They made their own costumes in Art Therapy. Or Occupational Therapy. Or Industrial Therapy. One of those. They had a therapy for every day of the week. Jeffrey wanted to be a pirate, but the therapist wouldn’t let him have a hook hand. Too dangerous. Nothing dangerous allowed in the C ward. For the longest time, Jeffrey thought they were saying “sea” ward because the halls were painted aquamarine blue. Someone finally clued him in and said, “The letter C, man. C for criminal. We’re doing time.”
Jeffrey was a pirate without a hook or a sword. He wore a black cowboy hat and a white shirt that was too big for him. The therapist allowed him to wear an eye patch.
They lined up in the sunlit hallway between rows of rocking chairs. Jeffrey avoided this hallway when he took certain medication. All the bobbing chairs made him nauseous.
“Let me ask you this, let me ask you this . . .” Jeffrey was standing behind the skinny kid who always asked questions and never retained the answers. He was the type who was in constant motion. Not a rocker. The rockers sat in rocking chairs all day. When they weren’t in rocking chairs, they sat in regular chairs and rocked side to side grinding their teeth. This kid never sat. An attendant once made the mistake of ordering him to sit. The kid sat on the couch in the day room, counted to ten, then got up and started slamming his head into the wall. Today he was wearing an orange cape. Jeffrey wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be.
The doors buzzed open and they shuffled down the corridor, a motley crew of freaks.
After they passed the cafeteria, they were buzzed into the garden. When the door opened, their ward supervisor turned around to face them and reminded them of their manners.
“Remember, we’re guests here.”
Yeah, right.
Their line stayed more or less intact as they walked along a path through the manicured sloping lawns, past the little driveways named after innocuous trees: Spruce, Birch, Willow, Ash, past the sweeping vista of the Anacostia River with the Washington Monument poking up in the distant skyline saying its own private little fuck you. Fuck you, I’m the tallest. No one can be taller than me, so sayeth Thomas Jefferson and the Frenchies who designed this town.
The kid in the orange cape broke away from the group and ran streaming down a hill with an orderly chasing him. He looped back up to the group and got back in line, a huge grin on his face. He did it a couple more times, but didn’t run as far. He was getting a kick out of it.
They arrived at the Square Garden. The correct name for it was the English Garden, but everyone just called it the Square Garden. Some ladies’ horticultural do-gooder society had donated it and paid for its weekly pruning. It had rose bushes and walls made of four-foot-high green shrubs. The women’s ward had decorated it for the party, an idiotic idea. Why decorate flowers? Paper chains drooped from the hedges. They had set up card tables with paper tablecloths, a bowl of Kool-Aid punch, and paper cups. Everything in this place was made of paper.
A nurse got things going by turning on the record player. They played lousy music and everyone bopped up and down together in the middle of the square. Some people sat on benches off to the side. One girl refused to leave the Kool-Aid table. A lot of guys grabbed whatever piece of ass they could. The girls were forced to sell themselves for good socialization points. Jeffrey wondered what kind of therapy this was.
Jeffrey sat on one of the benches and looked down at his feet with one eye. I’m the most famous guy in here, he thought, and I can’t get a date to the party. Not that there’s anyone in here who I would actually date. You can’t go from being involved with Oscar-caliber actresses to dating mentally ill trash.
Jeffrey’s shoes had no shoelaces. They were a step up from the paper slippers he wore when he first arrived.
Valerie didn’t want to comb her hair, but the angels made her. Just because you’re in here is no reason to let yourself go, they said. Valerie let them help her. They would get so testy if she didn’t. Now that she lived in their red brick castle they thought they could boss her around all the time. Valerie tried to ignore them at first, but they woke her up in the middle of the night and slapped her around. She only had one good arm. It was hard to defend herself.
She made her costume with the other ladies on her hall, meticulously cutting fabric with school safety scissors. It took Valerie a few tries to get the hang of it, jamming her adult fingers into the child-size holes. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was making; she let the rounded scissor tips lead the way through the white sheet. She crawled across the white ocean and followed the dull blades to the opposite shore. When she arrived she had two white triangles and a handful of pipe cleaners.
The angels helped her slip her arms into the linen wings. They didn’t stick up the way the angels’ did. They drooped toward the floor and dragged along behind her picking up dust.
A nurse pulled out an old Christmas wreath made of golden tinsel and placed it on Valerie’s head.
“Am I one of you now?” she asked the angels.
Not yet, but you’re in training. Study hard and do good deeds. And most importantly, keep your mouth shut.
“Why?”
There are those around here who wouldn’t understand.
Valerie waited on a bench in the garden with the other ladies: an assortment of princesses, animals, and nurses.
When the music started, Valerie was snapped back into reality. This wasn’t an enchanted castle. She wasn’t an apprentice angel. She was a bad person wearing a dirty sheet. She didn’t understand how any of this was supposed to make her feel better.
A pirate was staring at her from across the square with one eye.
Valerie looked away. She would wait it out. She didn’t belong here. But it was her fault. She had failed at death. She wouldn’t try again unless she had a foolproof plan.
“I don’t dance.”
Valerie looked up. The pirate was standing beside her.
“Do you?” he asked.
Valerie shook her head.
“Good.”
The pirate sat down on the edge of her left wing anchoring her to the bench. Valerie thought about tugging it free, but decided the pirate might think it rude. She stared across the square at the girl who had started crying because she had spilt Kool-Aid on her costume. She was transfixed by the cherry-red stain running down the girl’s front. A nurse was trying to calm the girl. The image didn’t upset Valerie. She simply stared at it, blankly wondering what it was that attracted her eyes to the girl’s sticky chest.
“Did you know that the average length of stay for a staff member is longer than the average length of stay for a patient?”
Valerie shook her head.
“Do you know why?”
Valerie looked into his one blue eye.
“Government job. They get all these pension benefits and then retire early on your tax dollars.”
She wondered if it was a joke. She didn’t get it.
“My name is Jeffrey. I’m a poet. This is a famous place for poets, you know?”
She nodded.
“Are you supposed to be an angel?”
She leaned over and whispered in his ear, “I’m in training.”
As she slowly pulled away from his ear, he turned his head toward hers and his cheek accidentally brushed her lips. The sun was setting, lighting up the sky in a glorious pink and turning the Washington Monument into a silhouette.
AMERICA (THE FRONTIER)
THERE IS NO HOME-LIKE PLACE
Moving day was exactly one week after sixth-grade graduation. There was a pool party at the Promenade Swim Club, but Tammy wasn’t allowed to go as part of her punishment. She wasn’t allowed to do anything after school until the school year was over. She tried to argue the night before that technically school was over when the bell rang that day at three o’clock, but her mother and Nick weren’t buying it. They said they were sorry she would miss the party, but even the last day of school was a school day. She had to come straight home from school after th
ey played the Chariots of Fire theme song for the sixth-grade class in the auditorium.
Tammy couldn’t even do much of anything the first week of summer break because they had to pack. Her mother made the kids pack two boxes a day of stuff from their rooms and two boxes of things from the living room or kitchen. Clothes that didn’t fit anymore or toys they didn’t play with anymore were put in a pile for the Vietnam vets charity.
On moving day, they rented an orange U-Haul truck. The plan was for Nick to drive the truck to Kansas and the rest of them were going to follow in the car with Tammy’s mother driving. It took all morning to pack up the truck and the car. Tammy’s mother kept rearranging things so she could see out the rearview mirror. When they were all packed up, Nick locked the door to the house. He dropped the keys into an envelope and licked it shut. Then he went up to the next-door neighbor’s house and knocked on the door. He gave the guy the envelope and shook his hand.
When he walked back out to the curb he said, “We’re going to make one stop downtown, and then we’ll go.”
Tammy’s mother said it was out of the way and she wasn’t sure if there was time, but Nick was already in the truck and didn’t hear her.
They drove to the Mall where all the monuments and museums were. Nick pulled over and walked back to the station wagon. “I don’t think we can park here,” he said to Tammy’s mother. “So, can you watch the truck?”
“Where are you going?” Steffi asked.
Nick had already started walking across the grass. “Come on,” he said without looking back.
Tammy, Steffi, and Hugh got out of the car. Don’t take too long, their mother said, we don’t want to get a ticket.
They walked along a fence looking for a spot to see in. They didn’t see where Nick had gone. They stopped next to a big gate where a bulldozer was parked.
“What’s this place?” asked Hugh.
“The vets memorial,” Tammy said.
It didn’t look like much. It was all muddy and still under construction. There was a cement wall with sticks poking out of it in the shape of a wide V and a sidewalk that wasn’t finished. The sidewalk ended on the far side in a pile of rubble. It was a big mess. Tammy didn’t know what it was supposed to look like when it was done.
“What’s a vet?” Hugh asked.
“Someone who was in Vietnam,” Tammy said. “They’re building this place because a lot of people died.”
“Do we know anyone who died?”
Tammy looked at Steffi, but she had spotted Nick and was running over to him.
Nick didn’t say anything when Tammy and Hugh caught up with him. He just looked at the construction site and the bulldozers and the men in hard hats smoothing out cement.
“Guess I won’t be able to see it,” Nick finally said. Then he started walking back to the curb and said, “Let’s go.”
They climbed back into the station wagon and Tammy’s mother started the car. Steffi waved her hand and said, “Good-bye, Washington, DC!” Hugh chimed in too. As they curled around the Lincoln Memorial, Tammy pulled her Polaroid camera from her backpack and aimed it out the car window. She had a new pack of film. She took nine photos and laid them on her lap to develop. She knew the pictures would come out blurry because they were in a moving car, but she knew she couldn’t count on her family to remember anything.
For the last picture, she turned her camera around and aimed it at herself.
They crossed the Potomac River and headed west.
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