The Long Journey Home

by Margaret Robison

  As soon as Ilene left, a nurse came and jerked the vase away, saying: “Patients aren’t allowed glass.”

  “Are patients allowed roses?” I asked.

  She glared at me. Then she handed me the roses, their long stems dripping in my hand.

  I gave them to the women on the ward—one to the woman who begged for cigarettes, one to the woman who wanted to save the world. I gave one to the woman who paced the corridor, her rapid turning like a snapping whip. I gave one to the woman who sat on the floor doing nothing, and another to the woman who wept continuously. I gave roses to the women who asked for them. Twelve roses to twelve women.

  Then one woman began to walk down the corridor, and the others followed. They walked silently in a strange parade, each with a rose like a torch in her raised hand.

  III

  The picture was printed on cardboard with simulated brushstrokes like those in the framed paintings that you could buy at the five-and-dime when I was a child: bowls of fruit, bouquets of flowers, seascapes with waves crashing against the rocks. This one was a bowl of fruit—apples, bananas, grapes on a dark walnut table. What I remember about it most clearly is darkness. And a sense of lifelessness. I couldn’t imagine those fruits ever having known sunlight or rain. I couldn’t imagine them ever nourishing a human soul any more than the cardboard on which they were printed.

  Two nurses sat talking in the nurses’ station in the hall. The picture hung to the right of the lounge door, just out of their field of vision. I paced back and forth across the room, smoking one cigarette after another, stealing glances at the picture. The longer I looked at it, the more monstrous it grew in my mind.

  At the upper right-hand corner, a speck of cardboard was exposed where a part of the image had been nicked or torn off. For a few thoughtful seconds I stared at the exposed cardboard, an area smaller than the nail on my little finger. Then, seeing that the nurses were still engaged in conversation and paying no attention at all to me, I went over to the painting, dug my fingernail into an edge of the torn area, and peeled away a small section. Then another. And another. The more paper I pulled off the print, the easier it became. But pulling the print off the cardboard wasn’t enough. In spite of all my effort, nothing of substance was revealed. Behind the bowl of lifeless fruit and dark wood lay no promised land. I felt a mounting rage.

  I tore and scratched at the picture—ripped apples, shredded bananas, fragments of grapes. Still I clawed at the cardboard. Then, in place of the damaged fruit, I saw the torn and bleeding faces of Mother and John. Furiously I tore at bloody flesh that gave way to bone.

  Only then I heard my own shrill scream.

  One of the nurses came running into the room.

  “What in the world?” she exclaimed. Then, seeing the mutilated picture, she clamped her hand over her mouth. Tears spilled from her eyes. “Why?” she pleaded. “Why did you do such a thing? And such a beautiful picture. I bought it with my very own money to try to pretty up the place. I should have known better than to even try with the likes of you in here.” Then she went and got a broom and dustpan and swept up the scraps that lay on the floor.

  With the arrival of the nurse, the faces had disappeared. Once again the picture was only a simple print of a bowl of fruit, now damaged beyond recognition.

  “I’m sorry,” I said limply.

  The nurse took the ruined picture from the wall and wordlessly walked away with it under her arm. Then a scream like none I’d ever heard before came from someplace on the ward. I rushed from the room to see what had happened.

  Down the hall two male orderlies were wrestling a screaming woman into a straitjacket. I caught my breath. I’d never seen anyone handled so violently. The woman wasn’t especially large, nor did she look physically strong, but the men were jerking her around roughly with a force I could only call an assault. Her eyes were open wide and filled with terror. “Please!” she screamed. “Oh, please!”

  I turned to the nurse at the desk and blurted out: “For God’s sake, what she needs is comfort, not attack.”

  “Mind your own business, lady. You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s time for you to brush your teeth and get ready for bed.”

  With the mention of my toothbrush, I forgot about the woman. My entire mind filled with the image of that toothbrush in its cellophane packaging.

  Where was my toothbrush? It was the third toothbrush I’d lost. My throat constricted with panic. I felt like I was losing my whole life.

  “I can’t find my toothbrush.”

  Disgustedly, the nurse pulled open a drawer, got another one, and handed it to me.

  “Now you keep up with this one, you hear?”

  I took the toothbrush. Then I looked down the corridor to find the men dragging the straitjacketed woman to a padded cell.

  “No!” I screamed to no one. “No!”

  Was this when everything began to have a purple haze around it? Was this when the orderlies came toward me? Was this when I rushed to stand behind a chair as if it was both fortress and weapon? Was the glare in my eyes so defiant, so threatening to those large, muscular men?

  Here my memory is shattered to fragments—a man’s large hands, his hairy wrists, flashes of white uniforms, nurses yelling. Screams.

  Then I was a child again, lying on my stomach on the living room rug, listening to the record player and to someone reading Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Then I myself was Alice falling down and down for miles, wondering how I would get out of such an unexpected dilemma.

  Was this when I was tied hand and foot to my ward bed, no longer Alice, but not certain who I was? My heart pumped as rapidly as when I was a little girl, always in a hurry, while Mother looked at me as she mimicked the White Rabbit’s words in a syncopated beat: “I’m late. I’m late. For a very important date.”

  Was this what I’d been hurrying toward?

  Mother must have been back home in Georgia by then. She’d gone without so much as a phone call to me, much less a visit. John told me later that just before she left Amherst, he and Mother had stood by my brother’s idling car, arguing over which one of them had driven me crazy.

  IV

  “These straps are not too tight,” the night nurse grumbled, jamming her index finger between the leather strap and the skin of my wrists and ankles. “Not too tight at all.” I struggled, still spread-eagle on the bed to which she and an attendant had strapped me after I’d torn pieces off the picture in the patient lounge.

  The restraints felt unbearable. I opened my mouth in the loudest scream of my life. I screamed for Dr. Turcotte, who would have never—I told myself—put me in this awful place, if only he knew its terrors. I screamed because I knew he knew very well its terrors and still he had put me here. I screamed because there was nothing else I could do. A nurse came with a hypodermic needle and, with the help of an aide, twisted me just enough to inject a tranquilizer into my hip.

  Soon everything felt far away. After a while I stopped struggling to free myself. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, I thought. Perhaps none of it matters. The ceiling light blazed in my eyes like a captured, shrunken sun. Maybe I’ll leave this body soon and go into another. Come morning, who knows where I’ll find myself? I looked across the aisle at the woman in the next bed. Except for me, she was the only patient awake in the whole room. Her eyes were dull with layers of rage like layers of compressed sediment in ancient stones. Her hair was stringy and greasy, and on her high, round forehead an enormous pimple rose in the middle of a mass of swollen red flesh. Looking at her, I thought: I could wake in the morning and be this woman. I might this very minute be looking into my own tormented and hardened eyes. I felt a knot in my heart. I could be this woman, I repeated to myself, and the knot loosened a little. What I felt was a seed of compassion. Tomorrow I could be this woman. How inadequate a thing mere skin is to contain us. I looked down at the woman’s hairy legs, at her toes with their thick, yellow nails. I looked at her fingernails with their c
racked and chipped scarlet polish. Tomorrow, I said to myself, I could be her, and I felt the compassion deepening. Compassion for her, compassion for me, compassion for the nurse scowling at the door.

  The woman screamed to the nurse: “Get that fucking bitch to stop staring at me, she’s driving me bonkers!” Then to me she shouted: “Stinking cunt, you give me the creeps.” And she gathered all the spit in her mouth and spat the whole wad into my face, where it clung to my skin before beginning its slow journey from the corner of my eye and down my clenched jaw.

  I looked at my feet. They had turned a bilious green. Perhaps I was dead already. How could I tell?

  V

  Morning brought an aide who set a breakfast tray beside my bed: cold eggs and limp toast. She offered me a forkful of eggs.

  “Please let me feed myself,” I said.

  “Don’t start giving me trouble again. Just eat your breakfast.” She tried to jam a forkful of eggs against my tightly closed lips. Then she slammed the fork down on the plate.

  “Please just unfasten my right hand and let me feed myself,” I said, hating the pleading tone in my voice.

  “You’re not going to feed yourself. You’re going to let me feed you, or you’re going hungry. No skin off my back, sister. You’re nothing but a troublemaker from the word go.”

  I looked hard at her face. Why hadn’t I noticed before? Shock raised gooseflesh all over my body. “I did an oil painting of you,” I said. “For nearly a year I worked on it.”

  “Nut!” she screamed as she picked up my tray and left the room.

  I felt relieved when the nurse left. I lay thinking about what it meant to be a human being, wondering what part of the human being is mortal flesh and blood and what is a part of eternity, or if flesh and blood, spirit and soul, cell and celestial configurations, aren’t all part of the boundless being of God.

  The room was full of women lying quietly on their beds. So far as I knew, no one had kicked up a disturbance like I had. They all looked so peaceful. Maybe not peaceful, but resigned, and obedient, like well-trained dogs. Drugged. Why couldn’t I get so drugged I didn’t care about anything either?

  I was pulled quickly away from my thoughts by the sudden appearance of the Pineapple Doctor standing over my bed and looking intently into my eyes.

  “Hello!” he said and smiled.

  “Hello, Pineapple Doctor!” I called him that because he wore a shirt woven from fibers of pineapple leaves. He’d told me about his shirt when I’d admired it the day before. I returned his smile.

  “How are you feeling this morning? You look better.”

  The doctor was Filipino, short and stocky with dark eyes and hair. His round face was one of those faces that would look forever young, even after he had grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He wore a chunky tiger’s-eye ring on his right hand, which caught my eye. “Nice ring,” I said.

  “I’m glad you like it.” His smile felt like a blessing.

  I stared at the complex weave of his pineapple-fiber shirt.

  “I don’t know why we can’t have the restraints removed,” the Pineapple Doctor said, calling to an aide to unfasten me. The purple haze that all night had surrounded everyone—patients and staff alike—had disappeared, and the morning light was as ordinary as on any other morning in my life.

  VI

  Paula didn’t visit me in the hospital, but she wrote me a note that she gave to our mutual friend Kay to deliver. She wrote that she didn’t know how to visit me without losing her identity. She also told Kay to ask me to tell her what my experience was like. “Tell her it’s like living in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night,” I said. “Only worse. Much worse.” I thought of the Tyrone family—father and sons drowning their pain in alcohol, the frail and ghostly mother with her pills and futile stays in sanitariums. Then I thought of how the young, sensitive, and mortally ill Edmund Tyrone wanted to be lost in the fog. I had memorized his words about feeling like he’d drowned long before, and how peaceful he felt “to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.”

  I certainly didn’t feel peaceful. I felt a torment I’d not known existed. Edmund’s words echoed in my mind. I longed to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.

  Kay visited me only once more, but Dee Waterman was a faithful and supportive friend. She was neither judgmental nor overtly afraid, though she later told me that her husband, Bob, had waited in the hospital parking lot for her during each visit. Afterward they went out to lunch while she recovered from the shock of seeing me psychotic, as well as seeing the other patients—the thin young woman who sat alone all day rocking and rocking, chin resting on her folded legs held together by her frail arms; the old woman who paced and babbled incoherently while bouncing a red rubber ball; and the woman who pleaded into her mirror for the long-dead John Kennedy to save us. “See! See!” she’d exclaim. “He’s right here in my mirror. If only he’d come out and help us. Oh, Mr. President, please!”

  Despite the upset, Dee came. She came bringing me bags of nuts and fruit. She came bringing me books. She came with her exuberance and her deep summer tan, silver earrings catching the sunlight, soft rose nail polish gleaming on her toes.

  Judy, a friend I’d met through Dr. Turcotte, came and brought me a blank journal, but after that, she left for her family vacation and I didn’t see her until I was home from the hospital.

  During the time when John and I had been meeting with Dr. Turcotte, Judy and her husband, Tom, had begun to go to him too. I met them at a dinner that the doctor arranged for a large group of his patients at the Northampton Hilton. Judy and I were seated next to each other at a long table. I was surprised when she leaned over and asked in a whisper, “Will you go with me to the bathroom?”

  “Of course,” I replied, pushing my chair from the table. As soon as we left the table, she began to cry, the story of her troubled marriage spilling out in sentences punctuated by sobs. By the time we got back to the table, I knew more about her and her family than I knew about some friends I’d had for years.

  Judy had spent weeks staying at the motel along with other patients. I’d often visited her when I went there to meet with John. Some weeks after she was able to go home, Judy had invited me to her beach house for the Fourth of July weekend.

  “You can’t leave me here alone,” Mother had protested. “I’m afraid of John.”

  Hurt and anger rose inside me. Mother and John. Mother, who forbade Daddy to drink, had jokingly commented to John, “Your new house would be perfect for you if only all the faucets ran with liquor.” John, who waited for Mother to go to sleep before he began tormenting me with his drunken forced sex and false accusations.

  “If you’re afraid of John,” I said to my mother through clenched teeth, “go to a motel for the weekend.”

  I brought Chris with me to the beach house, and Judy brought her son too. Judy’s sister, Martha, was there also, along with their mother, Mabel, who, according to Martha, roamed the house at all hours of the night, carrying on animated conversations with herself or her long-dead husband. Mabel was a warmhearted woman, and I enjoyed sitting on the porch with her talking, as we four women drank whiskey sours while the children watched the fireworks in the distance.

  “See that blue light blinking across the bay?” Judy said to me, pointing in the opposite direction of the fireworks. “It marks the place where the house stood that Eugene O’Neill lived in when he wrote Long Day’s Journey into Night. The house was destroyed in the hurricane of ’thirty-eight.”

  Mabel sighed. Light from the fireworks sparkled for a moment on her earrings, tiny carousels that made gentle tinkling sounds like miniature wind chimes. She turned to face me. “You know,” she announced with sad appreciation, “I’ve always loved Eugene O’Neill and musical comedy.”

  Fireworks burst again in the night sky above the water. The children yelled exuberantly while we chain-smoked and drank. My broad-brimmed hat was lying on a table, and Martha asked if she
could try it on. “Of course,” I replied, then felt my heart plummet when I saw how charming she looked with my hat tipped back on her head, revealing her smiling face. It had never crossed my mind to wear my broad-brimmed hats—and I had many—tipped back. I always wore them low over my forehead, shading my eyes.

  “Keep the hat, Martha. It looks much better on you than it does on me,” I said.

  “Are you certain?” Martha asked, surprised.

  “Of course I’m certain. The hat looks wonderful on you.”

  I felt miserable. I wore my hat as if to hide from the world, as if to conceal my fear and sorrow in the shadow of the brim. Suddenly I felt totally undeserving of it. Why wasn’t I refreshingly pleasant like Martha? I accepted another drink when Judy offered it.

  The evening became a whiskey-soaked blur.

  Mabel, Martha, and the children went to bed. Somehow—I’ve no idea how—Judy and I ended up lying on the living room rug with me unbuttoning the five or so buttons at the top of her blouse. She fumbled at the buttons, pushing each clumsily back into its buttonhole as I slowly became aware of another presence in the room. I looked up to see Tom, Judy’s husband, towering over us. He had never looked so tall.

  While Judy screamed furiously at Tom for having come to the beach house uninvited, I sat up, overcome with embarrassment. How could I possibly have dared to do such a thing as to unbutton those buttons?

  Judy demanded that Tom sleep on the couch in the living room. She and I slept in her bed. By the time we’d gotten undressed and crawled in, a storm had risen. All night, a hard rain beat at the windows while a wild, howling wind ripped at the roof shingles.

  By daybreak the storm had subsided, while the storm in my mind raged more furiously than ever. My thoughts were racing wildly. I remember only one thought, and that was vaporous and fleeting like the tail end of a dream caught just after waking. I was thinking about reality and how most of us are unconscious that we are living in a dream from which we are waking, if at all, so slowly we can hardly notice the changes taking place in ourselves and the world around us.