Girl, Interrupted (3 page)

It wasn’t my father; he was busy.

It wasn’t my high school English teacher; he’d been fired and moved to North Carolina.

I went to see who it was.

He was standing at a window in the living room, looking out: giraffe-tall, with slumpy academic shoulders, wrists sticking out of his jacket, and pale hair that shot out from his head in a corona. He turned around when he heard me come in.

It was Jim Watson. I was happy to see him, because, in the fifties, he had discovered the secret of life, and now, perhaps, he would tell it to me.

“Jim!” I said.

He drifted toward me. He drifted and wobbled and faded out while he was supposed to be talking to people, and I’d always liked him for that.

“You look fine,” he told me.

“What did you expect?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“What do they do to you in here?” He was whispering.

“Nothing,” I said. “They don’t do anything.”

“It’s terrible here,” he said.

The living room was a particularly terrible part of our ward. It was huge and jammed with huge vinyl-covered armchairs that farted when anyone sat down.

“It’s not really that bad,” I said, but I was used to it and he wasn’t.

He drifted toward the window again and looked out. After a while he beckoned me over with one of his long arms.

“Look.” He pointed at something.

“At what?”

“That.” He was pointing at a car. It was a red sports car, maybe an MG. “That’s mine,” he said. He’d won the Nobel Prize, so probably he’d bought this car with the money.

“Nice,” I said. “Very nice.”

Now he was whispering again. “We could leave,” he whispered.

“Hunh?”

“You and me, we could leave.”

“In the car, you mean?” I felt confused. Was this the secret of life? Running away was the secret of life?

“They’d come after me,” I said.

“It’s fast,” he said. “I could get you out of here.”

Suddenly I felt protective of him. “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks for offering. It’s sweet of you.”

“Don’t you want to go?” He leaned toward me. “We could go to England.”

“England?” What did England have to do with anything? “I can’t go to England,” I said.

“You could be a governess,” he said.

For ten seconds I imagined this other life, which began when I stepped into Jim Watson’s red car and we sped out of the hospital and on to the airport. The governess part was hazy. The whole thing, in fact, was hazy. The vinyl chairs, the security screens, the buzzing of the nursing-station door: Those things were clear.

“I’m here now, Jim,” I said. “I think I’ve got to stay here.”

“Okay.” He didn’t seem miffed. He looked around the room one last time and shook his head.

I stayed at the window. After a few minutes I saw him get into his red car and drive off, leaving little puffs of sporty exhaust behind him. Then I went back to the TV room.

“Hi, Lisa,” I said. I was glad to see she was still there.

“Rnnn,” said Lisa.

Then we settled in for some more TV.

Politics

In our parallel world, things happened that had not yet happened in the world we’d come from. When they finally happened outside, we found them familiar because versions of them had been performed in front of us. It was as if we were a provincial audience, New Haven to the real world’s New York, where history could try out its next spectacle.

For instance, the story of Georgina’s boyfriend, Wade, and the sugar.

They’d met in the cafeteria. Wade was dark and good-looking in a flat, all-American way. What made him irresistible was his rage. He was enraged about almost everything and glowed with anger. Georgina explained that his father was the problem.

“His father’s a spy, and Wade’s mad that he can never be as tough as his father.”

I was more interested in Wade’s father than in Wade’s problem.

“A spy for us?” I asked.

“Of course,” said Georgina, but she wouldn’t say more.

Wade and Georgina would sit on the floor of our room and whisper. I was supposed to leave them alone, and usually I did. One day, though, I decided to stick around and find out about Wade’s father.

Wade loved talking about him. “He lives in Miami, so he can get over to Cuba. He invaded Cuba. He’s killed dozens of people, with his bare hands. He knows who killed the president.”

“Did he kill the president?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” said Wade.

Wade’s last name was Barker.

I have to admit I didn’t believe a word of what Wade said. After all, he was a crazy seventeen-year-old who got so violent that it took two big aides to hold him down. Sometimes he’d be locked on his ward for a week and Georgina couldn’t get in to see him. Then he’d simmer down and resume his visits on the floor of our room.

Wade’s father had two friends who particularly impressed Wade: Liddy and Hunt. “Those guys will do anything!” Wade said. He said this often, and he seemed worried about it.

Georgina didn’t like my pestering Wade about his father; she ignored me as I sat on the floor with them. But I couldn’t resist.

“Like what?” I asked him. “What kinds of things will they do?”

“I can’t reveal,” said Wade.

Shortly after this he lapsed into a violent phase that went on for several weeks.

Georgina was at a loose end without Wade’s visits. Because I felt partly responsible for his absence, I offered various distractions. “Let’s redecorate the room,” I said. “Let’s play Scrabble.” Or “Let’s cook things.”

Cooking things was what appealed to Georgina. “Let’s make caramels,” she said.

I was surprised that two people in a kitchen could make caramels. I thought of them as a mass-production item, like automobiles, for which complicated machinery was needed.

But, according to Georgina, all we needed was a frying pan and sugar.

“When it’s caramelized,” she said, “we pour it into little balls on waxed paper.”

The nurses thought it was cute that we were cooking. “Practicing for when you and Wade get married?” one asked.

“I don’t think Wade is the marrying kind,” said Georgina.

Even someone who’s never made caramels knows how hot sugar has to be before it caramelizes. That’s how hot it was when the pan slipped and I poured half the sugar onto Georgina’s hand, which was holding the waxed paper straight.

I screamed and screamed, but Georgina didn’t make a sound. The nurses ran in and produced ice and unguents and wrappings, and I kept screaming, and Georgina did nothing. She stood still with her candied hand stretched out in front of her.

I can’t remember if it was E. Howard Hunt or G. Gordon Liddy who said, during the Watergate hearings, that he’d nightly held his hand in a candle flame till his palm burned to assure himself he could stand up to torture.

Whoever it was, we knew about it already: the Bay of Pigs, the seared skin, the bare-handed killers who’d do anything. We’d seen the previews, Wade, Georgina, and I, along with an audience of nurses whose reviews ran something like this: “Patient lacked affect after accident”, “Patient continues fantasy that father is CIA operative with dangerous friends.”

If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now

Daisy was a seasonal event. She came before Thanksgiving and stayed through Christmas every year. Some years she came for her birthday in May as well.

She always got a single. “Would anybody like to share?” the head nurse asked at our weekly Hall Meeting one November morning. It was a tense moment. Georgina and I, who already shared, were free to enjoy the confusion.

“Me! Me!” Somebody who was a Martian’s girlfriend and also had a little penis of her own, which she was eager to show off, raised a hand; nobody wanted to share with her.

“I would if somebody would want to but of course nobody would want to so I wouldn’t want to force somebody to want to.” This was Cynthia, who’d started talking like that after six months of shock.

Polly to the rescue: “I’ll share with you, Cynthia.”

But that didn’t solve the problem, because Polly was in a double herself. Her roommate was a new anorexic named Janet who was scheduled for force feedings the moment she dropped below seventy-five.

Lisa leaned toward me. “I watched her on the scale yesterday: seventy-eight,” she said loudly. “She’ll be on the tube by the weekend.”

“Seventy-eight is the perfect weight,” said Janet. She’d said the same about eighty-three and seventy-nine, though, so nobody wanted to share with her, either.

In the end a couple of catatonics were teamed up and Daisy’s room was ready for her arrival on November fifteenth.

Daisy had two passions: laxatives and chicken. Every morning she presented herself at the nursing station and drummed her fingers, pale and stained with nicotine, on the counter, impatient for laxatives.

“I want my Colace,” she would hiss. “I want my Ex-Lax.”

If someone was standing near her, she would jab her elbow into that person’s side or step on her foot. Daisy hated anyone to be near her.

Twice a week her squat potato-face father brought a whole chicken roasted by her mother and wrapped in aluminum foil. Daisy would hold the chicken in her lap and fondle it through the foil, darting her eyes around the room, eager for her father to leave so she could get going on the chicken. But Daisy’s father wanted to stay as long as possible, because he was in love with Daisy.

Lisa explained it. “He can’t believe he produced her. He wants to fuck her to make sure she’s real.”

“But she smells,” Polly objected. She smelled, of course, like chicken and shit.

“She didn’t always smell,” said Lisa.

I thought Lisa was right, because I’d noticed that Daisy was sexy. Even though she smelled and glowered and hissed and poked, she had a spark the rest of us lacked. She wore shorts and tank tops to display her pale wiry limbs, and when she ambled down the hall in the morning to get her laxatives, she swung her ass in insouciant half-circles.

The Martian’s girlfriend was in love with her too. She followed her down the hall crooning, “Want to see my penis?” To which Daisy would hiss, “I shit on your penis.”

Nobody had ever been in Daisy’s room. Lisa was determined to get in. She had a plan.

“Man, am I constipated,” she said for three days. “Wow.” On the fourth day she got some Ex-Lax out of the head nurse. “Didn’t work,” she reported the next morning. “Got anything stronger?”

“How about castor oil?” said the head nurse. She was overworked.

“This place is a fascist snake pit,” said Lisa. “Give me a double dose of Ex-Lax.”

Now she had six Ex-Lax and she was ready to bargain. She stood in front of Daisy’s door.

“Hey, Daisy,” she called. “Hey, Daisy.” She kicked the door.

“Fuck off,” said Daisy.

“Hey, Daisy.”

Daisy hissed.

Lisa leaned close to the door. “I got something you want,” she said.

“Bullshit,” said Daisy. Then she opened the door.

Georgina and I had been watching from down the hall. When Daisy opened the door we craned our necks, but it was too dark in Daisy’s room to see anything. When the door shut behind Lisa, a strange sweet smell wafted briefly into the hall.

Lisa didn’t come out for a long time. We gave up waiting and went over to the cafeteria for lunch.

Lisa gave her report during the evening news. She stood in front of the TV and spoke loud enough to drown out Walter Cronkite.

“Daisy’s room is full of chicken,” she said. “She eats chicken in there. She has a special method she showed me. She peels all the meat off because she likes to keep the carcasses whole. Even the wings—she peels the meat off them. Then she puts the carcass on the floor next to the last carcass. She has about nine now. She says when she’s got fourteen it’s time to leave.”

“Did she give you any chicken?” I asked.

“I didn’t want any of her disgusting chicken.”

“Why does she do it?” Georgina asked.

“Hey, man,” said Lisa, “I don’t know everything.”

“What about the laxatives?” Polly wanted to know.

“Needs ’em. Needs ’em because of all the chicken.”

“There’s more to this than meets the eye,” said Georgina.

“Listen! I got access,” said Lisa. The discussion degenerated quickly after that.

Within the week there was more news about Daisy. Her father had bought her an apartment for Christmas. “A love nest,” Lisa called it.

Daisy was pleased with herself and spent more time out of her room, hoping that someone would ask her about the apartment. Georgina obliged.

“How big is the apartment, Daisy?”

“One bedroom, L-shaped living room, eat-in chicken.”

“You mean eat-in kitchen?”

“That’s what I said, asshole.”

“Where’s the apartment, Daisy?”

“Near the Mass. General.”

“On the way to the airport, like?”

“Near the Mass. General.” Daisy didn’t want to admit it was on the way to the airport.

“What do you like best about it?”

Daisy shut her eyes and paused, relishing her favorite part. “The sign.”

“What does the sign say?”

“ ‘If you lived here, you’d be home now.’ ” She clenched her hands with excitement. “See, every day people will drive past and read that sign and think, ‘Yeah, if I lived here I’d be home now,’ and I
will
be home. Motherfuckers.”

Daisy left early that year, to spend Christmas in her apartment.

“She’ll be back,” said Lisa. But Lisa for once was wrong.

One afternoon in May we were called to a special Hall Meeting.

“Girls,” said the head nurse, “I have some sad news.” We all leaned forward. “Daisy committed suicide yesterday.”

“Was she in her apartment?” asked Georgina.

“Did she shoot herself?” asked Polly.

“Who’s Daisy? Do I know Daisy?” asked the Martian’s girlfriend.

“Did she leave a note?” I asked.

“The details aren’t important,” said the head nurse.

“It was her birthday, wasn’t it?” asked Lisa. The head nurse nodded.

We all observed a moment of silence for Daisy.

My Suicide

Suicide is a form of murder—premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.