Between Here and April

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  “Of course I remember, Tessie. And I’m going to stop off at the store . . .” (which store?) “. . . on my way home to get them, okay?”

  “With cream cheese frosting, like you promised?”

  “Yes, of course, cream cheese frosting. Just like I promised.” No. I’m not a mother. I just play one on TV. “Tessie, remind me. What color bottoms were we going to make? Chocolate?”

  “No, vanilla. Remember? I told you Vanessa’s allergic to chocolate? So everyone has to bring in vanilla?”

  “Of course. Vanilla it is. Okay, sweetie, you go to bed now, and before you know it we’ll be frosting those cupcakes.”

  As I sped along the Potomac River to the airport, trying to remember which grocery stores in my neighborhood stayed open late, and of those, which would be most likely to have purple sprinkles and confectioner’s sugar for the icing, snow had started to flutter from the sky, first gently, like tiny pieces of confetti in front of my headlights, then more like the second coming of the ice age, in great fluffy, cotton bushelfuls.

  All flights out of Reagan National were cancelled. I called Mark at work to tell him I wouldn’t be home, that he would have to bake cupcakes and make sure to find purple sprinkles and vanilla bottoms and cream cheese frosting, and he grumbled something about how his data had been massacred by some insidious virus designed by a seventeen-year-old from a tiny town outside Stuttgart, to whom Mark referred, more than once during our conversation, as “that Nazi fuck,” before he realized, upon closer examination—or maybe it was just the way I kept saying, “But, but, but . . .”—that I was perhaps more shaken up than him, because I hadn’t just lost five months of my work. Oh, no! I was losing something much more valuable: my mind.

  “I’ll go to Hot ’n Crusty tomorrow and pick up some cupcakes on the way to school,” he said. “Don’t sweat it.”

  “Don’t sweat it? Will they have vanilla bottoms? And purple sprinkles? WILL THEY HAVE CREAM CHEESE FROSTING?”

  “No, Lizzie-bean, I can’t promise that they will. But they’ll have a candle, and her classmates will sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ and she’ll be fine.”

  “What about Vanessa? Huh? She can’t eat chocolate!”

  “So we’ll buy a corn muffin for Vanessa, okay? Calm down. You’re blowing this way out of proportion.”

  “How do you know Vanessa is not allergic to corn, too? Huh? HOW DO YOU KNOW?”

  “I don’t. Now I’m going to hang up the phone, Lizard, okay? And when I hang up the phone, you’re going to magically turn back into the woman I married, okay?”

  “Don’t hang up on me, Mark!”

  “I’m hanging up now.”

  “Mark!”

  LATER THAT NIGHT, as I lay in my childhood bed, wearing a pair of flannel pajamas left over from high school, which I found lovingly folded at the foot of my bed by the same hands which had once force-fed me a hot dog (“Life’s full of irony, bubelah. Haven’t you learned that by now?”), I read the final pages of Dr. Sherman’s transcripts.

  Patient: Adele Cassidy

  Date: Monday, October 2, 1972

  Note: Patient walked in five minutes late with her two daughters, Lily and April, still wearing the same house-dress and rubber flip-flops and looking even more disheveled than the previous week. The girls, however, were wearing clean clothes and looked relatively well-groomed and well-cared for. The younger one was clutching a rag doll.

  DR. SHERMAN: Well, hello, girls. I’ve heard so much about you. You must be Lily.

  LILY: Uh huh.

  MRS. CASSIDY: Lily, answer politely, please.

  LILY: Yes, Dr. Sherman.

  DR. SHERMAN: That’s okay, Lily. We’re not going to be formal in here. And you must be April. How old are you, dear, six?

  APRIL: No. Five and three quarters. My birthday’s on Friday.

  DR. SHERMAN: Well, happy almost birthday then! What a big girl you are. And who’s that little friend in your hands? Does she have a name, your doll?

  APRIL: She’s not a doll. She’s a rag person. And you don’t have to speak to me like a baby.

  MRS. CASSIDY: April!

  APRIL: Well, he doesn’t.

  DR. SHERMAN: That’s okay, Adele. Let her say what she wants. I’m sorry, April. I should not speak to you like a baby, you’re right.

  APRIL: Can we go now? I don’t want to be here.

  DR. SHERMAN: Why is that?

  APRIL: Because . . . because I’m missing school. A film-strip. On mammals. We’re studying them.

  DR. SHERMAN: Really? And what are you learning about mammals?

  APRIL: That they’re just like us. Or, well, sort of like us. They care for their young. Which means they don’t just leave them out, you know, in the rain or something, because then the other animals, bigger ones, might eat them. And the mommies all have breasts. I mean milk. They all give their babies milk from their mammaly glands, and the babies grow in the mommy’s tummy, just like I did.

  DR. SHERMAN: That’s a very grown-up thing to know about. Mammary glands and babies growing in tummies.

  APRIL: And you know what else? I remember being in my mommy’s tummy.

  DR. SHERMAN: You do?

  APRIL: Yes.

  DR. SHERMAN: What was it like?

  APRIL: Oh, it was really nice. It was really warm, and there was a lot of light and lots of toys for me to play with, and I swam around all day long. Sometimes my mom would pop her head inside and tickle me, and we’d laugh so much together. Just the two of us, laughing our heads off and splashing in the water. Remember, Mommy? Remember when I was in your tummy and we used to laugh together? Remember?

  MRS. CASSIDY: Sure, sweetheart. I remember. [Patient begins to cry.]

  DR. SHERMAN: It sounds very interesting. But April, aside from missing your mammal filmstrip, which I completely understand—I wouldn’t want to miss a filmstrip on mammals either—is there another reason you don’t want to be here?

  APRIL: I don’t want to be here also . . . I don’t want to be here also because, because there’s nothing wrong with my mommy. She doesn’t need a doctor. [The girl starts to cry.] She just needs to take a bath and get some peace and quiet, and everything will be fine. She’s a good mommy. She makes our beds and gives us food and reads us books at night when she’s not too tired. Like Little House on the Prairie. Please, if you just tell her to take a bath and get some rest, that’s all she needs. And maybe she should stop taking those pills, because they make her tired. And she forgets to take her bath. And she forgets to brush her teeth and read to us. And so she should just stop taking those stupid pills and then she’ll take a bath and brush her teeth and we won’t have to come here and everything will be fine.

  LILY: April!

  DR. SHERMAN: Lily, what’s wrong with what your sister is saying?

  LILY: Mom doesn’t have to take a bath if she doesn’t want to. She works hard. And she has a lot, a lot of responsibilities. And Daddy never helps. And he makes her do things she doesn’t want to do.

  DR. SHERMAN: Like what? What things does your father make your mother do that she doesn’t want to be doing?

  LILY: Like . . . like . . . like putting garlic in his roast beef. She doesn’t like garlic. She says it makes her feel sick. But he yells at her if there’s no garlic. And ironing his underwear. She says underwear doesn’t need to be ironed. You wear it under your clothes, so who cares what it looks like?

  DR. SHERMAN: And if your mother doesn’t iron his underwear, what does he do?

  MRS. CASSIDY: Is this really necessary, Dr. Sherman? All this . . . talking . . . with my children . . . is it really necessary? I already told you what happens when my husband gets mad.

  DR. SHERMAN: What happens when he gets mad at her, Lily?

  LILY: He . . . he . . . Mom, can I say? Mom?

  DR. SHERMAN: You do not have to ask your mother for approval for what you can and cannot say. We speak the truth in here. That’s what this room is for.

  LILY: Mom?

 
DR. SHERMAN: What, Lily? What does he do?

  LILY: He . . . Mom?

  DR. SHERMAN: Lily, speak to me.

  LILY: Mom?

  DR. SHERMAN: What does he do, Lily?

  LILY: He hurts her. [The girl starts to cry.] Last year he kicked her in the shin. She had to use crutches.

  MRS. CASSIDY: That’s not true, and you know it, Lily Ann!

  DR. SHERMAN: What’s not true, Adele? That your husband hurts you or that you were on crutches after he kicked you?

  APRIL: Lily’s lying. My daddy is a good daddy, and my mommy is a good mommy, and she had crutches because she tripped on the stairs, and I want to go back to school now and see my mammal filmstrip and eat grapes with my friend Lizzie, because she has grapes in her lunch today.

  MRS. CASSIDY: I didn’t know you like grapes.

  APRIL: I switched.

  MRS. CASSIDY: Are you happy now, Dr. Sherman?

  DR. SHERMAN: I’m going to assume that is a rhetorical question, Mrs. Cassidy.

  APRIL: What’s a rhetorical?

  LILY: Shut up, April! Stop being so stupid.

  MRS. CASSIDY: Come on girls, it’s time to go. Say goodbye to the doctor.

  DR. SHERMAN: We have twenty more minutes left, Mrs. Cassidy.

  MRS. CASSIDY: Not on my watch. Come on girls. Say goodbye, and let’s go.

  LILY: Good-bye, Dr. Sherman.

  DR. SHERMAN: Good-bye, Lily.

  APRIL: Good-bye, Dr. Sherman.

  DR. SHERMAN: Good-bye, April. Good-bye, Mrs. Cassidy. Will I see you next week, at our usual time?

  MRS. CASSIDY: I don’t know. Let’s go girls. Let’s get you back to school.

  That was the day April “mistook” her mother for her mother’s friend, because of the dust from the filmstrip, and I remembered the grapes I brought in, how I’d promised to share them with April, the odd way she looked when she walked into the cafeteria several minutes after the start of lunch. She was still wearing her windbreaker from outside, and her eyes had pink rims around them, and she was clutching an old rag doll with black x’s sewn horizontally across her chin for a mouth, which, I couldn’t help but notice as she dropped the doll into the trash can next to me, looked as taut and unnatural as April’s.

  I turned to the final page in the transcript folder, which, unlike the preceding pages, was not typed. Rather, it was handwritten, on lined paper.

  **Eleanor, please type ASAP!

  Patient: Adele Cassidy

  Date: Monday, October 9, 1972

  Note: Patient did not show up for her normally scheduled session again. I called her house a half an hour after the appointed time, and she hung up the phone. I called her back immediately, and she said she didn’t want to see me anymore, that I should stop calling her, and that she couldn’t think straight on the pills so she’d stopped taking them. She blamed the pills for forgetting her daughter’s birthday and claimed that since she’d stopped taking them she felt more lucid, more clear about what had to happen in her life for her depression to lift. When I asked her what that thing was, she said she was thinking of making a “big change.” I asked if she meant going back to her job or hiring help, but she surprised me and said she was going to leave her husband. I urged her to come in and talk with me about this first, before taking any drastic measures, but she said, very firmly, that she no longer wanted to speak with me, that she would send in the check for the missing session when she got where she was going, but that I should take her off my schedule once and for all. Then she hung up the phone.

  Patient: Adele Cassidy

  Date: Tuesday, October 24, 1972

  Two policemen arrived at my house this afternoon, while I was meeting with another patient. They waited until my session was finished and then walked into my office bearing a check, written out to me, in Adele’s handwriting. The police then asked me questions about the patient’s treatment, but I had to demur, to their visible frustration, to the laws of doctor-patient confidentiality.

  Patient allegedly killed herself and her daughters by means of carbon monoxide poisoning late Sunday night, in the woods near Gaithersburg. According to the police, a suicide note had been found. I asked the police officers if I could take a look at the note. They said no. After they left, I tore up the check.

  Attached with a staple to this handwritten page was the same Washington Post clips I’d found at the New York Public Library the day after my fall: “Maryland Mother, Children, Found Dead”; “Maryland Mother, Children’s Deaths Ruled Suicide, Murder.”

  I closed the file and switched off the lamp above my head, suddenly remembering the day April came in to school, and her name was on the chalkboard, with a “Happy Birthday” preceding it, an exclamation mark to its right, and there was Miss Martin, at the morning meeting, asking her whether she preferred to hand out her treats during snack or after lunch, to which April had replied, with an overly cheerful smile, “After lunch,” hoping, I now understood, to buy herself some more time, her mother a few more hours to do the impossible: wake up, get dressed, bake cupcakes.

  CHAPTER 13

  ASTRID WAS HUNCHED over clearing the last shovelfuls of snow from the steps of our building when the taxi dropped me off the next day. “Hey, you made it!” she said, leaning on the shovel and brushing a strand of gray hair, which had become loose in her exertions, behind her ear. She was always complaining that she had no time to dye it, no money to plump up the deepening lines striating her forehead, but I think she found a certain sense of pride in letting time’s scythe mark her. “We were afraid you’d be snowed in for longer.”

  “You were, were you?” The taxi driver dumped my lights and camera equipment on a patch of thick ice on the sidewalk and drove off, which made lifting the heavy metal boxes without slipping quite tricky.

  “Yes, Mark told me your flight got . . .” Astrid leaned the shovel against the banister and came down to help me. “Here, give me that one.” She pointed to the largest of the three boxes.

  “Thanks,” I said. And we started up the stairs.

  I’d first befriended Astrid a few weeks after Mark and I moved in, when she knocked on our door late one night, the color drained from her face, her hand wrapped in thick layers of bloody gauze, to ask if I could come down to her apartment and watch her boys until her husband could get home to relieve me. She’d been chopping tomatoes for a lasagna. The knife had slipped. “Of course, of course!” I’d said at the time. “What time do you expect him home?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. She hadn’t been able to reach him at his office. This was normal, she explained. When Jim was caught up in his work, nothing could rouse him. Except, as it turned out, one of his clients. And his partner’s secretary. And a mother in their sons’ preschool.

  I went downstairs a lot after she became wise to these after-hour meetings. And when the divorce became finalized, I forced her to go out, even if only to take herself to a movie while Mark and I watched TV in her apartment. This was before my husband and I had children of our own, back when we did things like sitting on a couch together, sharing a bottle of wine.

  “Mark called me last night,” she now said, her demeanor turning serious, concerned. “He said he had too much work. He couldn’t get home. I got upstairs around seven, so you probably owe Irma an extra hour or two.”

  “Oh, Astrid. I’m so sorry. Did he come home really late?” I was suddenly furious with him for not trying, the one night I was stuck in another state, to get home at a reasonable hour.

  “No, I think he walked in around eleven, but Lizzie, you know how I feel about this so let me put it bluntly: it’s not me you should be worried about.” Astrid—because it took her six years of being deceived to figure out her husband was a liar—became convinced that everyone’s spouse was having an affair, whether they knew it or not. I tried explaining to her, on several occasions, that I was 99 percent certain Mark’s entanglements were with his data, not a woman, but Astrid said either way, abandonment was abandonment. Something
had to give.

  “Oh shit,” I said, looking at my watch when we’d reached my landing. “What time do you have?”

  “2:45,” said Astrid.

  “I gotta run,” I said, quickly thanking Astrid for her help and shoving the equipment in the front door before skipping down the stairs two by two while mentally cursing the American school system for still clinging to the illusion that children were required to get home in time to till the fields. Fifteen minutes later, I was standing in the girls’ schoolyard with all the other mothers and nannies and the lone father clutching his Times as a shield, all of us bouncing up and down on the balls of our feet to stay warm. “Did you hear about Finn Slater?” one mother said to another. “He fell off the jungle gym at the Diana Ross Playground and broke his arm.”

  “Oh my God,” said the other. “I’m telling my kids to stay off of that thing.”

  A couple of nannies huddled off in the corner nearby, quietly discussing their friend’s dismissal over a box of store-bought pasta. “She tell her employer, ‘But I have no time to make the homemade pasta every day.’ But does she listen? No!”

  The two mothers in front of me stood face to face, the tips of their styluses poised and ready to plunder. “Monday, the nineteenth?”

  “No, Chandra has oboe on Mondays. Tuesday the twenty-seventh?”

  “No, Sidney’s going home with Kira that day. I guess we’re looking at March then.”