store’s management the last time she undertook this venture. Criminal mischief doesn’t necessarily mean that the young woman is somehow out of sorts but her parents wanted her committed rather than jailed. I know the feeling so I have some sympathy for her.
There is an elderly gentleman whose only crime seems to be his age. His name, I gather, is Robert Ludlow Broad, as he introduces himself several times a day to both Shirley and the young mannequin killer. He has not yet spoken to me and indeed seems unaware of my presence most of the time. Mr. Broad is nearly ninety and lives in an assisted living facility where he recently attacked someone, smashing a Dixie cup of urine over her head because, as he put it, she was stealing his socks and selling them to the Nazis. I have not yet worked out the particulars of this crime but I have learned that his elderly victim was his wife, also a resident at the home. So he was packed off here to undergo a ten-day evaluation to determine if his dementia is dangerous or if he is fit to return to the facility. He has no visitors and holds books upside down while he reads them.
No one else here interests me much. A few young people, all in their early twenties who liked to smoke and draw on themselves with ball-point pens have come and gone. They were all suicide attempts who promised, after seventy-two hours, that if they were given back to their families they would never again try to drown themselves in the bathtub, inhale bug spray or make those pathetic, horizontal scratches on the tender skin of the inner wrist with an unfurled paper clip. They promised to behave themselves in other words, promised not to draw attention to themselves by inflicting pain or engaging in self-mutilation (or whatever it is they did after reading The Bell Jar for the first time, discovering someone else’s angst and being seduced by it), trying to conjure the uncertain character of the truly defective in order to achieve some sort of notoriety among their peers. Perhaps that is harsh but it is how I saw them; pretenders to mental incapacity, the poseurs of the ga-ga set. I neither dislike nor pity them. I just do not find them as endlessly fascinating as they find themselves and I have been glad to see each one of them leave. There will be more. They arrive on the weekends, usually Friday night or Saturday morning, morose and often clad in black, or conversely, manic and clad in LL Bean or Tommy Hilfiger. They are gone by Tuesday morning, having recovered long enough to ask mommy and daddy to take them home and love them. Mommy and daddy then tearfully promise to love them more than ever before and respect the seriousness of their trauma. It is all very tedious.
Through the window I can see Mr. Broad taking a walk with Marie and Miguel, one of the orderlies. I like Miguel, he speaks a kind of Spanglish that I find endearing. Yesterday he came to me in the day room to ask me if I wanted to go outside and walk around for a while and when I said yes he said, “Eeets very cold I tink. You should put on your long sleeve pants,” which I thought was hilarious. I put on my ‘long sleeve pants’ and went outside with Miguel and Steven, a student nurse on a clinical rotation from the University of Wisconsin whose claim to fame is his size. He is nearly six-and-a-half feet tall and weighs in at two-fifty-five. He seems to be made of solid muscle. I’ve never seen a nurse who looked like him.
Miguel has the stature of a lot of Mexican men, compact but toned. He stands maybe five feet three inches tall. Both are extraordinarily good looking and their kindness matches their firm resolve to try and help the people in their charge. I genuinely like them both and have been glad for their company at times over the past three weeks. As with so many other staffers here I do not know how much either of them knows about me. I know that there are daily staff meetings where our individual cases and care plans are discussed and updated, but whether any of the junior staff like Steven or Miguel are made aware of a patient’s particular history I cannot say. I suppose that they must be so that they are prepared for what any one of us might do. Frankly I do not really know what I might do. Certainly I would not try to escape. That would require a kind of effort and energy I cannot imagine ever having. I do not really feel like killing myself although, as I said, I would not mind just dying. I don’t know how well any of them, except Glassman, really knows me. Glassman is my doctor and therefore, in a way, my sole judge here. I do not want others to judge me. I do not want to feel responsible for responding to the complexities of other people’s expectations. My actions have been made public enough. These are my own ghosts.
Mr. Broad is kneeling at the graves of the dead sisters. His blue gabardine robe billowing out in the breeze hung loosely over his too-big pajamas. Like many elderly people Mr. Broad often looks like he is wearing clothes that he borrowed from a larger person sometime in the 1950s. He appears to be praying. I wonder what he’s saying, what he’s asking from almighty God on their behalf. Or maybe he’s asking the dead nuns for some favor, some intervention in his current circumstances. Whatever the case Miguel looks bored but Marie is taking an interest in what Mr. Broad is doing and she looks worried. After a minute or two they help Mr. Broad to his feet and begin walking him back to the building. He is crying.
I am struck by both the tenderness of this moment and the perplexity that it causes. Two emotions seem to have overtaken Robert Ludlow Broad at the cemetery. The first, a visceral response to something sacred which compelled him to drop to his knees and engage in transcendental conversation, the second, some kind of sadness remarkable enough to bring him to tears. Neither action appeared to me, from the vantage point of my window, to be the workings of Mr. Broad’s disturbed mind. He seemed to know what he was doing in those moments he prayed. Whatever that action called forth caused a deeply held pain to surface. I cannot help but wonder what lay at its source.
Ensconced comfortably in this chair by the window, mulling over Mr. Broad’s actions caused me to draw an uncomfortable parallel between myself and the elderly man. I was no longer really a faithful person. I never prayed anymore, not genuinely anyway. But for many years in my life I did. I experienced the presence of God, or what I thought was the presence of God so clearly in my life that I spent many years going to Mass almost every day and taking part in the devotional practices familiar to Roman Catholics. I said rosaries and offered novenas. I sat in grottos and in adoration chapels and asked for forgiveness in confessionals though I am not sure that I have ever been all that sorry for anything that I confessed. Of course I never revealed all the things that might need to be forgiven either. The last time I went was before I left Chicago to go to New Orleans for a job. I stopped into St. Peter’s just before I left. Pete’s was an ‘open all night’ church, the kind you only find in large, metropolitan areas. They catered mostly to the residents of the Outer Drive and could afford the security necessary for twenty-four hour a day service. The experience was bland and unfulfilling, as I’d come to expect. I left the church at least half-knowing that I would never go back.
It was so long ago now but I remember the bus ride to Midway Airport very clearly. I was the only passenger, just me and the driver. We passed so many different businesses that were either closed at that hour or were just preparing to open. One in particular caught my attention; a small drugstore, independently owned from what I could tell. It reminded me of the drugstore on the corner of our street when I was growing up. It was owned by a family we knew from church that lived on the next block. We went there for everything. There was a small, bright blue insignia, the family crest or something stamped on nearly every item. I always thought it was ridiculous; I mean, who needs someone else’s family crest on a bottle of aspirin? Everything in our medicine cabinet had that crest on it. It was almost a taunt every time someone opened it up. As if the notions inside represented a better life that our family could never achieve. The family that owned the store was exactly like the rest of the families on their street in that they lived in a single house that they owned. They did not rent the downstairs of a duplex like we did. They did not share an attic or a basement with elderly neighbors who stank of arthritis cream and sorrow. They were better than us and the aspirin with the dumb label reminded us of
that almost every day. According to one of my mother’s rants, that might have been the intention.
While I was sitting on that bus, looking at the drugstore while we were stopped at a red light, the image of the medicine cabinet in our house came back vividly. Among the aspirin and tweezers and Band Aids, there was always a small bottle of Syrup of Ipecac on the bottom shelf. I knew vaguely growing up that it was supposed to make you throw up in case you accidentally swallowed something poisonous. I always wondered how people accidentally swallowed anything (the act of swallowing seems deliberate enough even under the most arduous of circumstances) and what ipecac tasted like. I remembered the day I got to find out but I had long ago shut the memory out, refused its entry into the present circumstances which seemed difficult enough. I did not wish to add to my own misery by recalling an event as unpleasant as unwittingly being forced by my mother to vomit.
I was seven I think. She came into my room late the night before it happened. It was not at all unusual for her to do