by Lynne Hugo
Roger’s birthday was the last weekend in June, and he was coming home for a week. Of course, I’d not seen him since the week we’d both spent with Mother over Christmas, which had been much like that of the previous year: only a little strained, but with no opportunity for us to talk freely. I think neither of us dared ripple the relatively smooth waters by trying to spend time together that didn’t involve Mother. She had canceled her flute and clarinet students that week; it would have been natural for us to leave or at least talk quietly in the kitchen while sixth-graders agonized through scales and arpeggios, and it didn’t seem like the lack of opportunity for Roger and me to talk was any accident. He was supportive of my being at Columbia; there’d been two brief notes in response to longer letters from me, but I missed the intimacy we’d had before that night in Boulder.
I had no birthday present for Roger. My funds were virtually nonexistent and would be until I got another check, small as it would be, the first of the next month. What I had was the plaque I’d made, which I dearly wanted to keep for my dorm room. When I first thought of giving it to Roger, I jealously rejected the idea, but it persistently reappeared as a shining solution. One of our mother’s favorite aphorisms was “sail into the wind,” meaning “meet challenges head-on,” and it was one she used to pound Roger with repeatedly; he had tended to duck when he was small, not that he’d been doing much of that since he went away to college. Not only could I solve the gift problem, I figured to get points with Mother if I gave Roger something to remind him of her, and by the time I got home I’d decided.
After he opened a book from Mother, Roger wrapped his big hands around my present, clumsily working at the paper and fussy bow while I improvised a speech, none of it true, about how I’d made this for him thinking of what Mother always said. He loved it; I could tell the plaque touched and surprised him and for a moment I felt good about what I’d done. Mother turned very quiet, and our familiar uneasiness filled the room.
I touched her hand. “Are you okay, Mother?” I asked.
She slid her hand out from underneath mine, and avoiding my eyes, said, “Yes, of course” in a voice that was cool and remote.
As was often the case, I had no idea what I’d done, only that it was starting again, and this time she didn’t want Roger involved, which meant he was in exceptionally good grace and that I would endure this alone.
Mother got up and began clearing the remains of the birthday celebration. Yellow crumbs and a few used candles slid from one of the plates. I reached to help her and she jerked back from me, her eyes fiery until she iced them over again. When she left the room, I whispered to Roger, a risk in itself.
“Do you know what happened?”
Roger shook his head, and reached to pat my shoulder. He pointed at the plaque and mouthed, “Thank you.”
“Give me some time with her, will you?” I breathed.
He nodded. Then he shook his head the other way, a resigned motion. “Nothing’s changed, I see. Give it up, Ruthie.” I was terrified she’d hear his whisper.
“Did I do something wrong, Mother?” I asked her after Roger feigned fatigue and said he was going to shower and turn in.
“How could you do that to me?” she hissed, her eyes now wide with the wounding.
“Mother, I’m so sorry, I’m not sure what I did.” I knew it would make it worse that I didn’t know, underscoring my insensitivity, how all her teaching was wasted on the likes of me, as she’d predicted it would be.
Instantly she was furious. “You took what was special between Roger and me, you took it away from me, and you just had to show how clever you are, how you could make him something, you could give him something better than what I gave him.” Even knowing the uselessness of it, I tried to defend myself, which enraged her more. “You just go back to that hospital where you wanted to work this summer, you just go on back there. If you don’t even know how cruel that was, then you belong there.”
In a terrible isolation, I took the train back the next morning, crossing the wavy heat of the city to the bus station for the trip across the Tappan Zee Bridge to Orangeburg, where the bus stopped at the main gate of the hospital.
“Ruthie, hi, I thought you weren’t coming back until tomorrow,” one of the other interns called as I was unlocking the door of my room. “Did you have a good time?”
“Great,” I called back. “How about you?” Mother’s rule: nothing was to be discussed with outsiders. Sandy looked like she was about to approach for a chat. I slipped into my room without waiting for her answer, letting the door click into place behind me. The close, colorless walls were still unadorned, the narrow bed made up with only white sheets and a small, flat pillow. I opened the single window next to the sink, its exposed pipes stuck into the wall like an afterthought, and looked out through the bars. I still prayed sometimes, and occasionally felt God, I thought, almost a visceral presence, a prickling of the scalp, a breeze from nowhere like a cobweb brushing my face. But that day, I felt nothing.
EACH OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY intern was assigned to two different wards for most of the summer, with brief rotations through the others for experience. There was the intake building, where hope lived with all new patients for up to thirty days and, in other buildings, the intermediate wards to which patients not discharged by the thirty-first day were sorted. There, if the TV in the dayroom worked, Lucy and Desi would alternately shout and sing, and June and Wally Cleaver reran a family no one would have recognized even if the room were not dense with smoke and Thorazine. By the time a patient was considered chronic and moved to a back ward in a remote building, almost everything was gone: all the bright, bizarre symptoms brought to intake, the screams, the hands clutching sodden Kleenex, the threats, even the occasional smiles were smothered into blank faces, unroused by the mild activity associated with medication, food and sponge baths. No one expected an intern to do anything on a chronic ward, just “watch them,” while the staff congregated in the lounge and gossiped over Cokes.
I was assigned to an intermediate ward in the mornings and to a back ward for afternoons. On the intermediate ward, time or medication had softened symptoms, and we did things: we worked in sand, pouring it from one container to another like children, sculpting castles and faces by adding water. We pounded nails into wood to make bric-a-brac shelves, we embroidered handkerchiefs while patients chatted about things that seemed normal, everyday. Rachel, my supervisor, said, “Of course. They’re people, they have thoughts and feelings just like you and me, and they’re in a place that’s safe for them, now.” As she spoke, I stared at the wedding ring on her hand, then at the little stud earrings in her pierced ears and her blond hair, arranged around them as predictably and consistently as daybreak, and envied her safe life.
That night, as we picked at dissolute gray meat in the staff dining room, I talked Sandy into piercing my ears. Two weeks earlier, I’d seen a pair of stud earrings, tiny fourteen karat gold roses that looked innocent and hopeful to me, and I bought them using the remains of my first paycheck. Maybe I thought of wearing pierced earrings as a talisman of the sort of a grown woman’s life spent with a kindly man, a father or protector, a man like the prince girls were taught to dream of. I asked Sandy to do it because she had not only pierced ears, but a solitaire diamond in a gold Tiffany setting on her left hand. For all I knew these were connected, in a secret world, closed to me, in which there was refuge.
Sandy and I brought two cups of ice from the staff dining room to numb my lobes. With great care I put tiny dots on each, to mark exactly where I wanted the holes. We removed the shade from the bedside lamp and brought the single straight-backed wooden chair to the side of it. Sandy threaded a large sewing needle with white thread and wedged a wine cork behind my ear. She lifted my hand and placed it on the cork. “Okay, Ruthie, hold this in place. Does your ear feel numb? I’ll stick the needle through really fast. Once it’s through, you don’t feel it at all.” I believed her. I thought she had probably had se
x with her fiancé; she knew about these things. The thread was to stay in place only long enough to mark the tiny new hole, through which the posts of the earrings, soaking in clear alcohol, would slide painlessly.
I heard the cartilage of my ear lobe crackle. The needle was stuck in my flesh. I jerked my hand away; Sandy caught it, an edge of disguised panic in her voice as she said, “We can’t stop now, it’s stuck in halfway. What’s the matter? Can you feel it?” I dumbly nodded my head, eyes watering from the stinging pain. Sandy’s hands which had seemed steady and capable were birdlike, fluttering. Her diamond flashed once in the harsh light of the naked bulb, and then I kept my eyes closed.
LOIS WAS IN MY intermediate group. She was loud, buxom, bossy, and appeared supremely self-confident. One morning shortly after I first met the group, she asked me: “So what books did you have to read for your psychology classes?” I listed some; Lois had read them all. She asked if I’d read The Mature Mind. Without thinking, I responded. “I love that book—have you read The Mind Alive by the same authors? That one is really my favorite. They analyze the traits of people with good mental health.”
“No, I’ve not read that one. Can I borrow it?” she asked. I was unprepared.
“Sure, I’ll, uh, I’ll look for it,” I answered, studying my hands.
That weekend I went home again. I’d sensed on the phone that the cycle was rounding a turn. Not directly, not openly, but Mother had begun to forgive me. I knew by the slight lessening of the tension on the ropes with which she held me. But as I walked from the train station toward our house, the signs were not good. The blacktop, melting and bubbling, stuck to my sandals, and dull heat seemed to rise up from around my feet, enveloping my head until it throbbed with my slowing heart.
“You’re so lucky you’re skinny and flat chested,” Mother said to me, one of her devastating compliments. She pulled up her blouse and hefted a watermelon breast with one hand to show me the angry heat rash there, then lifted her cotton skirt and spread her legs revealing the same where her thighs chafed one against the other as she walked. I considered my response carefully.
“Yes,” I said. She was speaking to me again, but I knew I was being tested. The afternoon was steamy and breathless. An ancient fan wheezed in the kitchen, turning its head hopelessly, surveying the faded, cracked linoleum, the chipped Formica of our kitchen table, three mismatched chairs. I’d hoped we might go out to the lake, but Mother wanted me to clean. As I vacuumed, she sat on the couch, perspiration rolling from her face. She ran her hand through the hair on her neck, lifting it from her skin while sticking out her lower lip to direct a long sigh upward, rippling the fringe of bangs limp against her forehead. For weeks, the patients on the wards had been sluggish in the same motionless heat, which was palpable and constant as an evil possessing all our minds and blurring boundaries. A fat psychiatrist had seemed to melt in group therapy, silent until he erupted in a rage at one of the patients who wouldn’t answer him, overturning his chair as he tried to extricate his body to leave.
“Answer me!” Lois had demanded like his echo when I entered the O.T. room, after that session. “Did you bring the book?” I’d nervously felt the earring in an infected lobe, turning it to break the scab again.
“I’m sorry, Lois, I forgot it. I’ll try to remember the next time I go home.” The book wasn’t at home; it was in my room in the staff residence building.
“I’ll write you a reminder note, maybe you can keep it in your sticky little fist long enough to remember. I know it’s a big thing for a busy person with a life like yourself,” she’d said, her voice saturated with bitter sarcasm. She caught herself and added, “It’s okay. I would really like to read it, though, if you’ll loan it to me.”
“Yes, of course, I’m sorry I forgot it,” I’d answered.
“Dammit, Ruth, what the hell are you doing? You ran that thing right over the lamp cord. You’ll start a fire, is that what you want, are you trying to kill me?”
“I’m sorry, Mother, I didn’t realize…”
“You’re sorry, you’re sorry. You’re dangerous. Pay attention, you hear me?” She struggled up from the couch and approached, jerking the wand from my hand when she reached me. She drew the metal wand back and hit me hard across both shins with it. Then she began to cry. Vacuuming furiously, in ragged motions across the carpet, she sobbed, “I’m so tired of having to do everything myself. I ask someone to do one thing and she can’t do it right. You might as well go on and leave now, you’re going to anyway. I’m so tired of it, I’m so tired of you,” she finished, wheeling to face me, her face swollen and red with the heat and her tears. Right then, Mother noticed the earrings. “You cheap little tramp. You look like a whore who’d go chasing after anything in pants, a gigolo like…” Her voice clipped to silence. Instinctively I knew what she’d bitten off; she couldn’t say “your father” and remain blameless. She raised her hand toward my face: I flinched and turned aside. With a guttural sound of rage and one step of pursuit, she grasped the earring and yanked down, ripping it from my ear in one heavy motion. I gasped in the sudden furious pain. I believe she meant to throw the earring out the open window, but her aim was high and it pinged against the glass like a pebble, bouncing onto the floor and skittering almost back to our feet, where it lay with its back clasp neatly still in place. Mother put one hand against each side of her head, her face screwed into an intense agony, and dropped to her knees. She swayed there for what seemed forever, her eyes tightly closed. “Jesus. Jesus. Jesus,” she moaned, a curse, not a prayer. I stood helpless, afraid to touch my tattered ear, afraid to approach her, afraid to leave, tears all over the surface of my body, too small a world for that tide.
“OH, GOD, WHAT HAPPENED? Sandy’s hand flew up to cover her mouth. I’d double-checked that my ear was covered by my hair before I went to Sandy’s room Sunday evening to tell her I was back and catch up on the latest about Mark. It backfired. Sandy had looked at the heavy curls against my neck and said, “Aren’t you roasting with your hair down? You should keep it off your ears anyway, until they’re healed…how are they doing?” In the intimacy of girlfriends, a whole new experience for me, she’d just reached over and flipped my hair back over my shoulder to get a look at her handiwork.
I was reasonably ready for her. My first inclination had been to try to avoid Sandy until the ear healed, but I’d realized two things: it was going to take a long time, and I really didn’t want to anyway. I was attracted to Sandy’s openhearted friendship, by the way she sang “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” to Mark’s framed picture on her dresser, made room for me in the circle of her exquisitely normal life. Mother had predicted we’d be seduced by the world if we left home, and I’d persistently insisted that I’d not, at least. Even though I tried to keep it from her, even though I was ashamed, I was being drawn in. I thought I could have a life and keep my word, though. I still thought that.
“Oh, I know,” I said. “Doesn’t it look awful? I washed my hair at home and when I was brushing it out I forgot about my ears. You know, I’m not used to it. Anyway, there was a tangle, you know, and I yanked the brush through—it caught on my earring and ripped it right out.”
Sandy moaned. She leaned in close to examine it, even took my shoulders and rotated me so it would be in better light. Then she looked me in the eyes. “It looks worse than that,” she said. “Are you…”
Shamed, I tried not to avert my eyes. A flush began to rise as I cast for what to say. Then, bless her, Sandy dropped it. Maybe even that soon, she had an inkling.
MOST OF THE PATIENTS ON Building 3’s chronic ward were elderly, “burned out schizophrenics,” the nurses said, still hospitalized less because they were sick than because they had been there so long they had nowhere else to go. One had a niece who had written her a weekly letter for thirty-one years, two dollars allowance always in it, which Ella folded and refolded and tucked in the pocket of the faded print housedress she wore, struggling to tilt her body sidewa
ys in her wheelchair to expose the pocket on the side seam.
“Such a sweet girl, such a sweet girl,” she crooned, patting my arm elbow to wrist in long strokes while I listened to stories about her mother’s long tubercular dying while Ella was a girl, and the daughter she named after her mother who died, too, and said, “Oh, I just know your mother loves you so much, she’s so happy to have a sweet girl like you.” Some days I just said, “Yes,” but some days I was too hungry for someone to call me a sweet girl and said, “Well, I don’t know,” so that Ella would wrinkle her forehead and say, “Oh, no, oh, no, she has to love a sweet girl like you” again, all the while stroking my arm with her pale, wrinkled hand. Sometimes she called me by her daughter’s name, Therese.
“And what about your daddy?” she asked one day.
“I don’t know what happened to him.”
“Oh, oh, oh,” she half sighed, half moaned in sympathy. “Oh, oh. My baby’s daddy died a year after she did. By his own hand, if you know what I mean, dear. It was too much for him.” She shook her head. “Just too much. My Therese. Sometimes, I think maybe it was best she did die, no daddy, you know, and just me then, a crazy old mother, when I get mixed up and I try to remember what happened first, you know? I can’t remember what happened first.”