macy’s card, and dropped back into her dream. Claire had worked hard to make herself this life, this marriage, these children, and now she suspected that she’d done all this as a cover-up, so no one would notice she was a fraud. She lived in fear of being discovered.

  In the children’s department, surrounded by infant clothing, Claire thought about her missing baby. The baby that was old enough to have a baby of its own by now. There was something undeniably different about having sons rather than daughters. Living in a house that was strictly male felt like a never-ending frat party. Only Claire seemed to care if they left their underwear in the living room or wore any in the first place. If she weren’t there, she was convinced, they’d pee in the sinks, out the windows, in dirty coffee cups, wherever it was convenient. There were times when all Claire did was play the maid, the referee, the police officer who kept them from having fun. If she left, if she ran away, they’d be pleased as long as they still had their take-out menus.

  The boys were Sam’s, his duplicates in every way. The day after Jake was born, she and Sam had a horrible fight. The nurse had come in and innocently asked “Are you circumcising?” and all hell broke loose. Somehow they’d never discussed it. Sam assumed they would; Claire assumed they wouldn’t. “What’s the point?” Claire said. “You’re not religious.”

  “It’s not about religion, it’s tradition. I’m a Jew!” Sam bellowed. “This is what Jews do. Besides, it’s healthier.”

  “It seems so unnecessary. He’s a little baby. Why do you want to start cutting him up?”

  “Because it’s what you do!” Sam screamed. “They don’t really feel it. It’s not something you remember when you’re older—‘Oy, the day they cut my dick!’”

  It went on and on, so loudly that at one point a nurse’s aide stuck her head in and asked them to keep it down.

  Sam ended it by saying, “This is my son. I want to be able to stand next to him in a locker room and not feel like we’re at a conference of Christians and Jews. I want him to be like me.”

  Claire couldn’t argue with that. She couldn’t say, “And I want him to be like my father, like the first boy I ever slept with.” And so it was done, without ceremony, before Jake went home from the hospital. The next time they were ready. When Adam was born, they did it the traditional way, a bris, with the baby’s godfather holding the baby, Sam and Claire standing off to the side, hoping not to faint when the mohel did his thing.

  Claire imagined having a daughter. She imagined taking the little girl to the hairdresser’s with her. She thought it was a shame that women didn’t have their hair done anymore. Every two months they just went and had it cut. She remembered when she was little, sitting on a stack of phone books under the dryer, imitating the ladies. She remembered her mother indulging her and letting the manicurist put clear polish on her nails.

  Claire had held her baby girl only once. The nurse lowered the baby into Claire’s arms as she sat in a wheelchair on her way out of the hospital. She’d never held a baby before. She wasn’t one of those girls who was a mother’s helper during summer vacations or baby-sat the neighbor’s kids. Claire was afraid of children; she watched them from a distance and worried about what she’d do when she had her own. The closest she’d gotten to her sister, Laura, was sitting on the other side of the room while her mother changed diapers.

  “Don’t look,” she remembered her mother saying.

  In 1966, in Washington, D.C., when a nurse deposited Claire’s daughter into her lap, Claire felt a rush as though she were going instantly insane. The blue-eyed thing that lay in her arms had come from her own body and yet was a stranger, a complete and total stranger. She gave it up before she ever knew who it was.

  The lawyer, posing as Claire’s father, followed the maternity nurse who wheeled Claire and the baby to the lobby. Claire accepted the hospital’s baby-girl gift bag, signed out, and then the nurse said goodbye and left Claire in the lawyer’s command. There was no reason for Claire to be sitting there in the wheelchair like a cripple except that it was hospital policy. She could have walked. She could have gotten up and run i
f only the baby hadn’t been sleeping in her lap. The lawyer, in a black cashmere overcoat, went up to a woman in a tweed car coat who was standing alone.

  “Is that the baby?” the woman asked, nodding in Claire’s direction.

  “Yes,” the lawyer said.

  As the two of them approached, Claire felt weak for the first time since the birth. The lawyer lifted the baby from her lap, and it was as if some vital organ had been ripped out. On the baby’s wrist was a name bracelet made out of tiny square pink and white beads — all blank. Claire wanted to take the bracelet off so she’d have something to keep, but she was afraid the child would cry and attract attention.

  The lawyer handed the baby to the woman. “If you ever see her again,” he said, pointing at Claire, “do not acknowledge her.”

  The woman nodded and looked down at the baby in her arms. “Pretty baby,” she said. “Your new mommy and daddy are going to be so glad to have you.”

  The lawyer rolled Claire out the door behind the woman and the baby. Claire stared at her back and tried to read her mind, wondering who she was under that big, thick coat. Outside, the lawyer slipped the gift bag over the woman’s shoulder and she walked off, trailing the twin vapors of her breath and the baby’s.

  Claire closed her eyes, not wanting to see the child leave. If Claire had been a stronger person, she would have stopped them. She would have screamed, “My baby, my baby, they’ve stolen my baby!” and the hospital security guard would have chased after the woman. The lawyer, seeing the commotion, thinking it best not to be involved, would have simply gotten into his car and driven off. Instead, he pulled his Buick up to the hospital entrance and drove Claire to a nearby park, where her father was waiting. An envelope was exchanged and the lawyer took off, tires spinning in the gravel.

  The whole way back to Baltimore, all her father said was “I had to take off work to do this.”

  As Claire climbed out of the car, her father added, “I hope things will be easier now,” and tried to pat her on the back, but she was already most of the way out, and his hand landed on her rear end. He blushed and brusquely told her to close the door quickly—“Cold air’s coming in.”