Content warning for antisemitism in this chapter.
Chapter 2
"Did any thoughts or feelings come up about our last session?"
Seth shrugs.
Ruth usually started off with this question, even when their "last session" had consisted of Seth explaining a graphic novel in minute detail. However, their actual last session had been very much not about graphic novels and very much about things Seth isn't sure he ever really wanted to know about or think about.
He'd tried-with considerable gusto-to convince his dad that he was too sick to go to therapy today. He'd really thrown himself into the pathetic act, stopping just short-perhaps to his detriment-of say, dummying up some fake vomit out of odds-and-ends from the pantry.
"The fact that you really don't want to go might be a sign that the therapy's really getting somewhere," his dad had said, chuckling sympathetically before patting him on the back and telling him he needed to go get dressed.
Not for the first time, Seth had been left wondering where adults came up with bullshit like that.
"It seemed like kind of an intense conversation for you," Ruth observes evenly.
Seth shrugs again.
He will not get full credit for therapy if he responds in only shrugs for the next fifty minutes, but he thinks he'll give it a go anyway.
"How are you feeling now?" Ruth cocks her head to one side.
Seth shrugs.
Ruth's head bobs in a little knowing nod towards him.
"It can be really hard to share things with someone else, to be vulnerable with them. It can make us want to run away from it, to shut down completely." She pauses. "Was that the game plan for today?"
Seth considers this.
"More or less. I tried just not coming, but my dad wasn't having it."
"Can you say more about not wanting to come today?"
"I just...I didn't come here to be mad at my mom." Seth frowns, irritated that his mouth is choosing to speak for him.
"And now you've found yourself mad at her?"
"I dunno, maybe. No." Seth looks away. "I feel like you told me a bunch of things that are supposed to make me mad at her."
"Do you think I want you to be mad at her?"
"Isn't that kind of how therapy works? We team up and figure out how my parents are the root of all my character defects?"
Ruth laughs. "That's not exactly how I see it working, but I get how it can feel like that."
"Then how does it work? Like, what's the point? I have good parents. You should probably just tell me to be grateful. It's not like they're abusive or anything..." Seth wobbles a hand back and forth. "...although one could argue that throwing a kid a bar mitzvah in Newport Beach is kind of a tricky gray area, child abuse-wise."
"And if I thought having perfect gratitude towards your parents would help you, I might encourage that."
"So what exactly about this is supposed to help?" Seth asks, wondering how he went from silently shrugging to confrontation in like, two minutes.
"The way we relate to our parents and the way they relate to us informs what we believe about ourselves and what patterns we develop in relationships with others. When we gloss over our own history and say everything was just fine, we tend to repeat not just the good patterns, but also the ones that hurt us and hurt our relationships." Ruth pauses, giving him an appraising look. "You grew up feeling like it was your job to protect your mother from your feelings, to keep things tidy and normal for her as much as possible, even if it meant lying, by omission or outright. And now you find yourself lying to your girlfriend."
"So complaining about my mom is going to help me stop lying to my girlfriend?"
Ruth smiles. "Understanding why you're lying to your girlfriend might help you stop lying to your girlfriend. I find it's difficult to change behaviors without understanding the core belief that's sustaining that behavior. It might be that some part of you thinks that Summer would rather you lie to her than burden her with-what word did you use last time?-your mess."
"She's told me pretty clearly that she'd prefer the truth."
"And yet you still lie to her."
Seth chews on that one. "Okay," he says.
"Okay?" Ruth looks puzzled.
"Okay, I mean, I guess I see your point." Seth holds up a hand. "I'm not saying I'm agreeing; I just get what you're saying."
"But it seems like you feel bad, talking about your mom, like it's wrong to be mad at her?"
"I guess." Seth leans forward and grabs the little wooden rake. It's easier to talk when he's doing the whole zen gardening thing. He guesses that's the point of it. "She's dealing with a lot; it kind of feels like dumping on her." He frowns. "And she's a good mom."
"Does it feel like we're saying she's not, if we acknowledge that there are some ways she might not have always met your needs?"
"Sort of. And I mean, she should get a lot of credit for being a good parent, considering what my grandfather was like."
Ruth takes a sip of her coffee as she contemplates this. "You don't talk much about your grandfather," she notes.
The air goes out of Seth a little, and he narrows his eyes at Ruth while his brain scans the topic of his grandfather for any signs of danger.
No one had told him how confrontational therapy could be. He'd sort of figured you were just supposed to vent and/or cry, not get everything you said thrown back in your face.
And he'd caught the shift in Ruth, her honing in on the grandfather thing like she'd been waiting for an opening to bring him up.
Which was fine, he decides. The subject could've been much worse.
"There's not much to say," he says. .
"Your dad said you were pretty close."
Seth snorts. "He would say that."
"So you don't agree?"
"I'm sorry he died, but I mostly just feel bad for my mom. We weren't close or anything."
"But your dad thinks otherwise?"
"Or he just says otherwise. It's kind of the parent thing to do, right? 'Oh, he doesn't hate you; he's your grandfather.'"
"He hated you?"
Seth rakes a few lines in the sand, mulling it over. "Hate might be a strong word."
"So how would you describe it?"
Seth rakes a few more lines.
"He didn't like me, or feel very connected to me."
"What led you to that conclusion?"
Seth smirks. "I overheard him telling my mom that he would never like me that much or feel that connected to me, that I'm too much like my dad."
"Wow." Ruth draws back, looking somewhat alarmed, clearly taking the whole thing way too seriously in that annoying adult way. "That's a hurtful thing to overhear about yourself."
"Eh." Seth rakes a few erratic patterns in the sand. "All told, it wasn't my worst birthday ever."
"Is that joke supposed to distract me from what you've just told me?"
"It's not supposed to do anything. It's not even a joke," Seth counters. "It was just actually my 7th birthday, and my parents rented a bouncy house that day, so it could've been much worse."
"And again with the joking."
"What do you want me to do? Cry about something I'm not sad about?"
"Do you know you're not sad about it?"
"I'm not. It's funny, and I get to torture my mom by throwing it in her face whenver I get the chance." Seth leans back on the couch. "It's not like it was a surprise that he felt that way." He taps the rake against his open palm. "It was kind of a relief to hear it, to have proof that I wasn't completely crazy."
"Because you suspected he felt that way?"
"Yeah well, I started to get a little suspicious after all the comments about how I'd never be an athlete." Seth snickers. "And the many jokes about my circumcision were another tip-off." He squints and scratches at his head. "Wait, was that a pun?"
Ruth's brow furrows. "You know Seth, you're talking, but I'm wondering if you're hearing what you're actually saying, through the comedic spin you've got going."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"I mean you're sitting there casually telling me that your grandfather made a memorable number of comments about your penis."
"When you say it like that, it sounds so tawdry." Seth gives her a dramatically scandalized look.
Ruth blinks at him.
"You're about to say you don't find me very funny, right?" Seth asks. "Believe it or not, I have heard that one before."
"I actually find you quite funny, Seth," Ruth says. "I also find you quite sad."
It's Seth's turn to blink.
Ouch.
"Yeah well, you're not the first woman to say that to me," he shoots back.
"You're very quick with the recovery," Ruth notes, leaning back in her chair. "I'd imagine that skill has served you well over the years."
"Sorry," Seth says, although he isn't particularly sorry. "If I could turn it off...well, I'm not sure that I would, but..." He shrugs.
"You're also not sure you can turn it off?"
"Correct." Seth nods firmly.
"Can we talk about the jokes?"
All kinds of alarms are going off in Seth's mind, but he's not sure there's a graceful way to back down.
"Sure," he says, aiming for casually unbothered and hoping he's hitting that mark. "Have at it."
Ruth folds her hands and looks up thoughtfully, like she's really working on something up there.
Seth has never wanted to flee somewhere so badly in his life.
And he definitely doesn't want her to keep talking, but also, Ruth seemed to be particularly skilled at getting him as intrigued as he was terrified by whatever she was going to say next.
Some of the things she said seemed completely ludicrous until he actually let them penetrate into the deep recesses of his brain where some little bulb lit up and said Holy fuck.
"So the jokes." Ruth looks at him. "I wonder if they're a way for you to tell the truth—about what's happened, about how you feel, about the things that feel obvious that you're told aren't true, and then you don't have to deal with the emotional fallout or blame for what you've said, because well, it's not like you were being serious." Ruth raises her eyebrows. "It makes me wonder how you expected your therapist to react after you told her that your grandfather made a memorable number of comments about your penis." Ruth cocks her head to the side. "It also makes me wonder how often you drop a verbal bomb and then walk away from the devastation, shrugging your shoulders like Who me?."
"That's bad, right?" Seth's eyes narrow. "Like, you're saying that's bad?"
Ruth laughs, not unkindly.
"No, I actually think I admire the spirit of it," she says, eyes twinkling.
"What? Why?"
"Haven't we noticed that, in your family, a joke is the acceptable way to talk about a truth that feels uncomfortable, maybe unacceptable to talk about?"
"That seems to be your theory, yes."
"The jokes feel like a way for you to subvert your family's unspoken rules. If we can only tell the truth in jokes, well, you're going to get the jokes, but you're also going to hear the truth."
"And you admire that?" Seth gives her a skeptical look.
"What can I say—I love a good sneaky rebellion. You don't get to make the rules, but you can use them against the people who do." Ruth's expression turns a little somber. "My concern is that it seems like it's made it harder for you to know how you actually feel, that you didn't then—and you don't now—have the room to let the feelings exist, to let yourself feel them."
"Or I just like jokes. There doesn't have to be a deeper meaning or big feelings to everything."
"What your grandfather said, that he could never like you or connect with you, you told me that you throw that in your mom's face whenever you get the chance."
"Because it's funny."
"What's funny?"
"Wha—what do you mean?"
A cacophony of car alarms scream in Seth's head.
"What's funny about it? I'm curious."
"Why do you want me to be upset about this?"
"I'd like you to explain what's funny about it. Really challenge yourself here."
"It bugs my mom, like I said."
"And why do you choose that moment, of all the moments or things you could bug her with?"
"I don't know. Sometimes the occasion calls for it."
"How so?"
"I don't know."
"What's an occasion that would call for it?"
Seth scratches harder at the sand with the little rake. This whole interrogation thing is starting to grate on him.
"Like my grandfather would say something douchey and I'd say something about it or mention that he obviously didn't like me and my mom would say of course he does; he's your grandfather, and then I'd come out with…" Seth trails off, feeling like his mind is imploding.
Ruth nods slowly, leaning back in her chair. She lets Seth's trail off hang in the air.
Which, rude.
"Look, it's just fun to torture my mom with how she rewrites history. She does it all the time. Like when I asked her about what my grandfather said at the time, she was like 'He didn't say that, and if he did say it, he didn't mean it.'" Seth gestures wildly with the tiny wooden rake. "That's like, some Animal Farm shit right there."
Unbidden, his brain retrieves a memory of the last exchange like that, over some stupid interaction with his grandfather that he can't remember and wasn't even really bothered by, Seth tossing his tried and true lines over his shoulder as he exited the kitchen, not sticking around to hear his mom explain that very sentiment to Ryan.
It didn't happen, and if it did happen, it still didn't happen.
Seth shakes his head, trying to dislodge the unhelpful jaunt down memory lane.
"And that's funny?"
"What else is it?"
"For me," Ruth starts, "it's sad to think about a 7-year-old you, lonely and not feeling like you fit in anywhere, and then hearing from your grandfather that you'll never fit in with him."
"Who would want to fit in with him?" Seth demands. "He wasn't that great a guy. And you can't convince me that I feel big angsty feelings about it." Seth fights to maintain eye contact with Ruth.
"It's just hard for me to imagine that it was funny then." Ruth pauses. "Or if it was, it's hard for me to imagine that there wasn't a lot that came before it to harden you to it."
"I feel like you're trying to make me more upset about things than I actually am."
Ruth considers this. "I can see why it would feel that way. I'd say that I'm trying to help you feel as upset as you are."
Seth squints. "Is that Jedi double-speak supposed to mean something to me?"
Ruth chuckles. "What I mean is that you seem pretty emotionally detached, but I'm not sure you come by it honestly."
"Meaning what?" Seth isn't sure he wants to know, but there's something about the way that Ruth lays out a conversation that traps him in the dialogue, the back-and-forth, asking the question that naturally follows her cryptic little therapist statements.
He needs to ask Ryan for lessons on how to just blink and stare broodingly when people attempt to know him.
"Meaning, you're a kid and your grandfather is cruel to you and your parents say 'Oh, you can't listen to your grandfather. He didn't mean it.' Spoken another way, the message is perhaps 'You don't get to be upset about this.'"
"So? Isn't it better to accept that he was like that than to cry every time he was a dick?"
Ruth's eyebrows raise. "And yet you said it was a relief to hear it, to know you weren't crazy."
Fuck.
Seth wonders if some eleventh hour blinking and staring broodingly will rescue him here.
"It sounds like some part of you wanted to be able to talk about it, to know you weren't crazy, that there was some relief you were seeking that you weren't getting from your parents."
Ruth's voice is soft and solemn and painfully earnest and Seth wishes she would knock it off with all that.
"I really don't know what you want me to say or feel about it. Maybe I'm hardened or whatever, but it objectively still feels pretty funny." Seth stares down at a hangnail, contemplating the best means of removal. "I don't know that it ever really hurt my feelings. I mean, if anything-" he cuts himself off.
"If anything, what?"
"Nothing," Seth says quickly.
"If anything..." Ruth presses, relentless as she is.
Seth blows out a frustrated breath. "Fine. If anything, I was more bothered by how my parents acted about him." He looks away, irritated. "But I guess that's what you were getting at."
"What's coming up for you about how your parents reacted to your grandfather?"
"They just let him say whatever, like they never told him to stop, or like, that it's rude to comment on someone's chicken legs." Seth frowns, trying to remember what his mom had said to his grandfather after he'd basically declared their relationship to be a lost cause. He can't quite grasp that part of the memory, but she didn't toss her cup of fruit punch in his face, so that alone left him wanting to some degree.
"They didn't stick up for you."
"Not really," Seth says softly. "But I mean, I get it. He wasn't going to change."
"But maybe it would've meant something, to hear them telling him to stop."
"Or they could've kicked him out of my birthday party. He was kind of throwing off the whole vibe."
"The vibe of celebrating you?"
"They'd always just tell me he didn't mean what he'd just said, even though he said basically the same things every time I saw him. The whole parental psyops routine." Seth bites his lip. "Or they'd tell me to ignore him, but it's not like he ever stopped." He scoffs and rolls his eyes. "So it's kind of funny that they thought that would magically work with the kids at school."
"It never worked on your original bully."
"I kind of hate that word, but sure."
"Bully?"
"Yeah, it's just..." Seth slouches a little into himself. "I dunno, it's embarrassing, talking about it like that."
"Being bullied?"
Seth flashes Ruth an irritated look. Tell the woman he hates a word, and she doubles down on using it.
"You know, I just hate the way everyone told me to just ignore it or have confidence in myself and then people would stop. Like it was in my control and totally my own fault."
"You're angry."
"It just feels like they tell you those things because it's a great cop-out for them. If it's your fault, they don't have to do anything about it."
"And maybe it makes it too embarrassing to speak up about it?"
"And like, I talked to my parents about going to boarding school or going to another school, and you know what my mom would say about it?"
Ruth shakes her head.
"It's going to be the same anywhere you go."
"How did that make you feel?"
Seth snorts. "How do you think it would feel for your mom to say you're going to be a friendless loser anywhere you go?" He holds up a hand. "Don't answer that." He taps the rake on the edge of the little sandbox. "And it's just stupid because my mom gets all smug about how things are so different at school now because I've changed."
"You haven't changed?"
"I wouldn't say that," Seth says. "I mean, I feel basically the same, but I have friends now. But it's not like all the water polo players saw what a confident young man I'd become and decided to look someone else to torture. People don't mess with me because Ryan's there. If Ryan's out sick or something, they still-" Seth cuts himself off. "I'm not talking about that." He stares pointedly at Ruth. "And not because it's some big horrible thing. It doesn't really bother me anymore because, again, I have friends now."
He delivers the last sentence slowly, like he's talking to a small child, like he's talking to his mom as she dropped little comments about how Summer and Ryan and Luke and Marissa and whoever were proof that she'd been right all along.
"So it's not that you're especially bothered by how these guys treat you; you're angry that it's all packaged up into this neat little narrative that, while convenient, also supports the idea that the bullying was your fault to begin with?"
"Correct." Seth does a double take. "Wait, I didn't say bullying. And I didn't say angry. I'm not angry." He pauses. "I'm annoyed. Approaching perturbed, perhaps."
Ruth makes a little hmm noise and then says nothing.
Seth rakes random patterns into the sand, frustrated-no, pissed-that he's spilling his guts about stuff he doesn't even really care about.
And Ruth lets him rake away, not saying anything for what feels like an eternity, letting that hmm take deep root into his brain, and he figures that's some kind of therapist psyops thing, and that's pissing him off too.
"My mom just doesn't get it," Seth says quietly, regaining control over himself. "She'd try to relate to me about the school stuff. She'd compare it to the hippie liberal kids at Berkeley thinking she was stuck up because she was Caleb Nicholas's daughter."
"That didn't quite land with you?"
Seth makes a face. "Not really. She just got to douse herself in patchouli and live in a mail truck and pretend to be poor and she was fine. I can't exactly hide all of this." He gestures first to his hair then to the rest of his body. "I kind of emanate the whole Jewish thing pretty hard."
"Hmm." Ruth does a little double-take.
"What?"
Ruth takes a long sip of her coffee before settling back in her chair. "I was just noticing that your Judaism comes up a lot. And that when you mention your mom, you so often reference her WASPish-ness, and then when you talk about yourself, so often your Jewishness."
"So?"
"I'm just wondering if there's been a kind of cultural divide in your family, and what that was like for you."
"There's no cultural divide," Seth says, face wrinkling at the huge reach on Ruth's part. "It's a good deal. I get to combine all the major holidays. And my family isn't even that Jewish. Like we're not super observant or anything."
"Yet you seem to identify strongly with your Judaism. You once described yourself as aggressively Jewish."
Seth shrugs.
"And you don't seem to identify so much with the WASP side."
"Yeah well, they don't identify with me." Seth's tone is sharper than he'd like it to be.
Ruth nods slowly.
Seth can tell she's going to privately celebrate that moment later.
"I guess I figured it was why I was so different from the other kids at school." Seth manages to even out his tone a little. "Like with what my grandfather said, that I was too much like my dad. I kind of figured that meant too Jewish." He arches an eyebrow. "Mine was not the only circumcision he saw fit to reference."
"That's how you made sense of the distance between you and your grandfather, and maybe some of the distance between you and your mom?"
"There wasn't distance with my mom," Seth snaps. He huffs a frustrated breath. "I mean, there isn't...distance."
"You sound angry with me."
"I'm not angry." Seth recognizes that his tone of voice is no longer chill or even, and that his jaw as well as sundry parts of his body are-weirdly-clenched.
Ruth looks at him for a long moment, not saying anything right away. She does that sometimes, seeming like she's taking her time to think of the next thing she's going to say.
Seth cannot relate to those verbal habits.
"You know, Seth, I'm not trying to say your mom's a bad mom," Ruth says, her own tone uncharacteristically gentle. "I don't always come right out and say things like that, but it feels important to make that clear to you. This isn't a judgment of your mother or your father or you."
"And my grandfather?"
"Jury's still out on that one," Ruth says, with a little smile.
"Hey, a joke." Seth snickers. "Nice."
"But Seth, I want to call your attention to what I'm seeing and hearing. I could be off, but when you talk-and not just today-I sense that you feel a pretty significant cultural divide between you and your mother. Not that it's all so neat and cliched as that, but that the Jew versus WASP thing has become a kind of shorthand for the places where you don't feel understood by her, the places where you're very different from her."
There's that blinking again, many times and rapidly. Seth opens his mouth to speak, then closes it. He swallows.
He realizes that his heart is hammering in his chest, that some kind of prickly giddy heat is floating through his brain, that he is furiously tapping the tiny wooden rake on the coffee table.
He sits up, cutting an abrupt end to the rake tapping, but not to the pounding heart or the prickly giddy tingly feeling in his brain that has now started to course its way through his whole body.
Inexplicably, he feels himself smile, just a little bit.
"What are you thinking about?" Ruth asks, annoyingly never one to miss a tiny shift in seemingly anything.
"I, uh.." Seth clears his throat. "I was just thinking about my cousin's bar mitzvah."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah. I went to New York with my parents."
"Your smile makes me think it's a nice memory for you."
"It was all right."
Jeffrey's bar mitzvah had been bright and loud and everyone had talked and laughed at that same booming volume, overlapping conversations and jokes and debates in between and while wildly dancing in circles to Hebrew music.
At first Seth's feet had felt as clumsy as they'd always felt as he tried to study and perfectly mimic the way his aunts' and uncles' and cousins' legs seemed to move so gracefully and so in unison, but after awhile he'd just let go of his perfect footwork aspirations, maybe after his Aunt Naomi stomped on his foot for the third time, or seeing the way Cousin Josh had to fight to stay on his feet every time his own legs knocked together.
And the morning after, his mom had stayed at the hotel while his dad took him to a deli and bought him his first genuine New York City bagel, half with lox and cream cheese and half with whitefish and cream cheese, and they'd loaded up on a bunch of different baked goods for dessert, his dad in his element as he lectured on the finer points of all of the different foods and flavors.
"What do you think's making you think of it now, your cousin's bar mitzvah?"
"It was the only time I can remember my mom seeming awkward and out-of-place. Maybe it's mean, but it was kind of funny. She denies it now, but I'm pretty sure she hid in the bathroom for like three hours because my uncle kept trying to get her to do the Hebrew dancing with us." Seth twirls the little rake around. "Couldn't patchouli her way out of that one, I guess."
"Not at your bar mitzvah though. It sounds like you were the fish out of water at your bar mitzvah."
"Hey, I told you that in confidence," Seth's eyes narrow. "And that steel trap memory thing you do and all the callbacks are...not my favorite. I'd like to say, like, one or two things that won't come back to haunt me later."
Seth stares down at the sandbox and the erratic lines and patterns and non-patterns he's managed to carve out in the twenty minutes or so that he's been there.
"As for my bar mitzvah...it was less fish-out-of-water and more..." he pauses to tap his chin with the rake. "More like I was a freak fish in a tiny freak pond for everyone to gawk at." He raises his eyebrows. "It was honestly probably a mercy that none of the kids from school showed up."
Ruth makes a thoughtful noise.
She has a surprisingly large array of those. Maybe they taught a class on that in therapist school.
"What?"
"You know Seth, I keep thinking of that line you hate so much, the 'it's the same everywhere' line.'"
"What about it?"
"Well, it strikes me that that might feel like a bit of a WASP-y sentiment around here."
"Meaning?"
"I mean, things might be the same everywhere for some people, but there are plenty of places where a bar mitzvah wouldn't trigger a call to Child Protective Services." Ruth smiles wryly.
Seth chews on that callback for a long while, brow furrowing as he digs into the sand again.
The sand more or less does what he wants it to as he starts to rake neat, orderly lines, covering over the loopy erratic figure-eights and swirls to nowhere. Sometimes a bit of sand goes rogue and jumps over the barriers of the sandbox, but he can quickly brush it off the coffee table and into the oblivion of Ruth's carpet.
Without lifting his head, Seth darts his eyes up to look at Ruth. "I'm guessing you've seen your share of b'nai mitzvot in your day."
Ruth opens her mouth, then hesitates.
It's the first moment Seth can recall where Ruth seemed off-balance, not completely and thoroughly sure of herself. Even when she was taking her time to think through what she was going to say, she did so with a kind of cool thoughtfulness, not like she was scrambling for a way to proceed.
"Sorry, am I not supposed to ask that?" Seth eyes Ruth warily.
"You can ask me anything you want," Ruth responds quickly, firmly. "I guess I'm thinking over how to answer."
"I'm pretty sure I already know," Seth offers.
"You sound pretty confident."
"I mean, your last name is kind of a giveaway." Seth pauses. "And my dad liked you right away."
"And you think it's because I'm Jewish?"
Seth shrugs. "Maybe, yeah. We're so few and far between out here, I think he gets a little excited. And he thought you were funny. He always says the goyim aren't funny."
Ruth looks amused at that one.
"But sorry if we're not supposed to talk about it," Seth adds.
"You can talk about anything you like," Ruth says. "We've just been talking about not feeling like you can say what seems obvious. There's nothing off-limits here; I want to make that very clear. I'm guessing you saw that I was hesitant to answer your question."
Seth nods. "And I know from tv that therapists aren't supposed to say anything about themselves."
Ruth chuckles. "That's one school of thought. There are a lot of things I won't necessarily share, but that's not really why I hesitated."
"So why?"
Ruth looks away, doing that thoughtful ruminating therapist thing again.
"I guess I'm wary of you thinking that this cultural piece that I'm seeing, that I only see and understand it because I'm Jewish." She pauses. "And I'm wary of you thinking that I might only understand what I understand of you because I'm Jewish."
"But if you weren't, you probably wouldn't understand, would you?" Seth's lips twist into a glum half-smile. "I mean, I'm not saying you couldn't understand things about me. But some stuff..."
He frowns, not quite sure how to sum it up.
"The being a Jew in Newport stuff?" Ruth supplies, after he's been silent for a good minute.
"That stuff, yeah."
Seth rakes at the sand, waiting for the pat no, of course I would understand, but when he peeks up at Ruth she looks like she's giving his question some serious consideration.
"In one way, that's a really hard question to answer."
Seth has to resist the urge to roll his eyes at the non-answer. Of course, yes, you can't know how it would be if you weren't Jewish when you are so obviously aggressively Jewish yourself.
"But in another way, you're right, I really might not see it or understand it." Ruth looks pensive. "We might be sitting here circling a thing you don't really have a name for."
"And you might be like, trying to convince me that it's going to be the same anywhere I go." Seth smiles wryly. "We'd be brainstorming the Newport equivalent of patchouli and a mail truck." He bites his lip. "Or the my mom equivalent of patchouli and a mail truck, I guess."
Ruth nods slowly and her next exhale of breath comes out a little like a sigh, looking like she needs a minute to think of what to say next.
Seth nods to himself and goes back to raking.
oooooooooooooooooooooooo
The black bear lumbers down the hill, one cub dangling by the scruff of his neck from her mouth, and a line of cubs following her in a meandering line.
Sandy smiles faintly, conjuring as it does some hazy memory of Seth as a baby, crawling determinedly towards whatever it was he wasn't supposed to touch-power cords dangling from outlets, the television, the stack of papers that Sandy had just organized. There were a few times when he or Kirsten weren't quick enough, and they'd had to snatch him up by the back of his little onesie shirt, his arms pinwheeling and his legs kicking, and laughing, always laughing, because that part seemed to be part of the game for him too, not just trying to get at the contraband, but getting caught, getting someone to pick him up.
A light rapping at the door interrupts Sandy's reverie.
"Come in," he calls, sitting up a little in bed.
He glances over at the digital clock, registering that it's past midnight.
Time has been funny, since Kirsten left. He's been thrown off of all of his routines. It's hard to know when to go to bed without that little sigh of Kirsten's, the long breath she lets out before getting up from the couch or the dining room table or the lounge chair by the pool, the long breath that lets Sandy know that the day is done, that it's time to turn in.
And it's hard to sleep without her beside him. He's heard that before, from people when their spouses go away, but he's never had to test it before for more than a night or two at a time.
Sandy hears soft footsteps and the first thing he sees coming around the corner is the mop of Seth's hair.
The rest of Seth follows, stooped over in rumpled pajama pants and one of Sandy's old Berkeley t-shirts and clutching a pillow under one arm.
"Hey kiddo." Sandy smiles at his messy hair and at the Berkeley t-shirt, at the whole picture it conjures of Seth when he was a little boy, showing up at their bedroom door in the middle of the night. "Everything okay?"
"Yeah, yeah." Seth nods, looking pensive. "I just couldn't really sleep." He bites his lip. "I figured maybe I could watch some tv with you, if that's okay."
"Of course." Sandy peels back the covers and pats the bed beside him. "I'd love the company."
Seth shuffles over to the bed and plops his pillow down next to Sandy before sliding under the covers.
Sandy lowers the blankets over Seth and Seth wriggles around a little before his body settles.
"What are we watching?" Seth mumbles the question into his pillow.
"Bears," Sandy replies.
"Cool."
Sandy assesses the scene. It's a big bed, but rather than relegate himself to the other side, Seth chose to hunker close to Sandy, body curled into a ball, his mop of curls hovering inches from Sandy.
Tentatively-reasonably sure it's welcome and wanted and sought, but also aware that one must go about these things carefully with a teenage boy and his delicate pride-Sandy reaches out and brushes a gentle hand through Seth's hair.
He still half-expects to be chasisted, but Seth is quiet, so Sandy continues to card his fingers along Seth's curls and tracing his nails lightly along the lines of Seth's scalp.
Sandy peeks over to see that Seth's eyes are closed.
Seth has been acting a bit younger since Kirsten left, has been letting Sandy take care of him a little more. He gently mocked Sandy's many attempts to get him to talk about his feelings, but this kind of thing was okay. He seemed to need the plausible deniability of a thing like resting his head right next to his dad and if he decided to comb his hands through his hair, well, so be it.
As Seth had gotten older and more self-conscious and more independent, Sandy and Kirsten had started to celebrate when Seth would doze off on the couch, started to have laughing arguments over whose turn it was to gently shake him awake and guide him up to his bedroom.
With full energy and all of his faculties about him, Seth would bristle more at causal physical affection, declaring himself too old for such things, but waking up from an accidental nap, too drowsy and disoriented for his hackles to go up, he could be downright snuggly, resting a head on a shoulder or giving a long lingering hug before falling into his bed.
Sandy peeks over again.
Seth's breathing is soft and even and Sandy wonders if he's drifting off to sleep, and if that was more or less the point of all this.
"I miss Mom."
Seth's voice is quiet, and Sandy feels something twist painfully in his chest.
He thinks this might be the first time Seth had said Kirsten's name since she'd left for rehab. It often felt like Seth was pretending that she was in the next room, and he seemed quietly agitated at any reminders that she was somewhere else.
"Oh kid, you and me both," Sandy says.
"The visits aren't doing it for me." Seth's voice wobbles a little. "She seems so different."
"It's hard," Sandy agrees.
"I just…what if she's different when she comes back? She's been out there changing and everything here is the same."
Sandy can't remember the last time he heard Seth so worried, the last time Seth had let himself sound so worried.
"I'm scared thing'll be different too," Sandy admits. "But we'll figure it out. We're a family, we've always figured it out in the past, how to get through things."
"Yeah." Seth nods into his pillow and goes quiet again.
Sandy frowns, not wanting to totally lose the thread of Seth sharing, worrying that his tidy little response-that they would figure it all out-felt inauthentic, and more like shutting Seth down than inviting him to say more.
"How are things going with Ruth?"
"Okay." Seth pauses. "She's cool."
"I'm glad."
Sandy continues to slowly card his hand through Seth's hair.
"Sometimes it feels like she makes everything sound so much worse than it is," Seth adds.
Sandy nods, taking that in as he stares absently at the top of Seth's head. It's kind of a strange vulnerable feeling, he's realized, sending your kid to therapy, placing him before a stranger with no idea what she will make of him and his life and his family life.
"And other times?" Sandy asks.
Seth shrugs. "Bears are pretty cool," he says, voice thick and sleepy.
"Hmm?" Sandy tears his eyes away from Seth and glances back at the screen, the mother bear watching her cubs wrestle and play and tumble over each other. "Yeah, bears are cool," he agrees.
A few moments later, Seth starts to snore soft little huffs of breath through his nostrils.
"Goodnight, son," Sandy says, hand still winding its way gently through Seth's tangle of curls, lips pressing into a wistful smile. "Sleep well."