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​​"Did you know that the word shrink, in the psychiatric sense, originated in Hollywood in the 1950's, referring to head-shrinkers who reduced the size of egos ?", Nadine said to Charlotte at Jonah's, the coffee shop where they occasionally met to talk. The way the building was implanted next to a large chesnut tree and was itself made of wood was grounding, as people in the area - people interested in things like feng shui and psychic energy - would sometimes say. But their conversations, typical of women's perhaps - at least men sometimes observed - were all over the place, earth to ether.
"It's fascinating to take things back to their roots", said Charlotte, "like psychoanalysis having very Jewish origins and developing in Austria and Germany then travelling to places like New York and Buenos Aires when Nazism became widespread in the 1930's " ( she'd been reading a book about Jewishness and herself had Jewish ancestry ). Saying that, she travelled in a way too, the way she liked to do with words, from the grit of etymology - hard, like men - to ethereal associations - insubstantial like the ideal woman was, so thinas to almost not be there, not enormous, like a mother.

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