A. Homes - In A Country Of Mothers

“I’m so bored,” Naomi said when she called Claire at seven-thirty. “You’re sleeping? I’ve been up since six. I can’t take it anymore. Can we do something today — just for us? Go to Soho for lunch, walk around, spend money?”

“Patients all day,” Claire said. “Maybe next week I can juggle the schedule.”

“So busy,” Naomi said. “Are you sure you’re not having an affair?”

“Just busy,” she said.

Claire wished she could talk to Naomi about Jody. She wanted someone to know, but the one time she had tried to tell her, it hadn’t gone over well. “You act like you’re in love,” Naomi said. “The way you talk about her, you get all jazzed up.” Claire shrugged and said, “Well, she’s interesting,” and then dropped the subject permanently.

At nine-forty-five Claire buzzed Polly in. In the taxi as they left the clinic, Polly had told Claire she was going home for a while and wouldn’t make the next few appointments. Claire wasn’t sure she believed her. Maybe mixing Claire with the abortion experience had been too much. Maybe just the sight of a shrink out of context made the world too confusing; maybe that’s why shrinks saw people in offices. But it had seemed like the right thing to do.

“How’re you feeling?” Claire asked.

For once Polly wasn’t crying. She wasn’t carrying her own personal box of Kleenex. Some days she’d start up in the waiting room. Now there was nothing on her face except a vaguely blank look. Worried, Claire half-wished for tears and considered what their absence meant. Resignation, strange surrender, or perhaps even progress? “Was it good to go home for a while?” Claire asked.

Polly didn’t answer, and they sat quietly for a few minutes. Claire decided that calling attention to the crying or lack thereof would be too aggressive. Sometimes you had to let things play out. If she mentioned noticing a difference, the temptation to regress would get stronger.

“Is there something special you’d like to talk about?”

Polly didn’t speak. They sat in silence for the full session, something Claire found difficult but had trained herself to do. The real trick was figuring out what she should do with herself. She’d learned to relax in her chair, to look comfortable and communicative while daydreaming behind an expression of sincerity.

At the end of the hour, Claire said softly, “Should we make an appointment for next week?”

Polly nodded. At least she didn’t say “No,” or “I’ll be dead by next week.” Claire hated it when patients did that, especially at the end of the session. She’d have five minutes or less to sweet-talk them into living a week longer, all the time sweating the details: How serious were they, what was the likelihood, and would it be her fault?

“Tuesday at two,” Claire said.

Polly nodded, then got up and left.

Jody was coming just as Polly walked out and had to turn sideways to avoid a collision.

“What’d you do, steal her Hershey bar?” Jody asked Claire once the door was closed.

Claire smiled but didn’t answer. She wasn’t allowed to.

Jody walked into the office and sat down. “What’s up?”

Claire raised her eyebrows.

“Did you have a good weekend? Do you want to talk about it?” Jody asked.

Claire didn’t say anything. The fastest way to get Jody to change the subject was to ignore her.

“Okay. Let’s talk about the multitude of ways a person can get to California,” Jody said. “There’s two roads, it’s your basic low-road, highroad deal. You can take the bus, like my father did forty years ago. It still takes a week. Or is it a month? There’s a train that goes straight from New York to Chicago, but then you have to switch, and keep on switching the whole rest of the way across, even out in the desert, where they have poisonous train-switching desert snakes.” She paused, as if waiting for a laugh track. “Or you can take my mother’s car. She’s getting a new one. We’re driving out together. It’s kind of a mother-daughter thing. She even wants my father to go, but I said no way. Not because I don’t like him, but realistically, all three of us in the car for five days, it could get ugly. My dad offered to do it himself. To drop me off in L.A. But I really need my mom. Is that terrible? Okay, I’m admitting it. I need my mother. If I get to a new place without her, I freak. I don’t know what to do — how to unpack or arrange the closets. I have zero nesting instinct.”

Claire still didn’t say anything. Polly’s silence had rubbed off on her.

“I’m leaving in about a month.”

“I’ll miss you,” Claire said, staring at Jody, thinking about the dream, trying to remember what Mark really looked like, how he carried himself.

“Yeah, well …” Jody said. “Anyway, don’t you think I should start getting ready, if only conceptually?”

“Soon,” Claire said, and then was quiet for a minute. “I’ve been thinking about your being adopted.”

“That’s really nice of you,” Jody said. “I’ve been slacking off myself.”

Claire felt guilty. She was doing this for herself. It had nothing to do with Jody, and it was bad practice. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” she said, giving Jody an out.

“I can talk about it,” Jody said.

Claire pretended to be unaware of the fact that Jody would do whatever Claire wanted her to. “When is your birthday?”

“Why?” Jody asked. “Do you want to buy me a present? I don’t have a CD player or a Cuisinart.”

“Do you know what hospital you were born at?” Claire asked matter-of-factly, looking at the sky outside her windows.

“It went out of business.”

“I’m trying to have a serious conversation,” Claire said, annoyed, focusing in.

“Sorry, but it’s true. It went bankrupt or corrupt or something and closed. A little depressing, isn’t it? My one connection to my real mother goes out of business.”

“What was it called?”

“I don’t know,” Jody said, looking puzzled. “My elementary school also closed. They turned it into an office building. Do you think this means something?”

“If you know that it closed, you must have known what it was called.”

Jody looked at her. “I did know,” she said. “But I’ve forgotten. Doctors, maybe. Is that the name of a hospital? Or is it a TV show? Why do you care, anyway — are you, like, a hospital groupie?”

Claire remembered a Doctors Hospital in Washington, somewhere downtown. But she’d given birth at Columbia Hospital for Women.

“Would you want to know who your mother was?” Claire asked a few minutes later.

Contemplating the Rothko print on the wall, Jody shrugged. “If someone was passing out pictures, saying ‘This is your mother,’ I’d look. I’d be curious. If someone came right up to me and said ‘Your mother’s name is whatever and she lives wherever and here’s her phone number,’ I’d listen, I’d take the information, but I don’t know what I’d do with it. It might mess me up.”

“How?”

“First off, I have a mother and a father already. That’s good enough, isn’t it? I mean, it should be, shouldn’t it? Second, it would grate on me and in a moment of weakness, a moment of wanting something, I might call and get rejected. She gave me away, remember? Chances are, she doesn’t want anything to do with me. I’m like a bad memory.”

“Do you ever think she might be out there looking for you?”

“No,” Jody said sharply. “Why would you say that?”

“I was just curious whether you’d ever thought about it from her side.”

“Why should I?”

Claire didn’t respond. “So, you’d never do a search or anything like that?”