A. Homes - In A Country Of Mothers

“It seems so unnecessary. He’s a little baby. Why do you want to start cutting him up?”

“Because it’s what you do!” Sam screamed. “They don’t really feel it. It’s not something you remember when you’re older—‘Oy, the day they cut my dick!’”

It went on and on, so loudly that at one point a nurse’s aide stuck her head in and asked them to keep it down.

Sam ended it by saying, “This is my son. I want to be able to stand next to him in a locker room and not feel like we’re at a conference of Christians and Jews. I want him to be like me.”

Claire couldn’t argue with that. She couldn’t say, “And I want him to be like my father, like the first boy I ever slept with.” And so it was done, without ceremony, before Jake went home from the hospital. The next time they were ready. When Adam was born, they did it the traditional way, a bris, with the baby’s godfather holding the baby, Sam and Claire standing off to the side, hoping not to faint when the mohel did his thing.

Claire imagined having a daughter. She imagined taking the little girl to the hairdresser’s with her. She thought it was a shame that women didn’t have their hair done anymore. Every two months they just went and had it cut. She remembered when she was little, sitting on a stack of phone books under the dryer, imitating the ladies. She remembered her mother indulging her and letting the manicurist put clear polish on her nails.

Claire had held her baby girl only once. The nurse lowered the baby into Claire’s arms as she sat in a wheelchair on her way out of the hospital. She’d never held a baby before. She wasn’t one of those girls who was a mother’s helper during summer vacations or baby-sat the neighbor’s kids. Claire was afraid of children; she watched them from a distance and worried about what she’d do when she had her own. The closest she’d gotten to her sister, Laura, was sitting on the other side of the room while her mother changed diapers.

“Don’t look,” she remembered her mother saying.

In 1966, in Washington, D.C., when a nurse deposited Claire’s daughter into her lap, Claire felt a rush as though she were going instantly insane. The blue-eyed thing that lay in her arms had come from her own body and yet was a stranger, a complete and total stranger. She gave it up before she ever knew who it was.

The lawyer, posing as Claire’s father, followed the maternity nurse who wheeled Claire and the baby to the lobby. Claire accepted the hospital’s baby-girl gift bag, signed out, and then the nurse said goodbye and left Claire in the lawyer’s command. There was no reason for Claire to be sitting there in the wheelchair like a cripple except that it was hospital policy. She could have walked. She could have gotten up and run if only the baby hadn’t been sleeping in her lap. The lawyer, in a black cashmere overcoat, went up to a woman in a tweed car coat who was standing alone.

“Is that the baby?” the woman asked, nodding in Claire’s direction.

“Yes,” the lawyer said.

As the two of them approached, Claire felt weak for the first time since the birth. The lawyer lifted the baby from her lap, and it was as if some vital organ had been ripped out. On the baby’s wrist was a name bracelet made out of tiny square pink and white beads — all blank. Claire wanted to take the bracelet off so she’d have something to keep, but she was afraid the child would cry and attract attention.

The lawyer handed the baby to the woman. “If you ever see her again,” he said, pointing at Claire, “do not acknowledge her.”

The woman nodded and looked down at the baby in her arms. “Pretty baby,” she said. “Your new mommy and daddy are going to be so glad to have you.”

The lawyer rolled Claire out the door behind the woman and the baby. Claire stared at her back and tried to read her mind, wondering who she was under that big, thick coat. Outside, the lawyer slipped the gift bag over the woman’s shoulder and she walked off, trailing the twin vapors of her breath and the baby’s.

Claire closed her eyes, not wanting to see the child leave. If Claire had been a stronger person, she would have stopped them. She would have screamed, “My baby, my baby, they’ve stolen my baby!” and the hospital security guard would have chased after the woman. The lawyer, seeing the commotion, thinking it best not to be involved, would have simply gotten into his car and driven off. Instead, he pulled his Buick up to the hospital entrance and drove Claire to a nearby park, where her father was waiting. An envelope was exchanged and the lawyer took off, tires spinning in the gravel.

The whole way back to Baltimore, all her father said was “I had to take off work to do this.”

As Claire climbed out of the car, her father added, “I hope things will be easier now,” and tried to pat her on the back, but she was already most of the way out, and his hand landed on her rear end. He blushed and brusquely told her to close the door quickly—“Cold air’s coming in.”

Claire went back to Baltimore with nothing except the memory of a three-day-old monkey face, pink cheeks, thick brown hair that stood in a point, and blue eyes she was sure already saw through her and hated her. She went back to the apartment and found that nothing had changed except the milk in the refrigerator had turned.

“It’s better this way,” her mother said on the phone while her father was at work. “Believe me.”

• • •

In Macy’s, Claire bought Jake and Adam clothes and toys and tapes and books. She charged over four hundred dollars’ worth and then had a hard time stuffing everything into a cab.

The phone was ringing when she stepped into her office. She grabbed it just before the machine picked up.

“Hi, it’s Barbara Schwartz. Were you in session?”

“No, just coming in the door,” Claire said. “Hang on.” She pulled all of her packages in, closed the door, and brought the phone over to the sofa.

“So, how are you?” Claire asked.

“Good,” Barbara said. “Tired, but good. I only have a minute between patients, but I wanted to call you back.”

“I’m seeing Jody Goodman. She’s been accepted into graduate school and can’t decide whether or not to go.”

“UCLA?”

“Yes.”

“Great,” Barbara said. “That’s what she’s always wanted. Jody’s special — a great imagination, smart. A thinker. Sometimes she feels obligated to kid around, to compensate for the dark stuff. But basically she’s all there. The main thing was getting her away from her family. They’re pretty dependent, and she’s always been too involved. She needs a lot of support, reassurance.”

“Any secrets?” Claire asked. There was noise in the background. Barbara didn’t seem to hear the question. Claire looked around her office; compared with Rosenblatt’s, it was quiet, humble, a relief.

“Oh God, here’s my patient. Anything else?” Barbara said.

“Is she a game player?”

“Game player?”

“You know,” Claire said. “Tall tales. Manipulative?”

“Not at all,” Barbara said, surprised. “Why?”

“Just curious. How’re the kids?”

“Great. Yours?”

“Fine. Everything’s fine.”

“Stay in touch. I’m glad you’re seeing her.”

Claire hung up, thinking she liked Barbara even more than she remembered, if only because Barbara was too busy to talk about Jody or, more importantly, anything else.

“Y our plane didn’t crash,” Claire said. She stood in the door to her office, smiling.

“Beginner’s luck,” Jody said.

“So, how’d it go?”

“I got into a fight with my mother on the way to the airport.” Jody turned in her chair and prepared to pantomime. “Me: ‘I don’t want to go to Los Angeles. I never said I wanted to go. I don’t even want to go to film school. I lied. I want to be a receptionist in a dentist’s office.’ My mother: ‘The dentist? You hate the dentist. Why would you want to work there?’” Jody said it slowly and deadpan. “Had a nervous breakdown on the runway. The engines started and it was like my guilt weighed enough to bring the plane down. My mother doesn’t want me to go away. It’s true. She secretly wants me to live with her forever. As we’re going down the runway, I start apologizing all over the place. The plane lifts up off the ground — we’re at the angle where you feel like an astronaut — and my mother squeezes my hand and says, ‘It would be good if you could learn to be nicer to me. After all, I won’t last forever.’ Up in the air, I’m chanting to myself: ‘I will never be mean to my mother again. I will never be mean …’ They served dinner. My mother kept trying to lower my tray table and I kept putting it back up. I didn’t want anything. She says, ‘You paid for it, at least let them give it to you.’ And I’m like, ‘Who’s gonna eat it — the guy snoring across the aisle?’ My mother ate her dinner and then all of mine.”