The Sand Hill Review               http://www.sandhillreview.org 2008

Therapy

            Merrill Joan Gerber

My mother called from her retirement home on Fairfax Avenue to say her big toe hurt and she hated to ask me this, but could I take her to the doctor. “The pain is unbearable.  Unendurable.”

“Did you stub your toe?”

“No, I did nothing.”

“Why not wait a day or two and see how it feels? What could a doctor do, anyway?”

“I can’t live with this pain. It’s killing me.”

I didn’t want to tell my mother I was seeing my therapist today since I’d never told her I was in therapy. If I did, she’d ask me if I thought it was her fault that she’d ruined my life and made me crazy.

“Let’s just wait till tomorrow.” If I told her I had an important appointment, she’d quiz me till I’d break down and tell the truth or get caught in a lie.

“If you say I have to wait, I’ll wait. If I fall down and have to lie on the floor all night, it’s not so bad, there’s a soft carpet here. I didn’t choose to get old. Wait till you’re old, you’ll see what it’s like.”

My therapist says that as bad as it is to have to do these services for my mother, it’s worse not to do them. I wonder if my therapist would do them for me if I paid her enough: pick up my mother and take her to the doctor. Is therapy of any use to me at all? Going to see Dr. Smith (and that, she claims, is her actual name!) gives a focus to my week and allows me to discuss what she calls my primary neurosis: my inability to buy clothing at the retail rate.  Though I live in a nice home (paid off) and though my husband and I have good jobs, I shop only in thrift shops, alongside the poor and desperate who have no money (though I sometimes notice Jaguars parked outside). Last week Dr. Smith gave me a list of the discount houses in downtown Los Angeles where she’s gone shopping and gotten great bargains. 

“Look at what I’m wearing,” she said. “A $200 blouse I got for only $30!”

“But look at my blouse,” I said. “I got it for $2.50 at the thrift shop.” I could see her restrain a sneer. I believe she suffers from designer tag addiction; much of her clothing displays a designer name on the outside. I would never consider wearing on my person an advertisement for some commercial product. Though I knew it wasn’t appropriate to confront one’s therapist with her own obsessions, I was tempted to bring her down to earth. I wanted her to realize that from the beginning of time, clothing has been made exactly the same way: a square of woven cloth, or a hide, with holes in it for a head and two arms. Labels were no big deal.

I had things to teach her. She had already violated the sacred trust between patient and therapist when one day, after my going to her office once a week for a year, she paused and asked, “By the way, did you say you had sons or daughters?”

I stared at her. She was just then looking absently out the window at the smoggy horizon of Los Angeles. “Do I have sons or daughters?” I had been discussing this with her for fifty-two weeks–my mother and her two daughters, myself and my three daughters. I had specifically told her that after giving birth to two daughters, I’d decided to have a third child to guarantee that I would create a different family pattern from my mother’s.

I challenged her in return, “Do you have children?”

“Why?” she asked, suddenly alert.

“Because I want to know. If you have children then you know what it’s like to be a mother.”

“And you think if I don’t have children then I can’t understand your problems?”

“The thought has crossed my mind.”

I knew Dr. Smith was not married because she didn’t wear a ring. She was very fashion conscious, so perhaps she was husband-hunting. She liked to wear big black plastic hoop earrings to match a black patent leather belt that I didn’t care for. But there were many things I didn’t enjoy about seeing her besides her hoops and belts.

Before I was allowed to start therapy, I had to take a long test with questions of this sort:

True or False: I often feel I have no friends and no one likes me. Then two pages later there would be this question:

True or False: I have plenty of friends and I am well-liked.

Did the Minnesota Multi-Phasic people think I was really that stupid? What if I wanted to write an essay saying, “Sometimes I feel I have no friends and other times I feel I have plenty of friends.” They allowed no margin for this kind of response.

I didn’t enjoy the sly, she-doesn’t-know-we’re-doing-this manipulation, even if the doctor gave me five sharpened-to-a-point Number 2 pencils for the test. It was a wonder she trusted me with sharp instruments of any kind.

Once I had told Dr. Smith about my appreciation for The Hemlock Society and their helpful work regarding self-deliverance for the terminally ill. I complained that the best drugs for this were barbiturates with a high toxicity level, but that these were impossible to get from doctors, who at most would give you a prescription for a mild tranquillizer.  As I spoke of these matters, Dr. Smith sat upright and started scribbling wildly on her chart.

“What is it?” I demanded. “This is no big deal!  I always talk about self-deliverance! One of my daughters brought home a friend from college and within five minutes, he and I were talking about the importance of letting the old and sick kill themselves if they so desired. And that I thought it criminal for Dr. Kevorkian to be in prison.”

Self-deliverance was one of my natural topics of conversation, the way men like to talk about sports. I hated to see Dr. Smith scribbling away, as if she had been idly panning for gold and had come upon a big juicy nugget.  She looked particularly silly that day, wearing long dangling earrings with little birdcages on them, and in each birdcage was a pink plastic toucan. She was also wearing pink metallic lipstick and pink nail polish. My guess of her age at that moment was that she was close to sixty-five, a good ten years older than me, though in a way, she looked as if she had wandered away from a clutch of teenagers in a shopping mall.

I didn’t enjoy driving downtown, parking in the Vermont Avenue mini-mall/supermarket parking lot next to my HMO where a sign proclaimed “No Medical Parking.  Cars not belonging to shoppers will be towed away.” But how could they know if I was a shopper or not? I wondered if I could leave a letter on my car explaining that I suffered from a phobia of five-story parking structures, that when I entered one of these spiral lanes leading upward, I would hyperventilate and recognize the start of a panic attack. I would beg to be allowed to park on the open, flat land in their parking lot just for one hour.

I had not yet discussed this phobia with my therapist, since there is only so much you can cram into a fifty-minute visit, ten minutes of which are devoted to making next week’s appointment. My therapist’s failure to remember if I had sons or daughters might be reason enough for me to terminate therapy. If I quit now I could take my mother to the doctor today. On the other hand, waiting in doctors’ offices also caused me panic attacks—being forced to watch a TV installed high up on the wall so you couldn’t shut it off, and having to watch Jerry Springer’s guests yell, “She’s pregnant with my husband’s baby and she’s my (bleeping) SISTER.”

I decided to drive to Dr. Smith’s. I checked the emergency kit in my car: water supply, flashlight, first aid kit, dried fruit and crackers. I entered the freeway where an extra lane opens up so that I wouldn’t have to merge with big rigs going by at 70 miles an hour. I slid into the tape player the story of Rapunzel, read by a gentle female voice. There was birdsong in the forest, the sighing of winds in the pines, the wonderful prince about to climb up Rapunzel’s golden tresses into her private bower. (My husband never noticed my hair, no matter how I wore it.)

Just as I was taking a long curve on an overpass that turns and declines slowly over four lanes of the freeway, I had an intimation that this was the moment The Big One would hit. The San Andreas fault would separate due to the weight of one mini-mall too many near Oxnard and the overpass would collapse. My daughters would be motherless and would be forced to decide what to do about the cabinet of cut glass that my mother gave me when she had to move into the retirement home. I should talk to Dr. Smith about the fear I have that my husband will one day take all the cut glass into the backyard and smash it with a mallet. During the last earthquake, I rushed to stand in the bedroom doorway while my husband checked hopefully to see if the cut glass had broken. Then he went to the back door to see if the pool was sloshing. Only that signified to him a real earthquake, otherwise he insisted that we’d only felt the rumble of a big truck going by.

When the quake struck, the day was extremely hot, and the radio announcer called it “shake and bake weather.” For several hours after the earthquake I sat in the yard with the portable phone, the portable radio and the portable potty. I chastised myself for not having put by one gallon of water per person per day, a camp stove with enough fuel to heat beans for a week, several hundred dollars in small bills in case the banks were destroyed and we had to buy black market purchases of batteries, bandages or a fire extinguisher.

I had made it safely over the overpass without an earthquake striking when it occurred to me that I was wearing my scuffed leather flats and Dr. Smith tended to stare at my feet critically during every session. That much negative scrutiny was demoralizing to me, so I decided I was going to run into a shoe store in the Vermont Avenue mini-mall to buy new shoes that could not be criticized during therapy and that would also give me proof (I’d leave the box in my car) that I was a bonafide user of the stores—“a shopper”—and thus could freely park in the lot.

As I exited the freeway and stopped at a red light, I heard loud rap music from the car that had pulled up next to me. A good-looking black man smiled at me; next to him sat a gorgeous black woman with her hair in cornrows.

He further opened his window and said something to me. I turned down the volume of “Rapunzel.”

“Have you ever had sex with a black man?” he called out to me. His girlfriend, laughing, leaned toward him and covered his mouth with her hand. I noticed she had long sparkling fingernails.

I laughed, too. To my surprise, I felt flattered.

“Want to follow us?” the man called, now also laughing. “To a motel on Santa Monica Boulevard?”

My God! The chance of a lifetime! My therapist had always said I would have to change at least one thing to break a stalemate, and I could break it now. I was tingling with the possibility. Should I act on this invitation? Years of cautions from my mother were rattling in my head. Could we first all exchange proof of recent HIV tests? I was sure this man knew all about G-spots. And his girlfriend was so tempting.

The light was changing. Now or never.

Never. I knew myself. At the green light, I sped along toward Vermont Avenue toward the shoe store. I felt tears in my eyes. I parked the car at the PayLess shoe store where my nostrils were assailed by the pungent smell of shiny plastic uppers made in China. I preferred shoe stores where no men had to kneel and handle my feet. I chose a pair of pointy black patent leather flats with a satin bow clipped to the front, thinking I could not disappoint Dr. Smith with these. They were on sale for $7, how could I go wrong? Afterward, I ran into Rite-Aid drugstore and bought a pair of black plastic hoop earrings, clip-on style.

By now I was late for my appointment, so ran out of the parking lot, going directly toward the medical buildings. I was clearly a patron of the stores, with my black earrings flapping on my ears and my new shoes already giving me blisters on my heels. I passed a vending cart at the curb and smelled the aroma of kosher hot dogs filling the air. I was seized with a desire to have such a morsel; I longed to bite into a bursting cylinder of steaming meat. I bought two, with the works, and carried them in their fluted white paper wrappers up to Dr. Smith’s office. She grinned with delight.  “This is my weakness,” she said. “Nathan’s are the best.”

“Look,” I said, for the first time feeling a spark of communion growing between us, ”I was supposed to take my mother to the doctor’s today, but I decided instead to come and see you.”

“Very wise,” she admitted, finally giving me the praise she had withheld for so long. “These old mothers of ours can drain our heart’s blood if we let them.”

“So why don’t we do something fun?” I suggested.  “You can take me to a discount clothing outlet, and then maybe we can find a first-rate thrift shop.”

She hesitated. I assured her that for a patient like me, a little on-site conditioning could only be good therapy. She made a few notes on her chart, now dotted with grease, and we finished up our hot dogs. On our way down in the elevator I saw the two of us reflected in its polished sides, looking like elderly twins, large black hoop earrings swinging in our ears. Outside, she confessed to me that she had two grown ungrateful sons, whose indifference, sharper than a serpent’s tooth, had broken her heart. We linked arms. We hailed a cab to downtown LA, to the garment district, where the tough and canny go shopping.