The lady cop shoots my mother a dirty look. “Ma’am? It’s against the law to dispense medicine without a prescription, which is what you’re doing, in effect, when you give someone else a pill prescribed for you.”
“Sure. That’s against the law,” my mother says. “A man can take the distributor cap out of the car he stole from his wife, steal her keys, and that’s okay. But when I offer her something that will make her feel better, will calm her down and—”
My mother is making a lot of sense. It is always a bad sign when my mother makes any sense at all. When she makes more sense than four cops and my husband, it is a bad, bad sign.
“I never—” Rio starts, but my mother interrupts him.
“Marty doesn’t even know what a distributor cap is. If he says you took it off, then you must have told him you did. And I know that she couldn’t drive us to dinner,” she tells Rio. Then she turns to me. “The Prince of Pizza here has been whining and moaning about you to Marty and David.”
“Who are Marty and David?” one of the cops asks.
“Her father and brother,” Rio answers dismissively, turning his attention to me. “Listen, honey. Dr. Benjamin said if you ran into trouble while she was gone, I should call Max Cohen and he’d take care of everything.”
“Dr. Benjamin thought I was going to run into trouble?” I ask. I can hear my own voice sounding dazed, confused.
“Teddi, you nearly fucking killed me. I’d call that more than ‘running into trouble,’ wouldn’t you?”
“But she thought?” I ask, a vague memory of some psychiatrist thinking his patient was crazy playing at the edges of my mind.
“What if the kids had been here?” he repeats.
We mustn’t disappoint the children. That’s what it was. Miracle on 34th Street, when Doris doesn’t believe in Kris, and he is so crestfallen at her doubting his sanity that he purposely fails his tests at the mental hospital. I am in the same boat as Edmund Gwenn. And it’s like Doris Walker predicted for Kris—“Clang, clang, Bellevue.”
“Mrs. Gallo?” Two officers kneel beside my chair, one on either side. Rio stands by the kitchen sink, his back to me, but I can see it shaking. “Do you want to go to Bellevue? Is that what you said?”
In the movie it takes a judicial hearing to get Santa out of Bellevue, so I shake my head. “South Winds. I’m willing to go to South Winds.”
When Rio turns to look at me, his face is streaked with tears.
“You can use my room,” my mother offers. “And my phone. But the sheets are taupe, Teddi, so you might want to bring your own.”
The cops exchange glances with Rio. “Her mother,” he says, as if that explains everything.
I suppose that maybe it does.
South Winds is nothing like The Snake Pit, I keep telling myself on the way over in the police car. I am not Olivia de Havilland. I have been here a million times before. Of course, each of those times I’ve been in the superior position of considerate guest, dutiful daughter. Now I am one of the wackos. What did my mother say the doctors call South Winds? Oh yeah. The Bates Motel. I am stuck in movie mode. Everything reminds me of some movie I’ve seen a hundred years ago.
But that is ridiculous. There weren’t movies a hundred years ago.
I’m losing it, I admit to myself, silently, so that the policemen who sit in the front seat of the car—with a grill between me and them so that if I go crazy (like if I have another paint gun hidden in my brassiere), they’ll be safe—won’t hear me.
No, I’ve lost it. Gone down the drain. I wonder why they don’t have bulletproof glass like the cabbies in New York. Can’t I shoot them through the grill? Does that mean that society thinks cabbies are worth more than cops? They probably have a stronger union.
“How you doing, Mrs. Gallo?” one of the cops asks. I didn’t recognize his Brooklyn/Italian accent before. I wonder if he hates Rio for marrying out of the faith.
“I like your new pope,” I say. “I mean, he’s no Pope John Paul II, but he seems like a nice-enough man.”
The cop who is driving takes his eyes off the road to exchange a glance with his partner. I don’t have to see it to read it perfectly. Loopy. Well, I am definitely loopy.
“He’s a nice man,” the officer agrees.
“My mother-in-law thought John Paul was the next best thing to—” I am only digging a deeper hole for myself and unfortunately I’m not so crazy I don’t realize it. So I sit here, uncomfortable, wishing the journey will end but praying we never get to South Winds.
Dr. Cohen, who is like some distant uncle to me after all these years of caring for my mother, comes down the hospital steps as soon as the cruiser comes to a stop. On his heels is my father. Each of them takes one of my arms as a policeman helps me out of the car, protecting my head like they do on the cop shows on TV.
Why am I so lost in movies and TV? Because everything feels like a dream, or a show in which I have been horribly miscast?
“Teddi,” Dr. Cohen says warmly. I have always liked his voice—low, even, understanding. But I don’t like it tonight. Tonight it sounds patronizing. “I haven’t seen you in a long time.”
“Not professionally,” I agree. He only saw me a couple of times when I was in junior high and wearing black so often that my father insisted I was clinically depressed. Dr. Cohen pronounced my ailment at the time as thirteen-itis. He’d patted me in a way that would probably be misinterpreted in these days as abuse, but which seemed rather fatherly at the time.
“You okay, honey?” my father asks when we get up to the top step and the bright overhead lights make us all look ghoulish. My father’s chin stubble is white in the harsh glare, and he looks older than the Grim Reaper. And about as jolly.
“I’m fine, Dad,” I say. “I tried to kill my husband with a paint gun, ruining both my life and my kitchen. I’ve abandoned my mother, don’t know what I’ll tell the kids, and feel like I really failed Dr. Benjamin. Other than that, I’m great.”
“Don’t worry about your mother,” he says. “I’m going to go pick her up on my way home. I’ve let her get away with this crap long enough.”
“Not wanting to stay in the same house with your husband and his mistress is not exactly crap, Dad,” I say as Dr. Cohen talks quietly with the police officers a few steps down from us.
“Yeah, well, she didn’t mind for thirty years,” my father says, shoving his hands in his pockets as if it isn’t a good eighty degrees outside despite the hour.
“She didn’t know for thirty years,” I correct him.
But I am wrong. I can see it in his eyes, in the clear-conscienced way he stares back at me, not saying the truth, but not needing to.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you,” he says. “Not now when you’re not feeling so good.”
Dr. Cohen takes the steps between us two at a time, an impressive feat for a man his age. “Let’s get you settled, shall we?” he says, as if he is the lord of the manor and I am an honored guest. “I’m glad your husband decided to call me. I had no idea that you’d decided not to see Dr. Benjamin anymore. There are several other excellent doctors I can recommend—”
I suppose that Rio has decided that if she hasn’t cured me it’s time to try someone else. Patience has never been one of his virtues. But luckily, the decision isn’t Rio’s. “I don’t want anyone else,” I tell Cohen. “I want Dr. Benjamin. Rio must have misunderstood me or something,” I add, not wanting Cohen to think that Rio would do something behind my back.
“Well, I’m perfectly capable of getting you settled in and comfortable in the meantime,” Dr. Cohen says. He is disgustingly cheerful for 4:00 A.M. “You must be exhausted after the night you’ve had. Why don’t we get you tucked in and get some breakfast set up for the morning?”
“Don’t you want to ring for a bellman?” I ask sarcastically, but Dr. Cohen doesn’t seem attuned to my sense of humor. I try again. “What’s the difference between a psychiatrist and God?”
Cohen loo
ks at me as if my brains are oozing out my ears.
“God doesn’t think he’s a psychiatrist.”
I don’t even get a smile.
“A brain surgeon and God?” I ask.
Nothing. I sigh and allow him to hold the door open for me. The brightly lit lobby of the hospital looks very different from all the times I’ve come to see my mother. Then I’ve always found the hospital quiet, serene. I know, of course, that there are emotions being held in check, but I’ve always felt that after all the visitors leave, after all the company is gone, the inmates get to take over the asylum, much the way I used to imagine that after I was asleep at night my dolls and toys got up and went off on adventures.
Sometimes I really get carried away with my own importance. If dolls can play, why would they care if I saw them? And if the people here at South Winds are lunatics, why would they care if I saw them, either?
At any rate, there are no loonies milling about the hospital lobby. There’s only a tired-looking nurse, who comes out from behind her desk to take me to my room.
“I’ve ordered a sleeping pill for you,” Dr. Cohen says. “Your first night here is bound to be a little strange and I don’t want you losing any sleep.”
“Do I have to take it?” I ask.
“What would it hurt?” my father asks.
“Dr. Cohen,” I say, letting him take my hand and massage the back of it softly, soothingly as we stand there waiting for the nurse to gather a bag of toiletries and a fresh towel for me. “Could I ask you one small favor?”
“You can ask me for the moon,” Dr. Cohen says. “I can’t promise you I’ll deliver, but I’ll do my best.”
“You are going to call Dr. Benjamin for me, right?” Even if I do get committed, I would have some say in what doctor treated me, wouldn’t I?
He nods. “Of course I will, if that’s what you want.”
“Well, wait until Monday morning, so we don’t ruin her weekend, okay? And when you speak to her, tell her that I’m really all right, that it was a misunderstanding, and that I can explain everything.”
“You’re not disappointing anyone,” Dr. Cohen says, letting go of my hand as the nurse takes my arm. It’s as if no one feels safe letting go of me unless someone else is holding on to me, as if I am free-falling and by passing me hand to hand they can somehow break my fall.
I merely nod. Did I really think I was the only liar living on Long Island? Now, that would be grounds for commitment, wouldn’t it?
CHAPTER 25
When I wake up, there is cotton in my mouth. I can barely swallow around it, can barely breathe. Gagging, I sit up in bed and put my fingers into my mouth, only to find nothing there at all.
I’d hoped for blissful oblivion—to think, when I first woke up, that I was back in my house, that all was right with the world.
Instead, before my eyes are fully open, I am well aware of where I am, of the fact that the sleeping pill has only half worked. Well, how long can a person sleep anyway? They’d put me to bed when I arrived, woke me several times for what they referred to as vitals, and now I’m not even sure what day it is. I am, however, acutely aware of where I am and why I am here.
There is no clock in my room, and for a second I feel a rising panic at not knowing the time—as if I will be adrift with no anchor in reality. I touch my wrist, feel my watch, and let go of the breath I am holding. It is barely seven o’clock.
Before I am out of bed, there is a soft knock at the door and a head pokes in.
“Oh, you’re awake!” a nurse in a Pepto Bismol-pink uniform says. “Good. Doctor’s on his way and you don’t want to be in your jammies, now do you?”
“Which doctor?” I ask, wondering if it sounds to the nurse like witch doctor, and wondering if there is any difference.
“Your doctor, of course,” the nurse says, opening my closet. “Oh, what lovely things your husband brought by yesterday. You’ll be a regular glamour puss to see the doctor!” Great. It matters what I’m wearing to greet the doctor? Frankly, my mother has always seemed ridiculously overdressed with her bouffant hairdo and her perfectly polished nails at South Winds. Aren’t crazy people supposed to wander around dazed, their hair stringy, wearing thin terry robes and scruffy slippers?
“Come on now, honey,” the nurse continues. “We need to get washed up and see about getting you a breakfast tray. We don’t want to keep doctor waiting.”
Well, I’m not crazy enough to find the nursing we any less irritating than the royal one.
“I’m not very hungry,” I say. “I can wait.”
“And have doctor yell at me for not feeding you? I don’t think so, honey lamb. I think we’ll have some nice oatmeal and maybe a cup of decaf or tea?”
“Whatever,” I agree, not willing to fight about breakfast. I can’t think of anything worth fighting over.
“Which doctor did you say?” I ask again, praying it will be Dr. Benjamin, then praying it isn’t, so that she won’t see me like this.
The nurse looks patronizingly at me, obviously thinking that I can’t follow a conversation.
“I have two. Well, I have one, but it could be one or the other. Of two.” I decide to drop it and put on the clothes that the nurse lays out for me.
“What day is it?” I ask, and am told that I arrived on Sunday very early in the morning and it is now not quite that early on Monday. I’ve lost a whole day. She compliments me on my flowers and the looks of the husband who brought them and who is now waiting outside to see me.
With a warning to Rio that “doctor” is on his way, and that “nurse” will be back in a moment with my breakfast, she leaves us alone.
He steps into my room gingerly, reminding me of when I gave birth to his children. Like then, he comes toward my bed looking shy and worried with a handful of flowers preceding him. Unlike then, this isn’t exactly cause for celebration.
“How you feeling?” he asks, his voice cracking in the quiet of the room. “You okay? I came half a dozen times yesterday, but you were always asleep. I brought flowers,” he says, gesturing toward two arrangements on my bureau.
“Thanks,” I say, figuring that it is the flowers that have given me the sinus headache that makes it hard to open my eyes all the way. “They gave me some pills and I got a good rest and now I’d like to go home.”
“I know, honey, but you can’t.” He stares at his hands.
“What do you mean I can’t?”
“Come on, Teddi. You know what I mean. You could have killed me the other night. As it is, you probably took a couple years off my life, scaring me like that, standing there pointing that gun at me, telling me you were going to kill me.”
“I never said I was going to kill you,” I say. I don’t remember that. I only remember being scared to death that someone was going to kill me. “If you’d only said it was you. If you’d only come in the front door like—”
“My boots were dirty. For that I deserve to be shot?”
“Of course you didn’t deserve to be shot. But I don’t deserve to be here. It’s not like I meant to shoot you. I thought you were a burglar.”
“A burglar? I talked to you on the phone a couple minutes before I got there,” he says. “I told you I was on the way.”
“Yes, but you were three hours away. There was no way it could be you—”
“No? Well, it was. I got bruises on my chest and paint in my hair to prove it. And you should see the goddamn kitchen.”
“I was defending myself and my home. A person has a right to do that.”
“Sure they do, under the right circumstances. But I told you to go to bed and I’d be right there.”
“No, you said—”
Rio sits down on the edge of my bed and puts his head in his hands. “You went over the edge, Teddi. Round the freakin’ bend. A different gun, a different time, and you’d have killed me, and maybe one of the kids.”
The thought is more than I can take. I want to scream, but it would only make me lo
ok as crazy as Rio thinks I am. I want to hide under the bed, lock myself in the bathroom, climb through the little window, which I think is too small for me to escape through. Of course it would be. I am, in effect, in prison, aren’t I?
“I want to go home. I only shot at you because you said you were—”
“Listen to me, Teddi. You haven’t been right for months. You can’t remember shit, you imagine things that aren’t there, and you’re a danger now. Do you understand that? That you could hurt someone? That you could hurt yourself?”
“You tricked me,” I say. “You told me that you were coming home—”
“And I came home. What the hell kind of trick is that? The same kind that puts money in your wallet?” He is off the bed now, pacing the room like a caged animal. “Maybe they can help you here. Maybe after a few weeks…”
“A few weeks!” My voice comes out a squeak. “Please take me home, Rio. I’ll concentrate harder. I’ll—”
There is a knock on the door, and Rio opens it. Dr. Benjamin, dressed in yet another of her silk sweater sets, stands in the doorway.
I slip off the bed and come to stand behind Rio in the doorway. “Dr. Benjamin? Thank God you’re here!”
Rio is clearly less happy than I am to see her. “What are you doing here? I didn’t ask for you to come.”
“I did.” I say it quietly but with finality.
“And that’s why I’m here,” she says directly to me, cutting Rio out of the conversation.
“She lost it,” Rio tells her, as if it’s all her fault and if she’d listened to him…“She went over the edge, like I told you she would. You know, you’re damn lucky it was the Tippman Pro Carbine I left in the kitchen, or I’d sue the freakin’ shirt off your back.”
The doctor looks more amused than frightened. “You want to calm down, Mr. Gallo? You aren’t doing your wife any good by carrying on like this.”
“You’re just lucky I didn’t die or I’d be suing you for all you’re worth—” Rio shouts again, but she cuts him off.
“Then I guess we’re both lucky you’re alive,” she tells Rio, mirroring his hands-on-hips stance. She shoots me a look as if to ask if I get the irony, but I don’t want to go there. My entire marriage has been ironic. At the moment, it feels as if my entire life has been ironic.
Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway? Page 19