"Doreen, just tell me you're all right."
"I am, I mean, I think I am. I'm scared of all the weirdos here, but I'm all right."
"Dear girl," he said, trying not to imagine how small
and afraid and alone she must be in the vast Port Authority, "can you tell me why you ran away?"
"Um . . . well I, I ran away because I couldn't . . . I couldn't . . . um . . .," she sobbed. "I couldn't stay there anymore."
"Doreen, does this have anything to do with David's birth father?" he asked. "Doreen, who is David's birth father?"
More sobs and finally she managed to ask, "Do you know?"
"I
do
know. I think I know. Did he rape you?"
"I hate him."
"Is he still abusing you?"
"I can't go back there."
"Doreen, you have to go back and report him. Turn him in. For your sake. For the sake of the rest of the family. Does Bea know?"
"Oh, no. It would kill her. She thinks they're happy together. It would kill my sister too. Ruin her life and the kids' lives too. And I love those kids—"
"What about
your
life? I care about your life. Go home and tell Bea. She'll give you the strength to do this."
"I can't."
There was a knock at the trailer door. Damn. Rick opened it and gestured with a please-wait hand up to the assistant director who stood outside pointing at his watch, mouthing the words, What about the dinner break? A dinner break. If he let those two actors out of that bed, he would totally destroy the mood for close-ups. What was he thinking? He'd
already
destroyed the mood by walking out. Fuck the mood, he thought. I'll get it back. I'll figure it out later. There's a life at stake here.
"Give them the dinner break now," he said out loud
"What?" Doreen asked on the phone.
"I was talking to my assistant director," he said. The AD nodded and closed the door. "Forgive me. Doreen, please listen to me and go home now, work this out. You can do it." He knew he shouldn't, mustn't, wasn't supposed to say the next, but all the rules were broken anyway so he decided he would bribe her. "I'll tell you what. Go home now . . . do you have money and a ticket?"
"Yeah."
"And if you do, if you go right now . . . I'll send you a ticket to come and be with me and David at Christmas. Would you like that?"
The voice on the other end of the phone now was the voice of a very young girl. "Oh, wow! Really? Yeah! That would be the best! To see the baby? I'm going home!"
"Doreen. You must put a stop to this man. No one can do that for you."
"I know," she said. "I will." But Rick was unconvinced.
"David and I both love you," he said, and the line went dead.
"Mr. R.?" Andrea opened the door of the trailer. "Is Doreen all right?" He nodded an absent nod. "The cast and crew are on dinner," Andrea told him.
The cast and crew? Yes. He'd better get back to his own problems. He was in the middle of shooting a forty-million-dollar film, the success or failure of which could make or break his career.
"Fine," he said. "Just bring me a sandwich." Now, where am I, he thought. Yes. The love scene.
37
S
O WHAT DO I DO? What's the etiquette when you think the teenage birth mother of your son has probably been raped by her sister's husband, which makes him the birth father of your child? Do you try and hire someone to kill the bastard, or just sit and wait for the phone to ring?" Then he added wryly, "And I
used
to think my relationships were complicated."
"Rick, from all you've told us, Doreen is very strong," Barbara said. "She convinced Bea to let her come here and give you the baby instead of having him at a home and giving him away in an anonymous adoption. She lived in your house and you got to know her strength intimately. Up until recently she was able to keep what both of you felt was a healthy distance from the situation. It seems to me that you may just have to wait and trust that she'll work it out."
"I disagree," Lainie said. "I think he owes her a lot, and that he needs to actively figure out a way to do
something for her. She gave him an incredible gift, the way Jackie did me and Mitch, and in taking the baby he took on a lifelong relationship with her."
Everyone turned to look at Lainie. She was even more pale and beautiful today, though her big blue eyes were ringed with red. "Jackie came to see me, came to my home one night and told me what she's been going through, and I'm beginning to have some understanding about how she feels. I still haven't forgiven Mitch, but at least I know now that there's some part of me that's starting to think maybe I can do what Judith talked about in one of these sessions. To learn how to change my definition of the way things are supposed to be." Her emotions stopped her from saying more.
Barbara turned to Mitch. "Do you want to talk about this?" She hoped there wasn't any judgment in her voice, because for weeks what she'd felt like doing was grabbing him by the collar of his shirt and saying, Talk to this woman and work it out. Maybe now their moment was here.
"I wish I knew what to say," Mitch said, and all of them watched as his tough front fell slowly away. "I come here and sit in these groups, and sometimes I'm feeling as if I want to run out there and grab Rose and leave with her. And other times I'm wishing like hell I knew how to break down and beg all of you to help me, because all I really want is for my daughter to have a good life."
"And what do you want for your wife?" Barbara asked.
"For her to understand I meant to do something loving and made a mess. That I love her and miss her and want her back, want my family back. But that I still believe we must somehow include Jackie in Rose's world."
Barbara only nodded, and then she looked around at
all of their concerned faces looking at Lainie. There was no doubt that the people in this group cared about one another. At the end of each session, before they went home to face their respective problems, they all hugged one another and wished one another well. And she was warmed by the way their interest in one another's lives seemed genuine.
"Make it work, Lainie," Ruthie urged. "Remember what we're learning in here about new rules."
Lainie couldn't look at any of them.
"Life is too short to waste time withholding your love, Lainie," Shelly said. "We know that very well," he added so softly it was as if he was talking to himself. "Particularly in our family." Everyone looked at him, and he wondered how they would react to what he was about to tell them. "Because I've been diagnosed as being HIV-positive."
Barbara glanced at Lainie, Mitch, Judith, and Rick for their reactions, and then at Ruthie, who had had no idea Shelly was going to tell them today. Her eyes shone brightly with her love for him.
"I haven't wanted to talk about this in here," he said. "It's been hard on our lives, particularly for Ruthie, and though I'm feeling pretty damn good most of the time, I've been fired from my job in an acute case of prejudice. I worry about my family and how they'll be treated when more and more people find out. I want to keep writing, maybe even write about what I'm going through, but I've never written anything but comedy, and this ain't particularly funny."
Barbara could tell that no one knew how to respond. She was surprised and glad when Rick spoke.
"Shelly, you're an extraordinarily good writer," he said. "You have a completely unique point of view. I've watched your show at least a dozen times, and I always know which material comes from you and
Ruthie, because the script always has your insight and style. You could write a hell of a screenplay about anything. And I for one would be very interested in it."
"You're being kind," Shelly said.
"No, I'm not. I'm being my usual selfish self. I think working with you would be profitable in every sense of the word. If you deprive the world of your talent because some homophobic jerk fired you, you're making a giant mistake."
Ruthie looked at Shelly and wondered what he was thinking. Rick Reisman may have had some bad luck in the past, but some of his films were classics. He was shooting one now that already had the buzz of success all over town.
"You don't have to write an AIDS story. I'll sit and pitch any idea you like with you. Don't stop working, Shelly. You're too damned good," Rick said.
"I appreciate what you're saying," Shelly said, looking at Rick, "and I'll certainly think about it." Ruthie crossed her fingers. If Shelly sold a treatment of a story to a studio, or better yet a screenplay, his spirits would soar. And thinking practically, his medical insurance would continue to be covered by the Writers' Guild.
The children were toddling in to find their parents. Dana gestured to Barbara that it was break time, but Barbara asked her to entertain the children for a few minutes longer so that she could bring up one more issue.
"Before the children get here, as I'm sure you're all aware, the Christmas holidays are fast approaching, and I wanted to talk about the stress that sometimes accompanies them. The stress for the parents is from the obvious. The traffic and the crowds, the financial pressures. Those adults who have had joyous family experiences at holidays frequently try to recreate those experiences, and that's potentially frustrating.
"Those parents who
haven't
had good holiday experi
ences sometimes try to better the experience for their own children, which doesn't always work out the way they'd hoped either. So what I strongly urge you to do is to keep your plans simple. Ask yourself how much of the plans really are about the needs of the people in your life now, versus your needs from the past.
"As for the children, even the best toddler has a hard time with holidays for a lot of reasons. His or her schedule is frequently changed around. Nap times, mealtimes are all topsy-turvy. The departure from their routine can make them grumpy or cranky and upset. Holiday situations may force them to be confronted by a lot of strangers who could seem frightening. So my suggestion is that you stay aware of your child's needs to keep as much of his or her life-style as intact as possible. Let them eat at home at mealtime and
then
take them to the party. Plan outings after a nap, don't insist that they be chummy with strangers at parties, because they won't want to be.
"I'm bringing this up now so you can avoid the trap of inflated holiday expectations. I'm personally feeling sad about spending Christmas without my children, because my daughter is spending the holiday with her fiancé and his mother, and my son is going on a ski trip with a friend. My mother is going back east to be with my sister, so maybe I'm projecting my own trepidations, but I thought I'd mention it."
"I've invited Doreen to come and be with me and my uncle and Patty and the boys."
"Wow!" Judith said. "That ought to be emotional."
"I'm hoping to get her out of her environment in Kansas and maybe find out what's really going on with her.''
"We're just going to a few parties," Ruthie said.
"I don't feel too much like celebrating," Shelly added.
"Well, it's going to be just me and the girls and some friends," Judith said.
Lainie didn't say a word.
The children were at the snack table now and the parents rose to join them. They had a snack, sang "Five Little Monkeys Jumpin' on the Bed" and "We're Goin' to the Zoo." Then Dana read to them from
Goodnight Moon
.
Barbara watched the families share hugs and holiday wishes with one another. Mitch parted uncomfortably with Rose, getting only a nod from Lainie. Ruthie and Shelly walked out with their arms around each other, and Rick helped Judith with her double stroller. After Barbara and Dana put away the toys, Barbara made notes on all that had happened and wondered if what she had told them about the holidays would help them, or herself.
38
I
T WAS A FRIDAY a few days before Christmas when Barbara stopped on South Robertson Boulevard at a Christmas tree lot run by the Boy Scouts of America and bought a large Douglas fir. Then she helped two Boy Scouts tie it to the top of her car and she drove home. When she stopped the car outside her house, she thought about just leaving the tree outside all night and waiting until Stan came home from his business trip tomorrow morning so that he could help her carry it in and set it up.
Of course in this city nothing was sacred, so she knew there was every chance she could come out tomorrow and someone would have stolen the tree. That was reason enough to pull the car closer to the front door and bring the big unwieldy thing in alone. The other reason was that doing all the chores to set up the tree would be a good test of her competence.
Sometimes when she worried about what her life
would be like if there were no Stan, she would silently challenge herself to face some task alone for which under ordinary circumstances she would have asked Stan's help. "If I can fix this fallen shutter without asking Stan to do it for me, I'll know that if the time comes when he dies first, I'll be okay." Once she told her friend Marcy Frank about the way she played that mental game with herself. It was during one of those reveal-your-inner-fears lunches that close friends have, and when she'd finished, hoping for some corroboration from someone else who had been married to one man for as long as she had, Marcy laughed, then raised her eyes heavenward and said, "And
this
woman is a psychologist?"
When the lights were strung, she plugged them into the wall socket next to the tree to make sure all of the bulbs had survived another year, and they had. By then it was ten o'clock and she still hadn't had any dinner, but instead of taking a break she went out into the garage and found the three boxes marked
ORNAMENTS,
piled them on top of one another, and brought them into the living room. In the silence of the empty house, she pulled each familiar figure and ball out of the protective paper in which she'd wrapped it so carefully last year.
Every one had a memory that came with it. The tiny glass angel she and Stan and the kids bought on that weekend in Williamsburg, and the adobe house they'd bought when they visited Santa Fe, and the ceramic Minnie Mouse Heidi had begged for at Disneyland. But unlike Christmas tree decorating sessions in the past, tonight there was nobody for whom she could hold one up and say, "Oh, look. Remember when we got this one?" Get used to it, she told herself. Until there are grandchildren, you'd better get used to it.