Tales From the Crib

by Jennifer Coburn

  I’m not going to be able to stand this calm, nurturing routine.

  Jack was right. We don’t need therapy. We’re fine.

  That other couple didn’t look like they were half as happy as Jack and I are.

  I wanted to make a run for it, but went inside her office anyway. Jack and I sat on a small blue love seat while Dr. Rosenblatt turned her desk chair to face us. Surely her removing the barrier between us was some sort of feng-shui meets-psychotherapy way of telling us how very with us she was. Behind her sat a white dry-erase board and a bookshelf filled with small plastic toys, keys, action figures, and a hand mirror.

  She folded her hands onto her lap and leaned forward to show that she was listening. “So, Lucy and Jack. What are you here for?”

  Good fucking question! I didn’t say aloud. How I hoped she would not make us play with the action figures or have me look at my vagina with the hand mirror. The image of a circle of women in my mother’s living room saying loving affirmations to their vulvas is still burned in my memory like a POW remembers his internment. Surprisingly, Jack showed no resistance.

  “Lucy and I almost got divorced a while back,” he started. “We’re happy now, but she thinks we need to come here to keep it that way.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way,” I shot back.

  Dr. Rosenblatt held her hand up at me. “Jack, are you finished?” He nodded. “Now, Lucy, tell me why you think you and Jack could benefit from counseling.”

  “I want to figure out what went wrong the first time around so we don’t make the same mistakes again,” I said, trying to showcase my sensible responsibility. “We have a child now.”

  “Are you finished?” she asked.

  “Oy,” I slipped.

  “Oy?” Dr. Rosenblatt asked. “It means- ”

  “Oh, I know what it means,” she said. “I was wondering what you meant by ‘oy.’”

  Hey, that time I wasn’t finished!

  “Well, you know, doc, sometimes an oy is just an oy,” I said, laughing. Jack laughed too, tapping my thigh as if to say good one. The doctor smiled ever so slightly. She reached into her desk drawer and pulled out two printouts for Jack and me. The heading read, “XYZ statements.” It advised couples to focus on specific behavior rather than make general complaints. I was supposed to tell Jack not that he was being a big, fat fucker, but rather that I felt hurt by his big, fat fuckerness. Or something like that. The main point was that I was supposed to make “I” statements instead of ones that went something like, “You are such a slob!” Instead, I should calmly inform Jack, “I feel disrespected when you leave your socks on the floor.”

  The follow-up conversation was supposed to go something like this:

  Jack: What I hear you saying is that you feel disrespected when I leave my socks on the floor. Is that correct?

  Me: Yes, Jack, you heard me correctly.

  Jack: Is there anything else?

  Me: No, not for now.

  Jack: So you are finished.

  Me: Yes, I am.

  Then I guess we’re supposed to kiss or something because I feel acknowledged and heard—and God bless him, he let me finish.

  “But does this get him to pick up his socks?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Rosenblatt said, looking to Jack.

  “I work hard all day and when I get home I just want to kick off my shoes and socks and be comfortable,” Jack defended. “I don’t want to worry about throwing my socks in the hamper.”

  “You know, with all due respect, doctor, I can live with the socks on the floor. Jack and I have bigger fish to fry.”

  “It’s not about the socks!” Dr. Rosenblatt said with her index finger pointing in the air. Then she got up and started drawing diagrams on her white board. She drew a blue dot on one end of the board, which was Jack, and a red dot at the other end, which was me. Then she frantically dotted a black line between the two of us. “The message we intend to send is often not the same message that is received,” she said. “To Jack, socks on the floor are a way of relaxing. Jack is saying to you, ‘I feel comfortable in my home.’ But what Lucy is hearing is ‘Jack doesn’t care about my need for a clean, orderly house.’ What we need to do is teach you to translate each other’s messages. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes!” Jack said emphatically.

  It does?!

  For the next twenty minutes, I listened to Jack talk about his childhood role in the family and his thoughts about what it means to be a father. It was all stuff I’d heard before, but it had been a while. Plus, I’d always heard bits and pieces. Memories scattered before me over years without any real cohesiveness or context. I settled into my half of the love seat and reluctantly admitted that perhaps the forced time listening to each other might be good for us.

  “Is there anything you’d like to tell Jack about how you’ve been feeling about the relationship, Lucy?”

  “Recently, I’ve been very happy,” I said.

  “Is there anything that’s hurt you over the past few months?” she asked. “And please call me Etta.”

  “Well ...”

  “Go on,” Etta encouraged. “And remember, ‘I’ statements. Now face Jack and share.”

  “Okay,” I began. “That time when you- ”

  “I statements!” Etta corrected. “I felt such and such when you did such and such.”

  I raised my eyebrows at Jack, wondering if I should just let this one pass. After all, he and Natalie had broken up. We had been so happy over the last few weeks. We spent hours joyously shopping on the Internet for furniture we weren’t going to buy for the house we couldn’t afford. We turned his former bedroom into a makeshift studio and filled it with paintings and sketches of my plump body. Why was I about to rock the boat with memories of Natalie?

  “G’head, Luce,” Jack said. “I can take it. I know we’ve had a rough year. I think it’ll be good to get it out in the open.”

  “That’s the spirit!” Etta said, clapping her hands. “Okay, Jack. I feel angry when you bring women into our home, have sex with them, then take them to the playground with our baby.”

  “Oy!” Etta slipped.

  We saw Etta twice a week for the next six weeks and somewhere around October I started hearing about parts of Jack’s life I didn’t know about. There were no dramatic revelations of beatings or abuse by the evil cousin, just little things that helped me make better sense of Jack. Of course, Etta always quieted me when I tried to make an observation, saying that I should be focusing on my response to what Jack was saying—not analyzing him. I hadn’t known that Jack’s mother never allowed him to mention his father’s name after he remarried and stopped visiting. “Upward and onward,” she repeated like a mantra in the months after he left. As the visits became less frequent, Susan advised Jack not to think about such unpleasantness. When his father evaporated, she grew impatient with her son’s constant inquiries about his father. She had no answers for him. One day, she snapped that he should never speak his father’s name again. Jack persisted a few times, but Susan smiled placidly and said, “I’m sorry, but I do not know anyone by that name.”

  Finally, the week before Thanksgiving, the topic of the miscarriages came up. “Lucy has always said that I blame her for the miscarriages,” Jack began.

  “Do you?” Etta asked.

  “Of course not!” he cried.

  “Are you sure?” she challenged.

  “Of course I’m sure. What kind of husband would blame his wife for a miscarriage?!”

  “Jack, no one’s blaming you for blaming her,” Etta said with her trademark calmness. “Blame is an emotion, not a rational thought. Blaming Lucy would not make you a bad person. It would make you human.”

  “You think I’m to blame?” I snapped.

  “What does it matter what I think, Lucy?” Etta asked.

  “I cannot believe this! You do think I’m to blame. I didn’t do anything to cause those miscarriages! Don’t you think it kil
led me to lose those pregnancies?! And now you’re saying I was to blame. What kind of therapist are you anyway?”

  “You have a lot of anger around this issue,” Etta said. She stood to write on her white board.

  “No! I don’t need any diagrams. You know I’m not at fault for this, don’t you?”

  “Do you?” she shot back.

  “What the hell are you saying?” Jack came to my defense.

  “I’m saying that Lucy has never forgiven herself for losing the pregnancies. Intellectually, she knows that she didn’t cause them, but emotionally, she blames herself. Since the two are incongruous, she puts it on you, Jack. She says you must be the one who blames her. She feels blame coming from somewhere so she assumes it must be from you. She accuses you of blaming. And although you’re furious at her for a variety of other reasons, and probably blame her for a dozen other things, you deny it. She gets mad because she knows you’re angry about something. You get mad because now you have to assure her you’re not mad at her about this, and you don’t get to express what you really are upset about.”

  “This is all very confusing,” I said.

  “I agree,” Jack said.

  I smiled. “I think I may actually blame you now, Dr. Rosenblatt. We were happy a few weeks ago.” She knew I was kidding, and the truth was that our marriage felt like sand bags were being tossed from a hot-air balloon.

  We began scheduling double sessions at 10:00 A.M., then ran to Pizza Hut starved for food and a continuation of our discussion. I was amazed at how the past ten years of our marriage had been consumed by mundane details like buying paper towels, paying bills, and filling the gas tank. Jack and I had stopped getting to know each other. As we ate pizza together, I listened to Jack’s stories from his early life and was rapt by his observations about how they related to our present. It occurred to me for the first time that Jack was an insightful guy. I don’t know if this was a new thing, or if he always was insightful and I was just noticing it. But as I listened to him between chomps of his deep-dish pepperoni pizza, I realized that I was pretty lucky to have a man like this.

  Chapter 38

  Anjoli’s Thanksgiving dinner was an intimate gathering of friends, including Anjoli’s new boyfriend, Miguel, a former defender for the Mexican soccer team and now a high school coach. He was a mere six years her junior and single! On her honeymoon, Kimmy met Steve, an attorney for Planned Parenthood, who she’d been dating for six weeks. I had to refrain from making jokes about Kimmy’s need for Planned Parenthood services now that she was married to herself. The usual suspects, Alfie and Kiki, were there, along with their friends George and Chris. As Alfie brought the carved turkey to the table, he suggested we go around the table and say what we were thankful for this year. I knew Jack cringed at these forced “go ʼrounds,” but he looked surprisingly unfettered by the suggestion.

  “What a splendid idea, darling!” Anjoli claimed. “It will put us in gratitude consciousness.”

  “A good place to be on Thanksgiving,” George teased. Anjoli dismissed him with a wave of her hand.

  “I should start since I’m the hostess,” she said, then held her hands out for her flankers to hold. This was our cue that the circle of gratitude would serve as our evening grace. “After I ran away from home, I was fortunate enough to find myself adopted by the beautiful and elegant Miss Dorothy at the Joffrey Ballet Company, who spotted my gift on the very first day of class.” A few incredulous looks were exchanged by newcomers, wondering if my mother was kidding or not.

  “Anjoli, love,” Alfie interrupted. “Your life has been so charmed. Let’s keep the gratitude about this year, shall we?”

  “I was doing that!” she protested. “I was about to say that without that experience, I would never have had the opportunity to work with the wonderful people at the Drama Queen, like you, Alfie!” It was going to be a long night. “I am blessed with an abundance of beautiful, creative people like my daughter, Lucy, and her family.” Huh? “The new bride, Kimmy. Miguel.” She did not elaborate on him any more, but the tone of her voice suggested it was a torrid romance. “My oldest and dearest friends, Kiki and Alfie, and now our new friends, George and Chris. Oh yes, and I’m thrilled to be off to Findhorn in Scotland in the spring to teach Selfless Nongrieving. I know it’s going to be the next big thing!”

  She glanced at Miguel beside her, who with a smoldering simplicity said, “I am grateful for the love.” George said he was grateful for being among new friends—and that he landed a part in Anjoli’s latest production, The Queen and I.

  Jack said that this year he got two second chances at life. “Car accident,” I explained to the newcomers.

  “We had our first child, and I remarried my first wife,” he added with an openness he’d never before possessed. Jack made me blush. Pardon me, I felt flushed when Jack made this comment.

  “Figuratively,” I explained. “We never got divorced, in the legal sense, at least.” Who was this man who was open to couples counseling, sharing with strangers, and painting upbeat, almost pop-art-style paintings these days?

  Then it was my turn. “Well, to be perfectly honest, it was a tough year and I’m grateful to have it behind me,” I began. Anjoli dropped her hands from the clasps of others and urged me not to bring down the group with sad stories. “I’m not going to tell sad stories, Anjoli. I was just being honest. It’s been a difficult year with Jack’s accident, and well, changes in the family.”

  “Oh, but there have been some real hoots too, Lucy!” Anjoli reminded me. “Tell about how the news crew showed up right after you gave birth to Adam. Or how ʼbout when drunk Barney showed up at that breastfeeding party?” I could practically see the thought bubbles over people’s heads, wondering what a breastfeeding party was.

  I flashed back to a dozen afternoons on Etta’s couch, where she asked me what my role in the family was. I told her I didn’t know. I told her my family was too small for us to have roles. I told her I was Kimmy’s understudy. Until that moment at the Thanksgiving dinner table, I hadn’t realized that I had forever been the court jester in Anjoli’s queendom, amusing her with anecdotes about our lives. I remembered sitting at this very table, hearing her ask me to tell her and Kimmy one more story. To do one more imitation of her friends or an actor we saw in a show. It was my job to keep everyone happy. And in my home, happy meant laughing.

  “Half the people here weren’t at Kimmy’s wedding to herself!” Anjoli suggested, glancing around the table for support. “You should hear Lucy’s dead-on impression of the minister. She’s got a piece about the wedding coming out in January Glamour,” she said, this time specifically to Chris. “She’s a writer, but she could’ve been an actress.”

  “Mother! You said I was too chubby to be an actress.”

  “A comedienne, then,” she said, annoyed. I’d just broken the unwritten rule. I was never to portray her in anything less than a mega-bright pink spotlight of flattery—even if it was the truth. No one wanted to think of the fabulous Anjoli contributing to her daughter’s body issues.

  I had always told my friends about how spectacularly adventurous my mother was when she disappeared to Monaco for ten days while I was in high school. I knew she was safe because she left a note and a few hundred dollars on the dining room table. I never mentioned that it was the weekend of my junior prom and that the limo driver took pictures of my date and me in front of the house. The story about my mother trotting off to the Cannes Film Festival is weighted down by the pesky reality that she left while I had a dangerously high fever. She left Kimmy in charge with the telephone number of her Reiki master, herbalist, and naturopath. When she had an audience, she characterized my father’s death as “the tragic demise of an enormously talented musician,” seemingly disconnected to the fact that my dead father was attached to that catch phrase. Often, she asked me to sing a few bars of his song that went platinum immediately after she mentioned his ever-so-hip heroin overdose. That night at Thanksgiving, Anjoli bra
gged to Chris that I was a writer. What she failed to mention was that I was also the family editor.

  “Mother, there was nothing funny about my year,” I said. “Okay, the bleeding drunk Barney and film crew were funny. And Kimmy’s wedding to herself was too, but poor Aunt Rita dropped dead at Red Lobster in Florida where Aunt Bernice is now channeling her sister’s spirit and threatening to jump off her balcony and into the Intracoastal. Meanwhile, my best friend, Zoe, will probably be there to video the whole thing for a new reality suicide show since Real Confessions went down in flames. None of this is the least bit amusing!” I paused. “I am so unbelievably grateful that my son survived gestation and my husband survived a car accident that should’ve killed him. That’s not funny, Mother, but that’s what I’m grateful for. That and the fact that we reconciled our marriage after a virtual divorce, where we lived under the same roof while Jack dated a worthless twit who’d dump a guy the second he went into a coma, and I screwed half-wits in car washes. Well, just one car wash. One half-wit.”

  “You had sex with someone?” Jack asked. I confirmed with a nod.

  “I’m grateful that we actually started acting as if we might someday move in the direction of leaving Caldwell and start the arts community we’ve talked about since we met,” I said. “Sorry if this isn’t funny, Mother, but it’s my life and it’s what I’m grateful for.”

  “Kids!” Anjoli said to Miguel. “Tell them they’re talented enough to be a comedienne and they flip out. Some people don’t know how to be happy. The mother is to blame for everything, darling,” she said as she smiled at her guests, trying to lighten the moment. I laughed. My mother was not perfect by anyone’s measure, but she was not the cause of all that held me back in life. Just knowing that doubled my love for her, and myself.

  “Have you ever thought about writing a book?” Chris asked me.