It was an audacious fantasy I was having, because I knew full well the absolute confidence it took to work in ink. You had to do it from your soul, and it had to be as natural as breathing.
Lillith’s uncle sent her raspberry licorice strings. We all watched while she opened the package and made a disgusted sound. “He knows I hate this crap.”
She put the tin on the sign-out desk in the foyer. After dinner Douglas took it into the dayroom and consumed every single piece while watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Then he went into the bathroom on the first floor and puked. Puking was a common occurrence at Willowridge. They’d note it down in the daybook: “Refused meds, reticent during group, vomiting 8 P.M.”
On my way into the kitchen for a cup of tea I heard him retching and then the toilet flush.
The bathroom door opened and Douglas emerged, looking amazingly healthy.
“Hey, geisha girl,” he said.
I pretended to be fascinated by a conversation in the nurses’ station.
“You do have beautiful hair,” he said. “Satin. Is it like that on the rest of you?” He came up slyly beside me and pressed his nose into the crown of my head. “Mmm. Smells good too.”
“Get away from me.”
“Don’t be so skittish.” He yanked at my braid and tears popped into my eyes. “Come on, I want to show you something.” Still holding my hair, he dragged me along the hall a few feet into the recess where the phone was. We called it a booth, though it didn’t have a door. He let go of my braid and turned me around so that I was facing him, and then he kissed me. I could feel the soft squishiness of his belly, surprisingly comforting, and also between his thighs where I was afraid to lean into. His lips were chapped. He twisted my head around to insert his tongue and despite his having been sick, his saliva was still as sweet as a child’s from the candy, although I could taste the other too at the back of my throat.
He said into my ear: “I’ve always wondered about what they say about Oriental women. Is it true, Sally? Tell me, is it true? Are their cunts, you know, slanted?”
“Fuck you.”
“Leave her alone.”
It was Mel, coming down the back stairs.
“Ah, don’t worry, she’s not my type anyway. Too skinny.” He released me.
Mel said: “Touch her again and I’ll kill you.”
“Christ, she let me do it.”
I ducked into the bathroom without asking the MH on duty like I was supposed to. The faint stench of Douglas’s half-digested dinner still clouded the air. I could report him, get him into a heap of trouble, but I knew I wasn’t going to. I took a piece of toilet paper and scrubbed at the corners of my mouth, which were stained a carnival red from the licorice juice, like the little-girl lipsticks Aunty Mabel used to give Marty and me for Christmas.
In group Mel told us that when he was little his older cousins had locked him in the garage and pulled down his pants and tortured him by sticking pins into his buttocks. It was a kind of game, he said.
“How old were you?” the MH asked.
“I’d just learned to walk,” Mel said tersely, not looking at anyone.
“Two?”
“Something like that.”
“How often did this happen?”
“Every single Saturday.”
“Did you tell your parents?”
What a stupid question, I thought.
“No,” said Mel. “I couldn’t talk very well.”
“But they must have wondered about the scars.”
Mel shook his head. “I don’t remember.”
“Hi, Ma. I got your messages.”
“How are you? How is your health?”
“I’m okay. They’re taking care of me.”
“Enough to eat?”
“Yeah, there’s plenty to eat. Ma, my group thinks it’s better if you don’t call me anymore.”
“Ah? What’s this? Who says this?”
“They think it’s better if we have less contact.”
“I don’t understand this at all, Sal-lee. This is not clear thinking.”
“Yeah, well, you can talk to them yourself if you want.”
“I leave you alone the first two days, because Valeric says let her adjust.”
“I know, Ma. Thank you.”
“So what’s this? They want to keep me away from my daughter?”
“They think it would be better if I didn’t have any outside influences.”
“Your mother is not outside. Next Tuesday I’m coming. They told me to come, for family night.”
“Family therapy. That’s right.”
“You want me bring anything?”
“No, Ma, that’s okay.”
“How about clothes?”
“No, Ma, I’m fine, they have a laundry room here and everything.”
“Valeric says there’s tennis courts there too.”
“Yes, Ma, but it’s too cold to play tennis.”
“Valeric says it’s a very prestigious place.” I wanted to laugh. Was Ma going to brag about me being in here? But then she continued: “You know your sister call me from south of France.”
“Really?”
“She’s having great time. She says maybe go to Africa on safari next. You sure you don’t want me bring anything? Those plum candies you like so much?”
“Yes, Ma, I’m sure.”
From my place on the window seat, I spotted Valeric right away, lanky in her big black coat, hair tied back in a fuchsia scarf, striding up the walk. There was a flurry in the nurses’ station when she asked for me.
And then there she was, in the dayroom doorway, holding the battered brown briefcase full of legal pads she used to take notes. I was never so glad to see anyone in my life.
“Well,” she said. “You look better. Your color has come back.”
We had our session in my bedroom, she sitting in the visitor’s chair while I lay on the bed. She leafed through the file folder that contained my chart. “I see you’re still on suicide precautions.”
“Yes.”
“Is that necessary?”
“No.”
“You don’t have any more thoughts about killing yourself?”
“Not in the near future.”
“Sally, this isn’t a game.”
“I’m not going to commit suicide.”
“I see. So, what I understand, is that you’re not contemplating suicide anymore, but you’re not exactly jumping up and down at the prospect of living either.”
“You got it.” I couldn’t figure how she’d done that, I’d thought I was fine, but now I couldn’t look at her, I couldn’t let her see that she’d made me cry.
“I’m going to have them ease up on the Stelazine. So you’ll feel something, even if it is pain. Your appetite?”
“Okay.”
She frowned, peering at something.
“It says here you’ve been having trouble sleeping. Nightmares?”
“I wake up a lot. But that’s nothing new.”
The unit was full of rustlings, and my bedroom door stayed ajar, so I heard all of it. The back and forth to the bathroom, the shivery emergency shrill of the phone in the nurses’ station, staff pouring a cup of coffee or getting stuff out of the refrigerator in the kitchenette.
“Are you still seeing ghosts?”
I’d told Valeric about my father—what happened when I was eight, how I had learned to forget and not forget, how he’d started reappearing on the streets of Manhattan.
“He’s not here,” I told her.
“Have you talked about it in group?”
“Him. Not the ghost.”
“I see,” she said.
“When am I going to get out of here?” I asked.
“When I’m convinced you can act like a responsible human being.”
I sighed. On the far wall I noticed faint tape marks where some other patient had once put up a poster. Was it possible that someone desperate enough to be on Status One wou
ld care that much about their surroundings?
After our session, I walked Valeric out to the foyer. In the mirror frame over the sign-out book was tucked a note telling Douglas to phone his mother.
“I’ll see you next week, sweetie,” Valeric said, laying her hand lightly on the side of my face. “Remember, we’re cutting down on the meds. Let me know how it goes.”
A little while later, when Pajama Man and I were eating our lunches, Douglas meandered into the dayroom, kicking at the door frame with his sneaker. “Sheeet,” he muttered, and collapsed into one of the TV armchairs beside Pajama Man. The Young and the Restless was on. One of the older female characters had on a crescent-shaped gold necklace and matching earrings that I found gaudy but I knew Lillith would like.
“Don’t forget to call your mother,” I said to Douglas.
He turned around and gave me a level look. “You are such a fake, Sally Wang.”
“Exactly what do you mean by that?”
He groaned and yawned, stretching his legs out in front of him. “I can see straight through that goody-goody act of yours. You pretend to be so fucking sweet, but actually you’re wondering what the hell you’re doing in here with all the loonies. You think you’re so much better than the rest of us.”
“I never said—”
“You don’t have to say. It’s in your expression.”
“That’s not fair.”
“That’s not fair,” he mimicked me. “You know what you remind me of? One of those little dogs people have in their cars, the ones that bob their heads up and down. You’re made of plaster. You’re not real.”
He reached over past Pajama Man and twisted the volume knob on the TV set until someone stuck their head out of nurses’ station and told him to turn it down.
4
In the bedroom Marty and I shared on Coram Drive, the wallpaper was white apple blossoms on a blue background. I can feel the texture of the paper now—the flower petals were raised and striated. The blue was the oddest shade, not like sky, or anything in nature, but dull and dark, a Prussian blue.
I dream I’m back in that room and there’s my mother sitting on the bed. She’s a monster—her skin has become that wallpaper, completely covered with it, like leprosy. She has no features on her face, just indentations. It revolts me in a way I can’t describe.
I want to kill her.
I wake up, but whether it’s out of sleep or into another dream I’m not sure. Though the room is dark I can make out white lace curtains at the windows. Or are they ghosts? My heart is pounding my ribs apart, cold sweat runs down my sides. I’m lying on my stomach with every inch of my body pressed as close as possible to the sheet. Maybe if I lie very flat like this, staying still as if I were dead, I will be okay.
There is a beating in my head, behind my eyes, and I squeeze them shut, willing the sound to stop. If my blood is so loud, how will I be able to hear anything else? In the darkness I wait a long time, studying the shape in the next bed-a puddle of black hair, the body like a mummy. Is she asleep or dead? Is that the silhouette of a baby rocking chair, tipped or tipping, by the window?
Finally I dare to turn my head and look the other way, toward the door. There is a gold line at the bottom. I can hear people whispering. “There’s an ugly one,” someone says in a loud voice.
The door snicks open and my eyes close in the same instant. I turn away from the light as if in my sleep.
“She was awake, I heard her crying.” I recognize the voice of one of the female MHs on the night shift. A male voice answers: “She just got off suicide watch.”
After they leave I look over at the next bed and see that it’s only my new roommate, Rachel.
14 March
Fran:
You can tell from this letterhead where I ended up. Thanks for listening to me all those times I called you in the middle of the night. You are a friend among friends to put up with me in this wretched state I’m in.
It’s actually not so bad in here. The big news of the week is that I’m up to Status Two, which means I can smoke, wear contacts, and attend all the scintillating therapies they have here.
My concentration is still not up to writing long epistles. I hope first-year law is treating you well. Write if you have time.
Love, Sally
17 March
Mar:
Happy St. Patrick’s Day. I’m sending this to the address you gave me when you left New York, which I hope is still good.
Supposedly I’m here to rest but so far there hasn’t been too much of that what with all this therapy—art, music, occupational, dance (they play a tambourine and we do free-form movements to get in touch with our bodies), and something you would get a kick out of—psychodrama. One person casts the rest of the group as members of their family in order to reenact some kind of traumatic experience. So far I haven’t gotten to direct but I’ve played a domineering mother, a bullying older brother, and an aunt dying of cancer.
Hope to see you soon.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day. I’m sending this to the address you gave me when you left New York, which I hope is still good.
Sa
20 March
Dear Aunty Mabel and Uncle Richard:
Thank you for the get-well card. I’m sorry that Niu-niu can’t climb up the trellis anymore. You could just set her in the kitchen next to the picture window to watch the starlings from there.
Yes, I’d love to come visit you this spring, if I ever get out of here.
Love, Sally
What I remembered about Florida: the flat clarity of light over white sand as I walked barefoot, edging my toe into the mild surf of the Gulf. A fragrant wind. The sun on my back.
The sun.
My stomach contracted with desire.
It was just over a week until Easter Sunday.
The art therapist told us to make a self-portrait.
I couldn’t do it. Every terror of the blank canvas I’d ever felt was multiplied a million times as I sat there at the big table with a sheet of newsprint in front of me. For everyone else it was a cinch, just another therapy. They were all working busily, Lillith with her arm coiled to hide what she was doing, Douglas chunking down like he was making polka dots, Mel leaning back with a cigarette in his mouth, and even Rachel—I could see from across the table that she was sketching an enormous face, in choppy lines.
It didn’t do any good to remember the first drawing class I took in college, with life poses for one minute each, where you wouldn’t even look down at the paper as you drew, fast, without corrections, following the curve of a spine by feel. No time to think, before the instructor’s “Next!” and the model would switch poses. Letting the sketches fall to the floor until by the end of the class you had dozens which you could look over later and say to yourself—“Yes, I caught the arc of that muscle” or “The proportions are wrong here, but the feeling of weight is good.”
I picked up my charcoal.
I was stupid now, and couldn’t see, but there had once been a time when I’d had the divine fire.
Senior year at boarding school, after the standard program of charcoal, pastel, and watercolor, we graduated to oils. It was a completely new language, the box of miniature paint tubes marked with colors I’d never heard of—burnt sienna, titanium white, cadmium red, Indian yellow—the fat stiff-bristled brushes that felt clunky in my hands after the slender supple-tipped watercolor ones.
For the first time, it didn’t come easy.
My problem was with the paints themselves, lying like gobs of frosting on the wooden palette. Our teacher ran us through some basic color theory before letting us mix. On the palette my colors looked okay, but transferred to canvas the effect was mud on a dark day. An unforgiving medium on an unforgiving surface. I didn’t understand impasto yet, and any slip in judgment meant I had to scrub with a turpentine rag.
I spent a lot of time torturing myself by leaning over other people’s shoulders and watching them work. In conten
t, they didn’t seem any more inspired than me, but their paintings had already begun to show texture and control. One day I walked into the studio and found an old still life someone had set up, a misshapen brown pot, probably a reject from the ceramics studio across the hall. It was crammed with daisies picked from the senior garden, already dying.
To hell with it, I only knew how to do what I could do. I put away the large landscape canvas I’d been working on and picked up a small new one. With my finest brush I began to work from the outside in, sketching the edges of the spiky petals protruding from the clump, using the white of the canvas as if I were working in watercolor. It looked too spare, so I mixed up some turpentine washes, blue and gray and brown, the tints of decay. The teacher had come in, and he strolled by a few times, looked, and moved on. I don’t know how long I played around the periphery, concentrating only on the flowers that interested me, but eventually my old impatience took over.
I laid out a new palette of the most improbable colors I could find: magenta, emerald green, electric blue, cobalt violet. With a fatter brush I blocked in the squat shape of the vase as it listed to the left, almost off the painting, and then the interior of the bouquet, where the petals were mashed, their yellow hearts rotting. I mixed the paints on the canvas itself, tossing down my brush when it got too grimy and picking up a new one. I worked fast, without care, approximating. In five minutes I was finished.
The teacher had been standing behind me watching for I don’t know how long.
“You caught it” was all he said.
Of course, as I learned later, that’s what Van Gogh did, slather on the raw colors and work them into each other on the canvas, only he used a palette knife instead of a brush. He couldn’t bear the distance between the medium and the subject, the medium and himself, the subject and himself.
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