Mercy Street(26)

She hadn’t disliked it, exactly. Married life was like walking around in shoes that almost fit. She wore them every day for two years, and still they gave her blisters. Like most shoes designed for women, they were not foot-shaped.

She saw, in retrospect, that she’d been a poor candidate for marriage. She had never seen a happy one up close. Her Yankee grandparents were so taciturn that it was impossible to tell if they were happy or not, but their children, who were less well behaved, lived in raucous misery. Aunt Darlene and her husband bickered constantly. Uncle Ricky drove his first wife to drink and his third to Jesus. Claudia wasn’t sure what happened with the second one, but none of them hung around for long.

She didn’t know how to be married, but she wanted to learn. It was part of her master plan to live like people on television. Phil was raised in Westchester County, New York, in a handsome Tudor house filled with books. His father and grandfather were law partners. His mother owned a high-end catering business and was a personal friend of Martha Stewart. The Landaus were people of quality. By marrying Phil she hoped to become more like them, and less like herself.

She took his name happily, gratefully. As Claudia Landau she could be someone else entirely, which was all she wanted. To be relieved of her Birchness seemed like a gift.

Her in-laws, Joel and Nadine, were educational parents. They were always telling Phil how to do things better: save money on car insurance, prevent jet lag with melatonin, allocate contributions to his 401(k). This, she later learned, was called parenting. (Nadine was the first person she’d ever heard use parent as a verb.) It had been going on for Phil’s entire life and explained why he was good at everything, competent in ways Claudia would never be.

A landau is an elegant horse-drawn carriage. A birch, in Maine, is the commonest sort of tree.

Next to Phil she felt like an orphan, unparented. It wasn’t a question of being poor—or not only. Like many poor people, she’d been raised by a teenager. Years later, working on Mercy Street, she would meet her mother every day—pregnant girls in extremis, half-educated, without resources. Adolescents charged with the monumental task of raising a human being and utterly unqualified for the job.

That Claudia had been inadequately parented must have been obvious. Phil’s mother, in particular, seemed alarmed by her ill-preparedness for life, so she took Claudia shopping. Claudia learned to write thank-you notes, to make hollandaise sauce, to iron sheets with a few drops of rosewater perfume. In Nadine’s world, these were basic life skills.

At first this attention was thrilling. Later it became oppressive. Phil had been raised in a greenhouse, fed and watered and protected from the elements. Such relentless care and tending was stifling if, like Claudia, you were nothing but a weed.

In those years she rarely spoke to her own mother. When she did, Deb’s stories never changed: a cranky resident at the County Home, senseless beefs with coworkers, a foster who had nightmares or played with matches or started fights or wet the bed. Deb, notably, asked no questions. Her daughter’s life in New York—the glamorous job, the handsome husband, the exemplary new parents—didn’t interest her at all.

Phil hated to be alone, so they arranged their lives accordingly. They shared a small apartment in a congested neighborhood of a vast teeming city. There were weekly brunches with his parents, drinks and dinners and movie nights with their lively circle of friends.

For their first anniversary he gave her a cell phone. It seemed an extravagant gift. At the time they were expensive and not everyone had one, but Phil felt it was necessary, in case he needed to reach her. To Claudia this made no sense—there was a telephone in their apartment, and another in her office at Damsel—but she didn’t say that to Phil.

She took the phone with her to work, to the gym, to yoga class—feeling, always, that she’d been assigned a tracking device, like Uncle Ricky after his DUI. At least once a week, she’d leave it behind in one of those places, and there would be a mad scramble in which she tried to remember when she’d last had it and where.

Later it would seem obvious that she lost the phone on purpose, for reasons she couldn’t have explained at the time. She wanted simply to be alone, to wander aimlessly through the vast teeming city, unnoticed and unaccounted for. To prove to Phil, but mostly to herself, that she was not incarcerated. That unlike Uncle Ricky, she had a choice.

They might have gone on that way forever—Claudia losing her phone, Phil losing patience—if chance hadn’t intervened. A few months into her cell phone contract, she fell pregnant—an expression she’d learned at Damsel, from a South African photo editor who worked there until she too fell.

Claudia’s pregnancy was unintended. The Pill gave her blinding migraines, so she’d quit taking it. She and Phil used condoms most of the time, which was only slightly better than not using them at all.

When she fell pregnant, that was exactly how it felt: a plummeting sensation, the plane losing altitude. She didn’t want a baby but was, apparently, going to have one. She didn’t consider doing otherwise. At that age, she had a horror of making decisions. She’d been raised in a sea of lost potential, people trapped by their own bad choices. Her own judgment seemed equally suspect. A choice of this magnitude—of any magnitude—was paralyzing. Every possible outcome seemed like a mistake.

When she miscarried at eight weeks, it seemed like a miracle. Her relief was unspeakable, so she didn’t speak it, and her silence passed for grief. Eventually Phil’s mother took her to see a therapist. She had married into a family where this was a normal thing to do.