“I’M NOT SURE,” I SAY, AND DR. PHALER NODS. HER WOOL suit shimmers.
Dr. Phaler has clothes like moods. Passive, soft, pastel sweaters. Bitter navy blue suits and scarves decorated with geometric shapes, as sharp as words you’ve uttered and can’t take back, words you have to wear, now, as a punishment around your neck.
She has a few premenstrual dresses, too—too tight, trying too hard to keep too much in, ready to let loose in an explosion of skin, popping the pearl buttons, ripping through the ribbons and lace—though Dr. Phaler is in her fifties. She must be done with blood. Or maybe not—
Once, I arrived twenty minutes early to my appointment and surprised her in the rest room in the hall outside her waiting room. She was wrapping something in tissue paper, and it looked like a tampon, or a newborn kitten—something bloody, with a tail. I might have gasped when I saw it in her hand.
“I’ll be with you in twenty minutes,” she’d said, professionally, throwing whatever it was into the trash.
But today she is a conservative bride, getting married at the courthouse in a hurry. But a bride with a secret, perhaps: Under her white skirt, I can see panty lines—a secret she’s tried to suppress.
“I don’t miss her,” I continue.
Dr. Phaler bites her lower lip. “No.” She shakes her head, and her blonde hair, which she’s cut since I first came to see her about a year ago, clings in wisps to her eyes and lips. She whisks it away with her fingertips. “No, I didn’t think you did.”
Last January, Dr. Phaler would not have given me even this—this little hint that she knew who I was, suspected how I felt. In the beginning she only wanted to hear about my dreams—all those snowstorms I’d lost my mother in, all those locked trunks and frozen outhouses and buses skidding off the ice into ravines. Nodding, nodding, nodding.
That nodding, I must admit, gave me confidence. It was as if that nodding gave an order to everything, an A-okay: The Doctor has heard all this before, read it in a textbook, taken and passed a test on it.
That nodding made it seem as if those details, as random as they appeared, made some sense, added up to something for Dr. Phaler, accorded with her professional opinions, her scientific constructs, and I began to see a pattern in them myself—began to see the ways in which those blizzards represented my mother’s distance, symbolized her emotional withholding, how her disapproval had become a metaphor in my dreams since she’d abandoned me for real, after so many years of cool remove, icy glances across the dining room table at my father and me—
And as I came to these conclusions, Dr. Phaler nodded.
Only once she said, “Your mother sounds cold-hearted,” and then we both nodded in approval at how snugly all the pieces—the adjectives and the nouns and the experience and the dreams—fit: nodded at how simple the mind, in all its complexity, is. Perhaps we each pictured a heart, frozen in mid-beat, locked in a human ice chest.
It was at the end of one of those sessions, in the midst of one of these epiphanies, that I finally cried, and Dr. Phaler whipped out her box of sticky tissues—epidermal and pink.
But as the year spun forward, and I spent every Thursday from 4:00 to 4:50 in her office with its nearly empty bookcases and comfortable purple chairs, she started to ask for specifics. I told her how my mother, since I was a child, had told me I was fat, had not allowed me to put one morsel of food in my mouth without sneering at it—hexing, cursing, poisoning it—first. I told her how, in the weeks before she left, she’d begun to walk around the house half dressed, flirt with Phil, call me a pig in front of him—and Dr. Phaler, blue eyes darting around the room, pressed me for more. I told her about the night my mother came into my room and yanked the sheets off me, demanded to know if I was fucking Phil, called me a slut, and told me I was too fat and ugly to please a boy like that—and, finally, after all the hours of composure and nodding, nodding and composure, Dr. Phaler looked appalled and said, “What kind of mother would do a thing like that?”
It was her first judgment, and it stunned me.
Inexplicably, I felt something rush into my mouth—placenta, tentacles, phlegm—and, without missing a beat, I said, “My mother.”
Of course, it had been rhetorical, and, answering that question, I sounded defensive, angry, all my naked longing and loss in those two words.
After that, at least once a session, Dr. Phaler asked that question, but I no longer answered.
Now, Dr. Phaler is braiding the silver chain from which her silver glasses dangle between her fingers. The fingers are elegant. The fingers of beautiful women—aren’t they always like fancy cookies? Lady fingers.
I could imagine Dr. Phaler forty years ago, a little girl carrying a napkinful of cookies across the jade green of a lawn party in her own honor.
“No,” she says, “I didn’t expect you to say you miss your mother, but I do wonder how her absence for one full year might make you feel.”
I swallow. I say, “Surprised, I guess. I guess I’m surprised.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I guess I’m surprised she could hold out this long. I guess if nothing else I thought she’d come back for money, or shoes, or something else she needed.”
“What about you?” Dr. Phaler sets those pale blue eyes on me. “Is it surprising that she could hold out this long on you?”
Now Dr. Phaler’s glaring at the floor, at the face of my bad mother projected on her expensive oriental rug. She does not approve of my mother. She is paid to disapprove of my mother. It is what psychologists like her do for a living all day all over this country—express outrage at the failings of our mothers.
But why? Among some species, it’s considered natural enough for a mother to gobble down her young—
A mother gets hungry.
A mother gets bored.
And who could blame her? As a baby, you were fat, and pukey, and dull. You knew only a handful of words, but she spent all day trying to talk to you. You clamped your mouth shut as she fed you, then knocked the spoon from her hands, laughed as it clanged across the floor. You shit your pants when she dressed you up, then screamed as she changed your clothes. You threw your shoe from the car window. You scratched your name in the paneling on the side of the station wagon.
“Do you love Mama?” she asked, and you shook your head no, no, no.
Not guilty by reason of insanity, any reasonable jury could conclude.
“Kat,” she says, “I asked you a question. Aren’t you surprised that she could hold out a whole year on you?”
Dear, beautiful Dr. Phaler—
Angel of Naivete.
Angel of Stupid Questions.
For a year her predictability, her belief in the simplicity, the banality, of the human brain has thrilled and astounded and insulted me—
“No,” I say, and shake my head. “It doesn’t surprise me at all.”
SHE’S WEARING A WHITE NIGHTGOWN, STANDING IN THE doorway of my bedroom. “Kat,” she says, “I put my hands in the water, and they disappeared.”
She holds her arms up, the sleeves of her nightgown slip down to the elbows, and I can see that the hands are gone.
“What water?” I want to know: I’m her daughter. I’m worried about my own hands.
“The dishwater,” she says. “I was feeling the bottom of the sink for a spoon. The water was too cold.”