The mother leaves the bathroom and the daughter locks the door behind her. She starts to take off her clothes. Without looking at herself in the mirror as she used to do. Without spending at least five minutes posing before the mirror to find the angles that made her look better and worse. Without sucking in her stomach, letting it hang out, standing on tiptoe, combing her hair over her breasts, then back, watching her nipples get hard.

Since that day there’ve been four more baths. The withdrawal set in after the sleeping pills and anxiety drugs ran out. After the friend who gave them to her was fired from the pharmacy.

She’d been taking the pills for three years because she refused to go to therapy. She didn’t like doctors of any kind. She found them all greedy and unjustifiably arrogant. Plus, if she was going to be in therapy, it had to be with a therapist who possessed intellectual capacities and analytical abilities superior to her own, and she was sure she wouldn’t find one like that, at least not one she could afford. The first and last time she’d been to a therapist she’d felt bored through the whole session. At the end, when the doctor explained the treatment she would have to follow, she raised an eyebrow and was on the verge of blurting out: “Okay, but what was the last book you read?” No, she wouldn’t take advice from just anyone.

The mother waits on the other side of the bathroom door, like a nurse in a sanatorium. The daughter remembers reading an article online called “The Ten Most Bizarre Psychiatric Treatments in History,” which talked about the baths they used to force hysterical women to sit in for hours—days, even—at the start of the twentieth century. The sepia image of three women up to their necks in bathtubs with metal bars is burned into her mind. Chained up, looking at the camera with empty eyes, plastic shower caps on their heads.