Hystera

by Leora Skolkin-Smith

  “I’m sorry,” she said to him now. “I wasn’t able to stop.”

  “Stop? Do you mean your rage at me?”

  “Yes,” she lied. She had caught herself before stumbling, or exposing the distress of the last hours, she thought. But then she felt a beating heat again inside her.

  “So you’re still angry at me?”

  “I don’t want to be trapped here. You put me in here. I want to get out.”

  “You were put in the quiet room to help you calm down. This isn’t a prison. As soon as you calm down, we’ll move you back to your room.”

  She stood up but stepped back from him. She started to turn away and then, seeing the mattress and heap of blanket, felt the dream about the nurse arrest her again, and she stopped in mid-turn, as if suddenly drained of her sense of direction.

  “What is it?” Dr. Burkert asked her.

  When she faced him, she said, “I don’t know… but… it’s nothing. I’m not feeling well. That’s all.”

  “You told me that when I spoke to you that first night you were admitted,” he said, and slowly, cautiously, went on: “But something was happening to you, and you were terrified of it.”

  “It was a hallucination.”

  “Were you hallucinating when you looked at the mattress just now?”

  “No, no. I just don’t feel well, I told you.” He was trying to unravel her on purpose, she thought. “I am losing myself. I told you, people make me into whatever they want. I disappear.”

  “These are dissociative states I think you might be trying to tell me about, brought on by the intrusions you experience in closeness. Closeness can be experienced as sexual and destructive. It can be overwhelming and terrifying.”

  Lilly felt alarmed and calmed by his words, bounding precipitously between panic and relief.

  “I stopped by because I wanted to see how it was going for you in here, and if we can both consider moving you back to the hall. If you agree you still need the safety, I’d like you to spend the night here, and in the morning we can see about you leaving.”

  Lilly nodded and turned from him. She looked at the clock Caroline gave her, placed on the floor. It had stopped running, all out of batteries. It read 9:20 a.m. all day.

  If I was staying in a hotel, I would always know the time and the day, she thought. It’s only in a hospital that time was an irrelevance.

  The sunny morning made the outside world seem illuminated by a rich yellow light. Outside the quiet room window, the distant buildings looked bathed in early summer.

  Waiting for Dr. Burkert, Lilly was already changed and washed. She ate her breakfast watching the sunlight as it grew, casting round yellow circles on the white wall.

  But everything could fall apart, cracking into sudden rushes of scenes—the dirty sheets; her mother’s reddening, tear-stained cheeks; her mother’s brown, moist eyes and predatory passions.

  As she waited for Dr. Burkert, she drifted into thoughts like a dream, imagining herself stranded at a train depot because she had missed her train. She was lugging around what was left of her possessions from the hospital which she had left to go home, and no one was helping her carry them. She then followed a man through a labyrinth of tracks—all to catch this train that the man said was running now from a different station to take her home. Her bags and suitcases were breaking in her arms. If she didn’t catch the train, she would have nothing of her possessions, she thought, and she would be lost in endlessness.

  When Dr. Burkert arrived in the late morning, a part of her sat beside him and a part of her sat across, far away from him with her eyes closed, stubborn and immobile, staring into his questions, mute. The part of her sitting beside Dr. Burkert felt like a nervous young woman, wondering who the other Lilly was and what brought her here.

  “Are you feeling comfortable enough to go back to your room?” Dr. Burkert asked.

  “I want to go back,” she said.

  “Does that mean you feel calmer?”

  “I don’t know what happened to me to make me come here.”

  “You said you felt you were vanishing—people, especially your mother, the nurse could make you feel obliterated and make you into whatever they wanted. Perhaps you feel a little more like yourself this morning.”

  “Yes, but I don’t understand it all.”

  Later, that evening, in a session now in Dr. Burkert’s office, Lilly, dressed back in jeans and her tee shirt continued: “I don’t understand what you were telling me.”

  “I was explaining that feelings, even sexual feelings, can make us feel like someone is persecuting us,” Dr. Burkert leaned forward in his chair across from her, as if there were a wall between them and she just had to put her ear to it and listen through it to hear him. “A little girl held too close by her mother,” he went on, “may not be able to differentiate herself from the body of her mother, especially if she feels she is the exclusive object of her mother’s desire, neither here nor there, just in a magnetic field which pulls and charges all the switches, emotional and sexual. It could be why that examination with the nurse your first night was so dangerous for you. And why I can be dangerous when you let me get close even you may need me to help you.”

  “I miss my father,” she said, feeling herself push Dr. Burkert’s words away now. “I wish my father were here right now.”

  “It’s sad, your father does not come across as a protector after his brain damage, but sometimes even as another violator of boundaries.”

  “If I told you what I felt,” she said. “You’d think I was crazy, I can’t stand people knowing me—” She stopped. “It makes me mad and I feel like I’m fighting for my life. Something happens in my body that I can’t handle. I can’t stop it—, it’s rape.”

  “I think closeness makes you feel obliterated,” he said, carefully. “It’s because you fight for your life against being annihilated that you become enraged at the people who are making you feel this way. Annihilation can be associated with orgasm, which can be a very confusing experience, sometimes it’s called a ‘ little death’.”

  Lilly felt herself close to fracture and nearing a collapse into tears as she yielded to his words but she fought back from within. She gave into a long silence before she spoke. “Do we need to continue talking about all this?” She asked him.

  “Yes,” he answered. “This is very important.”

  When she looked at him, she thought she heard him say, “Stay with me.”

  “What?” She asked.

  “I said: stay with it,” He answered. “And we’ll work on this together.”

  “Lilly, you know the rules.” It was Caroline’s voice Lilly heard, as Caroline ushered Lilly back into the eternity of the real, her first community meeting after the days in seclusion. Three days had already passed between the time Lilly was released from the quiet room this time.

  “Find a seat,” Caroline said to Lilly, who stood uncertainly by the far wall now. “I’m glad you feel ready to join us.”

  The hem of Caroline’s summery shirt was loose, un-tucked, draping the nurse’s cotton navy-blue skirt. The sniffling sounds of the seated patients had seemed too loud when Lilly was first released from the quiet room, as if the whole ward were crying.

  Lilly settled into a stiff-backed chair. The sounds the patients made as they shuffled, coughed, and muttered seemed ordinary, just restlessness. She noticed the faces of a few new patients who had arrived while she was in the quiet room. But when she searched the faces, Lisa wasn’t there.

  A collection of clippings lay open on a lounge table next to the armchair where Lilly finally sat. She saw a headline and photo about Patty Hearst on the front page of the New York Post. The headline read, “Patty Hearst Found at Another Crime Scene: Patty Hearst Now a Member of the Symbionese Army.” This time she was at Mel’s Sporting Goods Store in Englewood, California. From a van parked across the street from Mel’s, shots were fired in the direction of the store. The shooter was identified as Patty Hearst,
the newspaper article stated. Patty said that “out of the ashes” of the fire she “was reborn”—and “knew what she had to do next,” the article read.

  There were several copycat kidnappings, the newspaper reported. A male hairdresser in England staged a faux capture by left-wing blacks, and later emerged as a female, his hair womanly and long, two breasts formed by padding in a bra. He was wearing a soft chiffon dress and embracing a beautiful man with smooth ebony skin. A teenage girl faked a kidnapping and was found weeks later in Haight-Ashbury, pregnant and smiling.

  No one could find Patty, the newspaper journalist said. There was no proof that it was Patty.

  Patty Hearst has managed to escape her own life, Lilly thought, transmuting herself into another form, another self.

  “Hi, Lilly,” Louise said to Lilly now. “You look ravishing.”

  “Louise…,” Lilly said quietly, and she listened to the rhythm of her own voice. It calmed her against the hectic sneezing, turning, and fidgeting of the others. And soon, more vigorously, the motion of her legs crossing into the ordinary way she used to sit relaxed her fear.

  “Are you well, my pet?” Louise teased.

  Lilly nodded, smiling.

  “Ladies, you know how these meetings are run,” Caroline said. “This isn’t a private conversation.”

  Lilly sighted the cabinet of records, magazines, and games. But of course she didn’t see Leonard in his usual spot. They weren’t talking about him now either. She rested her eyes on the floors, its familiar stains and marks. Some spilled backgammon die still lay where they had fallen. The floor hadn’t yet been cleaned completely from the night, still soiled, so unlike the bald white of the quiet room’s floor and its chalky finish, Lilly thought.

  “Are people worried about when the new residents will come?” Caroline was asking the group. “It’s going to be July soon.”

  “Where’s Lisa?” someone was asking. “How come Lisa isn’t here?”

  “Lisa is seeing her family. She got a pass, and she is in Westport tonight,” Caroline explained. “Are you feeling anxious about the July rotation of doctors?”

  Lilly was certain Caroline was talking directly to her. But then she realized she had arrived late and the discussion had already started before she took her seat. Discharge dates moved up to accommodate the demands of the July rotation, the change in residents. Dr. Burkert had told Lilly that she would be discharged in about two weeks when he would be leaving the floor, and that he recommended they continue to work together in the outpatient department. She didn’t want to think about it.

  “Who will be my new doctor?” a female patient was asking.

  “I want to leave, too,” someone shouted.

  The floor buzzed with the word “discharge” all that next week, and with the news of patients and to whom they would be assigned when the new residents arrived. Leonard’s suicide still made the staff cautious. There were more staff aides in the corridor and more meetings; some morning meetings were held in the center lounge where the window had been repaired but the frame was still unpainted.

  Chapter Ten

  Wednesday, ten days before Lilly’s discharge from the hospital, was another bright, sun-filled day. The hospital parking lot and the walkway were sheens of warm light as Lilly left on her first pass to her apartment in Little Italy. It wasn’t an overnight pass yet, but she would have lunch with Jane and see their neighborhood for the first time since she was admitted. She was wondering what the warm outside sun would feel like on her, without anyone guarding her movements under it, when suddenly she saw her mother on the walkway.

  “Hi, my darling,” Helen said to Lilly as she approached, as if the chance encounter was almost expected. Both had halted as their eyes met.

  “Don’t be frightened, darling,” Helen said softly. “I thought they told you. I have been coming to see Mrs. Levine, the social worker, for a few weeks. I came for our appointment today. This is why you see me here. She understands the grief I have been going through,”

  “I’m glad,” Lilly caught herself before she gave in to her body’s shaking, to her shock. “I’m glad, Mom.”

  “Do you think we wanted this to happen to you?” Mrs. Weill spoke louder, as if in sudden desperation. She looked around the neo-Gothic establishment—the clipped gardens and spruce trees. “Your father doesn’t understand what’s happened to you,” she said quickly. “But I want you to know, I do.”

  “I do—,” Lilly started.

  “I suffered a great deal, Lillian,” Mrs. Weill went on. “You were in my belly once, you know. I feel all this.”

  Lilly flared in alarm. In her mind, Lilly shouted, Mother, I am very angry. When she was done thinking it, it was almost as good as if she had said it to Helen.

  “The social worker knew right away I was a good mother. I didn’t want so much to be on you. I had no choice.”

  “Yes,” Lilly said, “I’m sure she did.” She felt her mother’s blindness to the boundaries, which separated them now as a sharp, lonely sorrow inside her. “Mom, has Daddy asked about me?”

  “We must just accept what has happened to us,” Helen said, as if she hadn’t heard her. “We are in therapy now, and this is good.” She held her head up high.

  For moments, Lilly counted the leaves on the stone pavement. Then she thought her mother was weeping.

  “Mom—” She looked into the puffy face. Helen’s eyes looked moist, expanding in a ring of pain.

  The warm waves of the June afternoon carried the grassy fragrances of the small plots of flowers that flanked the large neo-Gothic building and made it look like a keep-house in a sprawling diocese. Lilly remembered the place where the baptistery stood, the statues of Mother Mary and domed ceiling inside the cathedral.

  “Mrs. Levine said you have trouble separating from me.” Lilly knew, from the way her mother was talking, that her father hadn’t asked about her, maybe he hadn’t even noticed she was gone. If he were thinking at all, it was about his Springbok notebook and the summer sparrows on the birch tree, she thought. But her mother was here, in front of her.

  “We can meet some time when you’re ‘ready,’” Helen told her.

  “I would like that, Mom.”

  “Lilly,” Helen said, raising her eyes again. “You know I never meant you any harm. You know that, don’t you, sweetheart?”

  After her mother’s visit, lying in her bed with her door shut, Lilly had pulled the white sheet up, under her chin, and imagined herself as an expanse of matter in a space between the stars and the planets. Lilly wasn’t a “nothing” in this great vacancy, she thought. But as she lay there she felt a surge growing within her and she realized it was rage. Helen eyed Lilly in her dream this night. Helen is very tiny, and she is sitting in a big chair. She gives Lilly a look of exasperation, her head twitches away. But then her eyes come down hard on Lilly. Who was Lilly to touch and handle their love, and then throw away their precious union? Her mother’s eyes were demanding.

  “Don’t eat anything.” The next day, sitting at a round breakfast table alone, a hungry Lilly was interrupted over a plate of scrambled eggs and rye toast by the aide named Stan. “Put the fork down, no food,” he went on, “you’re getting a blood test this morning.” Her face fueled with fire. Lilly picked up the empty water glass as a fierce fury overtook her. “It’s intolerable, here, “ she started as Stan was pulling the plate of food away, out from under her. But then, filling with rage, she was aiming the glass at the window. She suddenly felt Caroline yanking the glass from her upraised hand, backing Stan away from her shouts: “Let her get control herself, Stan, everyone stop staring!”

  Then: “ Lilly, please,” Caroline said and Lilly un-clenched the glass as Caroline grabbed it. Just as quickly, Lilly bolted from the dining room. She ran down the corridor as other patients moved to the dining room exit and stared at her. Hushed and startled again by the sudden rages which it seemed would once again explode in the quiet Lilly, who had rarely said a word to an
yone, hazy and inaccessible for all these weeks. Always watching others, agreeable, listening. The rages came like surges, as though she were possessed.

  Now Lilly slammed her bedroom door shut, kicked it from the other side, thinking the thrust hard enough to break the wood.

  “But did she throw anything?” she heard Dr. Burkert suddenly ask outside her door.

  “No, no.” It was Caroline who answered Dr. Burkert, and Lilly realized Caroline had called him. The door was still intact when Lilly opened it to let Dr. Burkert inside her room.

  Dr. Burkert stood in Lilly’s bedroom moments later, his left elbow leaning against the top of her bureau’s flat top, and he watched Lilly as she started breathing deeply and slowly to calm herself.

  She made herself sit silently in the desk chair, and she breathed and breathed until her body stopped shaking.

  Then she had started to cry feverishly, and with such pain that she sounded as if she had swallowed broken glass. She sounded as if she could never come back.

  He waited. Then, “Come to my office,” he said.

  She followed him down the corridor, a person made of gasps of air, she thought.

  “I understand you saw your mother yesterday.” Dr. Burkert said as Lilly sat in her usual chair.

  “No,” she said. “Not saw, I ran into her.”

  “This morning she called me to tell me she hoped we could have a family session, she said she would be able to bring your father, you had asked about him. How would you feel about that?”

  Lilly hesitated, her breathing had eased but now she heard the clack-clack-clack of the big fan on the ceiling over his desk, it was noisily turning but why hadn’t she heard it when she first walked in. She felt the wind it made on her legs, he seemed to have aimed it at her, before she walked in, and it blew at her lap.