In A Country Of Mothers

by A M Homes

  Claire went back to Baltimore with nothing except the memory of a three-day-old monkey face, pink cheeks, thick brown hair that stood in a point, and blue eyes she was sure already saw through her and hated her. She went back to the apartment and found that nothing had changed except the milk in the refrigerator had turned.

  “It’s better this way,” her mother said on the phone while her father was at work. “Believe me.”

  • • •

  In Macy’s, Claire bought Jake and Adam clothes and toys and tapes and books. She charged over four hundred dollars’ worth and then had a hard time stuffing everything into a cab.

  The phone was ringing when she stepped into her office. She grabbed it just before the machine picked up.

  “Hi, it’s Barbara Schwartz. Were you in session?”

  “No, just coming in the door,” Claire said. “Hang on.” She pulled all of her packages in, closed the door, and brought the phone over to the sofa.

  “So, how are you?” Claire asked.

  “Good,” Barbara said. “Tired, but good. I only have a minute between patients, but I wanted to call you back.”

  “I’m seeing Jody Goodman. She’s been accepted into graduate school and can’t decide whether or not to go.”

  “UCLA?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great,” Barbara said. “That’s what she’s always wanted. Jody’s special — a great imagination, smart. A thinker. Sometimes she feels obligated to kid around, to compensate for the dark stuff. But basically she’s all there. The main thing was getting her away from her family. They’re pretty dependent, and she’s always been too involved. She needs a lot of support, reassurance.”

  “Any secrets?” Claire asked. There was noise in the background. Barbara didn’t seem to hear the question. Claire looked around her office; compared with Rosenblatt’s, it was quiet, humble, a relief.

  “Oh God, here’s my patient. Anything else?” Barbara said.

  “Is she a game player?”

  “Game player?”

  “You know,” Claire said. “Tall tales. Manipulative?”

  “Not at all,” Barbara said, surprised. “Why?”

  “Just curious. How’re the kids?”

  “Great. Yours?”

  “Fine. Everything’s fine.”

  “Stay in touch. I’m glad you’re seeing her.”

  Claire hung up, thinking she liked Barbara even more than she remembered, if only because Barbara was too busy to talk about Jody or, more importantly, anything else.

  7

  “Your plane didn’t crash,” Claire said. She stood in the door to her office, smiling.

  “Beginner’s luck,” Jody said.

  “So, how’d it go?”

  “I got into a fight with my mother on the way to the airport.” Jody turned in her chair and prepared to pantomime. “Me: ‘I don’t want to go to Los Angeles. I never said I wanted to go. I don’t even want to go to film school. I lied. I want to be a receptionist in a dentist’s office.’ My mother: ‘The dentist? You hate the dentist. Why would you want to work there?’” Jody said it slowly and deadpan. “Had a nervous breakdown on the runway. The engines started and it was like my guilt weighed enough to bring the plane down. My mother doesn’t want me to go away. It’s true. She secretly wants me to live with her forever. As we’re going down the runway, I start apologizing all over the place. The plane lifts up off the ground — we’re at the angle where you feel like an astronaut — and my mother squeezes my hand and says, ‘It would be good if you could learn to be nicer to me. After all, I won’t last forever.’ Up in the air, I’m chanting to myself: ‘I will never be mean to my mother again. I will never be mean …’ They served dinner. My mother kept trying to lower my tray table and I kept putting it back up. I didn’t want anything. She says, ‘You paid for it, at least let them give it to you.’ And I’m like, ‘Who’s gonna eat it — the guy snoring across the aisle?’ My mother ate her dinner and then all of mine.”

  Claire laughed.

  “It’s true,” Jody said.

  “Did anything good happen?”

  “I guess you could call the plane not crashing good, depending on how you look at it.”

  “What happened once you were there?”

  “We looked around, flew home, and I took the train back to New York.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Jody looked at Claire. How could she not believe her. “Okay, we didn’t look around and then we flew home.” She paused. “I made my mother go to Forest Lawn and spend two hours looking around for graves of famous people. All she said was, ‘Well, it’s nice to be outside on such a beautiful day.’”

  “I think you had a good time and don’t want to admit it,” Claire said.

  “Don’t start thinking you’re brilliant or anything,” Jody said. “It’s pretty basic.”

  “Some people’s mothers wouldn’t have gone at all.”

  “It’s not a comparison study,” Jody said. “It’s just my life, okay?”

  “Sorry,” Claire said. “You’re right. So what about UCLA — are you going?”

  “Harry says I’m a fool if I go to graduate school. ‘Film students are retards.’” She did a perfect imitation.

  “Who’s Harry?”

  “Harry Birenbaum, the film director. He made Trial of Love and a bunch of other stuff.”

  “Really?” Claire said, excited. “That’s my favorite movie.”

  “It’s everyone’s favorite movie.”

  “That’s who you work for?”

  “No. Technically I work for a film producer, who sent me to spy on Harry. Last week, before I left, Harry gave me a long lecture and then took me to some benefit dinner dance at the Plaza where everyone kept saying they didn’t know he had a daughter so grown-up.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “He wanted to have a sleepover. I should probably introduce him to my friend Ellen. All they both talk about is fucking. Who they fuck, why they fuck, how much more they want to fuck. Every week or so Harry picks a female project and works on them until they either give in or quit.”

  “Are you one of his projects?”

  “I’m not talking about myself. Every word out of my mouth is not about me,” Jody said, and immediately wished she hadn’t. She had the urge to apologize, to start the session over, walk in the door and go on about how sunny and warm California was. She was quiet.

  “Is there something you’d like to talk about?”

  “The weather,” Jody said.

  Claire smiled. They sat silently. The longer they were quiet, the more nervous Jody got. She played with the ends of her shoelaces, with a quarter from her pocket, with a piece of hangnail on her thumb. She crossed and recrossed her legs, trying not to look at Claire. She looked at Claire’s shoes, brown suede slip-ons. Nice. Probably from Saks. She looked at the air conditioner. She wiggled around, trying to look like she wasn’t wiggling. She fought the overwhelming desire to fall asleep. There was no air in the room. There was air in the room but it was treated with special tranquilizer dust. Claire had pushed a secret button on her chair and released an invisible cloud of the stuff and Jody was falling asleep. Her head was weaving around. Her neck felt too thin and weak to support her skull. Not only was it exhausting not to talk, but it made the hour seem incredibly long.

  “Are you all right?” Claire asked.

  “Fine,” Jody said.

  “Well, we’re out of time for today,” Claire said.

  Jody had a hard time getting out of the chair. Her body was like lead.

  “Would you like to come in on Wednesday, same time?” Claire asked.

  I have to work, Jody thought. I have a job. I like having a job even if I don’t fully understand what I’m supposed to be doing. But Claire was nice to her. She’d gone all the way to Los Angeles for Claire. She couldn’t say no.

  “So Wednesday’s all right?” Claire asked. Jody nodded. “We’ll talk more about things then.” />
  Jody walked out. She might not want to talk about things Wednesday. She might not want to talk about them later in the week, later in the year, or ever.

  She called Ellen from the phone in Harry’s trailer while Harry went out to lunch with a reporter from Premiere.

  “Third National,” Ellen said.

  “I screwed up at shrink,” Jody said, glancing out the window at the Hell’s Kitchen location — special security guards had been hired for the afternoon to keep panhandlers away.

  “And how may I help you this afternoon, Ms. Goodman?”

  “I didn’t talk. I must be having a nervous breakdown.”

  “No, we don’t give oral sex for opening new accounts anymore. It’s toasters. One moment, please, I have to put you on hold.” There was a long pause, and Jody started opening the cabinets in the trailer; one was filled with boxes of Jiffy Pop microwave popcorn, the other with packs of unused Polaroid film. Jody slipped some film into her knapsack.

  “Sweetie,” Ellen said, “you don’t just walk into a shrink’s office a few times and all of a sudden have a nervous breakdown. All day long people go to shrinks and don’t say anything, it’s no big deal.”

  “I kept looking at her shoes, her feet and stuff, and the more I didn’t talk, the worse it got. Then she made an appointment for Wednesday. She used to want me to come in every day. I don’t think she likes me anymore.”

  “You’ve only been going for two weeks? Why do you care what she thinks? Maybe she’s busy tomorrow. Maybe there’s a sale at Bergdorf’s or something. Don’t take it personally.”

  “I am taking it personally.”

  “Majorly. She sounds like a lousy shrink. How come she didn’t do anything to make you start talking? You haven’t known her long enough to be completely silent together. Look, I met this guy — maybe you want to come out with us tonight.”

  “Penis four thousand fifty-four.”

  “I like sex, okay?” Ellen said loudly. Jody could picture all the other people behind their desks at the bank whirling around and staring. “I like it a lot. Everyone always tries to make me feel bad about it, like I’m some kind of pervert. I like to fuck‚ to get fucked — what’s wrong with that? If we weren’t supposed to, we’d be built differently!”

  “You’re yelling,” Jody said.

  “No, I’m not!” Ellen yelled. “I’m just talking to you and you don’t like it.”

  “I worry about you,” Jody said. “It’s selfish, but if something happened to you I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to. Sex is dangerous. It’s not like when we were growing up.”

  “I have to go,” Ellen said. “Someone’s waving at me. Talk to you later.”

  Later that afternoon, the assistant director barked “It’s over” down the street, and Carol Heberton was led from her trailer to a waiting car. Two guys in suits climbed into another trailer behind Harry, and someone dumped the rest of the coffee from the huge insulated vat into the gutter. The PAs were checking their walkie-talkies in for a recharge, and one of them turned to Jody. “We’re going for beers, wanna come?”

  It was the first time they’d invited her anywhere. Every night she’d seen packs of production assistants walking off the set together, relaxed, laughing, never looking back.

  “So, are you related to someone?” one of them asked as they walked down Eighth Avenue.

  “No,” Jody said, “Not related.”

  “Well, so, what’s your job exactly? Me,” he said, “every morning I buy flowers for Heberton’s trailer, I buy her a fried-egg sandwich at a quality diner. I spend my days fetching whatever needs to be fetched. Before I check out, I turn in receipts and get paid back. But what do you do and who do you do it for?”

  “I work for Michael Miller. I help raise money, but for now I’m on loan to Harry.”

  As they walked, weaving their way through the west side of Midtown, breathing in the thick fumes of tunnel traffic, they passed places Jody had always wanted to go, places she’d been and meant to come back to: the Film Center Cafe, the Cupcake Cafe, Restaurant Bellevues. She assumed they had something better in mind. She figured they knew where they were going. When they turned into the doorway of a place marked BAR/PIZZA in neon, Jody’s stomach sank. She wished she’d eaten that last bagel on the food table. Production assistants seemed to revel in their lack of taste, their psychotic roommates and below-poverty-level standard of living. Jody made it a point to sit as far way from the florist/fetcher as possible. They ordered pitchers of beer and a pitcher of Coke for the alcoholics, of which there seemed to be quite a few.

  “When this one wraps, I’m getting a regular, boring job,” one of the women said.

  “If you want to stay in film,” Jody said, “you should write Michael a letter. My job will be open soon.”

  “And where will you be going?” the florist/fetcher asked. “Off to direct your first feature, or to spend the summer in Paris?”

  Jody didn’t answer right away. There was no way she could tell them about film school, about Claire, about Ellen, Harry, or anything. “I’m going back to Montana,” she finally said. “My father has a ranch there and they always need an extra hand.”

  They ordered five pizzas for seven people, bad pizza with cardboard crust, sauce like watered-down blood, and cheese like shoe rubber. In the end Jody was walking down Seventh Avenue with a huge pizza box in her hands.

  “Really, you take it,” one of the PAs had said. “After all, you put in the most money.”

  Out of guilt, Jody thought.

  She passed a homeless man camped out in a small park. “Would you like a pizza?” Jody asked, holding out the box.

  “Is it poison?”

  “No, I ate some. It’s just not very good, too chewy.” Jody lifted the top so the man could see.

  “Has it got tomato sauce on it? That looks like tomato.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a pizza.”

  “I can’t take the tomato,” the man said. “Doesn’t agree with my stomach. I like that other kind, though. What do they call it — white pizza. You got any of that?”

  Jody shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “Well, I guess you could go on and leave it on the bench. I’m expecting company later, maybe they’ll want some.”

  Jody put down the pizza and walked away.

  “Next time,” he called after her, “get the other kind. It’s healthier.”

  8

  Sam sat on the edge of the bed in the glow of the television, an old set of heavily padded earphones circling his head. Ever since the playoffs, when night after night they’d found Jake asleep with his head pressed against the wall, the house rule was that Sam couldn’t watch sports at night without the headset. He was also forbidden to carry on discussions with the commentators, although occasionally his feet pounded the floor and Jake would yell “What happened, what happened?” from the kids’ bedroom.

  Claire climbed over the bed and sat at the small desk jammed into the corner against the windows. When Adam was born, they’d converted the master bedroom into the boys’ room and taken the little one for themselves. It was ridiculous — a queen-sized bed, a double dresser, a desk, a chair, and two adults crammed into an eleven-by-fourteen box. She looked out the window into the apartment across the street. It was bigger than theirs, nine windows across; there were flowers in some of the windows, and the walls were painted interesting colors, probably by a decorator.

  “Remember Karen Armstrong?” Claire said to Sam. He didn’t answer. “They just bought an apartment in the San Remo — they were asking eight-five, but Karen got it for seven-eighty. Her sister Susan’s curating an exhibit at the Whitney that’s traveling to four cities.” Sam didn’t respond. Claire stood in front of the TV, raised her shirt, and flashed her breasts at him. His feet stamped the floor in a brief tantrum, and Claire left the room.

  She called her friend Naomi.

  “Can’t talk now,” Naomi said. “I’m trying to get the kids to bed.”

  “It
’s ten o’clock,” Claire said. “Maybe you should get one of those tranquilizer dart guns.”

  “Yeah, and send them to the zoo. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  Claire hung up. Her life was fine, according to some people perfect. There was a reassuring rhythm and routine to it. But now she wanted something else — something to hook her in, to take her to the next level, to keep her interested.

  She made a microwave pizza, put it on a tray along with a bottle of seltzer and two glasses, and carried it into the bedroom. Sam took his half of the pizza, rolled it into a tube, and ate it in less than seven bites, letting crumbs fall all over the floor. Great, Claire thought; all we need is a mouse again — maybe a sewer rat this time.

  She lay back on the bed and hooked the elastic band of Sam’s underwear with her toes. She pulled it away from his body and then let it snap back against his skin, again and again, until Sam reached back and grabbed her foot. After five minutes, when nothing else happened, Claire folded her foot underneath her and picked up a book.

  Their apartment was definitely too small. At night it shrank, as though someone upstairs held marionette strings attached to the walls and gave a firm yank at eight p.m., drawing the walls closer together. Until now, Claire had thought living in close quarters was good for a family. It taught them how to get along, how to find private space when there was none, and how not to need so much. It was impossible for Jake or any of them to have a secret life, no way to sneak anything in or out. And yet there was a major drawback in knowing everything your kid did. For example, when Jake did nothing, when he lay in his room staring at the ceiling, waiting for his life to begin, it annoyed her no end. And as much as setting them free scared her, she really didn’t want to know so much about them anymore. They were beyond the stage where it was cute. She looked at Sam watching TV and wished the game would end so they could have a serious discussion.

  Claire crawled under the covers and thought of how her parents would see things. Her father: Big deal he’s a lawyer, they’re all lawyers. That’s how they get all the money. You should see how they live — not that I’ve ever been there, my other daughter told me. Children running around the house in their underwear. Slobs. Hippies, that’s what they are. Never grew up. They live in that Greenwich Village, like animals. Bohemians. It’s disgusting.