10
HE WEATHER COOLED. Kate took the girls for haircuts and dental exams. She tucked the girls under a blanket on the couch in front of their morning show and made tea and warmed their undershirts in the microwave.
She made a phone call to the number Brooke had given her and left a message. The therapist—Dr. Levy—called back and left a message. She called him again. Finally they connected and scheduled an appointment. On a Tuesday, Kate and Colin sat in a small, overheated office in what had once been a residential building. A framed photograph hung behind the therapist’s head—a door, adobe-style, and through it a desert, New Mexico maybe? Kate wondered if Dr. Levy had hung it there to inspire or signify insight.
“What brings you here?” he asked quietly.
They looked at each other. Colin shifted on the couch. Silence.
Dr. Levy tried again. “Are you fighting? Are you stuck on something?”
She should tell him about her dream, the messy room. She should tell him about the Valeries and how they tormented her. She should tell him about the Valeries in her body and the rat in her head.
“Is it sex?”
Last night, once again, the kids had ended up in their bed. Kate and Colin had gone out into the hallway to fight. Now she felt crabby and drowsy. She’d taken two Excedrin before heading to the appointment but her head still ached. The rat chewed. It chewed and chewed, meticulously, at the very center of her brain.
“Are you considering a separation?”
“That’s not even on the table at all,” Colin said.
Kate played with the magazine she’d carried in from the waiting room. She flipped through the pages and rolled the magazine into a tube. “No. Not that. Things are just wrong,” she said. “And we don’t know how to fix them.”
She looked at Colin. He looked at her. She looked at Dr. Levy.
“Has that been your experience?” he asked.
Colin seemed unsure. He nodded, then grimaced.
“We can’t really separate,” Kate said.
“Why not? What’s your feeling about that?” Dr. Levy shifted toward her in his chair. His expression revealed no tendency toward either of them. He spoke with a slight lisp, a special inflection, in a serious but animated tone. Kate wondered about his sexual orientation.
“We have two children. It’s not what I want for them.”
Dr. Levy raised his eyebrows sympathetically.
“And now?”
“Well, I guess it’s just …” She shrugged. “We’re here, aren’t we?”
Dr. Levy looked at Colin. Colin also shrugged. With his larger frame, he outshrugged her.
“We’re here,” he said.
Kate could feel her face starting to flush in the radiator heat. But happily, the Excedrin was taking effect. “Do you mind if I open the window?” She looked from one man to the other. She stood and shoved it open. Old construction, it rose reluctantly, spitting lead. She sat. “It’s just not something I want, anyway. A separation.”
“Is that fear talking?”
“I guess.”
“It’s limiting. Living in fear.”
“But sometimes I have a fantasy about it. About … leaving.”
“Whoa, whoa,” Colin said. “You do?”
“It’s just silly.”
“Tell me about the fantasy,” Dr. Levy said.
“Well … it’s absurd.” But the poor fellow needed something from at least one of them, something to work with. So she continued. “There’s this book I read to our kids, about an elephant: a little girl elephant and her mom. Ella the Elegant Elephant. They live on this island and the mom runs a pastry shop. We don’t even know what happened to the dad.”
“Deadbeat,” Colin said.
“So I think about something along those lines. I imagine running away with the girls and living somewhere just different, on an island or the city or Europe—”
“Europe!” Colin shouted.
Levy held up his hand.
“And just baking a lot and happily ever after.”
“A compelling scenario,” Dr. Levy said.
“This isn’t how it was supposed to turn out for us,” she said.
“Why not? How were … things supposed to go?”
“Well. We were so crazy about each other once. At the beginning.”
The doctor nodded. They were like children, she thought, Colin and she, quarreling children called into the principal’s office. They sat facing him together, guilty as charged.
“It was such a happy thing,” she said.
Colin’s cheeks flushed over his tie. She worried about him, there on the other side of the overheated office. Who was he, anyway? What did he want from her, from himself? He sat reddening over the tie, the one she’d somehow put him in, while she failed him in ways she did not understand, in ways he could not articulate. She had not even wanted him to take this job, the one that had driven him into the suit—she’d wanted New York, downtown, bohemia! But he’d insisted, driven by his sense of responsibility and propriety, insisted on their life as it was.
And likewise she could see but not describe the ways in which he cheated her and silenced her, the way he stopped up all exits, the way he stubbornly denied her and testified against her. Once, back in the Bridgeport apartment, Andie had thought him a lawyer. And yes, he seemed—hatefully—like a lawyer.
The chewing began again. The Valeries at her gut, the rat at her brain.
“Let’s backtrack a bit,” the doctor said. “Tell me about yourselves.”
So, in turn, they told him, silently correcting and critiquing each other’s stories. Kate heard Colin sigh as she expressed her wish for less housework, more fun.
“Tell me about your children,” Levy said. “What are they like?”
Kate described Lila and Robin. Colin joined in with details and anecdotes. They became a team again, suddenly—comic, in sync.
Then they divided.
“If you had to, what would you say you want from each other?”
“I guess … I want him to understand me. That sounds like a cop-out, but I do.”
“Colin?”
“I want her to be happy. I want her to be fun again. I want her to blow me in the car, like the old days.”
“Really, Colin?” Kate wrapped her arms across her chest, embarrassed. She avoided eye contact with Levy. “Is that really, actually what you want?”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
“What do you hope for your girls?” the doctor asked.
Colin looked at the ceiling and frowned.
Kate said, “That question always makes me sad. But if I have to answer it, well, I hope they’re gay.”
She did. As she said it, she knew it.
Both men stared.
“Men bully women. I don’t want that for them.”
“I—” Colin said.
Dr. Levy held up a finger. “Do you feel bullied, Kate?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s my fault, of course,” Colin said.
“How? In what way? Can you tell us?”
“No.” Kate fanned herself. She looked up at the drop ceiling. Strips of aluminum divided the squares. “I can’t explain how. But I see it at work all the time. I mean, where I volunteer.”
Dr. Levy nodded. His expression flattened—too many matters at once. “Okay. Let’s come back to the job later. For now, tell me, just quickly, about your family life. What are your routines?”
“Routines?” Colin said.
“What do you do in the evenings?”
Colin said, “Sometimes she puts them to bed. Sometimes I do.”
“Do you eat dinner together? As a family?”
They had agreed early on—soon after Robin’s first birthday—that for now they could not endure the chaos of family dinners: the mashed potatoes on heads and noses, the jumping in and out of laps, the constant imperious demands for juice bread salt napkin, the nipping from plates, the shrieking and crying. They couldn�
��t enjoy the experience; nor could they agree on the division of labor in such circumstances.
“I get home on the late side,” Colin said.
“Weekends?”
“Sometimes we all go out to dinner on the weekends,” Kate said. “Just to the Japanese place or the bar and grill, something simple. And during the day, well, sometimes we go strawberry or apple picking or whatever.”
“Mornings? I’m just trying to get a sense of your family dynamic.”
Kate said, “We get up and I get them to school.”
“I usually take them to school.”
“I get them ready. You drop them off. Late.”
“Robin’s not late.” Robin’s preschool began at nine.
“Well. Congratulations.”
Dr. Levy looked intently from one face to the other, as if watching a bird dive to and fro, a bird trapped inside the tiny hot room. Kate played with the magazine in her lap. She tore out a page and folded it into a fan. Colin frowned at her.
“You make them late. You do. You don’t care that they’re late. Or that Lila’s late. Whatever. You care more about your fucking shaving and primping and Wheaties or fucking whatever than you do about them.” She paused, and edited. “Being late.”
“Okay.” Dr. Levy leaned forward in his chair. She’d excited him—this pleased her. “A more productive way to talk, when it comes to this sort of miscommunication, is to use I instead of you. For example: ‘When the kids are late to school, I feel frustrated and angry, as I make an effort to get them ready and feel it’s important for them to be on time.’ ” He sat back. “And they should be on time for school, no?”
Colin nodded dubiously—unsure, it seemed, whether he was incriminating himself with agreement. Kate experienced a certain brief sensation of triumph.
“And you, Colin, could say: ‘I feel angry when you approach me about the children’s punctuality. It makes me feel …’ ” He looked at Colin and raised his hands. “Colin, how does it make you feel?”
“Angry.” Was he mocking Dr. Levy?
“And then you could say to each other, ‘So what is this about?’ ” He looked from Kate to Colin, from Colin to Kate. They stared at the floor, naughty children. “Try it,” Dr. Levy said. “Try that approach. Try, when expressing yourselves, to focus on yourself, not on the other person—on your own feelings, not what the other person has ‘done.’ Instead of saying, ‘You did this, you’re doing that, you’re acting like this,’ say, ‘I feel this, I feel that.’ ”
“I don’t mean to be a jerk, but that sounds kind of precious to me,” Colin said.
The radiator banged. Kate fanned herself in silent agreement.
“Try it now,” the doctor said. “Kate. Do you think you can express yourself to Colin in such a way?”
“I guess I could give it a shot.”
“Wonderful,” Colin said.
Dr. Levy watched the darting bird.
Kate said, “When Colin doesn’t contribute to the household it makes me feel … really mad.”
“The household?” Colin raised an eyebrow.
“I mean,” Kate said, “I spend my day—like, a whole day every week, which is not so terrible but he doesn’t do it—running all over town shopping for organic this, free-range and hormone-free that.…”
“And then there’s nothing to eat. Nothing to eat, ever, in our house.”
“That’s not true. And why don’t you shop for food once in a while. Do you think it just magically appears on the shelves?”
“No.”
“That’s right. Someone has to shop for it. Go to the store.”
“Someone does.”
“You think I don’t spend half my life at the fucking store?”
“I also spend time at the store.”
The one item that motivated Colin to shop was toilet paper. It had become her habit to remove the final few existing rolls and hide them for her own personal use and that of the children in hopes he would be driven to the store. The strategy worked, for the most part, but he did a shoddy job with the list, bringing home Fig Newtons instead of Fig Newmans, whole milk instead of one-percent, Zest instead of Dove.
“Talk to Brooke,” he said. “She’s always got good stuff around. Those noodles. That chicken salad.”
“Brooke has an au pair. And a housekeeper every day.”
The implication being: If he delivered on his end—the economic—she would deliver on hers—the domestic.
“At any rate,” Kate said, “so I go running around.… Stop & Shop has the produce, right, and the whole organic section, but not the meat and the chicken, not always, at least, and not the juice boxes, so I have to go to Thyme and Season for the juice boxes … but then they don’t have chicken or meat so I have to go to Dominic’s for that … and so on and so on.”
“And this is why we need a Whole Foods right here, in Fairfield,” Colin announced.
“Really? And Whole Foods would change my life? Our lives?”
“It might!”
“There’s a Whole Foods in Westport,” Dr. Levy offered.
Kate stared at him, betrayed.
“Okay. Well, Whole Foods is expensive, for one,” she said. “Colin? And I’m sure it comes with its own set of problems that we don’t even understand yet.”
“You’re a pessimist,” Colin said.
“And when I finish shopping it’s time to pick up the girls and then by the time I get it all home and get the kids and the groceries out of the car and break up the fight and unpack the groceries, then it’s time to make dinner … and then I do, and I make extra, for their lunches, or the next day, or whatever, but the more I make the more Colin eats! And he pouts if I tell him I’ve spent all this time shopping and making it for the kids!”
“Because that makes me feel like you don’t think of me as part of the family.”
“Oh, Colin, and that, that in and of itself … just because your mother spent every minute of her life stocking the fridge and feeding you doesn’t mean I’m under any obligation to take care of you.… As part of ‘the family,’ you should be helping me.… They’re your kids too!”
“Fuck, woman …”
Dr. Levy held up a hand to each. Then he motioned to Kate to move forward. “Back to the girls and their food. What’s that about?”
“Well, that’s it, sort of …”
“Something about it, I sense, is very distressing to you. Causing you deep anxiety.”
“Yes. I suppose.”
“For example. Why go to all that trouble?”
“Because”—and she sat up straight in her chair—“just because of everything you read, about girls getting their periods at eight years old, because of all the hormones … you don’t want that to happen! And then, of course, there’s cancer, and child obesity, and et cetera.”
“Well—let’s focus on the former concern. Let’s say it did. Your girls got their periods early. Whether or not diet is the real culprit is debatable, I believe. But, that aside. Let’s say you fed your girls regular—meaning, paradoxically maybe, not organic, not free-range, not hormone- and engineering-free—food, and ‘that’ did happen to them. Would it be the worst thing in the world? And perhaps more important, would it be your fault?”
“Well, yes! And his too, okay? But not as much, because he doesn’t take any responsibility in the first place. For stuff like that. For anything that’s not … completely obvious and in the moment. And the thing is, if it were just me, if I were a single mom or something, it—their puberty, that is—wouldn’t feel so threatening. Though, of course, for an eight-year-old to wear a tampon, or a sanitary pad even, is not age-appropriate. But it’s like, I worry because of him”—and this was just occurring to her, just hitting her, and saying it, articulating it, she knew it to be true!—“because, it’s like … I want to protect him … I feel responsible or something.”
The men looked at her, over their ties and collars.
“You’re not making sense,” Colin
said.
“She makes sense to me,” Dr. Levy said.
“And it all just feels bad, like I need to do something about it, to stop it!”
Now both men looked perplexed. Kate herself felt perplexed. What did she mean?
“Let’s give Colin a chance to talk,” Dr. Levy said. “Colin, what are your thoughts? Do you share Kate’s anxiety in this matter?”
“I mean, you know. I want to be a good father to them. So—well, besides all the obvious reasons, such as I’m crazy about them, so they don’t run around, fucking around …”
“Fucking around?” Kate glanced at Dr. Levy—would he allow the interruption? “What do you mean by that?”
“You know. Fooling around, sex, blow jobs.”
“And what’s wrong with blow jobs? You like blow jobs.”
“Getting them!”
“Well, someone has to give them.”
She knew what he meant. But she wanted him to say it.
“You know what I mean,” he said.
“So it’s fine for me to give them but not for your daughters to give them.”
“It’s just … It’s degrading, I guess.”
“Okay for me to do it, though.”
“That’s different.”
“A guy going down on a woman, is that degrading? If you had a son, would it bother you to think about that?”
“Fuck, no!”
“But that’s the problem!”
“They’re my little girls.”
Dr. Levy, the crossing guard, held up his hand. “Time’s up. Look, I believe in looking at what’s going on inside, but also in experimenting with what’s on the outside. I’m sensing a lot of separateness here. Do you do things together alone? Do you have a regular night out? A date night, if you will?”
“We have fight night,” Colin said.
Kate laughed.
Dr. Levy looked from one to the other, sharply. “Good,” he said.
11
O COLIN BOOKED A TABLE at an Italian restaurant in South Norwalk and Kate called Portia—and, finding her busy, called Bella Hertzberg, junior at Fairfield Warde and lifeguard at the club. Kate gave the girls dinner (chicken tenders, string cheese, baby carrots), and at seven Bella arrived in a hot-pink T-shirt displaying the Go-Go’s in pastel relief, towel clad and turban headed. Below, hotter-pink glittery script read, We Got the Beat. The T-shirt had been purchased at Target, Kate knew, because she owned the same one, though after two babies she did not fill it out quite as exuberantly.
Games to Play After Dark Page 12
