Since You Ask

by Louise Wareham

  He flicked a tiny spider from his leg.

  'We should go dancing sometimes, get a group together.'

  That would never happen.

  'Maybe,' I said.

  I sat at the edge of the pool, my feet in the cool water and my shirt open. Bobby came running from behind me, taking a beautiful dive: long and shallow and graceful. A young couple at the far end had their arms around each other. She was wearing a huge diamond engagement ring. I hoped I never wore a ring that flashy ever.

  'Very nice,' I said to Bobby.

  'Thanks,' he said. 'Harvard diving team, actually.'

  He looked good in the pool. The sunlight and the chlorine brought out his eyes. He swam over to me and took hold of my ankles. 'Don't,' I warned him suddenly when I saw he wanted to pull me in. I had my vial in my shirt pocket. 'Don't,' I said again, when he ignored me.

  He wasn't going to stop. I could see it in his eyes, the way they lit up suddenly from the challenge. Then I kicked at him, meaning to splash him, but hitting him instead. 'Jesus,' he said, pulling back from me.

  He got out of the pool and the young couple was staring. She had diamond stud earrings to match her ring—just like her mother, I bet.

  Bobby went off and got us iced tea. When he came back, I was in a deck chair, smoking.

  'I'm sorry.' I was too. I hadn't meant to kick him.

  'You're a little edgy.'

  'I know.'

  'What is that?'

  What is that? I couldn't stand people who asked, What is that?

  I shook my head. 'Nothing,' I said.

  'How was it with Bobby?' my mother asked that night on the telephone. I felt terrible, letting her down. 'It was fun,' I said

  'Do you think you'll see him again?'

  She was so hopeful, I felt sick. 'I don't know, Mum,' I said, and she went quiet.

  LAURA

  Dear Betsy,

  I only wish you had come to me years ago and told me about Raymond. I can't understand why you didn't, nor why, even now, you keep so much from me. I know Doctor Keats says we shouldn't discuss these things too much between us, at least not now when the past is so upsetting to you, but I want you to know that I am on your side, if there are any sides to this. I don't know what Wayne told you about him and me—but it hardly matters, at least to me. What matters to me is you, that you get well again and come back to us.

  In a hospital, they say you 'recreate' your outside world. This is known as Mapping and means, for example, that if you have two friends and one enemy on the outside, you will make two friends and one enemy on the inside. Keats says I choose people who take the 'focus' off me—standouts like Sylvia in high school, who couldn't walk down the street without people staring at her, or Robbie, the art dealer from Long Island who plays guitar with me on the Dobson porch. When the nurses found out that Robbie had bought me a skirt in the gift shop, they complained; they said one of Robbie's ways of Mapping was to take care of people like me.

  Then there is Jo—Jo who would be beautiful if she were well, but who is not well, who is twenty-eight and looks old: her body clumsy from meds, her face lined, and her hair the color of dull bark. We met in Main House, in the lounge. My blood pressure was too low, from my medication, and I was on the couch eating Saltines. Jo was at a table, mixing cans of cranberry and pineapple juice in a cup of crushed ice. She had such tremors, she held her cup with two hands. The red and yellow juice stained her mouth.

  'What are you reading?' she asked.

  'The Crack-Up.'

  She lowered her cup, running her tongue around her mouth. 'Good book.'

  There is only one question you should answer 'No' to at Fairley. This question is, 'Do you ever hear voices?' To hear voices means you are not just depressed, you are not just in trouble, or exhausted, you are here forever.

  Jo doesn't mind this. Jo says, 'Yes.' Jo says, 'Yes, I hear voices and I am possessed.'

  Dr. Keats says Jo is schizophrenic and that most schizophrenics stay that way. Before she became schizophrenic, she was an English major at Smith.

  It was Jo who told me that I was starting my sentences at the end and my stories in the middle. Because of this, and other confusion, I am on Haldol. This is a drug for psychotics, though I am not psychotic, Dr. Keats says. I am 'scattered.'

  I feel scattered; I feel scattered around and cast about.

  Afternoons are slow. We have Art Therapy and Occupational and Rec. Alcoholics sneak off in couples into the woods. Depressives set up deck chairs and read books about trauma and abuse.

  In the pool, I float around in a Christ-like position. Tara comes by in a cream-white bathing suit, padded like something from the 1950s. People say Tara's husband is in the mob because he visits her in a cream-colored limousine and doesn't get out. Also, Tara has a woman bodyguard and every day her room is filled with pink and white canna lilies.

  'Dunhill?' she asks me, sitting on the pool's edge.

  I am doing breaststroke.

  She dips a toe in the pool. Her toe polish shines like a tiny red traffic light.

  'You're swimming.'

  'Yes.'

  She is here for alcohol and cocaine and Fiorinal, a headache medicine. Or maybe she is just here because her husband wants her to be. That's what some people say.

  Sammy comes in and calls out that Dr. Keats wants to see me in Dobson House. I wrap a towel around my waist and squeeze water from my hair. Keats is with Nurse Caroline at the nurses' station.

  'You didn't tell me you fell over this morning,' Keats says. The living room is empty green light falling through the trees onto a yellow couch set.

  'I'm sorry. I forgot.'

  Caroline puts her arm around my shoulder.

  'How are you, sweetie?'

  In Dobson House, when I was in a bad mood, she used to come up to my room with crushed ice and a can of diet soda, which underweight girls weren't allowed.

  'How's the big house?' she asks, taking my blood pressure.

  'It's okay.'

  'Are your parents coming up again?'

  Everyone asks about my parents, once they have met them.

  'Maybe.'

  'Eighty-sixty,' she tells Keats. 'The heat affects her.'

  'I think we should try some Ritalin.'

  I like being watched over. I like it that everything I say and do—every tiny piece of information about me—goes to Dr. Keats.

  'Is that all?' I ask, dripping pool water onto the green carpet. Keats takes my hands. My fingers are cool against his hot palms. I know everyone is supposed to fall in love with their doctor, but I know, too, that I am not everyone.

  'No tremors?' he asks.

  He is about 5'10", the same height as Beck and also Henry. 'No.'

  He smiles. 'Good. No more swimming today.'

  Tara is outside with her bodyguard. 'Here.' She hands me a carton of Dunhill blue. 'For you.'

  We smoke in our deck chairs by the Rec. Porch. The Dunhills last a long time, like Ray's English cigarettes.

  'Is your name really Tara?'

  'Delores.'

  John McCaney comes out of Rec. in a damp T-shirt. He wipes a towel across his face, which is wet from sweat. 'Ladies.' He pulls a chair over to us, sitting at our feet.

  His limbs are long, covered in reddish blond hair. The sun is in his eyes so he squints.

  'Isn't she pretty?' John asks Tara.

  A rush goes through me, like a ray of sun. 'She is,' Tara says.

  'The two most beautiful women,' he says, placing his hands on our ankles. 'And I'm sitting with them.'

  In the gift shop, I buy my mother a pair of earrings. Actually I charge them, because I don't have any money but they are cornflower blue and she will like them. She is easy to buy for, because she likes anything feminine: soaps, bath salts, scarves. Once, on Mother's Day I bought her three baby dolls and tied their hands together: one boy one girl, and another boy. This made her cry for some reason. I have only ever seen her cry a few times: in the hospital when I was
ten, the day Raymond left for Antigua, then the last time, the day she brought me into Fairley Nurse Caroline had unpacked my bag, giving my mother my perfume so I wouldn't drink it for the alcohol. The perfume was Fracas, Wayne's favorite. Wayne had given it to me—and maybe my mother guessed this. Or maybe she was just upset about leaving me at Fairley. At any rate, she started to cry with the Fracas bottle in her hand.

  It has been two months since I wrote to Henry from the Mission Inn in Kansas. First, he sent me my photograph of the tulips. Now he sends me a postcard of the largest concrete Jesus in the United States. On the back is written:

  Dear Elizabeth, Betsy, Liz, Liza, Beth, Bettina, Bets, 'Count up for me those who have not yet come… Gather for me the scattered rain… Show me the picture of a voice;

  … Then I will explain to you the travail that you ask to understand.' Ecclesiasticus 5:36-37

  I hope Henry finishes his thesis. I hope he doesn't end up in a religious cult or Tibet.

  Raymond writes to me care of my parents; my parents send his letter to Dr. Keats and Keats asks me if I want to read it in front of him. I don't, though. I take it up to my room and the windows are open and the lawn has just been cut and smells sweet.

  Raymond's writing is terrible: long and loping. The card is a little corny—a photograph of a lake by moonlight, a small boat tied up at a dock.

  Dear Betsy,

  Here I am in Montana. It is so beautiful sometimes I think I have died. I'm staying with some old friends in this tiny little town. You probably can't even find it on the map. I couldn't. Missing you and thinking of you every day,

  Raymond

  He doesn't mention where he was when the police picked me up. He doesn't even mention whether he knows I am in Fairley.

  I take the card to Morning Group.

  Everyone there—except me—has recently attempted suicide. Meg is twenty-nine and a cellist and stabbed herself in the stomach with a carving knife. When I first came to Group, she said I reminded her of her. It seemed to me that there was a big difference between what she did and my overdosing.

  Gregory is seventy-one and tried to hang himself when his wife died. Robin is from Westchester and Judith is a Jehovah's Witness from the Midwest. Then there is Mary, the teacher who gets electric shock, and Jo. I show Raymond's card to everyone and Lindsey says this might be a good time for me to 'tell my story.'

  I tell them about Raymond, of course: about Raymond and Beck and Frank and me, Raymond and Wayne and me, Raymond and Wayne and my mother and me. Afterwards, no one says anything. They are supposed to say things. They are supposed to sympathize and make me feel better. This is known as 'feedback' and is an important part of our 'program.'

  Finally, Lindsey asks if anyone has anything to share with me. Jo looks at me with heavy eyes. Mary lays her head on her lap. Judith puts her hand on her chest with her twenty small buttons. She doesn't mean to offend me, she says, but why was I pleased to hear from Raymond?

  'Why?'

  Lindsey leans in, looking all concerned, the way she is paid

  'I don't hate him,' I say.

  'But why don't you hate him?' Meg asks.

  'Well, personally, I didn't think we were encouraged to hate people in mental hospitals.'

  The sun falls in patches on the floor.

  'Perhaps what people are trying to say,' Lindsey tells me, speaking too slowly so it annoys me, 'is that you don't have to hate

  Raymond, but after everything that's happened, you might not want to let him get so close to you.'

  'But that's the point,' I say. 'We're the same, he and I.'

  'You are not the same,' Jo says.

  'Yes, we are. We don't like it here.'

  Everyone goes quiet then.

  'You were a child,' Lindsey says finally.

  That's what they always say.

  'It was still me.'

  They don't like hearing that. But it's true. I get up and wave at them all, and then I am out the door.

  'Bad day?' Kenneth asks, opening the car door, and I don't even answer him.

  'What did you expect them to say?' Keats asks, an hour later. 'On the one hand you present Raymond as the root of all your problems—'

  'He is the root of all my problems.'

  'On the other, you see him as a kindred spirit, a romantic figure.'

  'Romantic? I don't think so.'

  'You pass around a card from him as if it is good for you to hear from him.'

  'You think it's not?'

  Dr. Keats shakes his head. 'You go from one extreme to another, which is what Raymond does with you.'

  Do I go from one extreme to another? I walk around the grounds, to the chapel that is always closed. I stand on the smooth marble steps and light one of Tara's Dunhills. It had been so nice when Raymond was a friend to me—when Raymond was, let's face it, a little more than a friend—opening doors, propping me up in the street, holding my hand as we wove through traffic. But wasn't that better than what we had before? Wasn't that better than hating him?

  It was, Dr. Keats says later. 'It just wasn't real.'

  I am bored—but worse, bored by myself and by Dr. Keats, who asks, 'What's going on?'—as if I know.

  On the lawn, I am annoyed at Jo's incessant talk of God. I am annoyed that it is so hard to make a string bracelet, weaving together red and orange and yellow thread from Occupational Therapy.

  In Art Therapy we are drawing 'how we feel,' and Robin draws a picture that is all black, with one pinhole of light at the center. When she explains that this picture symbolizes her depression, I don't think too much of her. Frankly I always thought that people in a psychiatric hospital would be a little more complex.

  Keats says I have trouble saying no to men because I have low self-worth. I don't see it. I think I have inordinately high self-worth because I can get any man I want, at least for a while.

  Sylvia's buttercup Mercedes gleams on the hot black tar. I watch her swing up to the doctors' office, step out of the car in a white cotton slip of a dress and beige wrap-around sandals. It has been more than a year since I have seen her and she looks more mature, as we said in high school, her blond hair pulled back in a braid.

  'Jesus,' she says, looking at my jeans, my shirt and boots. 'It's ninety degrees.'

  'I should change?'

  'Yes, you should change.'

  I take her up to Main House.

  'Very nice,' she says. 'Colonial.'

  I fetch us apple juice and ice, which we take to my room.

  'What should I wear?' I ask.

  'A skirt.'

  When I was a child, we went to a park called Fairyland. It had a wooden carousel and gliding bars so you could fly through the air. They made cotton candy the grass was thick dark green, and I really thought there were fairies there. I'm glad I never have to go back there, because now I'd know it was just a seedy park, with broken swings and strange people my mother didn't want us to associate with. Luckily with Sylvia, it is not that way.

  'How long have you been here?' she asks.

  'Three months.'

  We stop by the nurses' station to get my meds. On the porch,

  I want to introduce her to Jo, but Jo turns her head away.

  In the car, Sylvia turns on the radio. 'That place gives me the creeps,' she says, as we swing out under the heavy trees.

  'I'm sorry.'

  'Doesn't it give you the creeps?'

  Fairley doesn't give me the creeps at all. I love Fairley.

  'Sometimes.'

  'What happened to you, anyway?'

  'I don't know exactly. A lot of things.'

  'Henry said you were on drugs.'

  'I guess I was.'

  'Remember how we did coke in the basement of school?'

  'Of course.'

  'We were so terrified.'

  In town, Sylvia takes me to a fancy restaurant named Louella's. We have endive salad, trout, and raspberry parfait. It is the kind of lunch you have after someone has died.

>   'Henry has kind of died,' Sylvia says. 'He is born again.'

  'No.'

  'Yes.'

  'He told me he was just checking it out.'

  'Not anymore. He has a girlfriend who is also born again.'

  Sylvia rolls her eyes. 'Her name is Jai.'

  'Jai?'

  'A yogi term. It means victory.'

  I go to the bathroom to take my medication. When I come out, Sylvia has paid the bill. We walk down Main Street and sit under an elm tree. Sylvia is remarkably calm. We are both twenty-four and she is in her first year of graduate school, getting a master's in linguistics.

  'I didn't want any flowers,' she said. 'But I guess you got the hospital.'

  Her hair has come loose; she twists a strand in her fingers as she talks. 'Not to be mean, Betsy, but you slur your words, did you know that?'

  'It's the medication.'

  'Do you really need to be in Fairley?'

  'I don't know.'

  'Maybe you just need some friends.' 'That's possible.'

  'But it's worse than that, right? What you have.' 'Yes.'

  'What is it?'

  I shrug. 'Drugs. Raymond.'

  'Your brother Raymond?'

  'Yes.'

  'What happened with him?'

  'It doesn't matter now.'

  Sylvia nods and takes my word for this. She is like my mother.

  'Don't let anyone pull you down.'

  She doesn't get it at all: It wasn't Raymond who pulled me down, but me who pulled myself down.

  It has been five years since I last saw Frank Ravell, one since Beck. If I could, I would ask them up here and we could walk the lawn, stand under the trees and by the creek beside Bishop House. Beck and I could make love the way we first did. Frank and I would stroll the grounds, him holding loosely to my fingertips.

  'You're so contained,' John McCaney tells me. 'You're like a Jack-in-the-box, all shoved down.'

  'I am not.'

  He is being kicked out for sleeping with a girl in the Adolescent Unit. Still, it is delicious, his body skirting mine, the smell of cut grass and sweet hanging branches, his sly admiring smile. 'Look me in the eyes,' he says, and teaches me how to kiss this way the blue glint of him up close.

  Jo's parents come to visit, bringing her sneakers and underpants and packets of socks. Jo's eyes afterwards are dark and remote. We go to Sunday barbecue at Rec., and it is so quiet, you can hear the flare of a match on a cigarette, the sizzling of hamburger patties on the grill.