“Now you tell me what it is about white people and deyr dogs!”
“What do you mean?” I asked, lost in Meriel’s non sequitur.
“Daht stupid Taco Bell dog Mrs. Amy and Mr. Eric have. She treat it like it’s one of de fahmily. Now she have a child and it’s like she still don’t know de difference between a pet and a person. Do you know she dress up daht dog like a doll? Daht dog has a raincoat—Burberry plaid—she don’t even have a designer raincoat for herself—and even a little matching hat. She have a red white and blue Uncle Sam outfit coming up for de Fourt’ of July. And in de winter, she tells me, it has boots so its paws don’t get hurt by de salt on the streets that melt de snow. So now I get to look forward to walking a circus animal when de weather turn cold. Then she have a ballerina tutu for it that she ahsk me to put on to take de dog to a costume pahty at de dog run in Riverside Park. And de animal is a male! It almost bite me when I try to dress it like a girl. I swear to God I get embarrass when I have to walk de stupid ting.”
I blushed, realizing that while our dog is never dressed like a Barbie doll, Sigmund does wear a bandanna on occasion—and when Molly was about twelve, she once tried to pierce his ears—and he does sleep on a comfy cushioned “bed” from Orvis, rather than on the floor, or outside, which is where Meriel insists dogs belong. Of course we all live in apartments, so outside is outside of the question.
“So, what I want to know before my time is up for today, so I can get a good night’s sleep tonight, is—tell me what it is you white people have with your dogs?”
NAOMI AND CLAUDE
“I can’t help it that I’m infertile!” Naomi snapped, at the end of her tether two seconds into the beginning of their session.
“And I can’t help it that I’m Chinese!” Claude said, as rational as Naomi was peevish.
“We just found out from the agency down in Georgia that lesbian couples aren’t allowed to adopt Chinese babies,” Naomi said, “so we have to start the paperwork all over again. And since we can only pick one of us to be the adoptive mother, and very few single women are allowed to adopt from China, Claude thinks she has a better shot at it and she’s cutting me out.”
The women had tried the in vitro route, but it did in fact turn out that Naomi is infertile. Claude suffers from endomitriosis, so she isn’t going to be a biological mother either. They chose to adopt a little girl from China even though the process takes two to three times longer than adoption from Latin America, Haiti, Russia, or the Balkans, because Claude feels very strongly about the ill treatment of females in her native culture and believes that adopting a Chinese girl is a political stand as well as a personal intervention. I hoped their little girl would turn out to be an absolute angel…and not eventually become a teenager like Molly, so sullen and angry at the world, channeling her adolescent rage into any opportunity to get attention, as if attention were something she had ever been denied.
“You are! You are cutting me out!” Naomi spat at Claude. “Literally! Tell her! Tell Susan what you did to me last night.” She lapsed into her nervous “tic,” bringing her long dark braid forward and beginning to split the ends of her hair.
“I didn’t do anything to you,” Claude replied.
“Okay, Claude. Naomi. Naomi, what do you think Claude ‘did’ to you last night?”
“I told you; she cut me out.”
“Gee, you two, I’d love some specifics so we can work on what’s really the core of the issue here. Let’s revisit how you two usually handle major decisions in your partnership.”
I received my answer from the more even-tempered Claude. “Fifty-fifty—most of the time. We’ve always been very concerned about being sensitive to that when it comes to the big stuff. But stuff like the nuts and bolts of the adoption issue is something we’ve never faced before, never even imagined we’d need to face. Since I’m now going to be the sole adoptive parent, I have to compile a bunch of photos of me that will make the bureaucrats believe I’m straight and send them to the agency for my dossier. And I have all these pictures of me and Naomi with our arms around each other and stuff like that, and…I had to do a Photoshop number on the ones that were on our computer and replace Naomi with the image of a guy who’s a friend of ours. And with some of the old prints, I had to snip off the half of the pictures that Naomi was in, because it was so obvious she was my lover. So…yeah…I guess I did literally cut her out, but it wasn’t with malice or anything.” Claude gave her partner a much beleagured, though compassionate, look, but her attempt to connect was pointedly ignored.
“I can’t even go to China with Claude unless I pretend to be just her friend. Obviously I can’t say I’m her sister,” Naomi fumed. “Funny, you don’t look Chinese,” she simpered. “I told her, we should just say fuckit and adopt from another country.”
“No. It has to be China,” insisted Claude. “You’re not changing my mind on that one.”
“Look…I hate to shine a spotlight on the obvious, and I’m going to warn you that I’m not speaking to you right now with my impartial therapist hat on, but the world is what it is,” I said. “You know that’s true. And the reality is that you’re not going to change it overnight. A grimmer reality is that you may never succeed in changing it at all. So. You have a lot to think about. But basically we’re looking at two major options. In this situation you can choose to be rebels and allow your individual agendas to divide the two of you, or you can chose to be parents and let the situation unite you even more. I know it may sound like a deal with the devil, and it is, in some respects. I know it pisses you off; and the stakes are really high no matter which road you take. Frankly, I see it this way, and you’re welcome to disagree with me, but you two women—even if Claude has to be the mom on paper—can give a, well…‘discarded’ little girl from across the world a loving home with myriad opportunities and advantages. There’s where you get to make your difference.”
I flashed on my own background: being carried on my dad’s shoulders to rallies against the Vietnam War in Washington Square Park; as a preteen marching in support of the Equal Rights Amendment alongside my mom in matching tie-dyed tee-shirts that we’d made ourselves in the kitchen sink, spattering Rit and Tintex all over the avocado-colored kitchen appliances; carrying black balloons to my college graduation as a protest against apartheid in South Africa…and I wondered how all the ideals I was raised with had manifested themselves in the adult Susan Lederer. Here I am, middle-class, and technically middle-aged, since all my ancestors never lived beyond their eighties (although, as they used to say, “Life begins at forty,” and I’m still waiting for something new and different to happen any day now). I’ve recently realized that I’m more politically middle of the road than I ever expected to be. Well into adulthood I’ve discovered that pragmatism is the thick dark border now drawn around the image that during my youth used to be boldly, colorfully, and deliberately scribbled outside the lines.
It’s sort of like the kid who’s a hellion hearing her frustrated mother’s constant refrain “Just wait till you’re a mother!” and then finding out years later, to considerable dismay, that she was right.
As I listened to Claude and Naomi argue, it occurred to me that I’d been making an incorrect assumption about identity. Naomi, who has an Italian-American background, saw herself as a lesbian first. Claude’s primary cultural identity was different: she was a Chinese-American first and foremost. The adoption issue had brought the question of cultural identity into high relief, and with each of the partners having a different primary cultural identity, accomplishing a smooth resolution was going to be a tricky goal.
“You are in fact getting to make a political statement by adopting a Chinese girl,” I reminded Naomi. “Even though it’s currently at odds with the other one you wish to make. But one thing we really need to talk about is what kind of a home you’d be bringing this little girl into if you and Claude don’t work this issue out.”
“Baby, you know I love you,” Cla
ude said, reaching for Naomi’s hand. “You’re my girl.”
Naomi pulled away. “I know. It’s not about that. And you know it. It’s a whole lot bigger than that. When the agency sends the fresh paperwork, Claude…? Don’t ask for my help. I don’t want to even watch you fill it out.”
I believed I’d said the right thing, at least I’d expressed as a compassionate friend what needed to be put on the table, but as a shrink—even though confrontation can be an effective therapeutic tool in certain circumstances—I felt like shit as I watched Naomi scowl. My unorthodox sessions occasionally drift into uncharted waters. In a totally conventional situation, couples therapists aren’t supposed to appear to be taking sides.
AND THEN THERE’S MALA SONIA…
WHO ISN’T A CLIENT
Mala Sonia is the super’s wife: proud, poorly educated, a genuine Gypsy. She resents my early morning therapy sessions because she likes to come into the laundry room and use all the machines before anyone else can get to them. I have never seen a woman with so much laundry. The no-hogging rule doesn’t apply to her since her husband Stevo will blacklist the tongue-wagging tenant. God help them—because Stevo won’t—the next time they have a leak or require the exterminator. Mala Sonia, like her husband, calls herself a born-again Christian and does things like cross herself whenever she runs into “blasphemers” like Claude and Naomi (only she gets the second half of the gesture backward), and mutters in Romany—a language I am learning in dribs and drabs thanks to Eli, who is drawing a graphic novel called Gia the Gypsy Girl. Last Sunday morning I asked him if “Gypsy” was un-PC, since he’s always so hypersensitive about that kind of stuff, but he told me that his editor preferred an alliterative title to a PC one; and besides, everyone except the Gypsies still calls them Gypsies. “Now if you called them ‘thieves,’ that might be a bit on the un-PC side,” Eli had said sarcastically, spreading Neufchatel on his whole wheat bagel.
Mala Sonia entered the laundry room and spat at the two lesbians. “Te bisterdon tumare anava!” She turned her back on Naomi and Claude and crossed herself—the wrong way, as usual—then sat on the couch and thumbed through an issue of People that was so old it featured Ben Affleck and J. Lo’s engagement on the cover.
“What the hell did she say this time?” Naomi muttered crossly.
“May your names be forgotten!” I translated under my breath, and Claude laughed.
“You’re too kind, Mrs. Badescu,” Claude replied loudly, giving Mala Sonia a huge smile. She turned to me and whispered,
“What am I supposed to do when she does that? Curse back at her in Mandarin and tell her that her ancestors slept with goats? What purpose is it going to serve, except to make the one doing the cursing feel…what? Better in some sick and twisted way?”
“Yeah,” Naomi said, emptying their washer. “World peace is a goal that only Miss America contestants still think is realistic. Unfortunately.”
Alice Finnegan came downstairs with another load. “These clothes are mine this week,” she said to me. “Oh, are you waiting?” she asked Mala Sonia. Alice gave a resigned little shrug. “I guess I’ll come back later then.” Mala Sonia began to stare at Alice, who visibly shuddered under the intensity of her gaze. “What? What’d I say? Did I say something—or do something—wrong?”
“You have deep sorrows,” Mala Sonia told her, wearing an Oscar-worthy expression of sheer empathy. “A-ko isi pomo shinava tumen. Maybe I can help you. Let me give you a reading.”
“I don’t need a reading. I know why I have deep sorrows.” Alice then grew curious. “How much does it cost?”
“Twenty dollars. And for a full reading and a chart, three hundred. Cash. After I go to my church and meditate on your life.”
Naomi drew Alice aside. “Those ‘churches’ are really Gypsy hangouts where they boast to each other how they took advantage of some gaje that day. Trust me: don’t do it.”
I caught Mala Sonia giving the two of them the evil eye.
“I can spring for the twenty bucks,” Alice told the Gypsy. “Beyond that is out of my price range I’m afraid.”
“Sar laci and’ekh vadra,” Mala Sonia muttered to herself. “Like crabs in a bucket.”
The worm was on the hook. Mala Sonia was a pro who knew how to turn that meager tidbit into a mighty fine dinner. She led Alice away from Naomi and sat her down at the long table. “I know your grandmother just died,” she began.
“Well, you’re the super’s wife, so of course you do,” Alice countered suspiciously. “You’d better not predict that I’ll be served with an eviction notice—because my name is on the lease, so everything’s legal.”
The super’s wife ignored the threat. “Is that a Dana Buchman blouse you’re wearing?”
Alice gave Mala Sonia an incredulous look, stunned that the pulchritudinous Gypsy woman currently sporting a skintight horizontally striped tank top and orange terry-cloth shorts above tanned legs and Fredericks of Hollywood–style mules might possess an intimate familiarity with a midtown, mid-priced, middle-of-the-road designer who’s not exactly a household name. Actually, I suspect that Mala Sonia spends the money she makes giving “psychic readings” on terrific clothes: we just never see her in them. Or else she’s gained her knowledge of Fashion Avenue from spending so much time in this depressingly downscale laundry room peopled with relatively upmarket tenants.
“I can read you like a book,” Mala Sonia intoned, as though she were reciting from the Gypsy’s Manual, basic readings chapter. “Your grandmother is very unhappy now.”
Alice’s eyes immediately began to well with tears. That’s how those Gypsy “readers” do it. They tap into something pretty general and allow the mark to relate it to something deeply personal. When the mark has displayed his or her vulnerability—pow!
“She wants you to be happy; to find a man to love you. And there is one who you used to love who will come back into your life and you must decide what to do about it. He is very close to you now, but this time there is someone who stands between you.”
Alice shivered just perceptibly enough for her reaction to register with students of human behavior—like myself and Mala Sonia. “Well, first of all, this blouse is a cheap knockoff—although it is a lot like Dana Buchman’s designs. But if you can really read me like a book, tell me the guy’s name!” Alice challenged skeptically.
Amy entered the room, carrying her son Isaac in a Snuggly. “Oh, there you are, Mrs. Badescu. I’m looking for Stevo. You remember me? I’m Amy Baum. My husband Eric and I just moved in last week? And there’s still something wrong with the showerhead in the master bathroom. So can you tell Stevo to get up to our apartment right away?” She pressed a bill into Mala Sonia’s palm. It found its way into the Gypsy’s pocket with the speed of a sleight of hand trick. “Apartment 4K,” Amy reminded her. I’m Baum, but it’s under my husband’s last name: Witherspoon.” She dashed out the door. “I’ll expect Stevo before two. Isaac has to go down for his nap then and we need absolute quiet in the apartment except for Baby Bach.”
“Witherspoon?” Alice said incredulously. “Eric Witherspoon?”
“You asked me his name,” Mala Sonia said. “That’s him!”
4
Alice looked totally stunned. “Eric Witherspoon lives here now? And that’s his wife?” Mala Sonia nodded. “I dated him last year; we even lived together for a few months at his garden apartment in Park Slope! I moved out of my grandmother’s apartment to be with him and then he ended up dumping me like raw sewage.”
“Kon del tut o nai shai dela tut wi o vast: he who gives you a finger will also give you the whole hand.”
Alice looked at Mala Sonia. “Apparently.”
“Eric needed a second bedroom when they had the baby, so they moved into Manhattan,” Mala Sonia said.
“My God. And she has a baby already.” Alice started counting the months on her fingers. “No way that kid could have been conceived after they got married. That sonofabitch works pretty dam
n fast. I wonder what it feels like for him to move into the same building where an ex-girlfriend lives. I wonder if he ever told Amy about me.”
“I know you do,” replied Mala Sonia. “And he did. But she was too busy thinking about other things just now to even consider that his ex might be you. Are you sure you don’t want that full reading?”
“I want a drink.”
“At eight-thirty A.M.?” I said. “You might want to reconsider such self-destructive behavior.”
“Not this morning,” Alice replied, and began to drag her laundry cart out the door. “I’ll be back in an hour when there’s a vacant washer. Totally pickled. That way I can be hung over before it’s too late in the day to drink a pot of coffee in order to get over it.”
“If you really want a drink, why don’t you come to Sappho tonight?” Claude suggested.
“Sappho? Isn’t that the nightclub in the meat packing district where straight women get to act like they’re gay?” Naomi nodded. “I’ve never been there,” Alice said, mulling over the invitation. “I’ve always been kind of curious about it, though. Do you two go there often?” I could see that she was wondering why two lesbians would frequent a club where women pretended to be lesbians.
“We’re there every night,” Naomi said. “We own it.”
“Why don’t you come tonight too, Susan,” Claude urged. “And each of you—bring a girlfriend, if you want to. Actually, tonight would be a great night to come down. We’re having a Weimar Nacht. You know, we’re pretending it’s Berlin in 1931 and everyone gets to act like Lili Marlene.”
“As long as you don’t also have people dressing up in brown shirts, I think I can handle it,” Alice said. “But I’ve got a performance at eight. How late are you there?”
Naomi gave a little snort. “It’s a nightclub, Alice. We don’t roll up the sidewalks at midnight. By the time Claude and I usually get out of there, most people are just getting ready to start their day! In fact, we often come to our therapy sessions with Susan directly from the club.”
Spin Doctor Page 5