“As if bad father is not the most pussy-drying phrase,” Lucretia says, gesturing with her hand to mimic a flower opening and closing.
Someone could flood a bathroom in Kemp. Someone could mess with the instructors. Maybe some of the plants are poisonous.
Frida calls Lucretia crazy. Think of how they’ll suffer, how their kids will suffer, if they lose their cases. Beth and Meryl scoff. Lucretia calls Frida a goody-goody. Linda calls her a fucking rule-following model minority.
They discuss whether they should blow the guard or have him go down on them. The table is divided on this question. Their intensity at this early hour, over this unappealing man, frightens Frida, who isn’t immune to coarse thoughts. She’s been missing Will, remembering his body, thinking of Gust and past lovers, the dirty-haired boy in college who chewed on her nipples, the chubby art director in New York who spoke too often of his dead father. But fantasy and desire belong to another life. She told Will not to wait for her. She leaves the table as her classmates continue their heated discussion of whether, for the sake of birth control, anal sex is the best option.
There’s a new guard waiting inside the glass doors of Morris Hall, a slim and shy young Black man with green cat eyes and a short beard and a face as pretty as a girl’s. He’s not very tall, but the body beneath the uniform appears strong. Some mothers say hello to him on the way to class. Some toss their hair. Some brazenly look him up and down. The guard is blushing. The mothers place bets on how many women he’ll fuck today. There can’t be cameras in all the trees. There are plenty of empty buildings.
Frida wonders what kind of girl he likes. Sharp and funny like Lucretia. Haunted like Beth. She likes his green eyes and full mouth.
* * *
Counseling sessions are staggered throughout the day. At 10:45 a.m., Frida waits in the foyer of Pierce, where someone has placed an arrangement of silk poinsettias on the table beneath the chandelier.
She reminds herself not to ask questions, to only cry if it seems advantageous to do so, to refer to Emmanuelle as “her,” rather than “it.” The waiting mothers make small talk about going to bed hungry, how the turkey was not that bad, considering. Down the hall, behind one of the closed doors, a mother is sobbing with abandon. Frida worries for her, whoever she is, remembers how the men from CPS cataloged her crying episodes. They said Frida’s grief seemed shallow. They told the family court judge that her crying postures—her habit of hiding her face with her hands, assuming the fetal position—suggested she was playing the victim.
She hasn’t cried here yet, though the desire to weep is constant. At night, she struggles to keep her hands out of her mouth. She wants to pull out her eyelashes, bite the insides of her cheeks until they bleed. But she’s learning to appreciate the dark. The solitude. Exhaustion has improved her sleep. In the last few nights, she’s slept deep enough to remember her nightmares.
At eleven, Ms. Gibson escorts her to the college’s old study abroad office. The counselor’s office is dove gray and smells like antiseptic. There’s a scale of justice on top of a filing cabinet, a dry-erase calendar with codes written in red, stacks of manila folders, assorted handheld devices. There’s a camera mounted on the back wall, facing Frida, who takes her seat and crosses her legs and smiles.
The counselor, an elegant, middle-aged Black woman whose pink lab coat is snug across the shoulders, is named Jacinda, but Frida can call her Ms. Thompson. She has relaxed shoulder-length hair that’s thinning at the temples and raised moles on her cheekbones. She speaks from the diaphragm and smiles like she cares, murmuring and nodding at the right moments as Frida answers questions about sleep and appetite and mood, if she’s made any friends, if she feels safe here, how she’s enduring the separation from Harriet. They spend the session reviewing Frida’s shortcomings, starting with her very bad day and continuing through this morning. The counselor encourages her to say, “I am a bad mother because…，” and fill in the blanks.
She asks why Frida hasn’t been able to comfort her doll. When Frida says no one has, the counselor says that doesn’t matter.
“Frida, why do you have such low expectations of yourself?” she asks. Is the problem an insecure attachment? Some underlying resistance? To the program? To the dolls?
“Your instructors have told me that your hugs lack warmth. They said, I quote, ‘Frida’s kisses lack a fiery core of maternal love.’？”
“I’m doing my best. No one told us we’d be working with robots. It’s a lot to absorb.”