The boyfriend speaks up. ‘We’re sunk, we don’t get out of here. Laura will tell you my mother checks the house top to bottom the minute she comes home. Just plant it pronto, will you. Wherever it’s meant to go.’
And they are not going to let me know where.
Minna gets up, stretching. ‘Off your butts, keeds. I’ve got a union meeting. Come on Carol, I’ll walk out with you. Here’s the dough.’ She is humming that tune she always does.… ‘The In-ter national hmm mm—shall bee the hyoo-man race.’ But when we get outside she gives me the high sign, and walks the other way.…
The bell has rung for intermission being over. Through the open doors, at the rear of the empty hall, the audience can be seen, still smoking and chatting outside.
But up there, on that blank stage, there’s no stopping me.
I am on my way back obediently loaded, chow mein whiffing in my nostrils from its cartons, sandwiches crackling in my arm. I have performed my errand well. Police cars and sirens sound, half a block away. I hear it, that city madrigal. With a rush of energy that carries me around the corner, I answer it.
How can a house-front, blown half-in, blast a mind? Or across the street, lace curtains, stirring through shattered glass, obscure life’s recall? In the cop’s arm, heavy on mine, is the destiny I require. He says, ‘Everybody got out. They got away. You come from there, eh?’
In the buckled façade the basement window is wide. They flee me. They have fled.
‘You the maid?’ the cop says. ‘That who you were?’
In the case record that weighed down Daisy Gold’s handbag is my answer, excavated first for authority—prison; then for me—hospital. Until now I myself could not recall it.
‘No, I’m one of them. I belong.’
… In the police precinct afterward, where I am made to sit for hours, I feed myself. The club sandwich that is Laura makes me gag, but I chew on. Ham-and-cheese on wheat—Doris, the Jewish girl who loves ham—that goes down easier. Carey’s chow mein I save for last. With each mouthful something in my head shuts down. Then a matron takes me to the john and I retch up, but only the food. The rest of me is gone.…
Nothing in the record mentioned that meal. Now I remember, on my own. Memory laps me, that bath in which the brain lives. Mind stretches, as elastic as anyone’s.
I am responsible.
And intermission is over in this theater. I prefer not to see Alphonse, in whatever roles he will assume. I regret not seeing Martyn as Wall, but maybe we’ll reconnect. I can even imagine that. But first, as the SW’s kept telling me, I have to get my act together. That’s their style, why not adopt it? I’m so happy to be back that I don’t mind remembering everything—which is more than many in my case would say. Or even ordinary persons? Is it now my ambition to become one of those? That I can’t yet predict. Maybe that’s Act Three.
Whether I’m still ‘counter-culture’—as the program says of this play, or just prime obstinate, will have to evolve. I’m hopeful. Maybe I have just swallowed unawares the great big pill that most call reality.
As I stroll out of the theater, the rest of the crowd are just strolling in.
Outside the hall, at the dingy entrance serving as lobby and stage door, there’s a solitary bench. I sit on it in the ebbing day. Down these old commercial blocks the hairy air is lion-colored, with tinsel sparks at the warehouse cornices. This is that other sunset the city gets no credit for. One the skyscrapers will never see. A slanting magic, folk art comfortable. Like I’m in the bowl of a worn but gilded spoon.
Now to the night’s conundrum. Where to bed down?
—‘If that’s freedom of choice, Carol,’ the last doctor I was with said, after the hospital finally agreed to release me to no permanent address—‘isn’t that a dead-end form of it?’ I liked Dr. Camacho, whom the patients called ‘Dr. Cee.’ He looked like the governor of a zoo who had chosen to sit with the animals. At least part of the time.
Dead-end? ‘Not if you’re in a hospital.’
Or worse, the halfway house. Where at night you lie in bed—very good beds they have, far too suitable for dreams; and think—I’m halfway to what? Gender? The road not taken? Some forever home it will take an anti-choking maneuver to haul me out of?—So you lie there, neither fish nor fowl, or like the riddle says: Are you half empty or half full?
‘What’s it like for you, Carol, on what you call the “outside?”’
Most doctors in his line have one tone for when they state something, another for when they ask, but Dr. Cee’s tone is always the same.
‘In summer, it can be more—like playful. You’re making your own moves. Like the men at chess in that little den of a house in the park. You can brood.’
He says something under his breath I don’t catch. And in winter?’
‘In winter, to be outside is a moral obligation.’ Thinking of it, I stand straighter. ‘To hang on with those who … who are in the wrong.’
‘Like how? You mean—with the law?’
Not always. Not only. ‘Like—they’re on the wrong side of things generally. Like they have more of nothing. And more coming.’
He doesn’t say anything. Like they do.
‘Yet who am I to side with them, Dr. Cee? A person who inherited. A girl with a trust.’
‘If it’s any satisfaction, the trust is about exhausted.’
It’s neither one way or the other to me. All the money goes to the hospital. Perhaps that’s partly why they’re now letting me go. So much is ‘partly,’ in a mental hospital. I don’t blame him.
‘I worry about you,’ he says. ‘Because physically you’re strong enough now. But ten years from now, five, what’ll you be? Like we see them get to be? Broken down, toothless. A hag. Or worse.’
I’ve seen them. But he doesn’t understand. They’re not them. They’re us.
‘There’s other ways of—of living,’ he says. ‘Than just to—to signify. And don’t tell me Jesus did just that.’
When I say, ‘Who?’—like I don’t know who that is—he laughs. ‘Just another activist.’
I trusted Dr. Camacho. He never urged me to have more tact.
‘I know why you all give us pills,’ I lashed out at him once. ‘It’s so you won’t have to listen that much to what we say.’
‘Not all day—’ he’d said, nodding. ‘It’s not bearable. Because it may be the truth.’
After that he let me come to him without the day’s medication. Which was hard, because there’s more of yourself to give pain. But when I referred to myself as schizzy he got sore. ‘You have empathy. For whom is after all your business. Not ours. You’re not disoriented. Rather, you suffer from a constant, even exquisite sense of where you in fact are. Which may give you philosophical trouble. That’s after all not our concern.’ This small dark-haired man with a nervous moustache, he’s never talked to me before on this level. And the next thing he says to me, his tone does change. ‘You don’t hear voices, Carol. Not even your own.’
And when that has sunk in he says those words that clang like an echo I’d always been hearing.
‘It’s like you weren’t sure of having been born,’ Dr. Cee said.
No anecdotes of my babyhood exist. Nor pictures—for who was to be sent them? The aunts showed us three off sufficiently at the bay window. End of my schoolyear, on prize day, they came, blushing seasonally over my good grades. On the streets I went to and fro, instructed not to mingle. Rarely visited, we did not reciprocate. It was as if we had made a pact with the town.
‘And that blast you were barred from made you even less sure, eh? Better to remove yourself.’
Then why does he so love my aliases?
‘Who cares how personality breaks out, Carol. It’s like you’re asking us to share a joke—that you do exist.’
I want to laugh with him now, wishing I could share this hour with him, and the hours to follow. How after ten blocks or so one begins to tingle with the walking pleasure, not all of it in the feet�
�or in the body alone. So many secret haunts for our sort in this city, on all levels of secrecy, of course: in some you will find company, if never quite of your own kind. Which nobody expects. Meanwhile, people have rosters of places known only to themselves, confided only if buddyship briefly strikes, or drugs or drink.
In ten blocks or so, I can arrive at that Ukrainian Hall which is no longer in business, but can be sneaked into. Or if I crave more space and am willing to shake a leg for it, I can push on to the area just before you get to West Street. There, in that quarter of mostly vanished meat wholesalers, the old cornices offer good broad rain shield, and the laddered fire escapes a river view. At times a graveyard quiet may afflict, or the slightest smell of animal blood. Yet hit the area on a balmy night and it may be a ballroom for a drag queen frolic. They have lovely manners, even if you’re a woman.
Anyway, it’s a menu. And for free.
—Last time I saw Dr. Cee the medical board was to be sitting on ‘releases,’ mine among others. When I enter his office, on mental tiptoe though I stride, he raises his arms in hurrah. ‘It was iffy, yes. But they’re hoping to let you go.’
‘Every release is iffy,’ I say. ‘You never can be sure whether they think you’re sensible or they’re giving you up.’
‘Ah, Carol. You have a tongue. But I’ll miss it.’
So I spare him a mention of that third qualification for a release which can zap you the quickest: money. Something about the Hippocratic oath changes, when you are expected to pay for it.
‘And the ward will miss you.’
Often on a ward there’ll be a patient who becomes advocate for the others. On mine I’d become that. ‘Only because I hear too much,’ I told him. ‘I don’t unload somewhere, I’ll break.’
‘Just remember what I told you.’
‘You’ve told me so much.’
He looks hurt, so I say: ‘Tell me again.’
‘Carol, you do hear. You empathize.’ Schizoids don’t, or not that much, he repeats. They rebel, because they fear. They can be violent, or retreat. ‘And violently intelligent. But with people—they’re hard to unplug.’
I don’t go for all of that, I tell him. Not from what I’ve heard on the ward. ‘I think: sane or mad, or intermediate like I’ve been—everybody has spells of everything.’
They don’t like to hear the word ‘mad;’ they have so many more complicated words for it. So he just shakes his head. ‘You’ll find danger.’ He comes down hard on the ‘find.’ ‘So watch out for yourself, hah? And drop me a card now and then.’ He hands me a packet. ‘Don’t open it now. Only postcards.’ We shake. He grips me by the shoulders and almost hugs; it’s a lenient hospital. And I’ll remember what you’ve told me too, Carol. It’s a deal.’
I’d used to stare at the sky outside his window, while we talked. He never called me on it; he knew I was trying to get my colors back. But this last time he can’t resist asking what color the sky is that day. Actually it is the same gray I always see, like they say a dog does. But I say: ‘The sky outside a locked window is always criminally blue.’
I am still on my bench. In the walking world it takes no time at all for a bench to become one’s own, and this is rarely disputed among us, although in Central Park’s upper Babyland the nannies may glare. Meanwhile, the crowd in the theater has dispersed, easing out past me, chatting its judgments, in the furtive decibel that audiences do. They have their destinations, what is mine?
Perhaps I should send the hospital board, which was so reluctant to release me to nowhere, a list of my addresses since? Dozens of them, no doubt showing my own patterns on a mythical pedometer, from that arch under a bridge not Brooklyn’s, to the niche behind that construction hut on Roosevelt Drive. I am an architect’s reference book of ignored ruins, boarded-up row houses, forgotten monuments. But a bench is for the interval anybody might snatch; seated on it I’m a common profile. I never sleep on a bench.
Maybe I should go Mungo’s route? Seek the salvation of a church? Not to nestle inside or to take its communion, but to bed down against its wall, through which there would surely be some seepage of the good? But the trouble with churches, even those too poor to have garden borders, is that some volunteer sexton can always be found to sweep sternly clean all niches and porches, and of course lock the door. If they knew the biblical needs of those like me, perhaps they would not sweep.
… Once, when I was in the halfway house and coming back after curfew found the door locked, and unanswered as well, which they had warned me of, I had found such a church. In the mist from the harbor I could just see its steeple—not too grand. At its base, a rundown stone border, no hedge. But in the rear, dusty but not garbagy, just the cul-de-sac for my kind. Some past sojourner had even left a coned smut of ashes from a fire.
When I woke, a man with a round collar was bending over me. ‘Will you have coffee inside?’ he said, ‘or would you prefer it out here?’ My neck was stiff from resting on my backpack, but I could still stretch it. ‘The steeple is grander than I thought,’ I said, in apology. ‘It considers itself a cathedral,’ the priest said, smiling. ‘With accommodation for all.’ I said I would come in for the coffee, but not stay. And what do you know—it was he who said ‘Thank you’.…
But this is another city. And I’m out of touch. Having a pad will do that to you. Or a hang-out—even one that had no membership.
What I’ll have to cope with now is that I do have my memory back. A headful, heavy with chartings and allusions. And with a need to see how things will turn out. I remember. How half of memory is the urge to tally destiny. However humble that girl back there was, she had a taste for dynamite. Wow.… Page Ms. Mickens. Ms. Bryna Mickens. I even remember your first name. On your bracelet, in gold. I had aliases once, a whole charm-bracelet of them. Wind-chimes, that’s all they were. Telling me of lands I hadn’t come from. And when it was time to blow.
Hello, Mickens. I’m Carol Smith.
I am still lounging there, as a stage door allows, and smiling at how I handled that, when this freak emerges. Blushy red-powdered cheeks, eye pencil, tufts of papery grass and flower buds in the hair. A gray running-suit.
‘Go on—’ I say. In the genteel voice of Dedham, yes. I mustn’t be ready yet for what-the-fuck. ‘It’s Wall.’
It grins. Underneath is Martyn. ‘What d’ya know. Stage-door Jane. Am I to take this as a compliment?’
I blush. In depression one doesn’t; there’s not much empathy even for oneself. ‘I left before you came on. It all came back to me.’
‘Yeah, it does affect people that way. A good play.’ He scratches his neck, picking a plastic flower from it. ‘But backstage, the sinks are jammed. All two of them. No dressing rooms. Half the production is from the Warsaw underground. They’re not on to union rules.’
Neither am I yet. I’m not in the union I was. I’ve lost the street-savvy. I’m not able to slouch off. I never could snarl, though sometimes I could confront. And he’s looking at me that easy way, hands on hips. ‘I had a kind of revelation, I guess. I mean—recovery.’ Trippy tongue, Carol. But yes, that’s what you had.
‘Jesus. Didn’t know it was that good a play.’ Bending over, he pulls a long, floaty clump from his head. Waves it at a cop just then passing us at the curb. The cop waves back.
‘That the cop on the beat?’
‘One of them. Why?’
To laugh like I am. To laugh, any old way. At seeing a cop wave friendly-like to a painted man pulling out his hair. ‘I’m just seeing the advantages of art.’
He flips me a salute. I watch while he cleans the blacking from his face. He’ll get any remark I throw off. And easy does it; he seems to have no guardedness, no need of that. How are these people made? And he gives off like sex doesn’t have to be involved; I don’t have to think of that.
Like with most persons now you have to identify your gender at the outset—even if you’ve never had a doubt about it. Indicating what satisfactions you pursue. And whet
her or not you would pursue those with the man or woman or gay you’re talking to. Even on the ward, that shadow play went on, if only verbally. Until, down the drug-clotted hours, we lost all the structure of our lives except the ego we were burdened with.
I have to stand still in all this clarity. And what do you know?—I can.
He has picked off the last greenery from his head. ‘Should’ve had a wig. But they couldn’t spend.’
‘You can stand in the street with daisies sticking onto your scalp and not mind?’ I say. ‘That’s because you’re not a freak inside.’
‘My country doesn’t think so.’ He slaps his forehead. ‘What time is it?’ His wristwatch is blurred with scratches; it has been places. ‘Past four. Gotta get a paper. News I expect. No news-stand around here.’ I can see he doesn’t want to leave me here. ‘Want to walk along?’
Does he guess I’m a walker? Wouldn’t put it past him. ‘Okay.’
He points us north. It’s Deadsville down here: boarded-up shops not even broken into. Sunday, but no church anywhere. And not a soul but us.
As we head off I’m wondering what kind of news he’s waiting for.
‘Home,’ he says, as if I’d asked aloud. ‘I’ve got a mother, a half-brother down there.’
‘I rallied once for South Africa. Anti-apartheid, I mean.’ The scent of packed bodies washes over me like a vinaigrette. Left of me, back there, a man’s upflung arm. On the dais a sea of heads sway, as a speaker snarls a quote in what must be Afrikaans. Right of me, a woman protrudes her tongue.
‘Boston. Yes, that helped,’ he says.
‘How—? Ah, you’ve caught my accent.’
We slog on.
‘My mother’s been anti all her long life. My brother, a police chief, a rabid separatist. But, dammit all if they haven’t become allies, now that we’re legally free of the old scourge. Neither of them willing to concede that we are.’
In the Slammer With Carol Smith Page 10
