A. Homes - In A Country Of Mothers

“No,” Claire said. “But I feel like I have no family; no one who knew me as a child. I have Sam and the kids, but Sam doesn’t belong to me.” She paused. “And my children are spoiled slugs.”

Claire almost started crying, but stopped herself. There were huge holes in what she said, but she knew Rosenblatt didn’t see them. She’d done a good job. All the same, as she sat in Rosenblatt’s big leather chair, talking, she felt as though she was starting to fall through. She wouldn’t tell him the whole story; she’d promised herself that.

The silence made her uncomfortable. She looked at Rosenblatt. He was someone she knew. She knew a million people who knew him. On the phone, she’d made it clear she was coming in for a bit of advice, not a whole big thing, just some clues from a seasoned expert who had one kid at Yale and another at Harvard. Rosenblatt was staring at her knees — bony and poking out from the edge of her skirt — hiding his discomfort behind his glasses and the pose of the elder, a professional, a man. He could do it to her and get away with it.

Claire told herself to keep it all a little more tightly wrapped. Talk to Sam, she told herself. Sam never seemed to think anything was all that strange.

More silence. Claire pulled herself back to the surface and got angry. Her anger would save her. She tried to get really mad, but was exhausted from the effort of sorting her life into two piles, secrets and things that were all right to discuss. She’d done well. None of the really messy stuff had come out — not Baltimore, not anything about her life after she left home. The one saving grace was that it sounded normal enough to say you left home at eighteen. She never added that in her parents’ home, the expectation was that she wouldn’t leave until her wedding day.

“We’re running out of time,” he said. “Where should we go from here?”

Bob Rosenblatt had done her a disservice, opening everything up. One could argue that like certain types of surgery, it needed to be done; that it was necessary to release the pressure before it built into an explosion. All the same, the side effects included the loss of her good sense.

“Would you like to come in again — say, next Monday at nine?”

Claire took out her appointment book. That she also did this for a living seemed strange. She felt like a fraud.

“Fine,” Claire said, getting up to leave, annoyed that she’d gone ahead and made another appointment instead of saying what she really thought.

She walked down Fifth Avenue toward Sixteenth Street, trying to shake off the Rosenblatt effect, stopping to look in windows along the way. She was meeting Sam for lunch, something they did once every couple of weeks, often enough that it didn’t feel like a doomed occasion where one of them would confess to something horrible: I’m leaving, the test came back, I’ve done something you won’t forgive me for. Claire got to the restaurant a little early and had a glass of wine at the bar.

“Whose fault is it?” Sam whispered in her ear, taking her arm and following the maitre d’ to their table. “If it’s genetic, it’s your side. Jews are never like that.”

The restaurant was filled with good-looking, well-dressed men and women gorging themselves on expense accounts. When the waiter handed them menus, Claire hid behind hers. Over four-tomato soup with floating goat cheese she began to cry. Sam’s face wrinkled. He always cried when she cried. The people at the next table stared. Claire forced herself to stop, blotted her eyes, and then looked up.

“A joke?” Sam asked, pouring her a glass of wine.

Claire nodded.

“Two guys, Abe and Louie. A promise: first one dies calls the other, tells him what heaven’s like. Twenty years later, Abe dies. Couple months go by, Louie’s phone rings. ‘Abe?’ ‘Louie?’ ‘Abe, is that you?’ ‘Louie?’ ‘So tell me, Abe, what’s it like?’ ‘You wouldn’t believe. Wake up in the morning, have sex, a little breakfast, a nap. Lunch, some sex, rest till dinner, a little nosh, more sex, then sleep all night like a baby.’ ‘Heaven sounds incredible, Abe.’ ‘Heaven, Schmeven — I’m a bear in Colorado.’”

Claire only smiled, having sunk too far into herself to laugh. She ate her soup looking at Sam. It was normal to go back, to reconsider, to move backwards before going forward. She remembered that when she first met Sam, his hair had been thick, cut like a thatched roof — a Jewish Robert Redford. In her mind, the closest she’d get to marrying him would be sleeping with him two, maybe three times, and then he’d move on to someone more challenging, more sophisticated. Sam was too good for her. Everything was too good.

They met at a demonstration at Columbia; she was getting her Ph.D. in psych and he had just finished law school. They were both watching friends get arrested. He grabbed her hand and pulled her away from the crowd. Together they went to the police station and waited for their friends to be released. Afterwards they all went out for Chinese food, and one of Sam’s friends explained in minute detail how carefully a male cop had searched her. “I had some dope on me and he was getting close, so I stated telling him how much he was turning me on and gave him a blow job to keep him distracted. It worked,” she said, pulling a baggie of pot out of her pocket and handing it to Sam. “I owe you this, for coming to get me.”

Later, in Claire’s apartment on 106th Street, Claire and Sam smoked the dope. Claire wasn’t used to getting stoned, and freaked out, confessing everything. “I had a baby,” she told him.

“You mean you had an abortion,” Sam said.

“No, I had a baby. No one knows. Years ago, a little girl. My parents made me give her away. I never should have given her up.” The words repeated themselves in her head, and then, as if something in her had broken, Claire started crying and repeating “I had a baby, I had a baby” again and again, wailing, bellowing like an animal. She was crying so hard and so strangely that she scared herself. She started thinking that the dope had been laced with something, that this feeling would last forever and she would never be herself again.

Sam got a cool washcloth and rubbed it over her face and arms. He found a Valium in the medicine cabinet and slipped it into her mouth. Sitting next to her on the bed, he held her hands until she fell asleep; and while she slept he cleaned the apartment, rearranged things so that the place seemed larger, took down the dark red curtains she’d made herself, and washed the windows. She woke up in a different world.

Claire picked at the swordfish she’d ordered and watched Sam spin the tricolored pasta onto his fork. The older Sam got, the better he looked, the more relaxed he seemed. If she weren’t so miserable, she’d be happy.

“Are you okay?” he asked, cutting a piece of her fish for himself.

“I’ll be fine.” She reached under the table, pretending she’d dropped her napkin, and rubbed his crotch. “Do you want to come back to my office after lunch?”

“Can’t,” he said, chewing.

“I love you,” Claire said, her hand still under the table. Sam leaned across the wineglasses and kissed her. Out of the corner of her eye, Claire saw the two women at the next table watching.

Back in the office, Claire told herself she had to focus on something. Work more. Being a shrink was lonely business; most of the people Claire knew were also shrinks who, between their practices and their real lives, were too busy for anything other than a quick breezy chat between sessions. And then there were her patients, but they weren’t exactly available for afternoon cappuccino. A little high from the three glasses of wine, Claire sat looking out the window, waiting for her next victim, thinking she should put a sign up: TODAY ONLY, HALF-PRICE SPECIAL, SPACED-OUT SHRINK.