by Marge Piercy
“I think we’re taught we want sex when we feel unhappy or lacking something. But often what we want is something higher.”
“For me, sex has more power than that,” Connie said a little sadly. “But I think we often settle for sex when we want love. And we often want love when we need something else, like a good job or a chance to go back to school.”
“People talk too much about sex,” Mrs. Perlmutter said, her hand inside her hospital-issue dress, feeling her own breast.
At odd moments, the better days, the mental hospital reminded her of being in college those almost two years she had had before she got knocked up. The similarity lay in the serious conversations, the leisure to argue about God and Sex and the State and the Good. Except for college students, who else in the world was sitting around talking philosophy? Outside, whole days of her life would leak by and she wouldn’t have one good thoughtful conversation. Sybil was a smart person, not street smart like Claud but thoughtful about the way things were and the way they might be. Outside, who talked to her?
On Ward L-6 every day smelled the same, looked the same, sounded the same. Patients rotated through their private cycles of night and day, touching and withdrawing, snowed by the heavy drugs. She was no longer Fargo’s favorite, because she spent too much time with Sybil. Today was Friday, a dangerous day, a day of doors opening and shutting.
A doctor came onto Ward L-6, a youngish doctor with pale hair and bloodshot pale blue eyes. He arrived two hours after the time when the doctor raced through, speaking only to the nurse and attendants, while patients touching that day chased after him pleading for attention, changes in medication, furloughs, privileges, a change of ward. Calling them bird dogs, the attendants ran interference. This pale doctor was showing Fargo some papers and Fargo and the nurse were going over the patient’s ward records with him, all those comments written on each of them that could get her sent to shock or raised a niche or two nearer the gates.
Even the patients not talking, not supposed to be in touch, knew something was up. Excitement rose like a hot dry wind and the women began chirping. Mrs. Martínez crawled into a corner and pushed her face against the wall. Joan began talking in what the staff called a word salad about her mother and God and the FBI. “They come and come and come again. Scrape it off the ceiling. Bad girl. Bad! Eat it for breakfast. Knock, knock, who’s there. Across it up and cross it off. A double cross. Come in and come out. All over, ugh, dirty. Dirty girl. Knock, knock. It’s a dirty bird. The pigeon did it. Bad, bad, ate it again! All comes out. Knock knock knock. Hot cross buns. Bang you again. Bang on the bum. Hot, hurt. Bad again! Bad!” Her voice rose high in a shriek of fury but her expression did not change.
From the side of her mouth Sybil asked, “What do you suppose the young inquisitor searches for? Are they hunting witches with needles today?”
Indeed, both the doctor and Fargo looked straight at them and they shut up. Connie turned away, but when she cautiously glanced at the station again, the two of them were still under surveillance. Had they been acting too intimate? Fargo jogged over and hoisted Sybil by an arm. Sybil tried to whip her arm free, but Fargo expertly pinned her. When Sybil got mad she could hold her off easily till she was hypoed, but she was more curious than angry. She drew herself up to eye the doctor along her narrow nose, making him instantly aware that she had two inches on him. “Do you enjoy visiting the zoo? Do you want to be a veterinarian when you grow up?” she cooed.
“She’s on the large side,” the doctor said. “I don’t think she’ll do.”
Fargo dropped Sybil neatly, knocking her legs out from under her, and hauled up Connie instead. “This one been acting okay. She help some. She trying to cope. But she hang out with that big-mouth.”
“Any outbreaks lately?”
“Not since she got on my ward. She was pretty wild when she arrive, but we straighten her out.”
The doctor turned away and Fargo let go of Connie. Weak through and through, she felt as if her bones had turned to wet rope. Her knees crumpled and she sat abruptly beside Sybil. She started to speak to Sybil, but Sybil shushed her and crept closer to the glassed-in station where the doctor and Fargo were once again looking over the ward book. Sybil was trying to lip-read through the glass. Finally they emerged and the outer door was unlocked with the usual clatter.
“All right, clean that one up Monday morning and bring her down for Dr. Redding … . Oh, she speaks English? I mean reasonably?”
“Sure, no problem, Dr. Morgan. Wouldn’t I tell you right off if she couldn’t talk?”
“Righto. Clean her up and trot her down early Monday.”
Sybil and she looked at each other in the ward boiling with tension. Sybil whispered, “All I could make out was that doctor he mentioned—I never heard of him before—Dr. Redding this, Dr. Redding that. And the phrase ‘possible subject.’”
“Oh! Oh!” Joan muttered. She got off her bed and darted over to peer into Connie’s face. “Knock, knock! Watch out!” Joan fled back to her bed and pantomimed the locking routine she seemed to hope would protect her.
“What do you think they’re going to do to me Monday?”
Sybil shook her head, frowning. “They like you because you’re small. They expect to push you around easily.”
She was scared but alert. Maybe it was a new kind of therapy? Usually they didn’t pull patients out of L-6 for group therapy, the only kind in the hospital. If it was shock, they wouldn’t make such a fuss. Maybe they were testing drugs, as they had on Claud. Claud’s friend Otis said they had given hepatitis, the dirty disease that had killed Claud, to a whole lot of little kids in Willowbrook, a state institution. Some doctor had injected little kids who hadn’t done anything wrong except to be born dim witted, and got a big reward for it. What would they do to her?
Monday morning she was taken from Ward L-6 halfway across the grounds to the hospital building itself—the real hospital in the mental hospital. Normally it was a sleepy, understaffed building, but one floor seemed to have undergone changes. She got only a glimpse of maybe twenty other patients, men and women, waiting on chairs in the hall, before Fargo dragged her off. “Behave yourself now. I want to use the staff john. Now you keep quiet and don’t mess around.” Fargo installed her by the clean white sinks with liquid soap in a container that worked. Enviously she approached. Fargo was pissing. Over the liquid soap container with its yellow-green ooze, she saw a drab, funny-looking woman in the mirror. Quickly she looked away. Outside, no day passed without her seeing herself in mirrors, in shopwindows, everywhere reflected. The battered tin mirror in the bathroom on L-6 gave up only ripples of distortion.
Her hair looked disgusting: not only uncombed, straggly, dirty, but with white roots grown out along her part. Her hair had turned white down the center like a skunk as soon as she had passed thirty. Dolly gave her money for hair dye, which she hid as carefully from her caseworker as a stash of dope. It was her secret vice, dyeing her hair, but also it was a small act of self-affirmation. As long as her will kept her hair black as it had always been, as it should be, she was some part Consuelo who had won the scholarship to junior college, who had had the guts to depart Chicago for a strange city to get away from a rapist, who had broken Geraldo’s nose—yes, she was proud of that. Her definition of Connie included black hair.
Well, at least she was no longer overweight, but she was flabby. At home she had the exercise of running up and down four flights of stairs ten times a day, every time she needed something from the superette or the candy store, every time she checked the mail, took out garbage, got a pack of cigarettes, mailed a letter, went down to welfare, went out to those scrubwoman jobs welfare made her do. She carried her groceries, her laundry, her garbage. She walked many blocks. Here her only exercise was being herded to and from the showers.
Small particles of dead skin gave her flesh an ashy look. If only she had a brush, she could disentangle her hair, brush out the mats and clumps. Ah, she looked like a bundle o
f institutional laundry!
Fargo hauled her along. The young doctor was bustling around the hall, followed by a secretary and more attendants. Fargo turned her over to one of the new attendants, a fat red-faced man, who inserted her into a row of green plastic chairs where the men and women had been placed to wait. As each new arrival was checked in, all the waiting patients stared in hope that something about the newcomer would make clear their mutual situation.
“Do you know what we’re in for? What they’re going to do to us?” she whispered to a young man in the next chair.
“I don’t know.” He was white, skinny, long-legged and tall, with abundant kinky brown hair. “They came on my ward last week and they looked over five of us. That blond doctor and attendant. They only took him and me.” He pointed to a short black man beside him.
“They didn’t say what for?”
“Some kind of testing, we heard … . It looks to me like that room at the end of the hall is fixed up as a lab. Past the offices.”
“A lab? What kind of experiments could they do on us?”
He shrugged, “Man, I don’t know. Whatever it is, you bet it will hurt.” He sighed, combing back his nervous hands through his long, tangled hair. “My name’s Skip. This is Orville … . You don’t have any weed, do you? By some miracle? I can buy.”
“I’m Connie. I wish I did. Last time I was in, it was all over the place.”
“Some buildings it’s around, some it isn’t. In some you can get anything … . Not ours. God, can you imagine the incredible acts of brutality we might commit if we had a little dope? Monsters like us. You been in before, huh?” He waited for her nod. “Me too. Seven times in various spitals. One for each consecutive time I tried to off myself. Actually that was only five times.”
“And never made it?” She laughed.
“I’m persistent. Maybe I have a will to failure. Orville, here, he cut up his girlfriend. Did you do anything like that, maybe?”
Orville said flatly (probably for the sixtieth time, as she well knew), “I was overworked. I had this job as night watchman and then I was delivering pizzas weekends. I couldn’t cope with it all.”
“Sort of.” She clutched herself. “I smashed a bottle in the face of my niece’s pimp.” She grinned. “I wasn’t overworked. I just hated him.” Such a light feeling, like floating, to say that truthfully and let it hang there; at the same time the floating feeling was a cutting loose because she had been raised and had lived under a code where a woman never did anything like that, let alone speak of such actions.
“As far as I can tell, we all walk and talk,” the boy went on. “We’re functioning crazies. We all broke the law. I hope we aren’t about to get shipped to some maximum security place—not that this place isn’t pretty tight.”
“You got a record?”
“Yeah … possession. But the shrinks wrote up worse things on my record.” He poked her with his bony elbow. “That doctor’s the boss. The other’s just his lackey.”
Middling height, middling weight, brown hair, thick glasses, in his late forties, he exuded an energetic self-importance like a big Harley-Davidson gunning up 111th Street with a Savage Sheik on top. He washed his hands together with a brisk dry happy sound as he marched by the row of bedraggled patients on green plastic chairs, and in his wake bobbed the pale man, Dr. Morgan, a nurse, a man in student clothing, a woman in a white coat whose hand brushed the student type’s hand super-casually, a male and female attendant, and a secretary, who stood holding a sheaf of records and pages and pages of other, ominous paper. Eventually Dr. Redding, as she heard him called, took various papers and cruised them, nodded and handed them all on to Dr. Morgan. “Fine, fine. Let’s get the show on the road. Morgan, Acker, and I will do the screening, and Patty and Miss Moynihan will sit in. We should zip through this batch before two, because I have to get back to the university to meet one of those foundation johnnies.”
Everyone but the attendants and the nurse bustled after him, as the patients looked at each other and the shut door. One at a time they were called in. The morning passed. No provision had been made for them to get lunch, which was brought in on trays for the staff, so they remained parked in the hall, grumbling, those screened and those not yet processed.
“It’s no different from a regular psychiatric interview,” said a woman in her forties, who also informed them she was a schoolteacher. “I teach auditorium,” she said. That sounded peculiar to Connie, like teaching garage or living room. “The doctors simply ask you the same old questions. They have your records right there, so they know the answers, or they think they do … . Perhaps I’m being reclassified, finally. They’re going to look into our cases.”
At about one, Connie was called in as Skip came out. Clearing her throat with nervousness, she sat in a chair facing them lined up behind a table. Doctors and judges, caseworkers and social workers, probation officers, police, psychiatrists. Her heart bumped, her palms dampened, her throat kept closing over. She could not guess which way to cue her answers. What were they looking for? Would it be better to fall into their net or through it? If only she knew. If only she knew what the net consisted of. She was taking a test in a subject, and she didn’t even know what course it was.
The young doctor who had picked her out of the ward did most of the questioning at first, with the type in the denim pseudo work clothes horning in from time to time. The same old stuff about Dolly and Geraldo, her daughter, her time with Claud, her drinking, her drug use, her difficulty in getting a job. It was like saying the responses at Mass. When what she said didn’t fit their fixed ideas, they went on as if it did. Resistance, they called that, when you didn’t agree, but this bunch didn’t seem that interested in whether she had a good therapeutic attitude. What were they listening for, inasmuch as they listened at all? How that Dr. Redding stared at her, not like she’d look at a person, but the way she might look at a tree, a painting, a tiger in the zoo.
They were on her brother Joe now. The holy ghost of poor Joe, who had died of a perforated ulcer just after he got out of the pen for a drugstore holdup. Now they were questioning her about the beatings her father had given her as a child. She kept her face frozen, her voice level. Inappropriate affect, they called that—as if to have strangers pawing through the rags of her life like people going through cast-off clothes at a rummage sale was not painful enough to call forth every measure of control she could manage. Her mother, her father, her brother, her lover, her husband, her daughter, all fingered, sized up, dissected, labeled. Still, their white faces looked bored. The denim type, Acker, and Miss Moynihan in the lab coat were exchanging flirtatious glances. They could eat her for dessert and go on to six others and never belch. They were white through and through like Wonder Bread, white and full of holes.
Suddenly Dr. Redding came to life and took over. “Have you ever suffered headaches? pain anywhere in the head region?”
“Headaches?” Now what was this? “The medication does that sometimes,” she said cautiously.
“The medication?”
“The tranquilizers.”
“Other times. Outside the hospital. Haven’t you had headaches outside the hospital, Connie?”
One of those first-name doctors who reduced you to five years old. “Not often.”
“How often?”
She shrugged. What was he getting at? Were they wanting to try out drugs on them? “My back aches. My feet sometimes. I’ve had female complaints. My eyes, my head never has troubled me much in my life. Knock on wood.”
“How about in connection with some of those incidents we’ve gone over? I notice in the incident where you used violence against your daughter there’s a mention in the record of your feeling unwell.”
“Doctor, I was hung over. Strung out. I was very bad. I’d been drinking for three months.”
“Connie, you’re diagnosing, aren’t you?” He seemed to suspect she was concealing headaches. “Dizziness? Blackouts?”
; “Like fainting? No, I never fainted in my whole life.”
“Yet you say you were unconscious the night you were admitted to Bellevue.”
“Geraldo and Slick hit me in the head. Slick knocked me out.”
“Do you remember any blows to the head previously? Before the last accident when you were readmitted to Bellevue?”
“Sure, occasionally.”
“Why don’t you describe those occasions?”
“I don’t remember them all … .” She paused when she saw Dr. Redding making a satisfied note of that. “Eddie, Eddie Ramos, my husband, used to hit me in the head sometimes.”
“That’s the second husband, the one she’s still married to,” Acker, the denim type, said.
“He didn’t sign the commitment. Where is he?” Dr. Redding demanded of Acker.
“Whereabouts unknown, Doctor.”
“I suppose no one has tried too hard to find our pugilist,” Dr. Redding said with a slight smile. “Connie, do you remember your head being x-rayed after any of these incidents with your second husband?”
“No. I never got beat up that bad, to go into the hospital and get x-rays.” They had to be kidding. When she had been with Eddie she had not been on welfare and who would have paid for x-rays and doctors? The only time she had gone in was when she had been bleeding after the abortion, and that had been terrible in its consequences.
“Not that badly, Connie? … Did he knock you down?”
“Sure.” She had noticed before that white men got off on descriptions of brown and black women being beaten. “Hay que tratarlas mal,” Eddie would always say.
“Get a set of x-rays on her before we begin the EEG monitoring,” Dr. Redding said to Dr. Morgan. “We’ll go with this one in the initial stages. How many live ones does that give us today?”
“Seven, Doctor,” the secretary chirped.
“That’s all? Let’s get cracking. Okay, Connie. Take her out.” Dr. Redding was already rummaging through the next set of records as she was whisked out and dumped in her chair again.