A. Homes: In A Country Of Mothers

“How do you know Barbara Schwartz?” Claire asked.

“She used to be my shrink.”

“How long ago?”

“Two years. I stopped when I moved to New York.”

“Would you like to come in tomorrow? I could see you at twelve-thirty.”

“Yeah, sure. I think that’ll work.”

“See you then,” Claire said, and hung up.

She flipped through her Rolodex, found Barbara Schwartz’s number, and started to dial, but then stopped herself. She didn’t want anyone’s impressions to interfere with her own. If she needed to talk to Barbara, she’d do it later.

Barbara Schwartz. Whenever the past crossed into the present, Claire got nervous. All day she saw what memory was for people: a stomping ground for bad feelings, frozen worst moments, gone over again and again until they were smooth and hard like calluses or beach glass. When things got bad for Claire, Sam tried to make her feel better by saying, “What happened, happened. Look at it this way: if you had to do it over again, you’d do it differently — who wouldn’t?” Claire accepted it. She accepted what had happened with the kind of resignation that was in some way expected of her. There was no reason to discuss it. What happened, happened. Past is past.

Barbara Schwartz, an immigrant from Tucson, Arizona. “The onliest Jew in the West” was what she’d called herself. Nineteen sixty-seven. Little Barbie in Baltimore, with her frizzy brown hair dyed blond. A row house subdivided into apartments; Barbara, the young social worker with her first grown-up job, downstairs, and Claire, depressed, upstairs. Barbarella Schwartz, who borrowed Claire’s cashmere sweaters for dates. Claire lent them, not caring that they came back with stains or cigarette burns. Somehow, if her sweaters went out on dates, it counted for Claire too. She’d sit up watching television, waiting for her sweater to come home. And when it got back, Claire would carry the contents of her refrigerator into her bed, and she and Barbara would lie there watching the late movie and saying nasty things about men. It was on one of those nights that Claire almost told Barbara her secret — the truly worst thing about a man, the reason she was in Baltimore. But she chickened out, afraid the story would ruin their friendship.

Baltimore was more than twenty years ago. Claire had arrived almost a year before Barbara, and stayed two years after she left. The whole time, the whole four years, she’d waited there in that same apartment, secretly hoping that what had been done would somehow, of its own volition, become undone. If only she waited long enough.

It was 1966 when Claire’s father had stormed out of their suburban Virginia split-level house shouting, “Something has to be done! This has to be put to rest!” while Claire lay on her twin bed, staring at the white lacquered furniture set, a child for the last time. She imagined her father going off to the local veterinarian and arranging to have her put to sleep. She imagined she wouldn’t live to get old. Her mother came in and silently started packing Claire’s things, putting in a few odd pieces of her own clothing as gifts. When her father returned, Claire followed her suitcase out to the car, and in silence they drove away. It was dark when he pulled up in front of the house in Baltimore, a place that might as well have been on the moon considering that Claire had never been there either. He carried the bag up the steps, unlocked the apartment, and dropped the suitcase inside. “Here,” he said, handing her the keys and an envelope from the bank. “Make it last. We can’t afford this kind of thing.”

Her father drove off, and Claire stood in the front window, dumbfounded.

As far as she knew, neither of her parents had ever told anyone. Her mother once said that if anyone asked, she’d say, “She’s gone off to Goucher College to study English literature”—something Claire would have gladly done, if only Goucher had accepted pregnant students.

The phone rang just as Claire was putting on her jacket, getting ready to leave the office.

“I know we’re getting together on Saturday, but how about meeting me for dinner tonight?” her friend Naomi asked. “I called your house and Sam isn’t coming home until late.”

“I haven’t been home all day,” Claire said.

“What’s another hour?”

The golden hour, the difference between life and death for trauma patients. “Sure,” Claire said. “Ten minutes.”

They didn’t have to discuss where to go. They always met at the same Italian cafe on Thompson Street.

“My family,” Naomi said, “is driving me nuts.”

Although Claire had never told her so, Naomi was her alter ego. She did and said all the things Claire only imagined.

“I feel like running away,” Naomi said. “I just want to say goodbye, close the door, and be gone. Sometimes I look at Roger and I want to know why. Why did I do this? Why did I get married? It’s like having a fourth child. If I’d stayed by myself and adopted a baby, at least I’d be alone when I got into bed at night. There’s no escaping. It’s either his children or him.”

Claire nodded. She twirled pasta on her fork and slipped it into her mouth. She smiled.

“There’s nowhere I can go for a minute of silence. I’ve started hiding in the kitchen. I stay in there all night purposely burning things that smell terrible so they’ll leave me alone.”

“Not a good sign,” Claire said, blotting marinara sauce from her lips. “Why don’t you go away for a weekend?”

“By myself?”

“Why not?”

“What would I do? Who would I talk to? I’d end up staying in the hotel room the whole time.”

“Go to a bed and breakfast upstate, or out to the beach. There’s a spa in Montauk, get a massage, an herbal mud wrap.”

The couple at the table behind them were arguing about something unbelievably stupid, destroying their relationship because both of them were determined to win. Eating her pasta, Claire realized that if she were really doing her job, if she turned around and explained it to them, her work would never end.

“Not to change the subject, but can I ask you a completely unrelated question?”

Claire nodded.

“How do you get your hair to do that?” Naomi asked. “Is it like a goy thing?”

Claire put her hand to her hair, which was up in a bun. “Hidden pins,” she said. “I’ll show you sometime.”

“Anybody home?” Claire called as she opened the front door. The television was blaring. “Hello … hello? ” She made a mental note to talk to Frecia again about the television. She hung up her coat, flipped through the mail, and went into the living room. Adam was curled up on the sofa with his stuffed rabbit. His hair was still damp from his bath. He looked tired, as though recovering from something. Jake sat next to him, eyes fixed on the TV. Frecia was at the far end of the sofa, folding laundry, stacking clean clothing on the coffee table. Claire went to Adam and kissed him on the forehead, leaving her lips against his skin a little longer than necessary, trying to decide whether or not to take his temperature.

“How was your day?” she asked.

No one answered.

“Anyone call?”

Frecia shook her head. Claire picked up the remote and turned the TV off.

“Mom, it’s the middle,” Jake said, still staring at the screen.

“Sorry,” she said. “Did you finish your homework?”

As much as she wanted to leave her children alone, to let them run their own lives, she couldn’t. They sprawled like inert objects, deflated balloons. Neither of them could focus on anything for more than a minute without becoming distracted. She was sure it was a birth defect that would become increasingly pronounced, so that by the time they were eighteen, when all the other kids were going off to college, hers would have to be institutionalized. She and Sam would begin new lives, adopting children from some far-off, war-torn country, raising them fully, lovingly. On Sundays she and Sam and the new children would go on long car rides to the distant institution where her old children lounged on plastic-covered, drool-protected sofas.