In A Country Of Mothers

19

Jody lay like a corpse on the twin bed of her childhood. The bed was too narrow, too short, too small, not unlike a coffin or a crib. From her window she could see her mother and father in the driveway, packing the car. She figured they would have to load her in along with all the old furniture they’d dredged up from the basement; furniture too good to throw out, too terrible to bring upstairs, perfect for Jody’s new home. There wouldn’t be room, and so they’d have to decide what to tie to the roof, Jody or the big old coffee table.

“It’s exactly what you need,” her mother said. “And in a couple of years, when you’re finished, you can leave it there. You don’t have to bring it back. Who could ask for more?”

Jody could. If she wanted to live in a room with her parents’ rejected housewares, she’d simply move into their basement. She didn’t have to drive 2,605 miles to do it. According to the Triple-A Triptik sitting on the front hall table, it was exactly 2,605 miles. The Triptik was as thick as a book, with miniature foldout maps, page after page of America, laid out with a thick green line marking Jody’s route. She wasn’t looking forward to it.

She watched her father reach into the car and beep the horn. “Jody,” he called. “Jody, come on out.” Through the carport, the windows, the house, the door to her room, his voice sounded thin, tired, like he was getting too old and trying too hard.

Jody lay on the bed. She wasn’t ready.

Her mother came into the room. “Daddy’s checking the tires,” she said. “I’ll drive first so you can rest. Look, I have something for you.” She pulled her hand out from behind her back and showed Jody an economy-size bag of M&M’s.

Did they think Jody could be bribed? Would they lay a trail of candy from her bed to the car and hope she’d follow it?

“I made a whole bag of sandwiches. And there’s a six-pack of Coke in a cooler. It’s going to be fun. I haven’t been on a real car trip in years.” She took her other hand from behind her back. “Pepperidge Farm cookies,” she said, swinging a bag of Milanos back and forth hypnotically.

Jody wasn’t hungry.

“You don’t want to go,” her mother said, and Jody was thankful for the words spoken. She nodded. “Give me your hand.” Her mother took Jody’s hand and pulled her up. “Now go arid wash your face.” She led Jody to the bathroom, pushed her in gently, and closed the door. “I know this isn’t easy for you,” she said through the door, “but it’s what you wanted. You’ve been talking about UCLA ever since junior high when you got that crush on Steven Silberberg.”

“Spielberg,” Jody said. “I got over it. He looks like a truck driver now — beard, baseball cap. They have truck drivers everywhere, I don’t have to schlep to California.”

“And I don’t have to either, but I’m doing it,” her mother said. “You never liked change. The first day I took you to nursery school you didn’t want to go, but I mustered my strength and left you there and you were fine.”

Scarred for life, Jody thought.

“You’ve never liked new things. You’re not very experimental. If there’s one thing you should work on while you’re out there, it’s trying new things.”

“Mom, if you don’t stop talking, I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“I’ll be waiting in the car.”

Jody had been out of New York less than a week and already she missed everything and everyone. She missed working on the movie, watching people watch Carol Heberton, watching Harry’s chin wiggle when he laughed. She missed the teasing, the repartee. She missed Ellen and Claire.

“Now, listen,” her father said, pulling Jody aside, slipping a roll of cash into her palm. “Enjoy. Go slow, stop at decent motels. Don’t eat on the run. Sit down, have a meal.”

“Dad,” Jody said.

“Have a good trip and good luck out there.” He hugged her, patting her back.

His hand felt smaller, more fragile, than she remembered. Little red blood spiders hid beneath the surface of his cheeks. “Thanks,” Jody said, kissing her father goodbye and hating the sandpaper texture of his skin.

Her mother backed the old Saab out of the driveway and simultaneously started crying. “Find me a Kleenex,” she said, sniffling. “In the glove compartment.”

“Stop crying,” Jody ordered.

“I’m just so proud of you.”

Jody sighed. She felt like she was riding to her own funeral, awake and annoyed.

The end of the driveway, the stop sign at the bottom of the hill, the ramp to the highway — everything marked the beginning of the final stage; she was being chauffeured to her death.

The whole way around the beltway, her mother kept blowing her nose, blotting her eyes, and handing balled-up Kleenex to Jody, who stuffed them between the seats.

Despite her mother’s sniffling, despite the Triptik on the dashboard, despite the pile of maps at her feet, despite the sensation of impending doom, Jody had somehow convinced herself they were just going for a pleasant ride on a sunny day, no big deal. Sunday-drive material, up through Skyline Drive to Luray Caverns. She remembered a stalagmite that looked like a fried egg. She’d seen it once a year every year, usually in the fall, until she was about fourteen and stopped going places with her parents.

“Did you ever go to Luray without me?” Jody asked.

“No. We did it for you. Don’t you remember? Every Sunday we took you somewhere.”

Mountain views, vegetable stands, apple picking, historical sites, houses of the famous and dead, battlefields — the stuff of field trips.

“I remember,” Jody said. “But what did you do after I left, when I was in college?”

“We visited dead Grandma.”

Dead Grandma as opposed to living Grandma. Dead Grandma, her father’s mother, used to be in the nursing home that Jody was too petrified to walk into. She’d tried to once, but got dizzy in the lobby and had to wait there while her parents went upstairs. She sat for an hour in front of a huge sign that said TODAY IS: Sunday March 15 1984. TONIGHT’S DINNER IS: Pot Roast and Apple Pie. IT IS Sunny OUTSIDE.

All of a sudden Jody didn’t know where she was.

“Where are we?”

“On the road to Mandalay. Let’s switch.”

What the hell is Mandalay? Jody mused. Her mother pulled off the road and Jody went around to the driver’s side.

They kept the doors locked, the windows rolled up, the air conditioning on high. Their only contact with the outside world was in gas stations, when the thick August air flooded the car quickly and silently. “Fill ’er up,” they said to the attendants, and took turns going into dark, clammy bathrooms and squatting over the toilet, trying not to touch anything.

“Did you wash your hands?” her mother would ask every time Jody got back into the car.

Nashville, Tennessee, in the dark was not quite a million miles from home, but far enough. A Holiday Inn, a hot shower, a grilled cheese sandwich, a glass of milk. A phone call to Dad, a message left on Ellen’s machine. All’s well that ends well. Network television. “The Tonight Show” and, finally, sleep.

“I’m going to Graceland, Graceland.” Paul Simon on the cassette deck.

“Mom, please — I always wanted to go to Graceland.”

“Why?”

“To see the other people that go there, maybe buy an Elvis head in one of those things you shake up and the snow falls. You know, Elvis with dandruff.”

“Let’s not make it take too long.”

Graceland: home of weeping women with high hair and polyester pants. Jody and her mother loved it. They spent seventy-five dollars on chotchkes. “Don’t ever tell your father,” Jody’s mother said, handing over the Visa card. “Don’t tell anyone.” When her mother wasn’t looking, Jody bought a gold-colored chain and locket complete with a picture of Jody and Elvis posed together courtesy, of modern technology and Polaroid film. She gave it to her mother late that night in a hotel room in Little Rock, Arkansas.

“I love you, Mom,” Jody said. “I really do.”

“I love you too, sweetie, but I never thought I’d be in Arkansas.”

They were in a fake-wood-paneled room, in twin beds, trying to fall asleep, trying not to let the blankets that had touched a thousand strangers touch them.

“I hope you realize that not every mother would do this.”

Jody didn’t say anything. She got up to check the chain on the door.

“Bring me two Advil, will you?” her mother said. “Everything is killing me.”

The next day, in Oklahoma, her mother insisted on singing Woody Guthrie songs all the way across the state. “This land is your land. This land is my land.” Oklahoma was six hours long — six hours of history, of her mother explaining about the dust bowl, the depression, migrant farming practices, all the reasons she’d refused to buy iceberg lettuce and green grapes during the majority of Jody’s youth. By the time they hit Texas, Jody felt as if she’d memorized and memorialized John Steinbeck, had been indoctrinated into and expelled from every left-wing political movement since the turn of the century.

The worst night fell in Amarillo, Texas. In the green tile bathroom of a motor court Jody’s gut was twisted by barbecued corn chips, root beer, and some sort of shredded meat sandwich her mother had pushed on her. Pained and delirious, Jody kept confusing Amarillo with armadillo, with the iguana in the Tennessee Williams play, with Richard Burton in Mexico. Was an iguana an armadillo? What was an armadillo, and why did they name a city after it?

“I have some Kaopectate in my toilet kit,” her mother told her. “It’s not so bad — you don’t have to drink it anymore. It’s a caplet, you just swallow it.”

The idea of swallowing anything made Jody even more nauseated. In a cold chill, goose bumps breaking out on her arms and thighs, she sat immobile on the toilet.

“Are you all right?” her mother called. “If it doesn’t stop, you’ll have to do something.”

“If it doesn’t stop there’s a reason,” Jody said. An hour later she came out of the bathroom, weak, thin, the odd green tile permanently tattooed on her eyes.

“I’m dying,” she announced.

“Does that mean I can go home now?” her mother said.

“Just make the funeral arrangements, then you can leave.”

“Go down the hall and get a cold ginger ale out of the machine. It’ll settle your stomach. You can bring me a soda too, something diet.” Her mother rummaged through her suitcase and pulled out her nightgown. “I’m going to take a bath.”

“Be careful in there,” Jody said, nodding toward the bathroom. “You might want to wait a bit.”

Her mother took the nightgown and her own personal can of Lysol and went into the bathroom. Jody heard a long hissing spray, closed her eyes, and slowly inhaled a long pull of germicide.

In the middle of the night, Jody woke to the sound of people fucking in the next room. Big sounds: out-of-control verbalizations, grunting, tortured bedsprings, Texas dirty talk. She hoped her mother would sleep through it.

“Santa Fe,” her mother said, reading the road signs aloud. “I didn’t realize we’d be this close. Can we stop?” she asked, taking the exit before Jody answered.

While her mother shopped for artifacts — Georgia O’Keeffe look-alike stuff — Jody bought postcards. Ever since they’d left home, she’d been thinking about what Claire would be like in the car, on the road. She kept trying to choose between Claire and her mother; and now she tried to envision the three of them in the car together, but it didn’t work.

From a pay phone Jody called Ellen, collect.

“Where are you? How’s L.A.?” Ellen asked.

“I’m not there yet,” Jody said. She heard a strange noise in the background. “Are you in the middle of something?”

Ellen didn’t say anything.

“Someone new? Someone I know?”

“Neither,” Ellen said. And there was a groan in the background.

Jody couldn’t tell if it was pleasure or disgust. “Well, don’t let me keep you,” she said. “I’ll call from L.A.”

The last time Jody had looked at the map, they were coming up on both the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest. She was starting to wish she’d brought some Valium.

“Tomorrow we rest,” her mother said as they unlocked the door to their room. “We go to the Grand Canyon. We spit on it.”

“In it,” Jody said.

“Whatever. You do what you want and I’ll do what I want.”

The Grand Canyon. If only Freud had seen it, Jody thought, life would be different. All around the analyzed world, the boundaries of acceptability would be broader and grandiosity would be celebrated. The significance of size in all subjects from dinner plates to penises would be acknowledged.

The day after their day off, the car broke down. It wouldn’t have been a road trip without a breakdown.

“How come you’re slowing down?” she asked her mother.

“I’m not,” her mother said, pumping the gas pedal, sliding the gears into neutral, and attempting to restart before gliding to a soft stop on the edge of the road.

“Shit,” Jody said, looking at the map. The time zone had changed again, Mountain to Pacific. If it was getting earlier and earlier, why did Jody feel like it was getting later and later?

She flipped through the Triptik, the Triple-A prayer book, and found the rescue number. The only hitch was that you had to be near a phone and they were in the middle of the goddamned desert. Jody could picture her mother making her get out of the car and walk. She’d walk for hours, become completely dehydrated, look up and see buzzards circling, waiting to come in for the kill.

Jody didn’t offer to get out of the car or to look under the hood. She didn’t say anything except “We probably shouldn’t use the air conditioning if the engine’s not running.”

Finally, a couple driving a station wagon stopped and offered to use their car to push Jody and her mother down the road to a gas station.

“Every day it’s something,” her mother said.

“Is that supposed to be comforting?”

“Do we have to pay them?” her mother asked.

“I don’t think so,” Jody said. “You could offer, but they probably won’t take it. They’re doing it because they feel bad for us, and want to prove to each other what good people they really are.”

“How do you know?”

Jody shrugged. At the gas station Jody’s mother offered the couple twenty dollars and they took it without even pretending to protest.

“Don’t see too many of these Japanese cars around here,” the guy in the gas station said.

“It’s a Saab,” Jody said. “From Scandinavia.”

“Same thing.” The guy couldn’t figure out how to open the hood. “Bunch of tricksters,” he said, laughing. Jody got out to help him. “Ought to be a law against it, arranging things so you can’t find ’em, don’t you think?” he asked, finally locating the dipstick and pulling it out. “Oil’s fine, though.” He put the stick back into its hole.

“Just die on you?”

Jody nodded.

“Could be the alternator — lots of these Volvos got alternator problems.”

“It’s a Saab,” Jody said, for the first time feeling possessive of the car that would be hers once they got to L.A.

“Well, give me a minute with it,” the guy said.

Jody and her mother sat in the station office, and while the mechanic futzed — dropping tools, cussing himself and the car out — Jody started thinking. She thought to herself until the thoughts were too much and she was driven to speak, if only to relieve the pressure of thinking.

“Did you ever regret getting me?” she asked her mother. She purposely said did and ever rather than do or now, because she wanted to make it easy for her mother to say yes. And she purposely didn’t use the word adopted, even though she knew her mother disliked it when Jody referred to herself as something they’d bought perhaps on a Sunday afternoon in a hardware store. Oh, and give me one of those children you’ve got over there. Lost my other one a couple of months ago, might as well go ahead and replace it now….

“Don’t you ever wish—”

Her mother cut her off. “I wonder why you’re asking that now?”

Jody knew why, sort of, but wasn’t about to admit anything. “A question with a question,” she said.

“This isn’t exactly the perfect place to talk.”

“It’s fine,” Jody said, looking around at the oily service bays.

“You,” her mother said, hitting the word with passion, “are my daughter.” It came out with a kind of frightening edge Jody wasn’t expecting. “Not someone else’s. Mine. So what if I didn’t have you? I couldn’t have you. I couldn’t have anyone else, either. Are you ever going to forgive me for not actually giving birth?”

Jody didn’t say anything. Usually her mother wasn’t so emphatic about it. Maybe they’d been driving too long, had spent too much time together, were too far from home, and were just plain exhausted. Jody felt bad. Her mother was fifty-five years old, almost past middle age, and still Jody pursued this topic with regularity and vigor. Would she ever give it up, or was it a ritual — their ritual, perhaps the basis for their relationship?

“I don’t make up for him,” Jody said, referring to her dead brother, whose name she couldn’t bring herself to say out loud in the wilds of Arizona.

“You’re not him,” her mother said. “No one ever asked you to be anything other than yourself.”

Jody knew this wasn’t true, but to explain in the middle of a gas station was too complicated. Her mother was right, this wasn’t the place for the conversation. It was a conversation best had some place safe and familiar, a place that could protect you even if you couldn’t protect yourself.

Regardless, Jody couldn’t let go. “If it weren’t for him dying,” she said, “you wouldn’t have adopted me.”

“We always wanted more children,” her mother answered.

It was a familiar excuse. When her brother was born, something had happened — a ruptured uterus, something, Jody couldn’t remember now. Anyway, the result was no more children. Her mother always used that medical fact as proof that Jody and the brother were separate issues.

“You never know,” her mother said. “I always wanted a little girl.”

“I know,” Jody said.

They’d never had the whole conversation, the one they had to have in order to put the thing to rest. They never really said anything. It was all hemming and hawing, out of fear that someone might say the wrong thing, someone might get hurt.

The car problem was solved more easily than the thoughts stirred by their half-conversation. Within the hour they were back on the road, quieter than before. Jody knew it was because they were getting closer to Los Angeles. The closer they got, the sooner her mother would leave. But before she could leave, they had to go over everything one more time, as if to refresh their memories and confirm their understanding, to make everything less than perfectly clear for the millionth time. It was ritualistic. From the dead brother, they would progress; it wouldn’t take long before they’d be discussing how Jody had hated to go to elementary school, moving on to her early therapy experiences, and closing out with how good it was that she was going off to graduate school to become what she’d always dreamed of being — a person? No. A filmmaker.

Two hundred and some miles later they were in California. Jody felt like she’d been holding her breath since they left home. In California she relaxed, breathed deeply, and then asked herself why. California was nothing, nowhere. It was the far edge of the country, a ledge waiting to fall into the ocean, an earthquake epicenter. Her chest tightened again, a strange shrinking sensation. She tried to comfort herself with signs. Mileage indicators, the big H’s indicating hospitals, exits, and names of towns were her favorites.

“We have to make a decision,” her mother said. “We’re about a hundred and fifty miles away. Do we want to knock ourselves out and just get there or do we stop now and wait until tomorrow? What do you feel like doing?”

“Dunno,” Jody said. “What do you want?”

“Rest,” her mother said.

Jody was glad. Suddenly she was in no hurry to get there. The longer it took, the better.

“I need some Advil,” her mother said. “I have this horrible muscle spasm in my back and all down my leg.”

“I think we should kill ourselves,” Jody blurted. “We should find a garage, close ourselves in, and let ’er rip.”

“Too late,” her mother said. “If that’s what you wanted, you should’ve said something a long time ago. Just after Little Rock you might’ve convinced me, but now it’s almost over.”

“Exactly,” Jody said. “It’s over.”

Jody lay on the bed in the final motor court of the journey paralyzed by the same thoughts that had frozen her five days before.

“You know,” her mother said from the tub, “we’re not going to be able to talk on the phone as much as we’ve been doing. It’s very expensive to call California, so let’s try and make it every other night from now on.”

Alone in the room, Jody started to cry. She didn’t mean to. Crying wasn’t her specialty. She lay there bewildered, the tears running down her face. Her mother was deserting her. She was taking her to Los Angeles as a kind of final favor, then leaving her. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

“What’s wrong?” her mother asked, coming out of the bathroom, two towels wrapped around different parts of her body, her feet leaving damp tracks on the tan carpet.

Jody sniffled. “Why did you drive twenty-six hundred miles just to be mean to me?”

“Mean to you?”

“You drove me out here. You know I’m scared, and then you say ‘By the way, don’t call home anymore.’ Who the hell am I supposed to call, the National Guard?”

“Stop it.”

Jody got up, went into the bathroom, and slammed the door. Two glasses fell off a shelf and shattered on the floor.

“What’re you doing in there?”

“Nothing,” Jody said, bending down to pick up the glass.

“Come on. Let’s find a nice place and have a decent dinner.”

“Not hungry.”

“Dont do this. I’m trying to help you. I’m not forcing you to go to Los Angeles. You wanted to come. I’m not the one who applied to graduate school. You’re scared, that’s all. Try and control yourself.”

After a few minutes her mother said, “I’m hungry.”

“So eat. Who’s stopping you?”

“Be nice. I’m your mother. Now, come on. Let’s go somewhere.”

“McDonald’s,” Jody said.

“Is that what you’re dying for?”

“McDonald’s represents certain standards, certain givens. You know what you’re getting before you even get it. They make everything in one place and then ship it all over the country. No matter where you go, the pieces are all exactly the same.”

“Are you sure this is it?” Jody asked her mother. “I can’t imagine picking this place.” An ancient, four-story walk-up on a mound of land someone might accidentally call a hill, a cracked-up pool in the back: no one would call this home.

“You picked it,” her mother said, unlocking the trunk, starting to unload onto the sidewalk. “This is the one you wanted.”

“It’s tacky,” Jody said. First floor, no window bars, what had she been thinking?

“It’s bigger than the one in New York,” her mother said. “Three times the size.”

“Great. I’ll spend my nights patrolling the premises, clutching a shot-gun.”

“At the time that’s what you liked about it. The word charm came up.”

“Oh,” Jody said, pulling open the sliding glass door that led out to the pool area. There must have been something that had attracted her to the place. But for now it reminded her of a bad David Hockney painting.

“Well make it work,” her mother said, carrying in more stuff. “Put up some shades, buy a few bright things. It’ll be nice. You have a pool right outside your door. There’s a view. It’s always nice to have a view.”

Her mother spent the rest of the week helping Jody find things: the bank, a decent supermarket, hardware store, cleaners, all the little things, donut shop, UCLA. They spent hours driving around Westwood, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, downtown, trying to figure out what connected what. The city was the strangest mishmash: Miami meets Mexico meets a set designer and a special-effects team, a horror movie. Weird foliage was everywhere, lots of things with sharp leaves, bushes that looked half-dead. Jody’s eyes ached from the sun. She broke down and bought herself a pair of Ray-Bans, the real thing.

They scrubbed, soaked, and sterilized the apartment as if the previous tenant had been a certified serial killer. Jody didn’t particularly want to start putting things away. Unpacking meant she was staying, and in her heart she still wasn’t sure. The day her mother would have to leave got closer and Jody still didn’t know where the airport was, how she’d drive there and back.

“I’ll go alone,” her mother said. “We’ll say arrivederci here and I’ll take the airport car or whatever it is.”

Jody knew that her mother was afraid she’d snap. At the departure gate Jody would demand to get on the plane, to go back home.

The apartment was almost finished. “You just need a few more little things,” her mother said. “If we hurry, I can buy you a plant before I have to go to the airport.”

They drove to a strange plant warehouse her mother had noticed the day before and bought a huge ficus for the living room.

Her mother zipped her suitcase closed, and Jody opened the door to keep an eye out for the airport limo.

“Maybe we should say goodbye before we leave the apartment,” her mother said, fixing her hair.

How do you say goodbye and then spend the next hour sitting thigh to thigh with someone you’ve just hugged and kissed like you’ll never see them again? The horn blew outside.

Jody and her mother went out together, Jody helping load her mother’s suitcase into the trunk. Car service both ways: the low-stress, high-cost solution. Airport limo to curbside, ticket agent, baggage check, security to departure gate, check-in, seat assignment.

Would Jody ever see her mother again? Would the plane get home all right?

“Thanks,” Jody said, kissing her mother.

“It was nothing,” her mother said. “Do well. Be good. I’ll talk to you when I get home. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“I’ll call you. Call Daddy and tell him I got on okay.”

“Okay.”

“Bye.”

Another kiss at the last gate. The back of the mother walking away. The back of the mother; sadness rising. The back of the mother disappearing. Lots of other people moving up the ramp where the mother just was. When to leave the airport? Wait until they close the door of the plane, until they announce last call, until they vacuum-seal everyone in and the engines start up, until the man with orange cone pointers for hands pushes the plane backwards with a couple flicks of the wrist? Should she run to the observation deck and try to find the plane outside? Should she watch every plane rev up and race down the runway? How long should she stand there — until the plane lands in Washington? At what point should she let go, turn on her heels, and head back the way she came, toward the strange city that was now her home?

“UCLA,” she said to the cab driver.

20

Plotting how to use every available inch, Claire and Sam stuffed the car with everything they owned and more — things they’d bought just to struggle with, groceries that were readily available in the Easthampton A&P but which were somehow better coming from home. As they carried what seemed like the entire contents of their apartment down to the sidewalk, the sky began to darken.

“Hurry,” Sam said.

“We’re in trouble,” Jake said.

When Claire went upstairs to get the last few things, she found Adam standing in the middle of the living room, crying. Rushing made him nervous. When he was nervous, he cried. Claire gave him graham crackers and sent him down to the lobby with Jake.

The apartment was quiet, still. It looked better with the stuffing taken out of it. It looked like the kind of place Claire would want to live. She had the urge to run downstairs and tell them to go without her.

Checking to make sure they had everything, Claire realized she’d packed as though she were leaving for good, not going on vacation. When just going away, you took what you needed, ugly and practical items that could get lost or ruined without causing any grief. But Claire had packed silk blouses and shoes that cost two hundred and fifty dollars a pair. There was no reason to even take them out of the suitcase, or to take the suitcase out of the car — except that it was less likely to get stolen from the back of a closet than from the trunk of a car.

As they drove up Third Avenue toward the Midtown Tunnel, it started to pour.

“‘Rain, rain, go away,’” Adam sang, “‘Come again some other day.’” It was his first big trip without a car seat; he was seat-belted in and propped up on two pillows so he could look out the window.

If the trunk leaked, her things would be ruined.

On the Long Island Expressway a car was trapped in an enormous puddle, a miniature flash flood. Traffic pulled around it in a great wide arc, not touching even the edges of the puddle, unsure where the disaster started, where it stopped. Water came up to the door handles of the trapped car. Claire saw that the man and woman inside looked surprised; if they opened their doors, water would rush in, and there was no way of knowing how much, or if it would ever stop. If it had been a different kind of couple and a different kind of car, they could have climbed out through the sun roof and stood on the trunk waving their arms until someone took pity on them and pulled over to help. Without seeming to notice, Sam drove around them.

“Cool,” Jake said.

Outside of Flushing, Queens, they passed the skeletal remains of the 1964 World’s Fair. The car bounced in and out of potholes, across bad road joints, and eventually the expressway opened up: twelve-plex movie theaters, car dealerships, and fields of high grass instead of high-rise apartment projects. Claire opened a bag of Hershey’s Kisses and passed some back to the kids. At fifty-five miles per hour, traffic hummed down the island, forming a line that backed up half a mile at the traffic light in Southampton and continued in a hinged snake down through Watermill, Bridgehampton, Easthampton, and Amagansett.

They turned right on Simon’s Lane. Ever since last January, when they’d arranged to rent the house, Claire had been repeating the address — Simon’s Lane, Amagansett — over and over again to herself as if it held some magical power, the promise of salvation.

“Which one is it?” Sam asked.

Claire pulled a photo out of her purse and compared it to every house they passed. “Matches,” she said, staring at a two-story gray-shingled house and then back down at the photo. “See, it’s the porch.”

In the photo and in reality, there was a glassed-in sun porch off the right side of the house, four windows across the front, green shutters, and neatly trimmed hollies hugging the foundation. Sam pulled into the driveway.

The house was larger and more run-down than Claire remembered. As she carried her suitcase up the stairs, she thought she saw something dart across the hall. She didn’t want to think what.

Even though there were three bedrooms, she put Adam and Jake together in the one that was painted a boyish blue. The empty bedroom was a rich red, and Jake wanted it for himself, but Claire said no; she suspected the red would make him psychotic — not immediately but later, when, in his mid-twenties, he’d turn into a serial killer. The red was too much like birth or death, she wasn’t sure which; regardless, neither was particularly soothing.

“We’ll save it for company,” she told Jake. “Besides, Adam really needs you. If he’s by himself in a whole new house, he’ll probably keep us up all night. Be a sport.”

“You owe me,” Jake said.

The master bedroom was a reassuring dark green that would hold them well in their sleep.

A couple of hours later, as she was sitting on the sun porch resting a wrenched back, a tail flicked against Claire’s leg and she screamed. A cat ran across the room and hid under the sofa. Claire immediately called the real estate agent. A second cat slipped down the stairs and headed for the kitchen.

“There are cats in this house,” she said.

“Hold on,” the realtor said. “Let me check.”

“One just rubbed against my leg, you don’t have to check.”

“Let’s see, that’s Simon’s Lane … nothing on my card about cats. Are you allergic?”

“No, but I don’t exactly love them.”

“I’ll get rid of them, if you want,” the realtor said, giving the impression of the cats’ lives being drastically foreshortened. Claire didn’t particularly like cats, but didn’t want to be responsible for euthanizing them either. She’d rather go ahead, open a couple of cans of food, and deal with it. “Forget it,” she said.

“I’ll arrange for you to be reimbursed for food and kitty litter. Just keep the receipts.”

Kitty litter — yuck, Claire thought, and immediately wrote it down on the first line of a shopping list.

On the first morning of their vacation, Claire woke up clutching the edge of the mattress and wondering where she was. She looked out the window at the sandy yard. She hated sand. Invisible to Sam and the boys, it would creep into the house, settle on the sofa, fill the bathtub, crawl up the stairs into their beds, and it would be her job to chase it out. She didn’t want to be on vacation. She wanted to be alone in her office with some poor pathetic person pouring out his or her soul. This was too much.

Claire was expected to know everything. It was as if a mother, any mother, could without question be transported from house to house and always know where the forks were, how the stove turned on, and where the extra toilet paper was kept. She didn’t know anything. She didn’t even want to be here.

She lay on the bed, facing the window. When Sam finally got up, she pretended to be sleeping. She heard the children moving around, their plastic pajama feet shuffling across the bare wood floor, the TV set clicking on and off, channels changing, volume going up. She heard the toilet seat flip up, bang against the tank, followed by the hiss of someone peeing and then silence.

“Flush, goddamnit!” she screamed, swinging her feet over the edge of the bed. Their laziness stirred her. They were sitting around in their pajamas acting like they didn’t know how to feed or dress themselves. The imbecile family. Her anger pulled her up and out of bed, barking commands. “Get dressed: pants, shirts, shoes, socks, no shorts, too cold for shorts.” She slammed containers of milk, juice, and cereal onto the kitchen table and glared at them while they watched her, bug-eyed. “Too cold, windy, cloudy to go to the beach,” she said, too tired to speak in whole sentences. “Daddy’s taking you to a movie.”

When they finally left, after Claire had called the theater, written down a schedule for Sam, jotted down the name of a place to take the children for lunch, the address of a video arcade where they could go if all else failed, after she’d given them a complete itinerary and shoved them out of the house, she poured their leftover cereal milk into a bowl for the cats and lay down in the bed again. She would have to ease into the idea of vacation.

The next morning was clear and still. They got ready quickly and walked down Simon’s Lane to Old Town Road. From a block away they could see the water, sparkling under the morning light. Worried about traffic, Claire held Adam’s hand. Strangers passed them on bicycles and said hello. Near the water, Claire turned the orchestration of the family over to Sam. The older the boys got, the less they were hers; the more pronounced the difference between male and female, the more they belonged to Sam.

While she set up camp, Adam rode into the water, high on his father’s shoulders. Jake threw himself head-first into the waves, screaming “Dad! Look at me!” She was an outsider among her own. She sat back on the sand, watching them chase one another up onto the dunes and back down into the water, and thought of two things: Lyme disease and how badly they needed a house, a backyard.

Claire closed her eyes, lay back in her chair, and let the whoosh and roar of the breeze and the waves sweep over her, as though the wind, the flying grains of sand, and the sharp, salty spray could erase an entire year’s worth of other people’s problems.

That night, she snuggled up against Sam’s warm red skin and rubbed her thigh across his crotch. “What would you think about having a baby?” she asked.

“You’re scaring me,” he said.

“Scaring myself.” She ran her tongue over his neck, flicking his ear-lobe, tickling the gray roots of his chest hair. “It has to be a girl,” she said a minute later, as he rolled on top of her.

“I’ll do my best.”

Two days later she got her period. Was it early or late? It didn’t matter anyway, though it did explain everything: why she was so tired yesterday, crabby last week, how come she was constantly a miserable bitch while Sam and the boys were always, if not cheerful, at least energetic and less than homicidal.

Sam offered to take her out to dinner.

“To celebrate?” she asked.

He shrugged. “It was kind of impulsive.”

The offer of dinner out, Claire puzzled, or the unprotected sex?

The last time she’d gone to the gynecologist, she’d asked about the possibility of having more children. Claire had lain there, ankles at her ears, listening to a statistical recital performed from the space between her legs as if the doctor were speaking directly to her uterus, her ovaries, her sex. When he finished, he popped up and said, “If you’re going to do it at all, do it soon.” And she left with a pat on the leg, a refitted diaphragm, and a pamphlet on mothering past forty stuffed into her purse.

On the beach, in the still heat of August, suffering vicious cramps, she saw herself as a finished thing wringing the last of life out of itself, waiting to be discarded. Sam would leave her for a younger, sexier, more fertile woman. The boys would follow, not willing to be abandoned by their hero. The new wife would build them the perfect clubhouse, and every year they’d call Claire on her birthday, pick up three separate extensions, sing a chorus of “Happy Birthday”—including the ‘How old are you now?’ verse — and then hang up.

She lay flat on the sand, her innards pulsing, beating out blood. Sam came out of the ocean and stood over her, dripping cold salt water onto her stomach. She sat up and everything started to go black.

“I have to go back to the house for a minute,” she said.

“Do you want to make lunch and bring it back for us?”

She shook her head. “There’s your lunch,” she said, pointing to the beach stand a few hundred yards away.

“Do you have money?” he asked.

She handed him ten dollars.

He waited for more. “This is Easthampton,” he said.

“That’s all I’ve got,” she said, adding another ten. Then she raised her hand for Sam to help her up and walked slowly back to the house, the hot sand burning her feet, her head light and eyes half-blind, concentrating only on the swollen pain at the bottom of her stomach. She walked down the road, sure she was leaking blood down the insides of her thighs, leaving a trail drawing dogs and curious busybodies out of their houses to watch a middle-aged woman who, despite being almost thirty years into it, still had no grip on this woman business. A woman running home like a stuck pig.

In the cool shade of the house, she checked, put her fingers between her legs, pulled them out, and looked. Nothing except the white Tampax string. She spent the afternoon alone in a cool coma, sandwiched between the sheets of their rented bed.

If she had a daughter, if her daughter were there, she would’ve come back to the house with Claire. She would have curled up with her and spent the afternoon reading magazines and eating frozen yogurt. If her daughter were there, they’d take off in the car and go shopping in Sag Harbor, to all kinds of antique shows and craft fairs. They’d go out for lunch and leave Sam and the boys to fend for themselves.

By the end of the week Sam and the boys had friends. They knew the names of everyone up and down the street and were regularly hopping into shiny cars and riding into town with strangers, acting as though they were best friends simply because they’d rented houses on the same block. Claire felt as though she was constantly being forced to smile, to say hello, to make chitchat. As much as possible, she stayed alone. When Sam asked what the problem was, she said, “My job is listening to people’s problems. To me a vacation is silence, not having to talk all the time.”

“Couldn’t you just be civil?” Sam asked.

Claire didn’t answer. She walked to and from the beach, up and down the lane briskly, with the brim of her hat pulled down over the wide rims of her sunglasses.

To make Sam happy, she agreed to go to one party. “Just one,” she said. “You pick it.”

He chose cocktails at the home of an entertainment lawyer he knew from Columbia.

“His wife has the money,” Sam whispered as they stood on the rear deck of the Sagaponack spread, looking out across the length of the pool to the salt pond, the thin strip of beach behind it, and the ocean in the distance. Three different waters; three colors against the twilight.

“Great view, huh?” Sam’s lawyer friend said. “Let me get you a drink — what’ll it be?” He clapped his hands together hard, exploding the air like a shot.

“Scotch,” Sam said.

“Absolut and tonic,” Claire said.

“That’s my drink,” he said to Claire, winking. “Twist of lemon, twist of lime. Be right back.”

Claire stood at the edge of the deck and let Sam schmooze. She sipped her drink, listening to the whispering rustle of the reeds and cat-o’-nines in the salt pond and watching the night sky fall and the ocean slip from view.

When her glass was empty, she carried it into the house for a refill. Modern jazz was blaring on the CD player. Every light in the house was on. Right and left people were yelling in order to be heard. Claire moved quickly, got a fresh drink, and hurried back outside, stopping only when the wife of someone Sam knew touched her elbow and said, “Hi, Claire, how are you?”

“Good,” Claire said. “And you?”

“Super.”

How good can you get? Good, better, best? No, super! Claire headed for the cool darkness of the deck, where bits of conversation drifted over and landed around her like debris.

“Long story short, she told him to get out. And she made him take the kids. He didn’t even want them.”

“Sell. That’s all I have to say to you. Not another word. Sell. Are you hearing me? Sell.”

“You really should go back on Valium. I know it’s gotten bad press, and there was that Jill Clayburgh movie all those years ago, but nothing else does the trick. Half a blue one and it’s all fixed. I took one tonight before we came here. I don’t know how you live without it.”

Drink in hand, Claire lay back on a padded lounge and dreamed.

That afternoon, thumbing through a local paper, she’d seen a series of photographs taken at “the wrap party given by Soho art dealer Christopher William at his Watermill estate, celebrating the completion of director Harry Birenbaum’s new film.” In attendance were three young Kennedys, George Plimpton, the actress Carol Heberton, several rock stars and their model wives, a fistful of famous young artists, and Birenbaum himself, looking every bit the beached whale Jody said he was.

If Jody had been in New York instead of en route to Los Angeles, her picture would’ve been in the paper too, Claire was sure of it. And if Jody had been there, she would’ve invited Claire along to the party. Jody would have taken Claire’s hand and led her around the room, stopping at the edges of all the good conversations, introducing her to all the right people.

Claire looked out onto the night. Down by the pool, a heavy man draped in linen was holding court. Claire imagined it was Harry Birenbaum. He was surrounded by an eager gaggle of men and women content to listen to him pontificate, to duck his wild gesticulations. Claire sat staring until she realized the crowd around the man had thinned and now the man was staring back. In her dark corner she blushed. She finished her drink and put the glass down next to her chair.

“Have we met?” the man asked, sliding into the next chair, his linen drapery moving with a soft windy whisper.

“No,” Claire said.

“I feel like I know you,” he said, extending his hand, holding Claire’s for a moment too long.

Claire smiled. “Perhaps you know my daughter, Jody Goodman?”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said and then paused. “But I’m sure you and I have met before. Are you at Paul Weiss?” he asked.

“No,” Claire said, spotting Sam in the distance, excusing herself, and walking away unevenly. When she slipped her hand into the crook of Sam’s elbow, he turned from his conversation and put his hand on hers.

“You’re like ice,” he said.

She nodded.

“Are you all right? Do you want to go home?”

Claire let Sam guide her back through the crowd, through the house, out the door, and down the long driveway to their car.

“Everything okay?” he asked, taking off his jacket and wrapping it around her.

“Fine.”

Later, after the baby-sitter was paid, the porch lights turned off, and her dress returned to the closet, Claire drew a deep breath and sighted.

“It wasn’t that bad, was it?” Sam asked.

Claire slipped between the cool sheets and snapped off the light on her side of the bed. “Don’t forget to hang up your blazer,” she said. “I don’t have a dry cleaner out here.”

On the second Monday morning, Sam left on the six a.m. train and Claire felt like a suburban widow, a woman without a husband until the weekend.

Late on the rainy Tuesday that followed, safe and dry inside the Easthampton library, while Adam sat on the carpet with a dozen other children listening to a story and Jake picked through sports biographies, Claire decided to do some digging.

“How would I look up adoption?” she asked the librarian.

“Information on how to adopt?”

“Searches. Parents and children looking for each other.” She might as well have been a twelve-year-old researching menstruation, sneaking around like a spy.

The librarian led Claire into the stacks and, using her index finger as a pointer, sc

anned the shelves, fingernail clicking against the spine of every volume. She pulled down several books and handed them to Claire. “You might also want to look in the subject guide to Books in Print and the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature.”

“Thanks,” Claire said.

“You might also want to go to a bigger library,” the librarian added.

“This is fine, thank you.”

Claire sat in a chair by the window, shivering. Outside, it was thundering, raining, and raw; inside, the air conditioning was blasting. It was like being in a refrigerator. She hoped the kids wouldn’t end up with sore throats.

One of the books the librarian gave her had a resource guide in the back, a list of organizations and addresses. Claire went through her purse and all her pockets, rounding up change.

“Have you got any change?” she whispered to Jake. “I’ll buy it from you.”

“Sixty cents for a dollar,” Jake said, holding out the money.

“Thanks,” Claire said, giving him a dollar. She Xeroxed the pages, rolled them into a tube, and slipped them under her raincoat. On the way home, she stopped at the drugstore, bought a pad of writing paper, a box of envelopes, and a Monopoly game.

While Jake and Adam fought over Boardwalk and Park Place, Claire sat at the kitchen table, working out a draft.

Please send any and all information about your organization, its publications and programs, as well as any additional information on resources that would be helpful in conducting a search for a child given up in Washington, D.C., in 1966. Thank you. I have enclosed a check for fifteen dollars so that you may mail me the information via express/overnight mail.

She wrote out ten copies exactly alike, stuffed them into envelopes along with ten checks, and instantly began waiting.

Without Sam, she sat on the beach watching Jake and Adam playing at the water’s edge and thinking of Jody. As far as she was concerned, Jody was the child. The papers and the searching were only a way of confirming what she already knew. For the first time she felt like the mother of three children. She felt complete. Everything had come together. In Claire’s mind, she had done a marvelous thing by setting Jody free and enabling her to begin her own life. Claire was the elusive perfect parent, the woman whose child came and went effortlessly, without conflict. She saw Jody as her own personal success story. And without being made to feel the burden of meeting a mother’s needs, Jody had given Claire something she’d been wanting for twenty-four years: her child was back.

Like Samantha in “Bewitched,” like Jeannie in “I Dream of Jeannie,” Claire had meddled, but had acted invisibly. No one would ever know she’d been there; no one would ever suspect her. From a safe distance she’d made her mark, staked her claim. Now she could sit back and watch and things would be wonderful. Thankfully, she’d controlled herself during those sessions when she couldn’t concentrate on a word Jody was saying, when it was all she could do to keep from blurting out, “But sweetie, I’m your mother!”

Claire looked out across the sand at the people around her. It was shrink month at the beach. Men with thick dark beards, skinny white legs, and fat asses hid under huge umbrellas, their faces protected by new hardcover books. It was their month to let it all hang out. There was no one there except shrinks — the August rents were so high that most other people couldn’t afford them. Two hundred pale weird kids on the beach. A hundred and fifty weird parents in the sand. Shrink fathers and mothers alternately screaming at and ignoring their children. A regular shrink convention.

Claire checked at the post office every day, and soon packages started to arrive. First, a long bibliography with a Post-it attached and a message written in loopy handwriting—“For search information in the Washington area, contact the Safe-Place Support System,” with an address and a phone number. The next day, a copy of the District of Columbia Code on Adoption, fifteen pages of fine-print gobbledygook: “Persons who may adopt … Consent … Legislative History of the law … Subsection (e) of this section is not unconstitutional on the grounds that it denies a natural parent due process…. Birth Certificates … Notice of final decree of adoption shall be sent to the commissioner (mayor). Unless otherwise requested in the petition by the adopters, the commissioner (mayor) shall cause to be made a new record of the birth in the new name and with the names of the adopters and shall then cause to be sealed and filed the original birth certificate with the order of the court. The sealed package may be opened only by order of the court.”

Claire read it all and then called the girl down the street to baby-sit, while she rested upstairs in the bedroom, shades drawn.

The next day a package came from the International Soundex Reunion Registry in Carson City, Nevada. A form marked Confidential read: “No Fee Charged for Registration. Present Name____. Searcher Is____.” Halfway down the page was a blue asterisk and the instructions: “Fill out this form as completely as possible in respect to the adoptee or other child as facts were known when the separation occurred.”

Claire couldn’t do it. She was sick. All she wanted was substantiation, gratification, an official notice. It was as simple and complicated as that. She looked at the form, held her pencil to the paper, and couldn’t write her name. Jody had said that she’d never search; it didn’t mean that much to her. Was she lying? Did she not want Claire to be her mother? Sometimes Jody gave Claire the feeling that maybe she didn’t really need her, or at least not as much as Claire needed Jody. Claire filled out the top line — Present Name, Claire Roth — and stopped. She worried that she’d actually fill out the form, send it in, and they’d send her the name and phone number of a doughy girl who worked in a Burger King mixing shakes.

There was nothing to do. The days and nights were mindless, punctuated only by Jake and Adam’s demands to be driven out to Montauk to play miniature golf, to the video store, the CD place, the ice cream shop. For days on end Claire focused on the information packets, the forms. Every morning she walked to the post office, stuffed the mail into her beach bag, and carried it with her down to the water. She’d sit on her blanket, facing the sun, and pore over the papers. Every time she opened a new envelope, her stomach knotted, twisted, and sank. She carried the information everywhere, and finally, at the end of the week, put it all into the night-table drawer and walked away. Jody was her daughter and that was that. She’d made up her mind and didn’t need anything else.

One weekday, after she’d spent eight hours in the sun, after she’d eaten two Häagen-Dazs ice cream bars and drunk a large Coke while the kids were off with friends, Claire fell into thick afternoon sleep and dreamt about Jody. They were in bed together, naked: Jody’s mouth at her breast, her tongue on Claire’s nipple. Claire rolled towards Jody, and in her sleep felt herself seduced.

A crying toddler walking up and down the sand woke her. “Shh … shh,” a woman said again and again, trailing after the child. Claire was confused, blinded by the glare. She couldn’t keep her eyes open. She was scared and horny. The more she thought about the dream, the more frightening it became. She rolled onto her stomach and put her head down again, pressing her face against the blanket.

In the dream everything appeared perfectly normal, as though this were the way it was supposed to be. On the beach in front of her was the shrink convention, and still Claire had no one to ask. She reached for a legal pad and attempted to diagram it for herself. Mother, Child, Oedipus, Freud. The dream didn’t belong to an old dead shrink, to any particular theory; it was her own.

21

UCLA film brats. Everyone knew someone or had sold something. They all thought they were special. Who to be friends with, and how? Talk about sleeping with the famous record producer’s son? Tell the truth, or lie? Or maybe wimp out and hang with the weaklings, the quiet ones, the ugly ones who must have gotten in on talent since they didn’t have anything else? The first day of school. Eighteen years of first days, all of them exactly the same, all as horrible as the one when she was almost four and her mother dropped her off at nursery school and she stood on the front step screaming as her mother’s car disappeared down the driveway.

“Hi, I’m Jody.” Shake hands, look at your feet. “I’m from New York.”

New York was good, much better than Bethesda or Washington. Washington State? Oh, Washington, D.C. Is your father a senator?

“Where in New York?”

“The city. The West Village.” Good move, Jody.

Registration, classes, meetings. Shaking hands with people whose names she wouldn’t remember in an hour or a month.

“Hi, my name is Bob, I’m not an alcoholic.” A joke? “I’m from Minneapolis.”

“What are we supposed to be doing?”

Compare Xeroxed information sheets and maps, run around in circles, get registration cards stamped and bad pictures taken, become official. Then, at the bookstore, charge things for yourself, books you always meant to read, magazines, stupid things for the apartment, a blackboard — things that’ll really help you get organized.

“Ice cream?” Bob asked. “You want to go have some ice cream?” Unpretentious, down to earth, midwestern.

“Sure,” Jody said. And on the way out, they picked up a lost girl named Ilene, formerly from the deep East Village, the roots of her dyed black hair already turning a peculiar orange from the California sun.

“Look‚” she said. “Would you look at my hair?”

“I’m looking,” Jody said. It was hard to miss.

“You’re from Minneapolis,” Ilene said to Bob. “Do you know Prince?” Another joke? A lot of comedy in these situations, stress-induced one-liners.

Friendships formed. Inseparable at first. Three was a good number. They expanded sometimes to four, sometimes to five, and sometimes shrank to two if someone was busy, tired, or fed up. New situations were overwhelming. Sometimes everyone had to be alone, decompress, call home, remember who she was and why she was doing this.

“Hi, honey, how was your day?” Jody’s mother asked nightly at eight o’clock Pacific time. “How’s the apartment coming along? Are you watering the ficus? Not too much. Have you met anyone interesting yet? Maybe you’ll find a boyfriend out there. You know, we really should talk less often, the phone bill’s going to be sky high.”

Jody’s apartment was mediocre, but so was almost everyone’s. There were a few rich kids with major daddy money and nice apartments; a few people, mostly couples, who’d rented little houses. Jody wasn’t particularly envious, but still, the apartment wasn’t really a home. She’d never looked out onto a palm tree before. She’d never had a pool in the backyard, either. She thought of swimming, dipping her face into the water, turning to the side, breathing. Outside of her parents’ basement, the horrible furniture somehow got better; the memories invested in it seeped out into the warm air, and Jody began to feel attachment, comfort, nostalgia.

Jody thought of Claire at the beach — their house was probably a quaint twelve-room cottage on the ocean that had been in the family for years. Claire undoubtedly spent the mornings in the kitchen, putting together massive picnics that she hauled to the water’s edge in a little red wagon. Afternoons were spent on the sand with assorted children and neighbors snacking on warm soda and grainy egg-salad sandwiches, pondering whether the crunchy parts were eggshell or sand. She saw Claire’s blond hair becoming nearly translucent, her skin browning. Every night there would be a fancy cocktail party on someone’s deck. Jody half wished she hadn’t left Claire behind, half wished she could talk to her now, tell her stories about everything as it happened, describing the people, the teachers, the city itself, making the horrible things funny.

“Harry B. is coming to town …,” Harry sang an off-key and off-color version of the Christmas carol on Jody’s answering machine. “You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not shout, ’cause I’m taking you out.”

Five days later he arrived in a chauffeur-driven Bentley. Jody had to skip a program meeting and a screenwriting class in order to keep the date.

“Hello, sweets,” he said, kissing her full on the lips as she climbed into the car. She subtly wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Excuse the man at the wheel, but I absolutely cannot drive in this town. I’m fine in the Alps, perfectly happy on the streets of Paris, but this,” he said, gesturing widely, encompassing the entire Los Angeles basin with his sweep, “drives me crazy.”

“I could have driven,” Jody said.

Harry scowled, waved his hands, and whispered the destination to the driver. “Tell me how it’s been,” he said.

“It’s only been a month.”

“Are you regretting your decision to abandon me?”

“No.”

“In time,” Harry said, gazing out the window as Hollywood slipped past.

They went to Chasins. Even though Harry spent almost no time in Los Angeles anymore, he knew everyone and, from the moment they were seated, held court. Right and left, from appetizers through coffee, people dropped by the table and chatted — or chattered, in Jody’s view.

“I’m a vice-president at Paramount now,” one would say. “Let’s do lunch.”

“Let’s,” Harry would answer, adding, “Do you know my friend Jody Goodman?”

The vice-president would blink and extend his hand. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

“Ms. Goodman is a stellar young filmmaker. Stellar.”

“Oh, really,” the veep would say, reaching into his jacket pocket, fishing out crisp business cards, setting one down on the table next to Harry and handing the other to Jody, who in a flush of embarrassment would knock her knife onto the floor.

By the time the dinner was over, Jody had met at least twenty people, collected sixteen business cards and three tentative lunch dates, spilled one glass of water, lost two knives, and was starving to death, because in an effort to make decent conversation she’d been unable to eat.

“Most productive, don’t you think?” Harry said as they stood at the restaurant’s entrance, waiting for the Bentley to pull up.

“I suppose,” Jody said.

“That’s how it’s done. Are you hungry, good girl? Are you ready to truly dine?”

“I could eat.”

Harry again whispered instructions to the driver, who sped them off to a nearby drive-through McDonald’s, and they feasted on Big Macs, fries, and shakes while the man at the wheel took them on a slow, smooth tour of Beverly Hills. Fatter than ever and stoned on sugar, Harry reached over and tried to feel Jody up. She bent her head down to meet his hand where it lay on her chest and bit him hard, leaving deep pink tooth marks in his spongy flesh.

Jody had done it: she’d gotten to L.A. Everything was fine; there were people to meet, parties to go to, mini-events where a screenwriter or director talked or showed something, passes to screenings. Soon there were choices and phone numbers Jody had to memorize.

Out of the blue Michael called. “News flash,” he said when Jody picked up the phone. “A fish on the line. For you, and just for you, because I love you.” He was playing with her, doing an L.A. routine. “Let’s have phone lunch — it’s like phone sex, only better. We both order salads, keep the receiver tucked under our chins, and you crunch and chew heavily into my ear.”

“What’s the deal?” Jody asked. “It’s not like you to run up your phone bill.”

“An old friend called. He’s out there going into production in La-La Land and could use a smart little helper. You got any spare time?”

“Maybe. Who is it?”

“Gary Marc.”

“Are you serious?”

“Do I dial long distance for my own entertainment? Call him at the studio, he’s expecting to hear from you. And P.S. — don’t tell him you fucked the record guy’s son. They hate each other from way back.”

“How’d you know I slept with him?”

“From the look on your face.”

“I’m so glad I don’t work for you anymore,” Jody said.

“Mutual. Listen, I’ll talk to you later…. By the way, Harry told me he had a nice dinner and that your tits are bigger than he thought.”

Jody laughed.

“We’re looking at a rough cut tomorrow. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

“Thanks,” Jody said. “Thanks a lot.”

She had the prime spot, the best job, the jealous respect of her fellow students.

“How’d you get it?” they asked.

“Just did,” Jody said. “Phone rang one day, like in the movies.”

Two hundred hours a week, that’s what it felt like.

Gary Marc. Mr. Producer. Mr. Hollywood. His house in Bel Air had an air-conditioned tennis court and the freezer was stocked with ice cubes made out of lime Perrier. “Call Brando for me — I was supposed to tell him about this thing…. Oh, God, it’s Shirley MacLaine’s birthday — send her flowers, make up something good to say on the card.” Soon Jody knew not just where and when but how Gary liked to lunch, in what kind of light, facing what direction. “I’m seeing a couple of actresses read today — be there. I want to hear what you think.” Jody, the arbiter of good taste, the uncorruptible New Yorker, critical, logical, on target. “Funny. You’re very funny.” A compliment — but how come everyone always said the same thing? She wasn’t that funny. Still, any compliment from the Marc Man himself was to be taken seriously.

“Thanks,” she said. Jody loved it.

The weather was nice, not offensive. Without even trying she had a little bit of a tan, although she sometimes wondered if it wasn’t radiation burn off the computer screen.

When she wasn’t in class, or doing the required amount of socializing, when she wasn’t schlepping for Gary, she sat in front of what amounted to a blank black-and-white TV trying to draw pictures with words. Medium shot. Car chase. Interior fast-food restaurant. Daylight. Phone call. Blackout. Sex scene. It was a comedy. As long as she was entertaining herself, she thought it was good. So far, it was a movie she’d love to see. Jody was having fun; she was doing fine. Once, twice, or three times a day, she reminded herself — told you so.

A guy named Simon, from San Diego, asked Jody out a couple of times. On what Jody thought would be the big night, she hid a condom in her shoe — her skirt didn’t have pockets, and she wasn’t about to carry a purse — and hurried to meet him by the mailboxes in the film department. After a lecture by Mel Brooks, they went to Simon’s apartment. With his roommate, Steve, in the next room, they sat on his futon and watched the video he’d used as his application to film school. It was all zoo footage. “Sweet,” Jody said. “Very sweet.”

“We have to talk,” Simon said breathlessly. “It’s about Steve. He likes me. Last night, we got plastered, had a huge discussion, and … well, I think I like him too. I just don’t know. I hope you’re not pissed.”

“Nope,” Jody said. “Pissed isn’t the word for it.” And she stood up, pulled herself together, and walked out of the apartment.

“See you tomorrow,” Simon called after her.

It was the beginning of the fall; it was supposed to start getting cold outside, dark earlier, and with any luck eventually it would snow. But not in Los Angeles, not in the land of the great imagination. At best it was chilly and raw, rainy. Jody was tired. She was having a great time, but she was exhausted; the fun was no longer fun. It was too fucking tiring. It made no sense. Jody was happy. She kept checking herself: I’m happy, right?

One night while she was home writing, Jody heard sirens and tires squealing in the distance. She didn’t think anything of it. If anything, it seemed perfectly normal, just like New York. Then, without warning, there was a loud bang. The bulb in her Luxo lamp blew out as a car slammed into the corner of Jody’s apartment. Her computer lost its memory; a broken headlight and grille poked through the wall where the ficus had been. Police cars pulled up and spun red and blue light circles on the empty walls. Radios squawked. The doorbell rang.

“Are you all right?” a cop asked.

Jody nodded.

“We’re evacuating the building until we can be sure the gas lines weren’t damaged.”

“There’s a car in my apartment.”

“We’ll have to get a building inspector. Is your phone working?”

Jody shrugged, pointed to the phone, and the cop picked it up, listened, and started dialing. She turned off her computer.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

Jody picked up her keys, wallet, and notebook, then followed the cop outside.

Using what they called “the jaws of life,” the firemen cut the car roof open and peeled it back like it was a can of sardines. There was blood and metal everywhere. Paramedics started working on the two people inside even before they were able to pull them out. Photographers and camera crews showed up. Jody went around the corner and walked ten blocks before she could find a pay phone.

“Some asshole broke a date with me — that’s why I’m home,” Ellen said. “You know how much I hate to be home.”

“A car crashed into my apartment,” Jody said, perfectly calmly. “While I was in it.”

“You wrecked your car.”

“No, someone else’s car wrecked my apartment. They’re cutting the idiots out now.”

“Are they dead?”

“Almost.”

“So listen,” Ellen said. “It’s kind of good you left New York, ’cause I’m being transferred to Dallas.”

“Texas?”

“I’m kind of looking forward to it. You know, cowboys and bronco busters.”

“Big dick country.”

“Exactly,” Ellen said. “Hopefully dicks with manners, if that’s not a complete contradiction in terms.”

“When?”

“About a month. It’ll be good. You can come sit on my cactus.”

“I’ll look forward to it.”

An ambulance sped past Jody, sirens wailing. “I should get back,” she said. “I wonder if the building will fall down when they pull the car out. I should’ve taken my screenplay with me.”

“I doubt it,” Ellen said. “It’s earthquake-proof.”

Ellen was right. When they pulled the car out, a few bricks fell, some cement crumbled, but the steel cables embedded in the cement basically held everything together.

“Your mother called,” one of the cops said as they were leaving. “The machine picked up, but I overheard her. She wants you to call back.”

“Thanks,” Jody said.

“No problem,” the cop said.

The super plugged the hole with sheets of badly sawed plywood and promised to come back first thing in the morning and do a better job. Jody dozed on the sofa, half expecting someone or something to come creeping through the plywood.

22

“What are these?” Sam asked. He was standing naked in front of Claire’s night table, his back to her.

“What are what?” Claire asked, slipping a clean blouse over her head. She’d finally found a dry cleaner in Easthampton. They were dressing for dinner, running late.

Sam turned around. The night-table drawer was open. The forms were in his hand. “You’re not thinking of doing this, are you?”

The pink flush from the day’s sun rinsed itself from Claire’s face and she shivered. “What are you doing in my night table?”

“Looking for the hydrocortisone cream. I got bitten.” He turned his calf toward her and pointed down to a red, swollen spot the size of a half-dollar. Sam flipped through the forms, fanning them with the fingers of his free hand. “I thought you were doing so well,” he said. “I thought you were over this.”

“I am,” Claire said. “It’s research for a patient. Let me see the bite. It might be a tick.” She went toward Sam, but he twisted away from her.

“Your name’s written on the top line,” Sam said, shaking the papers.

Claire put her cold hands on his hips. His skin was warm, almost hot. She lowered herself onto her knees, ran her hands down his legs, stopping to examine the bite. She looked up at Sam, watching her, rubbed her lips against the insides of his thighs, and started working her way higher.

“We don’t have time for this,” he said, stepping away. He dropped the papers onto the bed, pulled on his underwear and pants, stepped into his shoes, took his shirt off the hanger, and carried it with him out of the room. “We’re late.”

Claire took the big suitcase filled with all her precious things out of the closet, stuffed the papers in, and got ready to go.

“I’m sorry,” Claire said later that night as they lay at opposite sides of the king-size bed, as far from each other as possible.

“We have such a decent life,” Sam said. “Why isn’t that enough? Why do you always want more? You’re never satisfied.”

Claire didn’t say anything.

“It makes me feel like shit,” Sam said.

“It’s not about you,” Claire said.

And each of them, while waiting for the other to say something, lapsed into an exhausted, fitful sleep.

“We could stay here,” Claire said the next night when she and Sam were alone, stretched out on chaise lounges in the backyard.

“Forever?” Sam asked.

Claire ran her fingers back and forth through the grass. “Through the winter,” she said. “It’s cheap to rent off-season. It’d be a weekend place.”

“What about the mountains? Something up near Woodstock?”

“We already have this. We’re unpacked, we’re here.” She looked at the lights glowing in the upstairs bedroom.

“It might be depressing.”

“Romantic,” Claire said, moving her lips in an absent kiss. “The boys love being outside. It’s safe here; Jake can go off on his own. He needs that.”

“You need it.”

“We all do,” Claire said.

Away from the city, the children seemed leaner, more muscular, and more curious than before. Jake was less of a doughboy. It was possible to have a conversation with him; he wanted to tell Claire about waves he’d ridden, things other kids said, and so on. Maybe it was something that would’ve happened anyway, but in Claire’s mind the change came from getting out of the apartment, out of town.

“Would we really want to come out every weekend?” Sam asked.

Claire nodded. “Long weekends.”

She reached across, took Sam’s hand, and pulled it toward her, pressing it against her chest. His lounge chair tipped over, spilling him onto the grass.

“What about work, school, our life?” he said, squeezing himself onto Claire’s chair. They lay on their sides, nose to nose.

Claire shrugged, “Life goes on.” She hadn’t realized it, but since saying goodbye to Jody she wasn’t terribly interested in getting back to work. It simply didn’t matter as much. She’d adjust her schedule and her patients would never notice. She was entitled to have a life. After all, she was supposed to teach them how to make lives of their own — shouldn’t she practice?

During the week, while Sam was in the city, Claire and the boys came home from the beach at five o’clock, when the lifeguard went off duty. They took quick showers, the boys outside, Claire inside, and went out to dinner — pizza, subs, and fried chicken in an almost religious rotation. On the way home they’d stop at the video store and Jake would beg for shoot-’em-up movies, justifying his choices by saying “But I already saw it once” or “There’s only a little killing in this one.” And then Jake and Adam and one or two kids from up the block would spread themselves out on the sofa, shove the cassette into the VCR and a pack of popcorn into the microwave while Claire hid upstairs reading back issues of The New Yorker.

On Friday nights, Claire and the kids drove to the train station, waited for Sam, and then they all went down to Snowflake and lined up for soft ice cream. The weekends were great. With Sam there, Claire was off duty. She didn’t have to play lifeguard, chief tick-remover and bottle washer. They stayed on the beach until dark, swimming, flying kites, playing football. At twilight, with her family in front of her, Claire felt warm, equal to the moment. Watching Jake and Adam toss the ball back and forth with Sam, she held the kite strings and listened to the plastic wings flapping against the sky — the evening breeze and damp sand pulling her body tighter into itself.

Back at the house all three boys showered together in the outside stall — in the “hot rain,” as Adam called it — and Claire waited jealously inside. She couldn’t strip off her bathing suit, fling it in the general direction of the clothesline, and mash herself into a flesh sandwich with the three of them. Nor could she line up in the backyard for a quick peeing contest — longest, farthest, fastest. But when the boys went to their new friends’ houses, when Claire and Sam came back from the beach alone, they stripped each other and, naked in the fading light, kissed against the picnic table, then stepped into the shower and did it right there where the neighbors, if they’d been interested, could have seen or at least listened. They showered and fucked and showered again and then wrapped themselves in beach towels still damp with sweat and tanning lotion.

With the boys helping, Sam would light the grill and throw on something that had been soaking in marinade all day. From inside the kitchen, as she set the table and boiled water for corn, Claire could hear the sizzle and pop of searing flesh. And every night after dinner, Sam would take the boys out into the yard and make s’mores; they’d come back two shades tanner, faces flushed from the heat of the coals, with marshmallow, chocolate, and graham cracker crumbs glued in rings around their mouths, eyes bloodshot from the sun, salt water, and exhaustion. Claire would wipe their faces with a warm washcloth, squeeze toothpaste onto their toothbrushes, and stand with them in the bathroom, making sure the job got done. When he finished washing up, Adam would raise his arms into the air and Claire would lift his sweatshirt off, pull on his pajamas, tuck him into bed, and watch as he fell almost instantly into an effortless sleep.

Near the end of the fourth week, when they were out for an after-dinner stroll, the couple next door, also out for a walk, asked when they were planning on leaving.

“We’re not,” Sam said, looking at Claire. “Didn’t I tell you?”

She shook her head.

“I’ve been so busy I must’ve forgotten,” he said, teasing her. “The lease is signed, through May.”

She hugged him. She kissed him. By the edge of the road, with the neighbors looking on, she slipped her tongue between his lips and flicked the roof of his mouth, the back of his throat, his one capped tooth. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

“I’m so jealous,” the neighbor’s wife said. “You’re so lucky — unbelievably lucky. We’re going back on Monday.”

“I could stay here forever,” her husband said.

“Well, maybe we’ll have dinner together one night in the city,” the wife called as they turned off into their driveway.

“‘Night,” Sam said.

“I love you so much,” Claire said to Sam.

“Prove it.”

“Come with me,” she said, leading him toward the beach.

On the second day of September, Claire dragged her big suitcase out of the closet and carried it down to the car. She went through everyone’s things, tossed the essentials into a couple of small suitcases, arranged for the guy at the farmers’ market to take care of the cats, and unplugged the coffee maker.

They backed out of the driveway, lightweight, almost unsteady. Sam drove down to the beach, and Adam got out of the car to say goodbye to the waves.

“Why are we doing this if we’re coming back next week?” Jake asked.

No one answered him. Sam took out the camera and finished off a roll of film with three shots of Adam pretending to kiss the sky, the sand, and the refreshment stand.

Waiting for her in her office was a postcard from Jody. GREETINGS FROM LA was splashed across the front in multicolored script. On the back Jody had typed: “Survived the trip. Tomorrow am going to Frederick’s of Hollywood to buy school clothes. Hope vacation was good. More soon.” The card was still curved from being rolled through a typewriter.

Claire immediately wrote back, using a postcard from the art museum in Easthampton: “Vacation great. Relaxed. Tan. Thinking of you.”

After the brightness of the beach, the rich colors of the flowers in the yard, Claire’s office seemed dull. She bought four beautiful pillows made out of kilims: deep reds, oranges, and purples, meaty colors of substance. She’d had enough of the minimalist thing.

Most of her patients came out of the summer frustrated in an encouraging way. They were determined to change, as if in the long light of August they’d seen themselves much more clearly. But as always, certain people seemed incapable of progress, and it was strangely reassuring to know that some things stayed the same no matter what. It gave Claire perspective and freedom.

Claire’s patient Polly, the one Claire had taken for the abortion, came in and announced: “I’m pregnant again,” as if to say, What are you going to do now — have me sterilized? “My boyfriend came back.”

Claire couldn’t respond. She sat in her chair trying not to do anything that could be read in any way. She wanted to make herself seem as flat as possible, neither positive nor negative.

“And I’m getting married,” the girl said, piling it on like a fat woman ordering a banana split.

Claire remained silent.

“You’re disappointed in me, aren’t you? You think I couldn’t get married and be a decent mother if I tried. You think I’m too fucked up.”

Who the hell am I to say, Claire thought to herself. Then again …

“I don’t need your condescending bullshit,” the girl said. “My mother is happy we’re getting married. She’s having the wedding and everything, and you’re not invited.”

Polly actually sounded like a six-year-old.

“Are you happy?” Claire asked.

“You just want me to be miserable to keep you in business.”

“It sounds like you’re angry with me.”

The girl didn’t answer. “Hey, you don’t owe me anything,” she finally said.

It was a strange response. No one had mentioned debt.

Do yourself a favor, Claire thought, and take a long walk. “Well, we’re out of time for today. Perhaps we can discuss this more thoroughly next week.”

“Fuck next week,” the girl said.

Fuck you, Claire thought. “Wednesday at three,” she said. “See you then.”

She was changing. Until now, Claire had always been caught up in thinking of ways to punish herself, to make life more difficult. For the first time, she really had the sense that hers was a good life and it could be extraordinary. All she had to do was go and get it.

As soon as they were back in New York, Claire started reading the real estate section of the New York Times, looking for houses. At first, mental circling was all she could do; it took her two weeks to work up to a nubby pencil, longer before she broke out a red pen; and it would be late October before she actually set foot inside any of the houses.

In Amagansett, their winter neighbors were mostly homeowners who’d disappeared during the summer, going farther north where the living was cheaper, renting their houses for enormous amounts, earning a year’s worth of mortgage payments in the three short months of summer. They came back in September and spent the fall fixing up the houses, reshingling, adding decks and extra rooms. Watching them was what got Claire really thinking about houses. She liked the idea of owning something.

On weekends, out of the office, away from the city, Claire felt more than a little guilty. She didn’t argue when Sam had a car phone installed — he wanted to be reachable, whenever, wherever — and she was always checking her machine, making sure her patients hadn’t left emergency messages. She worried that she was inadvertently intimidating her patients into containing their problems between sessions: you are alone, the nightmare is true, no one will help you until next Tuesday at three.

While Claire stayed inside the house, resting, watching the leaves change, Sam took the boys — equipped with wet suits — down to the beach, where they rode the waves until just before the first frost.

For the first time in her children’s lives, she raked leaves. On a warm afternoon, the four of them worked their way around the house, sweeping the bright red and orange leaves into a huge pile, then took turns diving in. She went for walks with the women up the street and sat with them on the grass among the trees, not worrying about ruining her hundred-dollar skirts. She was returning to herself, becoming more herself than at any other time since she’d married Sam. She was making her life over, turning it into the one big life she’d been afraid to let herself have.

In the beginning of October, Claire got a long letter from Jody, all about Los Angeles, school, her new friends, the internship working for a producer called Gary Marc — why does this man have two first names?

As soon as Claire read the letter, she called Jody. They had a great conversation, lots of laughs. Even in Los Angeles, Jody was hers. She would always be hers.

Almost immediately, Claire got into the habit of calling Jody once or twice a week in the middle of the afternoon, between patients, when she needed a laugh, a pick-me-up. On the phone Jody talked about things that maybe she wouldn’t have talked about in person, things that seemed easier for her to say with Claire twenty-four hundred miles away: nothing incredibly important, just basics — how Jody felt about herself, her family, about being alone in L.A., and how when you don’t know what’s in front of you, you become more attached to your past. Claire even gave Jody the number at the beach house. She didn’t know exactly why she wanted to be so available, so open, except that it felt perfectly natural.

By mid-October Claire had started house hunting. At first she didn’t even admit it to herself. But with a few hours to spare, she’d find herself at the garage, and before she knew it she’d be in Westchester, lower Connecticut, sometimes New Jersey, slowing down whenever she saw a For Sale sign, feeling her pulse quicken if it looked good from the outside. It became an addiction. She shifted her schedule around and started taking Thursday mornings off. Within weeks she was out with agents, going in and out of other people’s houses, trying them on, walking through the rooms, flushing the toilets.

In some of the houses, the kitchens looked like they belonged in restaurants. In one, twenty-five Cuisinart attachments were mounted on the wall above an industrial-sized Kitchen Aid mixer and a full row of assorted slicing and dicing machines. “Does Julia Child live here?” Claire asked.

“Very funny,” the realtor said. “Actually, the woman is a food critic for the New York Times.”

Claire started worrying that in the suburbs the expectation was that you cooked long, hard, and well. Slaved, was more like it. She wasn’t sure her family could survive without having Chinese food available on ten minutes’ notice twenty-four hours a day.

“Do places around here deliver?” Claire asked.

The real estate agent looked at her blankly. “I really wouldn’t know.”

She started to notice that all the fridges and freezers were gigantic, the size of walk-in closets. The scale of life was too big, too overwhelming. They would need a second car — one for her, one for Sam, and maybe a truck for the groceries. Sam would never get home before eight, or seven if he was lucky, and they wouldn’t be able to have their little lunches anymore.

The more Claire thought about it, the more convinced she was that in the future, when her clients discussed getting divorced, she’d suggest moving to the suburbs. “You won’t see each other at all,” she’d say. “Very autonomous lives.” She envisioned the happy couple coming back to thank her. “It’s perfect,” they’d say. “We go out on Saturday nights. It’s like dating. We love it. Weekends only. The kids love it too. We never see them, they never see us. We leave each other notes on the kitchen table. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“What are we doing about Thanksgiving?” Sam asked one morning as he was getting ready for work, filling in dates on his calendar.

“It would be nice to stay out at the beach,” Claire said. “Maybe we could work it into four or five days.”

“It’s the only holiday we can have my family here.”

“Does it matter if for one year we don’t have your sister over for Thanksgiving?” Claire asked. “We can tell her we’re going away. She’d probably rather eat out anyway.”

“What about the parade? I wanted to take the boys to see the floats the night before.”

“We can drive out on Thanksgiving morning.”

“Too tiring,” Sam said. “All that driving, then cooking.”

“Since when do you cook?” Claire asked. “I can do most of it in advance.”

“It’ll be cold and lonely. No one will be out there.”

In Claire’s fantasy, cold and lonely was more like fantastic and romantic: Claire, Sam, and the boys bundled up in sweaters, walking on an empty beach, cozy by a roaring fire, sated with fresh turkey, pumpkin pie, and wine, the house dim except for the reflection of the fire on the children’s faces. A nice long game of Monopoly, then sleep. The quiet life.

A car alarm cut into her fantasy.

“I don’t want to stay here,” Claire said.

“This is your home. Amagansett is not your home. Our life is here.”

“Then let’s move,” Claire said, surprising herself.

Sam didn’t answer.

“Fine. So you expect me to stay home all day cooking dinner in a kitchen that’s too fucking small just to feed your family on the one fucking day of the year when they’ll stoop to eat in my house, even though none of them ever touch the stuffing for fear I’ll give them some goyishe food poisoning.”

“If you don’t want to cook, we can order the food, for chrissake,” Sam said, throwing his date book into his briefcase and slamming it closed. “For every other holiday—”

“Jewish holiday,” Claire said, cutting him off.

“For every Jewish holiday my sister makes a nice dinner and invites us over. What’s the big deal about returning the favor once a year?”

“And every time your sister and her family nearly kill each other — just like this. Look at us. Is this what you want? You’re making us act exactly like they do.”

“I’m not making us do anything. All I said was that I wanted to have Thanksgiving at home.”

Claire stood silent, arms crossed in front of her chest. Sam didn’t say anything else.

“I’ve got things to do,” Claire finally said, picking up her purse and walking out of the apartment.

23

Jody sat on the couch, looking through the sliding glass door. In the distance were palm trees and the Hollywood Hills. Her arms and legs ached as though something long and thin like a knitting needle had been inserted and was slowly being turned — torture. Earlier in the afternoon, she’d called her mother at the office. “I’m dying,” she blurted, immediately destroying the possibility of being believed.

“I’ll have to call you back,” her mother said.

For weeks, Jody had been feeling strangely and nonspecifically ill. And it was getting worse. Two weeks ago she’d gone to Health Services.

“Parasites,” the nice young doctor said. “You have parasites. Could you give us a stool specimen?”

“Right now?”

The doctor had nodded. “If you can’t give us one, we can get one.”

How? Jody thought. “I don’t have parasites,” she told him, and went home. Three days later she went back and asked to see a different doctor.

“Hepatitis,” this doctor said. “Wash your hands a lot, you don’t want to give it to anyone.”

She called her mother. “You don’t have hepatitis,” her mother said. Jody agreed, but still washed her hands more often than usual.

She’d gone to see one of her professors, who said something about the first semester being notoriously difficult and how every year a few people — mostly young women — dropped out and were never heard from again.

“It’s not like that,” Jody tried to say.

“Have you ever been in therapy?” he asked.

Now she sat motionless on the sofa, wondering how long she’d been sitting there, hoping that when the phone finally rang she’d know enough to answer it.

“There’s something really wrong,” she said when her mother finally called back.

“You’re overexcited. Rest. Put a cool washcloth on your face.”

“Fm sick,” Jody said. “How often do I tell you I’m sick? Would I say I felt like I was dying if I didn’t?”

“Well, I can’t come out there.”

“No one’s asking you to.”

Jody called the airlines. To fly home with no warning would cost an enormous amount of money. If she could wait three days, it would be cheaper; even less if she could wait seven. Better yet, if she could wait until Christmas it would be free, since her parents had bought the ticket three months ago.

She went to class with a headache and stiff neck. After half an hour, she started shivering uncontrollably and had to be helped out of the room.

“Do you want to go to the hospital?” someone asked.

“No,” Jody said. “No. If someone could just drive me home, that’d be great. I really want to go home.”

When they dropped her off, Jody asked one of the guys to come in for a minute. “Do me a favor and dial my friend’s phone number — I’m still shaking.”

It was the first time she’d called Claire like that, at home, out of the blue. She was afraid to do it herself, afraid Claire’s husband or one of her children would answer, afraid she’d find out something she didn’t want to know. Jody wasn’t about to tell the guy she wanted him to call her shrink; she just said “my friend” and left it at that.

He dialed, asked for Claire, and handed Jody the phone. “Hope you feel better soon,” he said, and walked out of the apartment.

Jody wanted Claire, not her mother; she wanted a reality-based response, not anxiety.

“Hello,” Claire said. “Hello?”

“I went to class, started shaking all over, and had to be carried home. I feel horrible. I’m freaking out, scared.” Only after she’d said all that did she realize she still hadn’t said who she was. “It’s Jody.”

“I know,” Claire said softly. “It sounds like you have the flu. Do you have a fever?”

“I don’t think it’s the flu. I’ve had the flu before and it was never like this.”

“There are new strains every year.”

Jody didn’t respond. She was searching for the thermometer.

“What do you think it is?” Claire asked.

Jody heard young voices in the background. “Sorry I called.”

“It’s fine,” Claire said. “Take some aspirin, have some juice, get into bed, turn on the TV, and just lie there. You’ll fall asleep soon, and tomorrow things will be different. I’ll call you in the morning.”

“Thanks.”

“Sleep well,” Claire said.

The next morning was one of those cold, rainy November days they don’t advertise. Jody’s throat was incredibly sore and covered with bumps that looked like blisters. Whenever she stood up, the room whirled. A lumpy pink rash was breaking out on her legs and stomach, and there was a dull, steady pain in her chest. Her temperature was a hundred and three and something.

She called Gary Marc’s office and said she wouldn’t be coming in. The receptionist refused to take the message and transferred Jody’s call to Gary’s car phone. While she was explaining her symptoms, Gary got stuck in traffic under an overpass and the call was disconnected. “Suck herbs,” was the last thing she heard him say.

She called Health Services and updated the doctor, who said it was probably mono and there was nothing she could do about it. Stunned, sometimes shaking, sometimes sweating, she lay in bed, noticing that she’d lost fifteen pounds in two days.

Claire called. “Just wanted to see how you’re doing,” she said.

“Wanna hear something weird?” Jody asked, her voice a raspy whisper.

“Sure.”

“I’ve always had this yellow dot, like this child inside me. I never told anyone about it. But I protect it. My job is to make sure no one ever hurts the yellow dot. Anyway, today it’s outside. It’s here in the apartment, in the living room, running around by itself. Do I sound crazy?”

“No,” Claire said. “People have inner selves. Everyone describes them in their own way. Your fever is up, which might make you experience yourself differently. That’s all. I do want you to make a doctor’s appointment — maybe they’ll be able to see you this afternoon.”

“I love my dot,” Jody said to Claire. Claire’s buzzer went off; Jody heard it long-distance. “You better go,” Jody said.

“I’ll call you later if I get a chance.”

At one in the morning, Jody called home. “Mom,” she croaked.

“You frightened me,” her mother said, groggy and breathless. “What time is it?”

Jody didn’t say anything. The pain in her chest was worse; she felt unable to breathe, much less talk. The last time she’d taken her temperature, it was a hundred and four.

“It’s the middle of the night,” her mother said.

“I’m really not feeling well,” Jody said. “You better hurry.”

“You mean that someone, namely me, should come out there?”

Jody didn’t respond.

“I’ll call you back.”

“Hurry,” Jody whispered.

Half an hour later the phone rang. Even though the phone was right next to Jody, it took her four rings to answer. She tried to say hello, but nothing came out.

“Are you there?” her mother asked.

“Umm-humm.”

“I’ve made reservations. It’s a six a.m. flight. I’ll be at your house by three. I want you to take some aspirin and have something hot to drink. At nine, call the doctor and make an appointment. I’ll see you in a little while.”

She lay in bed, waiting, dreaming, dozing, watching the sun rise, watching morning television, feeling oddly calm, as if it might be all right if she died.

“How long have you been like this?” her mother asked when she finally arrived and saw Jody face-to-face.

“I tried to tell you.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” She pressed her cold hand to Jody’s cheek.

The room seemed to be shrinking, getting darker. “I have to put my head down,” Jody said, turning away from her mother and starting toward the bedroom.

“When did you go on a diet?” her mother asked.

Jody didn’t tell her she wasn’t on a diet. She wished she were, but she wasn’t. On the way back to bed, she fainted, crashed into a wall, and knocked a lamp over, and her mother had to come running.

Later that afternoon they went to the hospital. The fever, the rash, the sore throat. How long? How high? Jody could hardly talk, hardly hold her head up, and now they wanted details. They pointed her to a room down a long hall; it took forever to get there, and she kept seeing people she thought looked familiar — her dead aunt Sally, a neighbor from her childhood, everyone was someone. She sat on an examining table while four doctors stood talking in the corner. The nurse was trying to take her blood pressure. There was a problem. The nurse wrapped the cuff tighter, squeezed the ball harder, and then finally asked, “Is there some reason I can’t get your blood pressure?”

“I really don’t feel well,” Jody said. All the doctors whirled around and in a minute she was lying upside down, her feet higher than her head.

Stand up. Deep breath. Hold it. The hum of the x-ray machine. Relax. Sit down. Arm out, alcohol swab, Betadine wash. A long, thin line of blood drawn through a narrow plastic line into a syringe.

“Something’s happening,” Jody said.

“Nothing’s happening,” the doctor mumbled, staring at Jody’s vein.

“Something is definitely happening,” Jody said, and then fainted onto the floor.

“Get my mother,” Jody said when she woke up, but they wouldn’t.

They got her a pillow and made her lie there on the cold tile floor. They wouldn’t get her mother because it didn’t look good for Jody to be sprawled there while all the big shots just stood around, waiting for her to recover. They bought her a soda, stuck a straw in, and eventually got a wheelchair and put her in a room. A plastic bracelet was slipped around her wrist, an IV started.

Guys came into the room with masks over their faces and a thousand questions. They asked her mother to wait outside. “Have you ever used intravenous drugs?” they asked.

“Give me a break,” Jody said.

While her mother was out of the room, Jody pulled the cutest intern close and told him about Peter Sears and a few others. “Who knew what the hell they were doing — or should I say whom,” Jody whispered. He snapped an extra pair of gloves on and stuck her vein again. They both watched her blood spring into the tube — wishing you could just tell by looking — and then the intern pulled the needle out, wiped a drop of blood off the tip with gauze, dropped the needle into a bucket marked HAZARDOUS WASTE, and silently slipped the test tube into his breast pocket. “Soon,” he said, patting the pocket. “We’ll know something soon.”

24

“Is something wrong?” Sam asked.

Claire shuffled out of the bathroom, phone in hand, her eyes pink and puffy, her slippers scraping the bare floor like sandpaper.

“Should I be worried?” he asked. Twenty minutes earlier, when the phone rang, Claire had tucked the receiver under her chin, pulled the full length of the cord into the bathroom, and closed the door.

Claire sniffled. “One of my patients is very sick.”

“With what?”

“Don’t know.” Claire looked at the Post-it stuck to the palm of her hand, on which she’d written the name of Jody’s doctor. “I have to make a call.”

“I’ll go into the living room,” Sam said, gathering newspapers off the bed.

Claire dialed the number in Los Angeles. “Dr. Brandt?”

“Hold, please.”

The ticking of long-distance wires, the consciousness of hearing time pass: silence was expensive, and time was running out. She tried to take a deep breath.

“I can reach his beeper and have him call you,” the operator said.

Claire left her number and hung up thinking it was time to make a move. If something happened to Jody, if Jody died and never knew who Claire was, what she was, it would be Claire’s fault. She dug into the closet and dragged out an old suitcase. She’d pack her bag first, go in to tell Sam she was leaving, then hurry downstairs to the cash machine and out to La Guardia.

Sam knocked on the bedroom door. “Are you all right?”

“I’m waiting for the doctor to call back,” Claire said through the door.

“Doesn’t this girl have a family?”

The phone rang and Claire jumped to answer it. She explained that she was Jody’s therapist.

“I can’t discuss a patient’s condition. I don’t know who you are.”

“I told you who I am.”

“You should know better,” Dr. Brandt said, as though he’d just finished reading a memo on patient privacy.

“She’s my patient too,” Claire said. She almost said, She was my patient first. But that sounded too possessive.

“I want you to tell me what the situation is,” Claire said in a firm voice. “Is it something serious?”

“Could be a virus that’ll resolve itself in a few days. Could escalate into something new at any time. I don’t know. She just came in today.”

“Are you running tests?”

“White count is down,” Dr. Brandt said flatly. “Liver’s off a little. Blood culture’s negative at twelve hours.”

“What are you giving her?”

“Are you a psychiatrist or just a psychologist?”

“What’s she getting?”

“Tylenol by mouth.”

“That’s it?” Claire said, horrified.

“IV to keep her from dehydrating. Someone from infectious diseases is taking a look in the morning. Hey, she could be out of here by afternoon — all kinds of viruses do things like this. Most likely it’s nothing.”

“You have my number,” Claire said. “If anything comes up, I want to know. I can be out there by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Yeah, all right.”

“Thanks.” Claire slammed the phone down. “Fucking assholes,” she said loudly, looking at the empty suitcase and trying to figure what to do with it. She couldn’t just jump up, pack her bag, and say goodbye — that would be asking for trouble. Just as Sam came into the room she jammed the suitcase back into the closet and then pretended to be rearranging their clothing.

“Jake woke up. The phone, I guess,” Sam said. “He’s in the kitchen, microwaving hot chocolate.”

At the beach they’d been drinking gallons of hot chocolate. Claire made it the real way — in a pot on the stove, with milk and deep brown cocoa from a heavy tin can, with heaping spoons of sugar stirred in and two fat marshmallows floating on the top. She didn’t use beige powder dumped from a premeasured package into a cup of water and rotated around for a minute and a half in a portable x-ray machine. She slaved over a hot stove for at least ten or twelve minutes.

Claire pushed past Sam and went down the hall into the kitchen.

“Get back to bed,” she told Jake.

“I’m making hot chocolate.”

“No you’re not.”

The mug was already turning in a circle in the microwave. The packet of cocoa mix lay empty on the counter, grains of cocoa dust trailing from the microwave to a spoon on the counter.

“Go back to bed.”

“Mom,” Jake whined.

“Forget it. You’re not drinking that shit at midnight. Have a glass of water if you’re thirsty.”

The bell on the microwave went off. If she’d been normal, she would’ve just let him have it. She would’ve said, Okay, fine, just don’t do it again. But instead, in a flash of anger and in front of both Jake and Sam, who’d come to defend Jake, she took out the cup of cocoa and poured it down the drain. It was all she could do to keep from throwing the mug into the sink. She would have loved to smash something.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Sam said.

She looked at Jake, standing there staring at her. He was starting to get tall. In a year or two he’d be at eye level. After that everything would be history; he’d be gone.

“I hate you,” Jake said, walking away.

“Feeling’s mutual,” Claire mumbled.

Sam raised his finger and shook it in her face, lawyerlike. “He woke up because the phone rang. It’s your problem, so don’t take it out on him.”

“He wanted a sugar fix,” Claire said, focusing on the pool of spilled cocoa in the sink. The mug was lying on its side. She still wanted to smash it.

“Big fucking deal,” Sam said.

“Big fucking deal,” Claire snapped back.

From above she could hear the upstairs neighbor dropping one shoe at a time onto the floor and then the creak and crunch of his Murphy bed coming down. Adam’s new stuffed elephant was lying on the floor under the kitchen table, collecting dust and crumbs. Claire picked it up and shook it vigorously, then propped it against his empty chair. It was midnight.

Claire spent the night making deals in a strange half-sleep. If Jody was allowed to get well, Claire would be a better person. She’d do more for others, work harder at being a good therapist, a good wife, a good mother to Jake, Adam, and Jody. She’d give herself to Jody in a way that she’d never done before with anyone. She’d make up for everything and then some. If Jody was allowed to live …

At nine a.m. she was in her office, sitting at her desk and ready to transcribe last night’s messages from the answering machine.

“Hi, Claire, this is Janet Fishman, your real estate agent in Stamford. I know we were supposed to look at houses tomorrow, but it’s not going to happen, not this week — my life is a disaster. You understand. Call me, we’ll reschedule.”

“It’s Randy Hill. I have to be out of town on business. See you next week.”

“She’s driving me crazy. I sent her back to the apartment. I didn’t want to be here by myself, but I couldn’t take it anymore. She scares me.” Jody’s voice sounded far off, full of fever. “I feel so strange. It’s the middle of the night. My mother’s driving me nuts. My room’s orange—not a Sunkist, get-well-soon orange, but a rusty, rot-in-hell kind of color.” Jody paused, swallowed. “Isn’t orange the color of insanity? Didn’t I read that somewhere? There’s a speaker in the wall. Sometimes it talks to me, just blurts out things. A minute ago it said, ‘Maria, Maria, where are you, Maria?’ and I thought I was in West Side Story.” Jody paused again. “Sorry to clog up your machine.”

Claire called the hospital. It was barely six a.m. in California. The floor nurse was nice — almost too nice. “It’s been a quiet night, no problems. She didn’t sleep much, and she’s still running a fever, but the rash seems better.”

What rash? No one had said anything about a rash.

All day, whenever Claire’s buzzer went off, she opened her office door and her patients came in, sat down, and picked up where they’d left off. At the end of their hour, when the buzzer went off again, Claire led them back to the door without the vaguest hint of what had transpired. In a sense she had vanished. Overnight, the gap between Claire and the rest of the world had grown into a crevasse so deep, so wide, that it could not possibly be spanned.

At two, during the half-hour she’d allotted for lunch and returning calls, the phone rang.

“Hello. You don’t know me,” a woman’s voice said, “but I’m calling about Jody Goodman. I’m her mother.”

“I’m Claire Roth,” Claire said.

“Jody keeps asking me to call you, I’m not sure why. And she won’t dial your number herself.”

Claire smiled. Jody’s refusal to call was sweet. She wondered how she’d managed last night — asked the nurse, or another patient?

“I don’t know what to do,” the mother said.

“About what?”

“Jody seems so upset. She wants me to get a plane and fly her home.”

“Is that possible?” Claire asked.

“Possible? I just flew out here. They only do things like that for people who need transplants, who have to fly halfway across the country to meet their kidneys. Jody has such an imagination. When she gets better, we’ll fly home together.”

Claire struggled to write down everything the woman said. Her hands were shaking. Claire was talking to the mother, the mother she’d only imagined, the woman who’d stolen her child, the madonna she’d conjured in her mind’s eye for twenty-four years. Claire pictured the woman as squat, low to the ground, earth-motherish. She saw her out there in Los Angeles, alone, afraid of losing this second child, this second chance. Claire had to make this woman trust her while at the same time being careful not to seem as though she was overstepping the bounds. She had to protect herself, protect Jody, and make a good impression. “Is there anything I can do to help you?” Claire asked.

“For me?” the woman said. “No.”

“Well, if anything comes up or you just need to talk, feel free to call me back. And let me give you my number at home.”

“I haven’t got a pen,” the mother said. “But thank you. I appreciate the offer.”

Claire hung up wanting more.

25

“Remember the yellow dot?” Jody said the next time she spoke to Claire. “It’s gone. Evaporated.”

The missing dot, however odd a concept, was the clue that something was really wrong, maybe irrevocably so. Jody hadn’t been able to protect that most fragile part of herself, and it had disappeared. Without someone on guard duty, the real Jody had no capacity to survive. Just as her biological mother had no way of caring for an infant, and her adoptive mother was unable to nurse a sick child, Jody could not take care of herself. They were all useless to each other. It was the truth of her childhood, her life; the unspoken truth she’d lived in fear of. She had always known this would happen; it made perfect sense. She wondered only why it had taken this long.

“I want to go home,” Jody told the infectious diseases specialist.

He stood over her, a mask covering his face, a paper gown over his white coat, booties over his shoes, thin latex gloves pulled tight over his hands. Through the gloves Jody could see the hair on his knuckles, matted down.

“Do you want to get well,” the doctor asked, “or do you want to go home?”

“I didn’t realize they were mutually exclusive,” Jody said. No one seemed to hear her.

A case of water from Gary Marc’s private Swiss spring arrived with a note from Gary warning that under no circumstances should Jody drink from her plastic bedside pitcher, potentially a source of deadly bacteria.

Ellen sent an FTD “pick-me-up bouquet”—seven brightly dyed carnations in a cracked mug — with “Get Well Soon” printed on the card in a stranger’s bad handwriting.

“I don’t want to die in Los Angeles,” Jody told her mother.

Ilene, Bob, and a pack of UCLA film students showed up and took over Jody’s room, crowding onto the bed with her. Jody’s mother sat in the corner by the window, working a crossword puzzle. Jody had never noticed it before, but there was something untouchable about her mother. Seeing it now, she realized that her mother’s heart had always been kept sealed away in a clear but impenetrable Lucite box.

“Are you researching Terms of Endearment Part II?” one of her friends asked, playing with her IV line.

“We had a choice between The Glass Menagerie and you,” Ilene said. “We figured they were both the same — depressing, boring, classic.”

“You look like shit,” another girl said.

“Thanks,” Jody said.

“No — I mean last week you looked fine.”

“It’s the lighting,” Jody said.

They all looked up at the fluorescent overhead fixture and nodded.

A nurse finally came in and shooed everyone out. “Are you trying to visit your friend or suffocate her?” she asked, hurrying them up off the bed. “Go on now, leave her alone.”

“It’s true,” her mother said, once they left. “They didn’t have to stay so long.”

“Then why didn’t you say something?” Jody said.

“I was leaving it up to you. They’re your friends.” Her mother paused, rinsed out a washcloth, and rubbed it over her own face and neck. “You always say that I don’t accept your friends. I didn’t want to interfere.”

“Mom, I’m in the hospital, I feel like shit. Interfere already.”

“You know,” her mother said, pouring herself a glass of Gary Marc water, “I didn’t plan on coming out here twice this year. Daddy needs me at home. He’s not used to being alone.” She paused. “He gets lonely.”

“I can’t believe you.”

“I’m here, aren’t I? I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t think it was important. All day I sit in this chair and worry.”

“What are you worried about, Mom, me or you?”

“You’re just upset because you’re not feeling well,” her mother said, refilling her glass.

“Leave,” Jody said. “Get out. I don’t feel good enough to fight with you.”

Her mother sat back down in her chair and picked up the crossword puzzle again, occasionally asking Jody questions like “Who’s an actress Somers?”

Jody drifted back in time. She remembered raising her hand in the third grade, telling her teacher that she felt sick. She sat on the blue-and-green plaid sofa in the school office while the secretary took her temperature and called her mother. “She says she’s feeling nauseated,” the secretary told her mother, “but her temp’s below normal at 97.8…. Well, yes, I can have her rest here for a little while and see how she feels.” Ten minutes later, Jody vomited all over everything, and there was no answer when the secretary tried to call her mother back. Finally a neighbor, a volunteer in the art room, took Jody home to her house, and Jody spent the afternoon lying there feeling like she was two million miles from home, even though it was less than a hundred yards away and clearly visible from the neighbor’s bedroom window.

During the night, someone in Jody’s unit died. She heard Code Blue paged, the rush of metal wheels and crepe soles down the hall. She was on a floor with a lot of AIDS patients. She knew because she saw them go past her door, because her mother walked the halls and reported back.

“It’s so sad,” she said to Jody.

Jody didn’t answer. She didn’t want to know about it. She was on the wrong side of the bed. She closed her eyes and imagined dying without ever knowing who she was or where she’d come from. She thought it was a strange time to realize how important her history was to her.

When the fever broke, Jody felt worse, even more tired and damaged. Her voice sounded not like a voice but like a piece of fine-grain sandpaper being swept gently across a surface. While her mother watched, the nurse helped her to stand and led her to the bathroom. She leaned against the sink and in the mirror saw herself for the first time — a thin, green stranger. The nurse helped her back to bed. She slept.

Late that night, the intern who’d slipped her blood in his pocket sneaked into the room, squeezed her hand, and said “Negative.” Jody stared at him, blinked. She wasn’t sure she was awake. She wasn’t sure that she wasn’t imagining him standing there. “Negative,” he said again, squeezing her hand so tight it hurt. “Just a plain, nasty virus.” In the morning she almost told her mother, but then stopped herself. There was no point.

Two days later, one of the doctors came in, looked her over, and said, “It’s over. You’re free, I’m releasing you. Fly away home.” He flapped his arms up and down.

“Excuse me, but I can’t walk. I can barely talk. I don’t remember anything. I still feel like I’m dying.”

“A virus,” the doctor said. “These things happen. Make an appointment in the clinic next week or with your family doctor. We’ll run fresh bloods and monitor a few things.”

“That’s it?”

“Far as I can tell.”

Her mother packed her things into a plastic trash bag, and Jody shuffled down the hall toward the Exit sign.

“They seem to know what they’re doing,” her mother said. “You have to trust somebody.”

“No you don’t.”

From her bed in her apartment, Jody made plane reservations while her mother cleaned the kitchen, defrosted the refrigerator, and complained. Jody arranged for one of her UCLA friends to baby-sit her car and the apartment until she got back. She arranged for her mail to be forwarded, the newspaper stopped, and her teachers notified. She felt worse every hour.

“You have more energy,” her mother said, bringing her a glass of juice.

“It’s not energy,” Jody answered. “It’s hysteria.”

What Jody had was the sensation that she should hurry home, that this window of opportunity was a momentary thing, a last chance. She was determined to at least get out alive.

“The plane’s not going to crash, is it?” she asked Claire.

“You’re too sick for the plane to crash,” Claire said, which somehow seemed comforting.

A wheelchair and an attendant met Jody at the curb of Los Angeles International Airport. The redcap propelled Jody toward the gate, handling the chair as though it were a snowplow. Her mother trailed behind, acting unrelated. At the departure gate Jody transferred herself to a narrower chair, more like a personal luggage cart, and was pushed up the ramp by two men in American Airlines coveralls; she felt like a steamer trunk full of china. At the top of the stairs, she stepped into the plane and gently walked down the aisle to her seat. Even though it was a warm day, she was wearing a turtleneck, sweatshirt, wool socks, a down jacket, and a wool hat, and still she was shivering. Her mother sat across the aisle from her and pulled out the in-flight magazine. When Jody asked her to get a blanket from the stewardess, she just looked at her blankly. Jody hated her. She hated her mother for revealing herself to be incompetent, unable or unwilling to do anything to help.

26

“Do you have plans for Thanksgiving?” Claire asked during a quick call between patients and between expeditions to Balducci’s, Dean & DeLuca, and the Food Emporium, hunting and gathering her way across Manhattan Island.

“Well,” Jody said, “I was thinking of rolling over onto my left side, but it turns out I can’t. Every time I move my head, the room starts to spin.”

For almost three weeks Jody had been held captive in her parents’ house, in the narrow bed of her youth. “I hate it here,” she said.

“On Friday, when you go to the doctor, I want you to tell him that I’m going to call. I need to talk to him.”

What Claire couldn’t understand was why no one was doing anything. Why wasn’t Jody getting some treatment? “You have my number on Long Island. I’ll be out there all weekend.”

“Great,” Jody said. “Have fun.”

“I’ll call sometime tomorrow — I don’t know when.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know what I have to do,” Claire said.

The night before Thanksgiving, bundled up in their winter coats — Adam’s over his Spiderman pajamas — the Roths set out on what seemed like a fantastical middle-of-the-night adventure. It was ten p.m.

“Going to the parade?” the doorman asked in a thick Spanish accent.

“Spiderman,” Adam said, throwing his arms into the air in an up-up-and-away gesture.

Claire had been dreading this crowd scene all day: throngs of people out for a night of cheap thrills, free entertainment; people out to see the people; people out to see the people seeing the people. She figured they wouldn’t be able to get close enough to see a damn thing.

The traffic was horrible, so they got out of the cab at Seventy-second Street and walked. The sidewalk was mobbed with people in bright parkas, knitted caps, patterned scarfs, the occasional fur coat, thick gloves, holding cups of steaming hot chocolate bought from street vendors.

“I want some,” Jake whined.

“No, it’ll give you cholera,” Claire said, and Sam laughed but didn’t disagree.

“Colored what?”

All of Seventy-eighth Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue had been sealed off. Mammoth portable lights cast an otherworldly glow, and long white tanker trucks filled with helium lined Central Park West. The floats — Spiderman, Ninja Turtles, Snoopy, and Betty Boop — lay unfurled on clean white dropcloths in the middle of Seventy-eighth Street, hooked to helium hoses, slowly swelling to life. Hundreds of small children rode high on their fathers’ shoulders. Preppy boys drunk on cheap beer and hormones climbed the wrought-iron fence that guarded the Museum of Natural History.

“Let’s leave for the beach tonight,” Sam whispered to Claire an hour and a half later as the cab sped back downtown. Adam was asleep across his shoulder. “It’ll be easier. There’s no traffic. We’ll be there in less than two hours.” The cab pulled into the driveway at 2 Fifth Avenue. “I’ll get the car,” Sam said, fishing wrinkled singles out of his pocket for the driver. “Meet me downstairs in ten minutes.” Claire nodded and watched him disappear down the street with Adam over his shoulder like an old sweater; then she and Jake went upstairs and got the groceries she’d been collecting all week. As part of their reconciliation, Claire had agreed to invite Sam’s obnoxious sister from Ridgewood out to the house along with her husband and their two crazy children, one anorexic, the other hyperactive. In return Sam had granted her Naomi and Roger and their children; but she’d convinced him that they’d all be happier staying the night at the inn in Easthampton. She told everyone to bring something, and Sam’s sister offered to make a sweet-potato casserole, quickly adding, “And I’ll also do the stuffing.”

With the children asleep in the backseat, Sam and Claire talked softly. In their silence, Claire thought about Jody. She wanted to tell Sam, but couldn’t.

“Are we going the right way?” she asked. In the dark the road to Amagansett seemed unfamiliar.

“Same way we always go,” Sam said, making the turn. “There’s the Easthampton pond,” he said, nodding toward an oily shape on the right.

Simon’s Lane was deserted; no streetlights, no house lights, no porch lights. The moon had slipped behind a cloud. Claire had never seen a night so black.

“Leave the headlights on so we can see the door,” she said.

Sam carried Adam into the house; Claire followed with bags of food. She left the groceries in the front hall and went out again for Jake.

“We’re here,” she said, jiggling his shoulder. “Go on inside and up to bed.”

“I’ll stay,” Jake said, mumbling.

Claire picked up the turkey and held it on her hip like a baby. With her free hand, she pulled at her son. “Come on, I’ll walk you up.”

A few minutes later, Sam started out of the kitchen to turn off the headlights, but immediately turned around and grabbed Claire’s hand, frightening her. The clock on the stove said two-thirty-nine.

“Come on,” he whispered, leading her toward the door. “Shhh.” He slowly opened the screen door and pointed Claire toward the backyard. In the farthest edges of the headlights’ beam stood a deer.

“If I was a pilgrim,” he whispered in her ear, his lips touching the back of her neck, “tomorrow we’d be eating Bambi.”

In the morning, Claire made hot chocolate. She filled Jake’s mug with steaming cocoa and let him have as many marshmallows as he wanted. She put the whole bag down on the table and watched as he took one after another, dipped them into his mug, then popped them into his mouth with a thick, smacking sound. When he got to eight she stopped counting and turned away.

With Sam and the boys dispatched on a time-killing mission to Montauk, Claire vacuumed and scrubbed floors, toilets, behind the sofas, the very boards of the house, then started in on the carrots and asparagus, feeling all the while that she was doing someone else a favor. This wasn’t really her house; the dinner guests weren’t really her family. She prepared the turkey for a long, slow roast, put together a mashed potato, green pea, and pearl onion casserole, cooked a batch of cranberry sauce — with a little too much sugar, and then a little too much lemon as compensation. She peeled apples for the pies, and at noon, with the bird in the oven, her face and hands coated with unbleached flour, she hunched over the butcher block and tried to roll out a pie crust, relying on directions she vaguely remembered from seventh-grade home economics class. Then, as she was slipping the pies into the oven, there was a heavy pounding at the front door. Claire couldn’t find the key to the dead bolt. “Coming!” she yelled as she riffled through a tin can of keys on top of the mantel. Finally she quit, brushed her hair out of her face, and called out the side door, “I’m over here.”

“Where?” Sam’s sister shouted. “I can’t see you.”

Claire stepped out and walked barefoot down the gravelly driveway.

Nora stood in the center of the front yard, her high heels sunk deep in the soft dirt. “There you are,” she said. “Well, we’re here. Bet you didn’t think we’d make it.”

I hoped and prayed you wouldn’t, Claire thought. “Well, now that you’re here,” she said, “come on in.”

Nora turned and screeched “Bring the cooler!” at her husband, Manny, who stood by the curb, wiping bird droppings off the hood of their black Cadillac. Nora started across the yard, and with each step her heels dug in like the world’s longest cleats. Eventually one shoe was pulled off completely, and she was forced to balance momentarily on one leg like a pelican as she bent over and plucked her Ferragamos out of the muck. “They’re ruined,” she said when she got to the driveway.

Manny walked up with a medium-sized Coleman cooler in hand.

“It’s the stuffing and the sweet potatoes,” Nora said, gesturing toward the cooler. “I put them on ice.”

Claire looked at her blankly.

“So they wouldn’t spoil,” Nora said.

“Come inside, won’t you,” Claire said, turning toward the house.

“Oh,” Nora said to her, “you’re not wearing any shoes. Is that how it’s done out here?”

“Have you checked in at the inn yet?” Claire asked, as they came through the door.

“No, we came here first,” Manny said, tapping the plastic cooler as if to indicate imminent spoilage.

“Well, perhaps we should call and let them know you’re in the vicinity.” Claire stopped. “Where are the kids?”

“In the car,” Manny said. “They don’t want to get out.”

“It’s so hard for them to adjust,” Nora said. “They’re very shy.”

Claire nodded, pretending to understand.

“Sam and the boys should be back soon, I hope. Why don’t you make yourselves comfortable while I go check things in the kitchen. Can I get you something to drink?”

“I brought some Diet Coke with me. It’s in the cooler. If I could just have a glass. Manny, get me one of my Cokes,” Nora said, and Manny got up from the sofa and went to the cooler. He handed Nora a Coke, and Claire hurried to find her a glass. She took one out of the dishwasher, still warm, and handed it to Nora, who took a handkerchief out of her bag and wiped out the insides. “Dusty,” she explained.

Claire excused herself, went back into the kitchen, opened a bottle of wine, poured herself a huge glass, basted the turkey, stirred the cranberry sauce, peeked at her pies through the oven window, and sat down at the kitchen table, hoping they wouldn’t notice her absence.

“Why are Melanie and Jonathan sitting in the car watching television?” Sam asked when he came in.

“You’re late,” Claire said. “They’ve been here for half an hour.”

Claire’s perfect pies, fresh out of the oven, sat cooling on the kitchen counter. Sam bent down and inhaled the vapors. “How come you only made two?”

Naomi and Roger arrived with their three boys, and soon the house was as raucous as five boys playing war could make it.

“The battery on my Watchman died,” Nora’s son Jonathan whined when he and his sister finally came inside.

By the time dinner was ready, Claire was drunk. All afternoon she’d been excusing herself to “check on things,” each time pouring a fast glass of wine. She sat at the head of the table, a little woozy, picking at her food, letting their compliments wash over her like waves.

“Where did you buy this pie?” Nora asked.

“I didn’t buy it,” Claire said, her speech a little slurry. “I baked it.”

“You really made it? The crust is so good, it must have been frozen.”

“Nope,” Claire said, standing to clear some plates. “Ho-made.”

Sam and Jake laughed. There was a big sign at the Snowflake ice cream stand that said, HO-MADE CHILI.

“What’s so funny?” Nora said.

“You,” Claire mumbled under her breath, walking away.

On the single step into the kitchen, she tripped, and the plates went flying, hurling a melange of Thanksgiving foods across the room in a multicolored splatter.

“Shit,” Claire said. “Sorry,” she called loudly in a singsong voice. “Would anybody like some broken glass with their coffee?”

Sam came into the kitchen, surveyed the damage, and, smiling, softly suggested that she go upstairs and lie down.

“Maybe I should,” Claire said, fixing her hair. “You take care of it.”

Sam nodded, and without a word to the guests Claire toddled off up the steps.

A few minutes later, Naomi came up and stretched out beside her on the huge bed. “Nora told Sam how sorry she is. ‘I never knew Claire was an alcoholic,’” she said, imitating Sam’s sister, “‘but I should have. Non-Jews always are.’”

Claire laughed. The more she thought about it, the more she laughed; then she jumped up, ran into the bathroom, and vomited.

“You’ll feel better now,” Naomi said from the bedroom. “You never could hold your liquor.”

Claire came back, pressing a damp washcloth against her face and lips. “I feel terrible.”

“And you look like hell,” Naomi said. “But dinner was great, no lie. Your pie was four-star.”

Claire lay down on the bed. “‘Is it frozen?’” she said. “‘It tastes so good, it must be.’”

“I’ll go and help Sam clean up. Sure you’re okay?”

“Fine,” Claire said. “Listen, come for breakfast. Just us. I’ll make French toast and we can go for a nice long walk.”

“Okay. Sleep well,” Naomi said.

Claire sat up. “Oh, make sure she doesn’t forget her cooler.”

“Or her fucking children,” Naomi said, pulling the bedroom door closed behind her.

Claire arranged the pillows, propping herself up, and called Jody. “Hi,” she said softly when Jody answered.

“Who’s it for?” a sharp voice in the background asked.

“It’s for me, Aunt Sylvia,” Jody said.

“Is it someone you know?”

“If you could just close the door,” Jody said to the aunt. “Sorry,” she said to Claire. “My whole family’s here, and the only one who bothered to stick her head into my room is my eighty-seven-year-old aunt. Before they showed up, my mother came down the hall and closed my door, like I’m a messy closet or something.”

“I wish you were here,” Claire said. “You’d like it. It’s beautiful, and the kids can run around outside, ride bikes, do all the things they can’t in the city.”

It was the first time she’d mentioned her children. She’d known she was going to do it; there was no point in pretending to keep them separate anymore. Soon enough, she’d introduce them in real life.

Jody didn’t say anything for a minute. “Shouldn’t you be doing something, wrapping leftovers, giving the kids Alka Seltzers?”

“I’d rather talk to you,” Claire said, adjusting the pillow behind her head, worried she might throw up again. “You have to come back to New York.”

“I can’t.”

“We won’t go into it now, but you have to. I’m going to find you a doctor. We’ll get the subletter out of your apartment and find someone to get your groceries and all that. You need to be here.”

“Don’t talk to me about it,” Jody said. “Talk to my mother.”

“I will.”

If Jody had been there, Claire wouldn’t have gotten drunk. The two of them would have hidden out in the kitchen and said nasty things about everyone. She visualized Jody resting on the sun porch, wrapped in a thick wool blanket, or sprawled on the sofa in front of a fire while Claire read to her, Jake, and Adam from Winnie-the-Pooh. Claire saw herself making Jody huge, steaming bowls of homemade soup. “Is it frozen?” Nora’s voice echoed in her head. Claire would take Jody back into her life and heal her once and for all.

When Claire got to the office on Monday, she started making a list of things Jody would need: mittens, scarves, a bright apartment with comfortable furniture, cable TV, flowers, a personal trainer/masseur, a nutritionist. She read it over, then threw it in the trash and began again, this time by listing doctors she knew, ones she’d heard about or read about in magazines. Then she wrote out everything she knew about Jody’s medical history and made a note to ask Mrs. Goodman for more information. In Claire’s mind, both she and Mrs. Goodman bore the responsibility for what Claire perceived as a series of grievous errors that had resulted in Jody’s current condition. As Claire saw it, Jody was sick because she’d been given away, delivered to a grief-stricken couple who’d sucked on the infant as though she were a Life Saver or a pacifier. It seemed possible that these twenty-four years of never knowing who she really was could have caused a sophisticated and subtle taxing of the human system, culminating with Jody’s outbreak of disease.

Between patients, first thing in the morning, late in the evening, Claire worked the phones.

“It’s not psychosomatic, it’s not AIDS, and there’s nothing we can do for it,” said the immunologist who’d seen Jody at Georgetown.

“So, what is it?” Claire asked. “What are you calling it?”

“A virus.”

“Is it genetic?”

“I doubt it.”

“How do you treat it?”

“We don’t.”

She called Jody at least once a day. “A nightmare come true,” Jody concluded. “It’s permanent. I’m not getting better. I’ll still be living here when I’m forty.”

“I’m bringing you back,” Claire promised. “Soon.”

Marilyn Esterhaus. That was the name a friend had left on Claire’s machine. Marilyn Esterhaus at New York Hospital.

Claire left five messages before Esterhaus finally got back to her. The phone rang just as a patient was leaving. The machine clicked on; Claire turned the volume up. “This is Marilyn Esterhaus. Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you, I’ve been—”

Claire grabbed the phone—“Hello, I’m here”—pulled out the note pad, and point by point began relating Jody’s history.

“Was a spinal tap done?” Esterhaus asked.

“No.”

“Brain scan?”

“No.”

“Still running fevers?”

“All day, up and down.”

Esterhaus paused. “What I can tell you is this. For a year I’ve been working with people who have similar symptoms. On several occasions we’ve isolated what we thought was the virus, but nothing has panned out. I’m not one hundred percent convinced this is entirely a viral episode. It could be triggered by several other things — a deep systemic response to a naturally occurring chemical, even an allergy. And of course your patient might not even have my disease. It could just as easily be something else. I’d need to see her.”

“I’ve found you a doctor,” Claire said. “She’s very real and very smart. I’m going to talk to your mother tonight.”

“Good luck,” Jody said.

It’s imperative that Jody come back to New York. If you don’t let her return I’m going to come to your house and take her. Don’t make me fight you. Think of what’s best for her. This is what Jody wants, and she’s old enough to know. She’s not your property; she’s not even your child, if you want to get picky about it. Claire played it all back and forth in her head. She didn’t know what to say to Mrs. Goodman, whether to ask, demand, or suggest. She couldn’t imagine what would make Mrs. Goodman want to load Jody into the car and drive her to New York City in the middle of December.

“I think it would be good for Jody to come back to New York,” Claire told Mrs. Goodman that night. She’d decided to start small and work her way up. Her own voice, pathetic and plaintive in the night, echoed back over the telephone wires and struck like a slap in the face.

“I don’t see how,” Mrs. Goodman said. “She can’t even take care of herself. I can’t go running up to New York City every five minutes.”

“She needs to have her life back.”

“It’s very expensive there, as I’m sure you know, and she’s not working. When she gets better, she can go back if she chooses to — I certainly won’t stop her.”

“I’ve found a doctor here who’s doing research on Jody’s illness,” Claire said firmly. “I realize it’s difficult financially, but a person has to feel like she has some control over her life. It’s very important for Jody to be here, and I’m willing to do whatever’s necessary to make that possible.”

Tug of war, winner gets Jody. Claire was pulling hard, throwing her weight into it. Without knowing what she was doing, Claire had entered a competition to prove who was the better mother.

“I’ve made an appointment a week from Tuesday,” Claire said, lying — she hadn’t made the appointment yet, though she planned to. “Perhaps you could drive her up the weekend before.” She paused. “We haven’t talked much about how you feel, but my impression would be that having Jody somewhere else would certainly take some of the pressure off. It must be hard on you.”

“It is‚” Mrs. Goodman said. “I thought it was the flu.”

“I did too,” Claire said.

“When she called me from school, I brushed it off. She’d been saying she was sick for weeks and I ignored it. You think I don’t feel terrible?”

“I can imagine.”

“Can you? Every time I walk down the hall to my bedroom, I pass her door. She just lies there as though she’s waiting for something. She looks at me and I don’t know what to do. I could just cry.”

“Bring her back,” Claire said. “I promise I’ll take good care.”