I try Margaret, but, as this is not technically a life-threatening emergency, I don’t leave a message. Next I call my aunt, who I hope will at least tell me I am not a sack of rancid garbage shaped like a human.
“Your mom isn’t easy, and neither are you,” she says. “I don’t know how you’ll fix it, I just know that you have to.” She suggests I call her friend, “relationship expert” Dr. Linda Jordan. “Linda will have thoughts,” she promises. “And she is great with giving fast and efficient advice.”
Advice? My therapist has never given me advice. She’s all about making me give myself advice.
So, about to commit my second major betrayal since the one my mother can tell you all about, I call someone else’s therapist.
Relationship Expert Dr. Linda Jordan is on a trip to Washington, D.C., with friends from college, so she calls me back from a bench outside the Smithsonian. It turns out we’ve met—years ago, at a Bat Mitzvah—and I vaguely remember her cap of honey hair and a handful of chunky diamond rings. “So, what’s going on?” she asks, with the warm but solution-oriented tone of a high-powered divorce attorney.
I let it all pour out. What I did. What my mother did back. What we’d both done to each other since we did those first things that we did. “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” Linda says, letting me know she’s with me.
Finally, I breathe. “So. Am I terrible?”
For the next twenty minutes, Linda talks. First, she explains some basic “facts” about the mother-daughter relationship. (“You are her possession, but you are also a person.”) Next, she tells me that we’ve both behaved in perfectly understandable, if unpleasant, ways. (“I get it” is a favorite phrase.) “So,” she concludes. “This is actually a chance to reach the next phase of your bond if you will let it be. I know that you can come out of this stronger than before if you can tell her, ‘You’re my mother, and I need you, but in a different way than before. Please let us change, together.’ ”
I hang up and feel the panic subside for the first time in days: Relationship Expert Dr. Linda Jordan has helped me. And fast. It wasn’t like Margaret, where I talk around something and she nods and we discuss a Henry James novel I’ve only read part of and then we meander back to the topic of my grandmother and how I’d kill to be asleep and then I compliment her shoes, which are, as always, fabulous. I asked a question and Dr. Linda Jordan gave me an answer. And now I have the tools to fix it.
I hang up the phone and call my mother: “I love you,” I say. “You’re my mother, and I need you, but in a different way than before. Please let us change, together.”
“That’s fucking bullshit,” she says. I can tell she’s in a store.
Audrey has had fifteen sinus infections this winter alone so, doctor’s orders, she is having her nose broken, septum straightened, tonsils and adenoids removed. Five of us troop uptown to Robyn’s apartment, where Audrey is recuperating. Before we ring the doorbell we put on Groucho glasses with attached noses and hold up our jug of soup.
Robyn answers in yoga pants. “The patient is this way,” she says.
Audrey lies on Robyn’s four-poster bed, nose bandaged, looking even tinier than usual. Robyn climbs onto the bed beside her. “How you feeling, sweetie?”
The other girls head to the kitchen to unpack the magazines and cookies we bought from a kiosk in the subway. And, as if we’ve done it fifty times before, as if we are a family, I crawl into bed with Audrey and Robyn. We all need to be taken care of sometimes.
Margaret and I have talked on the phone from just about everywhere. I’ve called her from beaches, speeding vehicles in western states, crouched behind a Dumpster, in the parking lot of my college dormitory, and from my bedroom ten blocks from her office, when I didn’t have the energy to make my way to her couch. From Europe, Japan, and Israel. I’ve whispered to her about guys who were sleeping next to me. Never has the sound of her voice, that calm but expectant hello, not put me at ease. She answers on the second ring, and all my muscles and veins relax.
On a recent vacation, I call her from the Arizona desert, wearing only my underwear, baking my flesh by a plunge pool. I spend the majority of our session telling her about the furniture shopping my boyfriend and I have done that morning. Our first time making real aesthetic choices as a couple, we successfully selected a coffee table, two bronze deer, and a pair of torn leatherette barstools. Unable to resist, I threw a Cubist ceramic cat into the mix.
“I really feel like we have similar taste!” I gush, ignoring how unsure she sounds about the addition of kitschy metal animals to a living room.
“That’s wonderful,” she says. “My husband and I have always had similar taste and it really makes creating a home such a pleasure.” With her accent, “pleasure” sounds like pleeeshuh. Such a pleeshuh.
Stunned, I wait a beat.