“Jennifer, I understand that you do not like this new treatment goal,” she told me. “But can you try to understand the reasoning behind it?”
I sighed. Loudly.
“Can we talk about your need to tell your mother everything that is going on in your life?” She lit a cigarette.
“I don’t have a need to tell my mother everything that’s going on in my life.”
“You do not call her every day?”
“Obviously not anymore.”
“But up until now, you have called her every day, yes?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder if talking to your mother so much helps you avoid becoming your own person.”
“It’s normal for daughters to talk to their mothers. Don’t your kids talk to you?”
“My daughters do not have eating disorders.”
“That you know of,” I said.
She raised her eyebrows.
“Sorry,” I said, and meant it. What an evil thing to say. I sighed again. “I thought I’m supposed to talk to people. We’re supposed to reach out for support. Staff tells us that all the time.”
“Of course,” she said. “But the key difference is—and this is important, Jennifer. Are you with me?”
I nodded, though I was still sulking.
“The key difference is that I suspect you do not feel like something has really, truly happened unless you share it with your mother. Does that sound about right?”
Was that right? It didn’t sound right. But I wasn’t the expert. I shrugged.
“If this is true, it would indicate that you are enmeshed. That you are not your own person. And so your treatment team has given you this guideline in order for you to learn how to be your own person.”
“I’m still not convinced.”
“Jennifer, the hospital is the perfect place to practice the skills you will need to be healthy in the real world.”
“The real world,” I grumbled. “Are there no phones in the ‘real world’? And how about—will I have to room with a kleptomaniac? Is that a ‘real world’ skill, too? Or is that just in the hospital?” I waited for her to say something. She didn’t. I felt suddenly shy and nervous. But I needed to ask: “Did staff know? About Heather?”
“Oh, dear,” she finally said. She tapped her cigarette on the ashtray. “I am sorry. That was an extremely unfortunate situation.”
“So you did know. You could have warned me.”
“No, I could not have warned you. For one thing, I—we—were still piecing that information together. For another, patient data is strictly confidential, except in the case of endangered life or limb. As I suspect you already know.”
“But you just let her steal my stuff. And that whole quarters nightmare—”
“Jennifer. We could not tell you. But we can talk amongst ourselves. Tell me, did Nurse Sheryl pursue her accusations of you using weights?”
“No. But she’s still a total—”
She held up a hand to stop me. “As soon as I put the pieces together, I spoke with staff, and we did the best for you that we could.”
“Oh.” Use a calling card. Hide your quarters. “Well. I mean. Okay. Thanks, I guess.”
“I am sorry we could not do more to protect you. We are not perfect, Jennifer.”
“So I hear.”
She smiled and glanced at her watch. “It is time for you to scoot to Journaling. Will you think about our earlier conversation? About separating from your mother?”
“Sure, I’ll think about it all the times when I should be able to call my mom,” I said.
She smiled. “Fair enough.”
“I still think it sucks,” I added.
“Duly noted,” she said.
After journaling, I brooded in my (private!) room for a while. Then I meandered into the lounge. The energy there was tense. More tense than usual. Everyone, including staff, was crowded around the TV. There was no sound in the room, except for a special news report.
I sidled up to Bronwyn. “What’s going on?” I asked.
Without taking her eyes from the screen, Bronwyn whispered, “A Pan Am flight crashed.”
“Oh no. Where?”
“Over Scotland. It killed everyone on board. It hit some people in the town, too. It might have been a bomb.”
At dinnertime, everyone was still watching the news. Our dinner trays sat, ignored, on the cart. I felt like I’d stepped into a parallel universe. Usually our rigid meal schedule was the axis on which the EDU spun. But tonight, everyone was focused on something else, something outside of the EDU and meal plans and therapy and disease and recovery. It was freaky.
Trendy held a crumpled tissue. She was crying.
Monica waved me over. “It looks like there were a bunch of Syracuse University students on that flight.”
“Oh no,” I breathed.
“Thirty of them,” Bronwyn said.
“Maybe more,” Amanda added.
“They were coming back from semester abroad,” Bronwyn whispered, “in London.”
Monica tilted her head to indicate Trendy. “She did semester abroad in London a couple years ago. She took the same flight back.”
“Oh God,” I whispered. I looked at Trendy. Bosom sat next to her, patting her shoulder.
“They think it was terrorism.”
“No!” I whispered. “Why? Who?”
Monica shrugged. “Nobody knows yet. Libya? The IRA? The PLO?”
“Oh my God,” I whispered again. “I can’t believe it.”
“I know. Everyone here knows someone who goes to SU.”
Trendy just cried and cried.
Thursday, December 22, 1988
The plane crash had cast a pall over the unit. It was so sad. My private room was the only good, happy thing in EDU life.
But after lunch, when I went back to my bedroom, the door was closed.
I stood in the hall, staring at it, gobsmacked.
Bedroom doors were never supposed to be shut. And that definitely wasn’t how I’d left it.
I pushed the door open. And instead of my very own, very Heather-free sanctuary, there were people in my room. A bunch of them. Some were sitting on my bed, and some were clumped around a girl who was sitting in Heather’s chair.
Dr. Wexler was there, too. He was the only one who noticed me come in. Dr. Kanduri, Monica’s psychiatrist, stood next to him. Then there were three older adults, four teenagers or twenty-somethings, plus the girl in the chair. Was this a new admission? Why were there so many other people here?
The girl’s long blond hair hid her face; her head was in her hands, her elbows on her knees. Her shoulders were shaking, a sure sign of crying.
“Er…sorry,” I said.
They all looked at me, including the girl. She looked so distraught. Her eyes were pleading…for what? I didn’t know. But I got a feeling it had to do with the commotion, like she actually wanted to be here, but she wanted peace and quiet.
Seemed like I was getting a new roomie.
My private room had lasted 24 whole hours.
Fingers crossed the new girl wasn’t a surly kleptomaniac.
Sophia. That was the name of my new roommate.
The basics: bulimic, wouldn’t have to gain weight, twenty- two. She had just finished her first semester in Cornell Veterinary School. Which meant she loved animals, so she understood how much I missed Spike.
We sat together at dinner. I scooted up an extra chair for her at my table. Now it was my turn to talk a newbie through her first meal. Sophia was a trooper. She didn’t cry or anything.
After dinner, we talked. After snack, we talked. Later, we got ready for bed and lights-out. It was strange to have someone in the room besides secretive, sullen Heather. Sophia was willing to share actual information
about herself.
“So…you’re bulimic?” I asked. She’d already told us she was. But in EDU language, So, you’re anorexic/bulimarexic/bulimic/a compulsive overeater? translated to Commence the rest of your life story in three, two, one. Go!
“Yeah. But…” She hesitated.
I waited in the semidark. Her sheets and blankets rustled while she shifted.
“This is embarrassing,” she said. “I’ve never told anyone.”
This was going to be juicy. “You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to,” I said, of course secretly hoping she would.
She was quiet a little longer. “I think I want to. That’s why I’m here, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“I never throw up,” she said.
“But…you’re bulimic,” I said. Which was probably the absolute worst thing to say.
“I know!” she said.
“Thus your secret shame,” I said. Oh great. What if she couldn’t tell I was joking?
Fortunately, she laughed. “Yes! Thus my secret shame. I tried making myself throw up, but I just couldn’t do it. How embarrassing is that? It makes me not even bulimic, right?”
Honestly, I’d never heard about a bulimic who didn’t vomit. “Did you use laxatives?”
“No. Nothing like that. Just exercise.”
“Huh.”
“That makes me super weird, right?”
“Well,” I said. “Since I’m completely normal, yes, I think you’re weird.”
She was quiet.
“Because I’m so completely normal that I’m a patient in a mental hospital?” I said.
“Oh,” she said.
Then we both started giggling.
“Shh! Don’t make Beverly come in here,” I said.
We both took deep breaths, trying to stop laughing.
I turned onto my side to face her, even though I could only make out the rough shape of her silhouette. “When I came here, I was worried, too. I was worried I wasn’t sick enough to be a proper bulimarexic.”
“But you were so skinny.” She’d seen my photos, taped to the wall.
“Not anymore,” I said.
“Please,” she said. “You’re still tiny.”
“Blurg.” I puffed my cheeks out. “Anyway, I guess my point is, maybe we all question ourselves?”
“Yeah.” She went quiet.
“I think it’s bad enough,” I said. “For you, I mean. Even if you didn’t throw up.”
“You do?” The hope, the relief in her voice; it was like I’d thrown her a life jacket.
“Definitely. I mean, it must have been bad, if you ended up here.”
She laughed. “True.”
“Besides, barfing is gross,” I said.
A pause. “Could we really get in trouble for being up late?”
“Probably,” I said. “But we’ve got our lights out, so we’re technically following the rules. And Beverly—the night nurse—she’s nice. She’d understand for one night. Plus, everything’s still off-kilter, because of the plane crash.”
“That’s so sad,” she said.
“It is,” I said.
We went quiet for a while.
“I can’t believe I’m here,” she said.
“It feels weird, right? But it gets better.”
“It does?”
“Not really.”
We laughed again.
“It doesn’t get better,” I said. “It always sucks. But you make friends, and you get used to it.”
“I can’t believe Christmas is in a few days,” she said.
Holy Napoleon. As sad as I was about being here for Christmas, it would be worse for Sophia. It was her first week. No passes, no visitors.
“Would they bend the rules, do you think?” I asked. “Let you have visitors?”
“They said maybe, depending on how my first few days go.”
“I was here for Thanksgiving my first week.”
“Did they let you have visitors?”
“Nope,” I said. “Christmas would be harder, though.”
“Well, my family’s a mess, so it’s probably better that I’m here than home. Especially during semester break.”
“Was that your family in here, before? All those people?”
“Yeah. Mom, stepdad, Dad, two brothers, one sister, and my boyfriend, Rob.”
“Wow,” I said. “Big family.”
“Yup. I’m the oldest. Do you have any siblings? Is that your brother in the picture?”
“Mm-hm. One brother, three years older. Mom and Dad, still together,” I said. “Is it worse at home than when you’re away at school? Your eating disorder?”
“Worse? I don’t know. I think it’s actually worse at school. But home can be crazy. My family is crazy.”
“Like, psychiatric hospital crazy? Unlike us…”
She chuckled. “Seriously, they are certifiably crazy. All of them in different ways. Every one of them thinks they need to be involved in my life, all the time. Like, they all just had to be here to see me admitted?”
“It did seem a little crowded.”
“My family means well. But Mom’s an alcoholic. Full blown. And my dad is schizophrenic. Diagnosed.”
“Oh,” I said. “Wow. Does he take medicine?”
“He does until he feels better. Then he stops, because, you know, he’s all better, right? And then he gets bad again. And then it’s a huge fight to get him back on his meds.”
“Is that why your parents got divorced?”
“Yup. And after my mom wasn’t around to take care of him, I got the job.”
“Because you’re the oldest.”
“Because I’m the oldest,” she said.
We went quiet again.
“Sometimes I worry I’m schizophrenic,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say. What if she was? Wasn’t mental illness sometimes genetic?
“You seem pretty normal to me,” I offered lamely.
She didn’t seem to hear me. “I feel like… Sometimes I feel like there is this thing inside me…” She trailed off again. “Now I really do sound crazy.”
“No,” I said. My heart was in my throat. Was she going to say what I thought she was going to say? “Go on,” I said. “Sometimes you feel like there’s…what inside you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want you to think I’m psychotic. Or, more to the point, schizophrenic.”
“You feel like there’s a monster inside you,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Oh my God,” I said.
“I know. I’m crazy, aren’t I?”
“No, no,” I said. “I meant, Oh my God. I know exactly what you mean.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I feel that way, too. I feel like there’s this ugly thing inside me that is completely separate from me—”
“Like it’s just this thing living inside you—”
“Yeah, just squished in there somewhere, sometimes in my gut, sometimes in my—”
“Brain,” she said.
“Yes!” I said. “And it tells me that I’m horrible—”
“And disgusting—”
“And totally messed up—”
“And nobody will ever understand—”
“So don’t ever tell anyone.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Nope, no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
She laughed.
I couldn’t believe it. She had the exact same monster. “I basically came here to figure out how to kill it, the monster,” I told her. “Or get rid of it somehow.”
“Did it work?” She sounded hopeful and excited, but cautious.
I thought about it. “I
don’t know. I’ve never actually said it before. Out loud. To my doctors. Or anyone.”
“Me neither,” she said.
“Going into recovery, you know how they say it’s a journey, not a destination?”
“I haven’t heard that,” she said. “But it makes sense.”
“Oh, get ready. You’ll hear it in groups all the time. People get all philosophical and spout these nuggets of wisdom. Recovery is a journey, not a destination. Happiness is being able to enjoy yourself on the detours.”
“Great,” she said. I couldn’t see it, but I knew she was rolling her eyes.
“Oh yeah, it’s something to look forward to,” I said. “When I’m really bored, I keep track. I count how many times someone mentions a saying. The record is nine in one hour.”
“Impressive.”
“It was me,” I said. “I was trying to see if anyone would notice.”
“Ha!”
“Anyway,” I said. “I think it’s true about the journey. And enjoying the detours—”
“JESUS! I AM JESUS!
“Water into wine!
“Water into wine!”
“What…,” whispered Sophia, “is that?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s a patient in the Adult Unit. She does this every once in a while. But it’s not every night. And she’s harmless.”
“JESUS!
“I AM JESUS!”
“Um. Will she stop?” Sophia asked.
“Eventually,” I said. “Either a nurse will calm her down, or they’ll call a—”
The intercom clicked on. “Code Blue. Code Blue. Adult Unit. All available nursing staff to Adult Unit. Code Blue. Adult Unit.”
“Okay, now there will be some commotion,” I said. “But honestly, don’t worry.”
“What will they do to her?”
“Give her tranquilizers, I think? I don’t know for sure. It’s creepy, but like I said, it doesn’t happen often. And she’s totally harmless. She did this my first night, too, actually. Maybe it’s a good omen.”
“Okay…” but she didn’t sound sure.
“Are you ready to go home now?” I said.
“Yup. I’m all better and ready to go home now.”
We laughed so hard we cried. God, it felt great.
Friday, December 23, 1988
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