In A Country Of Mothers

by A M Homes

  In all her thoughts, in all her fantasies, it had never occurred to Claire that a daughter could turn on a mother, that a daughter could become a woman’s worst enemy.

  The phone rang and Claire grabbed it. “Hello,” she said. “Hello.”

  “It’s me,” Sam said excitedly. “We’re selling the apartment. They offered two-ninety-five, and I said yes. The realtor’s not in on the deal, so it’s all ours. You call the agent in Connecticut and offer two-eighty-five and call me back.”

  “I’m with a patient,” Claire said flatly, trying not to give anything away, not to Sam, not to Jody.

  “I’m here,” Sam said. “Call me when it’s over.”

  “I will,” Claire said, hanging up.

  Jody was standing.

  “We’re not out of time,” Claire said. “The session isn’t over.”

  “I’m done,” Jody said.

  “Please sit down. Let’s make a time for tomorrow.”

  Jody didn’t respond.

  “Twelve o’clock. I have a break afterwards, so we can go out for lunch.”

  “Bye,” Jody said, opening the door.

  “See you tomorrow, then,” Claire said. Waiting until Jody was gone, she frantically flipped through her address book for the real estate agent’s number.

  35

  Pots and pans. In January Jody had made a trip to Macy’s, a rare outing. She’d bought pots and pans, thinking that eating properly was part of getting well. For months they sat shiny and unused on top of the stove. Now Jody stood in the center of her apartment and banged the eight-inch frying pan against her body with all the vim and vigor of a bell ringer. Slam for wanting, and slam for now expecting, slam, Claire to help her; for being stupid enough to let down her defenses, the punishment would be severe; she’d have to suffer. She smashed the pan into her ribs, testing the depth of her anger. She fixed the video camera to a tripod, turned the camera on herself, and recorded the howling and wailing, the clash of aluminum and copper against skin and bone. Only when her chest made a strange thin whistle as she breathed and her skin was too tender to touch, only when she was stupid with pain, did she quit. She played the tape back; it came off like a PBS documentary on upper-middle-class white women’s tribal dancing. She watched herself beating herself and was sick. The pots and pans left deep bruises, injury, but no marks of their own. Jody liked that. No one could argue that she was doing it to be noticed.

  “She’s taking over my life,” Jody told her mother. “Invading my privacy, driving me over the edge.”

  “You’re afraid to let her really know you,” her mother said. “You don’t like anyone to know anything about you. Your father and I always used to wonder what in the world you were thinking.”

  “Mom!” Jody bellowed.

  “You always were very private. Remember how nervous you used to get before I’d go in for those parent/teacher conferences? You hated anyone talking about you.”

  “I caught her coming out of my building,” Jody said. “I have it on tape.”

  “It was probably someone who looks like her. You always think you’re seeing people. In the hospital you kept saying Aunt Sally was in the room next door — and she’d been dead for seven years.”

  “I had a fever of one hundred and four, Mom. I’m here now, feverless, in New York, and I’m telling you Claire Roth was in my building doing strange things. I told you — I have it on tape!”

  Jody started crying. She didn’t mean to, it just happened.

  “You know,” her mother said, “sometimes when people don’t feel well, it makes them a little crabby, a little suspicious.”

  “I’m not paranoid. This is real!” Jody howled, sure the neighbors could hear her.

  “Well, no one ever said you had to see her. It was your choice, Jody.”

  “You’re not hearing me. She’s going to kill me. One way or another I’m going to end up dead.”

  “Come on, honey, I really don’t—”

  Jody slammed the phone down and tried to remember Harry Birenbaum’s number. Harry would understand. She dialed his number and got his machine. “It’s Jody. Jody Goodman.” She stopped. “Are you there?” She paused again. “There’s something I need to talk to you about. Call me.”

  At the newsstand on the corner a headline announced an article called “Firing Your Shrink: Sixteen Steps to Getting Out Alive.” She bought the magazine, ran home to read the piece, then noticed that according to the bio it had been written by a “prominent psychotherapist and NYU professor.”

  Going to a therapist to talk about therapy. No one would believe.

  “Come in, come in,” the shrink said the next afternoon as Jody stepped into his office.

  He had a beard, wire-rimmed glasses, and a hooked nose. His office was cold, dark, and small, with one chair — the doctor’s — and a sofa that smelled moist. Jody perched uneasily on the edge.

  “On the telephone,” he said, “you mentioned having some questions about therapy.”

  “I’ve been seeing this woman. She used to be amazing, but now she’s driving me crazy. She’s making me want to kill myself.”

  “Ah, you’re a lesbian.”

  “No. My shrink. I’m talking about my shrink.”

  “So you’re seeing another therapist,” he said. “Does he know you’re here?”

  “It’s a she, and no — she doesn’t.” Jody thought maybe he needed a hearing aid.

  “Well, you’ll have to tell him.”

  “The reason I came to see you is that I need to get some distance, perspective. As I mentioned on the phone, I read your article and thought maybe you could help. The woman I’m seeing — my shrink — she calls me all the time, invites me to dinner, makes me go ice skating with her family.” Jody took a breath. “She came into into my building and stole my mail.”

  “So, your fantasy is that she invites you … and then what happens?”

  “It’s not my fantasy. It’s real.”

  “I can assure you that I would never invite you anywhere or call you at home except to change an appointment.”

  The session had hardly begun and already Jody wanted out. Claire was a genius compared to this guy, so what if she was torturing Jody? At least it wasn’t like being in a Three Stooges movie.

  “It’s becoming very destructive. I feel like I’m being forced to do something drastic.”

  “Do you dream about her?”

  When Jody didn’t answer, he started in on a long discussion, more like a presentation, on the peculiar and sometimes perverse ways in which women relate. It was all too interesting to him — something that would make a great paper, another article for the magazine, or maybe even a book. As the clock ticked, Jody became more and more alarmed, convinced that she was sinking into something that she’d never be able to escape. She felt as though she were in a room where insanity divided exponentially and suddenly there was nothing left.

  A bell went off, startling her. The shrink pointed to an egg timer on his desk and Jody realized that for the past twenty-five minutes she’d just been sitting there, daydreaming. “We’re out of time,” the shrink said. “I suggest you come back on Thursday.”

  “I’ll check my schedule,” Jody said, going for the door. “I’ll call you.”

  • • •

  “Okay, you really want to know why you won’t help yourself?” Ellen asked. “It’s because you don’t think you’re worth it. You think you’re shit because some people have failed you. You’re looking for the perfect this, the perfect that — family, mother, whatever. The thing is, you’re never going to find it. It doesn’t exist.”

  Jody didn’t respond. She gazed out the window and thought about hanging up the phone.

  “You’re unrealistic. Instead of being happy with what you’ve got, you go to someone else, a substitute, a shrink. Fine, except your shrink’s crazy.” Ellen paused. “You have to learn to be what you need; to love yourself more than anyone else would ever love you. You’re the only on
e who really knows what you want.”

  “And you’ve been reading too many new-age books. Discover your inner self and blah, blah, blah.”

  “I’m telling you the truth and you don’t like it.”

  “So, what if you’re right?”

  “I have to put you on hold,” Ellen said.

  Jody heard the week in weather, the forecast for Dallas-Fort Worth, and the Eagles song “Hotel California.” She fingered the pack of matches on her desk. Self-punishment. As if the whole thing were her fault from beginning to end. Every time Jody went to Claire’s office, she wore the marks of a new self-inflicted injury. It had taken Claire an unbelievably long time to catch on. The other day, when Jody went in with her face, arms, and neck covered with thin, bloody razor lines, Claire innocently asked what had happened.

  “Nothing happened,” Jody said flatly. She knew it was crazy. It made no sense and still she did it. She did it again and again, as if externalizing her pain, literally painting it across her body, would either make it go away or get someone to notice.

  “I don’t get it,” Claire said.

  “Obviously.”

  There was no way she could demonstrate her need any louder without sawing herself in half.

  “You’re an idiot,” she had told Claire near the end of the session. “A total fucking idiot.” She rolled up her sleeves and flashed a thick, fleshy burn. “How do you think this happened? You did it. You did it to me and I did it to myself. I wish I’d never met you.”

  Then she had pulled a pack of matches out of her pocket, lit one, and pressed it into her arm, extinguishing the flame on her flesh. She felt like a bad actress in a bad movie.

  “Stop it,” Claire had said, slapping at the matches. “Stop it!”

  There’s millions of matches in this world, millions of fires to set, Jody had thought as she slipped the matches back into her pocket.

  “What you need,” Ellen said, coming back on the line, “is to get away from her, extricate. You didn’t come all this way to kill yourself, that’s for sure. Gotta go, I’ll talk to you later.”

  The war escalated — over the phone, in Claire’s office, on the streets of New York. “How could you act like this after all I’ve done?” Claire screamed at Jody. “How could you even think of hurting yourself when someone cares about you as much as I do?” She threw her hands up in the air as if raising the question to the gods.

  It was as simple and complicated as falling in and out of love. It was like the moment ten years into a marriage when you realize it’s over — but in a marriage you might stay, you might develop outside interests, build an addition to the house, take a leisurely trip around the world, have an affair. In therapy there was nothing except fifty minutes in that room.

  “What do you want from me? Tell me,” Jody said when Claire called her for the third time in a single morning. “What do you want, blood?” Before Claire could answer, Jody hurled a glass against the wall and watched it splinter across the room. She had the urge to dance on the fragments, to roll in the shards.

  “You need something I can’t give you,” Claire said.

  “You made me need it — I gave myself to you.”

  “And I to you,” Claire said.

  “But I’m paying for this,” Jody said. “It’s costing me.”

  “My twelve o’clock’s here,” Claire said. “I’ll speak to you later.”

  “Yeah,” Jody said. “The highlight of my fucking day.”

  Jody took the bus across town to Radio Shack. She bought a tape recorder, a dozen cassettes, and a little device that hooked up to the phone and recorded conversations. Video wasn’t enough. She had to start documenting everything Claire was saying and doing to her. This way, if something horrible happened, there would be proof that she’d been herded to the edge.

  “You say she follows you around, lures you out skating, telephones you incessantly, and makes you feel as though you’re losing your mind?” Harry asked when the round of phone tag was finally over. In the background she could hear a zydeco band playing and, again and again, the clink of ice cubes against glass.

  “Yes,” Jody said, excited that for once someone was going to understand. Though drunk, Harry listened patiently while she spilled the whole story.

  “Has she got you good and gaslighted?” Harry asked when she finished. “Has she twisted you round and round like limp cherry licorice?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Have some sympathy, darling. Don’t be so critical of your elders. All she wants is what everybody wants — to get between some lovely young thighs.” Harry sighed, then belched.

  If Jody had more energy, or if it had come from anyone but Harry himself, she would have hung up.

  Harry wheezed a thick wheeze. “I’m too old to be so drunk. Forgive me, young one, forgive me. You said you had a story to tell. I am in a frame of mind to hear a story.”

  “I just told it to you,” Jody said, depressed. “The shrink, the girl, my life.”

  “Have you got another one?”

  “No,” Jody said. “You’re plastered, Harry. It’s not like you to be completely incoherent.”

  “It’s the gin. Bombay. And the heat. I’ve died and gone to hell.”

  “Call me if you get to New York,” Jody said, and hung up.

  Late that night, while she was sleeping, the phone rang. Jody heard it through her dream, as a bell or a buzzer. It continued to ring and finally Jody woke up, heart racing. As soon as she picked up, the new recording equipment clicked on, and somehow the even hum of the spinning tape cleared her mind instantly. “Hello,” she said.

  “I was thinking about you,” Claire said.

  “It’s one-thirty in the morning,” Jody said, looking at the glow-in-the-dark numbers on her travel clock.

  “I feel very badly about what’s happening.”

  “You’re driving me crazy.”

  “I’m trying to help you. Can you come in tomorrow morning? There’s something I want to talk to you about, something I have to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll tell you in the morning. Nine-thirty. See you then.”

  Jody fell back asleep and dreamt that Claire kidnapped her and took her to a high-class nuthouse somewhere in the Berkshires. At the last minute, at the entrance gates, everything turned around, and in the end it was Claire who they locked up and Jody who drove the car back to New York, exhilarated.

  At nine-twenty-five she was in Claire’s office.

  “I’m moving,” Claire said as soon as Jody sat down. “I thought you should know. I’m buying a house in Connecticut. I’ll keep the office here, but I’ll be less available. I’m not leaving you, just the city. I should’ve said something sooner, but it all happened very fast. I’m sorry.” She drew a breath. “I hope you won’t make this difficult.”

  In her darkest, wildest, most depressing dreams, this was something Jody had never imagined. She felt her face change. She didn’t know if it turned red, white, or blue, there was no way of knowing. She just felt it change; the features caved in on themselves, mouth pulled tight, eyes narrowed.

  “I hope you won’t make this difficult,” Claire had said. What did she think Jody would do — block the exits from Claire’s building, stop the movers from loading their trucks, hold the family hostage until Claire agreed not to go?

  “It’ll be okay. I’ll be in the office three days a week. We’ll talk over the phone. It’ll be better, in fact. I’ll be more relaxed, more able to help.”

  Jody continued to implode, her whole body drawing in on itself.

  “Are you all right?” Claire asked. “Talk to me. I want you to say something.”

  Jody lifted her shriveled face, her lips feeling as if they were glued together by thoughts unspoken, and stared at Claire. There was nothing to say.

  “Now,” Claire said, “unfortunately, I have to see someone else, but I hope we can get together tomorrow. By then maybe you’ll be a bit more communica
tive.”

  In a trance, Jody lifted herself from the chair and went home. She envisioned going into the drugstore and asking where to find the razor blades as innocently as she’d ask about toothpaste. She saw herself examining the razor blades, picking up a package of every kind to see where they were made, what the special features were, and how much they cost. What did it mean, what was the difference if you killed yourself with cheap ones instead of the fancy brands? Either way it would be over.

  I’m going to kill myself, going to kill … It was like having people over for dinner — you had to shop for it. Jody went into a hardware store. “Can I get some help here?” she asked the pack of salesmen picking their teeth at the back of the store. “I want a rope.” One of them stepped forward, led her down an aisle, and handed her a small coil.

  “What can you tell me about this rope?” she asked.

  The man didn’t answer; he must have been working for the other side.

  “How strong is it?”

  “What do you need it to hold?”

  A body, she thought. “A hundred and thirty pounds,” she said, but didn’t tell him that she hadn’t eaten a real meal in months, and didn’t weigh even a hundred and eighteen anymore, that it was probably closer to a hundred and five.

  “This’ll do you,” he said, holding up a package that looked like twine.

  “I’ll take nine feet of that one,” she said, pointing to a rope thick enough to hoist a piano. “Better safe than sorry.”

  At the register, she waited for the guy to flip through a mystery list of people who weren’t allowed to buy rope. She expected him to ask for a permission slip.

  “Four-fifty,” he said, putting the rope into a bag.

  On the way home, she stopped in the local erotic emporium and bought handcuffs. She could pick up a clear plastic bag from the supermarket produce department, slide it over her head, and tape it around her neck with thick layers of duct tape. She could pour a gallon of gasoline into the tub, wrap the rope around the shower nozzle and her neck, slip the plastic bag over her head, and light a match. She imagined a loud whoosh, a hot flash, a kind of choking, and then nothing.