Blood Sugar(38)
While I was FaceTiming with Ellie, having my morning coffee as Jason had his morning Diet Coke, Ellie doubled over in pain. Spencer rushed into the frame, worried. But when she looked up, I could see she wasn’t afraid. She was inspired.
Ellie smiled. “I just felt the baby kick! For the first time. Holy shit, she is strong!”
Even though babies kick billions of times every day inside millions of mothers-to-be, it was like a miracle to all four of us. I got off FaceTime and turned to Jason. The idea of Ellie’s kicking baby sucked me into a centrifuge of love, momentarily spun out all my raggedy baggage and left my center filled with tenderness. Even though all my training taught me that cobras couldn’t be changed, I wanted to try and repair my relationship with Gertrude. To claw my way out of the horrible cliché of not getting along with my soon-to-be mother-in-law. So I told Jason I would go with him to tell Gertrude that we were engaged.
The first five minutes of our visit seemed to go well enough. Gertrude’s subdivision house was exactly as I had pictured. A small two-story, built in the early nineties, with a manicured lawn, which, aside from her many ceramic frog decorations, had an exterior that looked exactly like every other dwelling in the area, including a doormat that cheerily read, “Welcome.” Inside was neat and tidy, with frog figurines thoughtfully perched on every surface from the side tables to the windowsills. There must have been over a thousand frogs of one sort or another in there. The frog lamp Jason had given his mother was prominently displayed in the breakfast nook.
Bland prints of Anne Geddes babies in flowerbeds and Thomas Kinkade cottages lined the beige walls of the downstairs areas. I lingered too long at one of the baby pictures, thinking about all the conservative male politicians who rail against homosexuals and then get caught having sex with men in bathrooms. Those who feel guilty about their own behavior are often the ones who protest the loudest about that same behavior in others. Like this woman who abandoned her own toddler but now had a house full of photos of happy boisterous babies in Easter baskets.
Evil people are often very intelligent. It’s how they survive and thrive in society undetected. Gertrude watched me as I stared at the large print of the smiling baby boy surrounded by pastel-dyed eggs, like she was reading my thoughts. The irony being she didn’t want her own thoughts to be read.
She said, “You better not be trying to get into my brain, little missy.”
But I was already in there. Deep. Judging her. Judging what kind of repugnant person abandons her own son and then manipulates him for the rest of his adult life.
I knew Gertrude had hated all of Jason’s girlfriends, including his high school sweetheart, Cindy, who she felt wasn’t good enough for him, even though she barely knew Jason himself and had never even met the young lady. But I realized as I stood in her living room that she was especially scared of me not because I was “the one” for Jason, the one he actually was going to marry, but because I was a psychologist. She feared I could see what lurked inside her and that I would use my skill to diagnose her and uncover her bottomless pit of wretchedness. She was right. But in order to keep the peace and try to mend and not tear apart this precarious relationship, I turned toward her and lied to quell her worries.
“I’m not trying to get into your brain. Therapy doesn’t quite work like that. I’m not like an FBI profiler. I have to talk to people to get to know them, to then be able to help them. And only if they want to be helped.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“Well, perfect, then. Because I’m off the clock.” I smiled.
But she couldn’t just stop there.
“As far as I can tell, therapy doesn’t work at all, for anyone. Whining about things incessantly makes people weaker. Not stronger. Where I come from, the past is the past. Move forward, already, is what I say.”
I listened, and said, “Moving forward is healthy. I agree. But without a solid foundation, everything crumbles eventually.”
She wasn’t sure if that was a threat or just the plain truth. She retreated into her breakfast nook to organize her thoughts and plan her retaliation.
Gertrude had not yet offered us anything to eat or drink. Jason planned on sitting her down and giving her the good news, but she noticed my engagement ring immediately. So within seconds the information had been received. And now we were all sort of at a loss for what to do next. So Jason asked if I wanted something, and I mentioned coffee might be nice. He poured himself some diet soda, which Gertrude had liters of in her fridge, and started to make me coffee in her standard drip pot. Since Jason didn’t drink coffee, making it did not come naturally to him. Gertrude didn’t offer to help, so I stepped in and said I would make a nice fresh pot for us. I told her I liked mine really strong. She snapped back with, “So do I.” But I knew by the shade of light brown water left in the pot from earlier that her Georgia idea of strong was not the same thing as my Miami raised-on-Cuban-coffee idea of strong.
I used three scoops of her grocery-store-bought, already-ground beans, keeping in mind not to overdo it. I truly wanted to make this woman happy. As the coffee dripped into the pot, I wondered about the theory that we pick mates who are just like our parents. Oedipus and Electra complexes urging us to continue the cycles of our childhoods. Did that mean that somewhere in the depths of Jason’s unconscious he thought I was similar to his mother? I might be way more cobra than pit bull, but I was nothing like Gertrude. I was loyal to those I loved and wanted them to be happy on their own terms, not mine. I was also in touch with my flaws, had spent hundreds of hours discussing and dissecting my own strengths and weaknesses, motivations, and feelings. I was not perfect, certainly, but I was aware of myself. Gertrude, it seemed, was so locked in her own denial that she wasn’t aware of anything but her need to remain unaware.