The Breakup Doctor (6 page)

“Wow! Good for you, Mrs. Ogden,” Sasha gushed.

“Mom spends the whole play imprisoned in her own castle,” Stu put in.

She made a sound between a snort and a
hmpf
. “Yes, I was perfect for it.”

“So when does it open? I bet you'll be great,” said Sasha the suck-up.

Mom leaned back with a smile, enjoying the attention. “We had the first read-through last Wednesday. The cast is superb—top-notch, even though it's a non-Equity production”—translation: community theater—“and the gentleman who plays Henry has acted on Broadway!” She pronounced it with the accent on the second syllable—BroadWAY—like she was a 1940s film actress. “We open March fifteenth—the Ides.”

My mother didn't always talk like this. She was in full theatrical mode. Over the years she'd told us about her acting days from time to time, and I could tell she missed it. I never saw her perform, because she quit when I was born. Dad always said she had been amazing—but Dad thought everything about Mom was amazing, and always had.

“Okay, Liz Taylor,” my brother said, poking Mom playfully in the side, where he knew she was fiercely ticklish. “We're all coming on opening night, and we're sitting in the front row with enough flowers to make a float, and we're gonna hoot and holler and do the wave when you come onstage.” He reached over and pawed up a handful of rolled salami.

Mom rapped his hand with the back of her fork.

“Ow!”

“Bedford Stuyvesant Ogden! Your manners.”

“It's
finger
food, Ma!” But he picked up the tongs and gingerly transported the meat to his plate.

“And you will do no such thing. You children will dress nicely—no jeans—and behave yourselves, please.”

I rolled my eyes. “Mom, we're adults. We understand how to comport ourselves in public places.”

“It's the theater, and you have to show respect for the art form. Do you know I've actually seen Floridians attend the theater in
shorts
?” She made an expression as if she'd said “grilling and eating babies.”

“Oh, I agree. My parents took us to shows in New York every year when our family would go up, and Mom always taught us to look nice and be respectful.” Guess who said that?

“Whatever. We're coming, and we'll be good—I promise,” Stu said. “We'll even make Dad wear a tie.”

Mom cleared her throat and picked at something on her napkin. “Well...that's all right. I mean, I'm not sure if your father will be coming.”

“What do you mean? He's your biggest fan.” Too late, I covered my full mouth with a hand, but my mother didn't even notice my breach. She became very busy rearranging her silverware.

“I mean that your father and I may be taking a little break for a while,” she said, her voice strained.

There was a moment of silence that her words dropped into like an anchor.

“Hang on,” I said. “What do you mean, ‘a break'?”

“A little time for ourselves,” my mother said. She focused her gaze just over my shoulder toward the sliding doors. “Just...a
break
.”

“What are you talking about?” I ground out. “You don't take ‘breaks' from your family.”

Stu looked bewildered, and Sasha's eyes had gone wide.

Mom thrust her cutlery back down to the table, but stopped herself just short of letting them slam.

“Keep your voice down, young lady!” she said in a harsh whisper. “Don't you dare broadcast our family issues to the neighborhood. I mean that I'm taking some time for
me
. I need some space. I'm going to be living down in Naples for a while, in theater housing. It's a long drive from here to there, and one of the patrons offered up her guesthouse, and...and I'm
sick
of feeling like the heroine of an Ibsen play. I'm going to go do what
I
want to do for a change, and if you kids can't support me in that, then I guess I'll just have to do it all on my own.”

She took a shaky breath and then stood up. I didn't try to stop her when she brushed past me and went into the house.

“Jesus.”

I looked over at Stu, whose voice was all but inaudible. His face was pale, and he reminded me of the little kid I'd grown up with. Sasha's mouth was open, and her eyes met mine as though looking for answers.

And all I could think about was my dad in the garage, skipping dinner so he could work on the cabinets he was making for my mother.

seven

  

We packed up and got out of there. Mom had disappeared into her bedroom after dropping her bombshell—somehow still managing to make me feel like the bad guy for yelling at her. I couldn't even say goodbye to my dad. I didn't know how to face him.

All I wanted was to drive straight over to Kendall's, wrap myself up in his arms, and pour out the whole story to someone who could give me the objective distance to process it. But Stu and Sasha had looked shell-shocked ever since the Mom Bomb. They couldn't be left alone. I told Stu to follow us to my house.

As soon as we made my front door, Sasha pushed my brother down onto my ratty yellow living room sofa and then plopped listlessly down beside him.

“What the
fuck
is up with your parents?” she said.

Stu didn't even react, just sat slumped, staring at his hands in his lap. I set my purse on the table by the door and came to sit on his other side, bookending him.

“Mom's not leaving him, is she?” he asked the room at large. “She can't be leaving him.”

“They're the most solid couple I know,” Sasha said. “If they get divorced, there's no hope for any of us.”

Since her own parents had gotten divorced when we were in seventh grade, Sasha had adopted herself into ours. And we adopted her right back, as evidenced by the fact of my mom including an “outsider” in her casual announcement that she was leaving my dad. Sasha was family too.

I didn't answer her. I had no idea what to say. The two of them were upset enough for all of us—I didn't need to add to it. No one spoke for a long time. We sat together on my sofa leaning against one another, linked together like plastic barrel-of-monkeys.

Finally, Stu seemed to snap out of his stupor enough to look around for the first time.

“Damn, Brook. What ate your house?”

Sasha smacked his arm. “Not now, Stuvie.”

But he worked himself free of our dogpile and stood up to get a better look at the walls. “Seriously, sis. What'd you use to get the paper off, a jackhammer? Ever hear of wallpaper remover?”

He was clearly recovered enough for smart-assery. I pushed up off the sofa. “I'm going to go wash the chlorine off me.”

“Nice going, Stu,” I heard Sasha snap behind me.

“What?”

Their bickering voices faded as I headed back toward my bathroom to take a shower. When I got out, towels wrapped around my head and body, Stu was sitting on my bed, leaning back against the pillows that were propped against the wall in lieu of a headboard.

“Geez, sicko,” I said when I saw him. “You're lucky I didn't come out naked.”

He made a face. “You walk around naked? Exhibitionist.”

“In my
home
? Where I live
alone
? Yes, unbelievable as it may seem, sometimes I do come out of the shower naked.” I was a little reassured that Stu was managing banter. A sarcastic Stu I knew how to handle; silent, devastated Stu worried me. “What did you do with Sasha?”

“She's in the other shower. Is this what you two do on girls' night? Kinky.”

“Stu, I'm a mental health professional, so I want you to believe me when I tell you you're deeply sick.”

Instead of lobbing back an insult, he fingered my beige comforter, looking down at it. “I like what you're doing in the house,” he said after a moment. “I think it's going to look nice.”

Weirdly, the unexpected compliment made my eyes prickle. I sat down on the bed next to him, shoving at his legs with my butt to get him to scoot over.

“You don't have to say that. I know it looks condemned.”

He looked over at me. “I'm not kidding. The way you're going at this is smart—starting with a clean slate before you start making improvements. It'll take some work, but this place isn't really in bad shape, structurally. I think you can make it look good. You know, with this floor plan you could actually use the other two bedrooms as a home office for your practice.”

“I could if I had any money. Which I do not.” I swung my legs up to lean back next to him against the pillows.

“Could you please go put some clothes on if you're going to sit so close? It's really kind of
Flowers in the Attic
for me.”

I pushed his shoulder, laughing as I got up and headed for my walk-in closet. “That was such a chick book. You're really showing your feminine side,” I called back to him as I grabbed jeans and a T-shirt and pulled them on out of his sight.

He said nothing, and I thought he might have left my room. But as I was sliding on a pair of flip-flops his voice came again.

“This thing with Mom is kind of freaking me out.”

I leaned against the wall and shut my eyes.
You and me both
, I wanted to say.

But his dull tone told me how hard this was hitting Stu—nothing had ever been so grim before that he couldn't make a joke out of it.

So I rallied up my best big-sister, wise-therapist voice instead. “I know, babe,” I said from inside the closet. “I'm sure this is just...just some phase or something. All couples have trouble from time to time. This is really the first time Mom and Dad have had anything big, so they're way overdue.”

“You think? You've seen stuff like this before? You think they'll work through it?”

There was such naked pleading in his tone, I sagged lower against the wall. That singular vulnerability I could hear—that he'd let himself express only with me safely out of his eye line—made me take a breath and tell Stu the only big lie I'd ever told him.

“Yeah, little brother, I do. I think everything is going to be fine.”

  

Later that night I snuggled into my queen-size bed, realizing as my legs curled into the cool sheets how long it had been since I'd gotten into bed alone. I wrapped myself around the phone receiver, in­stead of Kendall, and hoped he was still awake. I was glad Stu and Sasha had wound up staying so late—by the time we'd found
Meet the Fockers
on television and sprawled in my living room with a liter of white wine and every bag of cookies in my cupboard, they had both seemed to cheer up a little. But all I had wanted all night was to hear Kendall's voice and feel some reassurance myself.

“This is Kendall Pulver.”

For one second I thought it was his voicemail, but the noise in the background and the pause after he spoke told me otherwise. I glanced at the clock. He was still with his clients after midnight?

“It's me. Where are you?”

“Brook? Hey! Hang on.”

I heard the muffled sound of his voice talking to someone, and then the loud music and chatter abruptly torqued back as if he'd hit the volume button.

“Hey, babe. Had to go outside to hear you.”

“Where are you?”

“Iniquity, can you believe.”

“You're kidding.” Iniquity was the kind of downtown nightclub you hated just to walk by, with the heavy bass leaking out and put­ting your heart into arrhythmia even out on the sidewalk, and a receiving line of freshly legal kids slouched against the front of the building smoking, sending their languid puffs of ennui wafting into your face. “With your clients?”

“No, I just felt like stopping in. Yeah, of course with my clients. Why else would I risk eardrum rupture and black lung? This guy's down here with his two sons, and I think they're determined to get in some pretty heavy-duty father-son bonding experiences.”

“Oh.”

“Hey, man, watch where you're going.” Kendall's voice was sharp.

I heard a slight scuffling, male and female laughter, and a lackadaisical, “Chillax, dude.”

Kendall muttered something under his breath. “Sorry, babe. It's a zoo down here.”

“That's okay. We can talk later.”

“No, no, come on. How was family dinner?”

I picked pills of fabric off the sheet. All I'd wanted all night was to talk to him about what had happened, but I didn't feel like shouting it into the receiver while Kendall strained to hear me be­tween techno songs bleeding out onto a busy downtown street. “Fine.”

“How's Sasha's nineteenth nervous breakdown?”

I'd told him about what's-his-name...the chef. I probably shouldn't have.

“She's fine. She and Stu and I ended up mostly hanging out.”

“Those two ought to just date. Solve both their problems.”

I wasn't sure what irritated me more—the implication that my brother and best friend were somehow defective, or the ridiculous suggestion that they date each other. “You don't know what you're talking about.”

“Hey...don't be angry. I was just teasing.”

“Sorry. I just... It was actually kind of a rough night.”

I heard a flare-up of noise in the background—pounding bass under something that sounded tinny and shrill over the phone line, with a swell of chatter layered over all of it. Someone called out something I couldn't make out.

“Just stepped outside because I couldn't hear,” Kendall said away from the receiver. “I'll be in in a few minutes.” The voice called out something else, and then the sound was muffled once again.

“Go on,” I said. “The client beckons.”

“He's twenty-three, and it's his daddy's money he's investing. He can wait.”

“What about Daddy?”

“Daddy's another story... But the last time I saw him was out­side the bathrooms with two girls I'm pretty sure had to have sneaked in on fake IDs.”

“Yuck.”

“Hey, I just lead the horse to water. It's not my business what he drinks. So come on—tell me about it.”

But I didn't want to anymore. Maybe I was tired of thinking about it, or just tired, but after waiting all night to talk things over with Kendall, now all I wanted was to put the phone down and go to sleep.

“I'll just see you tomorrow.”

“What do you mean? Aren't you at the condo?”

“No, I'm at my house. We wound up here and... I'm pretty tired.”

The sounds in the background faded and I knew he was walk­ing farther away from the club.

“You won't be there waiting for me? How will I know I'm home?” Kendall's tone was teasing, and something loosened in my tight chest.

“It'll smell like boy. No girl cooties,” I said.

“I like girl cooties... Your cooties anyway.”

I smiled into the phone and we listened to each other breathe for a few seconds.

“I'd better get back inside,” he said finally. “I'll give you a call as soon as I wake up.”

“Okay.”

We said good night and I leaned over to put the phone on my bedside table. I was so worn-out I thought I'd slip immediately into unconsciousness, but I lay on my back for a long time, blinking up at the ceiling in the dim blue light seeping in through the blinds, my eyes scratchy and wide-open.