In A Country Of Mothers

by A M Homes

  “Are we waiting for something?” Claire asked.

  “Blood sucking,” Jody said.

  Marilyn Esterhaus’s office was a dark cube crammed with textbooks, back issues of Immunology Today, and styrofoam containers marked PERISHABLE, HANDLE WITH CARE, HUMAN TISSUE.

  “Did you always have a heart murmur?” she asked.

  “I don’t have a heart murmur,” Jody said.

  “Sometimes people with these viral illnesses develop them — it’s nothing to worry about.” She paused and jotted something down. “I want you to have an MRI. A brain scan. If nothing else, it’ll give us a baseline. And the pictures are quite remarkable.”

  “Polaroids are nice too,” Jody said. “And I can take them at home.”

  “Is it necessary?” Claire asked.

  “Is this in my imagination?” Jody asked.

  “No,” Esterhaus said. “It’s real.”

  “Is it going to get worse?”

  “It’s important to relax. Stress aggravates viruses, depresses the immune system.”

  “What can we do?” Claire asked.

  “Nothing, really. The blood will take a couple of weeks; have the scan, check back. There are a few experimental drugs being used with other immunosuppressive illnesses, but I’m hesitant to recommend them. They can be toxic. With this we have the advantage of time, so let’s use that.”

  “Can I get pregnant?” Jody asked, surprising even herself. “I mean, what would happen if I got pregnant?”

  “You probably wouldn’t be able to carry a baby to term,” Esterhaus said.

  It was something she had to ask. Not that she was planning on it, but she supposed it was one way of getting grounded in this world. If you have no lineage, make one.

  “Does it have a name?” Jody asked.

  “What?” Esterhaus said.

  “The virus,” Jody said.

  “Let’s wait for the test results,” the doctor said, standing to dismiss them.

  “Are you upset?” Claire asked in the cab on the way home.

  “There were no surprises.” Jody glanced out the window at the buildings whipping by, and the motion nauseated her.

  “We’ve never talked about you wanting to have a child. Is that something important?”

  Jody felt as if Claire were trying to crawl inside her, to invade her with questions.

  “You know,” Claire said, “they really don’t know much about these things.”

  Jody nodded as the cab drifted down Second Avenue.

  “I’m coming to the brain scan with you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Sweetie, you don’t have to tell me what to do,” Claire said, patting Jody’s knee. “I can figure it out for myself.”

  “She’s taking me for a scan,” Jody told her mother. “It’s a magnet that makes photographic slices of the brain. I don’t know why, but it makes me think of Green Eggs and Ham.”

  “I’m glad,” her mother said, ignoring Dr. Seuss. “If she wants to arrange things, let her. Believe me, she’s not doing it for free. We’ll get a nice big bill.”

  “Why don’t you ever do anything? You’re my mother.”

  “How can you say I never do things for you?” her mother asked. “Who drove all the way to Los Angeles?”

  “You did,” Jody said.

  “And we had a good time, didn’t we?”

  Jody didn’t answer. It was true, they’d had a good time. The last good time. She didn’t regret it, but it had nothing to do with what was going on now.

  “See,” her mother said. “I’m like your friend.”

  “I have friends,” Jody said. “Be my mother.”

  • • •

  The Magnetic Resonance Imaging factory was on the lower floors of a mansion on the Upper East Side. Although it was well lit and tastefully decorated, it could have been Frankenstein’s lab, buried in the tombs of a nice quiet street. She didn’t want to admit it, but Jody was glad Claire was with her — it seemed like a place where people checked in and didn’t necessarily check out.

  “How are you going to pay?” was the first thing the receptionist asked.

  “Bill me,” Jody said.

  The woman shook her head. “We accept payment in advance. You can charge it on your MasterCard or Visa.”

  “Visa,” Jody said.

  “That’ll be nine hundred and fifty dollars.”

  Jody was tempted to ask if there was a discount for cash. She signed the charge slip anyway, and the receptionist led her to a staircase. Claire’s heels clicked behind her as they walked down the marble steps.

  The basement was seamlessly shiny and white, its perfect, postmodern, postindustrial design not unlike the inside of a spaceship so new it’d never been flown.

  “How long does it take?” Jody asked.

  “You’ll have to ask the technician,” the woman said, guiding them into a cold anteroom.

  “Leave your purses, credit cards, removable dental plates, anything magnetic or metal.” The woman pointed to a large plastic basket.

  Claire handed over her purse, and they both emptied their pockets. Jody felt like she was being robbed. She dropped a roll of money into the basket.

  “The machinery is not affected by paper,” the woman said, handing it back.

  “Does this machine give off radiation?” Claire asked.

  “You’ll have to ask the technician. Think carefully — are you wearing any bobby pins or, again, removable dental plates?”

  “I didn’t know they still made bobby pins,” Jody said.

  “Sign this.” The woman handed Jody a consent form attached to a clipboard.

  Jody looked at the form and turned to Claire. “Basically, if they kill me, I have to agree not to sue.”

  “My husband’s a lawyer,” Claire said to the woman. “I’m not sure these are legally enforceable.”

  The woman didn’t blink. “Just sign,” she said.

  Jody signed.

  “The technician will be with you shortly. Whatever you do, don’t open this door.” The woman pointed to a door in front of them.

  “What happens, Igor escapes?”

  The woman took the clipboard from Jody and walked off without a word. They sat. Claire crossed and recrossed her legs.

  A technician came out of the door they weren’t supposed to open. “Goodman?” he said. It came out sounding like “goddamn.”

  She raised her hand. “Is there a bathroom?”

  “Does this give off radiation?” Claire asked.

  “How long does it take?” Jody asked. “Can she come with me?”

  “Do you have any bobby pins, removable dental work, or metal in your head?” the technician asked.

  “Metal in my head?”

  “Steel plates, pins, et cetera?”

  Claire looked at Jody. “I don’t think so,” Jody said.

  “Bathroom’s right there,” the technician said, pointing to something that only started to look like a door when Jody stared at it.

  She peed in two seconds, then spent five minutes in front of the mirror examining her head, wondering if maybe there was metal buried in it, metal she didn’t know about. Nails. Chunks of gold. Something that could be drawn through her skull, ripped out in an excruciating flash. Claire had never mentioned her husband before. A lawyer? Jody pictured someone who looked like Raymond Burr.

  The MRI machine was the size of a small nuclear reactor. There was a hole in the center, like the eye of a hurricane. The technician had Jody lie down on a narrow metal bed jutting out of the hole, then covered her with a blanket. “Don’t move,” he said, pushing a button that slid the bed deep into the machine. Jody felt like she’d been loaded into a cannon, reinserted into the womb, dipped into a coffin. The inner walls were less than two inches from her nose.

  “Even my apartment’s bigger than this,” Jody called.

  “It’s all right,” the technician said.

  “For you, maybe,” Jody said.
/>   “You’re going to have to be quiet.”

  “For how long?”

  “Forty-five minutes.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “You can stand here and talk to her,” he said to Claire.

  “Are you sure this doesn’t expose me to any harmful rays?” Claire asked.

  “Will you stop being so fucking self-centered?” Jody felt like yelling from inside the machine.

  “Positive,” the guy said. He took Claire’s hand and put it down on Jody’s leg. “Hold her leg and talk to her.”

  Claire squeezed her leg. “Do you want me to read to you?”

  “From what?”

  “Family Circle,” Claire said, grabbing the only magazine nearby.

  “We’re running,” the technician announced over a loudspeaker from inside the dark control booth. “Talk to you in forty-five minutes.”

  “‘Apple raisin cake. A delicious and healthy dessert, or after-school snack — great in lunchboxes too. Three cups flour, one box raisins….’”

  30

  Just after the first of the year, Claire started house hunting for real. She shuffled her schedule, created blocks of empty hours; and as if in a dream or a fugue, without a word to anyone, she walked out of her office, into the cool damp of the garage, and took off, driving deep into the suburban landscape. As the car slid up the parkway, crossing the Harlem River, it was as if she were slipping into a strange unrecorded sleep. Alone in the car, there was no reality and she became herself, truly Claire.

  She drove up and down streets with names like Maple Avenue, Post Office Road, Hickory Street, cruising the big houses, zeroing in on details such as carefully groomed privet hedges and painted fences. All of them were enough the same that nothing looked incongruous or out of place. There was comfort in familiarity and in the fact that these weren’t developments, preplanned nightmares, stamped out and snapped together. These places had grown, however spontaneously, in response to an idea of how things ought to be. A promise of sorts.

  What Claire wanted was serenity and sameness. A private fortress, a seemingly impenetrable veneer. A place where no one would know or care about anything, as long as things looked all right from the outside, a place that at the very least looked safe.

  She drove around and around projecting her fantasies onto the seemingly deserted houses and empty streets, all the while thinking about her family — Sam and the boys, Jody.

  Why didn’t they realize what it did to Claire when they put up a fight, how it undermined her efforts?

  She checked in with real estate agents, women who sat behind gunmetal desks well armed with books of names and addresses, maps and photos. She pulled into parking spaces in the center of those small suburban towns, tilted the rearview mirror down, put on fresh lipstick and sometimes a little blush, making sure she looked decent, able to make an appearance, a presentation; then she walked right in and sat down.

  In the houses of strangers, Claire could dream. Everything was exactly the way she wanted it. She could see herself as a different person in a different life. She tried them on, as though she could actually lift the very foundations up over her shoulders, pull the walls close around her neck, button them up, and spin circles in front of a mirror. She wrapped the houses around her bones, the layers of rooms like layers of clothing. Bathrooms were like underwear, functional, basic; bedrooms were jeans and T-shirts, leisure clothes. The living and dining rooms, like silk blouses and good skirts, had to look sharp, be well coordinated, and make a coherent statement. The kitchen was like shoes, essential.

  “Too big” or “too small,” “just not me,” Claire always concluded, and then moved on. Every few miles there was another town, every town had real estate agents, every agent had a book of photos and the keys to all the houses.

  Lately, Claire had the sense that her patients were generally in better shape than she was. One afternoon in January a large envelope arrived from Claire’s former and least favorite patient, Polly. Carefully packed between pieces of shirt cardboard were two eight-by-ten wedding photos. “Thought you might want the enclosed if only to round out your files. The wedding was beautiful, truly the happiest day of my life. My husband, Phil, is working temporarily for my father and will continue looking for something of his own. Meanwhile I wanted to apologize for my attitude towards you. I realize you were only trying to help and that on occasion I blamed my own frustration on you. I hope it will please you to know that things are working out well for me and that I thank you for your efforts.”

  Claire looked at the photographs: stock wedding portraits — glassy-eyed, the husband stood behind the wife, his arms extended around her, marking her as his possession as if claiming her for the camera would make it true. Then she tore the pictures in half so they’d fit neatly into the wastebasket under her desk.

  While waiting for her two-fifteen patient, Claire flipped through catalogs. She had wanted to give Jody some kind of a small present at Christmas or New Year’s, but hadn’t known how to handle it. Now she decided just to order and send, no questions asked, no card enclosed — little mysteries, pennies from heaven. From Lillian Vernon she ordered a backseat organizer for Adam’s car toys, and monogrammed mugs for herself, Sam, the boys, and Jody — filling out a separate form for Jody’s, shipping it directly to her. Claire’s patient never showed, and she spent the full hour shopping by mail; underwear from Victoria’s Secret, a skirt ensemble from Tweeds, a computerized car compass from The Sharper Image.

  When Claire opened her door at three, she was five hundred dollars poorer and the Owenses were already fighting in the waiting room.

  “I work goddamned hard,” Jim Owens was saying, “so you and your son can buy whatever the hell you want.”

  “Would you like to come in?” Claire asked.

  The Owenses were overwhelming. They didn’t need Claire; they needed a referee and a professional league to play in.

  “We were just talking about her son,” Jim said.

  “Your son. He acts just like you.”

  “You don’t have the first idea of what I was like as a kid. If I wanted something, I had to ask for it.”

  “‘Nobody gave me anything’,” Gloria whined, imitating her husband.

  “Bitch,” he said.

  “Perhaps we could give this discussion a little more focus,” Claire said.

  “Look,” Jim said, “all I want is for the kid to know the rules. I think you’ve said it yourself — kids need limits.”

  “Did something happen?” Claire asked.

  Gloria raised her hand. “I bought him a new pair of sneakers.”

  “A hundred and ten bucks.”

  “They were the ones he wanted, they fit him well, and all his friends have them. I don’t want my child to be an outcast. Kids are so sensitive.”

  “As I’ve already told my wife,” Jim said, “it’s not the money I’m so angry about, it’s that two days later he needed cab fare to get to school because one of the other kids got mugged on the bus, and what’d they take? His sneakers.”

  Gloria shook her head. “Why does everything have to become an issue?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, these damn sneakers are costing me fifteen bucks a day. It’s ridiculous. Get the kid some real shoes.”

  “Why don’t you?” Gloria asked.

  “Because I’m too fucking busy working all day to earn the goddamn money.”

  After forty minutes of relentless bickering, Claire cut them off. “We need to work on the two of you making decisions together, rather than one making a choice and then blaming the other for not being involved.”

  The Owenses nodded, drew in their breath, and started their sparring match again.

  Claire glanced at her watch. “Perhaps next week we can talk about techniques for negotiation instead of just fighting.”

  “Thanks,” Gloria said, standing up.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Jim said grudgingly, hitching up his pants as he turned to
leave. “You know,” he said to his wife, “next week we could just stay home and argue, save the money, and then go out for a nice dinner.”

  Claire sat at her desk making session notes and writing out bills. Ten sessions, twelve hundred and fifty dollars; but for you eight-fifty. She asked herself what made the sliding scale slide — a good story, a pretty face? Then she dug Polly’s wedding pictures out of the trash, pulled out one of her embossed note cards, and in her most ornate hand wrote: “Congratulations. Beautiful photos. I’m so pleased things are working out. Be well. Yours, Claire Roth.” She dropped the photos back in the trash, then sealed and stamped the little envelope. Guilt management.

  At ten after five, Jody came in, late, walking slowly, like an old woman whose muscles had drawn up on her.

  “I don’t think I’ve told you,” she said, “but I’m not going back to UCLA. It’s over. Finis. Down the drain.” Jody paused, looked at her shoes, and waited. “One of my friends is shipping my stuff back. In exchange for all my furniture, the landlord is canceling my lease. And for five hundred dollars a service is driving my mother’s old car back to Bethesda.” She stopped again. “I’m trying to think if there’s anything else involved in canceling a life. I keep thinking I’m forgetting something. Maybe it’s me. Maybe that’s the problem — I’m still here.”

  Claire wanted to go to Jody, to hold her and tell her it would be all right, that it was a bad time, a bad day. She wanted to plait Jody’s hair into small braids. She crossed her arms in front of her chest and forced herself to stay in her chair. “It seems like you did a really good job of arranging things,” she said.

  “I was supposed to be a director, remember? That’s what directors do — they direct.”

  “I should have you organize my life.”

  “Retired,” Jody said, and sat there mute.

  Jody was frustrating. Sometimes she was sarcastic and unreachable, different from what Claire wanted her to be.

  “I want you to meet my husband, Sam, and the kids.”

  Jody looked at Claire as if to ask why.

  “I want to help you, to take care of you. I’m offering you things I’ve never offered anyone,” Claire said, her voice cracking. “I care about you more than anyone, except my other children.”