by A M Homes
A slip: why did she say other? What was she doing? She was losing it. This was pathetic. It would have made perfect sense if Jody got up, spit on her, and walked out for good. Claire might even have admired her for it.
Jody only shrugged. And soon it was six o’clock.
“We’re out of time for now, but maybe we should take an excursion to Bloomingdale’s, a kind of cure. I’ll call you tonight.”
After Jody had left, Claire noticed a sweater on the floor next to the chair. She picked it up, rubbed it against her face, and quickly pulled it over her head.
Outside, fat flakes of snow were falling. Claire called her local real estate agent, asked what time she was showing the apartment, and hurried home to meet them there. If she wanted it done, she’d have to do it herself. Exhausted, still wearing Jody’s sweater, she stood in the front hall looking dispassionately at the apartment, curious what the pair of young architects on their way over would think: disappointing, small, unstylish? The architects would hate it, noting how odd it was for an apartment in such a good location to be so utterly lacking in potential. Jody would probably hate the apartment as well.
The doorbell rang and Claire ushered in the real estate agent and the two young men. “Hello, welcome. I’m Claire Roth.”
The architects introduced themselves — Tom and Bill — and shook Claire’s hand. They were both dressed in classic, expensive wool suits.
Claire’s skirt was all wrong, and with Jody’s sweater pulled over her blouse, she knew she looked bad. There was no way they would want the apartment.
As the realtor led them from room to room, Claire brought up the rear, answering unasked questions about the apartment, the building, the co-op board, pointing out details she thought would be of interest — molding, the window frames, the new bathroom fixtures. While they were in the master bedroom, Frecia and the boys came in.
“Look what I made!” Adam shouted, coming toward Claire, trailing slush, a snowball in his mittened palm.
Even before noticing his joy, Claire noticed a spot of red in the snowball — blood, she figured, or the top of a crack vial. She snatched the snowball from Adam’s hand and dug at the red spot with her fingernail.
“Mitten fuzz,” he said. “Don’t hurt it.”
After careful examination, Claire pushed it back into the snowball. “Sorry, honey,” she said. “Why don’t we put the snowball in the freezer so it won’t melt? Would that be a good idea?”
Claire led Adam and his snowball into the kitchen. The realtor and the architects came out of the bedroom.
“Thanks very much,” Tom said as they headed for the door.
Claire rushed over to show them out. “Any first impressions?”
“I’m sure it’d work well for someone like you,” Bill said. “But for us it’s not possible.”
“Why?” Claire asked, as though the man could tell what was wrong with her by diagnosing the apartment.
“The rooms are too oddly sized,” he said, stepping around Claire and opening the door.
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” the agent said. “I’ll call you.”
“Who were those people?” Jake asked.
“Jerks,” Claire said. “Pretentious jerks.”
That night after dinner, after Claire had given Adam a bath and put him to sleep, she and Sam were lying on their bed with the door closed. With his index finger Sam traced the outline of Claire’s breast through the sweater. “Is this my sweater?” he asked.
Claire shook her head. “I have to make a call,” she said, not moving.
“It’s ridiculous,” Sam said.
“What?”
“You spend more time talking to that girl than you do to me.”
“She’s my patient.”
Sam laughed. “I’ve heard you, Claire. You giggle and trade movie-star gossip with her. It’s hardly therapeutic.”
“I was thinking of inviting her over,” she said.
“She’s your client.”
“She’s one of us, like one of the kids.”
“Except I don’t know her.”
“I’m not asking for your analysis,” Claire said, pulling away. “I just want to know if it’s all right with you to have her over.”
“You’re the shrink, I’m just a lawyer,” Sam said, scratching himself. “If she decides to sue, call me.”
“You can be such an asshole,” Claire said.
He rolled onto his side and aimed the remote control at the TV. “Fucking cunt,” he said.
“Piece of shit,” Claire said. “Stinking.”
Jake walked in without knocking. “Can you stop fighting. It’s distracting.” He turned and walked out again, leaving the door open behind him.
“One day,” Claire muttered, “I’m gonna kill him. I can’t live like this anymore. We have no privacy.”
“While we’re on the subject,” Sam said, “I know you’re showing the apartment.”
Claire didn’t answer.
“Is this something we should talk about, or are you planning to just pack up, sneak off, and leave me homeless?”
“I’m working on it,” Claire said.
“These are decisions people make together. I’m not sure I want to move.”
“Fine. Then we can get divorced. You keep the apartment and you’ll still have to buy me and the kids a house.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Does everything have to be so goddamn difficult?” she said, getting up off the bed, folding clothing, putting it away, slamming the dresser drawers. “Why is everything such a struggle? Why don’t—”
“Why don’t I just do whatever you want?” Sam said. “Because I’m a person, Claire. Because I have ideas that don’t belong to you. This is a marriage, not a monarchy.”
The phone rang and Claire ran to answer it. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Roth?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Bea”—the patient who’d escaped her children’s lives, her husband’s complaints, and her apartment. “You once gave me your number at home and said I could call.”
“I remember,” Claire said. “Are you all right?”
“I came home from my class tonight and there was a letter on the kitchen table, propped up against the salt shaker.”
“Yes?”
“It was from Herbert. He left. He said he was tired of coming home to an empty apartment, tired of me not cooking, not taking care of him anymore. So he left. After thirty-six years. I came home from an art history lecture and this is what I get? He’s fifty-seven years old. Does he think he can just walk out of here and into some other apartment where some other old woman is going to cook and clean for him?”
Claire didn’t say anything for a minute. She looked at Sam stretched out on the bed holding the remote control, pouting.
“Would you like to come in and see me in the morning?” Claire asked.
“I’m supposed to go to the Met with one of the girls from my class. I’m not going to cancel just for Herbert. It would give him too much pleasure, wherever he is.”
“Well, call me tomorrow if you want to talk.”
“Thanks,” Bea said. “Sorry to bother you at home. I just wanted you to know.”
“It’s okay,” Claire said.
Bea laughed. “The funny thing is, I called you, but I really have nothing to say — I’m speechless.”
“Well, you can call me back if you need to. Are you going to be all right?”
“How would I know?” Bea said. “Well, good night.”
Claire stared at the receiver for a minute and then hung up and left the room, closing the door behind her.
31
“You’re floundering, babe,” Ellen said when Jody told her about the plan to meet Claire’s family. “You don’t even ice-skate.”
“At least Claire wants me. I should be glad for that.”
“Do you hear yourself?”
“It’s scary. I never thought it would happen, but I’m needy, Ellen
. Needy. It’s vile.”
“If I were you, I’d be furious with her for reducing you to this infantile blob. You have no self-confidence. That’s what this is all about — low self-esteem. I saw an ‘Oprah’ on it.”
“Viral castration,” Jody said. “It’s smooth, it’s fast, it’s final.”
That Claire liked her was flattering; anytime someone likes you, the instinct is to like them back. True, the relationship was out of the ordinary, several degrees more intense than Jody was prepared for, but so were the circumstances. When Jody had started this, she never thought Claire would mean anything to her. It’d been simple enough at first, but things had changed, and Jody had discovered that everything wasn’t as it seemed. Her belief in her family’s power had been an illusion, and her concept of self was constructed around the myth of literally being their child. She wasn’t theirs, wasn’t anyone’s. What all that meant wasn’t clear; but Claire was helping her, almost cradling her while she figured it out. This wasn’t the first time someone had treated Jody as though she were special. All through school her teachers had doted on her, and later Michael and Harry as well. People enjoyed her, so the rules changed in her favor. This wasn’t something Jody asked for; it just happened and she went along with it.
After hanging up with Ellen in Dallas, Jody put on her coat, took the elevator down, and hailed a taxi on Hudson Street. She wasn’t meeting Claire and her family for an hour and a half. “Museum of Natural History,” Jody told the driver. The safest place in the world, locked in time, reminiscent of childhood Sunday afternoons at the Smithsonian: the mammoth elephant in the Great Hall, the Eskimos chewing blubber in their dioramas.
A person will do anything to survive. Call it animal instinct. Jody went to the museum sure that if she could spend an hour not thinking — about failure, about Claire, about Ellen, about anything — if she could give herself over to the quiet, gravelike darkness of history preserved, she would be returned, healed.
At the entrance to the Great Mammal Hall, she stopped to get her breath. Jody was in with the caribou, the brown bear, the wapiti.
“It won’t get out, right?” a little kid behind her asked his mother.
Jody was thinking that this time, it all just might come crashing out. Claire had started dropping her family’s names into the conversation a while ago — Sam this, Jake and Adam that — and Jody had tried to pretend they didn’t exist. Shrinks weren’t supposed to have families, no one other than you, as if they, too, lived for those fifty minutes. That was the way it had to be. Now Claire was insisting that she meet them and wouldn’t let go of it. A year ago it wouldn’t have bothered Jody; but now, when all that had always seemed near, familiar, and good had gone sour, Claire seemed to be flaunting her success, her husband, her children.
Jody looked around. The Alaskan brown bear was up on its hind feet, two stories tall. The male wapiti had its head thrown back, its mouth dropped open, its black eyes popping out. All the animals looked as if they’d seen the ghost of something terrible. The silence felt trapped — stillness stuffed, sewn in. Everyone had a family, everyone belonged to someone and imitated them in ways they would never notice or need to articulate. Jody had simply arrived, delivered to her parents’ house like food ordered in. She considered what would happen if she skipped out on Claire’s family, if she simply hailed a taxi and went back down to Perry Street. Would she spend the rest of the afternoon feeling like a failure, having missed out on another amazing opportunity, curious how her life had come to this incredible grinding halt?
The flying squirrel was perfect: in a deep-black case like in the darkest dream, it was fixed against tall trees, moonlight, a distant forest, and snow-covered mountain peaks. Fully extended, the northern squirrel was up there, out there, hanging in midair.
Jody would pull herself together. She would go to the park and meet Claire’s family. What harm could come of it? She hurried toward the exit, wishing there was someone to lead her out, eyes closed, blind. She walked quickly, trying not to pay attention; but all the same, the last thing she saw on her way out was the dodo bird.
At three-thirty, the appointed time, she stood on the grassy knoll above Wollman Rink. The light was starting to fade, the chill of night slowly seeping into the air. Hovering over the park, backlit, were the tall apartment buildings of Central Park South. The thick red letters of the Essex House sign hugged the skyline in the same way that the “Hollywood” letters clung to the hill in L.A. It had been a deceptively warm day for late January: faces were flushed; left and right, people had taken off their coats, stripping down to turtlenecks. A hopeful afternoon. Jody would meet Claire’s family; she would exchange greetings and then, as soon as politely possible, break away.
A long line of would-be skaters curved up the path leading to the rink. From above, the ice was crowded, as though all of New York had come out for a skate this particular Sunday afternoon. Jody climbed a rock and looked for Claire, working the line from back to front. She was there, halfway down, also looking. There was no reason to rush. Claire was at least thirty people away from the entrance. When she was within fifteen, Jody would start down the path, pressing through the line—“Excuse me, coming through … Meeting someone up front, par don me.”
Then Claire spotted her and waved frantically. Jody automatically waved back and went forward.
“I thought you might be standing us up,” Claire said.
“Running late,” Jody said, not sure which of the strangers surrounding them were Roths. Claire tapped the backs of a man and two children in front of her. Jody expected her to say, Please allow me to introduce the recalcitrant, resistant, deeply neurotic Miss Goodman. Instead she patted the hair on top of the smaller boy’s head and in a clear and happy voice said, “Guys, this is Jody.”
Sam turned and faced her — not a vampire, not a gorilla, just a guy. “Good to meet you,” he said.
“Yo,” the elder boy said.
The younger one, Adam, looked down at his shoes. “I don’t wanna wear skates. Just my shoes.”
The line moved forward. At the admissions window, Jody took out her wallet, but Claire stopped her and let Sam pay for all of them. “My treat,” she said. “All day.”
The clubhouse was noisy, filled with shouting children, out-of-date pop songs, and people in a hurry. Jody focused on putting on her skates. She could feel herself disappearing into a haze.
“Pull the laces tight,” Claire said.
Jody looked at her blankly.
“Pull the laces tight,” Claire said again, this time reaching over to help. “It supports the ankle.”
Sam, Claire, Jake, and Adam. Real people, only better, like a family from a TV commercial. Handsome and cool compared with Mr. and Mrs. Goodman, who were getting ready to apply for Social Security. Claire in her off-duty clothes — faded jeans, turtleneck, with her blond hair held back with a thick barrette. Sam in wide-wale cords, a hand-knit sweater, hair just a little long, a little gray. By contrast Jody felt dark, black, mismatched. It wasn’t their fault. Claire’s family didn’t look at her strangely, didn’t treat her as if she were peculiar or contagious. Nothing about their actions screamed, Oh my God, it’s a patient—be careful.
“I’m not sure I can do this,” Jody said, remembering that one year for Chanukah her mother bought three pairs of skates, packed meat loaf sandwiches and thermoses of cocoa, and drove Jody and her father down to the C&O Canal. For the first hour it was wonderful, right out of a Norman Rockwell painting: Mom, Dad, and Jody in mittens and long scarves, gracefully sawing their way back and forth across the ice. Then Jody’s father fell, landed on his coccyx, rode home facedown sprawled across the backseat, and spent the next month sitting on inflatable rings intended for infant use in swimming pools.
“Of course you can,” Claire said, pulling her toward the rink. “Tell me when you get tired and we’ll take a rest.”
Jody and Claire wobbled out of the clubhouse walking on the thin blades like demented ducks. The s
katers whirled past, and the only way to get onto the ice was to take a running start, a flying leap. If you hesitated, they’d crush you.
“Have you ever jumped rope?” Claire asked.
“Not recently.”
“Well, it’s like that, like jumping in.”
Jody was looking at the skaters, trying to gauge the pace, when Claire grabbed her hand and jerked her onto the ice. Jody pulled back. Around them three people fell. “Skate,” Claire said. And Jody did, at first in odd, jerking motions, and then more evenly, using her arms to swing herself forward.
“Odie,” Adam said. “Odie, take me around. Slow,” he said. “I like slow.” A three-foot, chestnut-haired, blue-eyed ladykiller. Jody took him around a few times, and then he said, “Okay, Odie — now Mom.”
Claire had introduced her and now she was on the inside, one of the gang. It wasn’t that they gushed over her or went out of their way to be nice. In fact, it was almost the opposite: she was nothing special, just a girl.
Jody delivered Adam to Claire and then took a break by the side of the rink, watching them skate as a family, Claire with Jake, Adam with Sam. It all came together — the music, the end of a winter afternoon, the perfect family. Everything they did was easy, effortless. They just did it and it came out right. Jody wanted life to be that easy. She wanted to be like them, and if she couldn’t be, then at least she hoped that maybe something would rub off. For the first time, she wanted all that Claire had been offering, that and more.
“Go on, go with Sam,” Claire said, pushing her toward where he stood a few feet away, arm already extended. “Go on.”
Jody slid her hand into Sam’s and they took off. They skated, they sailed, steering with the swing of their arms and the tilt of their legs. Jody was along for the ride, taking off on the even glide of the skates, taking in the skeletal trees against the sky, the horse-drawn carriages in the distance, the winter city near dusk. The sensation of motion, round and round, breathed life back into her. Round and round, skating the great wide circle, in matching rhythm and stride. They passed Claire and Adam, waved and called out to them, then took off again, skating faster, legs working harder, wheeling their way around. Jody imagined that people were watching them, thinking they were together. She pushed her hand farther into Sam’s. His palm was large, rough. The way he wrapped his fingers around her hand but didn’t squeeze, didn’t crush, made Jody feel good.
