Lilly missed school again that morning. The Little Italy streets were deserted when she looked out her bedroom window a few hours later. Undressing, she slipped naked between the sheets in exhaustion. But she was feeling the bulb. She wouldn’t answer the phone if the school called, if anyone called, she promised herself. Before she let herself drift into sleep, she planned how she was going to spread out all her mimeographed pages of notes about alchemy on the old wobbly desk she had barely used before this day. She would include the characters who had come to her in the library. She could, maybe, propose to her college don a thesis on alchemy, to keep her place in the college. It felt hopeful before she fell off into the dark state that came with sleep. Then Lilly was drowning; the alchemy, too, was failing her. In the dreams, blended into shocks and images, she saw androgynous figurines drifting from the alchemy texts, and she was floating up to join them as they mirrored her freakishness.
What had gone wrong? Lilly asked herself now in the seclusion room of the hospital.
How was it possible for Lilly to feel alone and crazy when there were pages and pages filled with voyagers of the self like her, centuries of them, packed as if in a telephone book full of phone numbers she could make calls to in her despair? How was it possible to feel hopelessness when despair itself “facilitated a unification of the limited with the unlimited,” as the books explained?
In spite of everything she wrote in the day, the dreams and the confusions came back in the night. She had lost control. In only a few weeks, her writing slid away from her.
Now she felt like a slap the stark white loneliness of the seclusion room.
Lilly took in a thickening breath; she did not want tears. She looked for her crushed pack of Marlboros in the quiet room, but they had taken them away along with her matches. Instead, she struggled to concentrate. She needed to piece together just the last long hours, the drive in the taxicab with Jane, the procedure in the emergency room, and what had happened to her in the examination.
But within seconds she imagined Dr. Burkert moving under the sheets with her, and then his long hands spanking her thighs. The bulb was growing again. She felt it pulse, swelling her with that familiar fear. How complete was her helplessness against that sudden moment’s visitation from a deep and awful eros.
No, she couldn’t permit this. To come here? Into a mental hospital? Like some wild element from an archaic chart of chemicals and compounds let loose upon the real world?
Lilly wished she had a match that she could ignite and touch its fire to her skin.
The fire could singe a tiny spot on her flesh that would send flashes of pain throughout her body, driving out the hot flush in the bulb. Anything to obliterate the fire within her. Inside Lilly was a place where blood was flowing wildly as mercury in the chaotic heat of her flesh. It made her eyes close, and then she only wanted to lose herself.
She tried to lie still. If she looked too distressed by what was happening in her body, her sex, Dr. Burkert or the cold nurse would soon notice the bulb when they came back into the room.
“Mercury must be baked in a triple receptacle of very hard glass.” She forced herself to remember something said in her alchemy texts. Her feelings could be contained, she told herself, make sense again. She told herself not to panic. She would understand everything that was happening. Soon. When her mind was clearer. She would just have to be patient, and her sense and logic would come back.
Lilly tightened the belt of her gown. Where were her writings? And all her plans and notes? There would be questions—from the college, from her mother about what happened to her. So she must retain control. She would be mad and unmad.
She had to stay here. There were darker houses for the genuinely crazy than this mental hospital, and people who were totally insane. She must not become unhinged or look disturbed. And she could not fall, crash, or skid— hurt herself in any way so that they would have take care of her. She didn’t want any real person to take care of her.
The quiet room resembled a basement. Why shouldn’t she stay here?
She needed a strategy. She must avoid the nurse. This was the first rule she set for herself. If she were to survive this journey, she must stay away from Beverly.
Slowly Lilly rolled from her side onto her back. She sank deeper into the mattress. She stared up at the peels and flakes of white on the ceiling.
Lilly felt her heart beating in her ear. Then she remembered she had forgotten to shut the window in her apartment. It was open, and the wind had been so strong the past few days.
Could it have blown all her notes away?
Chapter Four
“Please find a seat,” said a thickset nurse, sitting in the closest chair to the open corridor. “You need to take a seat before we begin. I understand this is your first community meeting.” She quickly glanced down at a clipboard of ruffled notes and patients’ names on her knees. “This is Lillian, everybody.” The nurse’s ruddy face was too uplifting in the bleak silence of the room. Her hair was in a rumpled bun, loose hanks splashing across her forehead as she looked back up and around the circle. Except for the chain of passkeys hanging from her belt, she did not seem like the other nurses. She was wearing cherry-brown loafers that matched her masculine, wide-lapelled shirt. A plain denim skirt aproned her chubby lap. “Lillian, you can’t stand during a community meeting,” she said again. “There’s a chair by Lisa.”
The hospital shifts had changed. Lilly was released from the quiet room by 8 p.m. A nurse had come, taking her from the quiet room to a private room on the hall.
Now Lilly felt alert. The medicine of hours ago had almost finished its watch over her impulses and quelled her. She moved hesitantly amid the hive of new faces and bodies. As in an airport where a flight was interminably delayed, all the patients looked stranded and anxious in the surroundings of ashtrays, magazine racks, and game tables where Scrabble and backgammon boards were folded away for the meeting.
“Lillian, I’m Caroline,” the same nurse said to Lilly. “We haven’t met yet. Okay. Everyone’s here.”
“Where’s Spia?” a young female patient asked. “Is Spia back in the quiet room, Caroline?”
Caroline turned to an aide. “You better go find her,” she said to him.
The aide disappeared down the long corridor as Lilly sat down next to a heavily freckled, thin young woman she guessed was Lisa.
Spia arrived from the other side of the hall in a pair of frilly green panties showing through her thrift-shop negligee. She carried two stuffed brown grocery bags.
“Oh, Spia,” Lisa said. “Why’re you doing this?”
“I’m leaving after the meeting,” Spia said in a gruff Haitian accent. “I’m going back to dancing. I’m going to dance at the club tonight. They’re already sold out for my show.” She plopped into a chair, pulled at the negligee that was too short and tight for her muscular body, and leered at Caroline.
“We will all be helping Spia if we simply do not pay any attention to this,” Caroline said. “I ask you, as a community, to please not look at Spia right now.”
“That’s a little hard, isn’t it?” a male patient laughed.
“I can’t understand what you find so goddamn funny,” another male patient said. “My bedroom happens to be right next to the quiet room where she was screaming her head off all morning. If she can’t keep her mouth shut, why don’t you lock her up someplace else, Caroline?”
“Well, Tom, I can see that Spia has aroused some very strong feelings in you.”
“Dammit, Caroline! I’m taking a shower, and she comes waltzing in. Every time you let her out of the quiet room she’s doing something.”
Caroline looked at Spia. “Spia? Did you walk into Tom’s shower?”
Spia nodded.
“Perhaps you’d like to say something to Tom, Spia. You’ve made him very angry.”
Spia smiled. “I love you, Tom,” she said. “I love everyone here.”
“All right, I think it woul
d be best if we dropped the matter for now.” Caroline picked a fallen hair out of her mouth. “Tom, I suggest you talk to Dr. Leach about your feelings. I’d like to start the meeting now. Lisa, please read the minutes from the last week so we can begin.”
The woman called Lisa shuffled a stack of loose-leaf pages on her lap. She was about twenty. Her freckled face and angular head looked too large for her squat body. She was wearing a corduroy jumper that Lilly had seen in junior high school, on the physically shy girls. After rolling her tongue over her freckled lips, she read,
April 10th, 1974. Tom said he couldn’t stand the way the place was overheated anymore. Caroline said he’d have to; it was an old building and nothing could be done. Tom said: Why couldn’t some of the patients go sun-bathe on the roof instead of going to recreational therapy since the weather was finally getting nice? Caroline said no. Tom asked if there could be a volleyball game on Wednesday night, and Caroline said she would look into this; the adolescents had the gym then. Sister Emelda asked if anybody knew whether Patty Hearst had been caught yet, and Sophie said the F.B.I. was in her bedroom all the time. Tom said he was sick of living with crazy people all the time. Louise Whitty said Spia was a thief, too; she had stolen three boxes of caramel Ayds from her because she was running low, it wasn’t fair. Spia said you can stuff your Ayds up your fat ass, they don’t taste good anyway. Louise Whitty began to cry. Spia began to cry too….
The air filled with sounds of restlessness, bottoms squeaking against the wooden seats of their chairs. It smelled like smoke, fresh Lemon Pledge, mahogany, polished floors. The fresh clouds the patients blew from their cigarettes mingled with the lasting odors of a steak and mashed potatoes dinner still wafting in from the dining room.
Lilly sucked in tiny, quick breaths. She tried to keep her eyes on the floor, but felt them drawn to the faces around her. The real world of the hospital was coming to life faster than she could endure.
As Lisa read the long pages of detailed minutes, Lilly watched Spia sitting with her legs apart, smiling complacently as she captured eyes. Spia was leaning back into her chair and rolling her hips, aiming her laced crotch at Caroline.
Next to Spia, a nun was strapped in a chair, a white canvas harness around her pudgy torso, a pristine child. While Spia thrashed around beside her, the nun’s face remained serene.
Lilly felt inside her jeans for the pack of Viceroys, but then she remembered she had dropped them in a drawer in her new room. She began to blink rapidly, to stay alert. She sensed the others staring at her, but she would not give into her trembling. She crossed her legs on her chair seat, and she felt an immense slack in her blue jeans, as if she had lost pounds just in the three hours she spent in the quiet room. Then she imagined the emptiness she would feel if she were back in the apartment in Little Italy. She envisioned herself not returning to her apartment, not having to return anywhere, unburdened, her former life vaporized, expunged. She was still anonymous here, and though she felt the desperation of the others around her, there was relief in knowing it wasn’t her own desperation.
The window was opened half an inch, and Lilly heard the rain spraying down into the leaves below the ledge. It hissed like a baby peeing into soft blankets. And, listening to it, Lilly was suddenly floating in a dissolution of space, a gust of thrill, foreign and exciting. She felt the pull of her own madness, the bulb, the confusing currents washing alternately through her and her fantasy world, like running water, merging the real world and this other realm that she needed time to comprehend.
Something had happened to her and it took along her body, its meaning locked within herself. She felt a refuge in the swelling mass of others and their suffering. She could lose herself here, hide while she found herself, if only for a short time.
Lisa laid the rumpled loose-leaf pages of minutes under her chair and looked up at Caroline, mashing her lips together.
“Thank you for reading the minutes, Lisa,” Caroline said. “Would anyone like to comment? Are there any new issues people have this evening? Leonard, perhaps you’d like to share with the group how it feels to be going out to the outside world tomorrow?”
“No thanks.” Leonard dropped the Time magazine he had been reading instead of listening to Lisa’s notes. He did not look straight at anyone. His lap was thick, his thighs muscular.
“Leonard will be downtown at City Hall in the mornings starting Tuesday for his trial,” Caroline announced to the group.
“Don’t you worry about it,” Leonard said. Next to Leonard, a thin man sat, in strong contrast to Leonard’s bulk. His weak hands were veiny, and he wore a boy’s baseball cap, a royal blue classic with the Mets crest embroidered on it in gold wool threads. But even the hypermasculine hat failed to add much to his slight form. The man’s eyes were dark and blank in their holes. He wore no socks, and his Hush Puppies shoes looked girlish. His figure barely threw a shadow on the wall. His fingers drummed on his Gap jeans.
“Arnold, would you like to share with the community what you’re feeling?” Caroline asked him.
Arnold waved his hand “no” angrily at her.
“Do people want to say something to Arnold?” Caroline asked the silent circle.
Lilly moved uncomfortably in her seat. Caroline’s warmth was a sneaky seduction, Lilly thought. She would be careful of Caroline.
“I don’t much appreciate what’s happening to me either, Arnold,” Leonard said. His hand jetted down to his trouser pocket, taking out a gold-plated lighter. When he flicked it, the flame was tall and blazing. He leaned into the fire; his face almost touched it.
In one of his pockets was an old but stylish tie, a Gucci, Lilly thought, or an Yves St. Laurent, or some other designer. Leonard clapped the lid of his lighter shut, stoking on his lit cigarette. Then his left hand returned the lighter to his pocket, and he looked more in command of himself again.
“Leonard, would you like to share with the group how you are feeling about going down to the courthouse tomorrow?” Caroline asked him.
“Nope,” Leonard said, and smiled at her.
There was a long silence.
A sharp ringing began in Lilly’s ear. Her head swelled with the delible faces and figures of the patients. An internal camera was developing its film in her own private darkroom now.
“You’re beautiful, Caroline,” a large female patient blurted.
“Thank you,” Caroline said. “But Louise, do you have anything to say to the group?”
“You’re a Rodin woman, honey. I miss the times when there were women of mystery.” Louise pulled at her dress, a flowing faux silvery-sequined lounge gown. Her hair was like a Clorox-soaked broom head, its yellow straw ends stiff and spiky. A colorful feather boa straddled her neck. “Did you know Marilyn Monroe was hospitalized here?” she asked. “See what I mean? Women can do this ‘crazy’ role better because we are submissive and helpless and we can have crisis. Crisis isn’t so bad. Crisis and pain and despair take you into being a whole person. It’s about what’s existential,” Louise finished. “But it’s also about orgasms.”
“Jesus Christ, Louise,” Lisa said.
“All right, Louise and Lisa,” Caroline said. “Let’s stay focused.”
Lilly startled. She struggled to stop the bulb from coming to life; she tried hard not to listen, to dampen its fire.
There were creaks and sighs, some loose jokes, and more bantering. The half an hour was passing quickly. Caroline’s gaze rested one by one on each patient, as if to make sure she didn’t miss any gesture, any mutter.
The patients in the room soon seemed to have taken on a family resemblance, patches of paleness on their skin under stiff, gaudy clothing.
“If you all don’t quit yakking,” Spia hissed into the noisy room, “I gonna walk out of here. You all sick in the head.”
But by now Lilly realized the meeting was breaking up. Two nurses were calling out from down the corridor, “Meds are ready!” Patients were standing, pulling their chairs back. A
black aide started turning on the three standing lamps to signal that the meeting was officially over. And then a chaotic dispersal of energy was unleashed in the changing light.
Lilly stayed seated. She watched Caroline. The nurse was standing now, directing the patients to clear out of the center lounge. There was a loud shuffling of armchairs under all the lights, which had been turned on so brightly as the meeting was ending.
Sucking in the smoke-saturated air, Lilly needed to get up now, to walk in the aimless trajectory of the other patients, pacing back and forth, between the north and south sides, or sitting at the TV in the other lounge, at the game tables, on the faux leather couches, listening to the night roars of traffic on the FDR Drive out the windows.
Lilly looked around in the room’s commotion to see whether one of the aides or nurses was waiting for her, to take her back to her room. But no one seemed to be noticing her now. She looked up at the clock. Nine-thirty, she read from the Victorian antique grandfather clock standing between the game table and the armchair in the lounge.
She wondered what the distance was between the center lounge and the private room she had been given. She would measure it soon; it would be something to do to pass the time. She would have to find something to fill the time here, which she knew now would be long.
“Hello, Mom?” It was 10 p.m. when Lilly got to the phone booth.
“Lilly! Oh, thank God! What is going on? Why didn’t you call earlier?”
“I’ve been sort of busy.”
“What happened? I called the apartment, and Jane said you went into a mental hospital. It was a horrible way for me to find out, Lilly. Why didn’t you call me?”
“I’m calling you now, Mom.”
“I don’t understand, Lillian. What does that girl Jane know? She knows nothing, too.” Helen was slipping into her Israeli accent, her voice growing frantic. “This girl Jane doesn’t know what happened to you. Who is this girl? You know her from school?”
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