“I’m sorry, Noira. Please continue.”
I gave him an appraising look before continuing. “I decided to get rid of it. I pushed it out of my loft, but it couldn’t fit in the elevator. I shoved it down the stairs instead. I assumed that watching the dresser shatter into pieces would bring me relief, but I was wrong. The impact of the dresser hitting the landing made my ears ring. The ringing started to vibrate through my body. I grabbed my ears, but it wouldn’t stop. I could feel it moving through me, and I tried to stop it.”
Dr. Stein looked up from his notes as I paused. “How did you try to stop it?”
I eyed the purple gashes on my arms again. “That’s how I got these,” I explained. “I started to scratch at my skin… I still felt the vibrations, so I dug deeper with my nails. The midget next door came running out of her loft. She started screaming when she saw me.”
“Calling people ‘midget’ isn’t polite, Noira,” Dr. Stein interrupted me.
“She’s a legal midget,” I snapped.
“Please continue.”
I glared at him.
“Noira…”
“Her husband grabbed me while she called the police,” I said. “I tried to explain to him that the ringing was what was bothering me. All I needed was for him to let me go so that I could dig beneath the surface and stop the vibrations. He didn’t seem to hear me though—he kept shouting to his wife about my bleeding…”
I stared down at my arms and ran my fingers along the welts. They felt like silk against the sand of my dry skin. It had been two weeks since the incident had occurred, and yet pain sliced through my body, as if I were still digging away at my flesh. So acute was the sensation that I still cannot remember the event without involuntarily spasms.
“Continue,” Dr. Stein prodded.
I swallowed, continuing in my deadpan voice. “The ringing seemed to be getting louder; it was escaping with the blood. I felt as if I was drowning in it. I tried to get free of the husband so that I could stop it, but he wouldn’t let me go. He didn’t understand; no one did.”
“I understand that you had an altercation with the paramedics when they arrived?” Dr. Stein asked.
“There was no altercation,” I said, sitting up in my seat. “I was simply trying to explain to them about the ringing, but no one would listen to me. I pushed them away from me, because I was trying to show them where the ringing was coming from. One of them stabbed me with something, and then everything became dark. I woke up at Beth Israel.”
“And then what?” Dr. Stein asked, looking up.
“And then I was taken here, obviously.”
We were back to the foolish questions.
“And why do you think that you were taken here, Noira?”
“I don’t know, Dr. Stein,” I said coldly. “You’re the one with the PhD, and I barely made it through my second year at university. You tell me.”
*~*
I didn’t want to go back to Golden Ridge any more than I wanted to take the medication that made me dead inside. I resigned myself to the tears, the nausea, the mini-electrocutions and the dizzy spells. I stayed in bed that day, sweating as if I was lying in the middle of the Sahara, and receiving periodic jolts to my brain. When Cienna came in to call me down to dinner, I faked a headache and pretended to be sleeping. I didn’t sleep. My mind was a motion picture of my depressing days, and every reel brought on even more tears.
Maman was waiting for me when I woke up at Beth Israel last November. As if sculpted into a gothic statue, her hands seemed frozen in their grip around her rosary, her face, molded into the folds and wrinkles of misery. She was in all black. The only sign of life were the feverish movements of her lips as she prayed.
I tried to call out to her, but I might as well have been a baby for the gurgling that came out. Maman’s eyes opened. Almost reverently, she stood and left. Dr. Rosenfeld, an elderly man with a receding hairline, appeared a few minutes later. I lay there with my eyes closed as he explained that he’d already spoken with Maman and had made the necessary arrangements to have me transferred to Golden Ridge.
“Do you understand everything that I have said, Noira?” he asked.
I opened my eyes once, looked at him, and promptly fell back asleep.
The next afternoon, Maman rode along with me in the car, dressed in brown this time and clinging to her rosary, like the Franciscan nun she was slowly becoming. We did not speak, but I laid my head in her lap, and she stroked my curls with her free hand. I longed for her to sing to me and tell me that everything would be all right.
When we finally got to Golden Ridge, it was not at all what I had expected it to be. As Joseph rounded the corner and began the driveway’s ascent, I wondered if perhaps we had taken a wrong turn. With its whitewashed shingles, shutters and pride-and-joy shrubs placed under the lower level sills, the hospital looked more like a warm, stately manor than a place that housed social deviants.
As we entered the main building, I felt as if I was stepping into the living room of a house rather than entering the lobby of a mental institution. Warm light swept the floors as the fire crackled in the hearth, and comfortable couches in soft shades of green and blue completed the cozy scene. I took a seat on an antique couch and waited for Maman to finish conversing with the nurses. On the nearest side table was a bouquet of red roses. It was a struggle to not curl up against the cushions and go to sleep.
When finally Maman turned and told me to follow her and the nurse, I half expected to be taken into the parlor, where we’d await the hostess for the evening. Instead, we were shown into an office of some sorts, with over-stuffed leather chairs and another fireplace. I was told to make myself comfortable.
“I’m just going to ask you a few questions for a pre-screening so that your doctor will be more informed for his visit with you tomorrow.” Anne-Marie, the Jamaican nurse on staff, smiled as she held the clipboard and reached for the pen in her pocket.
With her large, almost vulnerable-looking eyes, and glasses perched against her tiny nose, Anne-Marie looked like the grandmotherly figure from the fairytales of my youth. I felt like I could trust her. When she spoke to you, her eyes remained only on you; you couldn’t help but feel important. And whenever she smiled, it seemed to stretch across her face and into eternity. No matter how depressed I was, I could not fight the urge to smile back. Anne-Marie quickly became my favorite person at Golden Ridge; her words came out as songs, and her accent always made me think of my Grandpa Bill.
Maman held my hand and cried as Anne-Marie and I filled out the questionnaire. I still have scars in the palm of hand from the parts that were too much for her to handle.
“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your depression?” Anne-Marie asked.
“Eleven,” I replied.
Maman’s hands tightened around mine.
“Ten,” I corrected myself.
Anne Marie smiled. “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your desire to die?”
“Twenty.”
Anne Marie didn’t smile then. That was also the first time that Maman’s nails found their way into my flesh. By the time that the pre-screening was over and I had voluntarily checked myself into Golden Ridge, it was past ten. There were no screaming patients being chased by tired nurses, no buff men holding down an unruly character and strapping him into a straight-jacket—nothing but silence and the bafflement as to where television shows got their ideas for how a mental hospital was to look.
My room was simple but tastefully decorated. It looked like the guest bedroom of any respectable home with fresh flowers on my nightstand, a bookshelf and adjoining chair, and an Impressionist-style painting of a garden on the wall across from my dresser.
“It’s rather nice,” Maman managed.
“Here at Golden Ridge, we understand how stressful this period can be, and we try our hardest to make it as comfortable and as stress free as possible,” Anne Marie replied.
Despite the bed and breakfas
t façade, Golden Ridge felt as cold and gray as a Parisian afternoon in the fall, but there was no wonderful earthy scent of the incoming rains. As I was on suicide watch, I wasn’t allowed to close my room door for my first month at Golden Ridge, and each day, a lucky nurse got to sit on a wooden chair in the doorway and keep me company.
In the beginning, I’d sit on my bed and try to remember what it felt like to have sand poured over me as a little girl vacationing in Mikonos and to laugh as Philippe took a picture of us, his “favorite girls.” As the days merged with the nights, I gave up on remembering. I began to focus on being buried in the sand, and the warmth that the steady weight provided.
*~*
Showering was infuriating. I wasn't allowed to bathe myself during those first few weeks at Golden Ridge. They didn't trust that I'd bother to clean myself properly. Personal hygiene had stopped being something that I cared about in the end.
“What is the point?” I once tried reasoning with Anne-Marie. “I’m just going to get dirty again.”
She pulled the dressing gown over my head and stifled my explanation. “In.”
I had to sit there in the tub at least once a day and have someone scrub every inch of my skin. Afterwards, the nurse would dry me, lotion me, dress me, run the brush through my hair, and make me pretty for the pictures that no one was going to take.
“I feel like I’m a piece of meat being dressed to be devoured at the table,” I told Maman on her first visit.
“No one is going to devour you, Noira. They are just trying to help you get better.”
“But there’s nothing wrong with me!” I insisted.
Maman’s eyes closed. Her hands were once again on her rosary.
I lowered my voice. “Just because I’m not like everyone else doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with me!”
Maman sighed. “Noira, please just cooperate. They won’t let you come home to me if you don’t successfully complete the program.”
I folded my arms. “Fine.”
Eventually, I was allowed to bathe myself, but never without a chaperone. Linda was mine. She had glassy blue eyes that were as clear and cool as premium vodka and wore her silver hair in a bun that pulled on her forehead and made her veins struggle to break free from her head.
“Not much of a smiler, are you?” I asked as she watched me from her position beside my tub.
It was as if she hadn’t heard me. I tried again. “In novels, women in situations like ours usually develop a kind of strange friendship.”
Linda finally spoke. “Let me know when you’re ready to shave.”
I hated bath time. Linda would sit there with her hardened stare watching me, making sure that I didn't off myself with the razor.
I didn't see the point of shaving either. I wasn't going anywhere, so why bother? Sometimes I thought about making a go at cutting myself just to see what Linda would do. I never did, however; I knew that it would have meant more time spent in that infernal place.
*~*
My body’s need to perpetually perspire stopped a day later, but the jolts seemed to worsen. Still, I became accustomed to the sudden surge of electricity to my brain and could function under Maman and Cienna’s careful gaze without them noticing that something was wrong. I spent that Monday in bed in order to wave off the nausea. Quite miraculously, after pretending to take my pills that evening, I actually managed to fall asleep. I slept until mid-morning on Tuesday, pretended to take my medicine once again and ate every last bit of the lunch that Maman had brought up for me.
“You’re looking a lot better,” she said, leaning over to stroke my hair.
“I feel better,” I replied. I wasn’t lying. I felt like a new person after almost fifteen hours of uninterrupted sleep.
“Are you sure that you don’t want to see to Dr. Rosenberg about your migraines?”
The worry line was back between her eyes; it was making progress towards permanence on her forehead.
“I don’t need to see Dr. Rosenberg, Maman,” I replied. “I was getting the headaches because I was having trouble sleeping. Now that I’ve slept, the headaches are gone.”
“Are you sure?”
I was tempted to roll my eyes, but out of respect, I didn’t. I was sick of having her fret and fuss over me. I was twenty-one, not twelve. “I’m fine.”
She didn’t bring up the subject of my going into the city to see Dr. Rosenberg again. To appease her, I spent the afternoon in the garden with her. I read the first volume of Janet Flanner’s Paris Journal while Maman pulled weeds and cut flowers for her arrangements around the house.
We had our own Garden of Eden. Huge bougainvillea bushes sprinkled brilliant colour in our vast yard. Potent oleander, beautiful pink wax roses, radiantly white begonias and luscious yellow allamandas basked in the sun. The tree of life, a Japanese cherry tree, once stood by my window, hauntingly beautiful as its branches drooped and wept its tears of pink and white all over. Though I marvelled at it, I didn’t dare touch it.
Every now and then, Maman would look up from her pruning. It was as if she was checking on me to make sure that I was still there. I’d give her my widest, most awkward smile, at which time she would give a little wave and continue with what she was doing. As the afternoon dragged on, I began to tire of pretending to be fascinated by Maman’s need to make sure that I was still present in the production that she had orchestrated. I could feel her gaze on me, but I no longer looked up to give her a reassuring sign. My heart was racing, and my skin felt as if I had poured gasoline on it and lit it on fire. I needed to get out of there.
*~*
On the twenty-seventh day, I rose. As expected, Maman came into my room at a little past midnight. She always crept up along the side of my bed. I knew that she was listening to hear my breathing. I always made a show of taking deep breaths in and out whenever she came; she left faster that way. As soon as I heard her close her room door, I made my escape. Maman wouldn’t be back until seven a.m., which meant that I had to move quickly. I called a cab company and gave the address of the house that sat at the end of my road.
“To the Seaport,” I commanded, slamming the door shut behind me. “Fulton and Pearl.”
The driver stared at me through the rear view mirror, a slight snarl on his face.
“Just drive,” I demanded. “If you don’t like long distances, you shouldn’t have chosen such a profession.”
Wordlessly, he pulled away from the curb.
As the car began to gain speed, I stuck my head out the window and inhaled the night air… I was free. Free of Cienna and her incessant chatter. Free of Maman and her worrisome eyes and permanently bitten lips. Free from Camelea and her accusing glares.
“Which way do you want me to take?” The driver asked.
“Just drive,” I snapped. “And I know how much it costs to get there from my house, so don’t try and take me on the scenic route.”
I was tense. I felt like cat that had been curled up in a tight ball for far too long; I needed to stretch my legs and restart the blood flow. There was only one way that I knew how. Leaning against the leather seats, I closed my eyes.
Un…
Deux…
Trois…
Quatre…
Cinq…
Six…
Sept…
Huit…
Neuf…
Dix…
It was all that I could do to stop my fingers from creeping slowly up my thighs, hitching up my dress and stroking the bead of moisture was beginning to form between my thighs… It was the best of all welcome home presents.
I knew that we were nearing my destination when my heart channelled my inner Olympian and took off at the imaginary start gun.
“Keep the change,” I said, tossing money over the front seat.
As I began to walk on the cobble path towards Front St, I could feel the stares. I didn’t blame them. Without a doubt, my legs were my best feature, and that night, they looked even more ravi
shing as my six-inch heels made all eyes wander up, up, and away until they caught sight of my thighs and the barely-there strapless dress that I had chosen.
With growing anticipation, the sidewalk became my runway as I swung a sharp right onto Front Street and strutted towards Bin No. 220. I’d discovered the bar one day when Bryn had taken me to Jack’s Coffee, the café beside it. While it may not have been New York’s premier bar, I preferred it above all others for purposes such as this. The Seaport was a tourist trap if there ever was one, and with its convenient location near Wall Street, it was always crawling with the idiots who worked there and lived in the historic district. Both types were perfect for quest.
I didn’t want any complications or an overnight excursion. I just wanted to be up against a wall, sweaty skin rubbing against mine, bite marks on my neck, legs wrapped around an anonymous waist, and a hard, preferably large, cock between my thighs. It really wasn’t that complicated.
I spotted my prey as soon as I ascended the steps. He was sitting on the porch with two other yuppies, tie slackened, beer in his right hand, and three shot glasses near his left hand. Clearly, he’d had a bad day and needed to relax. I didn’t bother pretending to be coy. I looked him dead in the eye, ran my hands through my hair, winked and disappeared through the doors. By the time that I sat down before the bar, he was beside me.
“What are you having?” he asked.
“I want a shot,” I purred, flashing him my brightest smile. “It’s my first night in New York, and I want to have fun.”
“You’re on vacation?” He looked absolutely delighted.
I put on my thickest Andalucian accent and replied, “Si.”
He leaned against the bar. I said nothing as his fingers ran against my thigh. “And where are you from?”
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