Girl, Interrupted (10 page)

“I look like a chipmunk,” I said. “I can’t do anything.”

In the cab I was too nervous to look at Boston.

“Lean back and count to ten,” said the dentist. Before I got to four I was sitting up with a hole in my mouth.

“Where did it go?” I asked him

He held up my tooth, huge, bloody, spiked, and wrinkled.

But I’d been asking about the time. I was ahead of myself. He’d dropped me into the future, and I didn’t know what had happened to the time in between. “How long did that take?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing,” he said. “In and out.”

That didn’t help. “Like five seconds? Like two minutes?”

He moved away from the chair. “Valerie,” he called.

“I need to know,” I said.

“No hot liquids for twenty-four hours,” he said.

“How long?”

“Twenty-four hours.”

Valerie came in, all business. “Up you get, let’s go.”

“I need to know how long that took,” I said, “and he won’t tell me.”

She gave me one of her withering looks. “Not long, I can tell you that.”

“It’s my time!” I yelled. “It’s my time and I need to know how much it was.”

The dentist rolled his eyes. “I’ll let you handle this,” he said, and left the room.

“Come on,” said Valerie. “Don’t make trouble for me.”

“Okay.” I got out of the dentist’s chair. “I’m not making trouble for
you
, anyhow.”

In the cab Valerie said, “I’ve got something for you.”

It was my tooth, cleaned up a bit but huge and foreign.

“I snitched it for you,” she said.

“Thanks, Valerie, that was nice of you.” But the tooth wasn’t what I really wanted. “I want to know how much time that was,” I said. “See, Valerie, I’ve lost some time, and I need to know how much. I need to know.”

Then I started crying. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it.

Calais Is Engraved on My Heart

A new name had appeared on the blackboard: Alice Calais.

“Let’s guess about her,” said Georgina.

“Some new nut,” said Lisa.

“When is she coming?” I asked Valerie.

Valerie pointed down the hall toward the doors. And there she was, Alice Calais.

She was young, like us, and she didn’t look too crazy. We got up off the floor to say hello properly.

“I’m Alice Calais,” she said, but she said
callous
.

“Cal-lay?” said Georgina.

Alice Calais-Callous squinted. “Hunh?”

“You say it
callous
,” I told Georgina. I thought she was rude to imply that Alice didn’t know how to say her own name.

“Cal-lay?” Georgina said again.

Valerie came over at that point to show Alice her room.

“It’s like Vermont,” I said to Georgina. “We don’t say
Vayr-mon
like the French do.”

“Phonetics,” said Lisa.

Alice Calais-Callous was timid, but she liked us. She often sat near us and listened. Lisa thought she was a bore. Georgina tried to draw her out.

“You know, that’s a French name,” she told Alice. “Calais.”

“Callous,” said Alice. “It is?”

“Yes. It’s a place in France. A famous place.”

“Why?”

“It used to belong to England,” said Georgina. “A lot of France did. Then they lost it in the Hundred Years’ War. Calais was the last place they lost.”

“A hundred years!” Alice widened her eyes.

It was easy to impress Alice. She knew almost nothing about anything. Lisa thought she was a retard.

One morning we were sitting in the kitchen eating toast with honey.

“What’s that?” asked Alice.

“Toast with honey.”

“I’ve never had honey,” Alice said.

This was stunning. Who could imagine a life so circumscribed that it excluded honey?

“Never?” I asked.

Georgina passed her a piece. We watched while she ate.

“It tastes like bees,” she announced.

“What do you mean?” Lisa asked.

“Sort of furry and tingly—like bees.”

I took another bite of my toast. The honey just tasted like honey, something I couldn’t remember tasting for the first time.

Later that day, when Alice was off having a Rorschach, I asked, “How can a person who’s never eaten honey have a family that can afford to send her here?”

“Probably really incredibly crazy and interesting, so they let her in for less,” said Georgina.

“I doubt it,” said Lisa.

And for several weeks Alice Calais-Callous gave no evidence of being either really crazy or interesting. Even Georgina got tired of her.

“She doesn’t know anything,” said Georgina. “It’s as if she spent her life in a closet.”

“She probably did,” said Lisa. “Locked up in a closet eating Cheerios.”

“You mean kept there by her parents?” I asked.

“Why not,” said Lisa. “After all, they named her Alice Callous.”

It was as good an explanation as any for why, after about a month, Alice exploded like a volcano.

“Lot of energy in that girl,” Georgina observed. Down at the end of the hall, muffled booming and yelling and crashing came out of the seclusion room.

The next day as we sat on the floor under the blackboard Alice was marched past us between two nurses on her way to maximum security. Her face was puffy from crying and bashing around. She didn’t look at us. She was occupied by her own complicated thoughts—you could tell from the way she was squinting and moving her mouth.

Her name came off the blackboard rather quickly.

“Guess she’s settled in over there,” said Lisa.

“We ought to go see her,” said Georgina.

The nurses thought it was nice that we wanted to visit Alice. It was even all right for Lisa to go. They must have figured she couldn’t get into trouble on maximum security.

It didn’t look special from the outside. It didn’t even have extra doors. But inside it was different. The windows had screens like our windows, but there were bars in front of the screens. Little bars, thin and several inches apart; still, they were bars. The bathrooms had no doors, and the toilets had no seats.

“Why no seats?” I asked Lisa.

“Could rip off a seat and whack somebody? I don’t know.”

The nursing station wasn’t open, like ours, but encased in chicken-wire glass. Nurses were either in or out. No leaning over the Dutch door to chat on maximum security.

And the rooms were not really rooms. They were cells. They were seclusion rooms, in fact. There wasn’t anything in them except bare mattresses with people on them. Unlike our seclusion room, they had windows, but the windows were tiny, high, chicken-wire-enforced, security-screened, barred windows. Most of the doors to the rooms were open, so as we walked down the hall to see Alice, we could see other people lying on their mattresses. Some were naked. Some were not on their mattresses but standing in a corner or curled up against a wall.

That was it. That was all there was. Little bare rooms with one person per room curled up somewhere.

Alice’s room didn’t smell good. Her walls were smeared with something. So was she. She was sitting on her mattress with her arms wrapped around her knees, and with smears on her arms.

“Hi, Alice,” said Georgina.

“That’s shit,” Lisa whispered to me. “She’s been rubbing her shit around.”

We stood around outside the doorway. We didn’t want to go into the room because of the smell. Alice looked like somebody else, as if she’d gotten a new face. She looked kind of good.

“How’s it going?” asked Georgina.

“It’s okay,” said Alice. Her voice was hoarse. “I’m hoarse,” she said. “I’ve been yelling.”

“Right,” said Georgina.

Nobody said anything for a minute.

“I’m getting better,” said Alice.

“Good,” said Georgina.

Lisa tapped her foot on the linoleum. I was feeling faint from trying to breathe without breathing in the smell.

“So,” said Georgina. “Well. See you soon, okay?”

“Thanks for coming,” said Alice. She unclasped her knees for a few seconds to wave at us.

We went over to the nursing station, where our escort had gone to visit with the staff. We couldn’t see our nurse. Georgina rapped on the glass. The person on duty looked up and shook her head at us.

“I just want to get out of here,” I said.

Georgina rapped on the glass again. “We want to go back to SB Two,” she said loudly.

The person on duty nodded, but our nurse did not appear.

“Maybe they tricked us,” said Lisa. “Gonna leave us here.”

“That’s not funny,” I said.

Georgina gave another rat-a-tat to the glass.

“I’ll fix it,” said Lisa. She pulled her lighter from her pocket and lit up a cigarette.

Immediately two nurses sprang out of the nursing station.

“Give me that lighter,” said one, while the other grabbed the cigarette.

Lisa smiled. “We need our escort over to SB Two.”

The nurses went back into the nursing station.

“No lighters on maximum security. Supervised smoking. I knew that would rouse them.” Lisa pulled out another cigarette, then put it back in the pack.

Our nurse came out. “That was a short visit,” she said. “How was Alice?”

“She said she was getting better,” said Georgina.

“She had shit …” I said, but I couldn’t describe it.

Our nurse nodded. “It’s not that unusual.”

The ugly living room, the bedrooms stuffed with bureaus and chairs and blankets and pillows, an aide leaning out of the nursing station talking to Polly, the white chalk in its dish below the blackboard waiting for us to sign ourselves in: home again.

“Oh,” I said, sighing several times. I couldn’t get enough air in, or get the air in me out.

“What do you think happened to her, anyhow?” said Georgina.

“Something,” said Lisa.

“Shit on the wall,” I said. “Oh, God. Could that happen to us?”

“She said she was getting better,” Georgina said.

“Everything’s relative, I guess,” said Lisa.

“It couldn’t, could it?” I asked.

“Don’t let it,” said Georgina. “Don’t forget it.”

The Shadow of the Real

My analyst is dead now. Before he was my analyst, he was my therapist, and I was fond of him. The view from his office on the first floor of the maximum-security-ward building was restful: trees, wind, sky. I was often silent. There was so little silence on our ward. I looked at the trees and said nothing, and he looked at me and said nothing. It was companionable.

Now and then he said something. Once I fell asleep briefly in the chair facing him, after a night full of fighting and yelling on our ward.

“You want to sleep with me,” he crowed.

I opened my eyes and looked at him. Sallow, bald early, and with pale pouches under his eyes, he wasn’t anybody I wanted to sleep with.

Most of the time, though, he was okay. It calmed me to sit in his office without having to explain myself.

But he couldn’t leave well enough alone. He started asking me, “What are you thinking?” I never knew what to say. My head was empty and I liked it that way. Then he began to tell me what I might be thinking. “You seem sad today,” he’d say, or “Today, you seem puzzled about something.”

Of course I was sad and puzzled. I was eighteen, it was spring, and I was behind bars.

Eventually he said so many wrong things about me that I had to set him right, which was what he’d wanted in the first place. It irritated me that he’d gotten his way. After all, I already knew what I felt; he was the one who didn’t know.

His name was Melvin. I felt sorry for him because of this.

Often on the way from our ward to the maximum-security ward, I saw him driving up to his office. Usually he drove a station wagon with fake wood panels, but occasionally he drove a sleek black Buick with oval windows and a vinyl roof. Then one day he shot past me in a pointy green sports car, which he slammed into his parking place with a squeal.

I started to laugh, standing outside his office, because I’d understood something about him, and it was funny. I couldn’t wait to tell him.

When I got into his office I said, “You have three cars, right?”

He nodded.

“The station wagon, the sedan, and the sports car.”

He nodded again.

“It’s the psyche!” I said. I was excited. “See, the station wagon is the ego, sturdy and reliable, and the sedan is the superego, because it’s how you want to present yourself, powerful and impressive, and the sports car is the id—it’s the id because it’s irrepressible and fast and dangerous and maybe a little forbidden.” I smiled at him. “It’s new, isn’t it? The sports car?”

This time he didn’t nod.

“Don’t you think it’s great?” I asked him. “Don’t you think it’s great that your cars are your psyche?”

He didn’t say anything.

It was shortly after this that he began badgering me to go into analysis.

“We aren’t getting anywhere,” he’d say. “I think analysis is in order.”

“Why will it be different?” I wanted to know.

“We aren’t getting anywhere,” he’d say again.

After a couple of weeks he changed tactics.

“You are the only person in this hospital who could tolerate an analysis,” he said.

“Oh yeah? Why’s that?” I didn’t believe him, but it was intriguing.

“You need a fairly well integrated personality to be in analysis.”

I went back to the ward flushed with the idea of my fairly well integrated personality. I didn’t tell anyone; that would have been bragging.

If I’d said to Lisa, “I have a fairly well integrated personality and therefore I’m going into analysis with Melvin,” she would have made retching sounds and said, “Assholes! They’ll say anything!” and I wouldn’t have done it.

But I kept it to myself. He’d flattered me—he understood me well enough to know I craved flattery—and in gratitude, I acquiesced.

My view, now, was of a wall, an off-white, featureless wall. No trees, no Melvin patiently looking at me while I looked away. I could feel his presence, though, and it was cold and hard. The only things he said were “Yes?” and “Could you say more about that?” If I said, “I hate looking at this fucking wall,” he’d say, “Could you say more about that?” If I said, “I hate this analysis stuff,” he’d say, “Yes?”