The Children's Crusade

by Ann Packer

  I suppressed a smile. “Did Jen cook?”

  “She threw something together. An Indian lamb dish with homemade naan in the wood-fired oven and chutney from mangoes she grew.”

  “I don’t think you can grow mangoes here.”

  “Metaphorically. She grew them metaphorically. I think she grew the onions literally.”

  “How are the boys?”

  “I like the boys. I am very much in favor of the boys.”

  “That’s a strange way to put it.”

  “I’m in favor of children. What did Dad always say? Children deserve care. I’m down with that.”

  “You’re in a funny mood.”

  “I’m not high.”

  “I didn’t think you were high.”

  “I haven’t partaken in like five years, in case you care. Isn’t this so reminiscent, though? I walk in late, and my adult keepers are sitting up watching TV? And I have to persuade them that I’m not drunk or stoned?”

  “Your adult keepers.”

  “You and Dad. Ryan and Dad. It was never Robert and Dad—I don’t think my delinquency really took root until he was gone. Robert,” he added, “is a tad angry about the prospect of selling the house. Are you? I don’t think Ryan is. I saw him today, too.”

  “I’m not sure yet, James,” I said, though on some level I was. “It’s so laden.”

  “Laden,” he said. “Laden. That’s a strange word if you think about it. It means loaded, right? Or overloaded? But it sounds like the past tense of ‘lade.’ Is there a word ‘lade’? I remember I used to say ‘boughten.’ ‘I wish I’d “boughten” that Matchbox car.’ ‘You could’ve “boughten” it for me.’ ” He shrugged. “Don’t you like the idea of Vince and his wife building a monstrosity, though? I think whatever gets built there has to be completely different. I don’t want to recognize it. I’d like to see a god-awful Mediterranean villa with a red tile roof.”

  “You’ve really decided,” I said.

  “I’m not sure yet, Rebecca. It’s so laden.”

  He said good night and headed off to the guest room, and Walt and I decided to go to bed as well. We went downstairs to the ground-level master suite, almost a thousand square feet dedicated to private space, an architectural possibility only when there aren’t and won’t be children. From the sitting area, sliding doors opened onto a beautifully landscaped yard full of native plants, and we finished the evening by turning on the outside lights and enjoying the view as if we were tiny creatures looking into a terrarium.

  • • •

  One thing I believed about myself for a long time was that I would go as far as I could academically. I got both a BA and a BS in college, I completed a master’s in psychology while working toward my MD, I did a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry once I’d finished my residency. I began my private practice assuming I’d spend three or four years establishing myself and then begin training to become a psychoanalyst. But I didn’t—not after three or four years and not after eight or ten, either. I saw friends enter into and benefit from analytic training, and I was hovering on the threshold: already reading deeply in the literature, my practice analytically oriented. My resistance seemed to focus, at least superficially, on the indeterminate length of the training. I consulted a former therapist, wanting help with figuring it out, and she related my anxiety to my childhood experience with James: I signed up to watch out for him without knowing I’d end up holding the job for life. “Maybe,” I said, but it didn’t sound right.

  Then, as my father began to fail, I reconsidered. My objections disintegrated; I developed an itch. I began a five-day-a-week training analysis (with one of the few Palo Alto psychiatrists I didn’t already know), started my coursework, and at the ripe old age of forty-two reentered supervision. A little over a year later, I had two adult cases in supervision and had recently begun supervision on a child case, a four-year-old girl named Alissa whom I was seeing four times a week.

  She was my first session the next morning. Initially referred to treatment for an eating disorder, Alissa ate only certain foods—certain white foods—but unlike most such children, she frequently refused food altogether. She declared certain days “yes” days and other days “no” days and announced over breakfast each morning which kind of day it would be. On “yes” days she ate jicama for breakfast and for lunch and dinner some combination of bread, pasta, rice, and potatoes; on “no” days she consumed only coconut water. She weighed twenty-eight pounds.

  Not surprisingly, most of our play centered around eating. I had bought a bin full of plastic foods—hamburgers the size of egg yolks, apples the size of walnuts. We fed these items to a group of dolls. Beforehand, we “washed” the food in cups of water we’d tinted with drops of white paint. By this point in the treatment it had become clear that white meant clean and stood in contrast to brown, which meant dirty. Food itself stood in contrast to feces. In eating nothing but rice and potatoes, Alissa was doing her best to avoid eating poop. And in skipping food a few times a week, she was doing the only thing she could think of to avoid producing it.

  The play area in my office looked out onto the parking lot, and toward the end of the session I happened to glance down and see a woman stepping out of a sleek silver sedan. She had blond hair to her shoulders and was dressed in a light blue polo shirt and what appeared to be a pair of jodhpurs tucked into riding boots.

  Alissa sensed the drift of my attention and threw her doll to the floor. “She’s finished.”

  “And maybe a little angry.”

  “No!”

  Anger was a dangerous substance in Alissa’s family. Her parents, when I first met with them, spent a lot of time preemptively disavowing any so-called negative feelings toward their daughter. “You probably think we’re furious at her,” the father declared, “but we’re not.”

  “What does she feel?” I asked Alissa about the doll.

  “Hungry, but she’s not going to eat anymore.”

  “Hungry and angry almost sound the same.”

  “I didn’t want you to tell me that again!” With that, Alissa lay on her side and drew her knees to her chest. She wore a short turquoise dress, and her folded legs looked like kindling.

  “You’re curled in a ball. Maybe that will protect you from my words.”

  “It’s not a ball, it’s a shell.”

  “Shells protect the soft creature inside.”

  “Kari is a soft creature.”

  Kari was the baby sister whose birth had accelerated Alissa’s eating issues and begun the yearlong health concerns that had led her to my office. When I fetched Alissa from the waiting room, Kari was always in their mother’s arms, while Alissa sat by herself on the floor.

  “Is Kari protected?”

  “That’s stupid. She’s a baby. Of course she is.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m making a wall at home.” She unfolded herself and got onto her knees. “It’s going to be really high.”

  “What will be outside the wall?”

  “There is no outside. It’s all inside.”

  “I see. What’s inside?”

  “It’s not what, it’s who. Everyone but you.”

  The session was just about over, and I told her it was time to put the toys away. After, I walked her back to the waiting room. Her mother was where we’d left her, with Kari still in her arms but asleep now, her head thrown back and one hand draped over her forehead like an actress overdoing a sickbed scene. I remembered Robert once arranging the sleeping baby Sammy to look like an old man clutching his stomach after a heavy meal, and how this prompted our father to say mildly that one of the hardest parts of being a parent was boredom, the difficulty of waiting for your child to reach the next phase of development.

  The blonde from the parking lot was in the waiting room, too, and when she saw me she
got to her feet. “Dr. Blair?”

  “Yes, just a moment,” I said, and I crouched down to say goodbye to Alissa. It was Friday, so I wouldn’t see her for a few days.

  “I changed my mind,” Alissa said. “You can be on our side of the wall.”

  “You wanted to make sure to say that.”

  “I had to.” With that she bolted for the door, and her mother stood up and trailed after her, trying simultaneously to smile at me, adjust her diaper bag on her shoulder, and support the sleeping baby in her arms.

  The blonde watched her go and said, “God, I’m so glad to be past that. The stuff. You seriously don’t know how you’re going to manage.”

  I looked harder and realized she was Lewis Vincent’s wife. I’d never met her, but I’d seen photos of her in the house when I was there with James, including a few in which she was dressed as she was now, in riding clothes.

  “I’m Lisa Jansen,” she said, holding out her hand. “I got your name from a friend and was going to call you, but I happened to be in the building this morning, and as I was leaving I saw your name on the directory and figured, Hey, I’ll just pop in and see if she’s there.” She hesitated. “Oh, God, you’re going to want to know my friend’s name! I’m such a space cadet, can you believe I don’t remember? She’s not really a friend, I just met her. I’m sure we will be friends, I can always tell. But in our conversation, our short conversation, she mentioned that she’d heard really good things about you. And I just wanted to talk to you maybe once about my daughter.”

  Lisa had woven a far more tangled web than was needed to obscure the fact that she was married to the person to whom I’d already said no. I should have been more careful, but I needed to get to my notes about the session with Alissa, especially important because of the supervision.

  “Ms. Jansen,” I said. “I think there may be some confusion. I’m confused.”

  Her face filled with color. “Actually, maybe I should just call you—I’m late for a riding lesson, anyway.” And she lunged for the door.

  I returned to my desk and wrote up my notes, but the strange intrusion and my clumsy reaction hung over me for the rest of the morning, and I realized I was blaming James because he was behind the chain of events that had led Lisa to my office. I was glad I was seeing my own analyst in a few hours. How would she have handled Lisa? I was making her into an authority, as I so often did. “We never get over it,” she said to me during one of our first sessions together. “What’s that?” I said, and she said, “Having started out as children.”

  • • •

  I woke into what I knew immediately was the middle of the night. This time there was no dream in the background, no intense emotion to metabolize.

  Then I heard James’s voice. Our house had an acoustical oddity that funneled kitchen sounds into our walk-in closet, and after a moment there was no mistaking the fact that James was upstairs talking to someone. I strained and at last heard a second, fainter voice—a woman’s.

  I put on my robe and made my way to the bottom of the stairs. I hit the light switch that would illuminate not just the stairway but also the main hall light upstairs, which James would see from the kitchen. By the time I got there, he was alone at the counter, his chin resting in his hand.

  I said, “That’s so strange, I could have sworn I heard voices.”

  “Maybe you did.”

  His cell phone, which I hadn’t previously noticed, began to buzz, and he reached for it, pressed a button that silenced it, and began composing a text. I saw that his laptop was also in arm’s reach, its lid closed.

  “Hang on,” he said, “or better yet, go back to bed.”

  “Who were you talking to?”

  He stared at the screen, texted, stared some more. Then he looked up and said, “Want to meet someone?” He opened the computer, waited a few seconds, and it began to chirp. “Come say hello,” he said to me. “I want you to meet Celia.”

  She was his girlfriend: his paramour, he said, almost without irony. I had heard him talking to someone—she’d been sitting at her computer up in Eugene, and they’d been video-chatting. She had shoulder-length brown hair and big dark eyes.

  She held her hand up and waved it back and forth, tiny waves like the trembling of a dial on a scale settling back to zero. She said, “I’ve heard so much about you. It’s really nice to meet you, but I wish I didn’t look so disheveled.”

  We chatted a little—it had been raining for weeks in Eugene; no, it was still dry in the Bay Area—and then James said it was time to stop.

  I told her it was nice to meet her. James waited until I was downstairs before he spoke again. I used the bathroom and drank a glass of water, and by the time I was back in bed the house was silent.

  He was in love. That’s what he told me the next morning—he’d never felt this way before, not with anyone. He said he was glad I’d come upstairs and interrupted them; it had made for an awkward introduction, but now that I knew about her, now that I’d met her, he was realizing he’d needed exactly this, to talk about it with me.

  As he spoke, I felt myself fill with hope. During all his years of wandering he’d been a drifter of the heart as well: a serial bigamist, he sometimes joked. There had been nothing lasting, nothing that required having his house key copied or buying an extra toothbrush to leave in a woman’s bathroom. Was it possible he was truly settling, had truly settled, into a satisfying relationship? Maybe at last . . .

  He told me about her gentleness, how he was only now realizing how often and unfortunately he’d been drawn to sharp women. Celia was soft, she was softness personified. She listened with so much empathy. And she was smart, the kind of person who makes a seemingly random observation that you don’t fully consider until days later, when it comes back to you with the force of a self-evident truth.

  She was from Los Angeles, an only child. She’d gone to Eugene for school, back in the nineties. She was, he said, a good person; it seemed very important to him that I understand this.

  Something wasn’t making sense, and at last I recognized what it was. “Why didn’t you mention her earlier?” I felt a pang of worry, remembering our conversation in the guest room and how he’d said things were weird in Eugene.

  He hesitated, looked away. Cleared his throat. Said, “There are some issues.” And then, “She’s married.” And then, “Actually, it’s more than that.”

  “There aren’t children?”

  “There are.”

  I had a somatic response before I’d even registered the emotional one. My heart raced and I began to sweat lightly. My body was in fight-or-flight mode, but my mind lagged behind, unable to do much more than recognize the hazy outlines of various unhappy thoughts and feelings as they assembled on the horizon.

  We were both silent. He shrugged elaborately and said, as if the issue were why I hadn’t figured out the situation rather than its heartbreak, “I mentioned her to you the other night in the context of overprotective parents.”

  And it came back to me: It’s like how people don’t let their kids play outside anymore. The paranoia. This woman I know—

  “Her husband knows, though,” I said. “And they’re separated.”

  “No.”

  “James, my God. This is very serious.”

  We were in the kitchen, sitting opposite each other at the table. It was a Saturday, but Walt wasn’t home; he’d gone into work for a few hours. James said, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Really, it’s serious? You think I don’t know that? Why do you think I’m here when the woman I love is five hundred miles away? We’re figuring things out.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Of course you are.”

  “It’s a really hard situation.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Are you thinking if we sell the property you’ll use your share of the proceeds so the two of you can . . . set up hou
se together or something?”

  “Asked Rebecca, making a huge leap.”

  I stood up and crossed the room. I faced him again. “How many?”

  “Two.”

  “Gender?”

  “Both boys.”

  “Like Sammy and Luke.”

  “Like Sammy and Luke. She hasn’t decided,” he added.

  “Whether or not to leave him.”

  He nodded.

  “Oh, I get it,” I said. “The self-evident truth. You want her to make a declaration of independence.”

  • • •

  Among my patients, I’d seen three women with children go all the way from an unhappy marriage to a divorce, and of the three it was the one who’d had another man waiting who’d had the hardest time. She’d been in treatment for a couple of years before she met her lover, unhappy in her marriage, unable to enjoy her children, and then she encountered this man at a party, fell into an idealizing affair, and her depression lifted. She mistook her rapture for a guarantee of a beautiful future life, believing that as long as she made sure to put her foot down firmly on each stepping stone in the path before her—the mediation stepping stone, the careful coparenting stepping stone, the family therapy stepping stone—then all would be well.

  She didn’t count on how her guilt would knock her over at every step. Insidiously, by preventing her from enjoying anything. She didn’t like the party her friends threw for her first post-separation birthday; she hated the apartment she rented for herself and her children.

  Her mood worsened and gave way to major depression. She started Zoloft, got a little better, got worse again. Eventually her lover broke it off with her, saying he wanted light in his life and her heart had become too heavy. She was devastated and suffered acutely, lost weight and couldn’t sleep, but it was only after all of this—after she had, in effect, paid—that she began to report she was feeling better.

  I wondered about Celia. What breaking her marriage would mean to her. And what it would mean to James. And what it would mean to their relationship.