Brood (6 page)

S
ometimes the twins call her Cynthia, and sometimes Aunt Cynthia. The Aunt Cynthia is a bit disheartening to her—it seems permanent, a dead-end job with no promotion possible. It surprises her to be continually colliding with that small, tender, and undefended part of her that would love it if one day Adam and Alice called her Mom.

But no matter. One way or another, they are becoming a family.

The children cleave to her. They don't help but they closely observe her every move when she makes her bed. They sit and talk to each other right outside the bathroom door while she takes her shower. They eat quickly and they watch quietly while she finishes her breakfast. It's heartbreaking and slightly annoying, and it's also sort of amusing, and on top of all that, it is touching and even a tiny bit gratifying. This is what she is learning: In family life, no one thing is just one thing. Everything holds a multitude of meanings.

There is no downtime. Especially not with these two. Their needs, as yet unspoken, overwhelm her. The fear they lived with, the gruesome things they saw, their months and months and months tumbling through the social-service system. What do they dream of? What do they say to their therapists?

A week that feels like a month goes by. She wishes she were younger, in better shape. Yet older now—she is forty-five—she is perhaps able to tolerate their using up every minute of her day, every ounce of her energy, without feeling impatient or trapped. If the worst thing you feel in your life is exhaustion—not pain, not loneliness, not hopelessness, not rage, not hunger, not terror—then you might as well consider yourself among the fortunate.

Another week passes. The New York summer is the kind Al Gore predicted: the sun a dirty yellow scream, the sky a crazy jumble of clouds, the nights thick as oil spills.

She knows she ought to have found a meeting by now, but it's been years since she's had a drink, or even thought about using, and there is something about being in New York that says fresh start to her. Drinking and its attendant dependence on AA feels like something she left back in California.

Cynthia has many contacts in the New York antiques world, and though it doesn't seem realistic to think that she will soon have her own shop—when she closed Gilty Pleasures back in San Francisco, she did so with the knowledge that she might never run an antiques store again—she has to begin earning some money, and a job has been all but promised her, working for Fay and Jiwani a few doors down from the Pierre, and there is a good chance at another position at a place called American Pastoral. But right now, who has time?

The twins must be fed. Every day. Three or four times a day. Though they are still determined to limit their caloric intake, they are also—despite all their talk about becoming vegetarian—ravenous for meat, which they seem to grab with one hand and push away with the other. She is happy—delighted, really—to feed them all the meat they could ever want, and often the huge kitchen smells like a barbecue pit. And they must be clothed. Cynthia doesn't want to be snobby or grand about it, but they don't look right in those Target and Kmart outfits they came out of foster care with. She takes them to City Outfitters, drawn in by the funky mannequins wearing casual clothes, but feels faint when she sees that a pair of pre-torn blue jeans costs $250. Luckily, the twins do not object when she steers them out of the place. Eventually, she gets them clothes she hopes will take them through the rest of the scorching summer and into the (she hopes) more temperate autumn. She must get them at least one outfit each that they could wear to church or a nice restaurant, and she must get them clothes to run around and be kids in, and she must get them school clothes.

She must also enroll them in school. Sending them back to the Gothic structures of Berryman Prep, their old private school, is out of the question, psychologically and economically. Without a doubt, they will be attending public school. But even in their neighborhood, where real estate prices seem to have been calculated in post–World War I German currency (when it took a wheelbarrow full of paper money to buy a pound of Black Forest ham); even here, where a medical doctor's salary puts him in the middle class and a professor would be unable to live without the help of an inheritance; here, where the Yorkshire terriers wear diamond-studded collars, and nine-year-old girls get four-hundred-dollar haircuts; even here, the nearest public school building is a monument to government neglect: a dingy, one-story afterthought with wire mesh over its windows and brickwork from which graffiti has so often been removed that the stones themselves seem wan and unstable. Here, the student body consists of the children of live-in nannies; rich little boys with behavior problems who have been bounced out of their private schools and who have gladly traded in their blue blazers for basketball jerseys; and a surprising number of children from actual and bona fide nonwealthy parents, children who the strollers and shoppers along Lexington and Madison Avenues thought lived miles and miles away and whom they might have expected to see only in a heartrending documentary about Want in the Midst of Plenty but who reside a few blocks east in tenements that have not yet yielded to the wrecker's ball.

The twins must also see their therapist—since Jenny Carlat, who had been assigned to Alice, moved to Cleveland, both children see Adam's therapist, a lanky young man named Peter White, an MSW who after two years working for the City of New York is already a burned-out caseworker.

White's office is on East Thirty-Second Street. Unfortunately, despite Cynthia's efforts to move the appointments around, Adam is scheduled to see White on Mondays at ten, and Alice sees him on Wednesdays at two, and so Cynthia must accompany them twice a week. They go as a threesome. They do virtually everything as a threesome.

Peter White's office is in what real estate agents call the garden level (but which is in fact the basement) of a shabby old brownstone, once a private home for a family of six and now divided into fourteen rental units, two of them windowless in violation of the law. To reach the entrance of White's office, Cynthia and the twins must take the steps that lead below street level, squeeze around the trash bins, and ignore the sour juniper scent of alley-cat congress. The office itself is scarcely two hundred square feet, devoid of so much as a ray of natural light. The space is divided in two by a wall, with the waiting room on one side and the consulting room on the other. When a client opens the door to the waiting room, the first bars of “Some Enchanted Evening” play in the consulting room, informing White that someone has entered. The first time Cynthia took the children there, she was surprised she could simply let herself in—even in relatively slipshod and easygoing San Francisco, people locked their doors, and here in New York, even the antiques stores had a system by which customers were visually inspected before being buzzed in. She mentioned her uneasiness with White's open-door policy, saying, “Anyone could just walk in here,” and Adam said, “I guess,” and Alice added, “But who'd want to.”

Adam seems indifferent to his appointments with Peter White, but Alice hates them, and today is her hour. She is not one to complain, but as they descend the concrete steps leading to White's door, her eyes are cast down, her shoulders are slumped, and her lower lip is extended in a classic pout of dejection.

“I don't see why we don't have the right to just forget about bad stuff if we want to,” she murmurs, as much to the cosmos as to Cynthia and Adam.

“It's the law,” Adam reminds her, which is his interpretation of Child Protective Services' making their continuing therapy one of the requirements for their adoption to be finalized.

Cynthia opens the door and hears the recording of “Some Enchanted Evening” played by carillon bells coming through the closed door of White's consulting space.

Alice glances at her watch. Today, she is wearing the American Girl, and Adam has the Swiss Army.

“Expecting someone?” Cynthia says, really as no more than a joke.

But Alice frowns. The girl has a talent for suddenly placing her foot in your path and forcing you to step on her toes.

“Kidding,” Cynthia says, hoping to reassure.

“I don't like it here,” Alice says.

“You know where I've always wanted to go?” Cynthia says. “And maybe before school starts we can go there. Just the three of us.”

“Where?” asks Adam.

“Mount Washington,” says Cynthia.

“Where's that?” asks Adam.

“New Hampshire. Right in the middle. It's totally wild. And high. And windy. They say sometimes the wind gets up to three hundred miles an hour.”

“Wouldn't that kill you?” asks Alice. “Why would you want to take us to someplace like that?”

“Because it's beautiful and it's wild. And it's only windy like that sometimes, in the winter.”

A moment later, the door opens and White appears, rubbing his hand on his cheek and chin, perhaps wondering if he can go another day without shaving. He is six and a half feet tall, with long dry hair the color of a parched field of wheat. He holds his long pale hands in front of him and glances at them continually, as if they might do something awful. He treats his hands as if they were on parole. White looks at the three of them expressionlessly.

“Are we early?” Cynthia asks, annoyed by the shrink's lack of affect. Today is the day she might tell him that if you break the word
therapist
into two pieces, you get
the rapist.

Yet why does she resent him? Why does she not acknowledge the fact that she
needs
him? It could be as simple as this: She wants the twins all to herself. She is giving them intravenous infusions of pure unadulterated love, and she does not want that to be interrupted.

“You're right on time,” White says.

“We'll wait right here,” Cynthia says to Alice reassuringly.

“Actually, Ms. Kramer,” White says, “I wonder if you and I could spend a few minutes alone before Alice and I begin.”

Cynthia is surprised to hear this. A nervous flutter in the lower digestive region. Despite Peter White's wracked, two-packs-a-day, ten-cups-of-bitter-coffee appearance and the fact that he is at least ten years her junior, she feels as if she is being called into the principal's office. Has he some sort of heightened emotional radar, has he guessed she has had dark thoughts about him? That
the rapist
thing was meant to be funny…She reaches into her handbag and gives Adam the sudoku puzzle book she'd brought along to pass the time.

“Sit tight, kids,” she says, her voice unaccountably merry. It is a failing of hers, she knows, this desire to keep every moment upbeat, engaging, and interesting, as if she were a TV host afraid they would switch the channel. “Okay? Little Alley-Oop?”

“Okay,” Alice says.

“How come she gets a nickname?” Adam asks. He is embarrassed by his own question. He can barely look at Cynthia.

“You want one? I wasn't sure. You're such a serious kid.”

Adam shrugs. “I don't care. Whatever.”

“Oh, so that's how it's going to be. All right…Braveheart, have it your own way.”

White switches on the white-noise machine on top of the table strewn with magazines and escorts Cynthia into his office, closing the door behind them. When they are seated, he wastes no time getting to the point.

“They are both very upset youngsters, Ms. Kramer. They are bright, engaging, and, when they choose to be, quite articulate. But Alice spends half her hour here crying.”

“Alice?”

“Yes, Alice. Adam doesn't cry. At least not here. But he brought me this drawing.” White unlocks the top drawer of his wooden, well-scarred government-issue desk and pulls out the drawing, slides it toward Cynthia. It is an astonishing piece of work, a pen-and-ink drawing so filled with images that the paper feels drenched. Trees, planets, houses, and statues bearing swords and bayonets all swirl around in a kind of airborne madness that looks partly like ecstasy and partly like the end of the world. In the center of this vortex stands a half-man half-beast creature who is holding a dog that he is preparing to devour; sticking out of his mouth are a dog's head, a rat's tail, a child's foot—the remains of what he has already consumed.

“This is an amazing piece of work,” Cynthia finally says, putting the drawing down. She places her hands in her lap, not wishing White to notice they are trembling. “I mean, a real artist did this. In fact, I doubt it was Adam.” She shrugs. “He's too young, for one thing. This isn't the work of a twelve-year-old.” She slides the drawing back to him.

“It is the work of a twelve-year-old, Cynthia. And Alice does cry in this office. We need to see what really
is,
not what we wish there to be.”

“Of course,” Cynthia says.

“I want to put them both on medication, Cynthia,” White says. In fact, he feels regretful about this, since his slice of the psychological pie is talk therapy, but he camouflages his regret with a certain aggressiveness in his tone. “They both need selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.”

“Antidepressants? Why? I don't see them as depressed.”

“Weeping in my office? This?” He taps the horrific drawing with his index finger.

“But you can't even prescribe them anything, Mr. White. You're not a medical doctor. You're a…what? You have a master's degree in social work? And now you want to pump those kids full of chemicals?”

“You sound rather angry, Cynthia.”

“The fact is, you can't prescribe medications.”

“I work very closely with the best child psychiatrists and psychopharmacologists in New York. Those children need treatment. I do believe that with time they could find their way through the thicket and come out as fine and productive members of society. But talk therapy is slow—and they need help right away. They are gaunt.