Last Rights

by Lynne Hugo

  My tears came up to meet hers. No daddy and a crazy mother, and no clue which happened first.

  THE INTERMEDIATE PATIENTS had been doing an embroidery project. “That’s not how you do a daisy,” Lois had corrected me and taken over teaching the patient with whom I’d been working, dismissing me with a gesture of her hand. I moved across the room to sit with another patient, but she took up grilling me about my courses and books in a cultivated voice that carried across the room, her comments imbued with learning. She was, she said, currently interested in the experimental use of certain of the B vitamins in the treatment of schizophrenia. “By the way,” she said, as though it were casual, but searching me, “did you remember to bring that book you said you’d loan me?” When Rachel came in toward the end of the session, Lois’s face was blotched and tear-tracked. I’d said I had forgotten the book again, and Lois had begun to cry. “I don’t have any other way to get it. I can’t get any books I want like you can.”

  “You don’t want to loan Lois your book, do you?” Rachel said after the patients had been dismissed to return to the ward. Her inflection was not questioning, but she spoke gently and privately. I felt a flush creep up my neck and face.

  “No, it’s okay, I just keep forgetting,” I said. Rachel shook her head slightly and touched my hand. Just then, the Good Humor truck pulled up the driveway of the staff residence, sounding its bells and music for staff members who were off duty or on break.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ll buy you an ice cream and we’ll talk.” Some of the patients were crowded around the window looking at the truck through the bars that striped every view, and talking about Creamsicles and Popsicles and nutty cones. Lois’s forehead was pressed against the upper glass. She pulled it away, still teary, leaving a smudge of oil there, as though she’d been anointed and was leaving that vague mark of her life.

  “No, thanks, Rachel, really, I just forgot. I’ll bring the book next time I go home.”

  That afternoon, perhaps because of the wilting heat, the Good Humor truck came back, slowly circling the narrow driveways between and around the buildings. Doubtless, the driver was looking for staff members, many of whom did run out to get themselves something, but it was torment to the patients—who had often no money and couldn’t have gotten beyond the first locked door anyway if they had—to listen to the bells and be left to their longings. Sometimes the image of my mother as a patient here came to me and I’d shake my head to clear it.

  Even on the third floor, where I sat with Ella, we could hear the ice-cream truck clearly. Ella struggled to reach her pocket and pressed a damp dollar like a fern into my hand.

  “Won’t you go get me an ice cream? Get one for yourself, too, and keep the change, dear, for your trouble. I’m so hot, I can just taste it, can’t you? Wouldn’t that be one nice thing?”

  It was absolutely against the rules, but even now I can feel how much I wanted to please her, this old woman with tufts of sad, gray-white hair whose forehead and neck glistened with perspiration in the heat accumulated in the ward like a kingdom uncome, who stroked my arm and called me a sweet girl. “Wouldn’t that be something nice?” she repeated.

  I glanced at the door of the lounge, where the staff seemed catatonic themselves.

  “I’ll try, Ella. Don’t tell where I went, though.”

  It was a long trip, unlocking and relocking doors and waiting for the rickety elevator that stopped at each floor on the trip down, the wide expanse of dead lawn to cross and return over, brittle brown grass crunching beneath each step as though even the memory of green had been killed. Before I was back inside the building, a watery little stream of cool vanilla had leaked from beneath its chocolate casing and reached my finger. I shifted the ice cream to my left hand and licked my right. As my tongue mopped it, the liquid was already warm. The elevator was crowded and on each floor white-clad staff listlessly and unhurriedly pushed the hold button as someone approached from a distance calling “Going up.” On the fourth floor, three doors to unlock and relock behind me; through an open window I could hear the tinny song of the Good Humor truck pulling out and fading like follow me away, follow me away, to anyone who could, cutting out whenever the truck hit a bump, as though iron bars sliced the sound as it entered.

  Ella wasn’t where I had left her. As unobtrusively as possible, I checked among the patients staring blindly at steady static on the TV or slumped sideways, asleep in their wheelchairs in the dayroom, the bathroom and finally, the ward where narrow empty cots lined the walls. I found her there; she’d wheeled herself a laborious distance so as not to be caught with the ice cream. “Therese,” she said, “Therese,” as I walked toward her quickly, dread-filled, turning the stick to catch the rapid drips. I would have done anything to get that ice cream to her intact, but like dread’s foretelling, it plopped off the stick onto the floor in front of her even as she reached for it, even as I tried to catch the sticky mess with my other hand. A blob of vanilla flecked with shards of chocolate coating spread on the worn tile between us. I sank on the bed and lifted the hem of my skirt to hide my face, and pressed it hard against my eyes. When I could open them to look at her, tears had reached the corners of Ella’s cracked lips, wetting them to a shine, and she licked them. More ran down as she said, “It wasn’t your fault, what happened, Therese, it wasn’t your fault.”

  That night, as usual, I cleaned my infected earlobe with alcohol. As usual, too, when I replaced the bottle on my nightstand, I noticed the spine of The Mind Alive where it lay beneath a short stack of books and resolved again to take the book to Lois if morning came. Then, as I’d been doing all summer in order to sleep in the torpor, I soaked a towel in the coldest water the naked sink in the corner of my room would pipe and spread it across my pillow. Someone might have thought it was crazy, that pillow, as sodden as if the tears of a life might never dry; as if night after airless night any woman might lie alone on top of sheets, grieving for all she’s lost or never had; as if any woman might try for the cool dream of ice cream in such a night, the tinny song in her mind repeating and repeating.

  13

  MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE, I wanted a man. Or, more accurately, a man who would become a husband. I was a relentlessly serious young woman; all the dating stuff was just preliminary and an enormous waste of time if it wasn’t aimed like an arrow at the altar. Every man—well, more accurately again, every boy—I met, I sized up and rejected on the grounds of his marriage potential, and by that summer, I already knew it was going to be tough. He would have to fit in with my family, difficult for anyone who lived on the right side of the boundary between rational and irrational, and loving me enough to even try could be equally problematic. Maybe part of what took me to Rockland was my cross-country trip with Mother the previous year. Perhaps it had begun to occur to me that a man with a certain type of experience could help me help her. I still thought that if she were happy, I could be, too.

  I first saw Joshua in the staff cafeteria, winding overcooked spaghetti around his fork, and asked if he was saving the seat next to him for anyone, a ridiculous ploy since the cafeteria was nearly empty. We struck up a conversation and after that, I began timing meals to be able to set my tray next to his. Within a few days he was seeking me out if he’d been delayed or my timing had been off. It wasn’t his looks that attracted me: only a little taller than my five-five, he had intensely curly hair, lackluster brown, and a short, sparse beard which got even thinner as it crawled up his cheeks to meet his sideburns. His eyes were an indistinguishable gray-blue, small and blinking at daylight like a nocturnal animal behind his glasses. He told me he’d been clean-shaven until he came to Rockland as a social worker, but thought he needed to look older than twenty-four because as “Discharge Planner,” he had to deal with patients’ families and community businesses. I had answered that a five-year-old would look old enough because as best I could see no patients were ever discharged, which elicited a pained look and a detailed explanation of why that was
incorrect. I reined myself in to his earnest humorlessness. It was the seriousness of him that was important after all.

  And, besides, there was that universal honey to draw me to him, deadly and irresistible. I’d seen him looking at me, and could tell that he found me attractive. Take a woman who’s scared enough, and she’ll marry a man she can’t stand if it’s plain he finds her desirable. But I didn’t marry Joshua Levertov, in spite of the fact that he met the basic criteria. Mother saw to that long before the question could have formed on his tongue. It’s just as well. He had feminine hands and blew his nose ostentatiously and often; he would have driven me insane. That’s the truth, but on the other hand, if I had married him she would still be with me. I never would have really loved him, and wasn’t that what finished it after all? Of course, I didn’t know that then. I try not to recriminate anymore, to stop adding item after item to the list of all I didn’t know.

  “BUT DOESN’T IT SOUND like an enormous job to you?” Josh asked plaintively. “I mean, don’t you wonder how one social worker could plan out lives for every patient within thirty days of discharge?”

  “Yes, yes. Do tell. How does one superman handle it all?” I was still occasionally trying to be funny.

  Wounded, he set down his fork and considered his answer. I swatted at a noisy black fly circling my tray, and realized I had gone too far. Not many people were in the huge dining hall because it was late, twilight already, and the sky darker than it should have been with incipient thunder.

  “Josh, I’m sorry. I’m just hot and tired and sick of being hot and tired. Do you think it’s going to rain?”

  “You should want to know about this, Ruth. If you go into social work…”

  “I’m not going into social work, though.”

  “It’s better money than O.T., and there’s a lot more intellectual challenge.”

  I was coming to agree with him about the intellectual challenge, at least here. Theory seemed dog-eared on a good day. I couldn’t really see that I was doing anything but keep patients busy doing elementary school crafts for a little bit of the day so that the important work of mopping the dayroom floor and sanitizing the toilets could be accomplished. Still, I couldn’t let him go unchallenged.

  “What exactly do you know about occupational therapy?”

  “Sand tables. Fingerpaints. Leather tooling.”

  I tried to act like a woman, after all. “Yep. That’s about it,” I said, squeezing out a smile like reluctant toothpaste. “So what would a social worker do with someone like Lois? Up on O. T., we let her pound sand. Literally.”

  “She’s that big woman you’ve got on Intermediate? Loud and bossy? I only saw her a couple of times when they rotated me through for orientation.” Josh had gone back to picking at the beef noodles on the heavy institutional plate which he’d lined up neatly with side dishes of canned beans and a lettuce salad. Sweat had plastered the edges of his hair to his forehead.

  “That’s the one.” I was uncomfortable about Lois, and not only because of the book. She was so confident, so sure she knew The Truth on any subject. How could that not make me squirm in recognition?

  “As I remember, Lois is a personality disorder, but I don’t know what brought her in to begin with. Some manic depressive symptoms? I can’t remember. A psychotic episode, maybe. Or a major depression.” He used two slender fingers of each hand to put quotes around the diagnosis. “She’s a tough cookie. Personally, my discharge plan would probably include setting her up for a date with Jimmy Hoffa. Buy her some cement shoes and suggest she meet him for a nice swim with the fishies.” He laughed then, softening it. “Usually personality disorders aren’t hospitalized for long unless they’re suicidal,” he said. “People like that are pretty destructive, especially with other people, but the thing is, the prognosis isn’t very good.”

  “Why not?” I tried to remain casual. I couldn’t eat, though, and pushed the plate to one side.

  “Because therapy just doesn’t usually work and neither do drugs. It’s real hard to move them. And they’re incredibly manipulative…So, anyway, when am I going to meet your family?” he said after a beat of silence, mollified by my having asked him about a patient. Josh reached across the sticky table and put his hand over mine. I wanted him to do that, but when he did I always chafed and would suddenly have to do something that required my hand be moved as soon as I decently could.

  I wanted to probe for more about Lois. “Just finish what you’re explaining. So what happens to someone like her?”

  “Lois? I don’t know. Sooner or later, someone will pronounce her cured and we’ll turn her loose. How long has she been here?”

  “I don’t really know. Over thirty days, obviously, but I got the impression it was pretty long. I can ask Rachel, or look in her chart.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Maybe she’s been in and out. Sometimes their families try to get them back in when they can’t take anymore.” Josh laughed then, which bothered me as much as anything he’d ever done. “Anyway, back to us. When am I going to meet your family?” he asked, wiping his mouth on his napkin and then running the crumpled paper up and over his forehead. “Whew. Wouldn’t you think the state would take pity and air-condition this place? At least for the staff? Maybe I can go with you this weekend?”

  “Right now, it’s really only my mother. My brother is at the University of Colorado, remember? But I wasn’t planning to go home this weekend.”

  “Wow. Why not? This is the second weekend you’ve stayed here.”

  “I thought maybe you and I could do something special. And Sandy wanted me to come to her house for dinner one night, too. You know, her family’s only a half hour from here, and she’s got her mom’s car this week.” This was dishonest. I wasn’t going home because after the earring incident, Mother had withdrawn again, back to the desolate place she’d visited so many times, and had cut only curt, thorny phrases when speech was unavoidable. I’d known that leaving before Sunday night would be damnable so I had stayed, enduring the punishment of her silence and tears. When I left, though, I had flat-out lied to her, saying that I’d been asked to work the next few weekends because the chronic ward was short staffed. “It’s because of vacations,” I’d earnestly assured her. I’d never done this before, lied strictly for myself, I mean.

  She had looked right through me and made no response. Since returning, my insides had been raw and unfamiliar. I’d begun rereading The Mind Alive, trying and hoping—without wording it so—to distinguish Mother from Lois. It was always a guilty balm, too, to go to Sandy’s, whose home reminded me of Suzanne’s. Settled. A made life that might hold a person in place. Her own bedroom with mementos tacked up: swimming medals, play programs, pictures of laughing teenagers. Pink curtains that matched the dust ruffle and quilt on her bed. Cranberry throw rugs on polished hardwood. Feminine, white furniture. A dressing table with a white skirt, edged with eyelet. She teased her mother and father. And, of course, Sandy’s engagement ring still flashed its reassurance to her like a personal word from God every morning and night. She knew what her life would be and it was a life she wanted. So when I saw her kiss Mark, I studied her face. She liked it. She was normal. Maybe I could be, too.

  “Great,” Josh responded. “What would you like to do? Dinner? A movie? Dinner and a movie?” This was good; he’d pay, for one thing, and these were normal things to do.

  “Whatever you’d like best.” I wanted him to like me. With a gesture of apology, I slid my hand from beneath his to revisit my cherry pie, which had a hard, uninspired machine-crimped crust. The filling had a perfumy aftertaste, terrible, hardly a passing resemblance to anything natural.

  SATURDAY NIGHT WE HAD dinner at a highway steak house, inexpensive enough that we sat in vinyl booths at a table set with a plastic tablecloth. Still, a single candle burned in a Mateus wine bottle, its wax dripping green over and between the bumpy ridges left by red and blue forerunners, and a track of popular music played softly for background. I re
solutely ignored “I’m Not in Love” and tried to think of “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” as applying to Josh and me, even though it was Sandy and Mark’s signature song. I was not uncomfortable. In fact, I was as comfortable as I’d been with anyone since Roger. Maybe I even realized it a little then: I was looking to replace my brother, too.

  “So what do you plan to do in the future? Is glorious Rockland your career home?” I asked the loaded question lightly.

  Josh’s voice was earnest, his look direct at my face. “That depends on what happens between you and me.”

  I nodded stupidly, not sure if he meant what I thought he might, the possibility that we would become serious about each other. I looked at him closely, trying to decide if I was in love with him. Or could be, at least.

  “I mean, if something were to develop…” he added. He’d worn a jacket and tie, not as great a sacrifice as it might have seemed if the restaurant weren’t air-conditioned, but a sign, nonetheless. I’d worn one of Sandy’s sundresses, too, a light green that she wanted me to keep because, she said, it brought out my eyes.

  Another nod from me. “My mother,” I began. “My mother…well, it’s sort of unusual, she’s raised me and my brother alone, and I owe her a lot. What I mean is, I need to take care of her.”

  His turn to nod. “Of course. That’s the right thing to do.” A good answer, I thought. He reached for my hand. “I really like being with you,” he said.

  I stroked his forefinger with my thumb and gave the rest of his hand a slight squeeze.

  “Is the difference in our background a problem for you?” he asked.

  To the contrary. The night before, I’d gone to Sandy’s. Her father and brother and Mark had attached yarmulkes to their heads with bobbypins before her father had begun a ceremony of candles, prayer and wine. The ritual seemed richly incomprehensible to me, trustworthy, a down quilt into which I could sink and rest like a cared-for child. “No, I’d like to study Judaism,” I said. “I mean, I think it’s beautiful.” That statement exhausted my total concept of his religious and cultural heritage, but the mystery of it contained the potential for answers.