Betty says, Patty Hearst.
How many suicide attempts does everybody have? Tina blurts out. I have unlucky thirteen.
People go around with their various numbers.
I have only about half of one, I say.
You’re bullshitting me, Tina says.
A beacon of mental health, the Virgin Mary here, Pam says. One half-assed attempt. Well, I can beat that weak-assed shit. I have zero. There are some other motherfuckers I’d seriously like to kill, though.
On the way back to the ward, Pam tugs my elbow, saying, I’ve got some contraband.
Tell me it’s chocolate, I say, for that day’s brownies had vanished from the ward kitchen.
Better than that, she says, and she draws from her sweatshirt pocket a small black Bic lighter. Then she whispers, I’ve also got a lightbulb in my room.
What fun we’re meant to wreak with these items, I can’t figure out, but I’m feeling well enough to let the opaque opportunity slide.
33
Waking in the Blue
We are all old timers.
Each of us holds a locked razor.
—Robert Lowell, “Waking in the Blue”
Three weeks after the lamest stab in suicide’s history, I sit typing in the sunlit hall of that asylum so famous one Ivy-League poet later suggests I include my time there on a résumé. In my blue-striped robe and vomit-green happy slippers, I’m finishing a poem about a particular circle of hell in which a sinner is fixed on endless video reruns of her every screwup. An eternity of reruns with eyelids held open by clothespins. Crucifixion by television.
Which is how the end of my drinking felt—the anesthesia of liquor had stopped working, and there was nothing much else to aspire to. It’s a crappy poem based on an old idea, but I haven’t written in nine months, so I type it with a jeweler’s lapidary care, the goal being to get through without having to trek to the nurses’ station to borrow white-out, which my shrink has banished.
How’s it dangerous? I ask Mary after my next typo.
People find creative ways to hurt themselves, she says.
Do I look like I wanna hurt myself? I breathe frost on the window and inscribe my initials with a little heart.
You’re not the only one on the ward, she says. It pleases me that she plays along with my breezy, confident subterfuge, when I was a sobbing wreck two weeks before.
I’d guard it from the other madwomen with my life, I say.
She looks around to be sure the other nurses are still doling out meds, then whispers, Your doctor is lobbying to read your poems, in case they’re bad for your mental health.
She can’t do that, I say. All kinds of poets wrote here—Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell.
She can, I’m afraid, Mary says, her lovely face wearing a look of concern that unsettles me.
I say, Don’t you think I’m ready to go home next week? My husband starts school. He’s working full-time. I’ve gotta start teaching.
I don’t get to decide, she says.
C’mon, Mary.
Another nurse steps into the room with a piece of mail Warren had that morning dropped off for me. A delinquent bill, I figure. But the return address holds the scarlet shield of Radcliffe College—the Bunting Institute for women scholars.
They’re probably writing to reiterate my rejection, I tell Mary, since the year before I’d applied—for the ninth time—for one of their fanciest postdoctoral fellowships. They gave you money and an office. Because my academic credentials were so stank, and my one book had proven ignorable. I’d never expected to get it.
But one poet had decided not to come, and I’m runner-up. It’s maybe the first gift that I understand fully as such. Rather than feel the button-busting pride I’ve been chasing with a decade of arrogantly filled-out grant applications, I feel toadishly unworthy. Mary reads over the letter while I stand stumped in the shine of it.
They make you an officer of the university, she says. What’s that mean?
You can charge drinks at the Faculty Club.
Drinks?
Club soda and coffee, I say. O.J. Iced tea.
She’s still rubbing her belly with a pinched look on her face. She hands me the letter.
What? I say. What aren’t you saying?
That says you have to go to a meeting this Monday, Mary says. Have to go. It’s an all-day orientation.
I know, I know. I get keys to my office. I get to meet the other scholars. I can’t wait.
She’ll never let you go, she says, referring to my in-house shrink: Alice in Wonderland. That’s what even the nurses call her behind her back, based on the platinum hair she wears past her knees, despite being on the far side of forty. It flaps behind her like a ship’s wake, or she pushes it back using horrid headbands with bows big enough to stick on a birthday convertible. (My doc was on August holiday, or she might’ve vetoed Alice.)
She barely lets you go to the drunks’ group in the detox on Tuesday. Escorted.
Won’t I be out by then?
Mary shrugs, adding, Maybe not.
Alice in fucking Wonderland, I say.
A passing doctor hushes me and nods toward the mailroom, where the shrink in question—tiny, humorless, and ruthlessly well groomed—is reviewing charts.
It’s such a cliché to hate your shrink when you’re in the bin. (In truth, all of my other shrinks contributed heartily to saving my life.) Dr. Alice herself would claim I’m projecting a buried hatred of my own seductive, narcissistic mother. But even other doctors seem to stiffen at her presence in group, and her lack of humor is legend in these halls. No one ever sees her pancaked face risk the breach of smiling.
She beckons me now, and I summon the bravado to flounce behind her to an office. She slips behind her desk. She’s wearing a peach-colored headband to match her Chanel suit. She’s a buyer of name brands, this one, no thrift shops for her.
Sitting primly in the chair across from her, I try to dazzle her with modest confidence. She has a tendency to bring up penis envy every session, and I swear that this time, when she does, I’ll confess to my intense longing for a dick of my own, for in most places that pretend to value honesty, I’ve usually found that sucking up is an underrated virtue given how well it works.
Reviewing my chart, she squirts a dollop of lotion into her hands and rubs them together with the untroubled air of a woman who’s never picked up a check and never gone to sleep without flossing.
She says, You’re still refusing the sleeping medication?
I’m sleeping so well, I say. I think all our talks are paying off.
What’s your objection to the medication?
I’m worried about the side effects.
Your addiction? she says. She gives me a watery smile. She finds my addiction droll.
That and priapism, I say.
Since a raging hard-on is one side effect they’d mentioned from the sleeping pill, I’m throwing her a bone, so to speak, and her face goes all eager.
She says, Do you feel there’s something missing from your body?
Funny you say that, I say. I do. Some absence. That’s just how I’d describe it.
She waits for me to say more, but I can’t think how to elaborate without bursting into lunatic laughter, so I try another tack.
The big problem when I came in was my head, I say. If there had been a transplant list, I’d have signed on.
Does this head of yours urge you to hurt yourself? she asks. (Is it paranoia that causes me to hear enthusiasm?)
I tell her no. I feel like an asshole about the whole thing. I want to get better. I want to work on my marriage and be a better mom. I want to stay sober.
Rubbing her hands together again, she asks, Not even any fantasies about suicide? Are you cutting yourself?
I never did that, I say.
Never? she says, adding, Most people who set out to hurt themselves rely on self-destructive acts for relief. She sounds disappointed.
My relief is that I di
dn’t hurt myself, I say. My thinking was skewed by years of drinking—there’s your destructive behavior. You’re the one who told me alcohol’s a depressant.
Any fantasies about hurting your child? Hurting your husband? she asks, probing like a dentist for a raw nerve.
I’ve already done that, I say.
You seem upset.
I’m in a mental institution.
Less than a month after a suicide attempt.
Suicidal gesture. (You pick up the distinct lingo your chart needs pretty fast in those hallways.)
How are you prepared to manage your life any better?
The antidepressants have obviously kicked in—
They should’ve kicked in before you arrived.
Well, then I’m rested for the first time in years. I ask people for help all the time. All I do is ask for help. I make, like, five calls a day to people in recovery to talk about how I feel. I talk to all the nurses.
Yet you think you don’t belong here.
I belonged here when I came. Now I’m taking up somebody else’s spot.
I wait till the end of the session to show her the Radcliffe letter (though with a shrink I trusted, I’d have gone bounding in like a puppy). She cocks a waxed eyebrow, saying that the treatment team will judge whether I’m able to go to the orientation. She’s concerned that my regular therapist is still out of the country.
You’ve been in touch with her. She’ll be back by Labor Day, I say, and I’m on the mend.
But you have me, she says.
How lucky is that? I say, and I mold my features into the unwilled smile of a store-bought doll.
As part of my program to look like a model inmate, I organize something I call Health and Beauty Day.
Joan has been called to the West Coast to nurse her father in hospice. But Deb and Liz bring in meditation tapes patients can listen to while lying on the dayroom floor in the morning. I also arrange for staff to take us on a long walk around the campus and to the gym, where we idly thwap around basketballs. Before dinner, we make facial masks from yogurt and honey and lie supine on mats in the kitchen with cucumber slices on our eyes and mayo slathered on our hair—homemade spa treatments I clipped from a magazine. Pam jokes that we should have a fashion show involving the papery nightgowns that show our flubbery asses.
After dinner, Betty invites me to her room so I can borrow some petal-pink polish for my toenails. She nicks into the bathroom to slip into her pajamas. Coming out, she pulls a daffodil-yellow sweatshirt from a drawer, and as it slips over her head, I catch a glimpse of burn marks up one arm above the elbow—a line of festering sores of varying depths. I grab her wrist, and she jerks away.
What did you do? I say.
Nothing, she says. It’s none of your business.
How did you even do that? I ask.
Leave it alone. It’s been there a long time.
Those were fresh. You’ve been here three months. How did you find a way to burn yourself?
You think you know about everything, Betty says in a hissed whisper.
Betty—
Miss High and Mighty. Miss Harvard Everything.
—you gotta tell your doctor about this.
All you’ve done since you got here is get fat! You’re disgusting. And your son is fat! He’s fat because you’re mean to him. You’re crazy! Your husband should take him to protect him from you. I’m gonna testify for him too if you mess with me. Get out of here. Get out of my room. You came in here to make a pass at me. You’re sick! You’re a fat, sick perverted lesbian!
She runs back into the bathroom and slams the door.
What’s going on in here? says a nurse, sticking her head in.
Nothing, I say. Betty’s worried about her complexion, I think.
In the dayroom the next day, Tina’s sketching a design for her wreath as I whisper what I’ve found out.
She shrugs. You’ve gotta stay out of that.
Some of those sores look infected, I say.
She tilts her head to the door, and I follow her toward the phone booth. She sits on the wooden stool under the pay phone while I stand in the hall. She glances past me to be sure the coast is clear, then pulls up her ankle-length nightgown. On the very top of her thigh are a series of red slash marks, inflicted with surgical proficiency at varying depths.
How’d you do that? I say.
Pam sold me a lightbulb.
Sold it to you….
For cigarettes. She sold Betty the lighter. We all do it, Mary. I’ve done it for years.
It’s a messed-up thing to do.
You don’t get it—we’re not trying to kill ourselves. I even use betadyne to be sure it’s clean.
But Betty could wind up getting shock therapy again. Y’all could wind up staying here a long damn time.
I like it here, she says. I find it restful.
She stands up and slides her finger into the change slot, checking for left coins, as she says, Do you fancy a bedtime yogurt? Dairy products encourage healthy sleep.
With me trailing behind, she starts toward the kitchen, adding, Or maybe a cup of that herb tea. Chamomile eases internal inflammation, also redness in the face.
You could wind up in the Monkey House, Tina, I say (That’s what we call the more restrictive ward). Or medicated into oblivion like Flora.
In the kitchen, she flips on the fluorescent light—a blinking hum. She says, Everybody has to work out their own shit. Isn’t that what your meetings tell you?
I don’t know where I get the sentences to speak to her. Maybe honest care for her just infected me, but I say, Whenever you cut yourself, you’re carving your mother’s sick message into your flesh.
Digging through the freezer for ice, Tina says, How many shrinks does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
I’m serious, I say.
None, she says, emerging with a container of yogurt. She adds, The lightbulb has to want to change.
I mean it. It’s like me with a drink. Every time I used a manhattan to take the edge off, I never got any better coping skills.
Like what?
Making a cup of tea. Going to the gym. Calling a pal to unload.
She’s pouring tea over ice that crackles in its plastic glass. She turns to me and says, What if none of your pals are home? What if you don’t have a single fucking pal? What if you’re a boy trapped in a girl’s body and the kids at your school call you Pussyeater and Butch and Muffdiver?
You tell yourself they’re shitheels and find somebody lonelier than you to be nice to.
What if there’s nobody lonelier than you? she says. She turns away to shield her face.
I’m standing in the chasm of her statement when she whirls around and throws the yogurt—with the force of a major league pitcher—into the trash can so it splatters up the sides. She stalks out, hitting the light switch on the way.
The next morning I wake early, hearing flame-haired Flora in the quiet room, howling in some unintelligible tongue. I step from my room into the faint odor of eucalyptus. The aroma builds up as I get close to the dayroom. A nurse brushes past me, her arms braceleted in red-ribboned Christmas wreaths.
Peering past her, I see dozens of wreaths of every kind. They fill the chairs where residents usually hang out. The nurses are stacking them on a dolly the custodians would (with bemused faces) wheel onto the service elevator.
Off to one side, Pam stands with an orange ping-pong paddle, occasionally bouncing the ball on it. She says, You missed the showdown.
It turns out Tina planted in Betty the hope that—with her extraordinary talent for floral arrangement and Tina’s acumen—they could make millions selling wreaths. Betty could be free from her father’s house, and Tina could leave public housing. So for weeks they’ve been ginning out an extra wreath here and there, squirreling them away in the art room.
But in the small and densely packed confines of Tina’s skull, the plan’s gotten larger and larger—visits on Oprah and Johnny Carson are inv
olved.
After she stormed out on me the night before, she convinced Betty to break into the art room in the wee hours, even luring Flora and Willy to chip in, like stockholders. At dawn, the day nurses found wreaths by the stack. Even Willy made one out of doll’s heads painted blue with tempera paint.
A nurse passes by with more wreaths. I ask Pam where everybody wound up.
Betty’s modeling the latest in four-point restraints up in the Monkey House. Her insurance has run out anyway, so the minute she’s stable, she’s gone anyhow. Flora’s in the safe room. Willy’s medicated.
What about Tina? I say.
Mighty Tina. She executed some impressive kickboxing moves, Pam says.
On the nurses?
Just the orderlies. I actually don’t think she made contact with anybody. I came out of my room and saw her do a flying side kick. Very Bruce Lee. Then later, she went bye-bye on the gurney.
We stand in silence outside the barren dayroom for a while. I’m conjuring their tormented faces—Tina’s and Betty’s, Flora’s and Willy’s—arrayed before me like plucked blossoms.
The prayer’s automatic, and it comes like a burst of lightning—some version of God help them. Petitioning whatever light I’m starting to believe in to shine on them. Give Betty a bite to eat, and free Will’s face of sores. Chase the demons from Flora, and lower Tina into a single pair of loving arms. Whether you believe prayers like this affect external affairs doesn’t matter. They measure the overhaul in my psyche and character.
Time for meds, ladies, a passing nurse says.
Pam turns on her heel, but I hang there a long time in that eucalyptus odor, which conjures up so many sickrooms. Mine when I was a kid and I viewed the world through a scrim of fever, and my mother’s white hands smoothed Vicks on my chest; Dev’s those nights he choked for air in the vaporizer fog; Daddy’s before he died.
It’s unhip to fall to your knees, sentimental, stupid, even. But somehow I’ve started to do it unself-consciously.
Behind a door, my body bends, and the linoleum rises. I lay my face on my knees in a posture almost fetal. It is, skeptics may say, the move of a slave or brainless herd animal. But around me I feel gathering—let’s concede I imagine it—spirit. Such vast quiet holds me, and the me I’ve been so lifelong worried about shoring up just dissolves like ash in water. Just isn’t. In its place is this clean air.