Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

by Kathleen Rooney

  I’m surprised to hear myself say this—I know it’s the wrong thing; I’m not sure why I said it except that I think it’s true—but her face, half-lit by the hospital windows, doesn’t show bafflement or anger, only fear and pain. “What’s your name, dear?” I ask.

  “Maritza,” she says.

  “My name is Lillian. Does tonight’s guest of honor have a name yet?”

  “Yes,” she says. “But it’s a secret. They’re a secret—one for if it’s a girl, one for if it’s a boy. Luis would kill me if I told you.”

  “That’s okay,” I say. “I understand. My husband and I, we were the same way. Didn’t tell anybody until it was a done deal. We called him Snooks while he was inside.”

  “We call ours Coco,” she says. “Like coconut. Though he, or she, is a lot bigger than that now.”

  “I recall the feeling,” I say. “I thought I’d get too big to fit in revolving doors.”

  “I know,” says Maritza. “Thank god these ones slide open.”

  “Why don’t you let me take you inside?”

  “No!” she says, stepping away. “Then they’ll check me in and Luis won’t find me. His English is not so good as mine.”

  She doubles over and groans with the pain of a contraction. I hold her hand and rub her back through the puffy coat. “It’s okay, Maritza,” I say. “I won’t let them take you back without him. But you’ll be more comfortable inside. We can just walk up and down the hallway until he gets here. It’s better to walk before they strap you down anyway.”

  “Are you sure?” she says. “I can’t go back without him. Luis and I aren’t married. We will be, but we aren’t now. I think they won’t send him to me because he’s not my husband.”

  “We won’t let them do that,” I say. “I promise. We’ll make sure he finds you, and you’ll go together.”

  “You think I’m a slut for having this baby when I’m not his wife?” she says, looking up at me.

  I try not to show the shock I feel at hearing that word, try not to act old. “No!” I say, “That’s ridiculous. Now come on, let’s walk.”

  “Okay, Lillian,” she says, face sweating, and she lets me help her inside.

  The doors part for us, and we pass among the afflicted and their attendants, under the fluorescent lights. Maritza does a slight double take the next time she looks up at me in the unflattering antiseptic glow—a reaction to which I’ve become accustomed each time my wrinkles and my mottled skin betray what my strong voice and perfect posture conceal. “How old are you?” she asks.

  “Eighty-four,” I lie.

  “That’s way older than I thought at first,” says Maritza. “You’re the same age as my abuelita. But you don’t act like her.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “I think.”

  Doubled over again, she doesn’t respond. I want to try to get her mind off what’s worrying her: Luis’s whereabouts, her pain, the pain to come. “Tell me more about Coco,” I say.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Well, it’s exciting to have a child,” I say. “What are your plans? No, scratch that—let’s not talk about plans. What are your dreams for the little person? What do you want for him or her?”

  Her creased forehead shines brightly with sweat, but she manages a little smile. “It’s silly,” she says. “Luis says it is. But I want Coco to be the first baby born in 1985. You know, the New Year’s baby.”

  “That’s a good goal,” I say, and look at my watch. “It’s about 10:30. You’re within sight of it, certainly. If you get this show on the road, Coco just might make it.”

  “Ma’am!” says a voice from across the room: the receptionist at the admitting desk. She has, I realize, been saying it for a while. “Do we need to get her to maternity?”

  “No!” Maritza says, pivoting her belly away as if to protect its contents.

  “We’ll wait for the father, thank you!” I say with a cheery wave.

  “Are you an angel?” says Maritza, squeezing my hand so tightly it hurts. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  “Good grief,” I say. “Don’t go delirious on me.”

  She looks past me to the sliding doors and relief floods her face. “Luis!” she shouts.

  A thin man with a round face that makes him look even younger than Maritza has just walked in, his dark eyes frantic, scanning the room. He sees us and sprints over.

  He wears a leather jacket and a baseball cap. He takes off the latter and clutches it in his hands as he looks at Maritza and then at me, confused. She says something to him in Spanish and he nods to me, and I transfer Maritza’s hand to his.

  “I think you’re all set to check in now, Maritza,” I say. “Yes?”

  “Yes,” she says, holding on to Luis. “Thank you, Lillian.”

  “Muchas gracias, Lillian,” says Luis.

  “Of course,” I say. “You’re welcome. And good luck. Just remember, the first thousand diapers are the hardest.”

  Maritza laughs, then says, “It hurts to laugh.”

  Luis seems to have all but forgotten me. He’s holding both of Maritza’s hands now, his eyes sharp with terror and wonder; his car keys, I notice, still dangle between his fingers. I think about all the ads for engagement rings that I wrote over the years, mostly for R.H. Macy’s but also freelance. How are you fixed for diamonds? they’d ask. Diamonds are better than sulfur and molasses for sweethearts suffering from the megrims. We’ve seen one of our diamond wedding rings revive a young lady’s drooping spirit in half a split second. A time came when these ads stopped seeming funny to me, and I could no longer write them.

  “Maritza,” I say, “don’t worry too much about what anybody’s grandmother thinks. Do whatever you want. Anyone who tells you you shouldn’t is trying to sell you something.”

  As I walk back to the street, I try to make a mental note to check tomorrow’s papers and see whether Coco, born to Maritza and Luis, succeeds in being 1985’s first sparkling new baby. It’s nice to feel a small sense of investment in the future, even if it only lasts a few hours.

  I have so little future left. And so much past.

  19

  A Horrid Little Ghost

  One leaves a sanitarium with a renewed enthusiasm for making oneself up.

  At least I did, that early summer of 1955. But one must remain in the sanitarium for quite some time before one achieves such a transformation. Four months in my case: from bleakest February to greenest June.

  The last poem I wrote before they sent me in was called “Blackout;” it went like this:

  When life seems gray

  And short of fizz

  It seems that way

  Because it is.

  It eventually found a home in Ladies’ Home Journal, accompanied by a cute illustration.

  I wasn’t kidding when I wrote it. Or so I gather; I don’t remember writing it at all. What I know of that period I’ve had to piece together after the fact—à la that clever Lieutenant Columbo—from journals, letters, medical bills, interviews with eyewitnesses, and the few odd flashes that have come back to me over the years. Filling in, bit by bit, an ugly picture of myself. At once the detective, the victim, and the murderer.

  The people around me, Max and Johnny particularly, had come to notice signs of trouble: my drinking, my distraction, my utter lack of pleasure in things—this last, I learned, called anhedonia, which to me sounded like the name of a flower Max never planted in the garden I never wanted. Max tried, in his graceless way, to snap me out of it with a series of increasingly tin-eared and desperate inducements that culminated in our second ocean voyage to Italy, about which the less said the better, but none of it was any use. I had become a stranger—dark and frightening—to the people I most loved.

  Or so I gather.

  So in I went.

  Max checked me into Silver Hill, a residential treatment facility in the tranquil hinterland of bucolic Connecticut.

  Severe depression, alcoholism, and menopause
on top of it all: that was Dr. R’s tripartite diagnosis, a three-pronged stab to Max’s heart and pride. I, evidently, was so far beyond caring by that point that I took in this assessment without interest, as though they were speaking of someone else—which, in a sense, I suppose they were.

  Comprehensive psychiatric and addiction treatment services, those were what Silver Hill provided. I remember, for some reason, holding their brochure, which Max gave me to browse on the ride down from Manhattan that white morning in early February; it apparently declared that they had been restoring mental health since 1931—the same year that I became the highest-paid advertising woman in America. Or so Max told me; I had no appetite for reading and simply took his word for it. I don’t think he cared. I think he mostly wanted to give me something to hold that was not his hand.

  Silver Hill was meant to be a hospital that didn’t feel like a hospital but rather like a comfortable retreat in the New England countryside: quaint and comforting as a house in a snow globe. But only if one had really lost one’s mind—only if it were gone completely, never to return—could one forget what it really was and why one was there.

  February is the shortest month, and thank whomever for small blessings, because I’ve never been lower in my life. The Silver Hill staff tried their damnedest to fix me, with talk therapy, occupational therapy, and drugs—Miltown, Luminal, Thorazine—but I was so far down the well that they could not even reach me, let alone pull me up.

  So they farmed me out. On the first of March they sent me to Greenwich Hospital—twenty miles southwest, almost to the state line—where I stayed for ten days. The location felt like an improvement: Even bedridden in my drab gown, brain scrubbed of every good and bad thought, I could feel myself closer to the city. Closer to the ocean, too; at night the open window sighed the cool breath of Long Island Sound.

  The drawback was that they’d sent me there for electric shock treatments.

  They didn’t administer such therapy at Silver Hill.

  Electroshock treatments are horrible—even though, indeed because, I can’t remember having them. To their credit, the staff at Greenwich Hospital was advanced in its methods: scrupulous about strapping me down and fixing my mouth with a rubber bit to keep the seizures from breaking my bones or making me bite my tongue, considerate enough to give me a muscle relaxant—and a more sophisticated formulation, at that, than the blowgun poison some doctors still favored—along with a general anesthetic to spare me the suffocating horror of the muscle relaxant. Such, I’m told, are the measures they took for my comfort; I’m sure it’s all true. But the treatments purged themselves from my mind even as they did their work—the way that cranes create and then erase themselves from the skyline, one might say—leaving me with only the faint nightmare recollection of lying in bed afterward, every muscle sore, with no notion of who I was, who I’d ever been, why I was in a hospital, how I’d gotten there, or what I’d be returning to when I left. If I ever left. If I’d ever been anywhere else.

  But the treatments helped me when nothing else did. In time—and not much time, really—almost everything came back: my address and my phone number, the fact that I was married and had a child, Max’s and Johnny’s faces and names, my books, my fame, all my years at R.H. Macy’s.

  What did not come back were the days that had led me to Silver Hill—or, more to the point, the miserable person who I’d been in those days. In an almost-literal flash, the treatments had transfigured me. My healing brain’s sentimental attempts to feel conflicted about this loss met with no success. No easy medical metaphor—they had amputated a wounded limb; no, they had cut out a tumor—seemed the right fit. The doctors’ electric pulse was more like the clearing of an old attic, or the burning of a barren field: Rather than destroying a part of me, it had restored me to who I really was. Or who I imagined myself to be.

  The counterfeit Boxfish—that crazy woman, that sorry drunk—was a mistake, a wrong turn, a missed stitch. Now she was gone, unraveled, with no stone to mark her grave, mourned by no one. Me least of all. She shadowed me for years, feeding off her inarticulate anger at the world, and when she saw that I was weak, she attacked. She sabotaged every effort I made to adjust my dime-bright expectations to my middle-aged maternal circumstances, and when the resultant shambles didn’t satisfy her, she tried to kill me and nearly succeeded. So good riddance to her—the best of all possible riddances.

  My only hesitation—the only thread of doubt in my vast tapestry of gratitude—has been the fear that, thanks to the treatments’ extreme effectiveness at expunging my enemy from my memory, I might not recognize her if she ever came back. Almost all electroshock patients have follow-up treatments every few months or years to keep their symptoms in check; I never felt I needed them, and so I never did. Over nearly thirty years, of course, this fear has faded as the stakes have shrunk. If she comes back now to claim me—this tall, proud, husk of a woman, ending her days alone in Manhattan—then I can’t see how the prize would be worth the fight.

  Once the treatments were over I wanted to go home. I could have walked back to Murray Hill, I swore—an easy thirty miles along the Lower Post Road, a thoroughfare older than the Constitution, rambling through Port Chester and Rye, through Mamaroneck and New Rochelle, across the Bronx, over the Third Avenue Bridge into Harlem, past the homes and the businesses of every kind of New Yorker you can think of, straight down Lexington to East Thirty-Sixth—but of course they did not let me.

  Rather I got shipped—alone this time, no Max, and certainly no Johnny—back to Silver Hill for indefinite “observation” and further rehabilitation.

  For three months I hovered like an astronaut over my old life, my real life. I wanted so badly to return to it—but in my own way, on my own terms. The thought of friends seeing me in my current circumstances was abhorrent. Fortunately, few of them wanted to. I received a number of kind and thoughtful letters, but blessedly next to no requests to visit.

  “If I may appeal to your expertise,” I asked anodyne Dr. R as he made his rounds, “perhaps you can settle a question for me: Is crazy contagious? Some of my acquaintances behave as though it might be.”

  Dr. R, accustomed at long last to my kidding, took this in the spirit it was intended. “For the most part, no,” he said. “Unless we’re talking about something like syphilitic psychosis. And you can assure your friends that they’re in no danger of catching that here. Silver Hill is a progressive institution, but only up to a point.”

  “Thank you, doctor. You’ve helped me win a bet with myself.”

  “A thing I have noticed,” he continued, unable to avoid self-seriousness for more than thirty seconds or so, “is that encounters with people who are confronting their psychiatric issues often produce anxiety in people who are not confronting their psychiatric issues, precisely because they are not doing so. You might keep that in mind while you’re reading your correspondence.”

  I shook my head in mock wonderment. “What a peculiar career you have chosen for yourself,” I said. “Didn’t your mother want you to become some regular sort of doctor? Like a podiatrist?”

  “Don’t get me started on my mother,” said Dr. R.

  My own parents were both dead by that time, to my great relief. My mother died in 1950; my father lost his will to live in her absence and followed not more than six months later to wherever it is that people who’ve died go.

  Nowhere, I think, is what you’d call the place.

  My older brother never came to visit me. He did write me letters, though: distant and condescending ones, because those were the shallow pools in which his small mind swam. When he sent me a clipping called “Mastering Your Impulses,” about how alcoholics bring their problems upon themselves and need merely to “buck up” and “grow a spine,” I never wanted to hear from him again, at least not while I was still inside. I sent him an envelope full of worthless plastic prizes that I’d collected from boxes of Cracker Jack—Dr. R was a psychiatrist, not a dentist—and I wrote my
response on the backs of what the box called a Zoo Card Animal Game: You are acting no more sensitive than a stupid animal when you send things like that. I feel caged enough as it is. If that is all you can find it in your brain to send me, then I wish you’d refrain. I’ll just see you when I get out.

  He did not write me anymore at Silver Hill, and that was fine with me.

  * * *

  Saintly Helen McGoldrick was the first guest I was permitted. She came in March, on a morning blue and bright with the muddy smell of spring. It happened to be Saint Patrick’s Day—a Thursday, so she could avoid the weekend traffic—and she brought a bouquet of green carnations suited to the occasion. They reminded me of the potted four-leaf clover Max had gotten me two decades ago when we were first in love, their botanical luck long since run out.

  I met Helen in the common area, where residents were allowed to have visitors. We could order coffee or tea and sit and drink it and pretend we were free: normal people joining friends at a café.

  Anyone else would have lied, said I looked great, told me I was beginning to appear healthy again. Not Helen. “Lily,” she said. “Your eyes!”

  I welcomed her lack of pretense, though it was hard to look at her still-lovely face as it saw my ravaged one. “I know,” I said, raising a hand to my cheek. “You’re the only person I’m seeing until my eyes have recovered. The creases and circles are from the Thorazine. It affects some people that way. Others break out.”

  “Thorazine?” said Helen, leading me by the arm to a table. “Let’s sit down.”

  “I meant to write you and explain,” I said. “But I didn’t have it in me. I figured I could just tell you in person, if you even want to hear about it.”

  “I do, of course,” she said. “If you even want to talk about it.”

  “They only give shock treatments to patients with severe depression,” I said. “And they sure had one in me.”

  A wispy, deferential presence—I was never sure what to call them; they were less than orderlies but more than waiters, and I’ll bet if a patient suddenly pitched a fit their wispiness would firm up in a hurry—took our orders and brought us our cups, smooth and silent as a marionette angel.