by Dyan Cannon
On the second day, Dr. James came to my room. I knew I was disheveled and I was aware of being tragically unwashed, but I didn’t care. I looked like I felt and I had completely exhausted my supply of fake happy faces.
“How are you feeling?” he asked. Well, I was staring into a huge bottomless pit of loss that I felt nothing could ever fill. But right now I just wanted out of this place. The doctor seemed sincere, though. He didn’t talk to me like I was crazy or anything, and although I was becoming increasingly angry over my confinement, I relaxed a little in his presence.
“I don’t understand why I have to be here,” I answered.
“You’ve had a bit of a breakdown,” he said matter-of-factly.
“What?” A breakdown? I really had no idea what he was talking about.
“Can you make yourself get out of bed today?”
“I need my medications,” I said.
“And what medications are those?”
I looked at him and thought about it. Blue ones, black ones, red ones, purple ones . . . He gave me a penetrating look through his wire-rimmed glasses and said, “Your mother brought me all your prescription bottles. I see you’ve got doctors in every corner of town writing you prescriptions. But, Dyan, these uppers, downers, and in-betweeners you’ve been taking are way too much for anybody. So we’ll be weaning you off them.”
“But—”
“No ‘but’s. Dyan, any doctor who spent five minutes with you would know that your nervous system is made for chamomile tea—not drugs. You may experience some withdrawal symptoms, and we’ll keep an eye on that, but I don’t think you’ll have much trouble. You’re here to get well and dumping the pills is a huge part of that.”
Dr. James left and I stayed in my room for two more days, ignoring the nurse’s continuing insistence that I make my bed, take my shower, blah-blah-blah. On the fourth day, though, I caved in to hunger and asked for something to eat. The cost of the meal, I was told, was to get cleaned up and make my bed, which seemed like the equivalent of running a marathon.
But I did so, and then forced myself to go to the dining room. I was looking around the room, trying to figure out where the food was—lunch was over and nobody seemed to be around. Then a pleasant young orderly approached. “Need something to eat?” he asked with a friendly, midwestern farm boy smile. I nodded. “I think I can find you a sandwich,” he said. “Then from now on you can choose your meals from the menu.” I took a seat and he slid a tray in front of me. “That’ll put you right.”
“Thank you,” I said, thinking it was the first time those two words had come out of my mouth in four days as I shoved the cheese sandwich into my mouth almost whole.
The next day I had my first session with Dr. James.
“It’s good to see you up and moving around,” he said. “Now, Dyan, do you know why you’re in the hospital?”
I clenched my jaw. I didn’t like the question. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess. Not really. But I’m okay now and I want to leave. I miss my daughter.”
“Let me just ask you this: do you remember what happened before we brought you here?”
I remembered a lot—everything actually. So what if I’d climbed out the bedroom window in the rain wearing only a white nightgown and had clawed my way up a steep, muddy hill barefooted? I needed some fresh air.
Seemed perfectly normal to me.
Or it did at the time. But when I started mentally retracing my steps for the first time since I’d been thrown in la loony bin, my actions did seem a little strange.
Actually, they seemed positively nutso.
Once I’d squeezed outside the window and splashed along the streets for a while that rainy night, I found an open garage with a car in it. I resolved to get farther away than I could go walking, so being the resourceful type, I decided I would hot-wire the car. They did it all the time in movies; how hard could it be? I opened the hood, looked at the engine, and was quite disappointed not to see two bright red wires marked “HOT” waiting to be twisted together.
That was so not fair. I decided to keep on walking.
I came to a very steep hill, at the top of which was a big, white two-story house. It was stark white but completely dark inside. I started scrambling up the hill, and as it got steeper, I found myself on all fours, grabbing at roots and scrubby canyon oaks to pull myself upward toward the house. I’ll be safe there, I thought. I climbed and climbed, and stopped a few times and rested. I thought I would never get to the top of the hill.
By the time I reached the front door I was covered in mud and scratches. No lights were on in the house, but I rang the doorbell anyway. Above me, a pair of French windows flung open and a man looked down at me. “Who are you? What do you want?” he called from the window above.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t talk.
He tried again.
“Where did you come from?” he said.
I pointed up to the sky.
The couple who lived there were kind. They brought me inside, dried me off, gave me a robe, fixed me some eggs, and asked if there was anyone they could call. I remained mute. They told me to watch out for their cat because the cat hated everybody. The next thing I knew, the cat was purring in my lap, much to its owners’ astonishment.
Outside the windows, the sun was starting to break through the dark. I’d been wandering the streets all night like a lost, wet ghost, and I dozed off for a while. Then I heard the doorbell. The husband got to his feet and answered. A second later, he said, “Your friend Vince is here.”
I looked into Vince’s sweet face and saw his pained smile, the worry he was desperately trying to disguise. I stared at him like he was an apparition. “How’re you doing, Dyan?” he said. I didn’t answer.
He went on. “Your mother called. Your bed hadn’t been slept in. The window was open.”
I went into the bathroom, locked the door, and sat on the edge of the tub. I could hear whispering in the living room and the sound of a rotary phone dial. Then Vince called through the door. “Dyan,” he said. “I want you to listen to me.”
I wrestled the bathroom window open and climbed out.
Vince was a step ahead of me. As I came out the window, he helped me to the ground and held on to my arm. A couple of minutes later, an ambulance arrived and Mom was standing next to it. She was crying, but I couldn’t for the life of me understand why. Beside her was a man I didn’t know, but he seemed very kind. He led me to the back of the ambulance and said, “You’re in good hands, Dyan. We’re going to take you to a place where you can get some rest.” That sounded good to me. I was so tired.
The driver and the kind man gently guided me onto a gurney and slid me into the ambulance. Mom climbed in next to me and held my hand. “Everything is going to be all right,” she said. “I promise you, everything is going to be all right.”
So now, five days later in Dr. James’s office, I recounted the broad outlines of the story to him.
“What was going on before you climbed out the window?” he asked.
“My boyfriend was supposed to come over for dinner and he didn’t show up.”
“Hmmm, okay. I don’t think you had a breakdown because of a broken dinner date. Let me ask you this: were you taking any nonprescription drugs?”
I hesitated to tell him about the marijuana, but I figured I might as well come clean. “I was smoking a lot of pot. And drinking a lot of margaritas.”
“What else?”
“Well, I don’t know if this counts, but I took a lot of LSD with . . . my ex-husband.”
Dr. James put down his pen and asked, “Why would you think that LSD doesn’t count?”
“It’s not a drug. It’s a chemical.”
He shook his head and took off his glasses. “Dyan, all drugs are chemicals, and LSD is the most dangerous psychotropic I know of. How many times have you taken it?”
I calculated about ten or twelve times, the most recent being about six months earlier.
; “That’s ten or twelve times too many,” he said, and looked at me very directly.
“My husband said he’d taken it more than a hundred times.”
“Everybody has an individual tolerance for these things. But for some people, once can be fatal. Let me tell you something, Dyan. I had a kid in here a couple of weeks ago who’d been tripping out on LSD. We got him stabilized but he took it again and jumped off a building, thinking he could fly. He broke every bone in his body and is lucky to be alive. Hear me good, Dyan. You can’t even get in the same zip code with that stuff. Now or ever.”
But I had known that, hadn’t I? All along, something inside had warned me that I was dancing with a dragon. But I went ahead with it, because I wanted to please Cary, and he was convinced it would change my life. Well, it certainly did.
Dr. James telling me this gave me quite a boost. For the first time in longer than I could remember, someone had validated a belief of mine. My instincts had been right about LSD all along! And it seemed just possible that there might be some other things I’d been right about.
Dr. James looked at me thoughtfully. “The pills, the pot, the booze—none of it’s good, and all of it can cause severe depression. But I don’t think that’s what caused your breakdown. LSD can chase your mind into a rabbit hole, and unfortunately, it can get stuck there. In my opinion, LSD is what tipped you into the basket. With your level of sensitivity, you are lucky to be alive.
“I’m so glad you told me, Dyan. That explains a lot.”
The next afternoon, I met Gina, the occupational therapist, who sat me down with a sheath of cheap leather, some white string, and a plastic needle. I gave her a what-the-hell look. When she told me I was going to make a wallet, I nearly took a bite out of the material and a bite out of Gina. After she left, I sat at the table stitching my wallet together, cussing Gina and Dr. James, the nurses, and the world. Who were they to treat me like a kid in Girl Scout camp? What really got me riled up, though, was when I found myself actually enjoying my craft project. I was making something. It felt good, though I had trouble admitting that to myself.
In the evenings, there were group sessions. I didn’t say much, but as I listened to the others, what made the biggest impression on me was how normal they all seemed. Of course, this wasn’t a mental ward for the criminally insane, along the lines of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but I was struck by how we were all there for the same reason: we’d lost our ability to cope. They were people who had hit bumps in the road, just like I had. Among them was a twenty-year-old girl who had tried to kill herself, a teenager who’d been driven to a breakdown not unlike my own by his parents’ bitter divorce, and a battered housewife in search of a way to forgive her husband.
Forgive him? I thought. Huh. That’s an interesting idea.
One night I lay sleepless. I was detoxing from the pills and I was in a cold sweat, but my mind burned like a forest fire. I tossed and turned, took deep breaths when I found myself hyperventilating. I stood in the corner, thinking I would stand until sleep came over me, but it didn’t.
And it slowly dawned on me:
I was in Fishponds.
A mental institution.
A lunatic asylum!
Had it been like this for Elsie?
Did an ambulance come for her, or did Elias tell her they were going for a ride, when the destination was really Fishponds? Did they take her by her wrists, and bind them to a stretcher, and take her away? Did she scream and fight and kick when they closed the door on her in her room at Fishponds? Did she know she’d be there for the rest of her life, her disappearance a mystery to her only son?
In a panic, I packed my bag. I was getting out of there first thing in the morning. But would they let me leave? What would I do if I did leave? I collapsed in the chair, feeling defeated. My mother had signed me into this place, and I wasn’t even sure I could sign myself out. But my parents were due to visit the next day. Visitors from the outside were greatly restricted. But at the end of the second week, Dr. James had agreed that a visit from my parents might be beneficial. He was also sympathetic to how desperately I missed Jennifer, and they at least would provide a firsthand account of how she was doing. But the next day, as the time for their visit approached, I found myself sinking. I felt ashamed of myself and sorry for them—to have a daughter who’d been completely knocked off her trolley.
There is nothing more miserable than trying to act like you’re all right in front of the people who know better than anyone that you’re not. Mom and Dad both showed the strain of this painful charade.
Of course, right off I asked about Jennifer. My parents had told her I was working far away and that I would be back very soon. I asked Mom if she was reading Pooh Bear to her and singing her to sleep every night—which was really crazy, because nobody knew better than me what a great mom my mom was. “Every night,” Mom assured me. “She misses you, honey, but she’s fine. And she made this for you.” Mom took a drawing from her purse. It was a picture of a lion and a giraffe, standing next to each other. Apparently, in Jennifer’s world, lions and giraffes got along just fine. She had written a little note in small, messy block letters. “I helped her a little with the lettering, but the words are all hers,” Mom said.
I read them. They said, “I miss you. You are the perfect mom. Come home soon.” She had signed it, “With lots of hugs and love, Jennifer.”
I looked at the drawing and wept.
I miss you. You are the perfect mom.
“I want to go home,” I said.
“It’s not time, honey,” Mom replied. “But hopefully it won’t be long. As soon as the doctor says it’s all right . . .” She touched my cheek. “Let yourself have this time to sort things out.”
I’d been determined to have Mom get me released from this loony bin that very day . . . but if even Mom thought I needed to be here . . . I must still be pretty shaky, I thought.
Dr. James had, of course, met Vince the night I went off wandering, and he allowed me a visit with Vince a few days later. He was my only other visitor the whole time I was there.
“How did you find me that night?” I asked him.
Vince sighed and then he smiled. I took that as a good sign. Vince was completely transparent. He couldn’t conceal his feelings any more than a leopard can hide his spots. “I drove around the neighborhood for three hours,” he said. “We were all just beside ourselves. Then it came to me to call Lily. I called her from a phone booth and we prayed. I got back in the car and about twenty minutes later I saw the lights on in that big white house, and . . . I can’t really explain it, but I knew that’s where I’d find you.”
“That’s unbelievable,” I said.
“I would’ve thought so too a couple of years ago,” Vince said. “But now it’s not so unbelievable.”
“And why is that?” I asked.
“It’s a big subject,” Vince said. “But it all comes down to faith. Once you get a little glimmer of how powerful faith really is, a lot of things that used to be impossible to imagine seem perfectly natural.”
“And you learned that from Lily?”
“Lily showed me where to look,” Vince said.
It was the first time I’d thought about Lily for a few months, but I remembered those few words she had said to me that had spoken so much—not just for their content, but for some intangible echo of truth that reverberated around them. That doesn’t sound like love . . .
It was another night of staring at the ceiling with my mind churning like a geyser pool. That word “faith” pricked at my thoughts. I’d had faith in Cary. I’d had faith in love. I’d had faith in marriage. To put your faith in something, I thought, was like taking all of your worldly possessions, as well as your body, mind, and soul, and putting them on the roulette table. That’s what I’d done and I’d gone bust. From now on, I thought, I was keeping my faith to myself. Except, who was “myself”? If I were going to put my faith in myself, I was really in a sorry situation. T
here were times when I felt all that was left of me was that muddy white nightgown pinned to a laundry line and whipping in the breeze.
I’d put my faith in Cary to the extent that I had lost the ability to think for myself. I had let him think my thoughts for me, and I had struggled mightily to learn how to think his thoughts. I did that to save him the trouble of having to constantly instruct me on the science of thinking Cary Grant thoughts with a Dyan Cannon mind.
And I had come to believe my inability to do this was a terrible shortcoming.
Now Vince and Artis were putting their faith in Lily . . . but who was Lily? Vince had said Lily had told him “where to look.” I wondered what he meant by that. But was putting one’s faith in Lily any better than putting one’s faith in Cary?
I was so used to serving that without a master I felt like a vagabond roaming alone in the dark. Who would I now serve? On my worst nights, I desperately wanted to be back serving Cary once again. But at the same time I was bitterly angry at my fallen idol, and in that anger came a certain kind of energy. Anger is a powerful thing. It had given little, petite me the strength to thwart three monstrous linebackers. Anger, I thought, kept Elsie alive all those years. Anger could blow up the world.
But something told me that I didn’t want to let anger be my life force.
The problem was, I couldn’t see any alternative.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Breakthrough
I began to settle into the daily routine of the hospital. Morning shower. Make the bed. Breakfast of fake scrambled eggs, a pleasant bacon-like substance, limp toast, and Tang—I ate like I’d been in a famine. A session with the doctor. Lunch. A group session. Arts and crafts. Quiet time. Dinner and television and then back to bed.