Born Under an Assumed Name

by Sara Mansfield Taber

  The next day at school was even more slanted and blurred and feverish. One five-minute stretch was crystal clear, though. I can still feel myself doing it, see the messy piles of papers on the desk, see the packed, disordered bookshelf to the back of the desk chair, feel the hard wood of the chair under my bottom, see through the large window the gravestones I loved straggling up the mountainside. Then the chair was suddenly full of a man. A man I disliked, disliked fiercely—Dean Kent, the one who had asked me to be a flower princess when I first arrived. And now I was a Sara who acted on her impulses. The dean, very tall in a tweed jacket, with a large, looming face and strict brown eyes, settled in his chair, started to take me to task, “Now Sara, what’s all this I hear about . . .” But I didn’t let him. I was belligerence and I would stop him. My anger was deep and it quietly crept out into the short space between the man and me. Quiet and sure, my hand darted out, picked up his coffee cup, and poured the coffee onto the messy paper piles on his desk. Just as quietly then, I walked out and, even though it was the middle of the day, I went back to the dorm and up to my room, and lay down. I was satisfied, but so, so tired.

  Whispering. Anger like electrified pink fluff.

  “How about an arm?” he said. It felt comforting to have an arm lightly across my shoulder. Dr. Mead was walking me down the steep hill to his apartment near the bottom of the mountain. I didn’t know why we were going there; he was just ushering me there and I trusted him. I vaguely knew I was sick, and that something not right had happened. I felt calmer with him, away from the school. He was tall and kind. He was going to take care of me.

  The apartment was tiny, a room of only eight mats: a tiny sleeping/living room, a closet kitchen, a bathroom. Mrs. Mead came soon after. She knelt down beside me like a Japanese lady, with her feet curled under her, on the mat where I was curled on a futon under a puffy quilt. She said, “Sara, we are going to try to call your mother. Okay? Do you hear me, Sara?” I rustled under the covers. I didn’t know why they were going to call my mother, but okay, whatever they did was fine. I just wanted to sleep.

  Before this, before we’d come to the apartment, I’d had a conversation; maybe it was with several teachers. I was wild, I watched myself. I was chuckling inside, I felt evil. I was also lost in a swirling-groping-grasping for what was true. The real, the old me, was trapped behind bars. She wasn’t unhappy; she was calm there behind the bars. She was just watching this other Sara move and say things she—that Sara—thought were true, but weren’t true.

  “Did you drink some alcohol, Sara?” the teachers said. “Yes. Whiskey,” I rustled, I nodded and grinned inside. I was giddy; I would say yes to anything.

  “Did you smoke some marijuana?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Did you take any drugs?”

  “Yes,” I nodded. It must be so. It was probably so. I did it all, I said, I did all of them. I did all those prohibited and dangerous things. I must have. That must be why I was like this, why the world was like this. Maybe I was like James Taylor. Their eyes darkened with concern as my mouth put out words. My mouth put out words, but I couldn’t reach the teachers. I couldn’t give them the right answer. I didn’t know. I nodded and nodded and nodded, and then I lay back down—tired, so tired.

  The Meads had to go back to school. I didn’t know if this was the same day that I had come to their apartment, or three days later. My mother, they said, was due to arrive in a few hours. Mrs. Mead squatted down beside me again, and gently patted me. Her face was tiny, narrow like a pixie’s, with large, kind eyes. She said, “Will you be all right here alone?” I nodded. She opened the refrigerator. “There’s yogurt, and some cheese, and bread. And there’s some chicken stew. Heat that up if you want to. Anything, Sara,” she said. I told her I would be all right. I still could be polite some moments, even though most of me seemed gone.

  I slept awhile and then I woke up. I thought, Maybe if I eat it will help. I was beginning to feel some panic about all the strangeness now. I went to the refrigerator and I got out the pot of stew. I was watching myself now. Maybe this will do it, I thought. I ate some of the cold, congealed stew out of the pot. Then I got out the bread and cut some slices. I spread the stew on the bread: big lumps of chicken, the cold, sticky soup sogging through. I forced myself to eat. At first it was good, and then it was too much. But I forced myself, even after my stomach was too full. I chewed and chewed, big blobs in my cheeks, until I couldn’t anymore. Maybe this will do it. Then I lay down again, my stomach too too full, but I had done my job.

  In a blur, my mother’s figure appeared in the apartment. Dr. Mead was behind her. Why is Mom here? It’s not right. I am in school. It isn’t vacation. (Later I would hear over and over again my mother’s story of getting to Kobe. Frantic after Dr. Mead’s phone call, she dashed to the Kuching airport and got the first plane to Singapore. In Singapore there was no flight to Tokyo so she boarded a flight via Okinawa and rode in the cargo bay. In Tokyo, someone from the office met her and put her on the bullet train. She was thin and wavering there in the doorway. She was speaking but I could barely hear her. She was saying my name and bending down and hugging me. I was indifferent. It was wrong. Why was she here?

  We were in a modern hotel room now, a luxurious room like our family would never normally have. It was creamy and modern, with a big window looking out onto the broad streets of downtown Kobe. Way below I saw people walking briskly with shopping bags and satchels in their hands, a whole city down there going about its day’s business. I liked my mother now, but I still didn’t know why she was here. She took me to a department store. I liked this. I liked shopping. We passed a makeup counter. I was against makeup, but this new Sara was daring and she liked it. Even though my mother was moving ahead, I stopped and started putting on the lipstick. I picked up one tube, slathered it on, and then I picked up another. I was trying them out to see how I looked—but something was wrong. In the mirror I had lipstick on my lips but also smeared all around my lips into my cheeks. I was pleased with myself but my mother came hurrying back. She was apologizing to the clerk. I was frustrated. Annie and I had done this for silly fun before, but this time, even I knew, something was not quite as it should have been. My mother was hurrying now. We passed along the glittery underground corridors of a fluorescent-lit mall. When we came to a pastry shop, she said, “Why don’t we get some pastries for your friends?”

  I had talked to Annie on the phone and she’d said she would bring some people to see me. It was so strange that I was not at school with them, that I was staying in a hotel with my mother, but I had to go along. People told me I was sick, that I was going to see a doctor in Tokyo who would help me. I knew that the world was slanted now, that I was saying things that were not true, that I was giddy and my arms were hanging too free, but I didn’t really understand all of this.

  We bought eight pastries—beautiful ones. My mother let me pick out all the different kinds.

  Back in the room high in the air, I was alone. My mother had to go do something for a minute or two, probably call my father, which she was doing a lot. I nodded. I was fine. I was sitting on the bed and the pastries were sitting in a pristine white box, tied beautifully with ribbon. I opened the box and ate a pastry. I needed sweets right now. These were just the thing. I sat on the arm of the tan-upholstered desk chair and ate. I finished one pastry and then I started on another. By the time my mother got back there were only two left, and crumbs sprinkled all over the desk and the chair and the floor by the chair. There was a blob of whipped cream on the desk. My mother said, “Oh Sara,” but she cleaned it all up as I sat there, full but feeling sure I’d done the right thing. As she squatted down there, cleaning, tears were running down her cheeks. I was hard though. I just watched. What was this nonsense?

  Very soon there was a knock on the door and Annie came in with Matthew and Zack in tow. My mother went out, to let us be alone. I felt like a princess in her boudoir, holding court. It was as if I had on on
e of those long satiny gowns, and I was receiving intimates. But it was ephemeral. They talked to me, asked me how I was. It was awkward for some reason. Now I was a sixteen-year-old girl again. But I was still not the right Sara. Annie and Matthew were sitting on the edge of one of the beds. Zack was sitting in the desk chair. I went to him and lay my cheek against his chest. I reached my arm up around his shoulder. I held on to him, lightly hugging. I nestled my face there against this boy who I must have thought about, must have wanted to be close to, must have thought was handsome. He cocked his head a certain way; he had dark hair flopping by his eyes, a lopsided smile. But who was this Sara who would do this thing of going right up to a boy and hug him, who would sit there with her face against him, silent, embracing? It was all wrong, but the Sara I was watching was happy. She thought she was fine. She just did what she wanted. Flick, flick—I want that, I want that. Soon, the awkwardness strange and surreal, they were leaving. Annie told me she hoped I felt better. The boys said “Bye.”

  Soon after, my mother appeared again. With her, though, was my father—my father now!—and Andy behind him. What was this? But I liked having the family there. I was a small girl now, confused and tired mostly. I could tell even Andy was worried. He hugged me several times. He kept shaking his head to my parents and saying, “I don’t know.”

  Now we were in a taxi again—all four of us. “Fire and Rain” was playing again, at least in my mind—as I went toward this next future.

  Next we were on the train, the bullet train, to Tokyo. My mother was across from me—we had seats facing each other. My mother and my father were on one side, me on the other. Andy was back at school. A Japanese woman and two little children sat across the aisle from us. They were eating mikans from a mesh sack. I asked Pop for some mikan, and at the next station, he got off the train fast and bought me a bagful. I was happy now, eating tangerines. But one thing was so uncomfortable. My mother was acting weird. She was wearing sunglasses even though we were inside the train and it was not a bright day. She was crying behind the glasses, or not crying, but hiding past crying. I was angry at first. I was defiant, a girl composed of iron pipes, looking at my mother. Why is she crying? My mother is so dumb. She’s such a worrier. Then, where are they taking me? Why will no one explain, no one speak to me, or really talk to me? Why is she crying, acting like things are so bad? And then the blackness of the glasses got to me. Maybe I was dying of some disease, and that was why they were taking me to a hospital. That must be it. They must have explained why we were going, but maybe they had not, and it was that I was dying of some disease. Why won’t Mom just talk to me normally? For a moment my whole torso flashed with fear. My father was quiet. He patted her on the knee, he reached over and held my hand. I noticed a slight tremble in his hand. He was being infinitely gentle with me. I squeezed back and felt comforted. I ate mikan, looking at the Japanese countryside whipping by out the window.

  Later, when I looked back, I knew my father had been deliberately calm on the train that day, that he had been holding back his grief—keeping it on his lap in his old leather satchel, held close to his chest, his heart. I was a soft, thin girl of flesh, eating from the string bag of mikans, when I looked at my father, and he had been a thin father in love, in anguish for his daughter.

  Taxi, taxi for a long time through streets deep and thick with honking cars. Then we were at the gates of “an Air Force base,” my father said. We showed our passports and my father handed the guard the paper with his orders out of his breast pocket, and we were let in the gate.

  And suddenly we were in a kind of America. A flat grid of streets lined with small, ticky-tacky one-story houses on checkerboard green lawns. No walls or moss or crumbling stone like in Japan. The cab dropped us off at what my father called our billet, a little motel, one story and modest, like the cookie cutter houses we passed. The billet was small and simple, with regulation Air Force blankets tucked into metal beds with spic-and-span hospital corners.

  Now we were at an office in a long, rectangular, two-story building. Everyone spoke American English and wore uniforms, some with white jackets over them. I was in some kind of medical office. There was a desk and across from it, three folding chairs. We were sitting on the folding chairs. My mother was wiping her eyes, my father was sitting with his hands resting on his knees. I was squirming. Why the heck were we here? I hated army people. I was against the war. And there was nothing much wrong with me—nothing I could put my finger on, anyway.

  A doctor in a white coat came in. Tall, dark-haired, with glasses, he shook my mother and my father’s hands, talked to them. Dr. Thompkins. I turned my head away and pretended I didn’t hear what they said. I was astonished when I heard my father say, “Actually, I work for the Central Intelligence Agency.” I had never ever heard my father say this out loud to anyone except Andy and me before. The doctor hesitated for half a second and then said, “I see.”

  A psychiatrist with an active mind might have thought, one could imagine, “This daughter is a stand-in for the father. The covert agent’s hidden self steps into the open. The daughter’s fugue, and the outpouring of truth, could be his.”

  After a little while, the doctor told my parents he wanted to talk to me alone. I felt defiant. I was not going to talk to a psychiatrist. I didn’t believe in them. I put my feet up on the coffee table and aimed them at him while he talked to me. I watched myself do this while thinking, in the voiceless part of me, “Sara, that’s not right.”

  The doctor asked me strange questions about the date and he had me add up numbers, and he asked me stuff about school, questions that I didn’t remember and didn’t know the answers to. He also asked me if I knew where I was.

  “On some base.”

  “Tachikawa Air Force Base, outside Tokyo.”

  He called my parents back in. I mostly ignored them, but heard him say, “It’s a good sign that she’s angry.”

  As he led us out, another doctor came up. He was blond and young, and had a kind face. “This is Doctor Cohen,” the dark-haired doctor said. I didn’t know why he was telling me this. Why was it important to me? But it would be so important. I didn’t know, either, that I had gotten lucky: Dr. Cohen was the only U.S. military child psychiatrist in the whole Pacific.

  It became clear that I was going to stay in the hospital and my mother and my father would stay in the billet without me. They could visit. I was a little nervous, but—a man nurse had me take some pills with a glass of water—I just did what they said.

  A year later, my mother would tell me how my father had wept when they’d walked out of the hospital.

  This was how it looked. You were walking down a typical hospital hallway: scrubbed floors smelling faintly of disinfectant, wide enough for a golf cart plus two people abreast to walk down, lit by small windows. There were sets of double doors at intervals that opened into the wards—doors that swung on their hinges, like entrances to saloons. The doors to Ward 3 looked deceptively the same as the others: that blue-mixed-with-grey favored by the Air Force. The doors opened into another wide hall, with three doors into patient rooms on the right side, and two or three doors into smaller staff rooms on the left: a therapy room, a staff meeting room, and finally the nurses’ station behind glass from which they had a wide-angle view of the ward. At the nurses’ station, and the third patient room, the hallway opened out into a wide, spacious community room with chairs, set in a disarrayed circle in the foreground, and five beds, hospital-cornered in white sheets and blue-grey blankets, at the back wall. A door to the left of the back wall led into a boarding school-type dormitory, with beds lined up on either side. At the end of that room, a door was posted with a sign that said NO EXIT.

  I was in a room off the entry hall now, with another girl, Binny. She was happy I was there, and showed me the bathroom and helped me put my clothes in the drawers, while she bounced on the bed and talked about her boyfriend. She said, as though it was a matter of course, that she had just been in overnigh
t for a drug overdose. She acted like this was a normal place to be. This made me feel like maybe it was. Maybe I could get some rest.

  But no. An orderly came in and told me to put on the Air Force pajamas and robe that were lying on the bed, and then “Come out to group.” I felt so tired I could hardly move. I lay down on the bed.

  But the man came back and said, “Come on, out you come. Dr. Cohen’s orders.” We entered the big room at the end of the hall. A bunch of people in Air Force pajamas and robes like mine were slumped around on the folding chairs—pulled into an approximate circle. Everyone in the room except for Binny and a tall, worn-looking woman, was a close-shorn man. The orderly pointed me to one of the chairs. I thought, Why am I here, surrounded by GIs, the thing I hate most about America?

  Pretty soon the doctors came in and sat on other chairs in the circle for “Check in.” One of the doctors was Dr. Thompkins. Dr. Cohen was the second, and the third was a burly man with warm, brown eyes. He introduced himself, extending his hand. “Hi, I’m Dirk. I’m the psych tech.”

  Dr. Cohen began the group. “So how’s it going for you today, Chet?”

  “Pretty bad, Doc, I’ve still got the jitters.”

  “Let’s talk after group,” he said. “And you, Blair?” he said to the next man in the circle.

  “I’m working at controlling my temper—talking about my feelings instead of hitting out, like you said.”

  “Great.” They talked a little.

  “And Steve?” Dr. Thompkins said.

  “When do I get shipped out? I want out of here NOW!’

  “We’re working on it as fast as we can.”

  I felt fogged up, bewildered. What am I doing here?

  In the fog, an older man with dark brows and eyes like a basset hound’s said to Dr. Cohen, “I’m still fighting the daymares.”