by Homes, A. M.
As I’m coming in the door, I hear Walter Penny’s voice on the answering machine: “I received your claim form: thirty-eight hundred dollars for damages to the car. We should be able to get this processed pretty quickly.”
I put the bags down and let him go on for a while.
“Don’t forget you’ve still got the halvah in the trunk; I think it worked for you as ballast when that nutcase was driving you out. No worries about bringing it back—once it’s out of our hands, we can’t take it back anyway. I wanted to remind you. It shouldn’t stay in the trunk, probably too hot in there. And, by the way, you left your cookies up at the camp—they’re very good. What’s the trick?”
I can’t resist any longer. I pick up the phone. “Tablespoon of warm water,” I say.
“Just one tablespoon?” Penny asks.
I cut to the chase. “Where’s George?”
“George complained of an injury, so we brought him in just after you left—didn’t seem like we could leave him out there after what happened. As soon as he’s feeling better, they’ll transfer him to a more traditional facility.”
“What about the agreement?” I ask.
“What agreement?” Walter says.
“The agreement we signed in the director’s office at The Lodge that said George would never go to a regular jail?”
“Do you happen to have a copy? I don’t think I have a copy.”
I’m not sure what kind of game Walter is playing with me, but I make an excuse to get off the phone and immediately call George’s lawyer.
“We never got a copy,” he says.
I call Walter back in the afternoon. “So, if no one has a copy, I guess there is no agreement?” Walter says.
“How long is he in for?” I ask.
“Five to fifteen,” Walter Penny says. “We compromised.”
“No trial?”
“Trust me, it’s better this way.”
“When’s the soonest he’ll be out?”
“Figure three years. We had to give him some credit; the Israeli was a good catch.”
Late one night, I drive to the temple and unload the halvah on the back steps. I leave a note: “This is good halvah—I am leaving it here for the community to enjoy as it’s more than one man can manage.”
As I’m unloading, the rabbi appears, sneaking out of a side door. He’s clearly frightened when he sees me, as though I’m a religious terrorist—unpacking C-4 plastique explosives.
“It’s just halvah,” I call out.
“What?” he says, his tone the familiar annoyance of an old deaf Jew.
“Halvah,” I shout as loudly as possible.
He comes closer, and I introduce myself as George’s brother, and lie: “I was recently doing a job and received the halvah as partial payment,” I say. “I thought perhaps the temple had a soup kitchen.”
“We have a preschool, and a day camp for the elderly,” the rabbi says.
Now is the moment. I have the rabbi’s attention; this is the meeting that I called months ago to arrange. It’s my chance to get good counsel.
“So,” I say, “what do you think? Was Nixon really an anti-Semite?” I ask, surprising myself.
“Nixon?” the rabbi intones.
I nod.
“You want to know about Nixon?”
“I do.”
“He was a son of a bitch, hated everyone but himself. The one who makes me nervous is Kissinger, who never stood up for himself—he sold us down the river.”
A police car pulls into the parking lot. “You okay, Padre?” the cop asks.
“Fine, thank you,” the rabbi says.
The cop looks at me like he knows me from somewhere. “Why don’t you go home now, mister,” he says. “Let the padre get a good night’s sleep.” He hovers until I say goodbye and then follows my car most of the way home.
As part of my quest to become a foster parent, I’ve made an appointment with Dr. Tuttle, a psychiatrist. Strange though it may seem, I’ve never been to a psychiatrist before, and so it is with some trepidation that I approach his office on the ground floor of a small strip mall. To the right of his “suite” is Smoothie King, to the left a dry cleaner’s, and next to that a cell-phone store. The office windows are covered in wide metal vertical blinds circa 1977; the waiting room is dark, with a low acoustical-tile ceiling and oatmeal-colored wall-to-wall. Six chairs with caned seats that are starting to sag dot the room in pairs like couples. There’s a little glass table with a precarious pile of magazines and a trash can so small it seems to say, Don’t use me. Sitting down, I spot a lone Cheerio in the corner, and then more—a series of Cheerios tucked up against the molding, likely pushed there by a vacuum cleaner. There are numerous signs, handwritten and poorly laminated with Scotch tape.
If you need a bathroom, go to Smoothie King and ask for the key.
If you need your parking validated, please ask, 1 hour free.
The psychiatrist opens the door and calls me in. “Tuttle,” he says, shaking my hand. His hand is wet, smelling of perfume and rubbing alcohol. I immediately spot a bottle of hand sanitizer on his desk—the sample from a drug company. Tuttle is a short, thin fellow, prematurely hunched—the top of his head comes to a kind of a shiny point, absent of hair but for a ring of yellow fringe that goes all the way around and is longer than the fashion. He wears horn-rimmed glasses, which he edges higher by repeatedly wrinkling his nose. The office has the same metal blinds as the waiting room and would be dark but for the afternoon sun reflecting off the cars parked outside.
“Have a seat,” Tuttle says, directing me towards a worn sofa.
I look past Tuttle; clear plastic cups from Smoothie King are in an even row on the edge of his desk, each less than a quarter full, one yellow, one pink, one purple. Mango, strawberry, and berry-berry lined up like some kind of experiment. There’s a half-empty old five-cent gumball machine filled with what look like greasy peanuts and piles of used legal pads. An air conditioner hums noisily.
“First let me get a little information: name, address, phone?”
I give him the details.
“Employer?”
“Self,” I say for the first time.
“Insurance? I don’t take insurance, but I’ll give you a bill each time we meet and you can submit it. The initial meeting is five hundred and runs for an hour, and subsequent visits are forty-five minutes and the charge is two fifty. I am a psychiatrist, not a social worker, not a psychologist.” He looks at me carefully. The glasses seem to be magnifiers—his eyes look enormous. “What medications do you currently take? Previous hospitalizations?”
I mention the stroke.
“Do you have a diagnosis that you are familiar with? And/or how has your condition been described to you? What was the referring agency?”
“A girl at Social Services gave me your name,” I say, thinking that something here is not entirely on the mark.
“Do you require court-ordered drug testing—i.e., do I have to watch you pee?”
“No,” I say.
“Good,” he says. “When I watch someone else pee it makes me feel like I have to pee. In fact, I usually get one of the employees from Smoothie King to do the watching. I tap one of the guys to follow us into the toilet, and I tip him a few bucks to do the watching. I really don’t want to see a patient’s water works and then have to talk to him about what he’s like with his wife. Plus, I happen to know the bathrooms are monitored—so there’s very little chance of the patient trying to get away with anything. But I digress, and this isn’t about me, and this isn’t about Smoothies. What can I do for you?” He puts his pad down, crosses his legs, and looks at me, again wrinkling his nose and lifting the glasses up a little.
“I think I’d like to begin by asking, what kind of people do you typically work with?”
“Spans the gamut, from court-ordered counseling for boys who get into trouble, to anger-management issues with married men, a few middle-aged ladies who wished they’d done
things differently, and a good number of teenage girls who want to be dead. What brings you here?”
“I’ve applied to be a foster parent and I need a psychiatric evaluation.” I hand him the form. “You were among those recommended by the Department of Social Services.”
He takes the form and looks at it as though he’s never seen one before.
“It would be a directed placement of a little boy with some learning problems who was recently orphaned.”
“Have you ever been arrested?”
“No.”
“Do you enjoy pornography?”
“Not especially,” I say. “But there is something,” I say, laying the groundwork. I tell him about George. He listens carefully, appearing never to have heard any of it before. Either he doesn’t read the papers or he’s very good at concealing what he knows.
“Let him cast the first stone…” the doctor says, when I come clean about my part in the domestic debacle. “And so, before all this, before last Thanksgiving, you led a conventional life, no affairs, no relationships outside the marriage?”
“A most conventional life,” I said.
“And the children?” he asks.
I tell him how I have come to know the children, how they are so much more interesting than I had expected, and that I love them. I share the details of our Williamsburg adventure.
“And are you in a sexual relationship now?” he asks.
“Yes, with a local girl, very nice family,” I say, as if bragging.
He shrugs as if to say, How would you know? “Okay, so this boy Ricardo that you want to foster…”
“He survived the accident, and the kids want to help, and the aunt who was left in charge has been struggling, and…”
“And what makes you think you’re qualified?”
“Good question,” I say.
He nods.
“I care about the kid. I was a teacher for many years. I have the time and energy to focus on figuring out what he needs and how to get that for him. I feel very bad about what happened and would like to see him through.”
“Would you send him to school?”
“Every day.”
“What if he needed to go to a special school?”
“I’d find the best one and fight to have it covered by the state education system, which is legally obligated to educate every child regardless of disability; and, depending on the outcome, I’d see what I could do.”
“Would you be doing this with an eye toward adoption?”
“The children would like me to adopt him. I’m not sure that’s what his family wants. But, yes, I’m doing it with an eye towards the long term; this isn’t something I take lightly.”
“And what is your work as a self-employed person?” He says “self-employed” slowly, like it’s a suspect notion.
“I was a professor of Nixon studies for many years, and as a Nixon scholar I am working on a book about him and also working with the Nixon family on a special project.”
“Interesting. What drew you to Nixon?”
“Nixon is like someone from another time: old-fashioned to the point of being a bit backward, inescapably ugly whether he knew it or not, bitter, self-spiting, insecure and overly confident simultaneously.”
The psychiatrist nods. “Not uncommon, to be both driven and conflicted.”
“I find it fascinating—his sweat, his paranoia, his emotional lability. Even as President of the United States he didn’t fit in.”
“Do you have a title for your book?”
“While We Were Sleeping: The American Dream Turned Nightmare—Richard Nixon, Vietnam, and Watergate: The Psychogenic Melting Point.”
“That’s a lot of title.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about the drug that is the American Dream as the American entitlement, which gave way to the American downfall. Without Kennedy’s assassination, we wouldn’t have had Johnson, who paved the way for Nixon. The seeds of Nixon’s ‘success’ were planted in a moment of failure—that hot, sweaty flop of a television debate and the lost election of 1960. Look at the Presidents all in a row and it makes sense: they are a psychological progression from one to another, all about the unspoken needs and desires and conflicts of the American people. I’m writing about Nixon as the container for all that was America at that moment in time and why we elected him and what we hoped he’d do.…” I’m digressing, and nearly aggressing, as I jump all over the place, hitting the highlights.
“You seem quite passionate on the subject,” Tuttle says. “But what’s your dream, what do you want for yourself?”
“Nothing,” I say.
“Really?” Tuttle seems surprised.
“Really, I can’t think of anything.”
“Is it self-punishing to not want anything in a society that’s all about desire?” Tuttle asks.
“Is it?” I ask.
“You have no desire?” he suggests.
“Limited,” I say.
“Depression?”
I shrug. “I don’t think so.”
“Then what is it?”
“Contentment? Satisfaction?” I suggest.
“Is there such a thing?” Dr. Tuttle asks.
“You tell me. Is contentment death? Does one need to want in order to live? Can one aspire to that which is not material?”
“It would seem wise to aspire to objects more real and less fleeting than a feeling state which you can’t bank on,” Tuttle says. “You may feel good now, but say something happens and you don’t feel so good later. In your model there’s no backup: you can’t say, ‘Well, I feel like crap but at least I have a really nice car and a big television set.’”
“Why not say, I may feel bad now but I felt good before and chances are I’ll feel good again?”
“Oh, that would be asking a lot of most people, a very lot,” he says, pressing back in his chair, tapping his fingers rhythmically against each other. He glances at the clock, an early digital model with tiny number flaps that tumble forward as each minute passes. When it’s quiet, you can hear the dull click as the digit drops.
“We’re running out of time for today,” he says. “Should we schedule another session?”
“I’m hoping you’ll be able to fill out the form for me,” I say, nodding towards the mint-green sheet of paper I gave him when I came in. “It’s the psychiatric report for the Department of Social Services, asking if I’m fit to parent.”
“Leave the form with me,” he says. “I should be able to complete it by the end of our next session.”
“So the total cost is seven hundred and fifty dollars to get the form filled out?”
“Is that a problem?” Tuttle asks.
“No, I just want to be sure I understand.”
Tuttle nods. “Same time next week?”
During the day, when I’m not doing something for the kids, visiting my mother, working on the Nixon story project in Manhattan, or sitting at George’s desk trying to finish the book, I see Amanda.
We meet in parking lots between errands. Amanda tells me what’s new in the grocery store—an expanded aisle of “ethnic” foods, more heat-and-eats, and that one of the checkout ladies has a heavy thumb on the produce scale. Amanda is a puzzle. I tell her that I wish I knew her better.
Amanda says nothing.
As I start to elaborate on my mother’s upcoming wedding, she cuts me off. “I’m really not interested in you as a person,” she says.
As hurtful as it sounds, I don’t take it personally. I think she’s lying.
In the evening, while I’m repainting the upstairs bathroom, I talk with Nate on speakerphone.
“Any further thoughts about the bar mitzvah?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Let’s cancel it.”
“No bar mitzvah?” I ask.
“Yeah, I can’t go into the temple,” he says.
“What about doing it somewhere else?” I dip the brush into the can of Benjamin Moore semi-gloss and sweep it across the wall.
“Like where?”
“Here at home?” I suggest. “I’ve been sprucing it up.”
“She was killed at home,” he says flatly.
“At a country club? Or hotel?” I dip the brush again.
“Over-the-top awkward,” Nate says, “and besides, I think the rabbi is a jerk.”
“Well, we should do something special. How about taking a trip?”
“Like to Disney World?” Nate asks, and I remember that I am talking to a twelve-year-old.
“I’m thinking something more substantive—a game changer.”
“I don’t know,” Nate says. “The one place I’d like to go…is back to Nateville. I’m not sure I’ll ever get there.”
“You’re twelve years old and worried you’ll never go there again.”
“Don’t mock me,” he says.
“So—you’d like to go to South Africa?”
“I think so.”
“Just to Nateville, or on a more expanded trip, like on a safari?”
“A safari would be cool. We’d take Ashley?”
“Of course.”
“And Ricardo?”
“If you like.”
“Cool,” Nate says, seeming genuinely pleased.
“Okay,” I say, standing back to look at my work so far. “I’ll see what I can find out.” The call waiting beeps; I say good night to Nate and take the call.
“Your mother called my mother,” Jason says.
“What happened to ‘hello’?” I say, stepping off the ladder.
“It was all very pleasant until she invited my mother to her wedding and got upset when my mother said, ‘I already went to your wedding. Don’t you remember?’ And your mother said, ‘Of course I remember—I’m talking about now, I’m getting married again.’ Long story short, my mother thinks your mother is out of her mind.”
My brush slips out of my hand and bounces across multiple surfaces before landing in the toilet. “She’s actually doing well; she met someone at the home,” I tell Jason as I fish the brush out of the bowl and shake it off.
“Are you going to let her get married?”
“I’m not sure that it’s entirely up to me.” I pause—it occurs to me that Lillian might know the fiancé. “Hey, could you ask your mother if she knows Bob Goldman? They all went to the same junior high, so it might ring a bell.”