I always tell people not to sit down, she says, because otherwise they try to be polite and break one of the little people chairs. It’s not a kindergarten class where the parents come in for conferences. In here it’s me and the kids only. I do consulting with the grown-ups next door.
What kinds of cases do you handle?
What kinds of kids? Every kind. I get referrals from all directions. Schools. CFS. Primary-care doctors. Juvenile Justice. The courts. Adoption agencies. Homeless shelters. All the way from mild adjustment issues to full-on psychosis. There aren’t enough child psychs in this world to let me be picky. She directs me to the door, waves to her assistant, and we’re in the elevator on our way down. Like this morning, she says, two appointments. Just to give you a sense of the range. First one, hyperactive mom, lives in one of the new Ritz-Carlton condos over near the Domino’s sign. She works in D.C., has a nanny seven to seven. Single, Dad’s already remarried and lives in Spain. Wants to know whether Jacob — he’s three and a half — needs Ritalin because he keeps breaking his toys. That’s number one. Number two, she’s eleven, six foster families, raped by an older foster brother two years ago, prematurely pubescent, getting in trouble hanging out with boys after school. She’s a candidate for early pregnancy for sure.
It’s pretty much the whole demographic slice.
You know who I don’t see? The suburban middle class. I mean, obviously, given where I work. But my kids break high and low. Because that’s who lives in Baltimore these days. You’ve got profoundly wealthy people in Guilford, old-line Wasp money in Roland Park, yuppies of all kinds around the harbor, and then profoundly, profoundly poor people, black, brown, beige, and white, too, of course, everywhere else. What you don’t have are teachers, nurses, firemen, shopkeepers, managers, what have you. They live in the county. And, of course, they don’t get to see a mental-health professional more than once or twice in their lives, because their HMOs don’t cover us. Medicaid, yes. The prisons, yes. Rich people, yes. Baltimore is like a big donut with the middle shot out.
We’ve come out on the corner of Wolfe and Orleans and now turn down North Broadway, a broad avenue of neat brick row houses that descends slowly to Fell’s Point. You like Broadway Market? she asks. It’s soft-shell season, you know. Or we could go to Bertha’s, but I think it’s overrated. Or the brick-oven pizza place.
No, the Market’s fine.
I like eating standing up. Don’t know why. Some people can’t take it. But again, I’m sitting all day. Standing up and reading the newspaper and listening to adults talk. Between work and home I get a little starved for conversation, as you can see. So listen, what was it you wanted to ask me? You must have questions.
Oh, I say, you’re answering them. Mostly I just need background. Who you are, what you think about the life you lead.
Nothing about how I met Martin? That kind of thing?
Of course. That, too.
And you’re not going to ask for my take on black entrepreneurship?
Definitely.
She bursts into laughter. I’m just giving you a hard time, she says. Listen, I could rattle off opinions for hours, so let me get some hard facts out of the way before I forget. About Martin, first off. We met in church. He probably told you that. And it was the first time I’d been to church in about three years; I was there for my friend Kara’s daughter’s baptism. He, at that time, was quite the faithful churchgoer, and my god, a single man, looking like him, with a job, with a wardrobe, and without a mother in law — there were crowds. It was like the Google IPO. But our eyes met, la, la, la, we clicked, it all happened fast. It was very efficient. Small wedding, up on Martha’s Vineyard. You have to keep it small when there’s no family on one side.
So you wouldn’t describe yourself as very religious?
Are you talking about in a black context or a larger context?
Is it different?
Of course it’s different. The black community still treats the church as central. You can’t be black, in a certain sense, without a relationship to the church. An appreciation for it. I’ve got that. But if you’re talking about a deep, personal, everyday, transcendent need for prayer and reflection, an immersion in the Bible, I mean, faith, then no. I’m culturally Baptist the way lots of Jews are culturally Jewish. It’s imperative to me that the kids are raised in the church. Not because I’m so convinced of the moral edification it offers, but because it grounds them in the community and the tradition. It’s all about integrity and wholeness for me, not Jesus and Jehovah. Maybe you got a sense of that the other day.
I did.
You should come again. You’d be welcome, you know.
I will. It’s on my list.
She laughs again.
What, you don’t make lists?
My whole life is lists. It’s just that there’s something so earnest about you, Kelly. You want to understand. You’re like one of those skinny college kids in plaid shirts in 1961, listening to Mingus or Smokey Robinson or something and trying to be hip. Can I be honest here? I keep thinking I’m being played. That’s my cynical, heard-it-all, twenty-first-century reaction. It’s like you’ve been in a bubble the last, oh, thirty years of your life.
I don’t want anything from you, I would so desperately like to tell her, to reassure her, just an hour of polite conversation, for now, and in the long term, perhaps, your forgiveness, your acknowledgment that none of this was my idea. The problem is that I’m trying too hard to do a good job. I’m trying so sincerely to be fake. And now I’m stuck.
So, I say, in your view, there’s just no excuse, anymore, for a naïve perspective, an innocent question?
There would be if you came from, say, Sri Lanka. Or Mars.
Then the white observer, the interlocutor, is in kind of an impossible bind, right? If I’m cynical and worldly I get called out for making assumptions and appropriating a black perspective. If I’m innocent and careful I get called out for false naiveté. Not much wiggle room, is there?
We come to the corner of North Broadway and Baltimore. Here the grassy median gives way to a cluster of trees, a small plaza, benches, now filled with dog walkers, neighborhood wanderers, residents in scrubs uncoiling in the unfamiliar sunlight. Underneath the trees there’s a small, improbable statue, hardly more than life-sized: a muttonchopped man in a frock coat, turn of the century, Theodore Roosevelt style. LATROBE inscribed on the marble behind him. Baltimore is full of these unexpected, anonymous tokens of a forgotten civic life.
Oh, Kelly, she says, and turns to look me full in the face for the first time. Are you really asking me, a black woman, about wiggle room?
Then I’m just supposed to stay frustrated?
Something like that.
The light still isn’t changing; I wonder for a moment if it’s broken, if we should just leap across, but of course what’s really happening is time is growing elastic, stretching out like taffy, in the course of an awkward, unexpectedly terrible, somehow ruined, encounter.
You know what amazed me about Martin, when we met? she asks. That he could talk to anybody. I mean, that should be my forte. But Martin is a true genius at giving people the benefit of the doubt. It must come from a business background. To him anyone is a potential customer. Or investor, or partner, or something. But that’s not the point, really, because that makes it sound mercenary, and it’s not. He has the rare gift of turning self-interest into something that’s almost like a Christian virtue.