Spin Doctor (7 page)

“Laurence goes to Fieldston too. He's also a junior, his father is a lawyer and his mom is a realtor who's allergic to cats so they had to give theirs away last year. We met in the Environmental Club that Mr. Nivon leads after school on Thursdays, okay? So, he's, like, socially responsible.”

I rolled my eyes. “And tonight would be a shining example of his social responsibility?”

“He doesn't drink.”

“Yeah, but you do,” Laurence quietly grunted, then immediately realized the gravity of his misstep in the loyalty department. Unfortunately for Molly, this time his mumble was articulate enough for me to decipher. While whistle-blowers are often regarded as heroes, the kid would not be someone I'd want on my side if cracking under torture was ever going to become a factor. It wouldn't surprise me if Molly broke up with him over this transgression.

“Excuse us, please, while I speak to my daughter,” I said to the boy, then pulled Molly toward me so we were nose-to-nose. “What were you drinking tonight and how many have you had?”

“God, Ma!” she whined. “I'm fine.”

“No. No, you're not. And I'm not just talking about underage drinking. I'm talking about lying to me. You didn't tell me where you were really going tonight—”

“Did you really expect me to? Mom, sometimes I think you are totally—”

“You didn't tell me that you actually went out with a guy.”

“So now I can't date?”

“Of course you can date. Don't put words in my mouth. Dating at sixteen is fine. Speaking of which, how long have you been dating Laurence and why did you feel you couldn't tell me?”

“Since March and it's none of your business.”

“As long as you live under my roof, eat my food, can't afford to pay your own tuition, and are below the age of eighteen, I'm going to have to disagree with you on that point.” With Molly, no matter what she's into, if you need to ask how deeply involved in it she is, it's always safe to assume that the answer is “very.” She's been pushing the envelope since she pushed her way into the world. I wasn't even about to ask the Sex Question as far as it concerned Laurence. Not in the middle of a nightclub, certainly. So I bit my tongue and chose a less inflammatory query instead. “So, why, Molly, as long as you were somehow managing to sneak into nightclubs with your boyfriend—which is another issue that I'll get to in a moment—did you choose to come to Sappho, since, it appeared to me, from your performance on the dance floor, that Laurence is a heterosexual male.” I regarded Laurence's almost pretty, clean-shaven face. “And tonight he's masquerading as a straight woman who wants to pretend she's gay for a few hours.” Shakespeare would have had a field day. “Either of you want to tell me what I'm missing here?”

Laurence blushed and shuffled his feet; at least his dress shoes were polished and his tuxedo pants neatly pressed. Then he reverted to teenage mumble mode.

“Sorry, I didn't hear you.”

“Stop embarrassing my boyfriend, Mom!” Molly screeched. “You should consider yourself lucky that I
have
a boyfriend, instead of just hooking up, like most of my friends do!” She gripped me by the elbow just as I had done to her a minute or
so earlier and steered me farther away from Laurence. Then she decided it wasn't far enough and after issuing him a curt “Wait here,” dragged me into the ladies' room.

If I do find out she's been “hooking up,” she's going to be grounded for life.

“I am so tempted to have it out with you right here, Molly,” I fumed.

Molly lowered her voice to a whisper. “I thought you wanted to know what Laurence and I were doing in a faux gay bar.”

“I do.”

“Yeah, so that's why we're having this conversation in here where he can't hear us, so you can't embarrass him any further than you already have. I am
so
going to have to make it up to him after tonight.”

I gave Molly a look of death. At least she had the good grace to wince.

“Okay,” she said, “you asked why we came here. You want the truth, Ma? Are you sure you can handle the truth?”

“Stop paraphrasing Jack Nicholson and get to the point, Molly.”

“Because he likes to see two women, you know, kissing and stuff. It turns him on, okay? And when
he's
turned on,
I'm
the recipient of that turned-on-ed-ness, okay? And that's fine with me!”

I suppose I should just act like the modern mother that I keep trying to think I am and be grateful that her boyfriend “de semester” doesn't drink, and not fret too much about his less wholesome tendencies. “Molly, you were talking a few minutes ago about social responsibility,” I said, lowering my voice to a hiss. “How did you two get in here? Weren't you carded? And how do you feel knowing that you could be getting Claude and Naomi in deep shit? Everything your father and I have attempted to instill in you aside, haven't you absorbed
any
sense
of ethics from attending the Ethical Culture schools for almost thirteen years?”

Molly folded her arms across her chest and narrowed her eyes, leveling a challenge at me. “The bouncer doesn't care.”

“Are you telling me that you've come here before?”

“I didn't say that.” It was hard to tell whether she was lying to me, particularly after her admission about Laurence's turnons. “Look,” she added grumpily, “the bouncer let us in with a whole crowd of people all dressed up like we are and he didn't check IDs, okay?”
No, not okay,
I was thinking. “I didn't even see Naomi and Claude. Are they here? Why would we be getting
them
in trouble?”

“Because they own this place. And if they don't know their bouncer is admitting minors to an establishment that sells alcoholic beverages, I'm about to enlighten them.”

“God, Ma! Who are you now, the FBI?”

I could have argued that the FBI had nothing to do with it and that it was the New York State Liquor Authority they'd all have to reckon with, but I didn't feel like getting into semantics with my teenage daughter.

The door to the ladies' room opened and Alice and Izzy poked their heads inside. “There you are!” Izzy exclaimed. “We wondered what the hell happened to you. Do you know there's a
guy
in here? A guest, I mean; not a bartender. Waiting right outside in the hall, in front of the pay phones.”

I told them an emergency had just come up but that there was no bloodshed, everything was fine, and that they should go ahead and continue to party without me, apologizing for being unable to spend any more time with them this evening. I did not divulge that I needed to drag my disobedient and soon-to-be-grounded daughter home by her tailcoat…after a discreet word in the owners' collective ears.

“You don't have to act like the Gestapo,” Molly moaned as I led her and Laurence toward the nightclub's exit. My patience exhausted, I chastised her for equating her Jewish mother with a Nazi, particularly on Weimar Nacht. “It's just an
expression.
You have
no
sense of humor!” she protested.

“Not tonight,” I said grimly, catching sight of Naomi speaking to the bouncer. I caught her eye and she turned around.

“Leaving so soon? Hey, we're going to have a costume contest at midnight…Oh, shit,” she muttered, recognizing my teenage daughter. “That's Molly!” She shook her head apologetically. “Don't worry, Susan, this is
not
going to happen again. Carding!!” she shrieked at the bouncer. “Carding! What have I told you about checking ID?
Every
ID. Do you want to get us shut down? I am not going to lose the business that Claude and I have been building up for seven years because some no-neck is too lazy to do his job. Next time this happens one of us is going to be facing unemployment—and it's not going to be me!”

Once on the street, I hailed a taxi and dropped Laurence in front of his apartment building. Turns out, it's around the corner from ours, right over on Central Park West. And still Molly had never introduced me to him until circumstances intervened. “You haven't heard the end of this,” I warned her as we rode upstairs in the elevator. “Just wait until your father gets home.”

At two
A.M
. Molly was sound asleep. But
I
was still waiting for Eli.

Progress Notes

Meriel Delacour:
Client's focus on her employer's anthropomorphism of her pet Chihuahua is a kind of “can't see the forest for the trees” paradigm. We need to work on what's really the larger issue, the bigger picture. Client's resentment of her job situation is also rooted elsewhere. Encourage her to surmount her insecurities about her value to the workforce, not as a domestic, but as it relates to what she feels is holding her back from exploring career options, rather than accepting as the end of the line—yet all the while resenting—an unpleasant job situation. In future sessions, discuss these obstacles to risk-taking.

 

Naomi Sciorra and Claude Chan:
The issue of adoption has created a sea change in this otherwise fairly stable relationship. Given a number of factors, including possible fear of abandonment and cultural identity, neither partner seems willing to concede any ground to the other, and each exhibits her own brand of denial in terms of the real-world scenarios or the other's sensitivity. Encourage them to function as a unified team to work through this enormous issue. Perhaps I'm not the right therapist for them at this stage because, while I'm entirely sympathetic to the hurdles facing gay couples seeking to adopt a foreign-born child, I have strong opinions on the subject, believing that all children should have the chance to be raised in a loving home, regardless of the sexual orientation of the parent(s); and therefore, even at the expense of shading a truth in order to pass muster with the bureaucracies.

Which brings me to…

 

Me:
One of the cardinal tenets of being an effective therapist is to practice what you preach. How can we expect our clients to
understand, and then run with, behavioral concepts that we can't master ourselves? How do I come off trying to help Claude and Naomi become good parents when I'm clearly failing, or at least falling down on the job, with my own daughter? Turning into a tyrant and grounding Molly will have an adverse effect (I know I'm backpedaling here), but if my rules remain the same as always, where's her punishment? Or, more importantly, what will she have learned from the Sappho incident, and will she apply that lesson to her behavior in the future? Who am I kidding? She's a
teenager,
not a test case!

TALIA

“I think it'll be good for me, y'know?” Talia said. For the past several sessions she'd been foregoing the laundry room couch for the floor. She'd sit on her yoga mat with her legs in a deep second position split, which is where she was this morning as she once again underplayed her achievements.

“Good? I'd suggest popping the cork on some champagne but it has calories. Talia, it's fantastic! You've been striving to be made a principal ever since you were accepted into the company.”

Talia nodded. “Yeah, I know, but champagne is too obviously…exultant, y'know? And I hate to jinx it,” she replied, touching her forehead to her right knee.

“For the time being, let's leave superstition to Mala Sonia,” I gently suggested. “You've earned this spot.”

“I can't believe I'm doing the pas de deux in ‘Diamonds.' I've dreamed about it for years from the wings. I've danced in the other two segments, ‘Rubies' and ‘Emeralds.'
Jewels
is one of Balanchine's greatest ballets and it's a big crowd favorite and all that, but the ‘Diamonds' segment is the most special. I'm going
to be dancing the role that Balanchine choreographed for Suzanne Farrell, and she's always been my idol, y'know?” She stretched out over her left knee.

Never in a million years, even at my most flexible, could I touch my forehead to my knee—and leave it there indefinitely. “I am so happy for you. Enjoy this moment, Talia. This entire experience. Resist all temptations to beat yourself up.”

“Yeah, you're right. It's just so hard not to. Though my mother is good at beating me up—emotionally—for the both of us. I couldn't wait to tell her that I'd be dancing the ‘Diamonds' pas de deux up in Saratoga this summer. And y'know what she told me when I said I hoped she'd come up to see me dance it?” I shook my head and waited for Talia to continue. “She said one of the cats is sick and she doesn't want to leave it alone.” She gracefully folded her body over her right leg again. “My mother said she wouldn't trust a sitter with a sick cat and she certainly wasn't going to leave it in a strange hotel room upstate.” And again over her left leg.

My thoughts drifted to Meriel's question regarding white people and their dogs. She and Amy were constantly battling over Hector the Chihuahua's proper place in the world. Most housekeepers would have gotten fired for such outspokenness, but Meriel confided to me that she was too good at her job to lose it, and Amy had admitted in
her
session that she just wasn't up to conducting interviews for someone new and that Eric liked the way Meriel ironed his shirts. “Of course I told him I'd be happy to send them out,” Amy had said, “but the truth is that there isn't a decent place in the neighborhood and Eric hates the idea of some stranger touching his garments.”

Any therapist who tells you that her mind never wanders during a session is lying.

Talia reached for the ceiling. “So I said to her—my mother—
‘Hey, I'm your daughter, y'know. A person. Not a fucking cat. That cat's not going to take care of you when you finally get cirrhosis.' Of course the way things are going she's going to die alone of a rotten liver with her cats crawling over her, wondering why the lady who always fed them isn't moving.” Talia stretched her arms toward the washers and leaned forward so that her forehead was touching the mat in front of her.

“My mother has never understood me,” she added, her voice muffled by her contorted posture. “I don't know what it was she wanted me to
become,
y'know?”

“You've done remarkably well, Talia. I'd encourage you not to focus on whether or not your promotion pleases your mom, because she's one of those people who, unfortunately, lacks the capacity to share your triumph in a positive way. No matter how fast you dance—metaphorically speaking now—she won't give you the applause and the bouquet without the thorns, and without finding a way of begrudging them—or even denying them—to you. Look at what you have to be proud of: you should be very pleased
yourself
by your accomplishments. How many people get to follow their bliss in life?
And
make a living at it?” Every day I count my own blessings in that regard.

My job has its challenges, to be sure, but I meet fascinating people from all walks of life, and when they grow, I grow too. Would I have loved to become a professional dancer? At the time I switched college majors, the answer was yes, but now…? I'm less sure about it. Put it this way: knowing what I know now, I've never regretted my decision.

“Well, it's not like I didn't
work
for what I've achieved,” Talia said dismissively.

“I didn't say that. Or mean to imply it.”

“I mean, I think I did pretty good for someone who never even went to college, y'know?” Vertebra by vertebra she rolled
up to a seated position and smoothed a recalcitrant strand of hair that had the audacity to defect from her dark bun. “Most people who never go to college end up working at McDonald's or something.”

“Well, that's one way to look at it,” I replied.

Talia looked momentarily studious. “Y'know, I make a living doing what I love to do most and I don't even need to know how to count higher than eight. And some of the time I only have to start at five!”

It was hard to believe she was serious, but she didn't crack a smile. Talia Shaw is one of those very literal people who don't do—or tend to get—irony. Her mathematical observation reminded me of the audition sequence in
A Chorus Line
where the choreographer sets the tempo for the jazz steps with “a-five, six, seven, eight!”

“How old were you when you first started ballet lessons?” I asked her. It was just about time to wrap up our session. She'd risen and begun to dance a combination involving zillions of
pas de bourrées.

“Four. No—wait. Four was
Ulysses
on my head.” Raising her arms in an exquisite port de bras, Talia
bourrée
d across the floor like the Dying Swan. “Five. I started classes at five.”

“Oh, well. Too late for Molly,” I muttered to myself, only half joking. I'm glad that my daughter wasn't, and isn't, one of the overprivileged overprogrammed, with a different after-school activity every day of the week since kindergarten, but my biggest fear is that Molly—who may never get to college the way she's going academically—might actually end up with a McCareer; she hasn't spent the last decade of her life in the passionate pursuit of her life's ambition. Talia was right.
Her
talent and dedication—and drive—enabled her to succeed without a college education. In Molly's case, there's
nothing
that I know of that she wants more than anything in the world. There are a num
ber of things at which she shows promise, but she lacks all motivation. Molly will need to know how to count higher than eight.

ME

Over brunch one Sunday, Eli and I sat down with Molly to discuss her college prospects. We'd visited a few schools over the spring; and between her unenthusiastic reaction to the campuses or the students or the faculty or the food or the weather or any combination of the above, and the schools' unenthusiastic reaction to Molly and what she could—or couldn't—bring to their respective institutions, the entire experience was pretty much a bust all around. Since then she's more or less settled on her first choice. At the moment, figuring she'd have a better chance of getting accepted as a legacy, it's between Bennington (my alma mater), and NYU, which is Eli's. Although she'll take the test again this fall, her current SAT scores are lousy, her academics are worse, and she has no extracurricular activities that would set off ecstatic bells and whistles in any hallowed hall. She's never played on any athletic teams, and pooh-poohs what she calls the “dork clubs” like debating or chess, which seem to have enjoyed a renaissance since her father and I were in high school. Molly had a few poems and short stories published in the lit mag, did a couple of shows through the drama department—mostly, I think, to prove to her kid brother that she could act too—and participated in a handful of modern dance recitals. This meager résumé would even have been unremarkable back when I was applying to college; nowadays the bar has been set impossibly high for most students of modest incomes and backgrounds.

For example, some of Molly's classmates, concerned that vol
unteering to serve Thanksgiving dinner in a homeless shelter didn't give them enough of a competitive edge in the college admissions wars, have interned at the Supreme Court, designed and successfully marketed their own line of sportswear, had a showing of their life-size metallurgy sculptures at an edgy SoHo gallery, and one polyglot spent his school vacations as a sherpa guide. Okay, his grandfather really
is
a full-time sherpa and his father is a Nepalese diplomat with connections…but still. Molly could never compete with—or should I say
against
—that in a zillion years. And applying to college these days is very much a competition. I've come to regard the entire hair-raising process as a combination of filing your income taxes and running with the bulls at Pamplona.

It both worries and disturbs me that my daughter is so apathetic about something so significant. Maybe the stress that Eli and I have placed on the importance of college has somehow had the effect of pushing Molly further and further away from the subject. Last night I warned her that if she didn't focus in the coming semester and really ramp up her grades, she might be looking at Manhattan Community College as her “safety school.”

“Ma,” she'd whined, “they teach ESL to the freshmen! Whoever heard of a person getting accepted to a college in America who can't even speak English!”

“Well, then you'll excel academically,” I said simply. She couldn't tell whether I was kidding. I'm not even sure myself.

“Maybe I'll just backpack around the world instead of college.”

“What will you use for money?”

“I'll think of something. I could always sell my body.”

“Don't test me, Molly.” I would never force her to waste tens of thousands of dollars of our money—hundreds, by the time she graduates, hypothetically—but I'm as burned out on this subject as Molly is. If only she were hungry for something. If she
were going to backpack in search of something a little less vague than “herself,” it might actually sit well with me. Eli too. We realize that all high school seniors are not college material the following year, if ever. But Molly's lack of direction suggests very few options. College life should provide some structure. I hope she does apply to Bennington, and I hope to hell they'll find a good enough reason to want her. I want her to experience dormitory life, the world beyond New York City, and that middle space between total dependence on her parents and complete freedom before it's time for her to permanently leave the nest.

 

Eli and I reviewed the Molly college issue after we made love last night, although I have to admit that I tried to postpone the conversation as much as possible. About fifteen minutes after he'd rolled over, I snuggled up next to him and tried to get things going again. He accused me of being a sex maniac.

“Sex maniac?” I'd said. “I haven't heard that phrase since high school. And since when is wanting to have sex with your husband twice in one night being a ‘sex maniac'? Whatever happened to all the inventive, creative stuff we used to do?”

“We've been married for almost twenty years,” Eli said simply.

His words stung like a slap, but I ducked an argument. “So,” I chuckled, trying to keep it light, “is that supposed to be an excuse? I refuse to accept that two decades of marriage and two kids
have to
take a toll on a couple's sex life. I know it's the usual, but it needn't be the norm.”

“Aw, Susie, don't get all ‘shrinky' on me.”

“
I'm
not the one who got ‘shrinky,'” I said, fondling him. Then I jumped his bones.

Finally, just before Eli was all set to roll over again, leaving that vast territory of no-man's slumberland between “his side” and “my side” of the bed, we discussed Molly.

“I told her she's really going to have to change her habits if she's got a prayer of getting into a good school, unless she wants to enroll at one of the CUNY campuses. The city doesn't seem to care much who they take these days, but it also means a degree from them will be worth shit. Even the state schools are highly competitive now. They can afford to be picky.”

“Molly's Molly,” Eli said sleepily. “She's always been Molly. She's never been interested in academics, has no use for sports, is generally apathetic about the performing arts—she's not Ian. She's Molly.”

I stroked his back. “So you're saying you don't think she can change her attitude?”

“You tell me. You're the shrink. I ‘draw comic books for a living,' remember?”

“You don't have to get snide. This is a serious discussion about our daughter, not a battlefield.”

“I wasn't getting snide. You misread me. It was a joke.”

It didn't sound like much of a joke to me, but I let it drop.

Eli brushed a strand of hair from my eyes. “You think too much, Susie.”

“Well,” I said, feeling my hackles rise, despite my better judgment, “I'm tired of being the only one doing any active thinking when it comes to a discussion about what goes on around here. I help people all day,” I sighed, “I'm the problem solver, the one people expect to ‘fix' them. And then I come home and I feel that I'm the problem solver here all the time too. I know you've been busy with
Gia
lately…you've got deadlines…and I don't call you at the studio every time something comes up—though Lord knows, whenever I do try to reach you I always get your voice mail anyway—but I need your support, especially on parenting issues. I feel like I'm doing everything alone most of the time.”