Shout Her Lovely Name (27 page)

“Voilà.” Blythe passed in seven dresses. “Remember, color is the new black, and with your skin and elegant hair, something here will be perfect.” Half of Cassie’s void-of-joy wardrobe was black. “I particularly like the . . .” Blythe stuck her head in the room and took in Cassie’s reflection. Her expression froze but did not waver on her smooth-as-a-fitted-sheet face. “I’ll find you a slip, something slightly alluring.”

The first dress she would not try on could best be described as a getup, a Hostess Sno Ball–pink number that would be perfect for offering mini cupcakes. The next was yellow. No one looks good in yellow.

“How about something a little darker,” she called to Blythe, hoping she’d understand the code for black.

“Humor me. Slip on the turquoise.”

Cassie reluctantly stepped into the turquoise and tangerine dress. It was better than she thought, two giant blocks of color, turquoise skirt with a tangerine bodice. She looked like a walking Rothko painting. When she stepped out, Blythe held her hand before her mouth and said, “You look exactly like Susan Sarandon.” She walked around Cassie as if she were considering a major purchase, a car or a sofa. “With the right accessories . . .” And she glided out into the store again, Cassie in tow. Blythe gathered a scarf, crystal earrings, gold bracelets. Cassie glanced in a mirror. In the brighter light of the store she saw that the dress wouldn’t do at all, it was puffy in the wrong places. Beyond the mirror was a clear day, an extravaganza of rust and gold leaves against a bright sky. Cassie truly hated shopping. She thought she might go ahead and buy the dress just to be done with it and then wear something she already had in her closet.

Across the street, pedestrians strode past Peet’s Coffee holding white paper cups, and Cassie yearned for one herself. She would offer to buy a latte for Blythe and then maybe they would talk about trips, GPAs (if Blythe asked after Ethan’s, Cassie would refrain from her stock answer:
It’s π
), college searches, the faux-safe subjects that held secret treachery, hidden hierarchies for middle-aged, middle-class women. She looked up and down the street, seeking the clump of plaid-clad teens that Edith mentioned. What had she called them?
Word
? Ah, her charming kids! A blue head caught her eye. Her first thought was,
Why so many blue heads?
How ridiculous. But then the way this blue head turned was too familiar. Edith. Standing on the corner at one-thirty on a Wednesday. Cassie’s heart revved up. Why were her surprises always unhappy?

“I’ll be right back.” She shoved her handbag at Blythe and bolted out the door, setting off the rhythmic bleat of Anthropologie’s alarm system.

Edith and a boy ambled up the street away from her. She noted the good-news detail that they weren’t touching. It mattered. She needed to handle this in the best possible way and so suppressed the urge to scream Edith’s name, which would be wrong and bad and she’d have to admit it later when she told Ben and Seth about this moment. Following after them, she called out Edith’s childhood name, nonchalant as possible, “Fred.”

Edith didn’t respond so Cassie ran, barefoot, she realized, when she stepped in something dank and damp, until she caught Edith’s shoulder and spun her around. “Why aren’t you in school?”

Rather than resist, Edith totally surprised her by throwing her arms around Cassie and saying, “Mom, Flood’s so psyched about coming to Dad’s party.”

“Why aren’t you in school?”

“Sweet! What are you wearing?”

Why was Edith talking so fast? What size were her pupils? Her eyes were hidden by ponderous smears of kohl shadow, both above and below her lashes, as if King Kong had applied her makeup.

“We had a short day. I told you this morning.”

Perhaps she had, Cassie couldn’t remember. She took her daughter by the shoulders and held her still. Edith wore sweatbands on her wrists.

“Fuck-ola, Mom.” Edith tried to shrug Cassie’s hands away. “Chill.”

Flood, the boy beside her daughter, laughed out a “Cracking dress.” He had a pierced tongue. Wasn’t that for sexual enhancement? Flood, Edith was explaining, worked at Peet’s and went to school at night to get his GED. “He’s, like, a latte genius.”

Another young man, this one in a Day-Glo-yellow vest with a badge on his left chest, stepped up to Cassie and clamped his hand on her shoulder. “Ma’am?”

“WTF, Mom?” Edith stared at the security guard.

“I’m required to escort you back to Anthropologie.”

Now it was Cassie’s turn to shrug a hand away. The four of them created a small roadblock standing in the dappled shadows of the elms that lined the sidewalk. Pedestrians craned their necks as they sidled past, some stepping out into the street.

“Now,” the guard said, tightening his grip as if Cassie were a flight risk. Cassie turned her slit-eyed, mouth-thin-as-a-piano-wire expression toward him, and he added, “Please.”

“I need a moment with my wayward daughter,” Cassie explained. She must have said it very loud because Edith’s face went pale and she stage whispered, “Fuck my life, Mom. You’re a spectacle.”

“Take off the sweatbands.”

“Who’s the criminal here?”

“I need to see.”

Edith slid the ugly black bands from her wrists and threw them at Cassie. She held up her unscathed arms. “Satisfied?”

Cassie both was and wasn’t satisfied. She was relieved Edith’s skin was untouched, but why did her daughter posture toward emo? All the drama and upheaval and plaintive music. What happened to her sunny child? A woman in a cooking store held a whisk midair and stared out at Cassie. Stared at the shoeless woman ranting at a blue-haired teenager on this lovely autumn afternoon.

Blythe, waiting by the door when Cassie and the security guard returned, asked if everything was okay and then added, “I guess that’s what you meant by feral.”

Cassie flipped through
Real Simple
magazine in Seth’s waiting room, eavesdropping on the clients before her. She couldn’t hear anything distinct, just the rise and fall of three voices that left her feeling territorial and excluded. When a great wave of laughter erupted from the inner room, she added discouraged to her emotional inventory. How could she follow whatever was going on in his office? She was like a standup comedienne having to go on after someone really funny, say, Eddie Murphy, before he started taking all those hokey movie roles.

She’d decided to wear her Rothko dress to the appointment, mostly as a sight gag for when she told her Edith/Blythe story, but also as a sort of penance because it was expensive and she absolutely would not wear it to Ben’s party. The dress swooped and clung, looking both absurd and kind of sweet, like a balloon bouquet.

“What’s on your mind?”

All signs of joviality were banished from Seth’s face. She wondered how he did it, how he shifted from being the vessel for one client’s messy life to being available for the next in just a few short minutes. Tai chi? Silent primal scream? Did he have some cleansing ritual? If he did, that’s what he should share with her. Enough of the weighty prolonged silences, repeating her words, the self-actualization crap; she needed to know how to be less herself, not more herself.

She had sort of worked out her story so it was a joke: shopping, sighting Edith, the wild conclusions that raced through her mind—cutting school, cutting her flesh, ecstasy, sex—the forced purchase of the ugly dress. But once on his couch, she didn’t have the energy. “I want . . . to be less vivid.”

He nearly smiled and then stopped himself when she didn’t join in. Yes, she got it; less vivid in her Technicolor dress, it seemed like a joke.

“Go on.”

“I heard you laughing with your last clients, and now look at you. You’re sort of . . . amorphous. You have no clear outline.”

“I’m not certain what you mean by
outline
.”

Cassie stared over his head at the womb-colored tapestry. She wasn’t certain what she meant either. In fact, she had no idea what she was saying or where it came from. Sitting on the couch, fiddling with pillow fringe, she wondered if she was telegraphing information to him by crossing her legs, looking out the window, by needing to do something with her hands. God—therapy, this business of revealing and concealing, was hard fucking work.

They sat in silence for a bit and then Cassie launched into her story. “Well,” she said, the word carving a space in the room for her mind-dump to begin. She mentioned Blythe, the cost of honesty, and her decision to keep opinions to herself, trying on the garish clothing, seeing Edith and Flood on the street, the security guard, the dog shit she’d stepped in and then tracked through the store, Edith’s claim that she would never cut, she just thought sweatbands were
tight.

Seth’s expression was pliant; it could go in any direction, smile, frown, or compassionate furrow. He brought his fingertips together in front of his chest the way he did. The story was good, but for some reason Cassie had no joy in the telling. Diminished capacity and all.

“I suppose what I meant about your absent outline . . . you have no agenda. I always have an agenda: hold the kids to a standard that I know is best for them, be a good wife, love my husband.” Her eyes stung and then spilled over. Why had she put on mascara today? It was shitting awful to be her.

“It sounds exhausting.”

She nodded.

“I’m wondering why you feel you have to work so hard.”

Cassie released a faltering sigh. “Last night, after the Anthropologie escapade, I called Ben and asked him to bring home Chinese. He brought Ethan’s spicy shrimp, Edith’s sesame noodles, his favorite—pepper beef—some sweet and sour pork, and white rice. He didn’t bring one dish that I really like. He forgot. We’ve been married twenty years and Ben couldn’t remember what I like to eat.”

“How did you feel?”

“I scrambled myself an egg.”

Seth lowered his gaze and waited for Cassie to answer his question.

“It sounds so pathetic, but I want to matter.”

Seth waited.

“Aren’t you going to tell me everything isn’t about something else? It’s what Edith tells me.”

He raised his eyes; the tightrope appeared. Only this time, he was stepping onto it. “I have no personal agenda in my office because I’m trained to be receptive. To become what best serves my client. To help them see clearly how patterns in their lives may not be serving them. I guarantee you that that is not the way I am in my personal life. We all have agendas.”

Cassie gave a tiny nod. “Thank you,” she whispered, both tensing and relaxing at the same time. Seth offering this kind of sympathy, describing anything about himself, was slightly unsettling. She yanked three tissues from the box and blew her nose, loud and ugly. “Excuse me.”

“I’m used to phlegm.”

“This is the dress.”

“It’s lovely.”

“Really? I feel like a Rothko.
Untitled Number Forty-Seven
or something.”

“Do you know how many times you’ve told me your age?”

“If you are going to reduce me to a midlife crisis, I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I would never reduce you.” She wasn’t sure, but she thought his smile smoldered. He took five or so steps along the tightrope. Cassie had the disquieting sense that Seth was seducing her, only she had a co-pay.

“I feel like a john.”

“So that makes me a gigolo?”

“Why must I pay someone to show interest?”

“You’ve said that before.” His eyes, her refuge, would not release her. And then he was beside her, gently taking the pillow from her hands and laying it on the floor. His hands were warm and moist, as if he were the nervous one. “Cassie, relax. You have no idea how amazing you are.”

She mumbled something about transference.

Only of course that wasn’t what happened at all. They had a terrible rest of the session, consisting mostly of great walled silences while Seth waited behind half-closed eyes. She couldn’t tell if he was looking down to offer her privacy or if he was avoiding her. Either way, the tightrope never appeared.

Finally he said, “If I were describing your subtext, it would be,
Hello? Over here. Care. Cherish me.
Does that feel true?”

“
Cherish
? That’s a song I danced to in seventh grade.”

Seth looked down and to the left again. Didn’t that particular gesture equal something in the big book of body language? A lie? Love? Disdain? Silence pumped into the room, filling it until Cassie felt pressed against the wall. At last she told him that therapy consumed too much of her thoughts. She felt that she would have to work through her self-indulgent issues on her own.

“I don’t know what
self-indulgent
means.”

“I’m sick of my own whining when, really, I have nothing to whine about. Sometimes after I’ve been here, I cringe at the things I’ve said.”

“You’re talking about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Your basic needs of food, shelter, and safety are met, so you can focus on your emotional needs.”

“Whatever. You’ve become a sort of raison d’être for me. I mean, I go through my week looking at myself and how I act to see if anything is therapy-worthy.”

“That’s called self-awareness.”

“Or maybe boredom. I’m just . . . itchy, all over. I think I need a career.”

She stood to go, and he stood as well.

“We can talk about your itchiness next week. If you decide to discontinue therapy, we can have closure at our next session.”

Cassie never wanted to be on the receiving end of that type of sentence again. Have closure?

He must have seen it in her face because he quickly said, “My door will always be open.” She looked up and he leaned in and they were kissing. Seth awkwardly, far more awkwardly than she’d ever thought possible for him, conveyed her back toward the couch, leaned her against the cushions, bent his knee between her legs, made them fit together just so.

Only of course he didn’t and Cassie didn’t even want him to, she just wanted him to want to.

The centerpieces were adorable. Cassie had stayed up late printing black-and-white baby pictures of Ben onto vellum and then gluing them into frames placed before votives. Ben, wise and cherubic, a buttery sage of a baby, glowed at each table. The setting was perfect, lighting optimal, Ménage à Trois played just loud enough to make it feel as if the party were a happening, food stations were dotted throughout Ben’s photography studio, both upstairs and down, same with the liquor, so people mingled. Check, check, check. It was all good.