But then the doctor came in and I remembered. I didn’t want to like her, but I did the second she opened the door. She had more gum line in her mouth than teeth and wild eyebrows, mad scientist eyebrows.
—Twyla White? she asked.
—Present, I said.
—Good to hear, she said. I’m Dr. Mercer but you can call me Sadie.
I decided immediately that I would always call her Dr. Mercer. No need to start up a buddy thing with a woman who could have me permanently committed.
—Let’s go over the basics, shall we? Is this your first time at a psychiatric facility?
—Yeah, and my last, I said.
—How old are you?
—Twenty-two.
—Hm. And where are your parents, Twyla White?
—Father’s dead. Mother’s on her way to it.
Dr. Mercer scribbled something on a notepad. She was nice to look at even though she was ugly. Her skin was smooth and pale, like the statue of Hestia that stood in the Chapter Room of my old sorority house. She’d been a lucky statue: girls would kiss her before their exams, or a date, or a pregnancy test.
—What are you writing? I asked.
—Just information. I can show you my notes when I’m done. I don’t believe in keeping things from my patients. Now, what brings you here today?
—I cut myself, I said.
—Yes, I understand that part, Dr. Mercer said. What I mean is, what emotionally brings you here today?
—Listen, I’ve seen shrinks before, I said. How about I condense all of this into one session and save us both the time? My father hanged himself in our garage when I was eight. I was the one who found him. Yes, he was abusive. Yes, he was an alcoholic. No, I don’t lie awake nights thinking about it. Yes, I’m an only child. My sex life is fine. I’m afraid of bees and heights. No, I don’t need exposure therapy to fix either phobia. And no, I don’t hear voices. Is that enough, Doctor? Am I free to go now?
I expected her to say, Let’s explore this anger you’re directing at me, that sort of thing. She studied her hands on the clipboard for a while. Mannish hands. I liked that, too. I didn’t really want to blow up at her the way I did.
—I’m going to get a coffee, she said. You want one?
—No, I said. But can you ask the bitchy nurse with the constant wedgie if I can get my phone back?
She didn’t respond, but I saw the twitch of a smile around her horse gums when she walked out of the room. I studied the watermarks on the tiled ceiling for a while and picked at the edges of the tape on my arms.
My father watched me from the corner, idly scuffing his shoes against the floor, a Marlboro tarring his fingers.
—You’re a stupid bitch, he said. Win her over, or you’re stuck here forever.
When Dr. Mercer came back she sat at the foot of my bed.
—Don’t sit there, I said. I need some space.
She nodded, got up, and moved to the chair in the corner. My father, bored and sullen and probably uninterested in my ugly doctor, vanished.
—You say you don’t want to be here, she said. And legally, we can’t make you stay much longer. I don’t think you’re suicidal; you’re not a danger to other people. But I think you should stay.
—Sorry, I said. I have to pick up my dry cleaning.
—Can your dry cleaning wait another night? she asked. Just one more night. Then, if you feel like it, you can go.
I don’t know why I said yes. But before I knew it Jason was leaving my stuff with the nurses at the front desk, and every time I speak to Dr. Mercer, she convinces me to stay on a little longer.
• • •
After the first day they took me out of surveillance and put me in Ward C. Some religious nut must have donated money to our floor, because the Twenty-third Psalm is painted in giant calligraphic script all over the hallways. Outside my room is the line Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. My eyes buzz with the words.
The anorexics are on the floor below. The suicidals and the self-harming are above, where they kept me the first night. We call them the acutes. If you fuck up on Ward C, if you start banging your head against the sink or telling people that the angels want you to kill the janitor, or you get caught stabbing at your hands with a mechanical pencil tip, then they put you with the acutes. I am a lot of things. But I’m not the top tier of crazy bitches.
The girls on my floor are a catchall. They’re just exaggerations of my sorority sisters at school: madness varied, but madness contained. Some of them shuffle the hallways like their veins are filled with cold honey. Some of them fall asleep leaning in doorframes. Some of them are afraid to leave their rooms. One of them tries to eat the toilet paper in her bathroom. One of them tries to fuck all the others. Another girl is an eraser. She rubs at her skin with pencil erasers or old gum or even a rough sock if she can get her hands on it, rubs at her skin until she gets a raw red burn. I can tell when it’s time for her meds because she starts quivering with nervous energy like a plucked guitar string that never settles. Ten minutes after she swallows, the muscles in her face slacken. Her chin drops onto her chest, and I can see the greasy part of her hair. I hate that she’s like me.
• • •
My roommate is a schizo, an overweight chick named Wu Chin with shiny teeth and a tattoo of the Libra scales on her shoulder. She laughs like a dolphin—eeee! eeee!—even when I’m not trying to be funny. Especially when I’m not trying to be funny.
—I bet you feel like hot shit knowing that you’re staying with a famous person, she told me when they moved me into her room.
—I’m sorry, I haven’t read an issue of People in a while, I said. What are you famous for?
—Oh, she said. Obama held me prisoner. He released me when the people protested. But he’s keeping me here to make everyone think I’m crazy.
—Makes sense, I said. What’d he hold you prisoner for?
Her eyes widened and darted around the room, irises pinballing in every direction.
—Have you got your Social Security card?
—Not on me, I said.
—I can’t tell you till I check it, she said.
When she wasn’t looking, I took the nail clippers out of her cubby and hid them inside the Kleenex box by my bed.
• • •
That night when I met with Dr. Mercer I told her I wanted out. Told her I had no interest in whack job conspiracy theorist roommates.
—Has it ever occurred to you that we all make our own conspiracies? she said.
—That sounds like hippie crap.
—I stand by it, she said. We all trick ourselves. We all scheme. It’s just that some of us live in the delusion enough to be hospitalized.
I didn’t feel like answering her. I could have. I just didn’t feel like it.
—I think you should reframe your idea of whack job. Crazy isn’t such a simple term, she said.
My stitches itched, but I didn’t dare touch them in front of her. I looked out the window behind her desk. A brick wall in the distance, at the edge of the grounds. I could just picture the evening traffic on Yale Ave. on the other side. People with their windows down, listening to the radio and smoking. The sunset flushed orange sherbet through the trees. When I tuned in again, Dr. Mercer was talking about my mother.
—You said in our first session that she’s dying, she said. What is she dying of?
—Breast cancer, stage four, I said.
—Want to talk about it?
I didn’t know what she wanted me to say, but I guessed. I thought of all of the Hallmark cards I used to stock when I still had my job at the DB Mart in Massachusetts.
—I’ve made my peace with it, I said. It’s for the best. Her spirit will live on when she’s gone.
—Mm-hmm, Dr. Mercer said. So I see we’re playing the bullshit game this evening.
—Thanks for playing! I said.
• • •
But that night I couldn’t sleep. I k
ept thinking of the last time I saw Mom.
I went to her house to weed the front yard flower bed and make sure she paid the hospice nurse. She had put on her wig for me. Her left arm was swollen, wrapped in a bandage from shoulder to wrist to keep the pressure going.
—I’ve been sleeping in your room since you left, she said.
—Wanna watch Wheel of Fortune?
—I know you won’t move back in with me, but what if you just stayed a night or two? It’s lonely at night.
—Next week I’ll do that.
She nodded, but we both knew I was lying. It had been so much easier when I’d been at college, thousands of miles away from her, away from her need. But since I had moved back to Tulsa I felt her yoked to me again, and my body ached under the weight of the burden.
—You were always so independent, she said.
Could she know what I was thinking? I tilted my face away from her.
—So were you, I lied.
When I glanced back, I found her eyes shut tight, the corners of her mouth drooping downward. She leaned her head back on the couch and her wig shifted out of place. The skin on her face was so translucent it couldn’t have been thicker than a moth’s wing. I thought she had fallen asleep. I got up to leave, and she spoke.
—Twy. Remember what I asked you after Grandma Gwen died?
—No, I said.
But I did. I just didn’t want to say it.
—Yes you do. You remember.
I could hear the mantel clock tick. My dead father cleared his throat and lit a cigarette from the gas burner in the kitchen. He gave me the finger when I looked at him.
—Soon it’ll be time, she said. Soon I’ll be in too much pain. I’m already in pain now.
—Why does it have to be me? I said. Why can’t you just do it yourself?
And she opened her eyes and stared at me, as if she’d never seen me before, the way a child surveys a stranger on a train.
—I’ve never asked you to do anything, Twy. And I want it to be your face I see when it’s time. My baby’s face, and no one else’s.
—You’re sick. How could you ask me that? You’re really sick.
—Yes, that’s the point, she said.
• • •
I couldn’t sleep in Ward C. So I got out of bed, took the nail clippers with me, sat on our bathroom floor with my back blocking the door. I decided on the skin above my pubic bone, where they wouldn’t look. If they tried I could call them perverts, yell about lawsuits. I dug the clippers in and pinched and yanked. Tracks of skin came up in little strips. It was bloody, it was superficial, but it worked. My hands buzzed with adrenaline. I felt every molecule of myself surge with focus. True Zen meditation, true presence and awareness and clarity.
When I finished, I flushed the skin and the bloody tissues. I stuck a wad of toilet paper against the gouges. The waistband of my underwear held it in place, the blood pasted it closed like glue.
And when I got in bed, whenever I saw my mother’s face, I would press hard at the new lines until the sting blotted out the memory. I fell asleep high on the ether of my own pain.
• • •
After four days, Dr. Mercer noticed I was still avoiding the other patients.
—I’m not asking you to go to group therapy, or even make friends. I’m just asking you to eat lunch with them. A little socializing would be extremely beneficial for you, she said.
—I’d love to socialize. With normal people, I said.
She was getting annoyed with me, I could tell.
—I’m not sure I understand your disconnect, she said. You can leave here at any time. But something prevents you.
I opened my mouth to protest, but she hushed me. She’s good at hushing. Pointer finger extended, thumb pointed out. The sort of gesture Jesus would make in a painting.
—As long as you’re here, I suggest you take advantage of your treatment. Meet the others, just have lunch with them. What’s the worst that could happen? she said.
—I could like someone, I said.
I’d done the camaraderie thing at school in Massachusetts. I’d had my sorority sisters, and in them, I’d had some friends, before Margot fucked it up.
—What’s wrong with liking someone? she asked.
I was remembering viscerally now: Margot on the gurney, zipped into a blue bag, the wheels snagging on the carpet outside of her bedroom door.
—I can’t be a part of someone else’s sob story anymore, I said.
—This might surprise you, Dr. Mercer said, but these girls don’t want to be a part of one, either.
• • •
And that’s how I found myself at the cafeteria during Ward C’s lunch hour, sitting between Wu Chin and an agoraphobic named Lisa who looked ready to throw herself under the table at the slightest provocation.
—Obama called me this morning, Wu Chin said.
—That’s a delusion, Lisa whispered. In group we said that’s a delusion. You need to accept that if you want to get out of here.
Wu Chin’s face plummeted so fast from satisfaction to rage that I felt my stomach lurch with the change.
—You’re a delusion! she shouted. And you have sheep’s eyes!
—Sheep’s eyes? I said.
Lisa put her head in her hands and moaned.
—Look at her, Wu Chin said. She’s all glassy and flat. Obeys everyone. LISTEN TO ME, LISA, YOU SHEEPY CUNT!
At the other table, the girl with the eraser burns started laughing at us, the kind of laugh that could shrivel a grape into a raisin.
I left my Jell-O half-eaten, my meat loaf untouched. I stabbed my spork into the top of it, like a flag. I waited by the door for lunch period to end. As soon as it did, I shot up to Dr. Mercer’s office and pounded on the door. Rustling papers inside. A woman’s voice halted in the middle of the pitch and fall of a sentence. I pounded again.
She only opened the door a crack.
—Yes?
—I’m not eating another meal with those fuckups, I said.
—I’m with another patient right now, Twyla. We’ll have to discuss this later.
She closed the door, and I stared at the jamb for a while, trying to figure out why I felt so jealous of the fact that Dr. Mercer had other patients besides me.
—She doesn’t like you, my dead father said. She knows you’re a liar. You waste her time.
I could hear him following me down the hall. His deep wheeze. The swish of his jeans.
On my way back to my room, the stuck-up nurse with the wedgie found me.
—You have a voice mail from a Jason DeAngelo, she said.
—Did you listen to it?
She nodded.
—It’s protocol.
They love that word here. Protocol.
I waited for her to tell me what he said. Instead, she handed me the phone from behind her desk and punched in the voice mail code.
Hi, ah, it’s ah, me.
Christ. I could have made a drinking game out of his pauses.
I ah, wanted you to know, ah, that your mom’s been looking for you. She had a nurse drive her over here and poke around and then she banged on my door and I met her. So I, ah, told her where you were. You should call her. Sorry.
The nurse was watching me. I moved carefully. Swallowed.
—Nobody can visit me here unless I give them permission, right?
—Right. Would you like to add your mother to the Visitor Clearance form?
—No, I said. I want you to make sure she can never get in here.
• • •
This morning I could feel the conspiracy, I could feel the nurses collaborating in the hallways and quieting when I opened the door. I’m so sick of fluorescent lights and off-white walls and whispers. I’m not paranoid. But I’m not stupid, either. Then Dr. Mercer calls me into her office earlier than usual, and my suspicions are confirmed.
I don’t like the expression on her face. Lips covering gums. Her hands steadier than usual. I sit i
n my usual spot and feel as if I should check under my seat for a snare.
—I’m starting to suspect something, she says.
Goddamn wedgie nurse. Are there no secrets in this hospital?
—I’m starting to suspect that you’re here in order to hide from your mother. But the question is, why?
—She’s dying, I say.
Dr. Mercer nods.
—Yes, I remember, she says.
Impatient. She’s impatient with me. She doesn’t like me.
—Does her death frighten you? she asks.
—No.
I say no too fast.
Dr. Mercer sits back in her chair and stretches.
—Let’s talk about your father, she says.
—Now we’re cooking, my father says from the corner.
—I think we should get to the heart of things.
—I want you to come to grips with the truth.
—Out with it!—Let’s have a breakthrough, for Christ’s sake—Don’t you know what a pain in the ass you are when you hide things—Your denial is toxic, is toxic, is toxic.
Who’s talking? Him or her? Mouths are moving and phrases are jumbling in and I can’t keep up, I’m behind on the quota, the assembly line is jamming.
—I’m ready to check out of here, I say.
But I trip when I get out of the chair, wobble and knock into the door and I leave so clumsy I’m afraid parts of my body have been abandoned on the way out. But there they are, arms and legs, all moving down the hall for me, blundering, but moving, down to my room and Wu Chin looks up from her bed and asks what the Fuck is wrong with me and I ignore her and go to the bathroom and lean against the door—why don’t they put locks on the door? They don’t even trust us enough to shit?—and I rip off the tape and start pulling the sutures out of my wrists and my legs, one after another, yanking, skin tearing, and people are pounding on the door, I can hear Dr. Mercer calling my name, but I don’t answer and then the door is pushed in, I slide with it, and a pair of hands grips me by the arms, pinning me flat, the bathroom light shines in my eyes until they water and I kick and scream and kick until something cold runs through me, suddenly I’m very tired, so thick and tired, and I drop off the edge into a black corner of sleep in a burly nurse’s arms.
• • •
I’m in a new room now, back with the acutes, I’m guessing, tongue dry and swollen in my mouth. I go to scratch my nose and can’t. My wrists are looped to the bed railings, bandaged and sore. And my father has his back to me—I can see the bald spot of his thinning red hair, and his ugly plaid shirt half-tucked—he’s looking out the window, and when he turns around I see the rope loose around his neck as if he’s wearing a bad tie.
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