“How voluptuous you feel,” he said, kneading my flesh. His fingers dug into me with such force that I imagined him bruising my bones. There was such hatred in his touch. Hatred. I felt frightened and confused. Nothing in our relationship had prepared me for this. Suddenly he was all over me, his frenzied hands everywhere, digging and digging. What was he trying to do? I tried to push his hands away, but he was determined and strong, pinning my body down with his while I fought to twist myself from under him. Almost thirty years have passed, and still I can sometimes feel the hatred in his hands. I remember him stopping to take a shower while I fell asleep, exhausted. Then I was once again startled awake as he climbed onto me and resumed the struggle.
I lost all sense of time. Many days and nights could have passed. Or only one or two. Once he went away and returned with some antipsychotic drug and I took it without protest. Then another drug. Once he returned with a little tin of candies. I opened the tin and became violently sick from the smell.
He undressed and got into the other bed.
“Come here, Margaret,” he commanded, stretching his arm toward me and sweeping it back toward himself. “Come here.”
He acted like I was an animal that he was determined to train to mute obedience.
In a chair across the room sat a large crocheted clown. I remember trading my heavy, beautifully wrought Celtic cross for it in the gift shop. What an ugly thing that clown is, I thought. Yet my eyes fastened onto it steadfastly, as if my life depended on it.
I looked at the crocheted clown and thought of Daddy. How hard he had worked to make us children laugh. I must have wanted the clown because something about it made me think of Daddy’s sense of humor. Thinking about Daddy made me feel secure. I learned what love feels like through Daddy’s touch.
“Come here,” Dr. Turcotte commanded, again stretching his arm toward me and sweeping it back toward himself. This time, I thought of Nazis marching by the thousands, then their salute: “Heil Hitler.” Dr. Turcotte’s gesture became the Nazi salute. I felt nauseated.
And lost.
Then darkness, a deep, thick darkness. And silence that felt like strangulation.
Then I was in another room in the motel. Helen was lying on the bed beside me. Chris was pacing back and forth. Talking quickly in intense metaphors, I was telling him about how he himself was the Future. Jim was there too. I got up and began to sprinkle some sort of bath powder over the room, explaining that I was performing a spiritual ritual, though I have no idea what I might have meant.
Dr. Turcotte came into the room. Seeing him, I threatened to hurl my heavy Frye boots through the picture window. “No,” he said firmly. “Don’t throw those boots.”
I turned to Jim, and he and I went down the hall and into the room that Dr. Turcotte and I had shared earlier. We sat at a table by the window and talked. The draperies were open, and sunlight flooded the room. I said nothing about my struggle with the doctor. I felt ashamed. Had I done something to provoke him? I didn’t ask Jim why Dr. Turcotte had called them all to come down. I thought the doctor was afraid of how upset he’d made me.
After my talk with Jim, I went back to my room and lay down. I lay there in silence a long time.
Days and nights become one long, thick fog. Maybe everything is my fault. The thought churned in my mind, which became a confused tangle of self-condemnation and fear. I thought of Suzanne. I thought: If I focus on her hard enough, will she feel my thoughts and come to get me? For hours I lay on the bed, eyes closed, my mind focused on Suzanne.
Of course Suzanne didn’t come.
For days I got up from the bed only to go to the bathroom. I neither ate nor bathed. I closed my eyes and thought of Suzanne. Please come get me, I pleaded silently. Please.
“You have to get up and take a bath.”
Whose voice is that? I asked myself. Dr. Turcotte’s voice with the same commanding tone he’d used when he said, “Come here, Margaret.” I don’t want to think of that. Keep your eyes closed, I told myself. Keep your eyes closed.
“Do you want to take a bath?”
It was not Dr. Turcotte’s voice this time.
I felt a hand on my thigh. The touch was firm but gentle.
Trustworthy.
Jeanie’s touch.
I opened my eyes.
“Hi, Jeanie.”
“Hi, Margaret. Someone found my phone number in your purse and called, asking me to come over. They say you’ve not been out of bed in days.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to take a bath. Would you stay with me in the bathroom?”
“Of course I would, honey.” Her thick Southern drawl felt like a warm hug.
I got my clothes together while she ran the bathwater.
She sat on the toilet, smoked a cigarette, and talked with me while I bathed.
I got out of the bathtub, dried myself, and dressed. It felt good to be clean.
I brushed my teeth.
Again there are blank spaces.
Now we are all in the restaurant. Brightness. I was aware of brightness everywhere. Out the window the sky was cloudless with a scattering of gulls. The ocean stretched its blue to the horizon. Lunch was over. The young people left Newport for Northampton.
The doctor and I remained seated. I was writing something in my notebook about the sky being the blue of one of Grandmother’s china teacups. I was still drugged, but my mind, like the day, was clearer. Dr. Turcotte took Ethel’s credit card from his wallet and handed it to the waitress. Once more he’d become the familiar man I knew. His eyes no longer frightened me like they did when he’d looked from his bed to mine, commanding that I obey him. Don’t think about that, I told myself. Don’t think about that. He was calm now, and self-assured. How could he have possibly …
Denial took root in my mind. Even before we left Newport, it sprouted and began to grow wild and rampant like the kudzu vines I saw in Georgia when I was a child. How rapidly it covered everything in its path.
III
On our way out of Newport, Dr. Turcotte drove me to Jeanie’s apartment. He rested on the living room couch while she and I sat in her kitchen and talked. She kept telling me that she didn’t trust Dr. Turcotte. She told me that she was very psychic and had led the police to a murdered woman’s body just by holding the woman’s scarf.
“Believe me,” she said, exhaling a cloud of smoke and inhaling again. “That man isn’t someone to put your trust in.” I couldn’t make myself tell her what had happened with Dr. Turcotte. My voice was rapidly growing weaker, and to talk at all was a great effort. It was easier to listen to Jeanie.
For dinner, she scrambled eggs, fried bacon, and made toast. I looked around her kitchen at all her knickknacks, but the only thing I remember is a large, pale blue crescent moon. It hung on the wall over—I remember now—a small maple table with its captain’s chairs.
That meal was one of the few that I remember when Dr. Turcotte didn’t monopolize the conversation. Perhaps he sensed Jeanie’s distrust of him. He buttered his toast quietly and ate in silence. We spent the night there. Dr. Turcotte slept on the couch. I slept with Jeanie, who gave me an enormous terry-cloth teddy bear to hold as I went to sleep.
The next morning Dr. Turcotte and I left for home. By that time, I could only speak in a hoarse, labored whisper. He was driving my car. As he spoke, his tone made me think of a puffed-up rooster in the chicken yard.
“You know, when we got to Newport, I opened the Bible and my finger landed on a verse that said, ‘Do not touch this woman,’ ” he said, pausing as if consciously giving me time to take in what he’d said. I felt the energy drain out of my body and spirit.
He glanced at me. Then he turned to face the road ahead. “But I was curious,” he said flatly.
Curious? Fragments of memories of his hands on my body, probing, digging in my flesh, flashed across my mind. Curiosity. Cruelty. His touch had been more cruel than John’s touch had ever been. In some way, John had cared. To Dr. Turcotte, I�
�d been a puzzlement. And somehow a threat.
I lay down on the car seat beside him and closed my eyes. Drugs still sedated me. I felt such relief that the doctor had returned to his normal self. It was like John coming back to his normal self after a night of drunken cruelty. It was like, when I was a very young child, Mother’s voice returning to normal after she’d said in a strange, shrill voice: “Your mother has left this body, and I—the wicked witch—am your mother now.”
The doctor drove. I slept. When I woke, I pretended to be asleep until I could no longer bear the cramped position I lay in. I sat up, relieved to see the Springfield skyline.
I’d soon be home.
Chapter Nineteen
I
1980
I CAME DOWN WITH AN EXTREME CASE OF THE FLU. FOR DAYS I LAY IN bed with a fever, cough, and stuffy nose. My whole body ached. I only got up to go to the bathroom. One afternoon someone left the TV on. I couldn’t make myself get up and walk across the room to turn it off. I lay there, miserable, listening to some soap opera I didn’t want to hear. Finally I reached for pen and paper on the bedside table and wrote a satirical poem about the soap opera. I ended by saying that I wished that I, like the woman on the show, could fall into the arms of the handsome police officer who would make everything all right. After I actually did get involved with the police I realized that in the poem I had known more than I’d recognized consciously.
But that came much later.
I lost track of time. Was it a year or more that I was depressed? Two years? I continued seeing Dr. Turcotte, never talking with him about Newport. I knew he’d deny what had happened just as he’d denied other things. Father Gray was a prominent and respected priest. Who would believe me with Father Gray on the doctor’s side? I did talk to Helen, but she didn’t believe me. She’d begun to work part-time for Dr. Turcotte, and I could see that her commitment to him was growing stronger as she was moving away from me. Chris, too, wouldn’t listen when I tried to talk to him about Newport. I guess he thought it was just more of my craziness. Or maybe he was afraid that what I claimed was true and he couldn’t face it.
II
1980
Dr. Turcotte had driven me to the Brattleboro Retreat, my friend Helen and Dr. Turcotte’s daughter June on either side of me. Chris sat in the front seat by the doctor. I no longer remember when or why I was moved from a room in the main ward, but the room I was moved to felt nightmarish to me. It was small, windowless, and cold, and the bare mattress on the cot was hard. There was nothing else in the room. I was barefooted and had only my raincoat to cover my naked body. “There was no such room,” my friend Helen later insisted. “Not in that hospital.” But in my memory, I lay on a cot in a small locked room.
I called out, asking for a blanket.
There was no answer.
I got up and walked to the door, hugging the raincoat to me. I turned the doorknob. The door was locked. My teeth were chattering.
“Help me,” I pleaded. “Please help me!”
No answer.
I called louder, beating on the door with my fist. “Help!” I screamed. “Help!”
No one came.
“Someone, please bring me a blanket! I’m freezing!”
Footsteps approached, paused, and then went on past the room and down the hall.
I called out again.
Waited.
Called out again.
Finally, I gave up and went back to bed, pressing my back against the wall for what warmth it might have held. There was only the hard smoothness of the cold plaster against my backbone. How long could I endure such cold? Even in the state hospital the temperature had been comfortable in the solitary-confinement cell. And I’d had all my clothes on then. Why was I stripped of clothes here except for this raincoat? I thought. Who would permit staff to strip and freeze a patient like this? Once more I called out.
No one came. No one came just as no one had come when I was a baby and screamed for hours, stopping only after my whole body was sweat-drenched, my nose running with mucus, my hands sticky with it, my breath coming in shallow gasps, and I had no energy left for screaming.
“Your screams still haunt me. I should never have left you alone crying so much. I only did what the books said for me to do,” my mother told me in her old age, her voice heavy with years of remorse.
But I was no longer in that crib in my grandfather’s house with its slanted floors and dark rooms. Now I was in a mental hospital in a small cold room that my friend will tell me did not exist. I don’t know how long I waited, or why. Hour after hour I lay on the cot, staring at the door. I didn’t know if it was night or day. The only sound was that of occasional footsteps in the hall. I was numb with the cold.
I don’t know what made me turn my eyes away from the blank wall across the room to stare at the door, but when I did, I saw a flicker of motion beginning in the wood’s grain, then another. As I watched, flames seemed to move through the locked door as if it had no substance. The flames hovered several feet above the floor, and inside them I saw Joan of Arc, her young face radiant with her own burning.
“I, Joan the Maid, the Lily Maid of France, am bound in chains,” I had recited in a high school monologue. Memorizing the words, I had repeated them over and over until they had moved through my mind and body, and out through my mouth as if they were mine. “Try it once more, Margaret,” my drama coach would say, suggesting a pause, correcting the prolongation of a vowel. But high school was over, and college, and graduate school. Marriage was over, too, and I was in a locked room that my friend told me never existed. I was looking into the face of Joan of Arc, and nothing felt real and everything felt more real than I could bear. My own face felt the flames’ heat, while her face was consumed by fire. And then there was no face at all, just the door, and in front of it, the flames in which my sister’s clenched fists emerged, then her face with her blue eyes, blond hair blazing. And I thought that she had been waiting all these years for me to take her in my arms again and walk with her the way I did when she was a baby with pressure on the brain, and screaming. A part of me escaped my skin and moved out of my body toward her. Molecules of me were leaving their home of flesh and blood, tendon and bone, moving through the skin and out into the air toward her. But my sister’s flesh was becoming flame even as I approached, no face now, no body, no clenched fists rising. I saw only her burned bones. I thought: How many years have they been burning? Burning. And begging for skin.
This is a memory: It was 1951 and my sister was four years old and had pneumonia. Mother stayed at the hospital with her most of the time. She sat in a straight chair beside my sister’s crib. Sometimes she lay down and rested on the adult hospital bed that stood by the crib. After school I went to the hospital to keep Mother company.
I dreaded the walk down the hall to my sister’s room. It meant I had to walk past the room of the burned boy. I didn’t know his name or how old he was. Always he was screaming. And the stench coming from his room was human and terrible. Passing his room, I tried not to imagine what it must feel like to have the skin burned off your body. I was glad I didn’t know his name. I thought it was easier for me not to know his name. I didn’t know that his scream and smell would be with me all of my life.
I wish I knew his name.
“They locked me in solitary confinement, and no one came,” I told Helen later. “I’m certain they did.” Still later, I drove north again to the hospital, that time alone. I spent a long time parked in the hospital parking lot looking up at the windows, trying to remember the floor plan of the ward, trying to imagine where the locked room might have been, wanting to know what of the experience of that room was dream, what, if anything, was waking reality.
III
Psychotic visions and dreams were intruded on by aides bringing meals on trays, or nurses with their carts full of medications. Or by frequent and welcome visits from my friends June, Amy, and Helen. Or by Chris, who had already learned to mask his own pa
in with a blazing intelligence and a searing wit.
That day June brought me a bag full of yarn in many colors. Awkwardly she handed it to me. She had witnessed my psychotic episodes before. Or “growth experiences,” as Dr. Turcotte had labeled them. I’d known June since I had begun to see her father in 1971, and she often kept Chris for me when I had to be away from home for one reason or another.
“Thank you,” I said, moved by her thoughtfulness. I didn’t tell her that I’d been waiting for a visit from Margaret Mead, who was coming from the land of the dead to visit me. All morning I’d sat waiting for her to arrive. I believed we had much to share with each other.
June sat in a straight chair across from me in the ward lounge, knees together, back rigid, hands clasped on her lap.
Helen was with her. She bent down and kissed me on the cheek. Then she put a stack of my favorite phonograph records from home on the table beside me: the musical Milk and Honey, Helen Reddy’s Long Hard Climb, Odetta at Carnegie Hall, the operas Tosca, La Bohème, and La Traviata. “Did you sleep last night?” Helen asked.
“Yes,” I answered. I didn’t tell her about the locked room. The experience was still too close to me; I couldn’t bear to put words to it yet. “Yes, I slept.” She sat down beside me.
I spilled the yarn into my lap and began to twist and knot it, a personal kind of macramé that I can only do when I’m in a state of madness, and then with a strange sense of confidence as if I’d spent whole lifetimes making things of yarn. “What beautiful colors!”
I can see that my working at the yarn was a comfort to June. She wanted the old Margaret back, the Margaret with whom she shared her poems and stories, the Margaret who was friend and inspiration to her. Knowing that she’d done something that pleased me comforted her.
The Long Journey Home Page 25