A. Homes: In A Country Of Mothers

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, pointing 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.”

Jody had said “I’m just a little nervous” in the same way Dustin Hoffman said “I’m just a little worried about my future” in The Graduate.