I shook my head.
“It’s amazing. You have to try it. We’ll have to try it together. Sometime.”
Pot, another new experience I hadn’t yet had. I couldn’t keep up. And instead of losing my virginity that afternoon, my carefully planned deflowerment, we lay back on his narrow bed and talked about school, our classes, what we were reading. Just like always. There were long silences, when you were absorbed in the music. Talking softly on that narrow bed, curled up together, was reminiscent of the summer before, but different. Because you’d told me about the pot, I felt awkward. Sometimes, in the middle of the conversation, you would jump up and change the record, saying, “You gotta hear this,” or dig through your duffle to find a book and then read me a passage. “Isn’t that beautiful?” you’d ask. I tried to act normal, to react as I had always reacted, but I wasn’t sure when I was supposed to be quiet and listen or when I should keep chatting. I felt left behind, unsure of how to behave with you now.
A more experienced girl might have tried to have sex again, wouldn’t have let the first failure deter her. It would have been as simple as reaching down and touching you gently beneath your white briefs. I could still see a bulge there. But, at that age, I couldn’t do it, could not be the one to initiate it. I was too afraid of rejection. You had decided that our body parts would not fit together any better than the pile of clothes on the floor and I didn’t know how to change that. Occasionally, you got so lost in the music, it seemed you didn’t even know I was there. Your eyes would close and your head would rock up and down in time to the beat. How would I answer Audrey’s and Caroline’s questions back at school? They’d known about my plan to have sex with you. I’d have to lie or admit what happened. Eventually, we heard Mr. Pine in the kitchen, and smelled meat sizzling in a pan.
We sat up, gave each other rueful smiles. “Maybe next time,” you said, and we quickly dressed, me stuffing the offending black panty girdle into my purse. The magic was gone.
I finished the vacation in Chicago in a terrible funk. I barely went out, until it was time to pile into a junky Plymouth with four other people to make the drive back to Ann Arbor. At school, I started to pay more attention to my classes, reading late at night. I decided that I would stop worrying about boys, and focus on being an intellectual. I wore less makeup, acquired several black turtlenecks, and had endless cups of coffee with people I met in classes, even some professors. About a month after I returned from the winter break, I was invited to a party where I smoked pot for the first time, getting lost in my own reverie of music.
In the dead of February, a terrible time of year in Ann Arbor, the gray winter feeling endless and the lovely crunch of leaves underfoot from autumn almost impossible to remember, I came in from my morning seminar in comparative literature and took out my small silver key to check for mail. Inside the cubicle, I found a bonanza. There were several letters and a small notice printed on yellow paper. We all knew that those yellow notices informed us that there was a package to collect from the dorm office. For me, this usually meant a package containing red coffee tins stuffed with homemade cookies or brownies, sent from my mother. My birthday was the next day, February fourteenth. I loved having my birthday on Valentine’s Day. Besides seeming very romantic, people were more likely to remember it. Perhaps there was a package from my aunt Gussie, something sent from the wonderful jewelry store where she worked. I did love receiving presents.
When I presented my yellow ticket to friendly Mrs. Gelfman in the office, she brought out not one, but three boxes. “Quite a haul, my dear,” she said and smiled. “Valentine’s Day. Somebody loves you.”
“It’s my birthday, too,” I told her. “Valentine’s Day and my birthday.”
I looked at the return addresses and saw, with a shock, that one was from Providence. Audrey and Caroline would be in class, so I took the packages upstairs so that I could be alone. First I opened the care package sent by my parents. Inside, in addition to the sweets packed in coffee tins, there was a generous check. My mother’s brownies were still soft and the room became thick with their chocolaty smell. There were chocolate chip cookies, most of them intact. And there was also the round loaf of date and nut bread that was one of my mother’s baked specialties in another, smaller, tin can. This bread was brown and dense, delicious when sliced thin and spread with cream cheese. Aunt Gussie hadn’t failed me, either, sending a small package containing a pair of gypsy hoop earrings, real gold. I ran to the mirror and tried them on. I thought that with my short hair, the hoops made me look elegant, yet Bohemian. With unusual patience, I’d saved the best for last, the box from Providence with my name, and the word “Rocket” written in parentheses after it, scrawled in the familiar blue fountain pen. I unwrapped the package slowly, prolonging the pleasure. Inside was a patchwork bag, the fabrics easily as colorful as and covered with even more mirrors than the one you had worn over your shoulder at the holidays. It was the same design, though the strap was a bit shorter, so that it fell to my hip at exactly the right place. “Happy Valentine’s Day and Happy Birthday,” the note on top of the purse read. “Sorry I was such a jerk in Chicago. We’ll make up for it someday. I promise.” The sparkles from the bag reflected on the walls and beds of the little room, brightening the Ann Arbor gloom.
4
Insanity
The line between sanity and insanity has become blurred as I aged. There were those times in my thirties when I was so exhausted at the end of a long day and the children refused to cooperate and get ready for bed, that I shouted vile things, becoming so enraged that I shook and could not see straight. In short, I acted insane, full of misplaced rage for my innocent children. Later, when I finally got them to sleep and could do what I had wanted to do since I’d come in the door from an exhausting day of listening to other people’s problems—turn on the television and eat a bowl of ice cream by myself, curled up on the couch—I’d think about the awful things I’d said. “You never leave me alone,” I shrieked with absolute venom to the twins. “Can I never, ever get a moment’s peace?” To this day these words make me cringe and I am ashamed.
A few years later, there was the day when their father came to get things out of the garage, boxes I’d retrieved from the storage unit and hadn’t yet had a chance to go through.
“Open the garage, Judith,” he said. “A lot of things in there are mine.”
Seth had all the money in the world back then, while I was broke, scraping by paycheck to paycheck from my county social worker job. I was seething with the unfairness of it all. What right did he have to go through the boxes of kitchen dishes and cooking implements? These were my things. He could afford new spatulas and bowls and mixers. And so, when he wouldn’t leave, I got a knife from the kitchen. Waving the knife, I stood in front of the house and shouted, “No, I’m not opening the fucking garage door. Just get the hell out of here.” Spittle flew from my mouth. I am sure I had never looked less attractive.
“You’re crazy, Judith. Insane,” Seth said with disgust, and slammed his car door and drove off with tires squealing.
He was right, of course. I was insane. Worse, and I’m not positive, because the front door was closed, but it’s possible that Evan and Miriam were peeking around the living room curtain and heard me threaten their father with a knife.
However, when I was nineteen, long before my marriage and divorce from Seth, before I’d experienced the exhaustion of being a single parent, or bouts of mad jealousy because of this husband who left me for a younger woman, I believed there was a clear division between sane and crazy. I had much to learn back then about the thin divide separating sanity from craziness. This education began the summer after we returned from our first years away at college.
You phoned soon after you arrived home from Brown, sounding depressed. “I’m working for my father this summer,” you said. “Ten long weeks. Max has this ironclad rule that at some point, everyone in the family has to put in time at Pine’s Meats. To see where th
e money comes from, I guess. I told him I’d planned to use the summer to write.”
“What did your father say?” I asked.
“He laughed. Said the discussion was over.”
Your experimentation with the incipient hippie life at Brown, which I’d seen the previous winter, was still in bloom. In another year or two, your interest in politics would resurface. You’d realize that in order to change the world, you would likely need to attend law school. Faculty and more experienced friends suggested that when applying to a top-tier law school, shorter hair and a drug-free profile might be the wiser course. You listened. The suits and briefcase of your AZA days would be dusted off. But that summer, at nineteen, you were not yet looking at the long view. You were full of discovery and the thrilling new life you’d found on the East Coast. This exciting new life, however, was apparently not impressing your father.
It was like that for me as well. No matter how much we felt changed by our first year away at school, the world we’d left behind in Chicago continued just as it had been before we left. It’s that way when you’re young. You cannot believe that those back home can ignore the seismic changes you’ve undergone. You wonder if they are blind and deaf.
“What will you do for your father?” I asked, thinking your father might put you in the air- conditioned office of Pine’s Meats, where you could put to use that perfect score on the math section of the SATs, while assisting the company’s aged bookkeeper.
“I’m not sure. But whatever it is, it’s sure to be a ballbuster,” you answered. “That’s what my brothers and cousins all said about their summers at the meat company. There’s no way out of it. My dad and uncle are getting old. One’s got bum knees, the other has back trouble. I’m sure I’ll be hauling ass. Probably lifting carcasses off and on trucks, that kind of shit.”
Some of our more privileged classmates from college went off to family summer homes, places with wisteria arbors and cool evening breezes. Some traveled through Europe. But in our world, summer vacations meant summer jobs. We were expected to spend two months working hard and put money in the bank for the coming year. Even though they had saved for our college expenses their whole lives, neither Max, nor my own parents, understood summers of indolence.
“When you get an education, you can pay for your own trips,” had been my mother’s response when I’d suggested riding through France and Italy on a Eurail pass with my roommates Caroline and Audrey. Traveling abroad was not to be an option.
“So what’re you doing this summer, Rocket?”
“I’ve got a job at a psychiatric hospital,” I answered. “It’s not such a bad place, actually. Part of Northwestern’s med center downtown.”
“Yeah,” you said. “I know the place.” I felt stupid for not realizing that, of course, you did. There was a long silence as we both thought about your mother, Helen, who had been in and out of every mental hospital in Illinois during your childhood.
“Have you decided to major in psychology?” you finally asked, changing the subject.
“Something like that. Social work, I think. For now, I’m just an aide. They call me a psych tech. I start on Monday.”
“We’re both going to need some diversion,” you said. “Me from frozen carcasses, you from the patients.”
We made a plan to go to the beach the following Saturday, after we’d both finished our first week of work. That June, there had been a terrible heat wave in Chicago and temperatures reached into the triple digits, with the humidity equally high. Rain would have been a blessing, but instead, day after day, there was hot, sticky weather, with more predicted all week. Like everyone else in the city, we knew that the only relief to be found was at the beaches along Lake Michigan.
Unlike you, I was actually looking forward to my job. As soon as I’d returned home, I’d gone to a hospital supply store and purchased two crisp white uniforms, as well as a pair of nurse’s shoes, also white, lace-ups with thick spongy soles. I’d shortened the uniforms, which nipped in flatteringly at the waist, as much as I dared. My stockings, although white, had a glistening sheen to them.
My father would drive me to the hospital each day as it was on the way to the army-navy surplus store he owned farther south on Wabash, just past the Loop. Though excited, I was nervous and unsure of how I was supposed to behave around mental patients. When I looked in the mirror that first Monday before we left the house, I gave myself a pep talk. With my white uniform and shoes, I thought I could pass for a real health care provider, not a little girl dressing up for Halloween. I glanced down at my dress and shiny stockings and gleaming white shoes approvingly. Cute, but still professional, I told myself. I’d be fine.
The week began well. By Wednesday, I was telling anecdotes about work to my parents as we sat around the dinner table. I spoke about “my” patients. Imagine my arrogance—a lowly psychiatric technician, the bottom rung in the ladder of mental health workers at the hospital, who’d had no more than two introductory courses in psychology at the University of Michigan, yet spouting insufferably to my family and friends about the diagnoses and pathology of the men and women on that ward.
The teaching hospital was modern and progressive, a five-story structure that faced the lake. There were attractive flower arrangements set into recessed alcoves in the lobby and, on the lawn, a metal fountain containing swans shooting streams of water high into the air. A dark green awning covered the walkway leading to the entrance. It looked more like the expensive apartment buildings located farther to the north on Lake Shore Drive than the mental hospital it was.
Soon after I arrived on the ward each morning, my job was to accompany about ten patients onto the elevator and go to the occupational therapy clinic one floor below. During the day, the patients were exposed to a wide range of activities and therapies: music, psychodrama, expressive dance. The occupational therapy clinic resembled a cheery, well-equipped home economics classroom from high school. There were tables, with vises attached to the sides. Patients worked at these tables on craft projects of their choosing, although the therapist subtly guided their choices.
The occupational therapist, a small woman with dark bangs and a serious demeanor, had informed me that it was necessary for the activity to be properly therapeutic, not just diversional. It was theorized that repressed anger caused the despondency seen in the depressed patients. So, they were encouraged to externalize this anger. For these patients, I would set up blocks of clay. The occupational therapist showed me how the patients were to wedge and pound and energetically strike the clay with their fists in order to get rid of the air bubbles. Most of the time, however, the men and women merely stared balefully at the red lump I’d placed before them, moving their fingers aimlessly through the muck. I went from one group to another, smashing the clay, trying to vigorously demonstrate what the occupational therapist had showed me. The patients ignored my efforts or moved back from the table uncomfortably.
Disorganized schizophrenic patients were given sorting tasks, putting nails and screws into appropriate plastic trays, or sorting the tiles by color. It was thought that repetitive jobs helped patients with schizophrenia order their disordered thoughts. Some were even given a toothbrush and asked to scrub the grout in the kitchen area. I blithely supervised these tasks and chirped words of encouragement as I moved among the patients.
Very early in the morning, even before I’d arrived at work, other treatments had been administered: electric shock therapy, insulin coma therapy. Modern psychotherapeutic medications were still being developed. Lithium, to treat bipolar disorders, was in the earliest stages of research. Although some patients received drugs, the side effects of drugs in those days were problematic. Instead, the hospital offered electric shock treatments. And, for the sickest patients, those who had not responded to anything else, high doses of insulin, high enough to induce a coma, were injected.
When I came onto the unit at eight in the morning, it was apparent which patients were receiving which treatmen
t. Those who’d had the dangerously high doses of insulin injected that morning needed close observation. Their names were written on a chalkboard in the nurse’s station. Glasses of orange juice were kept ready, orange juice being the quickest way to get sugar into the pancreas. While we were down in the occupational therapy room, I had the task of watching for symptoms of insulin overdose. The head nurse told me that these patients might get pale or their skin might become clammy. If that happened, I was to hurry to them with a glass of juice and make sure they ingested it before they passed out.
Other patients, the ones who’d received a massive jolt of electricity earlier that morning, had a vague, confused look. Short-term memory loss was typical in these. Their eyes had a blank, vacant expression, and they would sometimes lose their way in the hospital corridors, not remembering which room was their own. I would gently guide them to where they needed to go, or remind them of the day’s schedule.
After morning activities and lunch, a community meeting was convened in the large, sunny dayroom. Another of my tasks was to set up chairs in a circle for the twenty-five or so patients on the ward, and then go around to each room, reminding people it was time for group. Few of the patients wanted to go to the community meeting. Most turned their faces to the wall.
“Come on, Mr. Nerebaum, time for the community meeting,” I’d say to one elderly man who always took his pants off when he got into bed and lay in boxer shorts with the fly disconcertingly agape. “Let’s get dressed now.”
“Girlie,” Mr. Nerebaum replied, “why can’t you let an old man have some peace and quiet? I’m resting, can’t you see?”
The treatment philosophy of the unit was called “milieu therapy.” Patients, or residents, as they were sometimes called, were encouraged to discuss the day’s events in the group. It was felt that the experience of living and working and creating together would duplicate life on the outside; the patients would learn from their daily experiences on the ward. But most people, except the manic patients or those hallucinating, did not want to talk. Neither to each other nor to the staff.
Love Is a Rebellious Bird Page 7
