Breaking Out of Bedlam

by Leslie Larson

  Me and Jasper’s the only ones left.

  One more thing. It’s hard to put into words, but I’m going to try. Once in awhile—if somebody mows the lawn right when it’s getting dark, and I get a whiff of that smell of grass and the sun’s going down and the dew’s about to break—I remember the feeling I had ever since I can remember, from the time I was the tiniest girl. It’s not happy, or sad, it’s just the feeling of me, of who I was, and still am. Me: Cora Lorene Spring, before I was anyone else, or took Abel’s name I’ve used for sixty-five years now, or had kids and grandkids, or got put away here in this place. Not fat or skinny, or dumb or smart, or rich or poor, but something beyond that. More. Maybe that feeling is God, or my soul. I don’t know, but it’s the reason I’ve managed to stay alive, and still want to be alive, despite everything—even my better judgment.

  THE QUARTERS

  My daughter, Glenda, gave me a roll of quarters so I can tip the girls here if they do something nice for me, like go get me a new towel or clean up a mess I made by accident. I keep them in a candy dish on my dresser. I hadn’t used but a few of the quarters because those girls are paid to do their jobs and don’t need any extra from me.

  A woman down the hall fell and broke her collarbone. They’re giving her Percocet, but that makes her goofy (ain’t that the point?), so she holds them aside and I give her a quarter a pill. I’d only bought four or five when I noticed my stash of quarters was way down. Sometimes I get a little fuddled up, and I thought maybe I was imagining things.

  Then damned if I wasn’t in the bathroom yesterday, standing in the tub and having a nice cigarette from a pack I found in the lobby (I’m not supposed to smoke. But that’s a whole other story), blowing the smoke out the window when that Filipino girl called Angela came in to change my sheets.

  “Mrs. Sledge, are you smoking?” she called out. Like she’d say, “Was you eating dead babies?” or “Was you robbing a bank?”

  Quick as I could, I flushed the cigarette (it wasn’t but two-thirds gone) down the toilet, washed my hands, and put a gob of toothpaste on my tongue.

  “Angela, how can you even begin to think that?”

  She gave me a look to show she knew better, so I decided to give her a little hush money. I went over to the candy dish and there weren’t but four quarters left! That’s when I remembered other things, like how my jewelry box had been askew, and how my closet door was standing open, when I swore it’d been closed when I left for lunch. My underclothes had been tangled up in my top drawer one day, but like I said, sometimes those pills make things fuzzy. Now there’s no denying it. I didn’t let on, though, because for all I knew, the culprit was standing right in front of me.

  “Thank you for your trouble,” I said as I put the quarter in Angela’s hand. I watched her real close. “I know you’re a good girl.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Sledge! You don’t need to do that.” She didn’t turn a hair and looked me right in the eye. If she was the thief, she was one cool customer. But she might have a lot of practice from going into everybody’s room all innocent-like and stealing them blind. It was a little suspicious that I didn’t notice them quarters was gone until now. Maybe she thought she had me over a barrel since she caught me smoking.

  “You keep that,” I said. “That’s for helping me out, because I’m at the mercy of people here. I sure don’t want to make no enemies.”

  “Enjoy those clean sheets!” she said as she waltzed out.

  People come and go in this room like Grand Central Station. Half the time I don’t know who they are or why they’re here. People like Angela coming to clean my room, or bring my mail, or give me treatments. There’s janitors come to change a lightbulb or check a faucet, inspectors making sure the smoke alarm works, and even them candy stripers, high school girls who want to read you the newspaper or clip your fingernails.

  Those last three quarters huddled in the candy dish like scared rabbits. I started to put them in my wallet for safekeeping, but then I had a better idea. I left them there for bait. I’ll get to the bottom of this one way or another. You watch.

  VITUS AND THE CIGARETTES

  Like I said, I’m not supposed to smoke because of my lungs. Besides that, I can’t smoke in my room. Plus it’s next to impossible to get your hands on a cigarette. Same with pills: They dole them out each day, and if you want any extra you have to go to the nurses’ station and get down on your knees and beg. They have to call the doctor to get permission, and if you’re lucky you’ll get one, and I mean one, pill that’s not on your chart. I hardly waste my time anymore. There’s people here who got more pills than they know what to do with and a screw loose to boot. I trade them for whatever I got, sometimes just a stick of gum.

  I’m a grown woman and I’ve been smoking since I was fifteen. So if I manage to get a cigarette by hook or by crook, I go out in the courtyard and have me a smoke. There’s plants out there, and a brick circle in the middle where they put a statue of Cupid—one of those plaster things from Tijuana—and a wooden bench. For a change of scenery I take my book out there and write, and boy have I been writing! I can’t believe it, but this thing is filling up fast. I write like a house on fire, ‘til my hand feels like it’s been pounded by a mallet. To tell you the truth, it’s the only thing that’s keeping me going right now.

  From time to time some busybody with nothing better to do comes strolling past here and wants to know what I’m doing. I tell them I’m writing my last will and testament. That usually gets rid of them. Except for that little Mrs. Cipriano, who reminds me of a spider monkey. She has a mustache thick as Joseph Stalin’s. I lit up when she started to pull up a chair, gave her a shit-eating grin, and blew a cloud of smoke into her poor little shriveled-up face. The old girl can still scoot, I’ll say that for her. Scampered across that pavement like her tail was on fire.

  Much as I write, I’m still not getting to the meat of things. I want to talk about me, what’s happened to me, but I keep getting distracted by the goings-on here. Like today. I’d no sooner got rid of that spider monkey than here comes another one—a man this time, a big one.

  He had on a kelly green sweat suit with white stripes running down the sleeves and legs. I’d seen him a few times from across the dining room, but never close up. Like I said, he’s tall, with a lot of pure white hair. He had sandals on. Sandals! Damned if he didn’t start heading in my direction. I closed this book and stuck it under my thigh. Lord have mercy, I thought. Here we go again.

  “May I?” he said, pointing to the empty space on the bench next to me.

  I shrugged. “It’s a free country.”

  “Finally, I find someone who indulges.”

  He unzipped a pocket of his sweatshirt, pulled out a pack of Parliaments, shook one out, and held it toward me. By that time I was down to the end of my cigarette, so I stubbed it out and took one of his. I wasn’t about to pass up a free one. He lit mine with one of those Bic lighters. I wasn’t used to that.

  “I don’t like smoking alone,” he said. “It’s so much nicer to have company. Vitus Kovic,” he said, reaching his hand out toward me. “Pleased to meet you.”

  He has an accent like Dracula’s. His hand was soft as a girl’s, but a lot bigger, of course.

  “Cora Sledge,” I said. “Where in the world are you from?”

  For the life of me, I can’t remember what he said. Czechoslovakia or Romania or Yugoslavia—one of those communist countries. I snuck glances at him. He crossed his legs at the knee and held his cigarette at the very tips of his fingers. He has dark, deep-set eyes. Not bad looking, not at all. And he talks a blue streak. He was a waiter in some high-class restaurant. Five stars! Nothing like we have here, where waiters are way down on the totem pole. He worked in Germany, France, Switzerland—all over, just about every country you ever heard of. He told me about rivers going through the middle of towns over there in Europe, and little tables where people eat outside, and big
churches hundreds of years old.

  “Ever see any castles?” I asked. I never been outside this country in my life.

  He chuckled. “So many castles, Cora, I’ve lost count.”

  Now, Abel had his good points, but conversation was not one of them. Most of the time I was lucky to get a grunt out of him. I’m not used to a man who chats. It got me talking. Before I knew it, I’d told him how my kids took everything I owned and put me in this place. I told him all about my house, right down to how I kept a red coffee can for bacon grease on the stove.

  He was interested in all of it, asked me where I’d lived, how long I’d been married, how many kids I had. Where did they live? I have to say I was flattered by all that attention.

  “How about you?” I asked. “Ever been married?”

  “Yes,” he answered with a faraway look in his eyes. “My wife died many years ago.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  I wanted to ask more—what happened to his wife, did he have any kin in this country, how he ended up in this hellhole—but I didn’t want to get too nosy. I settled for asking him how long he’d been here.

  “Only a couple of months.”

  I could tell by the way he pursed his lips and stared down at the ground that he doesn’t want to be here any more than I do. “Bad business. Bad business,” he said, shaking his head. He looked up and smiled. “Say, shall we have another cigarette?”

  Well, I was starting to feel funny spending so much time with him there on the bench, but I figured one more wouldn’t hurt. When we were done he stood up and held out his elbow to me.

  “May I escort you to your room?” he asked.

  They got better manners over there in Europe.

  GLENDA COMES CALLING

  Glenda showed up at my door carrying a basket of dried fruit: figs, dates, prunes, and apricots. Once you hit seventy, people aren’t happy unless your bowels are running like a sieve. She set it down on my dresser, breezed over to my armchair, and plunked herself down like nothing in the world was wrong. She was wearing one of her outfits—flouncy sleeves and loose pants you could fit three people into.

  “Well, Mommy, you’re looking nice today,” she said, giving a big smile that showed off the teeth her new husband paid to have capped. “How are you doing?”

  I turned away. I couldn’t stand to see her face.

  “Are you ever going to get tired of giving me the silent treatment?” she asked while she picked up each and every thing on my dresser. I liked to choke when she ran her hand over this book, but thank God she didn’t open it. “We only want what’s best for you,” she said with a sigh. “We found the very nicest place we could to make sure you’re well taken care of.”

  That burned me up, but I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of an argument. “How’s Lulu?” was all I said.

  “Lulu is just as happy as she can be. Alex is taking real good care of her. She loves playing with the kids.”

  She was lying through her teeth. Lulu does not like children and she doesn’t like noise. Since the minute I laid eyes on her, I’ve been able to read that dog’s mind. “I’ve been waiting for you. Let’s go home,” she said when I found her at the dog pound. When we got to the house she sniffed around a little, then looked me in the eye and said, plain as day, “I’m very happy. I might not always be good, but I’ll try my hardest.” And that’s just what she did. Aside from getting into the trash whenever I forgot to close the cupboard under the sink, that dog has been as good as gold. When my great-grandkids come over and chase her around, she comes up to me and says, “This is not my idea of fun. If you don’t make them stop, I’ll have to bite.”

  “We got you this private room so you wouldn’t have to share with anybody,” Glenda went on. “Your meds were way out of whack, Mommy. You couldn’t even walk straight. You were disoriented. We were so worried about you. We couldn’t go to bed at night without wondering whether you were okay. Now you got someone here to clean your room, and make sure you’re getting balanced meals, and managing your meds.”

  All the time she was talking she kept walking around and fingering everything—the sheets, pillow shams, and bedspread she’d bought me in what’s called bed in a bag. The curtains on the window alongside the bed were in the same floral print, blurry purples and pinks that call to mind toilet paper. Then she started messing with the special things I keep on my windowsill: a glass spaniel with two puppies connected to her with gold chains (to remind me of Lulu), a violet in a pot no bigger than a shot glass (the only growing thing in the room), and a picture of my kids taken at Sears one Christmas. Finally, she picked up my crystal.

  I got to take a detour here to tell you about it.

  This rock came from my great-aunt Alpha, who dug it herself in the Ouachita Mountains down there in Arkansas, where my daddy’s family’s from. They’re known for their crystals, some of the most beautiful in the world. People around there wear them, or carry them in their pockets. Say they’re sacred, with magical powers for healing, and for seeing into the past and the future.

  Aunt Alpha, she used them rocks for scrying, or what you’d call fortune-telling. People came from all over to ask her advice or to talk with people who’d passed on. She had a room at the back of her house where she lit candles, burned some kind of smelly brush, and looked into those crystals to make contact with the other world. She smoked a corncob pipe and kept a thousand cats. Us kids were scared to death of her.

  My crystal is what you call a hand holder because it fits right in your palm. It’s quartz, like a big lump of ice. One end is pointed and as clear as water. The other end, where it broke off from the ground, is frosty. It’s called phantom crystal because of the shapes inside it—pictures like the mountains it came from, a waterfall, and a fish. There’s a face with a beard and a broke-off branch. The more you stare into it, the more you see. Pretty soon you yourself are inside the rock, walking between icy cliffs, with that fairy frost swirling around you. Up toward the point, my crystal has two bubbles of water locked in it, like they’re dancing with each other, floating to the top. That water’s been in there forever. Millions of years.

  My daddy gave me that crystal when I was seventeen years old, a few months before I married Abel. That was one of the blackest periods of my life. I was desperate, let’s just say that. Young as I was, I was backed into a corner I couldn’t see my way out of. It’s one of those things I never talked about. Too much pain, and too much torment. But that rock. He gave it to me as something hard, something to hold on to.

  I like to hold it against my cheek or neck, or sometimes my forehead. If you’re hot or have a fever, it feels like a big chunk of ice. If you’re cold, it’s like a hot-water bottle. I feel the life inside it, and the place it comes from, the place where I grew up, the rivers and lakes, and the springs bubbling up through the rocks. This far from home, way out here by this ocean that I never even saw ‘til I was all grown up, I remember the smells of my family and how my ma’s hands felt when she pulled the comforter up under my chin at night.

  Sometimes when I stare into it I see the faces of men I might have married, children I might have had, or houses I might have lived in. I see storms moving in and the sun coming out. Lightning strikes, hoot owls, and car wrecks. I don’t have Aunt Alpha’s gift, but I’ve asked the crystal what’s going to become of me. Or I try to ask those that’s passed over to the other side what it’s like. If they’re happy and what’s in store for me. I hold the rock against my temple and ask the dead ones, my mother and father, to protect me. To use what they’ve learned to guide me and keep me safe.

  Your rock, Abel called it, and that’s what it is. He’d bring it out of the china cabinet to show people when they came to call. He drove me crazy. He kept a bone he’d found while he was digging out the backyard. Just a chicken bone as far as I could see, but that man acted like it fell out of King Tut’s tomb. He always had to sh
ow people something, even if it meant running out in the yard and pulling an orange off the tree.

  I couldn’t help but tease him about the shapes inside. “You don’t see that elephant standing there by the circus tent?” I asked, and he’d stare into that thing ‘til his eyes bugged out. “And them fields with the cows grazing near a windmill?”

  I swear, that man had the imagination of a newt. “Oh, yeah. There it is! I can make it out now!” he might say. He looked real hurt when I snorted and shook my head. Poor old bastard. He must have gone fishing the day they handed out brains.

  “Put that down!” I told Glenda in no uncertain terms. “It’s nothing to be fooling with.”

  That hurt her feelings. She’d always been closer to her daddy than to me, and I wondered if she felt cheated that he died first. People might not know it, but I hate to be a disappointment to her, even though I always am. Who wouldn’t be ashamed to have a mother the size of me who spends half the day in bed? Sometimes I think I should never have had kids in the first place.

  Even though she’s sixty now, I can see the girl standing there chewing the end of her braid like it was yesterday. She’d fasten her eyes on me while I did the housework until I had to yell, “Quit your looking at me! Go out in the yard!” I’m not proud of it now. No. In fact I’m so ashamed I burst out bawling. I just couldn’t help myself. Before I knew it I was heaving and snorting and crying up a storm. I felt like I was coming apart at the seams, like my body was going to fall in pieces on the floor.