by Laurel Brett
“No, of course you didn’t.”
“She’s this way.”
I strode though the large common room and found Daphne rocking in the corner of Juliana’s bedroom. There were three beds in the room: a set of bunk beds and a single bed with Daphne on it, facing the wall. She sat with her legs crossed on top of a navy blanket.
“Daphne?”
She turned. When she raised her head I saw butchered hair, hacked off unevenly, sticking out at all angles under a Yankees cap. Dirt dimmed its usual red hues, and her dull skin lacked color.
“Garrett.” Her voice was flat. She had never said my name like that before. I couldn’t be sure which Daphne sat before me.
I said, “All your beautiful hair.”
“Yeah. I’m a real Jo March,” she remarked sardonically.
“Joe March?”
“You’d have to be a girl who read Little Women. What are you doing here?” She spoke in a one-dimensional monotone.
“Juliana called me. She was worried.”
“Okay.”
I still had no idea how she felt about my visit, but decided to deal with practicalities and so I exited into the common room to consult with Juliana. “Can she sleep here tonight?”
“Yes,” she assured me. “We have an extra bed.”
“Which one do you want her to take?”
“She can have the one she’s on. My roommate and I will take the bunks.”
“Is she a student here, Juliana?” I asked, trying to glean enough information to solve this puzzle.
She shook her head.
“I’ll go back to her and see if I can get her to sleep. Where is your roommate? And where are the other girls?”
“She’s studying with her boyfriend, and the others are around. They’ll be back soon, but they knew you were coming, so they wanted the room to be quiet. Everyone is worried.”
“Why is she here? And why have you all taken her in?”
“You’ll understand when you hear her story.”
I walked back into the room, and Daphne was in the exact position in which I’d left her. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
“No. I felt good about two hours ago. Now I feel like shit.”
“You’re stoned on something, right?” Teaching at a college had brought me into contact with a lot of drugs. Kids came stoned to class all the time, and on occasion someone even came to class tripping on mescaline or LSD. Her affect struck me as different.
“I smoked a big wad of sticky black opium in a hash pipe,” she announced with a touch of triumphant relish, her head nodding in rhythm with the drug.
Then Daphne curled up like a snail in its shell, still rocking on the bed. I sifted through everything I knew about opium, but all I could remember were images from the movies of Chinese opium dens and men in long braids and beautiful brocaded robes nodding off in the corners. The dorm room wasn’t exotic, and neither was this sad girl in front of me, nodding out and far away. She uncurled herself, stopped rocking, and sat ramrod straight, her emerald eyes smoky with defiance.
“What happened?” I asked.
“They killed him.”
“Killed who?”
Her expression was withering. “Come on. You can do better than that. Wait a minute. I’ll show you.” She reached for a large canvas bag and pulled out a copy of The Portable Nietzsche, the thick paperback with a purple cover. I had the same book. Then she held out a picture. I saw a handsome young Latino man in uniform.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“Don’t you remember? The one I talked to about Nietzsche. Rick. He couldn’t get a deferment because he wasn’t a citizen. He only had a green card. He was a musician and knew Zappa from the downtown scene, but everyone there started calling him ‘Baby Killer’ when he went off to basic training, even though they would have deported his family if he hadn’t. It was so unfair.” I could hear a catch in her throat.
SDS Daphne had once told me about this young soldier. Ur-Daphne had tried to start a correspondence with an army private, but he had not written back. That meant that this girl was either SDS Daphne or a new Daphne who’d branched off from her. I wanted to find out just whom I was talking to. Then I remembered that SDS Daphne had only gotten one letter from Rick.
“Your pen pal, right?” I asked first. Then I tried to be nonchalant. “So, remind me. We saw each other last when?”
She nodded. “My pen pal. Rick told his friends to send me these mementos, the book with his signature, the picture, and the Yankees cap. He loved the Yankees, even though lately they suck.”
I thought about the day I’d met Ur-Daphne, when I was so upset about the Yankees. This past season they hadn’t done much better.
That poor kid was over in Vietnam rooting for the Yankees . . . “How did he die?” I asked.
“What does it matter? He’s dead. He was twenty-
three. Now I’ll never get to meet him.”
“What about Terry?”
“You mean the SDS guy? What about him?”
She hadn’t answered my question about the last time we’d seen each other. Getting off the bed she said, “I got a long letter from Rick the day after I met you.”
I felt relieved just to see her get off the bed. This is progress, I thought. She sidled over to the stereo and pointedly chose a record from the sprawl of albums on top of the bookshelves. The album cover featured a decal banana. The song she played was about heroin, the music raucously recreating the action of the drug. I could hear the lead singing, “When I’m rushing on my run, and I feel just like Jesus’ son, and I guess that I just don’t know . . .” I got chills listening to him.
Daphne returned to her cross-legged position. I went over to the stereo and gingerly lifted the needle off the album. I saw that the name of the group was the Velvet Underground, the singer, Lou Reed. Just hearing this snippet told me the group was talented but very close to the edge, and I shivered again. This new Daphne was close to the edge too.
“Planning on heroin next?” I asked. Then I decisively said, “No more Velvet Underground, and no more drugs.”
“What does it matter?”
“I’m not going to have a philosophical discussion. You’re not shooting heroin.”
“I want to,” she said. “And I know where to get it.”
“That’s really stupid. That’s a way to become an addict. What would you do then?”
“Not everyone gets addicted. That’s an ignorant old wives’ tale.”
“No, it isn’t. Not absolutely everyone gets addicted, but most people do.”
“How do you know?”
“I studied it. I’m very sorry about Rick, but do you think he’d want you to stick a needle in your arm? He wouldn’t.” Taking in her overall pallor I added, “You should have something to eat.”
“Nah. Not after the opium.”
“Could you sleep?”
“Maybe.”
She took off her jeans and crawled under the covers, her head on the pillow, in a fetal position. She was asleep before I left the room.
Juliana stood waiting for me just outside, in the common area of the suite.
“Mission accomplished,” I said.
“She’s sleeping?”
“She is. Can you tell me what happened?”
Juliana launched into the story. Daphne had gone to a rock concert with a high school friend five days ago. Juliana hadn’t gotten it straight if they’d been at the Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden that had just opened its doors right at Penn Station, or at Café à Go Go, or the Fillmore East, or somewhere else. She also wasn’t sure what band they saw. Daphne hadn’t been too forthcoming. Juliana knew that Daphne sat next to a young kid who happened to have a lot of drugs. He gave her handfuls of uncut grass, which she ate. Then he gave her seven Nembutal, which she swallowed, one by one, with no thought of the dosage. They must have been the very lowest dose available, or Daphne would be dead.
“Do you think
she was trying to commit suicide?” I asked Juliana.
“I have no idea. I don’t really know her.”
“Go on,” I said.
The friend Daphne was with wanted to go home, but Daphne didn’t. Daphne was just straight enough to get to Penn Station with her friend, but in a stunning show of poor judgment she decided to stay in the city, even though her friend was leaving. According to Daphne, they parted ways when she was still standing and mostly all right. Soon after the girl got on the train, Daphne was overcome by such sleepiness that she just lay down in the middle of 34th Street in front of the Statler Hilton Hotel. She only remained alive because of the sparse traffic at that late hour, to hear her tell it.
A young guy, a Good Samaritan on speed, took pity on her and picked her up off the street. Mr. Speed Freak had an open invitation at Stony Brook to visit friends. He chose that night, and took this wasted girl on the train with him going east. He crashed with friends and Daphne slept on an empty bed in the room. The Nembutal was so powerful that she awoke in the boys’ suite twenty-four hours later.
“The awful thing,” Juliana told me, “is that when she came to, Mr. Speed Freak was having sex with her without a condom. According to Daphne, she just shrugged. I told her that this was a form of rape and wanted her to report him to the police, but she just said she just didn’t care who she fucked and besides, he had rescued her, so he deserved a reward.”
I couldn’t bear to hear any more of this. I should have been there and protected her, although I knew these were irrational thoughts. I understood Juliana’s charity. “You were hurt like that once?”
“Yeah.” She clenched her jaw to hold back tears, and her whispery voice grew almost inaudible so I had to strain to hear her. “When I was fifteen. By my mother’s brother. I can’t call him my uncle. No one believed me, especially not my mother. It almost killed me. When one of the guys from the suite in the boys’ dorm thought Daphne should be with women to take care of her, he brought her here. He knew my history.
“Mr. Speed Freak sold drugs and had sex with half the women on the floor, and abandoned each one just as fast. He was using everyone. Finally, the boys came over to eject him from campus. They put him on a train and warned him never to come back. But Daphne is still in really bad shape. She’s grieving for the guy in Vietnam, feeling sexually exploited, fucked up on drugs, and she has nowhere to go. She’s been camping out on people’s couches, living with friends, or sometimes on the street for a while now. I get the feeling that she dropped out of high school. Something in Rick’s letter. You have to do something.” Juliana urgently grasped my hand.
“I will. I’ll figure out something.”
I went to the bathroom and leaned my forehead against its cool tiles. I thought I might throw up. I couldn’t process the desperation Daphne must have felt to swallow seven pills that could have ended her life. I felt angry that she would throw away her future because Rick had lost his. I tiptoed into the room and was gratified to discover that Daphne was still asleep. I would have been glad to sleep on the floor of the common room, but boys and men were prohibited from sleeping in the women’s dorms.
After I checked into a motel I walked across the street and sat in an all-night donut joint. I wasn’t ready to go to sleep so I ordered a coffee, which I nursed for about forty-five minutes till it turned stone cold.
I thought of my little Junior League Ur-Daphne sitting in our coffee shop wearing the pearls we’d ridiculed. I had been put off by that Daphne’s primness. How I’d laughed when I discovered that I had not lost her to a more conservative vision of herself. Now that reaction seemed foolish and indulgent. That Daphne did not know the sadness of this hollow-cheeked girl. My first Daphne was still connected to the nourishing roots of childhood, whether she wore pearls or a hippie bead necklace. This young woman in the Yankees cap had been severed from childhood completely. Both girls seemed made of the same stuff, but life events had shaped them so differently. An open question in psychology was whether personality and character keep evolving. Now I was certain they did.
Their dissimilarities went beyond the simple observation that circumstances conditioned each Schrödinger girl to react in a different way; this was something more. Just as in Borges, these were forking paths. At the pulsing point of divergence, one girl became four different girls, and even the inner kernel of self became reshaped by the path she traveled. The Schrödinger girls both were and weren’t the same person. The metaphysical implications were dizzying, raising questions about the nature of the self that psychology might never answer. Behaviorism didn’t ask any of these questions, and the rest of my training as a psychologist hadn’t prepared me to answer them either.
* * *
That Saturday morning I had more pressing concerns. I was up early, after only a few hours of sleep. Dawn was an uneventful display. The darkness gradually lifted to reveal a charcoal-gray sky that lightened into a pearly, almost nacreous silver. Then it was day. There was no room service, but I’d brought back a couple of donuts from the night before; I’d get coffee later. It was too early to return to the college. I had already decided to consult Jerry about how to help this girl, yet it was also too early to call him. I had brought something to read, but instead I stared out the window in mindless absorption. In the early-morning light this stretch of commercial road was dull. I was about five miles south of campus, and the large stores, gas stations, motels, and car dealerships were uninspiring.
At eight a.m. I called Jerry. Any calls to him had to be screened through a switchboard. Poor Jerry. He can’t even screen his own calls.
“Garrett?”
“Yeah, it’s me. How are you doing, friend?”
“As well as can be expected. I might become a holy roller now that I’m no longer a sinner.”
“So you’re not still an atheist?”
“Kiddo, what’s going on so bright and early? We’re still on for tomorrow?”
“I’m not sure. I encountered a new Daphne, and she is seriously abusing drugs and is suicidal. She definitely needs professional help. I don’t know where to take her or what to do.”
“Does she have parents you could involve?” If he thought I was delusional, he didn’t show it.
Although I had resolved never to involve her parents, Jerry’s question made sense that morning. “I’m not sure. Trust me, that wasn’t a question I could ask last night.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at Stony Brook, way out in the boonies on Long Island.”
“If I could arrange it, could you drive her to this rehab center?”
“She’s not eighteen yet. I don’t know if I could get parental permission. Does that make a difference? And I don’t know who’d pay for it.”
“Let me work on things here. Can I speak to her?”
“Not right now. I’m at a motel. I couldn’t very well stay in an all-girls’ dorm.”
“No, of course not. Call me back when you’re with her.”
I waited an hour and half before driving north along a street with only trees and traffic lights. The five miles were just a blur of barren branches. I could see that the school was being built in a particularly undistinguished style. Puddles and mud filled in all the space between buildings, but the dorm was easy to find by daylight. I parked in the large student parking lot.
Juliana must have been expecting me, or seen me through the window, because she was right by the door when I knocked. “Yes, Daphne is up,” she said before I could ask.
“Will I be disturbing anyone if I walk straight into the room?”
“No, not at all. Most of the suite is at the train station to go home for the weekend. Daphne and I are alone.”
Daphne seemed to have recovered from the night before. The pink had returned to her face, though she still appeared tired and pale. “I was a brat to you last night,” she said, avoiding looking at me.
“You were fine, just unhappy. I am so sorry about Rick.”
She t
ook off her baseball cap. I could see that she’d gotten up early enough for a shower. Her hair still hung in uneven bunches, but at least it was clean now. Her copper-penny auburn strands shone in the eastern morning light.
“I need to ask you some questions,” I said.
“Okay.”
“The first is about your parents.”
“I’m an emancipated minor.”
“That makes things easier. Would you consider going into rehab?”
“I guess so. Everything hurts and I don’t know where to go.”
“Let’s get some air. Get some breakfast. Ask Juliana if she’d like to come.”
Both girls climbed into the backseat of the car. It was a cold, hard, bright morning. Light fell in spiky darts, and crisp air shone blue against an even bluer sky. We drove until I saw a beach, West Meadow, the sign said, deserted in the winter. The blue-green waves crashed and receded. We walked along the sand, holding our collars against the wind. After ten minutes we were too cold to keep walking so we went somewhere close by for hot chocolate and buns. After eating, I took the girls back to the dorm. This time I called Jerry from the common room phone.
He had gotten his lawyer working on things. God bless Jerry. Since Daphne was an emancipated minor there was no problem making arrangements for her without her parents’ consent. He had somehow finagled a scholarship, if that’s what you’d call it, from an affiliated facility nearby. Apparently, a lot of people from New York City went into rehab there, just north of the city.
Jerry said, “I thought it better that we not be in the same facility anyway. Too many potential entanglements.”
“But didn’t you say yours is the best?”
“Me and my big mouth. Don’t worry. It will be just fine, and she’ll have somewhere safe to be and a chance to work through this . . . Now I have to talk to her.”
Daphne got on the phone. I heard her confirm all the details I had given Jerry. Then I heard her emphatically declare, “Yeah, I’ll go into rehab. I’ll try to get better.”
She had come so far in just one day from the alienated, emotionless girl I was with yesterday. Or maybe that had just been the opium. She sounded more like the old Daphne. She would spend one more night with Juliana, and then I’d drive her to the facility upstate.