Eventually they untied Rachel and took the camisole off Latha, and the two girls were able to stand together at a window and watch a snowfall. It was a heavy snowfall, almost a blizzard, which covered everything in no time, and the whiteness seemed to purify the gray solemnity of the world.
“Almost makes you think there might be some kind of a God up there,” Rachel said, “who wants to cover up his mess now and then.”
“Covering it up don’t make it better,” Latha said. She noticed the pond, a sizeable body of water at the lower end of the asylum’s campus, which had iced up and was now covered with a smooth blanket of snow. She wondered if it was stocked with fish, and whether the inmates could fish in it. It had been so very long since she’d gone fishing, she’d probably forgotten how to thread a hook with a worm.
As she stared longingly at the pond, the snow and ice melted and the trees burst into leaf, and flowers shot up all along the banks of the pond. White was replaced with green. If white is pure, green is fresh. She shook her head to clear it.
Rachel said, “Welcome to D, which is for Demented. You don’t look demented to me, but you probably drowned your kid brother, didn’t you?” Latha shook her head. “Then you must’ve peed in the punchbowl at the prom? No? Then you must’ve tried to jack off the minister of your church during a baptism. No, wait, that’s what I did. So it wasn’t you. But just what did you do to get yourself declared demented, darling?”
“I lost my voice in the presence of unkind people,” Latha said, feeling dizzy. She needed to sit down, so she sat on the nearest unoccupied cot and thought, At last I really have lost my mind. She asked Rachel, “What day is this, do you know?”
“Unlike some people I could name, I don’t have a calendar, so I couldn’t tell you exactly, but I would guess it’s the somewhere around the middle of May.”
“But just a moment ago that pond out there was frozen over,” Latha said.
“And if you’ll wait a minute, it will freeze over again. That’s the way the world works, or refuses to work.”
“But hadn’t you already asked me what I had done to get myself declared demented?”
“Just a moment ago,” Rachel said. “And if you’ll wait a minute, I will ask it again.”
“But I think I really am demented, now,” Latha said. “I don’t know what time of year it is, or what day, or what hour, or whether I’m going or coming.”
“Take it up with Dr. Kaplan,” Rachel said.
“Who’s that?”
“Our sweet busybody nutcracker,” Rachel said.
“What happened to Dr. Silverstein?”
Rachel stared at her. “You really have been out of it. Silverstein was fired several months ago. Don’t you remember how heart-broken I was?”
Latha was sorry that she would have to keep reminding herself that her dear friend Rachel was not of sound mind herself. But she was at least right about the doctor and about the month, which Dr. Kaplan told her was May. The twentieth. Dr. Kaplan reminded her that it was the day of her monthly appointment with him. She was sorry she had forgotten. He had the same office that Dr. Silverstein had had, and on the wall were the same diplomas that Dr. Silverstein had had, only they had Dr. Kaplan’s name on them. And he too did not serve anything to eat or drink, other than a glass of water, but he wanted to be sure that she was comfortable. “Let’s pick up where we left off last time,” he said. “You were telling me about your cleithrophobia.”
“My what?” she wrote.
“Cleithrophobia. Fear of being locked in an enclosed place. In my study of phobias, I find that very interesting in view of the fact that you say the people of your town never locked doors or anything.”
“I don’t recall telling you that,” she wrote. “In fact, I don’t recall telling you anything. I don’t recall ever meeting you before.”
He laughed and gestured at her folder. “Well, we’ve already determined your doxophobia, your acousticophobia, your harpaxophobia, and your agateophobia.”
“The only one I caught was the one with the harp in it. What’s that?”
“Fear of being robbed. Understandable in view of your dreadful experience in the hold-up at the bank.”
“I told you about that?”
“Yes indeed,” he said, and lifted a thick sheaf of papers from her folder. “You’ve written down most of the major events of your life so far. We’ve established almost all your phobias and eliminated the rest. I think you’ve probably got hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, which is simply fear of long words.”
“I’ve also got a fear of psychotherapists,” she wrote.
“Ah, iatrophobia,” he said. “I suspected that.”
“But I’m telling you, I can’t remember anything that has happened to me since last January.”
“Amnesia is a common side effect of your condition.”
“What is my condition?” she wanted to know.
He sighed. “If you don’t remember anything we talked about for the past several months, then it would be hard for me to repeat over again my explanation of your diagnosis.”
“Well, whatever it is, how long do I have to stay in D Ward?”
“You don’t like it here?”
“Nurse Richter is nice,” she allowed.
“Nurse Richter left us in February. With Dr. Silverstein.” He reported this news distastefully, as if there had been a scandal involved.
“Too bad. Then Rachel Rafferty is the only person here I care about.”
He stared at her. “I thought we had established that this ‘Rachel Rafferty’ is just someone you had invented, and you have agreed to let go of her.”
“Wait a minute,” she wrote. “I might have a great imagination, but I couldn’t imagine a woman this tall—” she held her hand high above her head “—who gave her preacher a knob job!”
Dr. Kaplan chuckled. “Imagination is a compelling thing. Especially in the minds of the delusional.”
Latha hung her head and began to cry. “Please don’t kill Rachel.”
He held out his hands as if he’d never touched Rachel. “I don’t have the power to do that,” he said. “All I can do is help you overcome figments who interfere with your grasp of reality.”
Latha jumped up and ran out of the office, determined to find Rachel and prove to the stupid psychotherapist that she very much existed. She went all over D Ward, and whenever she saw an inmate who looked reasonably lucid, she asked if she had seen Rachel Rafferty. But all she got was an assortment of very blank looks. On one floor of the D Ward building, she discovered a chapel, which she had not known existed. She went inside and found a minister, or priest, or whatever, and asked him. He said, “My child, there is no such person in D Ward.” Latha decided he might be the same preacher that Rachel had given the hand job to, and thus he wasn’t going to admit she existed. She found herself crying again. The minister took her arm and said, “Let’s get you back to where you belong.” And he led her back to the dormitory. She sat on the edge of her cot for days, weeks, months and pondered just how it could be that someone as real as Rachel had been only make-believe. The day came when she realized that if she had been persuaded to do away with her best friend, then she could just as easily re-create Rachel, and she said aloud, “Rachel, where are you? Please come back.” She waited for days, weeks, months, but Rachel did not return. She decided she would just have to try to find another woman to replace Rachel as her best friend. She got up from the cot and went around to all the other cots, and into the dining hall and kitchen and laundry room, and back into that chapel, and looked closely at each and every person, and even spoke to several. Not a blessed one of them looked as sound and sensible as Rachel. Many of them were in strait-jackets and were foaming at the mouth and inclined to curse her. Others looked as if they didn’t know she was there. Others looked at her with homicide in their eyes. A teenaged girl mistook her for her sister. An even younger girl thought Latha was her mother. At Christmastime, Latha joined in t
he singing of carols, but most of the others could not carry a tune. A group of well-dressed ladies from the Little Rock Civic Club appeared with armloads of presents, mostly cast-off clothes and various cosmetics that the nurses instantly confiscated, and the Club ladies looked very uncomfortable, even afraid, and they did not remain very long. One lady said to Latha, giving her a gift, “Here. This ought to make you look as lovely as you are.” Latha thanked her and took the gift out of its wrappings and opened it. It was a taffeta ball gown. Latha had never seen a dress so fancy, nor ever gone to a ball, so she took off her gray gown with the stenciled letters PROPERTY OF ARKANSAS STATE LUNATIC ASYLUM on the back, and put on the ball gown. There were no mirrors in the place, so she couldn’t see what she looked like, but she felt like stepping out to a fancy dance. An idea suddenly struck her, and she caught up with the group of Civic Club ladies as they were leaving the building, and walked along behind them, right out of the building! But it was freezing out there. “Aren’t you cold, dear?” a lady said to her. “And you don’t even have any shoes.”
“She’s one of them!” another lady said.
“Let’s help her escape,” another lady said, and several other ladies said, “Yes!” and “Let’s!”
“Let’s get the poor thing into a car before she freezes to death.”
“That would be against the law, to help her escape.”
“But it’s Christmastime!”
“Let’s hurry.”
“No, we’d better just take her back where she belongs.”
“Imogene, you are a heartless wretch!”
“Where’s your sense of propriety?”
“Where’s your sense of kindness?”
The whole group of ladies stood there in the freezing breeze arguing about whether or not to take Latha with them. Latha kept herself warm by figmenting in detail the scenario of being taken to live in a fine mansion in Little Rock, meeting and falling in love with the handsome son, becoming his bride and bedmate and lover, lover, lover. His name was Ronald. She called him Ronny. The debating ladies were almost equally divided between those who wanted Latha to live happily ever after and meet Ronald, and those who wanted to return her to D Ward. One of the latter said, “Let me remind you that we undertook this mission with the clear understanding that we would not intermingle with the lunatics or become involved with them.” By her dress and demeanor Latha determined that she was probably the president of the club.
Ronny died in an automobile accident, and in her grief Latha was committed to the state asylum, where she languished in D Ward.
Her bad case of sniffles she attributed to her mourning for poor Ronny, or poor Rachel, or both, but as it turned out her sniffles were the result of being exposed to subfreezing wind during her brief spell of freedom in the company of the Civic Club ladies. The sniffles developed into a fever, which Nurse Auel reluctantly took with a thermometer and gleefully declared that her temperature was 108° and that she had better go to the infirmary. Latha had not been aware that there was an infirmary when she was in B and C Wards. It was a huge room occupying nearly an entire floor, and every bed was filled. Latha had to wait a whole day until one of the patients died and was carted off before she could have a bed. And then she waited another day before a nurse came and took her temperature and declared it was 109° and another day after that before a doctor finally looked at her and listened to her chest with a stethoscope and declared that she had a severe case of pneumonia. He didn’t hold out much hope for her, but gave her some pills to take, and told her to stay in her bed until she died or got better, whichever came first. Her fellow patients, the hundreds of them, were too physically sick to be mentally sick, so there wasn’t a lot of howling, moaning, screeching, or cursing. Latha reflected that they might be crazy but they were smart enough to figure out that by being committed to the infirmary you escaped commitment to the nuthouse.
The assistants to the nurses were imbeciles, who brought the patients their food twice a day and emptied their bedpans once a day, and bathed them once a week. Latha discovered that the imbecile assigned to her was able to talk, and her name was Susie. She reminded Latha of Rindy, not the grown-up Rindy who had eloped to Pettigrew with that Tuttle boy but the Rindy she’d known in the first grade, very pretty and smiley but dumb as a post. Latha told Susie the story of finding the kitten she’d called “Cutie-Pie Face” in C Ward, and Susie was delighted. “I had a kitty when I was…when I was…when I was…” Susie tried to say, but Latha never learned when she was what.
Whenever Susie brought her food on a tray or came to empty the bedpan, she would hang around, and sometimes sit on the floor beside Latha’s bed. Susie was twenty-eight, some years older than Latha, but she had never been to school, and she really didn’t know much. Latha told her stories, not ghost stories because those greatly distressed her, but tall tales from the Ozarks, and fables, and simple yarns. Latha’s temperature had steadily gone back to normal, and after a couple of weeks she was feeling fine, but nobody said anything about sending her back to the D dormitory, and even the food was better in the infirmary than in D’s dining hall, so Latha made the best of it, and enjoyed the daily visits from Susie.
But one thing troubled Latha, and one day she said to Susie, “Pinch me.” She had to repeat it and try to explain to Susie that she needed to find out if Susie was “real,” and that was the only way she could think of to accomplish such. So Susie very timidly took Latha’s arm between her thumb and forefinger and gave a squeeze. It was a gentle pinch, but it was palpable enough to convince Latha that Susie wasn’t a figment. Latha realized that if she just wanted to figment her, she would have figmented someone with enough brains to describe her dreams and hopes, if any.
She was telling Susie a bedtime fairy tale one night when Dr. Kaplan showed up. “They told me you were here,” he said. He put his hand on her brow. “How’re you feeling?”
Latha whispered to Susie, “Tell him I’ve been better.”
Susie said to the doctor, “She’s been better.”
Dr. Kaplan laughed. “Do you mean you were better a year ago, or that you’re better now than you were a year ago?”
Susie said, “She was better before she came here.”
“Susie, I’m not talking to you,” Dr. Kaplan said. “Why don’t you run along?”
Susie said, “But she’s telling me a story.”
“She can finish it tomorrow,” Dr. Kaplan said. “Be a good little girl, and let me have a chat with Latha.”
Susie pouted but got off the floor and went away. Dr. Kaplan gave Latha a pad of paper and a pencil. Latha wrote, “Is she real enough to suit you?”
“Oh, yes,” Dr. Kaplan said. “We’re all very fond of Susie McGrew.”
“So you’ll let me keep her?” Latha wrote.
Dr. Kaplan laughed again. “I wouldn’t become too attached to her, because it’s time you left the infirmary and went back to your ward. We have matters to discuss.”
“I like it here better,” Latha wrote.
“So does everyone else,” Dr. Kaplan said. “That’s why it’s so crowded in here. It’s unhealthy. The air is full of contagious germs.”
“Well, I have to finish the story,” she wrote.
It took him a moment to realize what story she was talking about. Then he said, “Very well, but I’m ordering your discharge next week. I want you to come to my office as soon as you’re able.”
She stayed a few more days in the infirmary, finishing the story she had been telling Susie, and telling her several others besides. After telling her one of her favorites, “The Good Girl and the Ornery Girl,” which Susie seemed to appreciate very much, Latha said, “They’re making me leave, so I’ll have to say goodbye.”
Susie yelped, “No!” and gave Latha a hug and wouldn’t let go. A nurse and one of the other imbeciles had to pry Susie off of Latha before she could leave. Susie was screaming when Latha made her departure, and Latha’s own mouth was choked with sobs.
&
nbsp; Not too long after that, during one of her visits to Dr. Kaplan, he informed her that Susie had caught a disease in the infirmary—“Not from you,” he said—and after a week of confinement had died.
Latha greatly grieved, but wondered which was worse, to lose a wonderful bright friend like Rachel who was just your imagination, or to lose a devoted imbecile who was very real. She pondered this dichotomy for a very long time. A hideously long time. She decided finally she would just have to flip a coin. But she had no coins, and nobody else did either. She had the great nagging sense of guilt that we all feel when there is something we should have done which we did not do. She decided to resort to a superstition: she went to one of the barred windows and looked out at the landscape. If the first bird she saw was a red bird, then the worse thing is to lose someone you’ve figmented. If the first bird she saw was a blue bird, then the worse thing is to lose someone who was flesh and blood. The red bird would be Rachel, the blue bird would be Susie. She waited and waited, noticing a number of brown birds, black birds, gray birds, and pigeons. But she saw no red bird or blue bird. The day nurse who had replaced Nurse Richter and whose name was Nurse Bertram came and took her by the arm and returned her to her cot. The next day she returned to the window and stood there until Nurse Bertram came and returned her to her cot. And the next day. And the next. One day Nurse Bertram asked, “Who are you watching for?”
Because Nurse Bertram was nice, unlike Nurse Auel, Latha was able to speak. “A red bird or a blue bird,” Latha said.
“A cardinal or a bluejay?” Nurse Bertram asked, and Latha nodded. Nurse Bertram stepped to the window and looked out, and just stood there looking out for a long time. “That’s odd,” she said. “There’s usually some cardinals or some bluejays flying around, but I don’t see any. Why do you need them?”
Latha attempted to explain the superstition, but Nurse Bertram, although she was nice, was not terribly smart, and couldn’t grasp the idea of why Latha needed to know whether it is worse to lose a truly good imaginary friend or to lose a defective real friend.
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