In A Country Of Mothers

by A M Homes

  “So you’re afraid? Is that the problem?”

  Of course that was the problem, or at least part of it. But she wasn’t ready to talk about it, so she started telling jokes. “I’m not so sure it’s the school I’m afraid of. I think it’s getting there, flying. I used to love it. Up in the air, Junior Birdman. Up in the air, Victory.” It was the first session and Jody was singing at the top of her lungs, making her fingers into goggles and pressing them up to her eyes, making faces.

  Claire was smiling at Jody. “You’re very funny. That’s great.”

  Not only did Claire understand; she appreciated, she approved. Jody felt incredible. She felt as though she could relax, could confess all the things she’d never been able to tell Barbara, all the things she’d never told anyone; anything and everything.

  She closed her eyes and saw herself as a World War I flying ace. She was flying to Los Angeles in a leather jacket and goggles, a white silk scarf flapping back into her mother’s face. Her mother wore a leather hood and big glasses and kept shouting directions into Jody’s ear. The directions were based on a trip she’d made to California by bus thirty years before.

  “Is there any other reason you might not want to go away?” Claire asked. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “No,” Jody said.

  “Do you want one?”

  It seemed like a strange question. “Are you giving them away?” Jody asked.

  Claire laughed. At the rate this was going, by the end of the session Jody could have the “HBO Comedy Hour” all to herself.

  “What about your family?” Claire asked.

  Jody raised her eyebrows.

  “Who’s in your family?”

  Oddly phrased, as though Claire wanted names, famous names, like Clark Gable and Rock Hudson. “I have a mother, a father, and a grandfather,” she said uncertainly.

  “What are they like?”

  “Well,” she said, teasing, “my aunt was Lucille Ball — you know, ‘I Love Lucy.’ It was really hard on my mom, not being the funny one.” Jody noticed Claire writing something down on her legal pad and got nervous. “Don’t write that down.”

  “I didn’t,” Claire said, looking up.

  “Why not?” Jody asked.

  “You don’t look anything like Lucy.”

  “I’m adopted,” Jody said, and Claire’s expression changed. “My aunt and I were very close.”

  “What I’d like to do,” Claire said, “is see you three times — then I’ll have a better sense of things and we can talk about where to go from there. Does that sound okay to you?”

  Jody nodded. She hated this part. Business before pleasure.

  “What kind of a job do you have?”

  “I work for a film production company.”

  “Are your parents helping you?”

  “A little.”

  “Can you afford ninety-five dollars an hour?”

  Jody nodded.

  “Are you sure?”

  Jody nodded again. There was something about Claire that made Jody think that even if she couldn’t afford it, she wouldn’t say no. She’d find a way.

  Claire picked up her appointment book. “Could you come the day after tomorrow at one?”

  “Do you have anything later?”

  “Three?”

  Jody nodded.

  “I’ll see you then,” Claire said, standing.

  Jody couldn’t believe the session was over. Okay, so she’d been a few minutes late, but this had to be the fastest fifty minutes in history.

  “Have you got the time?” Jody asked, getting up, noticing that Claire was quite tall, at least five nine or ten — model material.

  “It’s one-thirty-five, we ran a few minutes over.”

  “Wow.”

  “See you Thursday,” Claire said, closing the door behind her.

  Instead of waiting for the elevator, Jody ran down the stairs, hailed a cab, and raced back uptown.

  Some strange and primal magic had been exchanged. Jody went back to work with more energy than she could ever remember having, so much energy that it was a little frightening.

  “Ahh,” Harry said, turning from a quick conference with one of the lighting guys. “I missed you at lunch.”

  Jody was at the food table, slapping cream cheese onto a bagel. She blushed, took a bite, and looked up.

  Harry reached out, wiped a blob of cream cheese off her face, and popped his finger into his mouth. “We should have dinner sometime,” he said.

  Jody didn’t answer. She chewed. One of the other lighting guys called Harry over to check something, and Jody ducked around the corner into a phone booth.

  “What’s the word?” Michael said.

  “Not much. They’re on the bookstore scene,” Jody said, staring at the Shakespeare & Co. marquee.

  “Is everything going right?”

  “Well, they’re splattering fake blood all over stacks of books and then trying to clean them off and do it again.”

  “I hope they’re not real books,” Michael muttered. “Check and make sure we’re not buying the whole inventory — and if we are, at least get them to use paperbacks.”

  Jody took another bite of her bagel. “Am I getting overtime? I should definitely be getting more money.”

  “Are you eating something?”

  “No,” she said, spitting the bread into her hand and dropping it, as nonchalantly as possible, into the gutter.

  “It’s disgusting. You’re eating while I’m talking.”

  “I’m not eating. Look, Michael, I’m not exactly clear about what you expect me to do here.”

  “Kiss Harry’s ass and then tell me how hairy it is. That’s your job.”

  “I never knew you were such a romantic,” Jody said. Michael hung up and Jody felt cheated out of one of her favorite moments, slamming the phone down. She dialed Ellen’s number at work.

  “Third National,” Ellen said in a smooth voice.

  “Hi,” Jody said.

  “Are you eating something?” Ellen asked.

  “A bagel,” Jody said with her mouth full.

  “Can I have a bite?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Jody said, swallowing. “So listen, I went to this shrink, you know, and it was kind of weird.”

  “Is she good?”

  “She’s either very good or very dangerous. I go back in two days.”

  “Can we not talk about your problems?” Ellen said. “Can we just talk about me? I’m so depressed.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Well, you don’t really have any problems. You got into UCLA, you like your shrink. On the other hand, what am I doing with my life? I can’t keep going out with Robert. He’s an insurance salesman. I don’t care about insurance. I don’t even have any. He wants me to marry him. Meanwhile, in this restaurant this afternoon, I met this actor-waiter type and went in the back and kind of … I really like him.”

  “Kind of what? Isn’t this the fourth person in three weeks that you kind-of ed? Are you being careful?”

  “The other ones don’t count. They’re from before. And this was really fun. We went out of the restaurant, opened those metal cellar doors you see on the sidewalk, went down there, and did it with the door open. If someone was walking by and had looked in, they would have seen us. It was—”

  “You’re nuts,” Jody said. “And when you’re dying of AIDS, you’ll expect me to visit you and bring you popcorn, play with your respirator and everything.”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  “Don’t be stupid‚” Jody said. “You can’t keep doing this.”

  “It’s just because I’m bored.”

  “Go bowling,” Jody said. The pay phone beeped and a nasty woman’s recorded voice cut in, demanding money for more time. “I’m out of change,” Jody said, as she patted a huge lump of coins in her front pocket. “Gotta go, talk to you later.”

  “How come you didn’t call me back last night?” Jody’s mother asked when she called at elev
en, when Jody was three-quarters asleep. “I called twice. Didn’t you get the message?”

  “I was busy,” Jody said.

  “Well, you could have called back and told me that you were too busy to talk. I would’ve understood.”

  “No you wouldn’t.”

  “Anyway,” her mother said, “I got tickets for us to fly out to UCLA and look around. Week after next. You’ll have to come home the day before.”

  “I’m not sure I can take the time off work. We’re in the middle of shooting.”

  “Of course you can. If I can take the time, you can take the time. Besides, you’re quitting soon anyway.”

  “Mom, don’t push me.”

  “Push you? You’re the one who applied to school in California. The tickets are in my hand. They aren’t returnable.”

  Jody felt confused. Everyone she knew said her mother was amazing. Supportive. That was the word, for all the people who were, or had ever been, in therapy. Supportive.

  “I know these things are hard for you,” her mother said. “I just want to help.”

  “I started therapy today,” Jody said, as if it were something you signed up for, like a dance class.

  “I thought you were through with that.”

  “It’s kind of a refresher course. Look, I’m really tired, can we talk about this later? Like when I’m thirty or something?”

  “Fine,” her mother said. “You’re tired. Go to sleep. I’ll call back tomorrow.”

  As soon as Jody hung up, she was wide awake. She lay in bed for half an hour, thinking about how everyone thought her relationship with her mother was great. “You talk,” Ellen said. “Do you know how many daughters don’t speak to their mothers? It’s special. Don’t knock it.” Special, yes, Jody thought, but not entirely marvelous.

  At midnight, she got up, took out the ingredients for brownies, and started baking. At one-thirty, when the brownies were cool, she sprinkled them with powdered sugar, poured herself a huge glass of milk, and sat eating while she flipped through the phone book. There was only one listing for Claire Roth, the same number Jody had called before. The real question was, Where did she live? Knowing things about her shrinks that were supposed to be secrets made Jody feel more comfortable. It gave her something to think about — which, she realized, was theoretically the reason she wasn’t supposed to know anything.

  There was a listing for Samuel B. Roth at 2 Fifth Avenue. Too close, Jody thought. After all, who’d want to live up the street and around the corner from her office — especially a shrink? Plus, “Samuel” was an old man’s name. Jody decided that Claire worked downtown but lived on the Upper West Side, and probably didn’t even know that old Samuel B. was practically a neighbor.

  Jody stayed on the floor eating brownies, getting smashed on the chocolate and sugar, questioning why she’d bothered calling a shrink in the first place. She was definitely going to graduate school. How could she even think about not going? Sure, California was hovering on the edge of the ocean, about to fall in. Sure, it was farther from home than she’d ever been for more than two weeks. But the fact that California was on the other side of everything didn’t mean she had to go into therapy. The problem was geographical, not psychological.

  After all, she’d graduated. Jody was the only person she knew who had actually graduated from therapy. She envisioned a little box surrounded by wedding announcements in the back of the Style section of the Sunday Times:

  Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Goodman of Bethesda, Maryland, are pleased to announce that after seven years of grueling biweekly sessions their daughter, Jody Beth,has finished therapy, graduating with honors from the practice of BarbaraSchwartz in Georgetown. Jody’sdegree is in human relations and self-actualization. She is in the process of finally leaving home and will be working for a film production company in New York City. The graduate will keep both her name and her sanity.

  It wasn’t as if Jody had been an inpatient, locked up behind doors that said FIRE EXIT ONLY. She was a perfectly normal twenty-four-year-old who’d been in therapy for more than half her life and therefore would never again be normal, not in the truest sense of the word.

  She imagined her mother hovering over her crib, watching for the first signs of maladaptation.

  “I’m not going,” Jody had said. She was three years old and starting nursery school.

  “Please go,” her mother said.

  They were sitting in the parking lot arguing while all the other mothers were unloading little children from their station wagons.

  “Get out of the car,” her mother said.

  Jody shook her head.

  “I’ll pick you up at noon, sweetie, I promise — just go on.”

  There was something in her mother’s voice that made it impossible for Jody to leave the car, even though secretly she liked the idea of nursery school.

  The first time Jody went to “see someone,” she was in the fourth grade. Her mother made the appointment with one of their pediatricians.

  “This doctor does a special thing,” her mother said. “Besides taking care of colds, he talks to children.”

  “About what?” Jody asked.

  “Anything you like.”

  The doctor was running late, so Jody and her mother sat for an hour in the waiting room with all the sick children. Jody didn’t want to play with anything. The toys, even the lava lamp, had lost their charm. She watched children and mothers come out of the bathroom with urine samples in clear plastic cups and thought about what this man was going to ask her. All that came to mind was sex. He would ask if she’d gotten her period yet, and Jody would have to tell him that she was only nine and wouldn’t be expecting it for a good while yet. He’d ask all kinds of questions like that and then he might make her take her clothes off. After all, he was a doctor. Jody didn’t want to go. When the nurse called her name, Jody stood up slowly and her mother pushed her forward. She started walking down the hall toward the doctor at the end, but then turned and saw the open door behind her and the sky and the parking lot outside. Jody ran. She ran outside and around and around in the parking lot until she found the car, then opened the door and locked herself in.

  The doctor and her mother came out, pressed their faces to the window, and begged her to open the door. Her mother tapped the window with her car keys, as if to rub in the fact that if she wanted to, she could unlock the door herself. Jody held the door button down with such pressure that her fingers turned white, bloodless. The doctor shook his head at her mother and she put away the keys. “You don’t want to force her,” he said in a voice that sounded soft through the glass. He smiled at her. She’d never seen a doctor out of context before. The strangeness of his white coat against the sea of cars confused her. She bent her fingers around the button as if to pull it up, but then came to her senses. No matter how much she might have wanted to give in, to have the doctor ever so gently take her hand and lead her down to the hall to his office, there was something so incredibly strange about the idea of just sitting there talking to him that she couldn’t go through with it.

  “Maybe another time,” the doctor said, and he and Jody’s mother turned around and went back into the building.

  A few minutes later Jody’s mother came out again, alone. Watching her mother walk empty-faced toward the car, Jody hated her more than anything. Jody unlocked the door, crawled over the front seat and into the back. They didn’t say anything the whole way home.

  The next time, her mother took her to someone whose office was in an apartment building. The waiting room was just off the kitchen; the doctor’s office was the bedroom. Jody thought the whole thing was a bad trick, a disgusting disguise. The psychiatrist tried to get her to play cards and checkers with him, hoping she’d slip and say something incredibly important if he let her jump his king.

  “Why do you think you get so many sore throats?” he once asked when they were playing gin.

  Jody put down her cards and opened her mouth. “Well,” she said, po
inting down her throat so far she nearly gagged, “the part back here gets a kind of a cold in it and turns red. I think it’s red now.” She opened her mouth again, but he didn’t look. “And then it really starts to hurt and it goes up into my ear and I have to put my whole head on a heating pad.”

  “But why do you get so many sore throats?” he asked again.

  In retrospect, Jody wondered what he had expected her to say: Well, I was never breast-fed, and considering the throat and mouth as an important area of contact between mother and child, I guess you could say that a soreness or pain in this area later in life might result from not having fulfilled the original bonding between mother and child.

  Why do I get so many sore throats? I’m a hypochondriac, of course. Or maybe I’m a lazy fucking asshole. I’m in sixth grade and I’d rather stay home and eat ice cream all day, watch soap operas, and read the porno magazines I found down in the basement. That’s my idea of the good life.

  “Why don’t you talk to my mother?” Jody said, then opened the door and pulled her mother into the room. There were only two chairs in the doctor’s office, so Jody sat on the floor at her mother’s feet and refused to talk. She was onto something, even if she couldn’t tell anyone what it was: by bringing her mother in, and making her do the talking, Jody was telling the shrink that it was her mother who was the problem. But no one seemed to get it.

  When she was in high school and her report card featured more absences than presences, her mother took her to see Barbara Schwartz. She dropped Jody off in front of the building in Georgetown, gave her the office number, and said she’d be waiting right there by the curb. For seven years — through high school and on college vacations, once a week, twice a week, sometimes three times a week — she’d gone to Barbara Schwartz. For seven years Jody sat in the same chair and looked out the big windows onto the parking lot while stories of her life escaped her like various gases, sometimes toxic, sometimes not. A lifetime in a chair.

  In the end Barbara said, “We’ve been talking about your leaving for a while now — do you have any last thoughts about it?”

  Jody was still sitting in the same exact chair. The chrome arms were losing their shine, they were starting to get wobbly, and sometimes she could feel little sharp things poking her ass through the cushion. She wanted to say, I was thinking that maybe if I could buy this chair from you, if I could take it with me wherever I go and sit on it for an hour or so a couple of times a week, everything will be all right. But instead she said, “I’m just a little nervous.”