Work Text:
On the twenty-third day of her isolation, Carol goes into Helen’s office.
When Helen first started helping to manage her writing career, they lived in a crappy little one-bedroom apartment, with a tiny living room that barely fit a futon. They were always in each other’s way, especially when they tried to work, but eventually they found a truce in which Helen would work from the futon in couch form, using an oversized art book on her lap in place of a desk, and Carol would alternate between making her edits in the bedroom and going out to the diner. Around five, if she was still working, she would relocate to the dive bar around the corner, calming her jitters from the bottomless diner coffee with a double bourbon, squinting at her notes in the dark.
She kept a toothbrush in her car back then, when she was trying to hide her drinking and avoid Helen’s inevitable look of disappointment, brushing her teeth using water from a plastic bottle before driving home. She’d spit a frothy mouthful of toothpaste into the landscaping woodchips next to the sidewalk and then get in the car.
The money happened fast when the first book took off; they moved right from that apartment to this oversized house, with its three superfluous guest rooms, its marble countertops. One office was already on the floor plan; they repurposed one of the guest rooms for a second. Hers and hers, one of them joked—Carol can’t remember who. They’d mostly stay out of each other’s way with respect to the offices, which were primarily for working but would become miniature fortresses during hard times. During a particularly lengthy strained period, Carol put an air mattress into hers, sleeping there in a sleeping bag for almost three weeks.
After Helen’s mother died, she spent long hours alone in her office, sometimes late into the night.
The death was almost a relief in some ways, for both Helen and her brother Jim, and privately for Carol, too. Pamela Umstead had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in her late fifties, and in 2009, once she became unable to live alone, Helen had moved her to a home outside Albuquerque. Helen had visited regularly for the next six years, and unless she managed to come up with a good excuse, Carol usually ended up going along.
The nursing home depressed her, as did witnessing any kind of mother-daughter interaction. She was secretly grateful when Helen’s mother stopped recognizing her. Eventually Helen stopped calling her “Mom” at all; it wasn’t any use, so she’d act like a helpful stranger. Then Carol would drive home while Helen cried silently into her hands in the passenger seat, her hunched shoulders shaking. (Carol would convince herself that road safety mandated she keep both hands on the wheel, that a soothing touch on Helen’s back could endanger them both.)
In 2014 Pamela fell and broke her hip, and this incident and the surgery that followed left her weak, battling a hospital-acquired infection that was identified later than it should have been. She died in February of the new year, her body almost unrecognizably small and frail.
After the funeral was handled, the condolence bouquets tossed in the compost bin, Helen began to close herself up in her office. Carol tried, at first, to knock on the door and cajole her out for meals or sleep, but it became clear that Helen would emerge only on her own terms, often in the middle of the night. Sometimes the only evidence of life was the disturbance of items in the fridge when Carol checked it in the morning.
Sometime in the first week, a friend of Helen’s from grad school stopped by with a cardboard box full of books. It was folded shut but not taped, and after she lugged it inside, Carol peeked at them. Psychology shit—identity formation, mother-child bonds, that kind of thing, mostly dry and academic. She googled the friend and found a profile where she was referred to as a psychoanalyst, with a Ph.D. in psychology from the university where Helen had gotten her master’s. Then she put the box outside Helen’s office door, announcing its arrival with a sharp knock and then retreating to her own office with a bottle of something high proof.
Now, she scans Helen’s shelves. The friend’s books must have been a gift or a favor, offloading old grad school texts—or else Helen just never gave them back—but there they sit, taking up a good chunk of one of the shelves.
When Helen finally emerged from her feverish grief-induced studies, she didn’t explain much about what she’d been doing. She had a thick spiral notebook full of notes, but never showed Carol what was in it.
Unfairly, Carol had hated Helen for having an adult relationship with her mother to unpack. She knew Pamela wasn’t easy to deal with, that she had been making Helen cry long before it was about illness or death. But at least she was present.
Carol rifles through a few of Helen’s desk drawers, but she doesn’t find the notebook she remembers. Maybe Helen threw it out, or put it away in the locked file cabinet they kept in the garage with all their important documents.
She scans the books again—maybe a dozen. A title catches her eye, white text on a black background: Longing for Paradise.
She pulls it off the shelf. The cover shows a subtitle, too: Psychological Perspectives on an Archetype. Not as thrilling as the main title implies, but she starts thumbing through it anyway. A page near the front suggests it was published as part of some project on Jungian studies. Carl Jung, Carol remembers vaguely. Something about dreams and shit.
She squints at a passage, picking out a sentence she can mostly parse: This initial relation between mother and child is unique because it does not yet contain a polarity between “automorphous self-development and thou-relation.”
Carol swallows, flipping some ways ahead. The author quotes someone else who describes the early mother-child relationship as “uroboric”—the spelling is weird, but Carol knows the concept. A serpent eating its tail. She’s always heard about it representing cycles, death and rebirth and so on, but it’s always unsettled her. The scenario doesn’t strike her as “endless” so much as “doomed”: self-cannibalism, destined to continue until there’s nothing left.
“You’re killing me,” Carol’s mother used to say to her, not flippantly but with both her hands fervently over her heart, as if it might stop just from the wrongness of her daughter. As a young child Carol would dream that it was true: she would turn a corner into the kitchen to find her mother’s body on the floor, lying in a pool of blood and know, as you know things with such certainty in dreams, that it was her fault.
She remembers vaguely a news story she stumbled on a few years back, a man in India who killed his mother and ate her organs. It’s always a man, she had said to Helen, who laughed. She wonders if she was right, or if a daughter has ever consumed her mother in such a literal sense.
She keeps flipping pages. Something about people seeking complete unity with partners in adulthood, wording that feels similar to judgmental thinkpieces about “codependence” she’s skimmed online. In a mature, adult relationship each partner’s needs and expectations must remain flexible enough to be modified in the light of the other’s psychic reality.
Yeah, no shit.
She keeps turning pages.
Above all, reads another passage, it is the maternal breast which appears to stimulate the first fantasies, being imaged either as good and nourishing or as punitive and withholding.
Carol almost laughs at the word “fantasies,” thinking of the collection of erotic lesbian short stories she picked up sometime in the late 90s where she learned for the first time about people who use nursing in sexual roleplay. It all seemed a bit overwrought, and the desperate moaning of the word “mommy” seemed incongruous—should a nursing infant be forming words yet? (She’s not sure, actually. Not really her area, despite the frozen eggs languishing in some ultra-low-temperature storage facility.)
She’s skimmed other texts like this and noted that they never seem to account for the formula-fed. Do they form such profound attachments to the rubber nipple, the clear plastic bottle? Or is it the mother’s hand, holding the bottle—or is it just nothing, babies who don’t nurse doomed to lives of distance and failed connection?
Dramatic, she scolds herself.
Another quote from the other writer, Neumann. Because the early, uroboric phase of child development is characterized by a minimum of discomfort and tension, and a maximum of well-being and security, as well as by the unity of I and thou, Self and world, it is known to myth as paradisiacal.
Carol barks out a laugh. She moves to hold the book one-handed, pinky and thumb keeping the pages open, and wanders into the living room to pour herself a drink. A minimum of discomfort and tension, she rereads as the gin glug-glugs into her glass. The unity of Self and world. Exactly what they want, right? No more Carol, no more identity, no more personality. A lifetime of memories subsumed into a bloated whole, so miniscule she might not even exist.
She sits down heavily on the couch; some gin from her overfull glass sloshes over onto her hand. She licks it, bitter herbal alcohol flavor mixing with the salt on her skin.
It’s how she felt at camp. Like they wanted to erase her—not just change her, but sand down all her edges until she could fit into a perfect mold. Until she could disappear.
Fuck these people.
Carol takes a long slug, too long, acrid juniper taste sticking in her throat as she coughs.
Laxmi probably had a great relationship with her mother, Carol thinks, a thought from out of nowhere that comes with a sudden surge of bitterness. The older woman from the airport, Padma, with her patterned clothes and red bindi, but the same vacant smile as everyone else—she must have nursed Laxmi, been tender with her, held her when she cried. Otherwise why would Laxmi have brought her along?
Paradisiacal. It’s a stupid word. Carol squints at it on the page and takes another sip of gin, then keeps flipping through.
But the Paradise of early infancy is dependent upon the maternal care tendered by the person in charge of the child.
Carol wants to laugh again, but it won’t come out this time and for a moment she feels like she’s choking on it.
It’s not like she really knows how her mother treated her when she was a baby, aside from the tidbit about formula. But she has few memories from childhood of her mother’s touch. It was only when Carol needed tending, a scraped knee or a fever, that she remembers her mom touching her at all. She would close her eyes at those moments and savor the brush of knuckles against her skin while a Band-Aid was applied, or the back of her mother’s hand against her forehead to check her temperature.
A few chapters later, there’s a case study: a patient who had been constantly mistreated and rejected by her mother, but persisted in following her around “like Mary’s little lamb.” The author calls the girl’s yearning for affection homesickness. Carol takes another drink. She suddenly feels the lack of touch on her body like a void, like she’s going to disintegrate into individual atoms if she doesn’t have someone to hold her together. But there’s nobody: no mythical mother, no Helen—not even Zosia with her eerie smile.
She squeezes her own thigh with one hand, like that could ever be enough. She slugs gin again, nearing the bottom of the glass, and unexpectedly feels that her cheeks are wet. She’s crying. Humiliating, she thinks, even though there’s no one here to see it. She takes her last sip and chokes it down despite the tears, then carefully puts the glass down on the floor beside the couch before allowing herself to sob into her hands.