by David Bergen
On a cold clear day, Lena left the house when no one was home. She walked up to Cousins and ordered a coffee and date cake and sat at a back table. Jeff, an older man she knew from working at The Nook, said hi to her and looked at her face, her breasts, and then her hands. He asked her if she was still working. Lena shook her head and put her hands under the table.
Jeff said that was too bad and went to sit at a corner table. Two girls came in who Lena knew from high school. She looked away but one of the girls saw her and came over and said, “Hey, Lena, got any cigarettes?”
Lena pushed her pack across the table and looked at the girl’s coat, the pale lines against dark wool. Megan, that was the girl’s name. An upturned piggy nose. Two cigarettes in the fat fingers of her right hand. “Thanks,” she said, and went back to her friend and sat down and they blew smoke at the ceiling and once Megan said something and looked over at Lena and then she turned back to the other girl and shrugged. Little nose pointing upwards. She had no idea what the world was about, Lena thought.
She left her uneaten cake and she put on her coat. On her way out she stopped beside the girls and handed Megan the pack of cigarettes and said, “Here, I won’t need these,” and then she stepped out onto the street. It was nearing four o’clock and rush-hour traffic was starting. She walked over to Maryland and up past Bridge Motors. The attendant, wearing a dark green parka and thick mitts, was pumping gas. Lena bent her bare head against the wind. She walked to the centre of the bridge and leaned over the balustrade and looked down. Back in the fall, crossing this bridge to Mason’s house, she had liked to stop and look down at the muddy river. Once, two rowers slid by, their boats thin and white and silent. An older man had passed her and asked, “Are you okay,” and Lena said that she was fine. She was working on a science project. Mass and speed and distance. She took a penny from her pocket, threw it over the railing, and watched it fall. The man walked away, but he turned several times to look at Lena, and the last time he looked she waved and he disappeared around the corner.
Now, in the middle of winter, she walked across the bridge and descended the embankment towards the river. She stood on the bank for a long time and looked at the snow and ice. A small sign warned people to stay off the ice. She walked back up towards the street and onto the bridge and went back to the middle and climbed up onto the wide concrete railing and she sat looking upriver, her feet dangling. A car honked behind her. Another slowed. On the bank of the river, to her left, a man was shingling the roof of a house. The traffic behind her; above her, the sky, and below, the ice of the river. She was wearing her mother’s fur coat. It was old and had a hole under the arm but it was warm. Seen from a distance she thought she might look like a large stuffed animal. A woman walking across the bridge looked at her and then continued on. Two young girls wearing the blue skirts of St. Mary’s Academy passed her and giggled. Below her, on the ice, Lena saw a man. He opened his mouth but she could not hear. She leaned forward; the coat pulled at her shoulders. The man picked up a megaphone and called out, “Shoot a bullet in his head, snip, snap, snout and my tale is out; tip, tap, tin and another can begin.” The man laughed. He was wearing a top hat and shorts and he was barefoot and danced a jig. He was beautiful. There was the sky. She looked up. Saw the dim light of an afternoon moon, the pale ceiling, the meagre sun. She looked down. The man was gone. She panicked and called out. Her voice was a low moan and she looked around to see who was crying. Another car honked. She saw a red-haired teenage boy lean out of the window of a passing car. He shouted, “Jump.” The car was silver, a silver Rabbit full of boys. The single word “jump” startled her. In the distance, on the sidewalk, there was a man in a brown knee-length coat. He was walking towards her. He had a briefcase with a strap and the strap went over his shoulder and he was holding his hand out to her. She turned away and looked down and saw her boots and the ice below. The man in the brown coat was close to her now. He was talking but she couldn’t understand him. A muffled gurgle. He reached for her and she tried to slide away, but his arms came around tight across the front of her coat, and someone grunted and called out, “Ohhh.” She was lying on her back, the man’s face above her. The pale sky beyond. She was convinced that she had fallen and was floating near the bowl of heaven.
The room she was in had a desk and a lamp and there was a clock radio and on the wall there were posters of famous paintings and she recognized one as Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. Her Art teacher at school had shown them slides of nineteenth-century works and Géricault’s painting had been talked about and admired and much had been made of the bodies of the men and one girl had said, “Do you think they were saved?” Her father had wondered, during his last visit, what merit could be found in putting that kind of painting in a place like this.
Mrs. Schellendal had said, “It’s not that bad. What do you want, unicorns?”
Lena was sitting on her bed. The three of them were drinking Sprite from plastic cups and nibbling at Liquorice Allsorts that Lena’s mother had brought. The sound of her father chewing made Lena sad. Her mother was wearing wool pants and she sat with her legs crossed, one ankle moving back and forth. She took Lena’s hand and wouldn’t let it go. Finally, Lena freed herself and went to the bathroom. She sat and listened to the rise and fall of her parents’ voices. She couldn’t hear what they were saying. She put her elbows on her knees. Her skin was dry. When her mother knocked at the bathroom door and called out for her Lena flushed and looked at herself in the mirror. She said her own name, Lena Schellendal, and then she turned and opened the door.
She liked where she was. She felt safe. Her bed was small but the sheets were clean and there was a tiny window that looked out onto a green space. She was not allowed to leave the ward without supervision. She could phone out but rarely did. The only visitors were her parents and during the visits they sat in her room. One time, they talked about Lena’s sisters. Rosemary was playing basketball, Margot had had a birthday, Emily had chipped a tooth. She missed Lena.
“Did you tell her where I was?” Lena asked.
Mrs. Schellendal waved a hand. She said, too brightly, “Have you made any friends here?”
“Hordes, Mom. We have a great time.”
“These aren’t the kind of people you want her to get close to,” Mr. Schellendal said.
“How’s banking, Dad?” Lena asked. She had a headache. Her father’s hands were huge.
“Let’s not start,” Mrs. Schellendal said. “Your father and I have been thinking about a family vacation. Maybe go to Cuba or Mexico. The girls are very excited.”
Lena stood and went to look out the window. She said, “I can’t go. Dr. Deane said it would be healthier if I didn’t get too excited.”
“It’s just a plan,” Mrs. Schellendal said. “First we want you better.” She went to Lena and hugged her. “We’re so sorry, Lena. We’re trying to figure all of this out and we need your help.” She placed a hand on her head.
Lena didn’t say anything. There was her mother’s body, her thinness, the scent that came from a silver tin and was rubbed onto her wrists and neck. Her father breathing and smothering her hands with his and then as they were leaving, stooping towards her as if to pick her up but only touching her. “Goodbye, Lena,” he said and slipped an envelope into her hand.
She opened it in her room. It contained five twenty-dollar bills and a handwritten note that said, “Lena, I want you to forgive me. I love you.” Then, in a more swooping style, he had copied out some lines:
So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news: and we’ll talk with them too
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow
by the moon.
At night Lena couldn’t sleep. She sat on her bed and fingered the card and reread it and wondered why her father hadn’t chosen a Bible verse instead. She walked down the hall to the lounge and sat with Carol, the ward worker, and Billy, a fifteen-year-old who had burned down the family house. Billy said that he wanted to smoke.
Carol said, “You can’t. You’re not allowed to have matches.”
“I could just slip out and stand in the snow. Five minutes.”
“Go to bed, Billy.”
“Lena, you got smokes?” Billy asked.
Lena shook her head.
“Sure you do. I can see you’re a smoker. Get me one, will you?”
“Shut up, Billy,” Carol said. “Watch TV and shut up.”
Billy looked at Carol. He said, “Okay. Okay.”
After a bit Carol said, “You kids hungry? I could eat some toast.”
She stood and Lena saw her big rear and the flab on her elbows. She walked to the kitchen. Billy said to Lena, “You got a boyfriend?”
“Fuck off,” Lena said.
Billy nodded. “My girlfriend’s name is April. She’s sixteen.” He looked at Lena. “Next time she comes to visit I’ll introduce you. Then you’ll believe me.”
“I believe you.”
Carol came back with three plates of toast and jam. Billy ate his fast, Lena looked at hers, and Carol chewed daintily, tiny bites for such a large mouth. Later, when Lena went back to bed, she wept until she fell asleep.
The following evening Rosemary came to visit and brought with her a bag of macaroons from Mordens. They sat on the bed and ate them and Lena said, “Weird people here, Rose. Little Billy’s a pyro who’d like to get in my panties and Alice throws knives, and the other day we went swimming, can you believe it, swimming, and I’m surrounded by freaks, only I look in the mirror and I see I’m a freak too. Mom brought me cigarettes.”
They went down to the front door in their parkas and huddled against the wind and smoked. Hector, a ward worker, went down with them.
“Emily thinks you’re at music camp,” Rosemary said. “She was pushing Mom and Dad, asking about you. They have you studying flute.”
“Good. And Margot?”
“She knows. She writes in her journal and shows me. Poems about bell jars and sex and boys and suicide by gassing. Very passionate.”
“Oh, man, Rosemary. Tell her to stop.”
“She thinks you’re perfect.”
Lena huddled against the wind. “Look at me. Bring her with you next time. I’ll talk to her.”
“Mason called and asked me if I wanted to go to this poetry reading with him. Mason read a poem about watching a girl. I figure that was you.”
“Really?” Lena was pleased. Then she asked, “He knew where I was?”
“He’d already heard. He asked lots of questions, general things like, Is she okay? and I answered him the best I could.”
Lena beat her cold hands together and exhaled into the air.
They went back upstairs and sat on the bed and finished the macaroons. Rosemary pulled a Coke from her backpack and they shared it. When she left she hugged Lena and then Lena watched her walk down the hallway of the ward and out through the green swinging doors and she was glad she didn’t have to go along.
One day, in her third week at the hospital, Mason came to visit. It was eight o’clock on a Thursday evening and he walked into the common room and said, “Hi, Lena.” In the room there was a TV and several couches and board games and a card table and a CD player and, over in the corner, folded into a large red chair, there was one other girl. She was reading Anna Karenina. Lena was sitting on a long couch. Her feet were propped on a coffee table in front of her and there were wads of Kleenex stuck between her toes and when she saw Mason she looked around and then she looked back at Mason and lifted a foot slightly and said, “Isn’t this pretty?”
Mason nodded. He said it was pretty. “Orange,” he said. He sat down across from Lena.
“Meredith did it,” Lena said. “Meredith just left on an evening pass with her mother. Too bad you couldn’t meet her. She’s very beautiful.”
Lena was wearing baggy jeans with frayed bottoms and a T-shirt that said Angel. Her lips were chapped. He said, “Your hair is really long.”
Lena pulled at it with one hand. “Yeah. Yeah. It is.” Then she said, “Were you scared to come here?”
Mason looked over at the girl who was reading Tolstoy. Her head was bent forward.
“Don’t worry about Ann,” Lena said quietly. “She doesn’t listen. And don’t be too impressed. She just pretends to read. She’s been on page 639 for the last week.” She paused and asked, “Did Rosemary tell you I was here?”
“Julianne did. I see her sometimes in the cafeteria and one time when we were alone she asked if I knew. I didn’t. Which surprised me, because you’d think I of all people should know. But then again I haven’t seen you since you called from some guy’s house. Right? But we don’t have to talk about that and anyways that’s way back there and gone. I know that. You don’t have to tell me. My father filled me in, you know. He told me you were repentant. That’s the word he used, repentant, and then he said that there was nothing new under the sun and remember that time when I was over at your house and I quoted the Bible like an idiot and used that same line? Well, it was like the strangest thing, hearing him say that line and remembering that day at your dinner table with your father all dressed up and your mother in her black dress and your grandma and sisters, the whole family. It’s amazing, when you think about it, how lucky you are to have your sisters.”
“Mason.” Lena had placed her feet on the floor and she was sitting forward and looking at him, her chest pressed against her forearms. “It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to entertain me.” She looked down at her knees and waited and then she said, “I don’t remember what happened. Only the man grabbing me from behind and this other man with a top hat calling out to me from down below on the river ice. Things like that.” She opened her hands and looked up. Mason was wearing a black sweater. He was biting at a fingernail, leaning back against the couch and pretending to be nonchalant. He was nervous, she could tell. She wished that they were alone. She touched his hand, the one resting on his thigh, and she held it.
“So, what’s up? Are you working? Still reading to that blind man?” she asked. She could feel him slipping away. He kept glancing at the girl with the open book and then over at the clock.
“Yeah, Tuesdays and Thursdays still. Mr. Ferry asked about you. I didn’t know what to say, so I said you were in the hospital.”
“Everybody knows, I guess.”
“Not everybody. Anyways, it doesn’t matter. Mr. Ferry said you were unhappy.”
Lena snorted. “How’d he get to be so smart. And he’s not unhappy?”
“I don’t know,” Mason said. “Just last week I saw a woman at his house. She was maybe thirty or thirty-five, and she was sitting on the couch and Mr. Ferry was sitting beside her and though they weren’t holding hands or anything it was like I’d walked into something private. She was a big woman, and there was this fur coat lying on the arm of the couch and Mr. Ferry didn’t introduce us. He just told me to wait in the library and I heard him say goodbye to the woman. I didn’t hear what they said, just a lot of whispering, and then she left. I don’t know who she was.”
“He was probably paying her.”
“You think so? She might have been his niece, or someone.”
Lena said that she wasn’t the person to ask. There was a glass of water beside her and she picked it up and drank from it. “Want some?” she asked, lifting the glass. Mason said no.
Lena pulled her feet up against her thighs and began to remove the wadded Kleenex from between her toes. She said that she didn’t expect anything from Mason. She was glad he’d come to visit and she didn’t know what his motives were and he didn’t have to tell her. Maybe he didn’t even know.
“I do know, though,” Mason said. “I wanted to see you. It might surprise you but that’s the truth.”
Lena put her chin on her knees. She said, “Rosemary told me you wrote a poem about watching a girl.”
“I did. She came to hear me. It was at The Blue Note and there were other kids doing things. Singing. One girl belly danced.” He paused. “I guess you’re wondering why I’m hanging around with Rosemary.”
“I’ve thought about it. No big deal. You fucked her yet?”
“Jesus, Lena.” He looked at her. Then he said, “Don’t talk like that.”
She closed her eyes as if considering this advice. She said, “Lots of material here for your brilliant poems,” she said. “Crazy people. If you want to be a goddam poet you’ve got to see things.” She touched her forehead. She was looking at his hands and she said, “I feel like I tricked you. I never meant to.”
“What do you mean? You didn’t make me do anything. I chose,” Mason said.
“See,” she said, “You don’t understand. This isn’t about what you like or what you choose. This is about me choosing. Does this sound mad? It is. But I think that if I say no to something, something really important, the most important thing in my life, that then I will save myself.” There was the sound of Mason breathing and the muted voices of patients out in the hall. She looked at his eyes.
He said, “That’s crazy, Lena. You’re not making any sense.”
“It’s over,” she said.
He didn’t answer. He stood and put on his jacket and she watched him walk out into the hall and then he disappeared. She sat and waited for him to come back but he didn’t. The girl in the corner glanced at her and Lena said, “What are you looking at?”
A while later Billy came into the common room and sat down across from her and grinned. She studied him and waited for him to speak but he said nothing. She reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out one of the twenties her father had given her. She pushed it across the table at Billy and said, “Here, buy yourself some cigarettes.”