A Woman's Place

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Understandable. It’s a situation that you can’t control.”

  That was quite a statement. It was direct and judgmental. I didn’t know whether it came from his own observation, or from Dennis. In either case, I disagreed. “It isn’t about control. It’s about being without my children. It’s about having my every move watched. It’s about not knowing what the future holds.”

  “It’s about control.”

  I gave him the benefit of the doubt. “Maybe,” I conceded, “but not in a negative way. It’s not about controlling people. It’s about controlling me, about determining what I do, about deciding on a course of action and seeing it through. It’s about being in control of, yes, okay, the situation. I’ve been doing that since I was eight. I did it then, because no one else was doing it, and someone had to. I did it during my marriage, because Dennis wasn’t doing it, and someone had to. Is that wrong?”

  “Not unless it holds other people back.”

  “It hasn’t. At least, I don’t think it has. No, how could it? I’m a booster. I boost Dennis’s ego, boost the kids’ egos. I’ve taught them they can take control and be anything they want to be. How can that possibly hold them back?”

  “It can backfire. If you tell the children they can be anything they want, and then your son doesn’t make a team or your daughter doesn’t get the part she wants in a play, they can feel they’ve let you down.”

  I was shaking my head well before he was done. “They wouldn’t feel that. I wouldn’t let them. We talk, my kids and I. We talk about feelings.” I was vehement about that. It was one of the things I had missed as a child and had vowed my own children would have, an open ear, unconditional support. I didn’t want either of them suffering the way Rona did.

  “Your son isn’t talking.”

  “Not yet. Mainly because I’m not there. He’s used to talking with me, but it’s hard to push a button and suddenly get into deep emotional talks with a child when the court limits you to two visits a week. Dennis is with him more than I am. He’d have more opportunity to talk with Johnny. I don’t know if he has. Heart-to-heart talks were never his long suit.”

  “He says the boy is tense and won’t open up.”

  “The boy is angry.” I was angry myself. In my wildest nightmares, this wasn’t what I wanted for Johnny. “He thinks I’ve abandoned him. That’s what the court has done to us.”

  Jenovitz set the pipe in his ashtray. “A word of caution, Mrs. Raphael. That kind of attitude can be harmful to a child. He’ll pick up on your resentment in a flash.”

  “Not if I don’t let it show. I haven’t said a word to him against the court, or against my husband. I’m very careful.”

  “But you do resent the court’s judgment?”

  “What kind of parent would I be if I didn’t? My place is with my children, not exiled from my home.”

  “According to your husband, you’re quite happy in your new home.”

  “Happy? There are moments when I like where I am. But, happy? No. I’m making the best of a bad situation. That’s what I’m trying to say. That’s what I do in life.”

  He nodded. “It’s one way of feeling in control.”

  Okay, so I liked feeling in control. “Is that so awful? Excuse me, Dr. Jenovitz, but I’m getting mixed signals here. Isn’t it my alleged lack of control that got me into trouble in the first place?”

  A bell rang. The psychologist’s next client was announcing his arrival, just as I had mine an hour before. I had been hoping for more time—the longer we talked, the sooner the study would be done.

  But Jenovitz was emptying his pipe of ash with one hand and flipping through his datebook with the other. “How’s your schedule?”

  “Wide open.”

  “Same time next week?”

  “I’ll come in again this week, if you’d like.”

  “No. This is a good slot for me.” He made a notation.

  I moved forward in my chair, but didn’t rise. “How many times will we meet, do you think?”

  “Three, four, depending on how things progress.” He stood. “Next time, bring me a list of the children’s teachers, coaches, doctors, any other adults who know them well. Names and phone numbers, please.”

  “Do you meet with them?”

  “A phone call will usually do.” He moved toward the door. “I may want a written report from the school. I’ll see.”

  “When will you talk with Kikit and Johnny?”

  “When I know more about you and your husband.” He opened the door and waited beside it.

  Gathering my coat, I approached him. The door wasn’t the one I had used before, but led directly to the stairwell, apparently to save the current client the awkwardness of seeing the coming client. So there was no one to hear what I said. Still, I lowered my voice.

  “They don’t know about you. What should I say?”

  “Nothing for now.”

  “They don’t know there’s a contest here.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “I don’t want them fearing they have to take sides.”

  “And you think I’ll make them choose, one parent or another? No, Mrs. Raphael. I won’t do that. Credit me with a little sensitivity. Please?”

  I wanted to do that, truly I did, but driving home from Boston, I struggled with it. If Dean Jenovitz was sensitive, I hadn’t seen evidence of it. He hadn’t been warm or understanding, hadn’t been encouraging or solicitous. He must have known I was nervous, yet he hadn’t tried to put me at ease. He certainly hadn’t tried to hide his opinion of me.

  “Take heart,” Carmen told me when I called from the car. “If he heard the worst from Dennis, that’s fine. He’ll get great reports from the people he calls. They know you far more than they know Dennis, and they like you. It’s uphill from here.”

  “He didn’t seem particularly upset by what’s been done to me. He didn’t seem overly committed to justice.”

  “His focus will be the children.”

  “Can I trust him with them?”

  “Yes. He’s better with kids than adults. The grandfather in him comes out. Good thinking to ask how to tell John and Kikit about him. He’ll give you advice, and give you points for asking.”

  I hadn’t done it for the sake of points, and was feeling vaguely sick, though how much of that was still from Jenovitz’s pipe I didn’t know. “I can’t tell you how distasteful this is to me, Carmen. It’s like a game—timing, strategy, calculated moves—only the ante is my life.”

  “I know. And I apologize if I make it sound petty. It’s not.” She paused. “So Jenovitz didn’t pick up on Dennis and Phoebe?”

  “No. He turned it around and said I was accusing Dennis of something to justify my affair with Brody. I need proof. How do I get it?”

  “We get it. We hire Morgan Houser. He’s a private investigator, and he’s good. He’ll find out if they’re currently having an affair. That’s easy. It may be harder to prove that they were involved before the separation, though proof of that will help us the most.”

  It would definitely boost our case. I wasn’t sure it would boost my morale. I cringed thinking of Dennis in bed with another woman. Now or before, it didn’t matter.

  My silence must have tipped Carmen off. More quietly, she said, “If proof is there, we need it. Selwey agreed to hear the Motion to Recuse, but his clerk says he isn’t happy about it. No judge likes being accused of bias. My guess is that the hearing will be a token one.”

  Still, it was a hearing. My spirits rose. “When?”

  “Thursday morning at ten.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “I have a meeting scheduled with Art Heuber later that day to talk about what Dennis wants by way of a settlement. We could use a bargaining chip. Proof of Dennis’s infidelity would give us that.”

  Proof like that smacked of blackmail. Yes, Dennis had used much the same against me, but I resented having to stoop to his level. It would be another instance where I was be
ing forced to be someone I didn’t like at all.

  Such irony. I was a peace-loving soul newly prone to fist-clenching rage, a level-headed person newly prone to the shakes, an optimist newly prone to dread. They had accused me of being someone I wasn’t, and in so doing made me into someone I wasn’t. It wasn’t any more fair than the whole custody situation was fair.

  Ahh. The custody situation. The bottom line. I might resist using blackmail to strike a better alimony deal, but when it came to the children, I would use it in a heartbeat.

  “Call Morgan,” I told Carmen. “See what he can find.”

  I would do most anything in a heartbeat, when it came to the children.

  That was a prophetic thought, if ever there was one. I had barely bathed and settled into bed that night, worn down by alternating calls to Rona and Connie, who were bickering with each other, when the phone rang. It was Dennis saying that Johnny was sick, that he didn’t want to disturb Elizabeth so late but that he didn’t know what to do.

  I knew what to do. I slipped into a sweatsuit and drove right over.

  ten

  My key still worked. I let myself in, dropped my coat on the stairs over scattered tiers of school books, sneakers, and laundry, and ran right up. Dennis was coming out of Johnny’s room when I reached it.

  “He threw up after dinner. Can’t seem to keep anything down.”

  I could smell that the minute I entered the room. Johnny was huddled under a blanket on the bare mattress. Mattress pad, sheets, and comforter were wadded up on the floor.

  “Hi, sweetie,” I said. My throat knotted as I sat down on the bed by his side. He had been my firstborn, as easy a baby as could be, my one and only for two years. Ours had been a mutual admiration society, a symbiotic craving. Time and circumstance had muted the craving—Dennis’s wants, Kikit’s arrival, Johnny’s own need for independence and growth—but it flooded back now.

  Praying that he wouldn’t turn away from me as he had done the last time I was at the house, I stroked his face. His cheeks were flushed, fever-hot. “Not feeling so good?”

  He shook his head and scrunched up tighter. “I couldn’t get to the bathroom in time.”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay, sweetie.” I fished one of his hands from under the blanket. He was wearing undershorts and nothing more. I assumed his pajamas were in the pile on the floor. “Does anything hurt?”

  “I didn’t know I was gonna do it,” he cried, “just woke up and felt awful and then it just came up. I tried to hold it in.”

  His hair was damp. I stroked it back. “Shhh, I’m not angry.”

  “But you had to come all the way over here.” There was nothing of the would-be man in his voice. He was little-boy sick, little-boy frightened.

  I was sick and frightened just then, too, thinking that my nine-year-old son imagined I begrudged taking care of him, because I knew what it was to feel like a burden. Year after year during my childhood, my mother had come home from work wanting solitude and silence. I remembered having things to ask her but not daring, having things to show her but not daring, the fear of rejection was so great. I had sworn my children would never experience that, had gone out of my way to let them know they came first. And they did. Still. Always.

  I held Johnny’s hand tighter, pressed his mouth closed with my thumb. “I didn’t have to come over here. I wanted to. Didn’t have to, Johnny, wanted to. I came the minute Daddy called.” I moved my thumb to let him speak. “Tell me what hurts.”

  “Everything.”

  “Nothing special, just aches all over?”

  “Mm.”

  “Flu going around school?”

  “Mm.”

  “Still nauseated?”

  “Mm.”

  Dennis stood at the door. His hair was mussed and his shirt untucked in a way that might have suggested concern for his child, had it not been for the hands on his hips and the peeved look on his face. I wasn’t sure what annoyed him more, Johnny’s flu or my being there, but I wasn’t brooding on it. It was the least of my worries just then.

  “Did you give him anything—aspirin, water?” I asked.

  “No. I got out the aspirin, but he wouldn’t take it.”

  “Is there anything left in his stomach?”

  “There can’t be. Not with all that came up.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Johnny protested.

  I rubbed the back of his neck. “Daddy knows that. He’s not angry, just upset that you’re sick. Maybe even scared. He’s new at this. We have to be patient with him. Know what I think would be good? A nice bath. While you’re in it, I can put on fresh sheets. How does that sound?”

  “Okay.”

  While Dennis ran the bath, I sat with Johnny, wiping his face with a damp cloth, humming a soothing song. When the tub was ready I helped him into the bathroom, then left Dennis with him so that I could see to the rest.

  First, though, because I couldn’t wait a second longer, I looked in on Kikit. The sight of her sleeping with her babies, the crowd of them profiled by the pale glow of her Pocahontas nightlight, brought a swift tightening to my chest. The picture was definitely a pearl in my life’s strand, taken for granted for so long, but no more. It was all I could do not to go in and touch her, but I didn’t want to wake her, lest she be upset.

  Lest I be upset. More than I already was. Because it was odd, moving around the house, so like I had never been gone that I could almost forget the circumstances. Things were just the same, organized the way I had left them, fresh sheets piled neatly in the linen closet and laundry detergent at the ready beside the washer in the basement. Granted, the washer held clothes I hadn’t washed, the dryer held others waiting to be folded, and the detergent bottle was covered with blue drips. Granted, coming back through the kitchen, I found the refrigerator filled with food I hadn’t bought, mostly cartons of orange juice and milk, loaves of bread, wedges of cheese, more of each than I expected the children would eat or drink in a month. Still, the bulletin board held the very notes I had left there, the wide cranberry candles still stood on the table on either side of the apple bowl, and the answering machine was blinking red to indicate a message waiting to be heard.

  Dennis never erased his messages, just left them for me to erase. I pressed the play button.

  “Hi,” came a clipped female voice. “Selwey gave them a hearing on a Motion to Recuse. It’s for show. He’ll never grant it. But we have to be there for the hearing, Thursday at ten. Be at my office early, and we’ll get breakfast. For the settlement meeting that afternoon, I revised our demands. There’s no reason we can’t shoot for more, since we’re in the driver’s seat. I’ll give my list to Art. He’ll do the talking. Anything else? No. Ciao.”

  I stabbed at the erase button, then further vented my fury by chipping ice into small pieces in a bowl. Returning to the bedroom, I closed the window I’d opened. By the time I had the bed freshly made, Johnny was walking bleary-eyed from the bathroom wearing the clean pajamas I had passed in to Dennis.

  I helped him into bed and gave him the ice chips to suck. He was still ghostly pale, but cooler. I rubbed his back and sang softly. He loved “Let It Be,” so I started with it and moved on to others that I knew he liked. He started to doze, caught himself, started to doze again, caught himself again.

  He was so obviously fighting it, that I coaxed, “You can sleep.”

  “What if I get sick again?”

  “Do you feel like you will?”

  “No, but what if I do?”

  “There’s a pail right here.” I pointed to it. “And me. I’ll help.”

  “Are you staying?” he asked so directly that it hit me, with a gnawing twist inside, that that was why he was fighting sleep. He didn’t want to sleep and find me gone when he awoke.

  “I’ll stay for a while. I like watching you.” He seemed pleased enough by that to let himself go. Only when he was sleeping deeply did I slip away.

  I was in the laundry room, shifting sheets from wa
sher to dryer, when Dennis came to the door and said, “That was messy.”

  My first impulse, sheer habit, was to offer sympathy—poor Dennis, swamped in vomit during his watch, I’m so sorry—but it was followed by a swift anger. “It wasn’t deliberate.”

  “I know. But I couldn’t ask my mother to come. She’s seventy-five.”

  My hands went still for the space of several stunned breaths, before tugging another sheet from the washer. “You could have done it yourself. It doesn’t take an advanced degree to clean up after a sick child.” I stuffed the sheet into the dryer.

  “Well, this worked out fine.”

  I didn’t say anything to that, couldn’t think of a comeback that wouldn’t be snide. Sad, but not so long ago, snideness wouldn’t have arisen. I would have given Dennis the easier chore without a second thought, would have done the harder simply because it was there to be done and I knew how. I was a mother. Dirty work was part of the job.

  The job belonged to Dennis now. So why was I doing the laundry?

  I consciously set down the box of fabric softener sheets. “What would you have done if I hadn’t been home?”

  “Called Brody’s house,” he said.

  I didn’t dignify the remark with a denial. “And if I wasn’t there?”

  “I’d have done this myself. I’m not helpless. You may find it hard to believe, but we’re doing okay without you.”

  I slid a pointed look at the laundry that I had personally folded and piled high.

  Dennis said, “No one asked you to do that. No one asked you to do any of this. You made such a big deal when I didn’t call you about Kikit’s attack that I figured I’d be a good guy and call you about Johnny.”

  My jaw dropped. “You figured you’d be a good guy? Come off it, Dennis. You didn’t know what to do! You panicked.”

  “You’d have a hard time proving that. What’s more, if you try, people will think you resented being bothered tonight, which wouldn’t reflect well on you as a mother. You can’t win.”

  “I’ll win,” I said, but I felt suddenly worn. Leaning back against the washer, I braced my fingers on the edge and studied Dennis. He was the same man I married—same looks, same quick tongue, same ego—but different. A stranger. I had thought it before. Now I wondered when it had happened. For the life of me, I didn’t know. “Where did we lose it, Dennis?”