Enduring

by Donald Harington

  As she entered the dormitory, Nurse Turnkey came up to her and said, “Well, just where have you been, Miss Priss?”

  Latha had nothing to write with. She could only try to pantomime the act of talking with a doctor, and did such a poor job of it that Nurse Turnkey threw up her hands and stalked off. Latha got into her cot, but Mary Jane, Flora, Betty Betty and some other ladies came over, and Mary Jane asked, “Did you eat him? Tell us about it.”

  “All I ate was some lamb chops,” Latha said.

  The ladies laughed, and Mary Jane said, “Wow! But didn’t you suck him off?”

  Latha was not familiar with the expression, although she assumed it was related to what Mary Jane had yelled from the window about “sucking up to the big man.” She shook her head.

  “Aw, come on,” said Flora. “You were with him all the livelong day and didn’t even get fucked?”

  Latha shook her head.

  Betty Betty sniffed. “Have you been drinking?”

  “Three glasses of wine,” Latha admitted.

  “Lord love a duck!” Flora exclaimed. “I would fuck and suck for a glass of wine.”

  More poetry tonight. “Not me,” Latha said, but she was still uncertain what this “suck” meant. Was it a way of kissing? When all the other ladies had gone back to their cots except for Flora, she asked Flora, “How do you suck?”

  “Me?” Flora said. “With my mouth and tongue and both lips covering my teeth and with my fingers under his balls.”

  Latha got the picture, sort of. It was not something that any of her Stay More friends had ever discussed, and it seemed the extreme of wickedness. Maybe these Madison County girls were of a different sort. “I reckon that’s what Doc Meddler was planning on,” Latha said.

  “You’ve never done it before?” Flora said. “It’s kind of fun, because it gives ’em such a heap of enjoyment. You might not like the taste of jism, but if you swallow fast you’d hardly notice.”

  That night, despite some laudanum Nurse Turnkey made her take, Latha’s insomnia returned. Trying to fall asleep, she had a mixture of thoughts—repugnance at the initial concept, fascination with the procedure, great curiosity over how it would feel in the mouth, and a general sense of sexual excitement. Maybe it was wicked, but wasn’t that a big part of the reason sex was so much fun? She put her thumb in her mouth. She had never sucked her thumb as a child.

  When finally she got to sleep, she had dreams of doing it. The person in her dreams wasn’t Dr. Meddler, though. It was Every.

  Every was getting over the mountain inside her mouth when her eyes popped open and there was Dr. Meddler, with Nurse Shedd holding her clipboard and folders. “You were sucking your thumb,” he observed. “Is that habitual?” She shook her head. “What were you dreaming about?” he asked.

  Latha sat up. She pantomimed writing, and he handed her a pad and pencil. “I was dreaming of my baby daughter Sonora nursing me,” she wrote.

  “You miss your child?” he said.

  “Terribly,” she wrote.

  “Come to my office later today,” he said, “and we’ll talk about possibilities for your seeing the child.” He moved on to the next cot.

  She spent a good part of the morning wondering just what he had meant by “later today.” Late morning? After lunch? After supper? She did not want to seem too eager; she did not want to seem to be sucking up to him. But his words had tantalized her. Maybe he could arrange for her to leave long enough to visit baby Sonora at Mandy’s house. She had to know what he meant.

  What he meant, when she finally got up her nerve to approach his office, was that he could telephone Mandy and ask her to bring the baby here for a visit.

  “They have no telephone,” Latha wrote.

  “Well, I could write them a letter. It oughtn’t to take more than a day to get a reply.”

  But it took more than a day. Each morning when the doctor appeared at her cot and woke her at five, she looked at him questioningly, but he only shook his head and said, “Nothing yet.” This went on for a week before the morning he finally handed her a short note from Mandy which said, “Me and Vaughn don’t think that would be such a good idea.”

  “She’s afraid,” Latha wrote on the doctor’s pad, “that the baby might recognize me as her real mother.”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” the doctor said. “The baby has already begun to think of Mandy as its mother.”

  After breakfast, Latha went up to the library and read the rest of the David Grayson book, but it didn’t remove her discontentment. It only made her more homesick for Stay More. If only she could figure out some way to get out of here, she would go to Mandy’s house in the dark of the night and kidnap the baby and run away to Stay More with her.

  The big news that day was that Mary Jane Hines had escaped. She was gone for two days before she was caught and returned, and placed in isolation. Latha waited patiently for Mary Jane to get out of isolation, so she could ask her how she had escaped, but when Latha finally saw her again, Mary Jane was so depressed she didn’t want to have anything to do with anyone. And then she was transferred to D Ward.

  One evening at supper, which consisted of a bowl of something that may have been chili but had no meat and no seasonings, Dr. Meddler came into the dining hall and approached Latha’s table. He spoke quietly. “You need answer only with your head. Aren’t you getting tired of this garbage they feed you?” She nodded her head. “Isn’t it about time you joined me for dinner again?” She nodded. “Tomorrow,” he said, and walked off.

  Latha was already somewhat confused with the world, not always knowing the difference between up and down, not always knowing or caring whether it was night or day, not always absolutely certain just who she was and where she was and what on earth was happening. She seemed to have lost the ability to speak to people she trusted, like Flora and Betty Betty. She seemed to have forgotten that these city people call the evening meal “dinner” instead of the noon meal as it was properly called. So at noon the next day she went up to Dr. Meddler’s office to have dinner with him. He wasn’t there. She waited for an hour, missing her own dinner at the dining hall, and decided Dr. Meddler might have just been teasing her, to get even with her for not doing whatever it was he wanted her to do, fuck or suck or woodchuck. She went hungry all afternoon and was so eager for supper that she ate it with her fingers, the whole plate of macaroni.

  At dawn she was awakened from a dream of having stuck a knife into Mandy when Dr. Meddler appeared, and said “So what happened to you? I had a very special dinner prepared for us, with an excellent bottle of Bordeaux.” He waited a moment, then handed her the pad and pencil. She wasn’t sure what to do with them, but remembered that she wasn’t able to speak.

  She wrote hesitantly and slowly, “But I came at dinnertime and you weren’t there!” Then it suddenly dawned on her that these city people mean supper when they say dinner. She scratched out what she had written, and wrote instead, “I’m so confused. Where I come from, you eat dinner at noontime.”

  “Where do you come from?” he asked.

  “Stay More,” she wrote.

  “I’d like to, but I’m still smarting from being stood up,” he said. “Why don’t you start a series of therapy sessions with me? After dinner.”

  The way he said that word gave her to understand that he meant lunch, so she decided to go up to his office after lunch. If he had really meant supper, then she’d be flummoxed once again. When the nurse was finished with her rounds, Latha asked her if there was some way she could get a clean gown, and possibly even have a bath. She hadn’t been in the water since that first scalding, and her gown was getting kind of rank even though she took it off to sleep. Nurse Shedd led her to the bathing room, but unlike Nurse Turnkey did not fill the tub with boiling water. She put in just a few inches of plain cold water, but it wasn’t so bad because it was already summertime and the weather was hot and besides Latha’d always bathed in cold water up home. Nurse Shedd was surprised she di
dn’t quake or holler at the coldness of the water. Latha washed her hair too, what was left of it. Nurse Shedd gave her a fresh gown to put on, which was a size smaller than the previous one and was pretty tight.

  Sure enough, the doctor had really meant dinner when he’d said dinner, that is, he’d meant lunch, so after Latha had finished her hunk of bread she went up to his office and he was there waiting for her. The first thing she wrote on the writing-pad was an attempt to explain to him that “Stay More” was the actual name of the town she was born and reared in and she had not meant it as an invitation when she’d used it a couple of times with him before.

  “It’s in hillbilly country?” he said. She nodded. “We have several other patients from that part of the world,” he said, “but I wouldn’t have mistaken you for one of them.” He asked her to lie on his chaise and close her eyes and just say whatever popped into her mind about anything. But she couldn’t talk, and she couldn’t see the writing-pad with her eyes closed, so she had to sit up and write down her answers. But she couldn’t think of anything to write. He prompted, “Were you ever molested by your father?” She just shook her head. “Did you love your father?” Again she shook her head, but then she wrote that in the Ozark mountains the word “love” usually carries some kind of indecent connotation, and saying you love somebody just means you gave them a hug or a feel or even went behind the barn with them. So she never loved her father in that sense, but if the doctor meant was she very fond of her father the answer was no. “I had a kitten when I was little,” she wrote. “And he took it away and drowned it.”

  “That’s despicable,” Dr. Meddler said. “What other bad things did he do?”

  Latha tried to think back to all of the shortcomings and failings of her father, but he was mostly just a blur of inadequacy. She didn’t enjoy talking (or writing) about him. But the doctor persisted, and she managed to come up with some other things her father had done wrong.

  Dr. Meddler kept on prompting her with other questions or suggestions. “Describe your house.” “What was your mother like?” “Describe a typical day in your life.” “What kind of food did you eat?” “Talk about your sisters.” “Tell me some of these superstitions that you believed in.”

  Before she knew it, she had covered many pages of the writing-pad and a couple of hours had passed. She had never known anyone to take such an interest in her life, and it had the unusual effect of clearing her head. For a while she had feared that she was losing touch with reality, whatever that means, but now she was back in control of herself, and she felt grateful to the doctor for it.

  At the end of the long session, he said to her, “Once again I am convinced that you probably don’t belong in this institution. You are also the most highly desirable female I’ve ever encountered, and I have no qualms in saying that I highly desire you.” She wasn’t sure what to say to that, so she didn’t write anything. At length he said, without looking at her, “I am going to make you an offer. If you will allow me to become your lover, I will arrange to have you released.”

  She couldn’t believe her ears, and suddenly she began to formulate a plan whereby after her release she could kidnap her baby and head for Stay More. But could she let herself become his lover? And did he mean right now? She wrote, “That’s very kind of you, but I would have to think about it.”

  “Take all the time you need,” he said.

  She thought about nothing else for several days. Each morning when he appeared at her cot, and she was usually awake, he would say, “Well?” and she could only shrug her shoulders. At length, it occurred to her that he was simply asking her if she was well, that is, if she was not sick, so the next time he said that, she nodded her head. He smiled real big, the first time she had seen him smile, and said, “How about dinner at suppertime this evening?” She tilted her head to one side and then to the other, as if to say, “Maybe so.”

  But when she went to his office that evening, where he had a real spread of food laid out, a crown roast and not one but two bottles of a fancy-looking wine, she had not been able to make up her mind to do it. She had decided that it would be like prostitution: his payment for her body would be his release of her. She wondered if he had done this with other patients. She wondered if anybody knew about it. She had almost asked Nurse Shedd if the doctor was a womanizer, but she doubted that Nurse Shedd would have admitted it. Latha was concerned about the possibility of venereal disease. Most of all, she did not think that Dr. Meddler was very attractive physically. And after all, he had said that a condition of her release was she become his lover, which made it sound like she’d have to do it more than once on a regular basis, and how could she do that if she was turned loose? It was all very confusing.

  But she enjoyed the supper greatly, the tastiest meat she’d ever had, and the wine must have cost a pretty penny. She was careful to take small sips of it, and not have more than two glasses, but he just kept pouring it. Throughout the meal he kept asking her questions, and she had to put down her fork to take up the pencil, so the meal lasted for quite a spell. Although she did not drink a lot, she ate as much as she could, for two reasons, one, it was so good, and two, she wanted to get so stuffed that when he got around to the point of starting something, she could truthfully say (or write) that she was just too full.

  Which is what happened. He was disappointed in her statement (or writement). He looked like a little boy Santa Claus had overlooked. He sighed and said, “Well, if you’re too gorged for coitus, would you consider performing fellatio?”

  The only part of that sentence that she understood was “performing,” which, she knew, involved a public presentation, and she wasn’t going to do anything naughty in public with this man. She shook her head.

  “Then you don’t want to be discharged?” he said.

  She realized that this might be her only way of getting out, but she suspected he might just be playing a trick on her and wouldn’t really let her be discharged. She wrote, “Not if I have to sell myself for it.”

  Chapter twenty

  And that was pretty much the last of Dr. Malcolm Meddler. He even stopped coming around to wake her at the break of day each morning. She didn’t mind that at all, and took advantage of it to sleep an extra hour. He had apparently instructed the nurses to do nothing that she asked, so she simply did not ask for anything. She confided in Flora the details of the dinner, and asked Flora what fellatio is. Flora said, “That’s just one of them fancy doctor words for licking dick, also known as head job or yodeling or cocksucking or slobbing his knob. Me, I’d of slobbed his butthole to get out of this place.”

  Nurse Shedd informed Latha that she was transferred from B Ward to C Ward, which meant that she had to give up certain things like library privileges, mail privileges (although she got no mail anyway), she had to work in the kitchen washing dishes after each meal, and she had a new diagnosis not just as “aphasia” but as “aphasic dementia.” It sounded insulting.

  Not a day went by that she didn’t wish she’d gone ahead and slobbed his knob. But the days went by. Latha’s twenty-first birthday came and went without observance, except by herself, who knew it meant she had attained majority and was responsible for herself. She also decided that if Flora was right about the difference between the dreams of B Ward women and those in C Ward, namely, that the former were commonplace and cut-and-dried while the latter were wild and outrageous, then she would start treating herself to some wild dreams, which she did, the only element of excitement in her tedious existence. She even had one dream of Dr. Meddler slobbing his own knob. Her dog Rouser used to do that. But thinking of Rouser made her homesick and nostalgic for the days of her youth.

  The kitchen where she worked washing dishes after every meal had a door that led to the outside world, where they brought in food and supplies. The head cook had said to her, “Don’t even think about trying to escape through that door. There are vicious dogs out there that would tear you apart.” But one evening as she was fi
nishing her dishwashing chores, she happened to see a skittish young kitten come running in through that door. Possibly those vicious dogs had frightened it. It (or he, as Latha soon discovered) was agreeable to being petted, and Latha picked him up and cuddled him, and he began purring like mad, and Latha was overcome with emotion at having produced such a feeling in a fellow creature. “Whose little kitty are you?” she asked him. He purred louder as if to tell her that he was now her little kitty. The cooks were gone, and nobody saw Latha open the big ice box and take out a jar of milk, and pour some into a saucer for her kitty. He lapped it up as if he hadn’t had any food in his whole life. She took him up to the dormitory and got under the sheet of her cot with him and snuggled up with him and told him his name was going to be “Cutie-Pie Face” because once upon a time she’d had a kitten by that name, and sure enough this kitten’s face was the cutest thing she’d ever seen, so cute she had to give him a kiss, which he didn’t mind too much. She had a wild and scary dream about a panther on Ledbetter Mountain, but it was her own panther and only destroyed her enemies.

  There was a problem in keeping the kitten hidden. Dr. Meddlesome and Nurse Shedd came around at daybreak (the summer was winding down and the days were getting shorter again), but since they never approached Latha’s cot any more, there was no fear of their detecting her pet. Yet when they were gone, and the rest of the women were awake, Cutie-Pie Face started meowing for his breakfast, and his sounds alerted other women to his presence, and all of them were delighted, and begged for permission to pet him or hold him. All of them began what became a daily custom of bringing bits and pieces of their food from the dining hall to give him, and one woman of B Ward who still had her mail privileges and got the Arkansas Democrat by subscription furnished several sheets of newspaper each day for the kitten to do his business on. But although Latha told everyone that she had named the kitten Cutie-Pie Face after a kitten of her childhood, Flora wanted to call him Sugardip after a kitten of her childhood, and each of the other women decided that they would name him after various kittens of their childhood, so he also went by (but never responded to, as felines never respond to their names) Tabby, Cuddles, Sandy, Leo, Tiger, Nate, Useless, Louie, Matty, Calvin Coolidge, Apollinaris, Whiskers, Rhubarb, Noname, and Krazy.