And so my third session is with Robyn. Robyn’s office is down the block from our apartment and, sensing some trepidation, my mother pulls me aside and says to think of it like a play date. If I like playing with her, I can go back. If not, we’ll find someone else for me to play with. I nod, but I’m well aware that most play dates don’t revolve around someone trying to figure out whether you’re crazy or not.
In our first session, Robyn sits on the floor with me, her legs tucked under her like she’s just a friend who has come by to hang out. She looks like the mom on a television show, with big curly hair and a silky blouse. She asks me how old I am, and I respond by asking her how old she is—after all, we’re sitting on the floor together. “Thirty-four,” she says. My mother was thirty-six when I was born. Robyn is different from my mother in lots of ways, starting with her clothes: a skirt-suit, sheer tights, and clean black high heels. Different from my mother, who looks like her normal self when she dresses as a witch for Halloween.
Robyn lets me ask her whatever I want. She has two daughters. She lives uptown. She’s Jewish. Her middle name is Laura, and her favorite food is cereal. By the time I leave, I think that she could fix me.
The germophobia morphs into hypochondria morphs into sexual anxiety morphs into the pain and angst that accompany entry into middle school. Over time, Robyn and I develop a shorthand for things I’m too embarrassed to say: “Masturbation” becomes “M,” “sexuality” becomes “ooality,” and my crushes become “him.” I don’t like the term “gray area,” as in “the gray area between being scared and aroused,” so Robyn coins “the pink area.” We eventually move into her adult office but stay sitting on the floor. We’ll often share a box of Special K or a croissant.
She teaches me how to needlepoint, abstract geometric designs in autumnal threads. When I turn thirteen she throws me a private atheistic Bat Mitzvah—just us two—where we eat half a pound of prosciutto. She tells me that soon she’ll be getting a real Bat Mitzvah, even though she’s almost forty now.
One evening I see her on the subway, and our interaction, warm but disorienting, inspires a poem, the last lines of which are: “I guess you are not my mother. You will never be my mother.” I make her a painting, a girl with big Keane eyes crying violet tears, and she tells me that she’s hung it in her bathroom, along with a free-form nude I did using gouache. I bring my disposable camera and take pictures of us hanging out and drawing, just like pals do.
The work we’re doing together helps, but even three mornings a week isn’t enough to stop the terrible thoughts, the fear of sleep and of life in general. Sometimes, to manage the images that come unbidden, I force myself to picture my parents copulating in intricate patterns, summoning the image in sets of eight, for so long that looking at them makes me nauseous.
“Mom,” I say. “Turn away from me so I won’t think of sex.”
Sitting with my mother in the beauty salon one afternoon, I come across an article about obsessive-compulsive disorder. A woman describes her life, so burdened with obsessions that she has to lick art in museums and crawl on the sidewalk. Her symptoms aren’t much worse than mine: the magazine’s description of her most horrible day parallels my average one. I tear the article out and bring it to Robyn, whose face crumples sympathetically, as though the moment she’d been dreading had finally arrived. It makes me want to throw my needlepoint supplies in her face. Do I have to do everything myself?
One day, when I’m fourteen, Robyn warns me that she might get an important call during our session. She’s sorry, but she has to take it, wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t a real emergency. She’s gone for about ten minutes, and when she returns she looks rattled. Takes a deep breath. “So—”
“Where’s your wedding ring?” I ask her.
“I’ll see you Wednesday, Leen,” Robyn says, and I pull on my orange parka and head for the elevator. In the waiting room are two teenagers—a blond boy, the kind of underdeveloped but cute thirteen-year-old male that drives seventh-grade gals crazy despite being four-foot-seven, and a pale girl with green streaks in her hair. I stare at her for a moment too long, because I recognize her: she’s the one in the photo in Robyn’s Filofax, which sometimes lies open on her desk. That’s Robyn’s daughter, Audrey.
I leave the office a beat before they do, but they catch up with me at the elevator, and I’m holding my breath as we ride down together, trying to somehow take her in without looking directly at her. I wish she were a picture in a magazine, so I could stare, rotate the page slightly, stare again.
Does she know who I am? Maybe she’s jealous. I would be. When we reach the ground floor, she looks right into my face. “He thinks you’re hot,” she says, motioning to her friend, then bolts.
I step out onto Broadway, beaming.