Later I was told that I was unconscious for two days. Dr. Kefir had to cease the electroshocks. Standing next to my bed after I finally came to, he confessed that apparently I was one of the few patients he’d ever had for whom the shocks ‘didn’t take’.
“Honestly, Diana, your catatonic state must be related to some undiagnosed psychosomatic shut down syndrome. ECT is perfectly safe.”
“Does that mean you’re done electrocuting me,” I asked with difficulty, trying to wiggle higher on my pillows.
“For the time being,” he replied, irritated. “You need to stop fighting against your treatment. I’m putting you back on meds for now.”
All was not lost, however. I picked up a useful little habit from another patient on my ward – the trick to faking the swallowing of medicines. I slipped the little green and white pills under my tongue while the nurses inspected my mouth perfunctorily, then spat them out and stashed them under the mattress as soon as medical staff was out of sight. I had a plan and nobody was going to stop me from executing it when the time was right. In the meantime I looked to my dreams and the landscape outside my window for a sign, some reason that I should stick around, but nothing came.
Rosario’s face gradually disintegrated from my mind – I refused to bring her into my consciousness, unwilling to pollute our happy memories with the ugly reality of my current prison. My mind shielded her away from my grasp, buried her in recesses inaccessible by me, where she would be safe from the nightmares of the lock-down area, where they kept the girls on suicide watch. At times I had trouble conjuring up what her voice sounded like, but I fought against the impulse to try. It was better that way.
After that I ceased dreaming altogether, the nights now becoming interminable, dark voids uninterrupted by any hope of escape. Even my dreams were broken, but no break could be had from my sentence of rotting in the antiseptic stench of the psychiatric ward.
I was nearing the end of my second month of hospitalization when an opportunity presented itself. All the nurses were away from the way station for what some of the longtime patients were saying was their big monthly shift change meetings. Word was, they wouldn’t get out of there for at least two hours, during which time they would skip their rigorous hourly check of the rooms.
The other patients were watching the Carson show on the television set mounted in the front common area. Walking quickly past the way station, I could hear the faint bounce of yet another doo-wop tune drifting from the hall radio. First filling a plastic cup to the brim with tap water from the toilet sink, I snuck back to my bed and reached deep inside the mattress, scooping out a fistful of assorted pills. I wasted no time in downing them fast, two or three at a time. Close to gagging, I paused just long enough to take a long, deep breath and relax my throat.
Time was of the essence – the pills needed time to take effect. By the time they checked on me, they would think I was sleeping. At first. By the second inspection, however, they would realize that something was wrong and try to pump my stomach as I had heard others say they had done to them. It was a nasty, unpleasant experience, and to avoid it you had to know how to do things right the first time.
I must have taken fifteen-odd pills when a familiar voice penetrated my consciousness. “Follow the sun,” it sang. “Keep it in your heart, hold it in your palms, no matter what – just keep on following the sun to the love that you want.”
My head jerked back automatically.
What the hell? Rosario, here?
My heart pumping furiously, I raced out of the room in search of her. I was still coherent, only the slightest numbness starting to tingle in my legs. I ignored the sensation, fought against it as I glanced left and right along the corridors.
Where was she? Had she finally come for me?
My feet stopped in front of the small brown radio on the nurses’ way-station. Distorted by static, her rich, melodious voice spurted over the airways, coming toward me. I started crying, my fingertips reaching for the black grid of the speaker.
There she was. She had done it, recorded the hit song Leonora had always predicted would catapult her to the airwaves.
And best of all, she was alive – her voice was my confirmation that she was all right, that she hadn’t been hurt or killed that terrible night we were ripped apart. She was here, as close to me as she could be, singing those words song especially for me. It was the most beautiful song I’d ever heard.
I’ve searched for you everywhere,
and I promise we will be together forever
but only if you keep the dream,
the hope alive in your heart
that we will see each other again –
just follow your heart.
Blinding tears started streaming down my face, threatening to choke me. And suddenly I was acutely aware of the numbness seeping into my muscles, making my legs wobbly. I stumbled to the bathroom and locked the stall door. Leaning over the toilet, I stuck two fingers down my throat and forced myself to throw up all of it – the pills, last evening’s soggy dinner, the fear of looking stupid, of not speaking my mind, of feeling powerless – I retched and retched until my body was as light as a breeze of air and nothing hurt anymore.
Rosario’s song was a message of awakening, one half of a pact I intended to fulfill. The only way out of this place was through Dr. Kefir, and the only way he’d “graduate” me was if I brushed my limp hair, smeared fresh lipstick all over my mouth and put on a pretty dress instead of the stained housecoat I’d shuffled around in all day for the last two months. So that is exactly what I did, rummaging through the bag my mother had brought to the hospital until I found a tawdry little chiffon number that was particularly tight across the chest.
I knew he considered my flirting as progress, some sort of twisted Oedipal progression toward normality. In his sick mind, me falling for him was a warped Freudian indication of personal growth – first the girl child has to fall in love with the father, and then as she sexually matures, she begins to develop normal sexual relations with young men her own age.
But beyond all that mumbo-jumbo, I knew that Dr. Kefir found me attractive because of how he constantly referred to me as “a pretty girl like you.” Were it not for the fact that he was over twice my age and engaged in a compromising position as my shrink, he may actually have been tempted to teach me a lesson or two about “healthy and mature sexual development.”
The key to my freedom, therefore, lay in charming the pants off the old bugger.
I climbed that staircase toward heterosexuality rung by rung, ascending into the cobwebbed attic of normality as my eighteenth birthday approached. I figured out Dr. Kefir liked it best when I wore red or pink dresses, and a combination of the two would send him right over the top. Pleased at my request to dress up, he authorized the staff to procure me with additional outfits he judged as particularly feminine. I wore them with no shame, delighting in the feeling of fabric clinging to my skin, a far cry from the shapeless sack of the hospital gowns I had worn for so many weeks. He even arranged for the nurse to provide me a razor for shaving my legs and underarms as a way to make myself feel feminine, and it took all my might to keep that razor blade from slicing into my veins instead.
I kept Rosario’s song in my head, fiercely clinging to those lyrics for dear life. I followed them like a recipe for a sanity potion. Just pay attention, I whispered to myself, figure out what others want to see from you and make them believe that it is so. That is the key to getting what you want.
“And how are you today?” I asked Kefir sweetly every morning. His smiles grew, first wary, then increasingly genuine.
“That’s how a pleasant young lady should act,” he gushed. “Indeed I am well this morning, and yourself?”
I batted my eyes at him. “Couldn’t be better.”
“Oh, very good – that’s what I like to hear.” I could hear his mind turning, as predictable as a hamster on a wheel. Patient responds well to medication, progress is tangib
le and consistent.
Indeed.
His final glowing report indicated a great success story. Since he didn’t think it was proper for me to read my patient file, I never got to figure out just exactly what he attributed as the “great breakthrough” in my therapy. Not that I gave a rat’s ass. He could have written that little green fairies came in the night and sprinkled me with magical heterosexual dust and I wouldn’t have cared less. The point was, I had him eating from the palm of my hand by the time he recommended that I be reintegrated back into society, and not a moment too soon since my birthday was round the corner.
“Won’t it be splendid for you to celebrate it with your folks, away from here?” he asked, closing the cap over his gold Parker pen. “Lillian, your mother, has come to see you today. She’s waiting outside. I do hope you will be nice to her considering what she has gone through. I know deep down you still resent her for consenting to the ECT treatment, but now that you’ve come this far, your relationship is on the mend. And we can address all the smaller issues in our outpatient sessions.”
Shrugging, I did my best to keep a bland, indescript look on my face. He smiled at me and got up, opened the door and ushered Lillian into the room.
“Why, you are looking so much better, my dear,” she exclaimed, kissing me on both cheeks with her rouged mouth, her white-gloved hands resting lightly on my shoulders. We sat down on the side-by-side chairs across from Dr. Kefir’s desk. She touched my head. “And look at your hair, it’s so pretty.”
I had done it up in a ponytail and tied it with a red ribbon. Tiny pearl studs adorned my ears, part of a gift set she had dropped off for me the previous weekend. The matching white pearl necklace hung from my neck, a subdued reflection of her own bigger necklace, which tapered from smaller pearls on the sides to fat globes of white hanging beneath her chin.
Dr. Kefir smiled warmly at the perfect mother-daughter tableau unfolding before his eyes, a veritable Madonna and Child montage. “I was just telling Diana that she is set to go home this week, and that I wish her all the best for a very happy birthday next week. We all do.”
“Darling, I can’t wait for you to come home,” she beamed at me. “Everyone has been asking where you are, Where’s Diana?, and I’ve grown so tired having to keep telling them you’re under the weather, or off in Paris with Debbie. And then, wouldn’t you know it but Debbie herself telephoned last week?” She paused for dramatic effect. “Oh, I can’t wait for us to get to know each other better.”
I watched Lillian’s lips move as she spoke her nonsense, nodding periodically to signal that I was still paying attention. She must be insane herself, I surmised, acting as if I wasn’t the daughter she had grown to loathe.
I didn’t get a lobotomy. I was reluctant to call her Mother because there was nothing maternal about her whatsoever, so I kept my mouth shut and nodded instead. No mother would do the things she did to her own child. This coiffured person sitting next to me was actually an imbecile who believed that the electric shocks she had authorized for me had generated her dream child, the obedient daughter who was a cloned, younger version of herself.
The horror of it was that I had to keep playing along, at least for now.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Seated in the back seat of Albert’s Oldsmobile, hands pressed together on my lap, I stuck my neck out the window like a dog, allowing the light breeze to linger on my skin. It felt like I’d been gone a year, locked away in a dungeon without sunlight, unexposed to fresh air. My skin was whiter than parchment paper. I thought everybody who looked at me would recognize me as an outsider, a being out of this world, an impostor – but strangely enough, as we lunched at Il Fornello’s, everyone seated around our table barely threw a glance at us.
I hated the way Lillian looked at me, that insufferable thin smile on her lips, the condescending tone that punctuated her superficial dialogue. She liked to think that she possessed me, that she could yield her control and threaten me with re-committal if I didn’t say “Please and thank you, Mommy.” That she could force me to respect her even if she showed no sign of respect in return, even if she held me hostage, and she knew that I knew this.
As she spoke of her upcoming charity dinner at the Pasadena Ladies’ Country Club, she was really saying, You will listen and pretend that you are enjoying yourself. You will act like a proper daughter or I will have you back at the funny farm before you can say Presto.
“Yes, mommy,” I nodded as I chomped down on a piece of meatloaf.
“How charming, she hasn’t called me that in years,” Lillian gushed to Albert. “Look at the appetite on her. That hospital cafeteria food must have been so bland.”
Red-faced as always, Albert looked as though he would burst out of the tightly-buttoned pale blue shirt that held his rolls of fat prisoner. I stifled a giggle.
“Can I have desert?” I asked, licking the back of my fork clean.
“Certainly, pet,” she conceded, “But only for today. You still have to watch your figure, young lady. Although if I dare say, you look as if you’ve lost ten pounds.”
“Being locked up in a loony bin can do that to you,” I replied as I buttered a fresh roll.
She rolled her eyes heavenwards. “Don’t tell me you stopped wearing your girdle.”
“Mother,” I exclaimed, wary of Albert’s brightening eyes at the mention of girdles.
“Oh, all right darling. What will you have?’ she asked as she summoned the waiter over.
“Warm apple pie. A la mode,” I told the waiter directly.
Mother smiled. “So what do you think you’d like to do for your birthday, pet?”
“Haven’t thought about it, to be honest,” I said, biting into the roll. “I’m sure you’ve thought of something, though.”
“Oh, but I have! Wait until you hear what I’ve got planned…”
I let her ramble on while I stuffed myself until the thought of taking another bite was enough to make me nauseous. Good. I was tickled pink to have ordered the most expensive entrée on the menu, secretly thrilled to watch fat Albert swallow hard at the thought of the final bill but not be able to do anything in fear of spoiling Lillian’s happy mood. Allowing me to order whatever I wanted was part and parcel of it. It was like I was a cancer patient on remission. I could have anything I wanted.
Except freedom.
“We should get on home,” he said gruffly as Lillian finished the last of her coffee and blotted at her lips with a cloth napkin.
“Yes sweetheart, let’s take our daughter home,” she responded, a cloyingly sweet look on her face. Revulsion spread over me as she pulled out my chair and wrapped her arm across my shoulder. Common sense interfered, however, and I ignored the pressing temptation to shake off her touch.
Just a little longer, and I would be free of them forever. I couldn’t wait for night to fall so I could repeat my disappearing act.
Unfortunately, Lillian had other ideas.
As much as she pretended to trust me, Lillian made sure to have Albert bolt down the windows, rendering any escape impossible.
I caught my breath. “Are you serious?”
“Let’s not make a scene, darling. You know very well what happened.”
The room was exactly as I had left it, with the exception that the bed was made. Memories of my last night here pounced upon me, sending my pulse racing.
“Well, I trust you will be comfortable. Just call out if you need anything,” Lillian said as she left the room, closing the door firmly behind her. The sound of a key turning into a lock startled me.
Heart pounding, I went up to the door and tried turning the knob. Nothing. Furiously, I rapped my knuckles against the wood.
Steps approached, and Lillian opened it with a surprised expression. “Yes, dear?”
“What are you thinking, locking me in like this?” I demanded to know. “I’m not an animal you can just pen in.”
“It’s just a precaution, darling. Only until you’ve adjuste
d.”
“What if I need to go to the bathroom?”
“Well, just knock and I’ll come let you out, silly,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “Do you need to go now?”
“I may as well,” I snapped. “Just let me grab something to change into – I’d like to have a shower.”
“As you wish, dear. I’ll let you settle in, but do be a dear and let me know when you’re ready for bed.”
“So you can lock me up again? Sure thing,” I said sarcastically as I opened a drawer and took out a fresh nightgown and a towel.
Under scorching hot water, I scrubbed every inch of my body – rubbing, pounding at my flesh until it nearly blistered. I had to remove every trace of the antiseptic smell of hospital detergents that clung to my skin. I shampooed my hair, rinsed and then washed it all over again, scratching my scalp raw in the process. The cleansing felt good – now I could stand as the new me: a purer, stronger Diana who was unafraid to fight back.
Lillian insisted that I continue taking the Prozac, but after fooling veterans like Nurse Brown it was a breeze to convince a mere amateur that the pill had gone down the hatch. I watched it closely as it swirled down the toilet bowl into the pipes and sewers underneath the city where it could keep the rats in high spirits, and then allowed myself to be penned back into my room like an obedient sheep.
Sleep came with difficulty. I lay awake for what seemed like hours, curled up chin to knees, thinking of how close the woman of my dreams was – only a phone call, or a short taxi ride away from me, yet so impossibly untouchable.
The day after my birthday I had to accompany Lillian to various shops. Leaving home early in the morning – she had borrowed Albert’s car for the occasion – we flittered from one store to another, inspected fabrics in the tailor’s shop, and even got me fitted with a new girdle at her favorite lingerie shop in Hollywood. She directed the salesgirl to help stuff me into a size too small while she occupied herself by trying on several lace teddies. She finally settled on one made of an indigo sheer silk that gathered Grecian-style underneath the breasts and flowed over her hips.
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