Wilma didn’t mind if she did.
Gertie asked, “How’s my old pal?”
“Lottie?” Wilma asked through a mouthful of fries.
“Of course.”
Wilma finished chewing. She looked at the handful of fries on Gertie’s plate, resisted the urge to stuff the rest of them in her mouth, and said, “She’s okay. She’s hanging in there.”
“Hanging in?”
“She’s not so popular with the other girls, on account of her beau. They put up with her because of me. I won’t let anyone say a bad word in my presence. Behind my back, they’re picking on her like pigeons on a painted bird.”
“What’s wrong with her beau?”
“He’s a shine. A damn handsome one, too. And talented. You should hear this fellow tickle the ivories. He should be a big star.”
“If I know Lottie, he already is. What’s his name?”
“Chester Ellis.”
Gertie’s eyes shot open like she’d been stabbed with a pin. “Chester Ellis? Could it be? What’s he look like?”
“I told you, he’s handsome.”
“Handsome how?”
“Tall and lean. Ropy muscles on his lanky arms. Strong chin.”
“Does he have conked hair that’s a little bit red?”
Wilma nodded, shoveled in the fries.
“Holy cow! You ain’t kidding when you say he can play the piano. He ran the house band over at Al’s Continental downtown. Brought the roof down every night.”
Wilma took this as her invitation to brag. “I’ve been playing with him a bit.”
“Playing what?” Gertie asked. “You’re not double-crossing Lottie, are you?”
“Nothing like that. They have this funny dobro ukulele in the music room. The loudest little thing you ever wanted to hear. I’ve been strumming rhythm for his melodies. We’ve arranged a couple of songs. We’re playing the bughouse ball at the end of the month.”
Gertie smiled. “What I wouldn’t give to see you and Chester Ellis playing a set.” She gazed off into the distance, as if somewhere outside the big windows of the café lay a picture screen playing a scene of Wilma and Chester doing their best Dixieland routine.
Wilma looked down at her dress, the sharp yellow rayon number Gertie had sent with that first package. It wasn’t as nice as Gertie’s get-up, but it was the nicest thing Wilma had worn since she got to the hospital. She tossed an idea around her head and let it fly toward Gertie. “You could be in that act,” she said.
“What?”
“Sure,” Wilma said. “It’ll be just like when I used to take math tests for you in school. We’ll switch out. You can be me for a while and I’ll be you.”
Gertie pulled a milkshake close and sucked the thick cream through the straw. She wiped her lips. “What are the doctors telling you, Wilma?”
Wilma shrugged. “I don’t have TB. Or syphilis, either.”
“Not the medical ones. The shrinks. What does your shrink say?”
Wilma shook her head. “I haven’t seen a shrink since I’ve been here. Not one. Not once.”
“So what kind of cure are they giving you?”
“I like to call it the Unpaid Maid cure,” Wilma said. She explained her day-to-day life at the hospital, the dorm she’d been reassigned to with thirty beds, fifteen per side. The smoke breaks in the Section. Storytime in the dorms at night with the girls. A little uke with Chester on weekends. Meals with Lottie. The beans in the cafeteria. The fellows who kept the pretty, flirty ones rolling in cheese and apples and prune sandwiches, though, for some reason, there never seemed to be enough food.
And all the cleaning. The bedpans and piss buckets. Every day, ten hours a day, scrubbing and mopping and polishing. Her life had become mostly just shifts as a maid.
As she said all this, Wilma could see Gertie’s ears turn pink, her lips tighten like they’d been cinched by a purse string. To Gertie’s credit, she kept her indignation to herself. Wilma launched into her Muriel story. Gertie was graceful enough to act amused.
When the psych tech called time, Gertie hugged Wilma and whispered in her ear, “It’s just one more month, Sis.”
Wilma felt Gertie’s warm breath on her neck and tried not to cry.
Wilma was pulled from mopping at ten the next morning. She wasn’t given time to fix her hair or put on makeup or even lip rouge. Even her gauze mask came off on the run. With strands of sweat dripping off her red curls and soaking the underarms of her state-issued dress, she came before a review panel.
She’d heard stories of these review panels from the girls in Unit 6. She’d been told they hate drunks, but Wilma brushed this off as alcoholic melodrama. When she was pushed into the review room, she took the warnings a bit more seriously. Just a bit.
The room was long and wide. A conference table took up the center of the room. Seven members of hospital staff, all men, all wearing suits, sat on one side of the table. Only one chair sat on the other side. Wilma gathered enough to know that was her chair.
She paused for a second to gaze out the three large, arched windows behind the lone chair. The same gentle sun that had caressed her on the way to the café glowed down upon a courtyard. Tall avocado trees mixed in their fair share of shade. A lone bench made of weathered wood and rusted iron nested in the middle, accompanied by a ceramic ashtray striped with light blue tiles. Clusters of flowers lined the four walls of the courtyard. This was a courtyard for the sane, a place for the staff to have a smoke and catch a little fresh air. The thousand crazies Wilma dealt with daily would’ve trampled it down to dirt in an hour.
Wilma took her seat. She patted her hair enough to know that dreams of being anything close to presentable were hopeless.
The man in the middle of the seven suits asked Wilma, “Do you know why you’re here?”
She let the first couple of smart-ass retorts run through her head: Ah, the eternal question, and, in the cutest voice possible, ’Cause my mommy fucked my daddy? She smiled at her ability to resist speaking these responses. The one that came out of her mouth wasn’t much better. She said, “Too much drinking and not enough thinking?”
No one laughed. The man in the middle asked, “Are we at an alehouse now, Miss Chesley?”
Wilma glanced at the stone faces to the right of the man and to the left. They looked like busts carved on the side of a city hall somewhere. Wilma changed her tone. “No, sir,” she said.
“I’ll ask again. Do you know why you’re here?”
“I’m an alcoholic, sir.”
“And as an alcoholic, do you feel it’s prudent to sneak into the café and drink a beer?”
“No, sir.”
“Perhaps, then, you’d like to explain why Dr. Harvey saw you doing just that at two o’clock yesterday afternoon.”
This blindsided Wilma. All she could come up with was the truth. “Sir,” she said, “at two o’clock yesterday I was cleaning the TB ward. Nurse Mendez was overseeing me. Surely, she can confirm this.”
The man in the middle leaned forward and caught the attention of the man sitting second from the right. “Dr. Harvey, did you not see this patient in the café yesterday at two o’clock, drinking a beer?”
“I did,” Dr. Harvey said.
Seven pairs of eyes glared down at Wilma. She struggled to catch her breath, to make sense of what was happening. “This is ridiculous! I did not drink a beer yesterday or any day since I’ve been here,” she said. Then, a thought struck her. Gertie! Gertie must have stayed back and had a beer after Wilma left. Dr. Harvey must’ve seen Gertie. Wilma said, “It wouldn’t have been me you saw. It would’ve been my twin sister.”
All seven men laughed at this. The man in the middle said, “Your twin sister. Of course. That explains it. You’re free to go, Miss Chesley.”
It seemed too easy, but Wilma didn’t want to push her luck. She stood to leave the review room. The man in the middle barked, “Sit your ass back down. Twin sister! Please, Miss Chesley. Do you think
we were born yesterday?”
Wilma dropped into her seat. Her proper posture abandoned her. She slumped back.
The man in the middle flipped through her file. “I see you requested a jury trial. Have you heard back?”
Wilma shook her head.
The man in the middle said, “We have. You’ve been denied. A jury trial is a statutory right, not a constitutional one. The particular statute you violated does not afford you the right to a jury trial. Do you understand?”
“What statute did I violate?” Wilma asked. Near as she could tell, the only thing she’d done wrong was piss off her father-in-law and live in a state where it’s easy to commit a woman to the loony bin. Still, she wanted to see what they saw. She said, “Can I see that?”
The man in the middle snapped the file shut.
“Let me see the denial,” Wilma said. “It should be a letter right there in the file. I can read it for myself, right?”
The man in the middle pulled the file closer, well out of reach for Wilma.
“I can also flip to the form that has my next of kin in the file. It’ll show that I have a twin sister, won’t it?”
“This file is confidential,” the man in the middle said.
Wilma could feel a fire building. Her ears burned pink. Her lips pursed to hold it in. She didn’t understand the legal differences, statutory or constitutional or whatever. It didn’t matter. The law had nothing to do with this.
The man in the middle said, “Regardless, your actions of yesterday clearly demonstrate that your cure will take longer than the judge initially suspected. Your sentence is hereby extended to one year. We’ll see you again in four months.”
The seven suits stood to leave the room. Wilma pushed away the shock of it all and started scolding them. “I’ll tell you what I understand. I understand that you know good and goddamn well that I have a twin sister, that it was Gertie in the café and not me. You’re not as dumb as you look. Not a one of you. You know good and goddamn well I don’t belong here. I understand that you fat fuckers are making money off my free labor. You found a maid you don’t have to pay and you’re keeping me. You’re not curing me. You’re not helping me. You’re helping yourselves.”
Six of the men scuttled out of the room. Only Dr. Harvey remained to hear Wilma’s tirade.
She kept screaming. “You fuckers took me against my will and are forcing me to work without paying me. You know what we call that behavior in this country, don’t you? You know this is fucking slavery, don’t you? We fought a whole war against this. Remember it, old man? Remember the Civil fucking War?”
Dr. Harvey didn’t respond. He kept staring at her, blank faced. Wilma rose from her chair and pounded the long mahogany conference table. “Is this the freedom my husband died fighting for?”
The door to the review room opened. Two burly psych technicians rushed in, straightjacket in hand. It was all too absurd. Wilma stopped screaming. She closed her eyes and raised her arms in front of her. She knew these camisole fittings hurt a lot less if she didn’t resist.
JACK, 1946
JACK WOKE UP on the bed of a motel room. His wrists were bound in leather cuffs with a chain between them; his arms were latched to the headboard above him. He tugged down. There wasn’t much room to move. His ankles were in leather cuffs and chained to the footboard. He was completely naked.
He glanced around the room, checked out the louvered closet door, the metal dresser, the nightstands on either side of the bed, the lights seemingly everywhere. He didn’t know if it was the knock to his jaw or what, but the room was so bright his head felt ready to split in half. A wave of nausea crashed over him. He took several long, slow breaths until it passed. Vomiting in a situation like this would be deadly.
Nothing happened.
Jack lay on the bed and concentrated on his breathing, the air filling his lungs, his chest rising, the blood rushing from his heart, the gradual exhale. He’d had these experiences in Germany, in the context of a bad situation, on the verge of letting the unknowns overwhelm him, learning to focus on the smallest elements of life to feel the time pass, to give him a chance when the shit storm inevitably struck.
Jack waited and breathed. Time went on without him until the door finally opened. A young woman walked in wearing a maroon satin robe and carrying a large purse. She had the high black bangs and wide-eyed makeup of a pinup girl, but the similarities ended there. She was tiny and dark. Jack couldn’t place her: Mexican or high yellow or who knows what. Maybe a refugee from the CBI theater.
She took off her robe, exposing a pair of black garters and garter belts, a black bra, and no panties. Her pubic hair was thick and dark. Jack became suddenly aware of his own lack of clothes. The woman took a riding crop from her large purse. She nodded in the direction of the closet. Jack looked at the closet, too. It was just a closet, near as he could tell. The woman brought the riding crop down on Jack’s chest and smacked him twice.
Jack leaned up. “Hey,” he said. “Knock that shit off.”
The woman sprung onto the bed above Jack, straddled his chest, and punched him in the jaw, right on the spot where the pistol butt had cracked him. He saw stars. Another wave of nausea started to peak. “Okay, okay,” he croaked. “Whip me all you want. Just stay away from the jaw.”
She stood above him, pulled the riding crop slowly through the open palm of her left hand. Jack focused on breathing, keeping the nausea down. The woman cracked the crop across the soft white skin of his upper arm, just below the bicep. First one arm, then the next. She walked around the bed, sometimes across him, and sought out sensitive spots to attack with her whip.
Jack had been beaten many times in Germany. If he let himself use the proper terms, he’d been tortured. He knew how to survive it, how to take his mind out of his body, find a seat across the room for his spirit to sit and watch what was happening from afar, as if it weren’t happening to him. Times like this, the concussions helped. They kept everything dreamlike.
The woman kept whipping Jack. Red welts rose like rows of strawberry plants across his legs, arms, and chest. It went on for a minute or dozens of them. Jack was too far removed to care. But when the woman knelt beside Jack’s legs and took him into her mouth, his spirit was yanked back into his body.
He was going to feel this whether he wanted to or not. He did his best to see the scene from a distance.
Something was going on here, obviously. Something didn’t make sense. It could’ve been a dream. Jack had to acknowledge that. His brain had taken a beating that he maybe hadn’t recovered from yet. His thoughts were floating in and out like a dream, sometimes leaving his body, sometimes rooted inside it. The situations around him were too different from ordinary life. He couldn’t figure out why this woman was doing what she was doing.
And he felt like there was a third person in the room.
Jack closed his eyes and listened. He couldn’t hear any breathing save the mechanical moans of the woman on top of him, any movement besides the creaking bedsprings. The more he focused, the more he could hear some type of whirring. It could’ve been the knock to his head and the blood pumping through his brain. It could’ve been a fan or a film camera or anything.
That’s when Jack realized: Oh shit, it is a film camera. There’s a cameraman right behind me. That’s who she’d nodded to in the closet right when things got started. That’s who she was looking at above his head.
Jack closed his eyes. Just as he’d learned to do in that POW camp, his mind abandoned his body. Let whatever would happen to it happen.
After an impossible amount of time, he opened his eyes again. Both the woman and the cameraman were gone.
He could’ve made himself believe it was all a dream if not for the welts all over his skin and the discharge stuck to his leg hairs. Jack still had the leather cuffs on his hands, but the woman had unhooked them from the bedpost. He sat on the middle of the bed and pulled his feet up. The ankle cuffs were secured by a simple belt buck
le. He freed his legs and swung around to sit on the edge of the bed. He let his hands rest on his lap. The wrists cuffs were secured by a belt buckle, too, but they were chained too closely together for him to unhook it. He thought maybe he could use the edge of a dresser to work the buckles loose. When he stood to try, a wave of nausea flooded him. He vomited on the carpet beside the bed.
Maybe this wasn’t the best time to try an escape, he decided. Even if he could get the wrist cuffs off, he didn’t have any clothes or car keys or any way to travel the sixty miles home. He lay back down on the bed and waited.
The wait took so long that he dozed a little until he finally went to sleep. He slept for several hours.
He awoke this time to someone slapping his head and stars flashing across his field of vision. Before even opening his eyes, he threw a two-armed punch at whoever was slapping him. He felt the knuckles of both hands slam into a sternum. He opened his eyes to see the thug flailing backwards across the room. He sat up on the bed, fought off the dizziness, and scrambled to his feet. The thug caught his balance first. He threw a pair of plaid, flannel pajama pants at Jack. They landed at Jack’s bare feet. “Cover yourself, tough guy,” he said. “And follow me.”
Jack picked up the pants and stepped into them. The thug opened the door. Night had fallen outside. It looked pitch black against the bright lights of Jack’s room. The thug led Jack into the black, across the patches of brown and green grass that passed for a courtyard, and into another motel room. This one had been outfitted as a screening room, with a handful of straight-backed chairs facing a blank white wall. A projector sat on a tiny kitchen table against the opposite wall, just below the window. A woman stood next to the projector. The thug nodded to her. Jack could barely make her out in the darkness. He could tell she wasn’t the woman who’d molested him. This one was taller, fuller, whiter, and older. She was also dressed to the nines.
The thug pushed Jack to a straight-backed chair. “Sit there and look forward,” he said.
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