A Friend of the Family

by Lauren Grodstein

  “You bought groceries?” Elaine asked as I unloaded the Fairway bags onto the breakfast bar. “I thought we were ordering Chinese. What’s this—smoked sturgeon?”

  “We’re ordering in?”

  She gave me a curious look. “It’s Sunday,” she said. In the years since her cancer, Elaine had gotten into the habit of marking the weekend with a regular delivery from China Lou’s and saving the fortune cookies for midweek necromancy. She examined my jar of pickled radishes. “What do you propose we do with these?”

  “Snack on them?” I didn’t even remember putting the radishes in my cart. “Martinis?”

  “We don’t make our own martinis,” she said.

  “Couldn’t we?”

  She sighed, leaned up to kiss me on the cheek. “I guess so,” she said. I wanted to say something to her, mention the hideous noises from Alec’s bedroom, but I didn’t know how to bring them up without also starting an argument about whether I was being too dictatorial about our son’s social life, and I didn’t feel like fighting. What to say? How to begin? While I was thinking, she left the kitchen. I sat down on a stool behind the breakfast bar and assessed the cornucopia of packages I’d left strewn across the marble. I scratched the stubble on my cheek. Pickled radishes. Scottish shortbread.

  “I see you went to the grocery store.” I turned around, both surprised and not even slightly to find Laura Stern in my kitchen. She was dressed in jeans and one of Alec’s T-shirts, oversized and paint-stained. I guessed she’d been in our house all day.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She poked through my haul. “Some interesting stuff you brought home.”

  “You’ve been here all day?” She picked up the package of beets, then looked at me. Was I supposed to offer her food now, too?

  “I was in Alec’s studio,” she said. “Reading. It’s hard for me to find a quiet place at my parents’ house.”

  “Aren’t you living in the city?”

  “I’m here half the time,” she said. “Alec just left for the Red Barn, wanted me to tell you he’ll be home late. He’s teaching a night class.”

  “If you’re living in the city, why would you spend half your time here?”

  “This is where my family is.” She put down the beets. “Why?”

  “I just … I guess if I had an apartment in the city, I would stay there.”

  She gave me a half-cocked smile, took the barstool next to me. I felt chilly. “It’s nice to get a change of scenery,” she said. “I like to keep moving. And I like how quiet it is in Round Hill. I only really appreciate this place when I leave.”

  “Maybe you should … leave more often?”

  She smiled as if I’d said something funny. Either she or Alec had cut the neck out of the T-shirt she was wearing, so that, sitting next to her, I could see her thin clavicle and the two thin chains she wore around her neck the way her mother did. She smelled flagrantly of soap. We both leaned our elbows on the bar, and I wondered what I was supposed to say or do next. I thought maybe I could put away groceries.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing at a small yellowish bruise on the inside of my forearm.

  “It’s a bruise,” I said.

  “How’d you get it?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Why don’t you remember?” She put her slim index finger, beige nail polish, just above my bruise, on the part of the forearm that tickles when you touch it. Why was she touching me?

  “It didn’t hurt that much,” I said. I wanted to stand and put away the groceries, but her finger was like a concrete block.

  “But it looks like it hurt.”

  I sat there and felt her finger tickle my forearm. Her neck was freckled like her mother’s. I thought about the noises in the upstairs bedroom, the giggling and whispering, raccoons behind the wall. “No,” I said. “It doesn’t.” Her hair was thick and red the way her mother’s used to be, before her mother’s hair had started to gray. I wondered when Laura’s hair would start to gray. I wondered what my son would think of her then, if she would be just as appealing as ever, or even more so, with silver threaded through her hair. Or if she would suddenly just seem old.

  “You look a lot like Alec,” she said. “It surprised me when I first saw him again, how much he’d started looking like you.”

  “He’s my son,” I said gruffly. “Who else should he look like?”

  “Is Elaine home?”

  “She’s upstairs,” I said.

  “I see.” What exactly did she see? Why was her finger still on my arm? Iris used to be this way, a toucher, a flirt. She used to give me hugs and kisses on the cheek when we’d meet casually on the quad at Pitt. I was eighteen, nineteen. No woman who wasn’t my mother had ever kissed me so casually before.

  “I should put away the groceries,” I said, but still I didn’t move.

  “I’ll help you,” she said, but she didn’t move either. And we stayed like that, her finger on my arm, my brain weaving and remembering, my forearm prickling, her red hair waving down past her shoulders.

  She moved her finger back and forth just slightly, tracing a vein.

  “Laura?” I asked.

  “You don’t like me much, do you, Dr. Pete?” she asked.

  I said nothing. She kept tracing the vein on my arm. Finally, after who knows how long, Elaine yelled downstairs to see if I wanted to call China Lou’s for delivery or if she should do it herself.

  “I guess I should go,” Laura said.

  “I guess you should,” I said. She moved her hand, and my arm tensed for a minute.

  “Alec will be home late,” she said.

  “Thanks for the message,” I said.

  “I’m really not so bad, Dr. Pete,” she said. “You ought to give me a chance.” I didn’t say anything back and didn’t wait for her to leave before I started to put the groceries away, pickled radishes, Scottish shortbread, fancy French beets. As Elaine came down the stairs to order dinner, the bruise on my forearm started to throb.

  THE SUMMER WAS ending. The hospital was quieter, the patient stream began trickling a little slower, and our office was perfectly empty when Roseanne Craig came in at the tail end of a Friday afternoon. Janene Rothman was in Nantucket with Bill and the kids, Vince Dirks had long since disappeared—he stopped seeing patients at three o’clock—and by the time five thirty rolled around I’d started to feel like a stooge all cooped up on a beautiful afternoon. Also, it was Elaine’s birthday, and we were having dinner tonight as a family, and I had yet to buy her a present. I was supposed to grill tuna.

  Tonight would be the first time I’d seen my son since the previous Sunday, when I’d heard him and Laura. It had been easy enough to avoid him; he’d doubled his hours at Utrecht, since he wanted to pay for his own books and supplies, and then, at night, half the time he didn’t come home at all but instead “crashed in the city,” which was code for staying at Laura’s place in the East Village. Which I tried to just forget about, and which I was able to forget about most of the time if I directed my mind to other things. He was starting school in three weeks. When the New School catalog came in the mail, I made Alec sit down next to me and go over it page by page; we perused Russian History after the Cold War, Italian Art of the Renaissance, Advanced Molecular Biology, Astronomy for Poets. It was a beautiful thing, the two of us in my study, perusing that thick, shiny catalog, and I was filled with that too-rare feeling that my son and I were on a joint mission, and that he understood what his responsibilities were in getting that mission fulfilled. Alec picked out four classes: Pottery I, Studio Painting, American Lit, Anthropology. We never mentioned Laura.

  “Dr. Dizinoff?” Roseanne said. “Do you have a second? I don’t have an appointment, but your office manager said …”

  I was surprised; Mina was usually severe about letting patients in without appointments, especially at the end of a Friday. But I was glad she’d let Roseanne in. The girl’s ponytail had come loose and her color
was high. She’d never gone to a psychiatrist, I could tell. I wondered if her father had talked her out of it.

  “Come on in, Roseanne, sit down,” I said. “What can I do for you? The Jeep’s holding up well, if this is a business call.”

  She twisted the pearls around her neck and gave me a half smile. “That’s good,” she said. “It’s one of our best-rated models.”

  “You’re not here to talk about the car, huh?”

  “Not really,” she said, sitting down. “I don’t know,” she mumbled. “It’s sort of embarrassing.” I remembered the tough, tattooed girl I’d met in my office not so long before, and wondered again what had brought all this heartache on. She’d told me a few loose details all those months ago, the boyfriend who left her for a man, the bookstore they were going to open together in San Francisco. She’d been so full of bravado before. My heart went out to her.

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s just, I don’t know, my mood keeps swinging in this weird way,” she said. “Sometimes I’m really angry for no reason, and then sometimes I just want to cry. Yesterday I sold an Escalade — do you know how much the commission is on one of those things? But my brother yelled at me, he said that I should have turned the sale over, since he’s the one that does the Escalades, and I locked myself in the bathroom and cried.”

  “That’s rough.”

  “The funny thing is that my dad brought me to work to cheer me up, and in general it does cheer me up! I like doing it! I can’t frankly believe it, since never in a million years did I think I’d like being on the floor. But I do! But then sometimes I just … my stomach starts to hurt and I just have to go lie down somewhere. I can’t take it.”

  “Roseanne, how old are you?”

  “I turned twenty-three last month.”

  Twenty-three. How hard it had become to navigate this age. Only thirty years ago, all you had to do was finish school, marry your college sweetheart, pick a job, and stick with it. Now these wonderful kids were breaking down all around us.

  “Is anything else bothering you? Physically? Emotionally?”

  “Not really,” she said. “All I want to eat are Doritos. Sometimes sushi. My period was late a couple of times, a little spotty. I know what it sounds like, but I’m not pregnant.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She rolled her eyes at me. “Unless it’s a virgin birth.”

  “Maybe I should give you a pregnancy test just to double-check.”

  “Dr. Dizinoff, I promise you—”

  It was irresponsible of me, but I trusted her. “Okay,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Any one of these things, it’s not like any of them is such a big deal, but I just don’t feel like myself, and I don’t know what to do about it. I feel like my body wants to rebel against me and is just waiting for the right moment.”

  “How long have you noticed these symptoms, Roseanne?”

  “On and off,” she said. “Maybe a year and a half. Maybe since I first came in and saw you.”

  “And did you ever pursue any psychiatric care?”

  “But if it were all in my head, why does my stomach hurt all the time?”

  “You know, depression isn’t all in your head, necessarily. It’s a problem that starts in your brain, specifically that you’re not making enough serotonin, which is an important chemical in mood regulation. Serotonin deficiency can cause a whole spectrum of effects, including, sometimes, an upset stomach or strange food cravings, alongside sadness or emotional swings. Which is why I’m curious about whether you ever visited a psychiatrist. He or she could make a proper diagnosis and would be better equipped than I am to give you the right medication.”

  “I just don’t think I’m depressed like that.”

  “Crying in the bathroom, Roseanne?” I said gently.

  She sighed. “I don’t know, I guess it’s not the sort of person I thought of myself as, you know? A depressed person. At Cal, every other moron saw a shrink. It was like a badge of honor. They were all bragging about their Prozac or their lithium or their Ritalin. I always thought it was such crap.”

  “It’s an illness, Roseanne. If I told you I suspected you had diabetes, would you tell me you thought insulin was crap?” This was a cliché, but it usually worked.

  She sighed, was quiet for a long moment. I let the quiet linger. “What did you say the name of that doctor you like is?”

  “There’s Owen Kennedy at Round Hill Psychiatric. It’s right down the street. He’s the one that specializes in young adults, and you’ll like him. He’s an incredibly nice guy.”

  “Actually, maybe I’d like to speak to a woman?” That was good, since it meant she’d thought about the therapeutic process, could envision herself taking part in it.

  “There are two women over there,” I said. “April Frank is the one I know better. She’s terrific—I think she’s from California herself.”

  Roseanne allowed herself a little nod.

  “I’ll call the office on Monday and see if I can get you an appointment.”

  “Thanks, Dr. Dizinoff,” she said. “I appreciate it.” She adjusted her pearl necklace so that the clasp hung behind her neck. “I don’t mean to be such a skeptic about psychiatry—”

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “No, really, I’d like to, if you have a second—”

  “Of course.”

  She took a breath, let it out in a sort of bitter little bark. “When my boyfriend—I mean secretly, you want to know the truth, he was my fiancé, we were going to get married. He’d proposed. I hadn’t had the guts yet to tell my dad — I think my dad always smelled the truth about Frogger. About Chris, that was his real name. Chris. We fought about it. He thought he wasn’t man enough for me—”

  “Ah.” So I wasn’t the only Round Hill father who objected to his child’s romantic objectives, despite the lenient and liberal times we lived in. I felt a burst of solidarity with lumbering Arnie Craig.

  “It was a problem, of course. That my dad didn’t like him, because my dad and I have always been super close, and—’

  “I can imagine.”

  “Anyway, we were going to get married. He’d secretly proposed over Christmas, a little ruby ring, I still have it. And then he comes out with this affair. He’s having an affair. With a man! And instead of being rational about it, I tell him—I mean instead of just leaving him in the dust, I tell him, Don’t worry, it’s just a phase, let’s go to couples therapy and work it out.”

  “Couples therapy,” I said.

  “Can you believe it? Like I can therapize him out of being gay? But I do, I take him to student services, they have every kind of therapy, and for an entire year we try to work out whether or not Frogger is gay. And he’s supposed to be honestly thinking about it. Keeps telling the therapist he loves me, wants to be with me, it was just that one month when it happened, it won’t happen again. I believe him! The therapist believes him! And the entire time he’s sleeping with that guy from Stanford.”

  Oh, dear. “Roseanne, did you ever take a—”

  “I took an HIV test right away and then another one at a clinic six months ago. I’m negative.”

  How could I not have thought of that sooner? I hung my head. It was always a surprise when I let my assumptions get in the way of good medicine.

  “I’m sorry all this happened to you, Roseanne. I really am.”

  “Yeah, well—” She looked down at her hands for a moment, picked at a cuticle. “It feels good to talk about it with someone who’s not one of my friends. I can’t tell my parents the whole truth. And my brother would probably go find Frogger and kill him. Literally.”

  “Well, listen, anytime you want to talk and you don’t feel like going to your psychiatrist, you can always stop by and talk to me,” I said. And I meant it.

  She stopped picking her cuticle. She had a small, lovely smile.

  “Do you have any plans the rest of the summer?”
I asked. “Any vacations to look forward to?”

  “Actually, some friends from high school have a place on a lake in the Adirondacks. Saranac Lake. We’re going canoeing next weekend.”

  “Well, that sounds like fun. Something to take your mind off things.”

  “Oh, please.” She laughed. “I’ve never canoed in my life. They told me we were going to have to catch our own dinner, and that’s where I drew the line. No way am I gutting a fish. It’s not like we’re on Survivor or something.”

  “Research before you go,” I said. “Tell them there’s a good steak house somewhere in the area and gutting fish might lose its appeal.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Or just order in pizza.”

  “I don’t think you can order in pizza in the woods.”

  “You’d be surprised,” I said. “I once had pizza delivered to a campsite in Yosemite.”

  “You like to rough it, too, huh, Dr. Dizinoff?”

  I grinned at her. In my heart, I knew she’d be fine. “I’ll check in with you on Monday, okay? Let you know how soon I can get you in to see April.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and we stood and shook hands. If I’d had no sense at all of professional protocol, I might have drawn her in for a hug. I liked her for a million reasons. She was smart, pretty, tough, showed initiative in her work and her love life and her health. If Alec would only date a girl like her—maybe there was some way to introduce them? It was a shame we weren’t in the market for another car.

  “Doc?” Mina stuck her head into my office as soon as Roseanne disappeared. “Let’s get out of here before anyone else shows up.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “Have yourself a great weekend, Mina. I’ll lock up.”

  “I’ll lock up,” she said. “You still haven’t bought Elaine a birthday present.”