A. Homes - In A Country Of Mothers

“Is there anything special you like to do with your friends?”

Jake shrugged again.

“Jake’s on the baseball team, and the soccer team, and he plays the trumpet,” Claire said.

Both Jake and Rosenblatt gave her hard looks, then ignored her.

“Do you like sports?” Rosenblatt asked.

“I guess.”

“Any one in particular?”

It went on like that for half an hour. In monosyllabic statements, Rosenblatt found out that Jake liked to eat in restaurants and go to movies, liked girls but didn’t have a girlfriend yet, blushed easily, thought his father was okay, wished his family was bigger, hoped one day he’d get his own room, and still wanted a drum set for his birthday even though his parents said it wasn’t a possibility.

Every so often Rosenblatt would bring her into the conversation in the worst way. “Is it true Jake sometimes says he has a stomachache when really there’s nothing wrong? Did you really throw out the copy of Playboy that he borrowed from a friend’s brother?” So she sat in her corner, distant, excluded, staring at the slice of the Chrysler Building visible from Rosenblatt’s window. Briefly she considered whether she should have asked Sam to come with them. But there was something about the nature of the problem that made Claire think it was strictly between her and Jake, a mother/son thing.

Claire pictured her own family in therapy. Her father would’ve sat on a chair as far away from the rest of them as possible, both feet planted on the floor, arms crossed over his belly, face unpleasant, chin doubled onto his chest. Her mother would be in the middle, her attention split between husband, daughters, doctor. Her sister would be in a swivel chair, spinning in circles, touching everything on the doctor’s desk, and no one would tell her to stop. There would be no chair for Claire; she would be forced to stand in the middle of the room. “See,” her father would say, “she’s always doing something to get attention. Everyone else is sitting down and she insists on standing up.”

In Rosenblatt’s office, Claire all of a sudden remembered that her sister always had earaches. When they went swimming, Laura had to put special plugs in her ears and wear a bathing cap and still try to keep her head above water. She swam laps with her neck stretched out, like a rare bird, the bright orange and yellow flowers on their mother’s hand-me-down rubber cap flapping in the breeze. Claire thought of Jody’s ears, thought of Jody’s tetracycline-stained teeth and tried to picture her sister’s mouth, but saw nothing except Laura’s head with the bathing cap on it and the thick red line running like a vein across her forehead that stayed for hours after she took the cap off.

That was it. On Rosenblatt’s lousy black leather sofa, while her son and this pompous ass transferred and countertransferred all their boy/man business, it all began to make sense. She’d figured it out. Laura had accidentally met Barbara at a conference — probably something like “Adolescent Willfulness” or “Finding Meaning in Your Marriage.” From across the room Barbara had seen someone she thought was Claire — the two sisters looked a lot alike — and ran over, calling Claire’s name. Laura smiled, said she had a sister by that name, and everything came out — Barbara’s discovery that she had a patient who was Claire’s actual daughter. Barbara and Laura skipped their afternoon panels and over coffee came up with the plan to send Jody to Claire. I am your child, back from darkest Peru. Barbara and Laura thought they’d done a remarkable thing. They got together, swapped details about Jody and Claire, and wondered if Claire had figured it out. They laughed. They became best friends. The two families rented a beach house together and had cookouts. Barbara, Laura, and their husbands sat in lounge chairs in the backyard while their children stood around a Weber grill toasting marshmallows. It was perfectly logical. Barbara and Laura would love each other. Long ago, Barbara had married someone who worked for the government — some sort of analyst or spy — and had moved from Baltimore to Washington. She’d grown up, stopped burning holes in other people’s sweaters, quit smoking, started drinking wine, embraced security, rules, and regulations, the conservative style of Washington society. She’d become a hard-core do-righter, in the sense of embracing the system, becoming the system, and believing in it. She would think Laura was great — exactly as Claire had seemed but not as depressed, not as quirky or weird. Claire hated them both.

“How would you feel about coming to see me once a week? Not with your mother, but by yourself?”

Claire was whipped through time back into the room, slightly dazed. What happened? What had she missed?

Jake shrugged.

“Is that something you’d be able to do?”

“I guess,” Jake said.

Claire was furious. Claire and Rosenblatt hadn’t discussed the possibility of Jake going into individual therapy, and to ask Jake about it before checking with Claire and Sam took a lot of nerve. After all, they’d have to pay for it. Rosenblatt was playing dirty, using Jake to manipulate Claire.

“How would you feel about Jake coming here?” Rosenblatt asked her.

Claire glared at him. “I’ll have to discuss it with Sam. We’ll call you.”

If Jake were left alone with Rosenblatt, together they would perform strange male rituals that worked like magnetic polar curses and drove the mother figure farther and farther away, until finally Jake would live in Maine and Claire in Florida.

“Why don’t we go ahead and make a time,” Rosenblatt said. “When do you get out of school on Wednesdays?”

“Let’s wait,” Claire said.

It was her obligation to protect what she perceived to be the best interests of her child. And if he needed to be in therapy, it would certainly be with someone else.

“I’m done at three,” Jake said, looking at his mother.

“I think you have an orthodontist appointment Wednesday,” Claire said, standing up. “We’ll have to check the book at home and call you.” Claire waited for Jake to get up and then marched out of the office.

“What a fucking asshole,” she said in the elevator.

“Mom,” Jake whined.

“Did you see what he did? Did you see how he tried to use me? He tried to use the process to get what he wanted? What a creep.”

“I didn’t think he did anything all that bad.”

Claire didn’t answer. Jake was eleven years old, he never thought anything anyone did was all that bad; that was part of the problem. She patted his head. “Do you think you need to talk to someone?”

Jake shrugged.

“You always have your father and me, and if you feel like you need someone else, let me know and we’ll find you someone, someone good.”

They walked a few blocks in the cool air, among the Saturday crowds. Claire walked quickly, hoping she wouldn’t go marching back to Rosenblatt’s office and give him a piece of her mind. She’d given him too much already.

“I kind of liked him,” Jake said after a while.

Claire shrugged. “There are plenty of other people you’d like even better. So, where would you like to go?”

“You don’t have to spend the whole afternoon with me,” Jake said. “Why don’t you just give me twenty dollars and drop me off at Matt’s house?”

Claire shook her head. “I want to spend the afternoon with you. How about a museum? We haven’t been to a museum in a long time.”

“Aren’t I a little old for that?” Jake said.

“No.” Claire almost laughed. “Which one do you like best?”

“I guess the Modern is more grown-up than Natural History,” Jake said.