The next person, a young guy, was a sophomore at BU majoring in medieval history. He’d started having obsessive-compulsive thoughts about killing his girlfriend, who he was sure was cheating on him with the assistant coach of the soccer team.
A woman with short black hair and very red lipstick was a flight attendant who had been suspended from her job because she kept testing positive for uppers.
My roommate, sitting beside me, spoke in a stilted, breathy voice, like a child reciting poetry: “My name is Lillith. I was living in a halfway house in Fairfield.”
“What happened?”
“I had an episode.” This close, I could see freckles. The skin under her eyes was fragile and purplish.
“Mmmhmm.” The leader turned to me.
“My therapist thought I wasn’t doing well enough on antidepressants.”
A bear eyebrow was raised, hovering.
“And I tried to kill myself last week.”
No one seemed impressed. Bear Man nodded and went on to the last person, the man in the yellow shirt.
His sleeves were now rolled halfway up his forearms, I guessed the overheated dayroom had finally gotten to him. In his late thirties, probably, with a black square haircut that made him look like Frankenstein. Propped up against the wall, a big muscular guy sagging like a sack of flour.
Bear Man saw right off that this one wasn’t going to be easy and tried another tack. “What do you do for a living?”
Mumble.
“Where do you work?”
Mumble.
“What is your job?”
The man lifted his head, and his eyes were unfathomably dark. “Security guard,” he exhaled, and then looked down again. That was all he said.
But now his badge of admittance to our group was plain to see—a deep purple vertical scar on the inside of each wrist.
My heart was filled with something like awe.
For dinner, they let us go out to the cafeteria. It was one of the modern buildings, an A-frame, all yellows and whites and chrome, appallingly bright and loud. Not a soul looked up as we entered. By the door was a tableful of teenagers, boys and girls, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, leaning over and shouting at one another. It wasn’t clear who was in charge of them.
The menu, purple Magic Marker script on shiny cardboard with smiley faces drawn on the bottom, was incomprehensible to me. I fell behind in line and listened to other people rattling off what they wanted to the lady behind the counter: veal Parmesan, chicken pot pie, eggplant casserole, several different kinds of vegetables, a soup I didn’t catch.
I slid my tray onto the chrome rack and said the first thing that came into my mind: “Eggplant casserole and rice, please.”
“What? You’ll have to speak up, honey.”
I repeated it for her.
“No rice today. Listen, how about some linguine? With garlic and butter. You look like you could use some meat on those bones.”
“Okay.”
“Good girl,” said a man’s voice behind me.
I turned around. It was the evening shift MH, a man about my age, as handsome as a movie star, with longish dark hair.
Lillith, sitting across from me, didn’t eat. She cut her veal up into splinters, which took a long time, since the knives, although metal, had no serrations, and then began methodically mashing the bits of meat along with the coagulating cheese into the linguine on her plate. It was hard not to watch her doing this. The man in the yellow shirt was sitting hunched over beside her, not eating either, his hands around a mug of coffee so that the scars were hidden. Every so often he swallowed, not the coffee, but his own spit. Bulging out of his white throat, his Adam’s apple looked like a growth.
I took a cautious bite of my eggplant. It eased down and then settled gently into my stomach. The taste was odd, not wrong, but like it was coming from far away. I forced myself to keep eating.
After dinner when Lillith and I were lying on our beds, she surprised me by leaning over and asking casually: “Okay, so how’d ya do it?”
“Are you talking to me?”
Her eyes were hidden behind her veil of greasy hair, so I couldn’t tell her expression. “Who else, Miss Priss?”
I turned a little so my back was to the door, pushed up the left sleeve of my sweater, and showed her my scars. Tiger stripes, I called them. Of course they were nothing compared to the man in the yellow shirt’s.
I’d started in high school. Using the smallest blade of my Swiss Army knife to pick away at a spot until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Only when I was alone. Didn’t anyone recommend you seek counseling? Valeric had asked me, and I said, No, it was just something I did, a kind of tic. Certainly not as dramatic as bulimia, which one of my roommates was into. At least my habit was more discreet. I had it down to an art, savoring the very first sting of it, before my brain had time to distinguish pleasure from pain. Finally it would subside into something dull and predictable, a nasty little wound that I could have gotten by accident. Only a new cut would do the trick, give me that thrill again.
After I got married, for some reason I just stopped, and I never even thought about it until those last few weeks at my job when I’d caught myself at it again. The delicate welling of blood, exactly one inch long—I had such a feel with my X-Acto knife I knew an inch without measuring.
Lillith propped her chin up with a fist to look. “Fuck,” she said appreciatively. “But that’s not the way you did it.”
“No.”
“I bet you took pills. You’re the pill type.”
“What about you?”
“Once I drank Lysol, but they pumped my stomach out. And I tried to hang myself. The only thing I haven’t used is a gun.”
“Too phallic, huh?” I asked.
It was supposed to be a joke but she didn’t laugh, just rolled around so that her back was to me, signaling she didn’t want to talk anymore. So I picked up that stupid Ladies’ Home Journal and stared at it until bedtime meds were announced.
Lillith conked out right away. I lay there in the scratchy, overbleached sheets as the brown darkness filled up with her bitter breath. From beyond the wedge of light at the door came the sound of low conversation and occasional laughter. When I couldn’t stand it anymore I got up and opened the door all the way.
“I have to use the bathroom.”
The handsome MH turned from the doorway of the nurses’ station where he’d been leaning and escorted me. When I came out he was standing with his arms folded over his chest, staring discreetly into space.
“I can’t sleep.”
I was afraid I was going to be scolded, the recalcitrant patient, but he simply gestured for me to sit down at a table. Then he sat too, as graceful as a cat. “What do you think the problem is?” A nighttime voice, soft, with subtle undertones.
“I never sleep well the first night in a strange bed.”
“And why is that?” If the day MH’s style had been supremely matter-of-fact, this one’s was seductive.
“I don’t know why. It’s disorienting, I guess.”
“Not used to a roommate?”
“I’ve been sharing rooms all my life.”
“The dark, maybe?” He was treating me like a child.
“The dark is kind, why should I be afraid of it?”
“Ah.” He smiled. “So what’s on your mind then?”
“I miss my sister.” I had no idea why I’d said that. I hadn’t been thinking it at all.
“Where is she?”
“Usually she lives in New York City, but now she’s out of the country on business.” That wasn’t exactly true, but I didn’t bother to correct myself.
“Aren’t there phones where she is?”
I shrugged, something Valeric hated.
“Well, one thing’s for certain. Someone’s broken your heart.”
“What makes you say that?”
“You’ve got an extraordinarily sad face. Like an ancient Kyoto beauty. Didn’t anyone e
ver tell you?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t up to flirting, if that’s what he was doing.
“Look,” he said, “I think you’d better try to get some rest now.”
This time, maybe because I could feel the meds kicking in, I knew I was going to be able to sleep. It was a relief to crawl back between those stiff hospital sheets, back into that haze that had no part in time. I’d have given anything to be able to stay there forever, drifting, not dead, not alive.
In the dark I leaned down to the foot of the bed where I had placed my bag and groped around in the side compartment until I found what Swivel Chair Lady had missed, jammed down to where the seam was fraying. A slender cylinder wrapped in a scrap of velvet. It had the heft of an expensive fountain pen although it was slightly longer. It smelled of the bag, medicinal and musty. In the dark I fingered the folds of cloth aside, to feel the cool jade.
My Nai-nai’s hairpin. Over a hundred years old, all the way from Shanghai, given to me for my ninth birthday. You would have thought the phoenix head would have been worn down by now, I’d handled it so much, but I could still trace the bulging eyes, the curve of the beak, as well as the wicked sharp point it slimmed into at the other end. My grandmother had once stabbed someone with it, one of her suitors who had gotten too frisky. I could picture his amazement as she jerked it out of her hair, which loosened in a gleaming, liquid black fall over her shoulders—for a split second he probably thought he’d gotten lucky—and then the mortal pain as she jabbed it in between his ribs.
I rerolled the pin in the velvet, wedged it back into its niche in the bag, and rebuttoned the compartment.
“Nai-nai,” I whispered. “Keep me safe.”
But even as I said it I knew: nothing in this world is safe.
2
Like most people I have many names. My father gave me “Delicate Virtue” in Chinese, but for the tough American world my parents decided that “Sarah Collisson Wang” had a ring to it. Herbert Collisson was the chairman of the Asian department at the Army Languages School in Monterey, where my parents were teaching then. But Sally is what I’m known as, Sally Wang-Acheson for the six years of my marriage, and since then I’m back to Sally Wang, those two flat a’s knocking against each other when Americans pronounce it, so graceless and so far off from what Daddy intended.
“What does it matter what Daddy intended?” I can hear my sister, Marty, saying. “He never gave a flying fuck about who we really were.”
You should understand this: I am not the kind of person anyone ever expected to go crazy. That’s more my sister’s department. The only extreme thing I’d ever done in my life was to drop out of college to get married. I thought I’d never have to make a big decision again, except maybe whether or not to have children.
It’s in my nature to hoard, and this turned out to be a godsend. My ex-husband, Carey, and I kept separate bank accounts, so when we got divorced the division of finances was simple. After I quit my job—telling my boss I wanted to freelance so I’d have more time to paint—I had enough savings to survive on for several months.
My new apartment in the East Village had a northeastern exposure and no coverings on the windows, so that I could sit in the baby rocking chair nights with the lights off and stare straight uptown to the silver spire of the Chrysler Building. Carey had kept most of the furniture, since it was originally from his family. My clothes were hung on exposed racks like a department store and I slept on a mattress on the floor. I had one mug, one glass, one plate, one set of cutlery, a single pair of chopsticks. Spare, the way I like things.
I actually did try working at home for a while, but it was just as excruciating as the office. Mornings I’d switch on the TV and just lie there, not getting to my drafting board until early afternoon, sometimes not at all. They fascinated me, those talk-show guests, bad skin slicked over with pancake makeup, as they related their dramas in quavering tones. I’d have to remind myself they were getting paid to do this.
I decided that what I needed to do was make my life extremely simple. Every Friday afternoon I went grocery shopping, always with the same list: a whole chicken, brown rice, and frozen vegetables. I’d stew up the chicken and live on it for a week. That was an old Wang tradition—even my sister, who can’t boil an egg, has been known to call my mother long-distance for the recipe. One day at D’Agostino’s a stock guy came up to me. “Hey, lady, are you all right?” I guess I’d been loitering in an aisle or something. Looking into his face, I realized he thought there was something wrong with me, maybe that I was mentally retarded.
I was cracking up and I knew it and I couldn’t stop it.
It got worse. I couldn’t tell anyone what I was seeing then. For one thing, my father was everywhere, a shock of white hair in the periphery of my vision, and then I’d turn and it would be a stranger, even a woman, or worse, nothing at all. Footsteps up the stairs at night, although I lived on the top floor and there shouldn’t have been any.
I took the bus to Chinatown and wandered around scrutinizing every single little old man on the stoops, hoping this would break the spell. They mostly spoke Cantonese. Daddy’s language had been a pure, educated Mandarin. Walking those teeming sidewalks, I felt totally alien although the tourists thought I was part of the scenery. When they stopped me to ask directions and I told them I didn’t know, they were always amazed and put off by the fact that I spoke perfect English.
I found the old bao zi shop where my parents would take Marty and me. Chinese McDonald’s, Ma called it. I sat on a cracked green stool at the Formica counter and ordered a pork—cha shao—with an orange soda, like I used to. But when the steamed bun came I couldn’t eat it. I drank my soda from the can through a bendable straw and watched old peasant women come in and order dozens of buns stacked in boxes tied with string. The women scolded the bakery man if he didn’t have exactly what they wanted. He just smiled and was cheerfully rude back to them.
Chinese man the best to marry, Ma would tell Marty and me. Like American, basically tenderhearted.
Except Daddy. I had killed him in my head long ago, long before he actually died. What he had done to me was horrific. Still, I’d recovered. I’d even gotten married. So what was the problem? Why was he plaguing me now?
USELESS GIRL. WALKING PIECE OF MEAT.
I crossed Canal and went into Pearl Paint. It was mobbed, as usual, with serious and not-so-serious artists. On the second floor I meandered into the mezzanine, where the priciest oils were. Without thinking I picked up a couple of tubes of Old Holland cobalt violet light and slipped them into the pocket of my parka. My heart began to thud so hard I was sure it showed, but as far as I could see no one looked at me twice. I just clomped down those rickety loft stairs and strolled out of the store with eighty bucks worth of paint in my coat. No electronic beeper, no security guard grabbing my elbow.
In a store window I happened to catch a glance of myself and saw what a lowlife I looked, hair hanging down in a tangle. I hadn’t even bothered to wash my face that morning. Amazing that I hadn’t gotten stopped.
At a street vendor, I bought produce: pale chartreuse star fruit, persimmons, giant globes of winter melon. Then I went home and piled it all on a card table and tacked up a stretched canvas on my wall. Using a new palette, including the paint I’d stolen, I made several false starts. Nothing was happening—it was too static. I rearranged the fruit more gracefully, but this time it looked pockmarked and malevolent. I adjusted the light down and then the fruit looked dead again. Nature morte.Over the next couple of weeks I watched it all rot. It became a kind of pleasure to wake up and examine each new stage of decomposition. I almost couldn’t bear to throw it out.
Fran suggested I try Chopin nocturnes. “Remember at school, when we’d get depressed? They always worked for you then.” I dug out the tape and played it over and over, but the only thing it did was make me cry.
The bare night against the panes started to spook me. I unpacked one of my few boxes of marria
ge stuff, the steel blue Porthault sheets we’d never used, and stapled them up over the windows. The shroudlike heaviness of the drapery spilling down and pooling over the dusty floor was comforting. Now my apartment had two levels of brightness: dark or dim. I rarely turned on the lights.
I tried calling my sister. She was always out—at her job as a clown at the South Street Seaport, acting class, auditions, or the kinds of parties you read about in New York magazine. When I finally got hold of her she told me that her new boyfriend, a producer, had invited her to his villa in the south of France. The next thing I knew she was gone.
“Career connections,” Ma explained to me from New Haven. By then I was hiding behind my machine, listening to the disembodied voices of the few friends who still called echoing in the empty apartment. My mother hates leaving messages and will just hang up and dial again, as if she could wear down the machine that way. She did this so many times in a row that one night I finally picked up, just so she would stop.
I told her I wasn’t feeling well.
“New York City air,” my mother diagnosed. “You come up to the country to rest. Stay as long as you want.” Ma considers anything not Manhattan to be the country.
I decided it couldn’t hurt. Although I had a set of perfectly good luggage Uncle Richard and Aunty Mabel had given me as a wedding present, I just threw some stuff into an old Macy’s shopping bag. Maybe I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t stay in New Haven long, which was a joke considering how soon after I arrived it became obvious that I would never leave.
Ma picked me up at the train station and then went back to Yale for a department meeting. We were in the middle of a January thaw, and I sat outside on the front steps and watched the snow melting off the eaves, plopping onto the gravel border. When you’re clinically depressed something like drops falling can mesmerize you for hours. Then I wanted a cigarette and I’d forgotten to buy some before I left the city, so I went inside and up to my sister’s room. Her desk was uncharacteristically bare, but in the top drawer I found used checkbooks, a letter from an old boyfriend (“My Winky” he called her), a ruffle-edged snapshot of the two of us on the swing set at our old house, and finally a pack of stale Larks.
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