In A Country Of Mothers

by A M Homes

  “We really have to stop,” Claire said. “Is nine-thirty all right?”

  “In the morning?”

  Claire laughed. “Too early?”

  “It’s all right,” Jody said. Didn’t Claire know that America worked from nine to five, that structure was good for people? Nine-thirty in the goddamn morning was way too soon. Nothing was going to happen between now and then. Jody would eat dinner, watch TV, sleep, then be back here with Claire. Why was Jody throwing herself at Claire? Moreover, why was Claire letting her do it? Shouldn’t Claire set some limits, say something like, I know you’d really like to see me again soon, but it’s not healthy, not productive. You must learn to solve your own problems, be independent, otherwise how are you going to get to California and make a name for yourself?

  The rain had stopped, and a veil of late-afternoon sun was poking through dark clouds. Somewhere — maybe in Vermont, where Claire probably had a weekend house — there was a beautiful rainbow. The air was warm from the rain. Jody crossed Houston and walked up to Washington Square, which was empty, the junkies temporarily chased out by the weather. A couple of street people pushing grocery carts were circling each other, staking out the best bench. She walked east toward Broadway, not at all sure where she was going. It was twenty past five. She’d been in the shrink’s office for the whole fucking afternoon.

  The phone rang at ten-thirty and Jody knew a stranger was calling. She’d already said goodnight to her mother, Michael was out of town and wouldn’t have bothered to take her number, Ellen was on a date, and Harry was at an opening at the Museum of Modern Art.

  “Hello,” Jody said, prepared to hang up without saying another word. She held the phone in one hand and, with the other, pulled back the window shade enough so she could peek outside, as though the caller would be standing at the pay phone on the corner.

  “I don’t think you know me,” a man’s voice said.

  Jody was tempted to slam the phone down, but there was something kind of nervous and pathetic about the voice. Jody let go of the shade.

  “This is Peter Sears. Ann gave me your number.”

  Ann who? Jody wondered.

  “She told me you were living in the city and suggested I call you.”

  Peter Sears had gone to Wesleyan along with Jody and about fifty people named Ann. His father was a famous record producer, and she’d considered trying to be friends with him, but she realized this impulse was based more on his father’s success than on any qualities Peter himself might have had, so she ignored him. Plus, he was good-looking, really good-looking, so good-looking, in fact, that Jody couldn’t figure why he was calling her in the first place.

  “So, how is Ana?” she asked, still not sure who they were talking about.

  “Fine,” Peter said. “She said that since graduation you’ve been doing some film work.”

  “A little. I’m helping Harry Birenbaum on a project,” Jody said, figuring that Peter would recognize Harry’s name. Harry and Mr. Sears probably played whatever it was that men played together. “But in the fall I’ll be going to UCLA.”

  “Wow, great.”

  Yeah, wow, great, Jody thought. Every time she said “UCLA” a wave of anxiety washed over her. At least it sounded good to other people.

  “What have you been doing?” Jody asked.

  “Some writing,” Peter said.

  He probably didn’t have to work. Jody imagined Peter living a life of extreme luxury in the brownstone his father owned but never lived in for more than three days in a row. Peter probably woke up at ten a.m., watched cartoons until eleven, drank fresh-squeezed juice in bed, and finally got up around noon, giving the maid a chance to straighten up before doing the shopping.

  “I have tickets to a screening of Tin Beard tomorrow night and was wondering if you might want to go.”

  “I saw it already, last week‚” Jody said. “It’s not great.”

  “There’s a party at the Ark afterwards — would you want to go to that?”

  “All right,” Jody said, as if she’d been talked into something.

  “Pick you up at ten-thirty.”

  Jody hung up, curious how come Peter Sears had to dig up strangers from college in order to get a date. She tried to remember which Anns he’d been friends with. There were four of them — interchangeable as far as Jody was concerned — Ann Weinstein, Ann Salzman and Anns Bankowsky and Willers.

  The phone rang again. It was either Peter Sears calling to say he’d come to his senses and there was no way he was going anywhere with Jody, or the guy at the phone booth on the corner had finally found her number. She peeled back the shade and looked outside again. The phone booth was empty.

  “Hello,” Jody snapped, turning on the answering machine even though it was after the fact.

  “Is everything all right?”

  Jody was silent, terrified.

  “Jody, are you there? It’s Claire Roth.”

  “Yeah, I’m here,” Jody said.

  “Sorry to call you at home. I was looking at my book and realized I made a mistake. I have to change our appointment time for tomorrow. Would four-forty-five be all right?”

  “Yeah, sure, fine.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Positive,” Jody said, banging her knee against the filing cabinet nervously, again and again. Tomorrow it would be black and blue and she’d look at it and wonder if it meant something, leukemia or hemophilia.

  “Good. Then I’ll see you tomorrow,” Claire said. “’Night.”

  Her voice was as soft as they pretended Kleenex was on television. It floated down over Jody and she breathed it in like a kiss.

  10

  Claire sat in her office, hoping Polly would cancel. When the buzzer went off, she let Polly into the waiting room and, feeling obligated to offer Polly a chance to talk herself out of it, opened the office door and asked, “Do you want to come in?”

  “Could we just go?”

  Claire locked the door and they stood silently in the hall, waiting for the elevator. Without the structure of the office, the two chairs, the fifty minutes, Polly didn’t know what to do. Claire wasn’t supposed to step out of context, much less out of the office. She was supposed to live within the walls, waiting for her patients, sitting near the phone twenty-four hours a day in case of emergency.

  “Is it still raining?” Claire asked, casually, but making it clear that while this wasn’t a session, it wasn’t a social event, either.

  “I don’t know,” Polly said.

  Outside, Claire flagged a cab, and Polly gave the driver the address. Sitting in the backseat with Polly, Claire started thinking about what people she met at parties did when they found out she was a shrink. Men told every therapy joke they’d ever heard and eventually ran off to the bar for a refill and never returned. Women pretended to understand. They looked at Claire, smiled, and eventually they’d whisper something about their children and a problem. Claire inevitably said, “It’s perfectly normal. It’ll pass,” and the women would seem relieved.

  The reactions were always based on the person’s feelings about therapy. The worst were those who had been “in” for a long time. Analysands refused to speak to her — as if Claire were responsible for all the shrinks throughout history. If Freud was wrong, it was her fault. Therefore it was mostly true that shrinks hung out with other shrinks or, more likely, didn’t hang out at all.

  Polly was mute, acting as if she’d regressed to a preverbal stage and was expecting Claire to take care of her. When Polly smiled at her, Claire felt she was waiting for her to do something, say something, that would indicate her willingness to be the mother.

  “Do you feel all right?” Claire asked.

  “Yeah. I took two Valiums this morning.”

  “Were you supposed to do that?” Claire asked, surprised.

  Polly didn’t answer.

  “Make sure you tell them when we get there.”

  Claire could picture Polly
not saying anything, and during the procedure the doctor would give her another drug that would cause a horrible reaction. They’d call an ambulance and take the comatose, brain-dead, half-aborted girl to the hospital. It would all be Claire’s fault.

  “I don’t really need you to do this,” the girl said after a while. “I can take care myself.”

  Claire simply nodded. They got out at the corner. Polly paid the driver and, without waiting, started off down the street towards the clinic.

  “Let’s stop for a second,” Claire said, and Polly stopped. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “Well, I want you to know that if at any point you change your mind, it’s okay. I won’t feel as though you’ve wasted this time. It wouldn’t bother me at all.”

  “Great,” Polly said, and started walking toward the clinic again.

  Inside, all of a sudden Polly got shy. She sat in the chair closest to the door and looked up at Claire, pleadingly, indicating her wish for Claire to handle everything.

  “I think you’re supposed to check in at the desk,” Claire said calmly, and then tried not to watch as Polly fumbled with the forms, the questions, pretending not to be nervous. When she watched her, she started hating her. It wasn’t productive. She focused on the nature posters taped on the walls. Someone had tried to make the clinic look like a pleasant place. Claire could picture the decorations being ripped down during an anti-abortion protest. She could see the receptionist ordering not one duck-pond poster but two or three, maybe half-dozen at a time. It was all very clean and neat. It could have been a podiatrist’s office. Claire found it hard to believe anything happened there. The room offered no clues, no sounds, no signs, nothing.

  She glanced at Polly. Claire hadn’t heard her say anything about the two Valium.

  “Did you tell them about the Valium?” Claire called across the office.

  Polly turned around and flashed her an annoyed look.

  “How many milligrams?” the nurse asked.

  “Two blue ones,” Polly said.

  “Ten milligrams?”

  “Yeah.”

  If Claire had taken two blue Valiums that morning, she’d be on the floor by now. The difference between what a body could take at twenty and at forty-three was amazing.

  “Have a seat and well call you.”

  “Why did you tell them?” Polly asked.

  “Because you didn’t,” Claire said.

  Five minutes later, when the nurse stepped out from behind her desk, Claire wondered if she should talk to her, explain who she was. She felt like an undercover agent. “Polly?” the nurse said. “You can come in now.”

  Polly stood up.

  “Your friend can come with you, if you like.”

  “She’s not my friend,” Polly said, “she’s my shrink.”

  And she’s a blabbermouth, Claire expected her to add.

  “She can come with you, if you like,” the nurse repeated as if she hadn’t heard. Claire was the girl’s shrink. Didn’t that mean anything? Was it every day that a shrink brought someone in?

  Polly turned around and looked at Claire, “It’s okay. Just wish me luck.”

  “I do,” Claire said.

  For a second, she’d seen herself in the operating room — if that’s what they called it — holding Polly’s hand and seeing more of her, literally and figuratively, than she ever wanted to. She saw herself forced to watch the whole thing, the unborn sucked in bits and pieces into a glass jar.

  The nurse took Polly away, and Claire was glad to be alone. Her thoughts had agitated her to the point where if she hadn’t been with a patient, she would’ve tried to get a little Valium of her own somewhere. She took a couple of deep breaths and closed her eyes. She’d been there before. She could feel it in her shoulders, in the back of her neck. Déjà vu, sort of. It was much different then. In 1966 there were no pregnancy tests on sale at the drugstore. There were no abortion clinics listed in the yellow pages.

  • • •

  Eighteen and a half years old, finishing her first year at George Washington University, she was involved with Mark Ein, an English professor just out of Yale with a novel already published. Intense, with curly brown hair, sexy pursed lips, and blue eyes. He was like no one Claire had ever known. He said he avoided eye contact because he was afraid of burning holes into people, and described himself as a nonteacher. “We’re in this together,” he told the class. “This is an exploration, the beginning of what should become an unending process.”

  As part of the exploration, he took Claire out. He took her for meals she’d never eaten, to movies she’d never heard of, to hot spots where they danced to strange new music. And then she was pregnant. In 1966 that’s how an eighteen-year-old knew; she figured it out. It didn’t take a genius. No red tag sale, the curse that didn’t come.

  “I’m pregnant,” Claire finally told him as they walked into an ice cream store.

  Standing in line, Mark leaned over and whispered in her ear. “I should tell you something. I’m married. My wife’s in graduate school at Berkeley.” He ordered a mint chocolate chip cone for himself and turned to Claire, who was about to throw up. “Want anything?”

  She shook her head and bit down hard, grinding her teeth together.

  “You don’t have to have it,” he said. “I can find a place.”

  Claire wasn’t sure what he was talking about. What kind of a place? A place where she and the baby could hide? Where he’d keep her as his extra wife?

  On the warmest day of spring, Mark picked Claire up in his green MG and drove her into a part of Washington she’d never seen before: street after street of row houses, not brick townhouses like they had in Georgetown, elegant and expensive, but rundown wood and brick. Some had little front porches; some had faded striped awnings and half-rusted aluminum porch furniture. There were a few children, a few older men shuffling around, the occasional dog loping toward home. Claire felt exposed, in danger. She wondered if Mark was taking her to the nanny who’d raised him and was going to leave her there. She would live in the nanny’s house, and sometimes Mark would sneak away and come visit her. By the time the nanny got old and died, the neighbors would be so used to Claire that she’d just go on living there for the rest of her life.

  “Come in,” a tall black woman said, holding open the screen door. They stepped up onto her porch. “I’m Luanne,” she said, leading them through the house, into the kitchen in the back. “Lie down.” She pointed to the kitchen table covered with a neatly pressed white sheet. Claire lay back on the table — the same table, she supposed, they ate their dinner on every night. She didn’t know what she was doing there. Mark hadn’t said a word. Would he make her do something she might not want to do? Would this woman operate on her, just like that, without warning?

  “Relax,” Luanne said, smiling. Her smile was filled with dark tooth gaps and bright pink gums. Claire looked at her uneven grin and decided they’d come for some sort of special treatment that would make the baby dissolve and disappear. Luanne closed her kitchen door and came to Claire. She lifted Claire’s shirt and put her hands on Claire’s belly.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “Two months, maybe a little more,” Claire said.

  With dry, bony fingers Luanne kneaded Claire’s stomach.

  Mark stood in the corner gnawing his cuticles. Claire could see him out of the corner of her eye. He no longer seemed so wonderful, larger than life. He looked small, nervous, unpleasant.

  “I can do it,” the woman said. “You come back and I’ll do it. You stay overnight. Think about it. I make no guarantee. There could always be a problem, and there’d be nothing I could do except try and get you to the hospital. I don’t have a car, and it’s hard to get a taxi. I’m telling you that.”

  Claire nodded. She finally understood what they’d been talking about all along, although she had no idea of how it would be done. Would the woman cut her belly open
? Punch a hole with a knitting needle and stir things around?

  “I’ll think about it,” Claire said, trying to be polite. There was no way she was coming back. The whole time she’d been lying on the table, all she could think about was the family eating dinner. She could see this woman taking her child, making stew out of it, and serving it up to a table full of people. Fresh, deep red, and tender.

  “We’ll be back,” Mark said easily to the woman.

  The woman nodded and smiled at him. Claire wondered if he’d been there before. She didn’t ask. She didn’t really want to know. For the next month she avoided Mark. The semester ended. For the first time in her life, Claire had straight A’s.

  “Guess you’re having it,” Mark said to her. They were in his office after the last class.

  Until he said it, Claire had never really believed that if she did nothing, in six months she would be forced — if only by gravity and the infant’s self-determination — to have a baby. She wondered how much it would hurt. Just having sex, having a man inside her, was enough. She couldn’t imagine a baby coming out without killing her. She pictured herself trying to hold it in, for months, years, the rest of her life.

  “Maybe you’ll have a miscarriage or something,” Mark said hopefully.

  Claire shrugged and pretended not to be offended. She could already feel it rooted inside her, not about to give up.

  “Sorry,” he said simply, as if he’d accidentally stepped on her toe. “I’ll walk you to the bus.” They walked out into the clear May afternoon. Claire saw the bus coming down Pennsylvania Avenue and, without a word, took off running toward it and never saw Mark Ein again.