I’m taking a lot less than I ever did.
A week or ten days ago, I was sitting on a folding chair right outside my door in a band of sun. It felt good soaking into my bones. One of those Mexican gardeners was working on the lawn mower over by the room where they keep their tools. He’d taken it apart and was down on his hands and knees, tinkering. It was that quiet time about two o’clock, when the residents take a nap or watch TV and the workers have finished cleaning up from lunch and are starting to get ready for dinner.
The gardener had a greasy rag hanging out the back pocket of his green uniform. He leaned back on his heels now and then and wiped his hair out of his face. I wasn’t thinking much of anything when my eyes lit on the gasoline can beside him. You’ve seen them—they’re metal, about the size and shape of a toaster, bright red. I don’t know how long I’d been looking at it when my breath caught in my throat. My chest heaved, my chin wobbled, and before I knew what was going on, I was sobbing. Tears streamed down my face like a river. You know why? Just that goddamn color. Red. The red of that can was the purest, brightest red I’d ever seen. I’d forgotten that color, and right then it all came rushing back to me: those candy apples they sold at our school fair during Halloween way back when, apples I waited months and months for, saving my pennies so I could sink my teeth into that hard candy, shiny as a fire engine, the crust of red glass that shattered into shards when you cracked into it, that crunched into a heavenly mash of spicy cinnamon and tart apple as you ground it between your molars. That red was Ma’s lipstick as she fixed herself up for church, the smell of soap in the air from all of us getting slicked up, and my ma there with her lips parted and her nose inches from the mirror, laying those glossy lines on her mouth while I watched, my heart bursting with love and longing, my own lips tingling like they were the ones being stroked and smoothed with that stick of bright red.
The red of that can brought to mind the frost of blood that covered my little angel the very first time I laid eyes on her and the ember of my cigarette floating in the dark while I smoked alone in my room at night. It was the same red as the kids’ scooter laying on its side in the grass when I got up early in the morning and looked out the kitchen window at the backyard. The red pumps and matching handbag I had right after me and Abel got married, the ones I wore when we drove overnight to Las Vegas to see Crystal get married for the second or third time. Lord, I was young then! I remembered the comb of the rooster that ruled the flock of hens back home and the rain boots Glenda loved so much she wore them rain or shine. All that. And me, too. The stone I’m named after. Coral, that high orange-red like the tomatoes Abel grew every year come hell or high water, those beefsteaks as big and heavy as grapefruits, warmed by the sun, smelling like summer, scenting your skin when you reached in to pick them.
It was just a metal gas can sitting on the ground there next to a gardener fooling with the lawn mower, but that color stood out against the grass and sky like a miracle. I hadn’t seen a color like that in years. That’s when I realized, plain as day, that them drugs was leaving me. I was waking up from a long sleep.
I sat on that metal chair still as a statue, my eyes fixed on that red can, while I thought about all the things I’d missed living in a world with colors as bleached out as a faded snapshot, with now and then just a hint of watery pink or washed-out blue. The sun shifted and a breeze came up. It played in the hair on my arms and the back of my neck. It tickled the creases of my arms and the corners of my eyes like God himself breathing on me. The branches of the trees quivered, the leaves twirled, the clouds slipped across the sky. Everything around me moved and breathed. I was in the middle of it, sitting in the metal chair.
That started me out. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not stopping all at once. That would drive me straight to the loony bin, I know for a fact. But I’m cutting down and keeping better track. I got a system. I keep all the pills in one place instead of stashed all over, and I dole them out little by little. Last week I took one when I got up, one in the afternoon before dinner, and one before I went to bed (along with my sleeping pills). But this week I cut each one in half, and next week I’m going to cut that half in half again. See what I mean? If I get to where I’m feeling real nervous, or like I can’t take it, then I help myself to a little piece of pill, a half or a quarter, depending on how bad I feel. If that don’t help, I take a little more. But those times are getting more seldom, and today, believe it or not, I’ve made it all the way past lunch on just the one pill.
It’s not easy. I wake up in the middle of the night with the sweat pouring off me and the feeling that I been chased up and down dark alleys by an army of zombies. Sometimes the terror in my chest is so strong I have to curl up like a cutworm and pull the blankets over my head. I been that far from buzzing the panic button they have that calls the nurses to come and help you. There’s times when it feels like ants are crawling up and down my legs, or my insides are fighting to bust out through my skin, or my head is a storm of black water swirling like a whirlpool. The last few days something new has started. Two or three times a day I get a jolt in my brain like a thousand volts just shot through it. My whole body jerks. Don’t ask me what that’s about.
Lord knows what’s next.
But I’m noticing things. Little by little. I don’t like to admit it, but before—when I was living alone at home—most of the time I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. There are blanks, things that don’t connect, time I can’t account for. Weeks and months I have no recollection of, scraps of memories that don’t make sense. I was so mixed-up, so confused in my mind, I was hardly there at all. That’s it, the God’s honest truth: I was a stranger to myself, somebody I hardly recognized.
I try to figure out when I lost track of myself. Must have been my late twenties, early thirties. Now that my brain is clearing up, I’m getting to know myself a little now. Thoughts passing through my mind, they’re new to me. Feeling things, seeing things. Like a newborn baby. It scares the living shit out of me. You might wonder, Why now? and believe me, so do I. Something happened to me is all I can say. Vitus is part of it, and coming to this place. Getting to this age of my life. Thinking I got to the end and finding there’s still a ways to go. It’s only these flashes I have, flashes of remembering myself like I used to be, that make me feel that some part of me is still out there somewhere, alive.
Which leads me to the second part of my plan:
2. Get to walking.
Ever since that night I walked up to Vitus’s room, I found out how far I can go by just putting one foot in front of the other one. Let me tell you that seeing the people around here, people with their legs swollen up, or missing altogether, or dangling like limp noodles from their bodies—not to mention the ones stuck in wheelchairs parked in a puddle of piss—has convinced me that, hard as it is, I got to keep moving. They’ll never let me out of here if I can’t get around, so every day I go a little farther, even if it’s just a few steps. I stop and rest whenever I need to, but I’m finding out that I can do more and more.
I walk out there in the courtyard, down the hall, even out to the lobby. There’s always a lot of people hanging around there, those that’s parked in their wheelchairs by their keepers, others that’s waiting for visitors, and all the people coming and going—deliverymen and salespeople, workers coming on or off their shifts, and kin visiting. Like a circus, or a freak show.
A few tattered magazines about five years old are always laying around on the tables. I thumb through them while I watch the people and rest up for the trip back to my room. One toothless old man, Mr. Speck, has tried to escape out that front door so many times he has to wear a plastic band around his ankle that sets off an alarm the minute he steps outside. Before they put it on him, they found him wandering in the parking lot over by Arby’s Steak House. Which goes to show you it’s a human instinct to want your freedom.
3. Get me some new clothes.
I am sick
to death of pastels, elastic waists, and baggy knits.
Why is it that, once you turn sixty, you’re supposed to wear the same colors as babies? Pale pink and powder blue, dingy yellow and that pukey lavender that turns my stomach. You see it all over here: old ladies walking around like wedding mints or Jordan almonds, milquetoast pastels that drive you to the depths of depression.
I want some patterns. Flowers. Stripes or triangles or polka dots. Bold prints. And some bright colors. Scarlet, peacock blue, royal purple. Fuchsia, poppy, watermelon, chartreuse! But oh no. When you’re fat, you’re supposed to wear dark colors. Flat black, navy blue, and shit brown. That’s about it. Otherwise, somebody might notice you.
If the colors aren’t enough to gag a maggot, the styles will. Loose saggy pants that you step into like a barrel, long tops shaped like flour sacks that hang almost to your knees, dresses made of yards and yards of fabric that flap around like a tent. No tucks, no curves, no nothing. You might as well be a zeppelin for all the shape you have.
The worst are them sweat suits. Glenda is determined I wear them. She bought me three of them. One dogsick green, one the color of pus, and one like chewed-up bubble gum. That last one has elephants embroidered on the front. Elephants! And you know what they’re doing? Exercises! Jumping jacks, sit-ups, and touching their toes.
I feel like a cottonball in them, like a used Q-tip, or a big wad of toilet paper. They’re sexy as a cold turd. No man in his right mind would want to look at anybody wearing a sweat suit, much less wonder what’s underneath.
I want dresses that button down the front. Nice collars, maybe a little zipper under the arm, so you can cinch it tight across the bust. I’ve always had nice big boobs. They might be drooping a little low, but if I get the right kind of brassiere I can hitch ‘em up into attention-getters, especially if I get a low-cut dress. That’s what I want. Scoop necks, square necks, and V-necks. Show some skin. A little lace. I want some jewelry, too. Bangles and dangles, a big gold necklace. It doesn’t have to be expensive, just the kind I used to get at the dime store. Rhinestones and glass beads, sparkly stuff. Live a little.
BUT I BEEN going on long enough. All this talk of bangles and baubles is holding me back. I’m getting good at this writing. I can fill pages and pages without turning a hair. But I keep interrupting myself. I want to get back to the real story, even though it hurts a lot more than talking about what color pants I want. If I don’t get it down now, I never will, so as soon as I get back from breakfast I’m going to get at it.
MY PREDICAMENT
You see, I dreamed it first. For about a week that summer of 1931, no matter what I was dreaming, I felt somebody watching, hovering around the edges. I couldn’t see anyone. They didn’t take part in the dream. They were just there with me, seeing what I saw, feeling what I felt. A presence that stayed just out of sight. It was a wonderful feeling, a true blessing, because that loneliness I always had—feeling different, or fat, or not what I should be—disappeared, at least in my dreams. She (even then I sensed it was a she) was there with me, looking out through my eyes. I didn’t understand it, not at first. I thought it was just some new turn my dreams had taken, something I ate, or a passing fancy.
The next clue came in the night, too. First, I dreamed my ma took the rug beater and gave my breasts a good whomping. It hurt so much I went and lay down on my belly in a dry creek bed full of gray rocks the size of cantaloupes. I was tired and wanted to sleep, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t push those stones out of my way enough to get comfortable. All night long I fought those rocks, shoving them right and left, trying to shift around, and when I finally woke up I was lying on my belly just like in the dream, only it was my own boobs I was grappling with.
That morning when I woke up my tits were sore as hell, like they had been dragged up hills and down dales, all over creation. I could hardly touch them. Heavy as millstones. You’d think I might’ve started getting the idea, but I didn’t give it a second thought.
Within a few days I started getting hungry. I’ve always had a healthy appetite, but this was something altogether different. If I just saw food, it was all I could do to keep my hands off it. When it was time to sit down and eat supper, I could hardly keep still while we said grace. The minute we said amen, I liked to broke somebody’s arm reaching for the food. My pride was gone. I shoveled it down like an animal.
The minute I was done eating, I was just as tired as I had been hungry. I felt like I’d knock down anything that got between me and my bed, and if I couldn’t get to that, I’d just lay down wherever I was and fall into a dead sleep. When I woke up it was time to eat again, then it was time to sleep, just like that. Only other thing I wanted was Edward and, though I’m ashamed to say it, I wanted only one thing from him—and I wanted it just as bad as I wanted to eat or sleep. I pawed the ground in front of the house waiting for him to come pick me up, and a couple of times we barely turned the corner before I made him pull over and get down to business.
I was scared, oh, I was scared. I had no idea what was happening to me, but all them urges was eating me up, and I didn’t have the energy to think. On top of that I started being able to sniff like a hound dog. I smelled things far, far away—meat stewing in a neighbor’s house, a dead fish floating in the creek way out yonder, onion grass sprouting in the field, my sisters having their monthlies. The walls smelled like chalk, the floor like pine, sweaters like the sheep they came from. It was like things that had been quiet started yelling all at once, only with odor instead of sound.
My clothes didn’t fit. It wasn’t gradual. It happened overnight. I got up one morning and couldn’t get the zipper on my skirt to close. I tugged my blouse over my sore boobs and wrestled every one of the buttons into their holes. When I finally got it fastened up, I bent over to put my shoes on and the seam down the back ripped open from my neck to my waist. You know what? I still didn’t get it. I was eating so much it made sense I’d be gaining weight, or so I told myself. The last thing I wanted to see was the truth. Who would?
When I missed my period, something I never did since I commenced at twelve years old, I had to take note. Everything I’d been shoving to the back of my mind came rushing out and I couldn’t have been filled with as much dread if I’d walked to the edge of a chasm, peered over, and saw hell itself roiling and churning, waiting for me to fall in. Oh Lord, what a panic! Every day it didn’t start I was more frantic than the last. I couldn’t tell a soul, and I had to go on with my day like nothing was happening: take care of the chickens and the cow, help my ma with the washing and cooking, drag my weary ass up and down the stairs like nothing unusual was happening with my body.
How I begged and pleaded with God! I promised if He’d give me my period I’d never open my legs again. I went to the toilet every half hour to check if it had come. Every little cramp or twitch down there made me dance with joy. But no luck.
Then a funny thing happened. To this day I can’t explain it, but that was when it was like someone hit me over the head with a hammer and knocked some sense into me because I suddenly knew, for sure, that I was in trouble. Deep, deep trouble, the deepest trouble I’d ever been in before. There was no more denying it. That’s when the real nightmare started, when my life got on a track I don’t think I ever got off.
Course we didn’t have no indoor plumbing. You had to follow a dirt path across the yard to get to the outhouse. It passed our kitchen garden and a pile of junk—old cans and jars and some pieces of equipment, plows and the like, we didn’t use no more. It was the hottest time of the year by then, humid, and walking out there to the outhouse for the fiftieth time that day I wanted to lie down on the ground and have it swallow me up. The only thing that kept me going was the hope that, when I took down my drawers, I’d see the blood and everything would be over, everything would be back to normal, and I’d never, ever, sin like that again. So I went out there and sat down and bent over to have a look at my underwea
r, hoping with all my might that I’d started. There wasn’t a whole lot of light, just what came through the cracks around the door and ceiling, so I had to lean over and look real close, and while I was like that with my head practically between my knees, all of sudden something in my nose burst and sprayed blood like a fire hose. It gushed all over my knees and underpants and floor, even on the door opposite, spattering everywhere like someone had been murdered.
Don’t ask me why, but it was a sign to me. I read it loud and clear, as if God himself made an announcement right through the roof of that outhouse. Sister Cora, you have got yourself into a right fix. You have made your bed, now it’s time to lie in it.
That was the end of my smelling things like a bloodhound. From then on I was all stuffed up. I couldn’t smell so much as a house on fire until after my little sweetheart was born. It was the end of my hope, too. Scared as I was, much as I wanted to die as I mopped up my own red blood with the pages of the Sears catalog we used for toilet paper, I told myself that I better get my ass in gear and figure something out. I cried the bitterest tears on earth as I wiped down the walls and floor and threw those crumpled pages down that shit hole, but I finally got knocked out of the stupor I was in. I had to open my eyes and look around. It was a grim sight, to be sure. But there was no time to waste.
Breaking Out of Bedlam Page 12
