Page 92 - Philly Girl

76 Janice Shapiro

baby hated my guts—why else is he screaming all the time?
I never said that aloud. Just: “Everything’s fine—he’s just
tired” (hungry, bored, wet, whatever you can think of at the
time).
So, this is how Connie and I became friends. We thought
of ourselves as good mothers and reasonable, kind, empathic
people. It turned out we both worked part-time as therapists.
She had a half-time job at Kaiser but wanted to start a private
practice. “I just found an office in our neighborhood,” I told
her. “It’s pretty nice, decent rent, part time.” Just what she
needed. She moved into the office next door to mine. We
were office mates for 30 years, and it never got stale. It was
fun and amazing—a shared journey of glory and tragedy.
Connie’s story is somewhat mythical. I have heard it
many times, and each time I think of magical realism. For
example, her parents are Colombian, and her father was a
general in the Colombian army. Her mother worked in a box
factory. There were four siblings, but only Connie was born
in the United States, when her father came to UCLA to get
a master’s degree. She recently visited her childhood home
in Bogotá. That former residence is now a fancy restaurant.
Speaking of fancy restaurants, I almost lost my Connie
because of one. We go out to dinner a lot, and it was my turn
to pick a place. I found what I thought was a new pop-up
in a café near my dance class. My restaurant radar was off
that night. We walked in, and everyone was wearing heels,
tuxedos, fancy clothes. We were dressed supercasually. The
waiters started pouring champagne and we were served an
amuse-bouche, but by the third course, with yet another
glass of wine, I realized that we were in the wrong place. I
asked the server what pop-up this was, and why they kept
pouring us different wines, which we were not ordering.
“Oh, this is Saison,” he said (the most expensive restaurant
in San Francisco), “and you are eating a nine-course meal