Soon, Jane went into private practice in a fancy white-brick apartment building in the Village, and my entire family would troop down from the Bronx each week to have dinner with my mom after her therapy, as though to support and honor my mother for sticking with the process. (Yes, we had moved to the Bronx for a little while, one of the eleven total apartments we lived in till I went to college.) Meeting my mom, we'd have spaghetti with meat sauce at the greasy spoon on Waverly, which was fun, too. We’d gawk at the insanely expensive, gorgeous food for sale at Balducci’s, a paradisical food store the therapist had told my mom about. Jane shopped there. My mother later told me that Jane never made my mother pay any fee at all, even after she’d been in private practice for twenty years and my mom had made some money.
Jane seemed to make my mother calm. As a little girl, I deeply envied my mother for having her. My mom called her all the time, when she was scared, or upset, or just needed a friend. Jane seemed to be available all the time, like a pill. I would hear and see my mom calling her from her bedroom and from locations all over the city, weeping at pay phones; afterwards soft and blissful with relief. I wanted someone like that I could call, and had no one like that in my life.
So when I finally got a therapist of my own, I was expecting that she would be a kind of servant I could summon to relieve me of my own most difficult moods. I had studied ancient Greek and was fascinated to learn that therapist had originally meant servant or henchman in that language. A powerful servant to be sure, like an imprisoned genie. My mother had rubbed on the dusky lamp of her therapist often, and I had been in awe—I think my whole family had been in awe—of Jane’s muscular, motherly, all-giving, obedient ability to take care of seemingly anything, even my mother’s moods.
She gave Jane tasks that she did not want to accomplish herself. The year after I graduated college, like I mentioned, I lived in Brooklyn with my mother. I don’t think I mentioned my mother’s new boyfriend, Will, who was married and would conspicuously come over in the afternoons to have sex with her. When she’d come out of the bedroom, my mother’s hair would be messy—one of the only times I ever saw it so—and her face hot and flushed.
I always felt confused when they came out, and had a seesaw sense of nausea when I’d see my mother’s hastily rebuttoned clothing, her skin rosy underneath, looking damp.
Besides Will, there was also "the Con Ed guy”—what my mom and I always called him—a sexy, blue-eyed utility company repairman who’d become acquainted with my mom while fixing her wires, who always came over to have sex with my mom in his uniform. Mom told me about their assignations. The air seemed especially hot when he was there.
A year later, when I left grad school, I wanted to move back in with her on Kings Highway. My mother said mysteriously, "You can’t, but I’m not going to tell you why!” She added brightly, "But if you call Jane, she’ll be very happy to tell you the reason!”
She’d arranged with her therapist to relieve her of the unpleasant burden of explaining it to me.
I never called Jane. I was too embarrassed. But also, I wanted my mother to talk to me herself if she had something to say.
Two months after mom tipped me off that I should talk to Jane, I began therapy with the woman Jane referred me to, Edna.
A couple of months into our therapy, Edna suggested that all four of us meet in Jane’s handsome Soho loft for a "joint session,” where the therapists would stand behind me and my mother like Athena and Aphrodite coaching their favorite fighters in the Iliad (to draw on a metaphor by Erica Jong in Fear of Flying).
In the beginning, doll, the session made me happy. The two therapists encouraged me to give voice to all the things I’d ever been angry at my mother about, or confused about. It was a long list.
But in response, my mother didn’t say anything, not a word.
After my final, speedy recitation, "And then sometimes you said very sexual things to me and you walked around the house naked and it was very confusing and upsetting. And sometimes your legs and hands shook and I didn’t know why,” my mother continued to remain spookily silent.
Jane took over. "I think we can tell Donna now, can’t we, Miriam,” she said in her very deep voice, "that you were sometimes taking drugs during those years, isn’t that right?”
That was news to me. I’d had a suspicion or two, but that was all. No hard facts.
My mom was silent.
Did she blink in acknowledgment?
Did she make some sign with her eyes to confirm what Jane had said in that oracular, male-God-in-a-Bible-movie voice?
Did she give a tiny nod, so quickly I thought I might have made it up?
My memory can’t decide if I saw her face do anything. It was that fleeting.
So it was that Jane took responsibility for my mother’s drug use, not my mom. My mom herself never acknowledged to me that she’d abused any substances.
I don’t know why I expected her to. She’d never acknowledged trying to get her leg around me that weird night in her basement apartment, either. Once though, years later, on a family vacation in South Beach, my mother told Josie and me we were "disgusting, ungrateful, ugly bitches” for three days straight, then blamed it on the shot of Demerol an obliging local doc had given her. She also sneered to Josie, "You’ll never get a man!” Thankfully she didn’t try that shit with me, because she had no idea how anxious I was about the possibility that I would never get a woman. She also told strangers in our vicinity—waiters at the restaurant, people in the hotel elevator—how much she hated us and how much she wanted to fuck them. "It was the Demerol,” she explained to us later, back in Brooklyn.
In any case, my mother said not a word about drugs in Jane’s big blonde-wood office-apartment. She didn’t have to. The ubiquitous genie had fessed up for her.
Other times, my mother used Jane’s name as a sort of magic incantation for getting what she wanted. When I was fifteen, my mother suddenly wanted to get a dog, although she mostly wouldn’t be home to walk it. "I’m forty-four years old, Jane says I can have a dog if I want to!” We had never had a pet before this, and I was frightened of dogs. Josie was extremely allergic and had asthma. Consuelo, my mother’s new cocker spaniel, never got house-trained, and, confined to our kitchen, made doody several times a day on the kitchen floor, which I would usually clean up.
In the end, my mom gave Consuelo back to the previous owners. "It’s just not a very good dog,” she said. "Too much trouble.”
Then, when I was away at college, my mother acquired a large pet rat she had rescued from being killed after it had been put through a series of medical experiments in the labs at Brooklyn College, where she had scientific contacts. Yep, to fill in for me in the household my mom had got herself a pet lab rat. But the rat grew so large and strong that my mother became afraid that it would bust out of its cage.
She gave Zeno back to be euthanized by the techs.
I felt sorry for Zeno, because this was the exact same reason all the golems in history had been put to death as well.
Even my earliest forerunners had been killed, the ones the rabbis in the Dark Ages had made as a parlor trick, or (once), because the rabbis were very hungry: the famous Calf Golem, shaped like a heifer and roasted over the coals for two starving rabbi gullets.
(You can’t make this stuff up! Look in the Talmud.)
The parlor golems, for their part, had been snuffed out simply because the trick was over, like extinguishing the candles when you leave a room.
When I first realized I was a golem, I wondered how long I had before my mother took me to the muddy riverbanks to undo me.
I knew exactly how she would do it, too: on some dreary pier in the East River, she’d make me lie flat on my back, so she could reach all the parts of me easily, then swiftly raise a paper towel and erase one letter on my forehead, changing the word emet, TRUTH, the sign of the living golem, into plain old met, DEAD.
Long before environmentalism, the same recipe in the Kabbal
ah for creating golems contained the recipe for destroying them. My mother was fluent in Hebrew, the basic language for golem creation and destruction; her zeyde, a sweet and doting man, had taught her that the kabbalist could assume the powers of God once he or she had become holy and learned enough.
Once the student had attained that level, merely writing one of the true names of God in God’s own language would make nearly-human beings rise and fall out of the dust.
Golems do not have defenders of our own, of course, because we are supposed to be defenders ourselves. We do not have protectors; we are protectors. Growing up, I had never had any kind of guardian. So I was amazed when, as a child, I first saw Jane with my mom. She seemed a stern, kind sort of superhero, like the enormous and well-muscled Asian servant, with rings in his ears, who protected Little Orphan Annie. Punjab was his name, and he wore a turban; he was her bodyguard. Daddy Warbucks had sent the wise Punjab to take care of Annie because he himself was so often off on the mysterious business of fighting communism and fascism.
It is not Edna’s fault, I know, that I expected her, too, to be like Punjab, and relieve me of every burden that might ever fall on me. That winter when I started with her, I thought I would be able to summon Edna whenever I wanted her.
At first I called her from the pay phone at my job, at the Columbia Law School library, several times a week (once or twice, several times a day). I thought it was going to be one of the fringe benefits of therapy that I could call her whenever I was anxious or even just not 100 percent.
Edna swiftly disabused me of that notion. "I’m not going to do therapy with you over the phone!” she said when she picked up. She sounded royally pissed off.
But Jane had always done it with my mother, or so it had always seemed. So I began my experience with Edna feeling deeply frustrated and envious.
I had to pay Edna, too. Every single time.
Edna, what is more, immediately became angry at me for pestering her, for acting the neurotic way I always did in my relationships, for continually talking back. It was only the beginning of a large and pungent anger she would develop for me over 12 years, an anger that would be epic and (it’s terrible, reader, but I am fiercely attracted to angry women) attractive to me. I didn’t know that therapists sometimes got mad at their clients. I'd certainly never heard of Jane getting angry with my mother. So when Edna, only a few weeks into our therapy, spat out over the phone, "Only call me when it’s important!” I thought it must mean I was a particularly detestable client.
Edna would often say, "I feel very, very frustrated with you!” When she ditched me, twelve years later, she made it clear that it was because of my own particularly frustrating qualities— and how spitting angry they made her. "WHY DO YOU KEEP COMING?” she asked me in sudden fury that day, in the middle of the session. "Why do you come here?!”
"You know the answer to that,” I said, alarmed and a little angered now myself. "Because it helps me.”
"Because I think,” she said, as though I hadn’t spoken, "THAT WE SHOULD JUST END IT!”
But oh, reader—despite how much Edna must have wanted to damn my eyes, she also did some things with me that were motherly and magical. (Was that her intention? Is that how they entrap you?)
Once she asked me what I would do if I found a strange sobbing child in the street.
"I would hold it in my arms and comfort it.”
"Then, oh, Donna, why can’t you do that to yourself? You would do it for a child you don’t even know. Do this for yourself, too, not just for other people!”
This, I know, went against state regulations for those who work professionally with golems. Advice to us in self-care is limited by law. So wherever you are, Edna, thank you!
Another time, when I was crying, Edna thrust a stuffed animal into my arms. I know this sounds hokey. I now suspect that it might be poor therapeutic technique. But oh, Edna, it made me feel so good! Did you want to ensnare me by giving me more than anyone else ever had?
Another time she bought me a special present, a little red stuffed dragon.
But there were many aspects to Edna’s personal enthusiasm for me that seemed disturbingly parochial. Edna enjoyed the fact that I was famous at the time as the dashing young gay reporter at the Village Voice, and she read and commented on every article I wrote every week. Then she told me that the extremely renowned (even-by-straight-people!) lesbian author N. C. had been her client, and that this woman and me were her two favorite lesbian writers in the world. (Edna was also, of course, a lesbian. This was a lesbian therapy Mafia I was dealing with.)
"It’s OK to tell you about N. C. because she said I could,” Edna said.
She often dropped N. C.'s name in sessions, for what reason I could not tell.
But I developed a complex about N. C. ever afterwards. N. C. had also co-founded a lesbian S/M activist and social group I later attended—I had sadomasochistic leanings, it turned out, as does almost every golem—and I felt nearly out of control with my feelings of competitiveness for her, notwithstanding that she was a bestselling, brilliant author who had won the National Book Award and I was a twenty-four year-old reporter.
What had Edna done with N. C. in therapy? What had they discussed about N. C.'s sadomasochism, and how did it color Edna’s views of those feelings and practices (decidedly against)? Would she have been less opposed to my sadomasochism if she had not encountered it in a much stronger form first with N. C.?
Did Edna love me as much she loved N. C.? Would she love me more if I won a big literary prize like her? And what would happen to me with Edna if I ever got less famous? "I love having famous clients I can tell people about,” she’d pronounced to me.
When RENT, the hit musical about starving artists in the East Village, came out, Edna announced, "One of the big female stars of RENT is a client of mine, but I can’t tell youwhich one!” Edna thought it was OK to let me know as long as she did not say the precise name. It was left to me to memorize all the names of the female actors and guess, because there were only two women in remotely "starring” positions, that either Idina Menzel or Daphne Ruben-Vega was the star golem of my therapist. (I still cannot see those poor women’s names in print without flinching and seeing Edna’s pasty face.)
Other times, she seemed to be operating out of a bad self-help book. In my first apartment of my own in New York, Edna had me put up sayings she had written in her own hand, on my refrigerator door. She’d had me come up with the slogans on the spot as things I could say to myself to bolster my faith in my creative work. One I coughed up but did not find very encouraging was "Sappho’s poems were used to wrap fish in” (which they were, at least according to the classicists I read thirty years ago).
Edna wrote it down in exuberant purple pen on her own shabby notebook paper, curly edges on the side from where it was ripped. What were the other mottoes for my edification? I can’t remember, but I guess they were things like "I am a good writer,” or maybe "Lenin started out as a film reviewer.” In retrospect, it does sound rather moving to have had all those brave, shabby papers up on my filthy refrigerator door, urging me to believe various things. At the time I hated them, both their stupid look and their saccharine hopefulness. I found them embarrassing, especially when I had someone over. It took me four months to realize that it would be OK if I took them down, that Edna did not come to my apartment and she wouldn’t even know if they were off the fridge.
If she had been able to see my fridge, I surely would have kept them up. Among the many magical notions I had of therapy was that Edna must know better than I about what was good for me, that my health and peace depended doing what she told me. I was twenty-two years old, and thought that someone had to be on top in any relationship. If Edna wasn’t going to be my servant, she would have to be my master.
Another magical notion was that I was supposed to blurt out whatever came into my head in therapy at any given moment, no matter what boundaries it might cross or how potentially insulting it
could be. I believed, reader, that I had no choice; that when I stepped into the therapist’s office, I became like a Ouija board or a god’s oracle, compelled to testify. The unconscious would speak with no guards and no boundaries up, and my therapist would tell me what it meant.
Despite or because of this I was always very qualmish about what in God's name I was supposed to say, how much detail I was supposed to go into, what on earth was important. Once I was nervously rattling on about the five pounds I wanted to lose—I was quite thin in my 20s, reader—when I even more skittishly informed her, "It’s hard to talk to you sometimes about wanting to lose weight, because you're um, kind of bigger than me.”
Edna did not say, "And how does it make you feel that, as you say, I’m kind of bigger than you?” She said, "That was a really nasty thing for you to say to me! I’m very angry at you!”
I had meant that I was afraid it would be hard for her personally if I talked about my very small weight "problem,” but by what I said I had in fact hurt her.
We never talked about either my or her weight after that, ever again.
Edna didn’t seem to like the language that I used about sex, either. In my early 20s, I was self-consciously "radical” as a feminist and queer activist: fuck was the word I usually said. Edna would correct me: "You mean have sex or make love.” She didn’t seem to like my action of fucking around any better, although I had no idea why. I tried not to notice her disapproving looks, grunts and sighs.
Surprising things I said always upset her. Which was especially hard because, a month after I had begun therapy, Edna said, "Are you trying to put me to sleep? I think you’re boring me deliberately.” After that, I became even more nervous with her. I was desperate to keep Edna entertained, like a comic who has to keep performing for the same jaded, hostile crowd.
Growing Up Golem Page 7