by Wally Lamb
Dear Grandma,
Tell my so-called father I don’t want him at my funeral. I don’t want him anywhere near me . . .
I didn’t want to write. I wanted to talk to someone, some person I hadn’t failed—someone who would listen. I could walk down to that door, knock, wake up the scientist. “Excuse me for bothering you. You don’t know me, but . . .”
Or I could just go ahead and do it. Stop those nightmares. End it.
I picked up the phone.
The Cape Cod information operator talked to the operator in California, who said there were three of them: Brian Sweet, M. J. Sweet, and Irving Sweet.
“Irving,” I said. “Get me that one.”
It rang and rang. Her voice sounded far away. “Wait a second,” she said. “Tell me again?”
“Bernice’s daughter,” I said. “Bernice, your friend who died. Her daughter.”
I reminded her about her telephone call after the accident, when she’d had Grandma put me on the line so she could tell me how much she wanted to meet me, how the bottom had fallen out of her life when she heard the news. She’d sent flowers to the funeral home—white gardenias—the biggest, most beautiful spray.
“I’ve saved every one of her letters,” she told me now. “We wrote on and off all those years. The night I heard about it, I took them out and read every single one. I know one thing—she loved you very much.”
She waited for my crying to stop, she told me to take my time. She asked me how I’d been, what I was doing. I was in college now, wasn’t I?
I told her it hadn’t worked out.
Was I calling from Rhode Island? From my grandmother’s?
I said I was calling from Cape Cod.
“Cape Cod?” she said. “It’s cold up there this time of year, isn’t it? What in the world are you doing up there in November?”
“Oh, nothing much,” I said. I watched myself in the mirror as I spoke, twisting the ends of my hair with my finger, watching the way my weight sunk the mattress. The crying had slitted my eyes. “Just trying to think,” I told her.
“Think about what?”
“Oh, lots of things. . . . Death, for one. I saw this whale die today. I’m staying at this place where whales keep dying.”
There was a pause on the other end.
“Tell me some more about my mother,” I said.
She talked about Ma and Daddy’s wedding, how my parents had been so crazy about each other, how Ma had prayed to get pregnant. She talked on and on.
“Her letters the last couple of years, though—honestly, they just broke my heart. First the divorce, then her breakdown. It seemed like every time she’d get back on her feet . . . she just seemed so vulnerable.”
If I did it, I thought, I’d be free—of myself, of all those Jack Speight nightmares.
“I used to invite her to come out here all the time. For a little vacation. Have a few laughs, you know?—a little R&R.”
“The worms come in, the worms go out, the worms play pinochle . . .” I sang it more to myself than to her. Her conversation was beginning to bore me.
“Dolores, honey? . . . Is everything okay with you? You’re all right, aren’t you?”
“I have to go,” I said. “There’s this pinochle game.” I laughed out loud at my joke.
“Honey, does your grandmother know where you are?”
I hung up on her. Rich bitch.
* * *
I walked and walked, down the unlit highway, then down the twisting narrow road, dodging headlights, waiting in the brush when I heard cars. The road went on and on, but I didn’t mind. I felt energized, ready for anything. Fat girl on a skinny road, I thought. It struck me as hilarious. I knew this was the way. I followed the sound of the ocean.
There were two cars in the parking lot. I climbed the steep dune, stopped at the top. The ocean looked silvery in the moonlight.
The wet air had a stink to it: already she had begun her sweet rot.
Two men stood below, holding hands and watching her. Their dog kept barking at her size. Down the beach, three people sat huddled in front of a driftwood fire, each of them facing her. I sat above, on the crest of the dune, apart and waiting.
Two teenage couples arrived, slamming car doors, laughing and swigging beer as they ran down the dune toward her. Their loud fun sent the other spectators away. The boys climbed up and walked her body, out to the face and back. They bent and sliced their girlfriends souvenirs.
People came and went like that, like Ma’s wake. I outlasted all of them—a chaperone for her corpse. I stayed with her all night.
At dawn I stood and looked down the beach as far as I could see. One side, the other, the parking lot behind me. The two of us were all alone.
I walked down the dune toward her.
The tide was further in than it had been the afternoon before; though she hadn’t moved, she was deeper into the water. At the ocean’s edge, I pulled off my sweatshirt, pulled down my jeans.
The water was no colder than the wind, but my nipples hardened against the sensation at my feet. My fat turned gooseflesh blue. I waded out to my knees, my legs aching, then numbing to it. I went further in, to my waist. The end of my hair was wet. I lifted up and under. Swam.
From the beach, she had looked black, but now, swimming beside her, I saw that her skin was mottled, blotched with darker and lighter grays. I reached out to touch her. She felt firm and muscular against my palm, my shaking blue fingers. Against my lips. The kiss felt soft and coarse. Salty.
I swam underwater to the front of her and resurfaced, bobbing and treading water. I was weightless.
Her massive head and snout were covered with knobs—ugly, patternless bumps littered with barbed chin stubble, sharp to the touch. Her scarred mouth gaped open, as if she’d died trying to drink her way back to safe, deep water. Her jaw, half above the surface, half below, was lined with thick broom bristle. Her eyes were underwater.
I held my breath and went under, my own eyes open.
The eye stared back at me without seeing. The iris was milky and blank, blurred by seawater. A cataract eye, an eye full of death. I reached out and touched the skin just below it, then touched the hard globe itself.
This was how I could die. This was where.
I fought against myself, my head butting downward toward bottom, arms pushing and flailing to stay under. I drank seawater in thick gulps and swallows, glimpsing the death eye in the midst of my battle.
Then I fought it, angrily. Burst upward, crashing the surface. I coughed and spit, gasping and choking for breath, letting the good air burn my lungs.
I swam to her other side, around the torn and broken flipper. My feet touched bottom. I stumbled and waded back toward the shore, hit again by the full, throbbing cold. My clothes sat in a wet heap by the water’s edge. I struggled them back on.
I had reached some kind of end. But hadn’t reached it.
I don’t know how long I sat there shivering.
* * *
From far down the beach, as far down as I could see, it approached. First just something to look at, then something to hear. A jeep.
The wet clothes, the wind, made my shaking uncontrollable.
A man in a tan uniform cut the engine and walked toward me, smiling. He squatted down beside me.
“Hello there,” he said.
“Hello.”
“Would you by any chance be Dolores Price?”
I nodded.
“Some people been looking for you. They been worried.”
He had plump little yellow teeth, like a row of sweet corn.
I told him I was sorry.
“I got a blanket for you if you’re cold. You look cold. Are you?”
I nodded again.
“Then let me get that blanket then.”
Back at the jeep, he talked into his radio. “Okay, she’s here,” he said. “I got her.”
PART THREE
The Flying Leg
17
> Gracewood Institute, the private mental hospital where I spent the next seven years of my life, faces Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, and turns its back on the Atlantic Ocean. From the well-traveled road, only the glorious granite mansion is visible, but the driveway forks around the main house and leads from either side to the two unassuming brick buildings that house the wards. A twelve-foot Cyclone fence borders the rear of Gracewood. Behind it are wild blueberry bushes, Newport’s cliff walk, the cliffs themselves, the sea.
I was an inpatient at Gracewood for the first four years after my encounter with the Wellfleet whale, an outpatient for the next three. I kept no diaries during that time to chronicle the thousands of hours I must have lost to tranquilizers and television, so my recollections are vivid but gap-ridden. I remember fragments of the worst nights: the detached sound of my own shrieking as they held me down for forced injections—those quick jabs of pain when the needle broke through my skin, violated me, like Jack. I recall how I sometimes doled out progress to them, then snatched it back again. (One Saturday morning I capped off a good week by burning the insides of my thighs with a lighted cigarette. Their campaign to get me into the recreation room ended in my playing a game of Monopoly, then biting my hand hard enough to require inside stitches.) Like the whale herself, my memories of Gracewood have become for me a corpse I’m obliged to carry. Sometimes it occupies the passenger’s seat in the car during long, quiet drives; sometimes it lies beside me in bed, on nights when I can’t sleep, or on nights when I can. The corpse is either benign or dangerous. It has the gift of speech.
* * *
“You’re a beautiful person, Dolores,” Dr. Shaw told me the very first day I sat across from him, locked in my fat and self-hatred.
“Yeah, right, I’m Miss Universe,” I snapped back. “I won it in the swimsuit competition.”
He was the beautiful one, with his lion’s mane of hair, that white turtleneck set against his tan skin. You could tell he was the outdoorsy, cliff-walker type when he wasn’t stuck inside with us wackos. He kept his office window cracked open to the thump of the ocean. Sometimes I’d look down from his green eyes to his thick, ringless fingers to the straw still stuck in the lacings of his Earth shoes. In those early sessions, Dr. Shaw always leaned toward me, recliner to recliner, and smiled. “If you will only visualize your own beauty,” he promised me that first day, “you can make it real.”
Dr. Shaw was my third psychotherapist at Gracewood. My first, Dr. Netler, parted his hair just above his ear and plastered the long remaining strands over his bald spot. He had a little potbelly and stuttered so badly, I spent half my time waiting for him to give birth to the syllables he eventually shaped into questions about my father’s leaving and my mother’s death—questions I refused to answer. During our months and months of getting nowhere together, I drew my power from stubborn silence; Dr. Netler’s power came in the form of orders to the exasperated nurses and aides to take away my cigarette privileges, up my dosages, “safety-coat” me whenever I got out of hand. Another of my Gracewood memories: the sour smell of that straitjacket, the futility of pulling against it.
They thought I might cooperate better with Dr. Pragnesh, an Indian doctor, a woman. She had perpetual garlic breath and called Jack “Mr. Speight,” as if he was someone we were required to respect.
“What do you think attracted you to Mr. Speight in the first place?” she’d ask in her squashed little accent.
“I have no idea. Why is your hair so greasy all the time?”
“What is all this belligerence for—protection?”
“What’s that dot on your forehead for? Target practice?”
It was Geneva Sweet who paid all my bills at the private hospital she’d flown east to select personally for me. Grandma had at first objected to the financial arrangement—this fairy-godmother approach to making me sane—but Geneva had sat down in Grandma’s parlor and pointed out that she and Irv were “comfortable,” that God had never given her a daughter of her own to provide for, that making me well was something she wanted to do for Bernice, God rest her soul.
It was Geneva, too, who had led that Cape Cod shore patrolman to the Wellfleet beach for my belated rescue. After I’d phoned her from the motel and sung “The worms go in, the worms go out,” she’d fretted and paced, then telephoned Grandma, who, in turn, picked up the receiver and dialed Hooten Hall and the Rhode Island State Police.
“When you said over the phone that you were staying at a town where whales were dying, it was a clue, a long-distance cry for help,” Geneva told me the first time we sat face-to-face. “At least that’s what my therapist told me.” She had rich-lady looks: blond-tinted hair pulled back in a knot, icy-pink lipstick and matching nails, moisturized skin. I let her believe she’d rescued me—kept it a secret that I’d tried death before that patrolman ever arrived, that I’d swum down and met that whale eye to eye.
Gracewood put on the dog for rich visitors. When Geneva flew in at Christmastime, I was driven up to the mansion to see her. We sat on tan leather sofas in the festive solarium, Geneva balancing a cup of eggnog on her lap and calling attention to the lovely falling snow, the charming antique ornaments on the tree, and all I should be thankful for.
Grandma visited me back in the ward, every Tuesday afternoon from two to three-thirty. Gracewood was an eleven-dollar cab ride from Easterly. She came by cab, she said, because she didn’t want to trouble Mrs. Mumphy’s daughter during the week. The real reason was that she had kept my craziness a secret. Poor Grandma: first a daughter in the state hospital, then me at Gracewood. She kept her coat on during visits and held on to her purse strap, her eyes jumping nervously from Mrs. Ropiek’s drool to Old Lady DePolito’s peculiar attire: flannel pajamas, fur-trimmed nightgown, high-cut sneakers. But Gracewood spared even Grandma the worst of it: the weekend aide who elbowed you hard if you didn’t obey him fast enough; Manny the Masturbator; Lillian, who picked her nose and wiped it on the wall, who shit her pants for spite.
“But you’re basically happy here?” Geneva asked me when she visited again the following summer, phrasing it both as a question and the answer she wanted me to give. This time we were seated in Gracewood’s spacious front yard on iron-lattice lawn chairs while gardeners primped at the color-coordinated petunia beds and the Atlantic rumbled behind us. My hand was still bandaged from the week before, when I’d bitten it. “Basically you’re happy? You feel you’re making progress?” My reply was, as always, a snort of contempt, a drag on my cigarette. Geneva hugged me at the end of each visit, a mannequin’s embrace that let you know she was nobody’s mother.
Dr. Shaw and I began our work together in the winter of 1971. I’ll admit it: when I recall Dr. Shaw, it’s with an impish memory that may or may not be playing tricks. I remember him as both my fool and my magician: the gullible idiot from whom I withheld information, the powerful wizard who evoked secrets I’d kept even from myself. More often than not, Dr. Shaw’s voice is the voice of the corpse.
“How is Dolores Price this beautiful morning?” he asked me at the beginning of our first session.
“She’s fine. How’s Dr. Quack-Quack?” I answered, blowing a throatful of smoke in the direction of his “Thank you for not smoking” sign.
“Dr. Quack-Quack? Why am I Dr. Quack-Quack?”
“You’re all Dr. Quack-Quacks here. You’re all the same.”
“Several of my colleagues might debate you on that statement,” he said, smiling.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, let’s just say . . . that I’m a bit of a maverick.”
“Which one—Bart or Brett?”
“Excuse me?”
You could tell he was one of those wholesome types that never watched TV. “Nothing,” I said. “Just forget it.”
He nodded, closed his eyes, and smiled at the beautiful version of me he claimed he saw. In our earliest sessions, all that shut-eyed smiling of Dr. Shaw’s gave me the creeps. But he was so hopped-up o
n visualization—saw a better me so emphatically—that he made me curious about the Dolores who existed behind his eyelids.
Visualization was how I lost the weight—not all of it, but enough so that people passing me just ignored another fat girl rather than gaping at a freak. “You’ve dropped another seven pounds, I see,” Dr. Shaw would say, smiling at my weekly report. “You know why you’re slimming down, don’t you?”
“No, why?” It was better to let him tell you what you were thinking, rather than wasting time having him correct you.
“Because you’re beginning to conceptualize the beautiful person you really are—you’re becoming the young woman you deserve to be.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”
After six months with Dr. Shaw, I could shove both hands down between my stomach and the waist of my jeans and flap my wrists in the space I’d made; I’m not going to say that didn’t feel good. But I wasn’t visualizing some beauty-contest version of myself. I was seeing mold.
That was how I did it. The cafeteria servers would cut me a square of shepherd’s pie, a block of macaroni and cheese, a wedge of cream pie: enough food so that I’d have to heft, not just carry, my tray. Everyone at Gracewood was pale and flabby—exhausted from all that starch and tranq. I’d plunk my meal down at one of the long tables and close my eyes like Dr. Shaw. When I opened them again, I’d picture the top surfaces going bad. I could make mold take hold of anything in front of me: canned fruit cocktail, the surface of soup. It was a skill I got good at. I’d make it sprout in a corner of whatever was on my plate, then network it out, thicken it into a furry blue rug over whatever I was supposed to chew and swallow. “She’s gaggin’ again,” Mrs. DePolito would always complain. “How are we supposed to eat our dinner with her gaggin’ all the time?” As if it was attractive to watch her eat scrambled eggs without her top teeth. As if that was appetizing. I never told Dr. Shaw about the mold. I let him believe he was helping me visualize some beautiful Dolores. After I got to know him, I didn’t want to disillusion him. He walked a pretty thin line.
