The backyard was separated from the driveway by a concrete curb, beyond which the terrain sloped steeply into a flat meadow. I sat on the curb with my back to the house and lit up. Even in this season, through the acrid taste of old tobacco, I could smell the clean must of the evergreens. I felt a spark of hope. Perhaps after all it had been a good idea to come home. I could see myself leading a dull, comfortable life for a few weeks, doing errands for my mother until I got my brain back. I exhaled, watching the last of the smoke from my cigarette curl up in slow motion.
When I was still able to, I took the Honda over to our old house on Coram Drive. In physical distance, it was nothing, about five miles. When we lived there, the house, the last on a dead end, had been painted forest green with black shutters. It had changed hands a couple of times since my parents had sold it, and now it was buttercup yellow, with a neat white trim replacing the shutters. At some point the side porch had been insulated to serve as another room, because I saw white curtains at the windows. Thick ruffled curtains, not the delicate lace-trimmed ones my mother favors. The cozy effect was completed by a calico cat sitting on the sill, something that made me realize just how completely wiped out our presence there was. We never had any pets. Daddy said that animals belonged on farms, where they could pull their own weight and weren’t just another mouth to feed.
The bedroom Marty and I had shared had a closet with a window. This had been my hiding place. From the window you could see past the grass island with its hawthorn bush and straight down the block to where the road made a sharp bend, by Witch Dugan’s. You could check out who was out riding their bike, who was playing kickball, who was getting yelled at by their mother on their front steps. I peered up at the window but couldn’t tell whether it was still being used as a closet or whether they had decided to make it into another tiny room.
It was too early in the season to tell if the daffodil bulbs my mother had planted along the front walk had survived. The hawthorn bush had been cut way back, almost to a stubble, and I couldn’t see any berries. I looped the car slowly around the circle several times, wondering whether I should park in front and knock. Someone who’d paint their house yellow and owned a cat would certainly be friendly. Maybe they’d even give me a tour. I hoped my circling wasn’t conspicuous. People were always getting lost on Coram Drive, it was such an odd little street, with its dramatic L-shaped bend and then suddenly the circle, which belonged to us, the neighborhood kids. We’d be out playing and have to scatter to the sidewalks or up onto the island when a stray car came by. “It’s a dead end, stupid!” we’d hoot at the driver, who would either glare or look humiliated, depending on whether it was a man or a woman.
There were no kids out this time, not surprising on a bleak, tail-of-winter day. The Katzes’ house next door had been knocked down a long time ago and someone had put up an ugly rawboned ranch that didn’t go with the modest fake Colonials on the rest of the street. No doubt the goldfish pond out back had long since been filled in. I ended up not stopping at all but instead retraced my route out to Whitney Avenue, past St. Cecilia’s and Lake Whitney and the wicked curve that was the last thing Darcy Katz saw in this life, and back home to the fancy house on the hill that contained only my mother, bent over the desk in Daddy’s old study, paying bills. When she asked me where I’d been I told her out by the lake.
My lie gave me an idea. I needed to draw again. I couldn’t read, and I couldn’t paint, but there hadn’t been a time in my life when I couldn’t depend on that most elementary of connections between my eyes and the paper. I went up to the attic to look for the old box of drawing pencils and a half-filled sketch pad I knew were there from high school. The place was a mess: boxes brimming with schoolbooks, crates of Nai-nai’s Limoges, which my mother thought was too good to use, packed in straw, ancient black fans with wicked-looking blades, bulging garment bags on hooks, moving cartons containing Daddy’s old Chinese newspapers. Everything I touched brought up a puff of dust, making me sneeze.
And then I saw it, behind an old black trunk from China: the green plastic laundry basket filled with stuffed animals. They were battered almost beyond recognition, but I remembered them all: Buzzy the bear, Charlie the giraffe, Wilbur the donkey. I reached into the pile and pulled out the most raggedy one of all: Piggy. His fur, what was left of it, had been worn to a kind of sickly flesh color, the plastic snout with its two indentations still a garish orange. When his dark beady eyes caught the light from the overhead bulb, I felt a repulsion so great I almost dropped him.
In the next instant he looked benign, dirty and scarred, an old warrior.
I brushed him off and took him downstairs with me. For a while it would give me a jolt to see him sitting there on my pillow, plain and alone, but then I got used to it.
I had completely forgotten about my plan to go out by the reservoir and draw. By the time I remembered, it didn’t seem worth it.
I began staying in bed all day. Every afternoon at one exactly Ma would come home from teaching, roaring up the driveway, clanging in the kitchen, and then rapping at my door. Without waiting for an answer, she’d push it open.
“You want cottage cheese? I make a nice salad, put fruit cocktail on it.”
“No, Ma, I had something.”
She knew I was lying and I knew she knew it, but we had to go through this ritual every day.
“Where all your grade school friends?” she asked me. “Maybe you call them, have party here.”
“There’s no one left,” I said vaguely, and then I realized I had made it sound as if they were all dead.
I ventured out of my room only when I heard the door between the master bedroom and bathroom open as Ma went to bed and I could smell the soap from her bath in the hall.
Night was when I felt most comfortable. The house looked different then, the stark furnishings and Tudor arches friendlier in chiaroscuro. I wandered down to the kitchen and found food laid out on the counter: Chinese plum candies in blue and red wax papers, sesame crackers shaped like chickens, swollen-bellied pears in browns, greens, and yellows, tucked into the Rembrandt shadows of an earthenware bowl. Ma’s own still life, to tempt me. The refrigerator was stocked with cottage cheese and plain yogurt, things that my mother herself never ate, but she must have remembered my vegetarian phase in boarding school. I sat down at the kitchen table and like an animal devoured what I had picked out, not knowing or remembering what I was cramming into my mouth, staring out at the black beyond the tiny window over the sink. Sometimes I’d take the food into the living room and consume it sitting on the floor with the TV on, sound off, even though I had no idea what was going on, watching simply in order to concentrate on something besides the static in my own head.
When even silent TV became unbearable, I went down into the basement and sat there in a dream until the sun came up.
My one-month visit had spilled into two. Ma made me an appointment with her doctor, who ordered a bunch of tests. The tests turned up nothing. I was underweight, but not seriously so. The doctor suggested that I see a psychotherapist.
My mother thought this was nonsense. “All you need is career. That takes your mind off personal problems. You seen my sewing scissors?”
“No,” I said.
One afternoon Ma came to my room and announced that she had invited Lally Escobar to tea. “She especially wants to see you.”
“I don’t want to see her.” I was lying in bed as usual, still in my pajamas.
“But she knows you’re home. What am I suppose to say when she ask for you?”
“Tell her I’m asleep.”
My mother said firmly, “You come down,” and shut the door.
The only place I could think of to hide was the basement. I made it down to the first floor without Ma hearing. The teakettle began to whistle at the exact moment I opened the basement door and shut it behind me in a single motion. At the bottom of the stairs I held my breath. The kitchen floorboards creaked as my mother moved about abo
ve me. Then I heard the chimes of the doorbell and short quick creaks as she went to answer it.
I didn’t dare turn on the light. When my eyes got used to the dark I edged my way deeper in through the maze of boxes and old furniture, the oil furnace growling in the middle, and finally reached the corner where I’d made a kind of nest for myself out of an old stadium blanket on top of several rolled-up rugs. I drew my bare feet up and tucked the bottom of the blanket around them.
Lally and my mother were talking. There was a package of Pepperidge Farm lemon nut cookies on the table between them. Because they were having Western tea, Ma was using her tulip tea set that had cups with handles. There was a bizarre rasping noise that I recognized as Lally’s laugh. I pictured her in her gardening outfit—a pink-and-green-striped turtleneck and overalls—although she probably wouldn’t be wearing that today.
I waited, growing colder. The dark pressed against my ears, so that I could hear my blood pounding. I covered the sides of my head and tried to slow down my breathing. The furnace rumbled. Lally wasn’t laughing anymore. In fact, it was perfectly silent above. I imagined slowing down my breathing more, suppressing my heartbeat, like the yogis in India. Only I’d will it past suspended animation. I’d make myself die.
I reached down between the rolled-up rugs and felt for Ma’s sewing shears. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do in the dark, but I knew where there was virgin skin, up near the crook of my elbow. The feeling came, not as sharp as it would have been if it hadn’t been so cold, and it didn’t last nearly long enough.
There was one window high up in a corner that let in a bit of daylight, and I made myself concentrate on that. My cut began to throb. I pressed a corner of the blanket against it.
PIECE OF MEAT.
The window had gone completely dark by the time I finally decided it was safe. I unfolded myself from the rugs, stamped around a bit to get the circulation back in my legs, and then went up the basement stairs, slowly and deliberately this time. When I opened the door there was my mother sitting alone at the kitchen table, looking directly at me. The tea things had been cleared away, and the dishwasher was humming. I blinked hard, getting used to the light, and saw that my arm looked much worse than I’d imagined. I hadn’t been so neat this time.
For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to say anything at all. I turned to go on upstairs to my room.
“Lally gave me the name of someone. A woman doctor.” I must have looked blank, for she added: “A doctor for your brain.”
“A psychiatrist?”
“She has a medical degree from Yale. Good reputation.”
So this was it. If my mother admitted it, I really was crazy.
I knew in my bones that no matter how brilliant this person was, she’d never be able to cure me.
3
We each got assigned to a unit. Lillith and I stayed together—same unit, same treatment group. The alcoholic and the flight attendant went to Rehab in its own separate building behind the cafeteria, and the quiet guy who slashed his wrists ended up being transferred to State. Lillith told me about State, how the ratio of staff to patients was so bad they kept everyone drugged up to the eyeballs. According to her, Willowridge was a country club.
The point, it seemed, was to deinstitutionalize our surroundings so we could pretend we were normal citizens instead of prisoners. The dayroom in our unit resembled an upscale suburban living room, with its gold wall-to-wall carpeting, Ethan Allen furniture, and the baby grand Steinway donated by a former patient. Where the dining room in a regular house would have been was the glassed-in nurses’ station, and across from it a kitchenette where people hung around and drank coffee. But unlike in a regular house there was an air of emergency, too many comings and goings, the phone in the nurses’ station constantly ringing.
I was on Status One, house arrest. Along with me was a man who had to dress in pajamas because he was liable to run away. “Elope,” they called it. We got our meals on trays and had single rooms on the first floor near the nurses’ station, where the staff could keep an eye on us. Our day began at 6 A.M. when we were woken up and taken for showers. In my entire twenty-four hours, the shower door was the only one I could shut behind me. I turned the water on full force and made it as hot as I could stand and then hotter, so that it steamed up the glass, obliterating the silhouette of the MH leaning up against the sink. We got exactly seven minutes in there—they actually set a kitchen timer. It was Lillith who explained to me the dangers of the bathroom. At State, she said, some guy had once managed to drown himself in the toilet.
In our first week at the unit, Lillith had advanced to Status Two and gotten her sharps back. She’d decided not to hold my unimpressive suicide attempt against me and became my buddy, bringing me honey packets from dinner, a necklace of tiny wooden spools she’d made in OT. It was Lillith I went to when I found I’d gotten my period. I’d lost track, I’d become so irregular, and during my shower I thought I had a stomachache and then looked down and saw it in the hollow of my thigh like a bloody oyster.
I found her in the dayroom and asked if she had a Tampax.
“Can’t help you there,” she said. “I had a hysterectomy.” There was something about the way she said it that discouraged me from inquiring why.
I had to ask at the nurses’ station. When I went back into the dayroom my treatment group was waiting there to go to breakfast. Lillith was reading a magazine. A couple of the younger guys, Douglas and Mel, were fooling around with a tennis ball, taking turns bouncing it off their heads.
When Douglas saw me he started chanting: “Wally Sang, Wally Sang, Wally Sang.”
Douglas scared the shit out of me. Over six feet tall and built like a linebacker, he wore the same stained forest green polo shirt and crummy jeans day after day. He was in here because he had tried to murder his mother who was black and from Barbados. His father was white. Douglas would actually have been an attractive guy if it weren’t for his personality. His thing was to hit on all the women—MHs, nurses, patients, even poor Rachel, who walked around with a teddy bear clutched to her bosom.
Lillith looked up from her magazine and patted the sofa next to her. “C’mere,” she said. “I’ll do your hair.”
No one had done my hair for me since Ma at the breakfast table before school. She’d make my two long plaits with paintbrush ends, and bows to match what I was wearing. “Beauty routine,” Daddy would mutter. My sister’s face framed by its Dutch-boy cut rose smug across the table.
Lillith’s touch as she combed was a lot gentler than my mother’s. It made me feel dreamy and in danger at the same time.
“I think braids,” she said. “I’m good at braids.”
“Okay.”
“How many?”
“Just one.”
“Oh,” she sighed, “I’d kill to have hair like yours.” Douglas passed into our line of vision, making a pig face, lips bloomed up touching the tip of his nose.
Lillith ignored him. She said to me: “You know, you should talk more in group.”
“I can’t.”
“Oh, come on. You’re so smart, you can think of something.” She herself had related harrowing tales of growing up in a mansion in Guilford with her pervert uncle and his string of boyfriends. Her stories were full of rubber gloves, hoses, and toilets. “When I get out I’m going to the beach every single day. Lie around and drink pina coladas and get a tan.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Seriously, if you want to get out you should talk. Why do you give a shit about what these people think? You’re never going to see any of them again.”
“That’s true.”
“Plus, you think they haven’t heard it all before?”
“I guess.”
“Okay, you’re done,” she said, snapping the elastic. I could see my reflection in the glass wall of the nurses’ station. She’d been so neat it looked like I had short hair.
“Thanks.”
“Tell me your opinio
n of this.” She opened her copy of Glamour to a photograph of a do-it-yourself crocheted string bikini.
“Wowza,” said Mel, looking over her shoulder. I liked Mel. At nineteen, he was the youngest in our group, transferred from Adolescents because he’d kept on getting into fights there. He wore macho clothes-frayed flannel shirts, work boots, a gold stud in one ear—but underneath I could see that there was something delicate, almost dandyish, about him.
Lillith said: “I’m going to send away for some shocking pink yarn.” I looked at the browned, busty, gleaming model, and then I looked at Lillith, all frail bones with a caved-in chest and skin the color of skim milk.
“That would look great on you.”
“You think?” When she smiled her teeth were stumpy, grayish at the roots. “Oops, gotta go,” she said. The MH had just come in. Breakfast had already arrived in plastic wrap for Pajama Man and me.
“Have fun,” I said.
I didn’t really mind being stuck in the house while everyone else was out at meals or therapies. Pajama Man and I mostly watched stupid TV, and when I got sick of that I’d go curl up in my favorite spot, the bay window seat, where I could sit for hours, doing nothing. Staff didn’t like that, they’d come over and try to get me to tell them my feelings.
I ate my breakfast at the window. The view was the flagstone path that led up to the front door, where another group was trooping back from breakfast. About fifty yards beyond shimmered the cold gray plane of the lake. On the near side were a couple of wrought-iron benches, where occasionally I saw someone huddled up, tossing bread to the ducks. On the far side stretched a line of weeping willows beginning to bud white. At least Willowridge really had willows. I imagined that if I could still paint I’d use a Chinese brush and ink—the kind you mix up in a stone—on the finest rice paper. Stark short strokes for the boughs, washed over with a broad sweep to indicate wind.
Monkey King Page 3
