Spin Doctor

by Leslie Carroll

  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!

  COLD WATER

  5

  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 mathem
atical 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 bourréed 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 number 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 volunteering 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 do
n’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.”

  “Well, you’re so good at it,” Eli replied. From the tone of his voice, it appeared to be an attempt at mollification as well as a period on the subject. Closing his eyes was another hint that should have tipped me off, but I couldn’t let it go.

  “I want us to work as a team: to share the responsibilities.” I looked at Eli, playing possum, and waited for a response. None was forthcoming. Not only had I wrecked the afterglow, but I’d made myself crabby and tense—and even acted needy, a real turnoff—in the bargain.

  “And,” I added, “when it comes to Molly, specifically, more than fifteen years of experience in the field, a Ph.D., and a zillion lightbulb jokes tell me that people can only change if they want to.” Actually, I believe that people can’t change who they are, fundamentally, in many ways—unless of course they need medication to balance the chemicals in their brain—but they can change their behavior, which affects who they are and what they do. “Molly may always be a sullen loner, but she doesn’t have to be a sullen loner with lousy study habits.”

  “I’m going to sleep,” Eli announced, grabbing a fistful of bed-clothes. “And we may just have to let go and let Molly go her own way, even if it’s not the way we want her to go. Because I still think people don’t change.”