Then an extraordinary thing happened. I was sitting on my sofa, red blood draining into the cheap red cotton upholstery, and the phone rang. It was an old friend, a woman called Doc who lived in Lexington, Kentucky. She actually was a doctor. She was a psychotherapist. She treated rich Kentucky neurotics.
She asked me how I was and what was going on. I told her. I told her in detail. I was thickly bandaged on both arms from the wrist to the elbow. The telephone was spackled with blood. My two dear lovers were long gone.
I was cutting myself, I told her. I couldn’t stop. The blood seeped through the bandages, no matter how careful I was. The blood clotted into the gauze.
“Honey,” she said. “This does not sound good. This does not sound good, sugar. At all.”
She told me I needed to be in a hospital. She told me I needed to come to the South to be in a hospital, that Yankees had no conception of the deep sorrows that Southerners felt, and couldn’t do a thing about it.
“Leave it to me,” she said. “Just get here. I’ll get you into the hospital here. They’ll take good care of you. I know the head psychiatrist. He’s not one of these bullshit guys.” Her slow whiskey drawl was as warm and comforting as the laying on of hands.
“And don’t hurt yourself anymore. It’s not getting you anywhere.”
I hung up the phone and cut my right arm just below the elbow.
The next day I got an airplane ticket. I kept insisting on the phone that I wanted a direct flight, not knowing a direct flight was different from a nonstop flight. And I realized something. I didn’t know what people wore in mental hospitals, but I imagined that merino wool double-pleated knife-creased trousers didn’t figure highly. So I went to Bloomingdale’s and bought sweatshirts and khakis and T-shirts, as though I were packing to go to camp.
I picked up my ticket. I would have to change in Pittsburgh.
I went to the hospital to say good-bye. I tried to explain I was going away. I tried to explain it wasn’t his fault, although he had no idea what I was talking about. I said that the machinery had been set in motion long before he drove to Connecticut, but I don’t think he heard any of it.
His doctor stopped in for a visit, to see how the latest electroshock had gone. I was sitting in a hospital armchair, and there was blood dripping from the ends of my fingers onto the linoleum floor. Nobody noticed.
On the morning of October 4, I went into work early and went in to see my boss, a man who smoked cigars at seven-forty-five in the morning.
“I know I’m supposed to go to jury duty this morning. I just . . . I just wanted you to know I’m not going. I’m going away, probably for three weeks. I’m going to a mental hospital. I don’t feel well.” It was probably the only piece of bad news he ever took with grace.
In the airport in Pittsburgh, as I walked the long way from gate to gate, blood ran down my arm and dripped onto my suitcase. Nobody noticed.
Doc and I sat over drinks that night, at her house. I showed her my arms. We talked quietly. I slept in her guest room and the next morning, she dropped me at the door of the hospital.
I stared at the doors. I was homesick already. I was homesick for the blade and the booze. I was homesick for the men in the tiny dark rooms who always said thank you, who always said something nice. About my body. About my greedy kiss. I was, most of all, homesick for the blood in the golden light from the street lamps, and the pain that shot up my arm like the venom from a snake.
My insurance paid for most of the stay. It had never occurred to me that I would have to carry some of the cost. I paid for the rest with a credit card. A Visa card. It took years to pay it off.
I had my razor blade in my pocket, but I knew. It was over. Just like that, with one phone call, it had ended, one touch to the heart, one voice that got through the haze, one word that saved my life. It was over.
I was a curiosity in the hospital. I had come all the way from New York. The mental hospital was in a town that had the same name as the town I grew up in. The irony didn’t escape me.
My brother flew up from Atlanta to spend the day with me. Sweet. The psychiatrist allowed me to go out to lunch. The world was very loud. I told my brother the doctor thought it would be good for me to discuss in detail what had happened to me. My brother said he’d rather not know. It was kind of him to come, anyway.
My mother called. You don’t just disappear for three weeks. I stood at a pay phone in the hall. “What did you do?” she asked, accusing me as though I had committed a felony and was serving time for, say, assault with a deadly weapon. Which, of course, I was, sort of. It was the only time I ever cried in the hospital.
I stayed for three weeks. After that my doctor thought it was best to confront my life in my own context. I was being sent home, high on Elavil.
When I left, the kind doctor told me to stay away from Tanqueray, and to stay away from my apartment. I didn’t do either one.
The scars were thick and purple, but over the years, they’ve turned thin and white. You can barely see them, except in the summer when I get tan, and then they rise to the surface, like lace on my skin. Nobody in my family has ever asked me why I went to the loony bin. My niece, once, looking at the still-purple scars, asked me with shock what had happened to me. I told her I’d had an accident; I’d gone through a plateglass window. With both arms. Nobody ever asked again.
I still carry a razor blade with me at all times. It is always in my pocket. Two weeks ago, I cut myself again, like a drunk taking a drink after twenty years.
It hurt like hell.
Butter Day
The thing about Butter Day was you had to bring your own cream. Every child brought a pint of heavy cream on Butter Day and we couldn’t have been happier about it.
In kindergarten and first grade, we went to a little one-woman private school and we had many little festivals and ceremonies to break up the monotony of learning how to read and add and subtract, but Butter Day just about took the cake. It didn’t come on any particular day—it came when Mrs. Lack-man wanted it to come—and so it was more sort of like the first snowfall or a hurricane than, say, Washington’s Birthday, which we elaborately celebrated. She would just, one day, tell us all to tell our mothers that we needed to bring a pint of cream, heavy whipping cream, the next day, and we would know it was on.
Of course, as kindergartners, we had no idea what was coming, but, by the time we were in first grade, when we heard the word cream, we knew. We just knew, because we’d already been through it once, unlike the babies in the other room.
The kindergartners sat on little chairs in one room, and the first graders sat at long tables in the other room, and Mrs. Lack-man was presumably supposed to wander back and forth, supervising both classes, but I got the feeling she didn’t really like the first graders anymore, so they were left largely unattended.
When I was in kindergarten, one of my classmates was a little red-haired boy who was the son of the farmer who lived next door to us, although that’s sort of misleading since there were ten acres separating our doors, but they were our closest neighbors. Every morning, he would stand at the end of their driveway and my father would pick him up and take us to school.
He was a funny kid, charming actually. But he had problems right away. Serious problems.
When you needed to go to the bathroom at Mrs. Lackman’s, you were supposed to hold up one finger if you had to pee, and two fingers if you had to do the Unspeakable Other. It was maybe the second day of school when he had to go to the bathroom, at eleven o’clock, and he held up one finger, but Mrs. Lackman avoided him and went on going over the alphabet. He violently waved his finger, but there was no way he was going to get her attention. She was moving through the alphabet like a freight train, and he just wasn’t part of her plan at all.
He peed in his pants. He peed in his pants and it dribbled on the floor, making noise, a wet noise like a tiny waterfall or a gutter spout after the rain has stopped, and Mrs. Lackman paused and looked at
him and said to the whole class, “Now, class, look at what a little baby we have! Such a baby he can’t even control himself. Don’t we just hate babies? Aren’t we glad to be grown up enough that we can follow the rules and not be babies anymore?” It went on for a long time, but it was just more of the same, Mrs. Lackman walking up to him and looking at the small puddle on the hardwood floor.
“Hey, first graders! Come look at what a little baby we have today,” and him just sitting there in his wet shorts, his face as red as his hair.
The next day, she’d brought in a high chair and put it in the middle of the room. She made him sit in it because he was such a baby and babies needed to be put in high chairs. At exactly eleven o’clock, he held up one finger while she was making us do our counting or something, and again she completely avoided him and, once again, he peed on the floor. Except now he was in a high chair and the pee had farther to fall so the sound was even louder.
Every day it was the same. Every day she viciously infantilized him, every day she refused to let him go to the bathroom, and every day he peed on the floor.
It was no wonder he didn’t come back for first grade. It was no wonder he became a major felon later in life, doing hard time in the state pen for dealing hard drugs to crystal meth–loving rednecks. Who wouldn’t turn into a sociopathic drug-dealing hard timer after going through that at the age of five? But he was lucky. His wife stuck by him and he got over it and now he has a successful excavation business.
My sister, when she was in the first grade, in the unsupervised first grade, suddenly felt one day that she had to throw up. She panicked. She didn’t want to throw up on her long table, but she didn’t know how many fingers to hold up.
She went to the door of the kindergarten class and held up one finger but Mrs. Lackman shook her head. She went back to her table, but she was feeling worse, and so she went to the door and held up two fingers with what she hoped was a sense of urgency, a sense of immediate need. Mrs. Lackman wouldn’t even look at her.
She went back to her table, but she was getting closer and closer to vomiting, so she got up and ran to the door and held up an unprecedented three fingers, not knowing what else to do, a sure signal of imminent danger, she felt, but Mrs. Lackman looked at her like she was a visitor from Mars or somewhere so she went back to her table and threw up all over Johnny Sheridan, the one boy in her class she thought was really, really cute. Their relationship never recovered to the degree she had hoped.
Later in life, of course, that sort of thing can be gotten over. There is a time you can throw up on your date and get away with it. You can even laugh about it. I did it once in Baltimore after an opening at the Baltimore Museum of Art and we went on with our romance uninterrupted. And she was my French teacher. But this is not the way it is in the first grade.
So, although we were carefully schooled from day one in the one- and two-finger principle, it almost never applied to daily life or even to urgent needs. Mrs. Lackman ran a tight ship. Apparently the natural functions of five- and six-year-olds played no part in it.
My brother had already been through Mrs. Lackman’s, where he distinguished himself with his total brilliance. When he came home from his first day there, he told my mother he wasn’t going to school anymore. She asked him why and he said he didn’t want to.
She said, “But think of everything you’ll miss. You’ll learn to add and subtract, you’ll learn to read so we won’t have to read to you anymore and—”
“I already learned to read,” he said sullenly.
“When?” my mother asked.
“I learned to read today.” And then he sat down and proceeded to read anything she threw at him, Dick and Jane books, the Richmond Times-Dispatch sports section, anything. He was a sly one.
He was the kind of person who wouldn’t show the slightest interest in a thing until he had mentally perfected it and had only to begin doing it for real. Take talking, for instance. He didn’t talk until he was three. It drove my parents wild. They kept trying to make him say wa-wa like Helen Keller, to say dada or wee-wee, but he just refused to utter a sound, not a peep. They took him to a doctor. They had his hearing tested. They did everything parents could do with a child who went through every day mute as a rock.
Then one day he was sitting down in his high chair or whatever having some soup for lunch, and he looked at my mother and he said to her, clear as a bell, “I want a cracker.” So when he said he’d learned to read in one day, what he meant was that he’d figured it out a long time ago and he’d been reading things over in his mind, practicing on the sly when people thought they were reading to him. He didn’t mean he’d learned to read. He meant he was ready to read, he felt the need to go public with the reading thing, the way he’d only spoken because he wanted a cracker to go with his soup. He’d been able to talk all along.
He used to concentrate so hard he’d curl his tongue between his teeth, and once in a football game, he got hit in the jaw and he came damn close to biting it off. He had to have stitches in his tongue. He was just very concentrated.
Mrs. Lackman had a son who was a youthful schizophrenic. He was certifiable, as we say. Certified to do what I’ve never been sure. To go to the crazy house at Western State, I guess.
I’m not sure how old he was, but he was a lot older, maybe eighteen. One day when he was off his medication, he got stopped by the police with a briefcase full of, as it turned out, elaborate plans and explosives to blow up the university. After that, he was barred from ever going on the campus, and, in fact, he still can’t go there today. He was a dark-haired boy with sparkling eyes, and he used to lurk in the doorways between the kindergarten and the first grade until his mother told him to go upstairs and mind his own business, presumably as long as his business didn’t involve blowing up public buildings with significant numbers of people inside them.
When he was on his medication, he was gentle as a lamb. He would have let anybody go to the bathroom, even for number two. He would never have made a five-year-old sit in a baby’s high chair.
It’s a wonder we ever learned to read at all what with getting ready for the pageants. There was a really big pageant on Washington’s Birthday, and then there was another really big pageant on May Day.
The Washington’s Birthday pageant was more of a torture than May Day, because it was a play and everybody had a part to play and you had to memorize dialogue and you had to memorize it perfectly or you just knew it was going to be worse for you than even peeing on the floor would have been.
I never got to play George Washington. This one boy got all the good parts because he was already as big as a truck driver, strong and athletic and good-looking, and he had the biggest head in the class, which was, for some reason, vital to all the lead parts, both male and female. He was every mother’s dream son, he went on to be captain of the football team and homecoming king, and every kind of social reward that could be bestowed came his way from the age of five, and he was a nice guy besides, so nobody had to feel bad about it. It was just naturally going to be him who got to play the Father of Our Country.
My father was dragged into it one year. He had to stand up in front of all the parents of the other children, with many of whom he regularly sat down to cocktails, and recite a really mawkish speech that began, “I am the flag,” and concluded with the Pledge of Allegiance, where at least we all joined in.
It was the one time I was ever proud of my father. I forgot for a minute that he made my skin crawl. I forgot while he spoke how afraid he made me feel. The hard, metallic distaste went away, just for that brief time when he was being so bravely humiliated, and I saw him as others must have seen him, handsome and tall and straight as a flagpole.
People now tell me I look like him. I don’t. I hope I don’t.
There was the scene with the cherry tree, of course, and crossing the Delaware, and being sworn in as our first president, but the truly startling scene was the scene that depicted George Washington’s b
irth.
Mrs. Lackman had written every word of the pageant herself. None of it came out of a book.
There was Mr. Washington outside the door, pacing and churning his hands together, frantic with worry, and there was Mrs. Washington in a big cardboard bed giving birth.
And then there was Mammy. It was Mammy who delivered the play’s classic line, its moment of ultimate drama. She picked up the little rubber doll that had been wrapped in swaddling clothes so you could just barely see its little rubber face, and she brought out the baby to show it off, and this is what she said, in a high voice like Butterfly McQueen: “Lawzy, Miz Washin’ton, you got a fiiiine baby boy. He look lak he a monf ole awready.”
Needless to say, there were no little black children holding up one finger or two at Mrs. Lackman’s, no proud black faces beaming from the parents’ section. God, when you think of it, it’s a miracle we didn’t all grow up to bomb public buildings or deal cocaine for a living.
May Day was another story. Of course, the boy who got to play Washington also got to be King of the May, probably two years running. Who got to be the Queen of the May escapes me. I’m sure she was lovely. And big-headed. I have noticed, in my brief encounters, that celebrities tend to have bigger heads than your average people, so maybe this was Mrs. Lackman’s way of putting in an early bid for fame for her beloveds.
Once, for instance, I had dinner with Elizabeth Taylor. She had the biggest head I’ve ever seen on a human being, even though she was quite small. Tiny feet. She looked, from the rear, like a big licorice ice cream cone. She said the most charming thing: “Everybody tells me I have such beautiful lavender eyes. A woman came up to me in Dior and said she just wanted to have a close look at my lavender eyes. They’re not really lavender. If you ask me, when I get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and look in the bathroom mirror, they’re gray. Just plain old gray.”
I understand things haven’t gone so well for her lately. If I were as beautiful as she is, I would think life would be filled with sweetness and light. I would hope my life would be a veritable festival of continuous adoration.