Spin Doctor (19 page)

ME

Then again, many people espouse the philosophy that things can only get worse before they get better. So when the phone rang very late on a Saturday evening about a month later, I feared once again that one of my clients had done themselves some harm, and steeled myself to handle the crisis.

But I hadn't prepared myself for what had in fact transpired. The initial conversation went something like this.

 

DISEMBODIED MALE VOICE

[moderate to heavy New York accent]

Susan Lederer?

 

ME

[hesitantly]

Yes…this is she…

 

VOICE

Mrs. Lederer, do you have a daughter named Molly?
[He rattles off our address as well, for verification.]

ME

[barely a whisper]

Oh my God.

 

VOICE

Oh, no, nothing to worry about Mrs. Lederer.

 

ME

[audible exhalation]

Whew. Who are you, by the way?

 

VOICE

Mrs. Lederer, this is Officer Lupinacci over at the twentieth precinct on Eighty-third Street. We have your daughter Molly up here—

 

ME

What happened? Is she okay?

 

LUPINACCI

Physically, yes. There was an incident earlier this evening in which your daughter was involved.

 

ME

[audibly panicking again]

Holy shit…

 

LUPINACCI

She's unharmed, Mrs. Lederer.

 

ME

You said…you said the incident was “earlier this evening.”
[Getting a bit angry now, despite my better judgment.]
Why did it
take this long for someone to phone me? Isn't everyone entitled to make one phone call after they get arrested, or does that only happen on TV? Didn't Molly have her cell phone with her?

LUPINACCI

Well…Mrs. Lederer, your daughter's cell phone was confiscated. It's being held as evidence.

 

ME

Evidence?? And isn't there still such a thing as a pay phone?!

 

LUPINACCI

Mrs. Lederer, we'd like you to come up to the Two-oh so that your daughter can be remanded into parental custody.

ME

Of course. Right. Of course. [
Words desert me.
] I'll grab a cab. Please tell Molly that I love her and I'll be there as soon as I can.

 

I hung up the phone and immediately called Eli, who was at his studio working on
Gia,
but I got the answering machine. I punched up his cell number and it went through to his voice mail. “Guess who's got to handle this alone,” I muttered angrily as I threw on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. Perhaps I should have looked more, I don't know,
maternal
, but they were the nearest garments to hand, and I didn't have the presence of mind to worry about which outfit might convince Officer Lupinacci that I'm a good parent.
Honest, Officer, I swear it. Just ask my other kid
—who was sound asleep until I woke him up to explain that Mommy needed to go out for a little while to pick up his sister.

CUT TO:
INT. POLICE PRECINCT. NIGHT.
[A frantic mother overtips cab driver in her urgency to attend to more pressing matters. She races into the precinct as though, well, as though she's about to rescue her daughter who is in dire danger.]

 

So, that's the scenario. I asked two different people behind two different information desks—one in uniform and one a civilian—where to find Officer Lupinacci, and was directed to two different doors, one of which turned out to be the men's room, where the janitor kindly pointed me in the right direction.

Molly was being detained in a small office cluttered with paperwork and littered with coffee mugs and the aluminum foil and plastic detritus of a day's worth of takeout and delivery. It was not the monklike interrogation room that you see on
Law & Order.
My daughter was pale, and looked very scared. Dark circles of exhaustion under her eyes made her look like she was nearly thirty. Torn between chewing her out for ending up here in the first place and weeping from relief that she was apparently unharmed, I just threw my arms around her, inadvertently whacking her in the back with my purse.

“You're fine, aren't you, baby?” I asked her, peering into her eyes. Although I only gave them a cursory examination, she didn't look like she'd been drinking or doing drugs. Thank God for that, anyway.

“Yeah, I'm okay.”

I registered Molly's involuntary flinch. “They didn't…hurt you…or…touch…you in any bad way, did they?” I whispered to her. I glanced back at Officer Lupinacci, whose expression was significantly more parental than I ever would have anticipated.

“No, I'm fine, Ma. They even took the cuffs off once we came in here,” she added, indicating this room.

I turned on the cop. “You cuffed my daughter?! What for?”

“Standard procedure, ma'am, when we apprehend a shoplifter. Once we determined that she was a minor who presented no threat of bodily harm to either herself or anyone else, we removed the restraints.”

“Shoplifting? Molly, if you needed money, you've got an ATM card. Or you could have phoned home, and we would have found a way to get it to you. What did you need to shoplift for?”

“I think we'd better start from the beginning,” the officer told me. “Your daughter was caught shoplifting from Zabar's—”

“Zabar's!!? What did you do? Try to steal tomorrow's brunch?”

“Sort of,” Molly said sheepishly. “But it was for my Bennington application.”

“I'm completely confused,” I confessed.

Officer Lupinacci flipped open his notebook. Reading from it, he informed me, “Your daughter used her cell phone to film herself shoplifting a package of smoked fish, a quarter-pound plastic container of vegetable cream cheese, and a chocolate bar with almonds.”

“What, no bagels?” I fumed sarcastically.

“Everybody knows that H& H has better ones and that they'll be fresher if you get them Sunday morning rather than Saturday night.”

“Now you're a comedian?” I snapped.

“
You
made the first bagel comment.”

I threw my hands in the air. “So where do we stand?” I asked the policeman. “And what was this stunt all about?” I demanded of Molly. “What's this about the Bennington application?”

A heavyset gentleman in jeans and a plaid shirt was ushered into our room and nodded curtly to the cop.

“I swear it's all just part of my college application. I've been phone-filming myself doing slacker stuff like cutting class, playing in video arcades, and now shoplifting, as part of my supplemental materials to Bennington, illustrating what happens to a teenager when she runs amok; and that a sound college education, offered from institutions like Bennington—well, specifically Bennington—can save an at-risk young woman like me from turning into an example of what's wrong with our society. They can uplift her instead and mold her into a model citizen representing what's best about the future of America. You know…” She bracketed her words as though we were watching them unspool on a giant screen above our heads.
“Save another promising creative mind from ending up like
this.”

“Do you believe any of this?” Lupinacci said to me.

“Knowing my daughter as I do, yes, I'm inclined to,” I replied.

“Will you un-impound her cell phone, because it might back up her story. And who's this man?” I asked, looking at the stranger in the room.

The stranger extended his hand to me. “Bob Akins. I'm the Saturday night manager over at Zabar's.”

“Look…do you mind dropping the charges? Molly's a minor, she's never done anything like this before and I'm certain she never will again. I'm sure this was all just a stunt that got out of hand; she was making a movie, and it just looked a little too real for comfort. Getting into college is so competitive these days that I suppose some kids are tempted to do anything—however misguided—that they feel might give themselves an edge.” I looked at Mr. Akins. “I can understand that you had to do your job and call the police. But we've discovered it was more or less a mix-up and we've straightened it out, now,
haven't we? You don't really want to drag this through court, do you? How much money was the merchandise worth, after all?”

Officer Lupinacci referred to his notebook. “Twenty-two dollars and twenty-seven cents. But there's tax on the chocolate bar…so it's a little more than that.”

“Let us reimburse you,” I offered, “and just call it a night. I'm sure you don't want the publicity,” I said to Mr. Akins, “and you, officer, don't want the paperwork. Twenty-two dollars and twenty-seven cents? Call it an even twenty-two fifty. Molly, please pay Mr. Akins.”

My daughter mumbled something that I couldn't hear, so she crooked her finger and drew me closer. “I don't have any money on me,” she whispered.

“What? How many times have your father and I told you never to leave the house without—”

“That was part of the
thing,
” Molly whined. “I wanted to know what it would really be like to get arrested for shoplifting and everything. To make it really real. Not to just get out of it by paying if I got caught. And so I didn't bring any money with me on purpose.”

I wanted to kill her, but she was flesh and blood, so my allegiances were clear. I took twenty-five dollars from my wallet and handed it to Mr. Akins. “I'm asking you as a mother: can we please just put a period on this little incident. I'm sure that my daughter has learned a lesson from all of this, if the frightened look on her face when I walked in the door was any indication.”

Mr. Akins pocketed my cash and handed me back $2.50. “Of course, what she might have been scared of was
you,
” he quipped.

“Do you have teenagers?” I asked him plaintively.

He grinned. “I have fifteen-year-old twins. That's why I accepted your offer.”

“Are we good to go?” I asked Officer Lupinacci. He nodded, then explained how Molly could redeem her phone. As we headed for the personal property room, the cop stopped us with his voice.

“Hey! I just gotta question, Mrs. Lederer.”

“Shoot. Oops, I didn't mean that, obviously. I was trying to say ‘go ahead.' What's your question, officer?”

“I just wanna know what it is you do for a living. Your profession. Just curious is all.”

“I'm a shrink.”

He shook his head in bemused stupefaction. “It figures.”

 

Outside the station, I hailed a cab. “If you think there won't be any fallout from this little episode, you are grievously mistaken,” I warned Molly. “When your father finds out that—”

Molly held up her hand to silence me. “You know, Ma, you're always telling your clients to think things through for themselves, not to rely on others to solve their problems, not to be
co-dependent.
And whenever something happens at home, you're always waiting for Dad to weigh in on it before you make a move. And half the time he's not even
around.
At least not lately.”

That stung. And she did have a point. “That's because there are two authority figures in our household and we've agreed to share the responsibility for everything.”
Even though
I
usually end up with the lion's share of it.
“Don't try to make this about something else, Molly. I'm on to you. You're trying to shift the focus away from yourself, and that's not going to work.”

Sure enough, when we returned home, Eli—who claimed to have arrived there not ten minutes after I'd left, but was sure I had everything under control and thought it made more sense for him to stay home with Ian—had something to say about the
matter. Rather than rail and scream at our daughter for turning out to be an irresponsible hoodlum, however, he decided to put Molly on trial, offering her the opportunity to defend herself. Molly demanded a juror of her peers, but since it was well past midnight, I voted against reawakening Ian. Sigmund seemed willing to listen as long as he had a bone to gnaw on, and like many jurors, ended up being more preoccupied with the demands of his stomach than with the proceedings.

To support her contention that she staged—or should I say filmed—the shoplifting incident as part of a streaming video she was making to supplement her college application materials, Molly screened the work-in-progress for us and offered her partially completed college application as further evidence. She also informed us that she was submitting her diary—the original and not a photocopy—as further evidence of her wasted life, a prime example of a perfectly viable human being who has been content until now to take up time and space.

“I think the diary will totally blow them away,” Molly told us. “I mean, won't they think it's awesome that someone would be so vulnerable—maybe even so stupid—to let total strangers know their innermost thoughts that they wouldn't even share with their best friends?!”

“Ever watch reality TV?” Eli was skeptical about this contention. “Are you sure you haven't kept two sets of books?” he asked our daughter.

“
Ucgh!
Dad, that is so rude!”

Eli smiled at her. “Your mother and I have learned to take nothing at face value in this life. And deviousness is a behavior that is not entirely unknown to you.”

“Okay, if you don't believe me, search my room! I swear, I
promise
you, there's only one diary.”

“We're getting derailed here,” I said. “Molly, you committed a
crime. A real one. And there are going to be real consequences. You're just damn lucky—we all are—that the Zabar's people didn't insist on pressing charges. Your allowance couldn't exactly cover legal fees.”