Kimberly's mother is seeing a shrink, but she isn't talking to him at the moment. Her shrink doesn't know that she refuses to talk to him yet because he's on vacation.
She's angry because he doesn't take her fears of death seriously.
Evidence of this is that fact that he will not override her physician and order a complete hospital stay full of tests and tubes to discover the actual origin of her imagined illness. Kimberly's mother longs for the hospital because what she really wants is doctors and flowers, male doctors and cut flowers, next to the bed.
She wants an illness because what she really wants is a date but since she's sixty-three and still married, even if her husband has looked at her maybe five times since 1971, she can't get one. It's my opinion that she couldn't get a date anyway because she tortures everyone around her and men have a way of sniffing out that torturing trait as if it were truffles and they were pigs.
So this mother calls her daughter, my friend, Kimberly to complain and to weep, and Kimberly listens like it's her family job, which is what it has been since she was eleven and started to become a threat to her mother's sense of her own youth.
Her mother calls everybody "gorgeous" because that's what she wants to be called and she's afraid she's dying because she wished everybody around her would drop dead. She's the original Mrs. Projection, claiming everybody is what she is and saying she is what she wishes on everybody else. She gets paranoid about her friend's not calling her after a dinner party, ostensibly worried that she made an offensive remark, when in reality she's mad as hell that the guest didn't bother to help in the kitchen and sat in the dining room while she schlepped plates back and forth like a maid.
She's mad as hell but she can't think that about herself so instead she becomes fearful, fear being an old friend and useful ally, and worries herself through the night, counting the hours until she can telephone and say those famous words, "Did I wake you? I'm sorry about last night," getting her stake into the friend's heart before the friend is even awake, the way a vampire killer gets Dracula while he's still sleeping the coffin. The friend mutters and sputters and has no idea what's going on, confused by the quick and early conversation, and is then left to try to make sense of it for the next several hours.
Meanwhile Kimberly's mother now hums around the house, straightening the small objects that litter shiny surfaces, and feels more in control.
