A. Homes: In A Country Of Mothers

“I have an, uh, appointment,” she whispered to Karl. “Be back in ninety minutes.” She figured fifty for the shrinking, forty there and back.

“Gotcha,” Karl said, winking.

She walked straight down Broadway, passing the bookstore where they were shooting, the production trailers and trucks, smiling, nodding hello and good morning. Once she was in the clear, with everything and everyone behind her, she flagged a cab. Within seconds she was stuck in traffic.

It was as if all of Manhattan had poured out onto the streets, the city itself doing a snakish shuffle-and-stop, shuffle-and-stop, like the “Soul Train” dance line. She checked her watch. She could’ve taken the subway, but the last time she was on it, something horrible had happened: the train ran over a man and they’d kept the subway doors closed until the police came. Jody was forced to sit there while the man moaned somewhere beneath her on the tracks.

The shrink’s office was on Sixth Avenue near Houston, seventy-some blocks from the location and about fifteen from Jody’s apartment. She was late. Timing the two-minute-forty-second wait for the elevator, she figured how much standing in the lobby was costing her. On the way up she entertained herself with questions like: Do all the offices in the building belong to shrinks? Is everyone in this elevator crazy?

On the third floor, she found Claire’s office and pushed the buzzer marked “Roth.”

“Hello,” a muffled voice called through a small speaker in the wall.

Jody considered not going in, not meeting Claire Roth face-to-face but having the session out there in the hall, chatting it up with a hidden voice, as if talking to the Wizard of Oz. “It’s Jody Goodman.”

The door unlocked with a thick sound like a joy buzzer. Jody grabbed the knob and pushed.

The waiting room was long and thin, three doors with chairs in the spaces between the doors. Jody sat on the chair closest to the door going out, unsure whether you were supposed to sit in an assigned chair — the chair next to the door that belonged to your shrink? The whole thing felt like a puzzle, a test designed to reveal something significant about Jody’s psyche. She had the urge to get up, take the subway back uptown, and call later to say she’d realized that she’d left the toaster oven on and had to hurry home. Reschedule? Well, right now I’m kind of busy. Oh, there’s my other line. Gotta go.

There were two noise machines on the floor, filling the room with the rushing sound of mechanically driven air. She was proud of herself for knowing what they were: shrink technology, white noise. They sounded like a constantly droning vacuum cleaner. Jody closed her eyes and imagined holding one to her ear like a shell. More than once, when she and Barbara reached sensitive points in what Jody called their “negotiations,” she’d wanted to lean forward and say, “Your sound machines don’t do shit.”

The door at the end of the hall opened. “See you Thursday,” a soft voice said. Because she couldn’t decide who to look at, the patient or the shrink, Jody saw nothing.

“Hi, I’m Claire,” the shrink said, extending her hand.

“Hi,” Jody said, shaking hands, worried that the shrink could feel her trembling, her sweat.

“Would you like to come in?”

I must be crazy, Jody thought as she walked over the threshold into the office. There were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, an old wooden desk, a leather sofa, a small table for the requisite box of Kleenex, and one chair. Claire sat in the chair, Jody on the sofa. It was easy, obvious.

“So,” Claire said, picking up a big yellow legal pad and resting it on her lap. “What’s going on?”

“I really shouldn’t be doing this,” Jody said, laughing a little. “I just escaped from the set of a movie, and coming here, sitting here, I feel like I’m in a movie.” Jody paused.

Two seconds had passed. Jody couldn’t imagine lasting an hour. There was silence. Jody looked at Claire and noticed she was wearing a short skirt. She’d never seen a shrink in a short skirt before. She hoped it was a good sign.

“You made the appointment,” Claire said. “There must be something on your mind.”

Jody had the sensation of auditioning to be Claire’s patient. At the end of the hour, just like a casting director or a theatrical agent, Claire would stand up and say, Look, this is all very interesting, but I really don’t work with people like you.

“On the phone you said you were having some difficulty making career decisions. Would you like to talk about that?”

Again Jody laughed, but it came out more like a snort. “For as long as I can remember I wanted to go to UCLA film school, so this year I applied, got in. And now, all of a sudden, I’m not sure.”

Jody wanted Claire to like her, to choose her. She didn’t want to say anything about herself that would seem too terrible, too complicated. She wanted Claire to think she was easy.

“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?”