“I’ll make you real meals,” she said. “I’ll only stay a few weeks and I’ll keep out of your way.”
“Mother, please, let’s leave things as they are.”
“I won’t force myself on you,” she said. “You’ll see how much pleasanter it will be if you let me stay for a while. Yum yum food.”
“No.”
“All right, Melvin, it’s your poison and I’ll honor it. I’ll come to visit again soon.” After she finished her cup of tea — she had brought her own teabag — she left after kissing the top of my head. “If you need anything, promise you’ll let me know.”
I made a perfunctory promise and she was gone.
Did everyone have a mother? The evidence was in favor of that assumption. Not everyone had a mother like mine, devoted to symbiosis, to not letting her son live his own life if he had one to live. Perhaps I’m being cruel. Perhaps she meant the best for me. I’m sure she did. Now I’m being too kind. It is hard to find the acceptable middle ground.
There was a knock on my door. I hesitated. Perhaps my mother had returned. It was my neighbor, Eva. She didn’t want to come in. She asked if I would accompany her on a walk. I didn’t want to go, but I said why not. Before we got to the corner of our own street, she said she had advice she wanted to ask a man and didn’t know where else to turn. The man she had been seeing with a certain regularity — this was all news to me — said he thought it would be a good idea if they saw other people as well. It was two weeks since he had brought it up and she hadn’t seen him since. Would it be a good idea, she wondered, to phone him? What did I think? Did that seem too forward? She didn’t want to seem pushy. I thought about it for awhile. “Are you seeing other people?” I asked her. Aside from me, she said, and I didn’t really count, she wasn’t. She had no interest in seeing other people unless… She squeezed my hand and gave me a significant stare. On the third block of our walk, she asked me if I was seeing someone else. “Not recently,” I said.
I took the idea of giving advice seriously, not asked for it very often, and I didn’t want to misinform her. On the other hand, I was not eager to be Eva’s someone else. I liked her and she was always very neatly turned out and though somewhat scrawny, she was reasonably attractive. I can’t explain it so much as to say that she reminded me of my mother.
“I would wait another week,” I said, “before calling.”
“We used to see each other every other day,” she said. “Sometimes more often than that.”
We were on the fourth block by now. “Uh huh,” I said.
“Waiting two weeks took extreme patience.”
“I see.” I said.
“He likes reassurance,” she said. “He may be thinking that I prefer the mythical someone else to him. What would you think if you were in his shoes?”
I tried to imagine myself in his position but came up blank. “I don’t know,” I said. It was getting cold and I was sorry I didn’t have a heavier coat. “Could we head back,” I said.
“We haven’t gone very far,” she said. “You haven’t answered my question.”
I wondered which question she was referring to. “If I wanted to hear from you,” I said, “I would be reassured by a call. I don’t know his state of mind. I don’t know this man at all.”
“He’s not very complicated,” she said. We turned around and headed back toward our building.
Much of our walk back was in silence. “You’ve been helpful,” she said, when we got within a block of our street. I thought she really meant you’ve been no help at all but was too polite to say so.
She shook my hand warmly at the door to her apartment and leaned her head toward me, which, in a rash of shame, I politely ignored.
Afterward, back in my apartment, I felt some regret for my coldness. She was not my mother nor was she even much like her. She was my friend and neighbor. I felt grateful for her attention.
The next day, I knocked at her door, which she took some time to respond to. When she opened the door, she opened it barely a crack. “I have company,” she said. “You see your advice worked.”
“Is it him?” I whispered.
“It’s him,” she said.
“I’m glad for you,” I said.
“I’d rather spend the time with you.”
“Not really,” I said. “Yesterday this was the answer to your fondest wishes.”
“Times change,” she said. “When he leaves, we can go for another walk.”
I went back to my apartment, nonplussed by her attitude, distrusting her words.
A little more than an hour later, she knocked at my door. “He’s gone,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m not. I asked him to leave. He wants to get back together on our old terms. I told him I’d have to think it over. Things have changed as I’ve indicated to you.”
“It’s hard for me to believe that a single day could have changed your attitude toward him.”
“It’s two weeks and a day,” she said, “a time in which I matured. Should we take our walk?”
I put on my coat, the heavier one this time, and we went out, though I was uneasy with her new stance. I was actually more comfortable being asked for advice.
This was a walk without an agenda and we made small talk. She didn’t seem disposed to talk about her out-of-favor former steady. At least right away. We walked apart, though every once in a while she would take hold of my arm in a proprietary way. I didn’t encourage this minor intimacy, which I could tell she was aware of. “What I’m going to do,” she said, measuring her words, “is give Ron a short trial period and see how it works out.”
“That sounds wise,” I said.
She seemed less pleased with me at the conclusion of this walk.
There had been an elderly woman, named, Dorothy, who assisted Dr. Klotzman, but one day she was replaced by a girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. The girl introduced herself in a solemn manner. “My name is Carol,” she said. “I’ll be keeping your appointment schedule.”
I mentioned that I had met the replacement to Klotzman. “What happened to Dorothy?” I asked.
“Dorothy retired,” he said. “In any event, she was getting forgetful. Don’t let Carol’s looks deceive you. She’s sharp as a tack. Don’t you think she spruces up the office?”
“I suppose,” I said. “I liked Dorothy.”
“We all liked Dorothy,” he said. “Carol, as you’ll notice, brings something else.”
That was the extent of our conversation about what seemed a radical change in office ambience.
Whenever I entered the office I was continually taken aback by Carol’s presence in Dorothy’s place.
The last few sessions had focused on Eva and my apparent confusion at the message she was sending.
“Why were you so surprised by the shift in her response to you?” Klotzman asked him. “Isn’t it clear?”
“I thought we were friends.”
“She felt you were rejecting her. Don’t you see that?”
“I didn’t reject her or not reject her,” I said. “She already has a boyfriend. I didn’t want to interfere.”
“You’re being dense,” Klotzman said. “From all indications she wanted you to interfere. She told you, didn’t she, that she had grown disappointed with this boyfriend.”
“I see what your saying,” I said. “I felt it wasn’t any of my business.”
“And she felt rejected by your standoffishness. What concerns us here is, what do you want from this relationship?”
“I don’t want anything,” I said. “Wanting always gets me into trouble. In any event, I messed things up.”
“I suppose you did,” he said, “though I think that comes from not letting yourself have anything.”