“Sure. What’d you have for lunch?”
“Never mind lunch. What’d you mean a short day today? How could Saturday...?”
“A short day for me, Mama.”
My mother still looks puzzled.
“I quit, Mama.”
“You quit? This was your first day on the job, how could you quit?”
“He was looking at me cockeyed.”
“Who, Annie?”
“The owner of the shop.”
“Cockeyed how?”
“Cockeyed. Like he didn’t trust me or something.”
“Thank God. I thought you meant he was some kind of rapist!”
“All men are predators, but this one kept watching me as if I was planning The Great Jewel Robbery. All his precious costume jewelry! A fat-ass jeweler in Brooklyn with the intelligence of a cockroach. I’ll never go back there, never.”
“Annie, you said it yourself. It’s a job. A job is a job.”
“I have a job. I make jewelry.”
“And you’ll sell it one day, I know you will. But meanwhile...”
“Not to you or your friends, that’s for sure.”
“Annie, how often must I apologize for...?”
“Forget it, you apologized, right, I forgot.”
“You just have to give it time, darling. But meanwhile, I think you should try to find a job you can hold for a while. You’ve never...”
“I didn’t want to hold this job.”
“Well, Annie, you’ve never held a job for more than a week. I don’t see any difference between this time and all the other...”
“Quitting a job isn’t the same thing as not being able to hold a job! I quit this job, Mom. I quit it because I was onto that fat bastard from the minute I walked into his shop. I knew he’d been warned about me beforehand, and I knew he was just waiting for me to make a false move so he could report me. Besides...”
“Report you? To whom? I thought he was the owner of the...”
“Besides, that’s not the kind of work I want or need. I have my jewelry. I’m an artist. And to continue growing I have to keep improving my spiritual life. Trotting all the way out to Brooklyn is not my idea of spiritual enrichment!”
“That’s all well and good, Annie, but everyone needs to eat.”
“I’m not interested in material things, the way you and your ladies who lunch are, the way my fat brother Aaron is! I’m happy to work on my jewelry, to be able to commit to my religious beliefs through my jewelry. If you and your ladies who lunch...”
“Let me remind you,” my mother says quite evenly, “that one of your so-called ladies who lunch is putting food in your belly and a roof over your head while you recuperate! I certainly don’t expect gratitude, but the least you can...”
“For your information, I’m fully recuperated, Mama. I’m a happy and healthy person. In fact, I was never happier in my life than I was in Italy, when those bastards came along and fucked it all up. I’m not to blame for what others...”
“How can you say you’re happy? You’re almost thirty-six years old, and all you’ve got to your name is a pair of dirty socks with holes in them!”
“Hyperbole, Mama, hyperbole! Besides, I don’t need material things! I’m an artist. I build spiritual communication with people who share my sensibilities and beliefs. These people are my true friends. They don’t care if my socks have holes in them, who gives a shit about...?”
“What friends? You don’t have any friends, Annie, face it. You never stay anywhere long enough to make friends. If you got a steady job, maybe you’d...”
“I do have friends. Have you ever asked about this Serbian man I’ve been seeing, whose name is Mirko, and whose company I enjoy? He’s an artist who’s involved with Vedic astrology, he teaches English as a second language. His father was a successful architect. He fled from Belgrade seven years ago, do you even care?”
“I care deeply, Annie. But I’m not going to stand here and let you scream at me this way.”
“Then go fuck yourself!” Annie says, and storms into her room, and locks the door.
“She hasn’t spoken to me for three days now,” my mother tells Shirley.
They are having lunch in a Chinese restaurant on Broadway. Shirley is sporting the Hermes scarf Mama gave her for her birthday. She clucks her tongue in sympathy.
“What do you suppose she’s angry about?”
“Everything,” my mother says.
“Are you giving her money?”
“Right now, a hundred dollars a week. But while she was...”
“Helene, please! You’re not impoverished, you know.”
“That’s just for spending money, just enough for her to get around the city.”
“Even so.”
“I was giving her a thousand a month while she was in Italy.”
“That’s not very much, either. No wonder she got in trouble.”
“You think?”
“Absolutely. That’s bare subsistence level, Helene. She was bound to meet sleazy people sooner or later.”
“I just don’t know what to do,” my mother says. “I don’t think she’ll ever be able to earn a decent living making jewelry. I’d be willing to help her pay for reasonable housing in a modest neighborhood, but I feel she should... well, don’t you think she should first show me that she can hold on to a paying job?”
“Oh yes. Absolutely.”
“And learn how to socialize with others?”
“It’s funny you should mention socializing.”
“I mean, she hasn’t spoken to me for the past three days.”
“Maybe she stopped taking her medication,” Shirley says. “That happens. They stop taking the medication, and they get... you know... withdrawn.”
“Yes. Well. I just don’t know. Andy’s supposed to be meeting with her sometime this week, he’s going to talk to her about seeing a psychiatrist. But I’m not even sure that’s such a good idea. I just don’t know what to do, Shirk She’s been living with me since early in July, and all at once I’m afraid of coming out of my own bedroom.”
“What are you saying?”
“She scares me, Shirk My own daughter.”
My mother begins weeping. She takes a handkerchief from her bag, begins dabbing at her eyes.
“Helene?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, forgive me.”
“Why don’t you go see this social worker I was starting to tell you about? They have support groups, you know, where you can meet people whose relatives are having similar problems. I think it might help you, I honestly do.”
“It’s just... she’s never behaved this way before.”
“Well, what happened in Italy must have been traumatic.”
“Even so.”
“Take the card, call her. Let me know how it turns out.”
“Thank you, Shirk” My mother looks at the card, puts it in her wallet. “She called us the ladies who lunch,” she says.
“Well, we are,” Shirley says, and picks up an egg roll.
My mother still isn’t sure.
For a few days — I calculate this to be the time just before our visit to Dr. Lang — Annie seems all right again. Not exactly the loving daughter she’d been at the beginning of the month, but at least communicative and working on her jewelry again. And then, right after our visit to Dr. Lang, Annie once again stops talking to my mother. Mama decides that seeing a psychiatrist was a mistake to begin with.
Yesterday morning, while Annie is doing her mantras in the guest room, Mama calls the mental health association whose name is on the card Shirley gave her. She leaves a message saying, in effect, that she wants to talk to someone about a daughter who seems... well... extremely troubled.