Inside Madeleine

by Paula Bomer

  The night before she left, she had persuaded Alicia to get high with her. Alicia had never been high. They sat on the top bunk, Ruthie’s bed, and Ruthie schooled her on how to use the bong, how to use the hit towel. Ruthie explained how sometimes, the first time you get high, you don’t feel it, that you had to try and feel it and then you’d see. Alicia said, “I don’t feel it.”

  Ruthie said, “Take another hit,” and Alicia did, her face all concentration, all hard work, the same as she’d looked over her desk all fall.

  Ruthie was high, but she was always high these days. It wasn’t very special. Watching Alicia get high for the first time was new, exciting even. “You’re feeling it now, I can tell.” Ruthie wrung her hands in anticipation.

  Ruthie looked at Alicia. She hadn’t made one friend at Lyndon that fall. She was the saddest person Ruthie had ever met. “Wow,” Alicia said, her voice coming out in that marijuana-induced whisper. She leaned into Ruthie. “I can see your shadow.”

  This startled Ruthie. She didn’t want anyone seeing her shadow. She didn’t want to have a shadow. Without realizing what she was doing, she slapped Alicia.

  Alicia slapped her back, harder, and then climbed down from Ruthie’s bunk. The two girls lay there in the narrow beds, hearts pounding. Ruthie felt as though she could feel the vibration of Alicia’s lifeblood coming up through the metal frame. Eventually, they fell asleep.

  • cleveland circle house •

  MARY HAD GROWN UP IN A HOUSE WHERE HER FATHER LOVED HER BECAUSE HE THOUGHT SHE WAS BEAUTIFUL AND BRILLIANT, AND HER MOTHER DESPISED HER FOR THE SAME QUALITIES. In truth, she was neither beautiful nor brilliant. She was an awkward girl, with a long torso and short legs, prone to nervousness, whose chin dropped too far down her neck. And although she was a hard worker, she never achieved better than slightly above average grades. She’d only been accepted to one college. But her father insisted on being proud of her, regardless. She was going off to college, in Boston. This was more than he had ever done.

  It was 1986. At the very beginning of her freshman year at Boston University, she declared her major in psychology. This was partly due to her attachment to Larissa, a dark-haired, zaftig girl she met in Introduction to Psychology 101. Larissa had read Freud and Jung. Larissa impressed Mary immensely. The two girls decided that summer that they would get an apartment together in Allston and get jobs. Mary called her father a week before she was to move into the apartment.

  “Dad, I’m getting an apartment with a friend. We’ll get jobs this summer and then stay in it the following year, during the school year.”

  “Is that allowed?”

  “Of course, Dad.”

  “You’re not coming home this summer? I’ll miss you so much.”

  “This is the right thing to do, Dad. I’m going to try and get a job in my field, in psychology,” Mary said, not knowing at all what that meant. “It’s a good opportunity.”

  “I’ll buy you a car,” he said, quietly. “I’ll buy you a car if you come home.”

  “Oh, Dad,” Mary’s face went hot. “I’m not coming home.”

  She’d been home at Christmas. She’d been looking forward to it and then was immediately miserable. Everything was exactly the same, but more so. Her mother’s face shoved angrily in a newspaper. Her father bouncing around, trying to think of fun things to do, his hands in the air, saying, “Let’s go to the mall!” For some reason, she’d assumed her absence would change things, would make things better. It hadn’t. She ended up returning to Boston early. She had been nearly the only person in her dorm for two days, but she was just happy to be back.

  The apartment was a small two-bedroom in an ugly gray building on the corner of Commonwealth and Harvard Avenues in the very center of the neighborhood of Allston. The first week, Mary would leap up the two flights of creaking, slightly malodorous stairs to their apartment, overcome with excitement. Her bedroom faced Harvard Avenue; it was noisy. Larissa got the back bedroom, equally small and dingy, but quiet at night. Larissa explained she got this room because she had found the apartment, which was true.

  Larissa furnished the apartment within a week. There was a shiny red and silver 1950s table with matching chairs, vintage rock posters lovingly stuck on the walls with blue gum so as not to damage them, and a groovy purple velvet couch that barely fit in the tiny space that passed for a living room. No matter, it was all cheap, all second-hand and all fabulous. She had already found a job at a trendy record store on Newbury Street.

  The night they both moved in, Larissa sat on the purple couch, stroking it with one hand. In her other hand, she held a cigarette. She had picked up smoking to lose weight and it was working. “Have you found a job yet?”

  Mary let out a ragged breath. “I have an interview tomorrow. At a halfway house for formerly institutionalized mental patients.”

  “Really? That’s fascinating.” Larissa blew a smoke ring toward the ceiling

  “I want a job in my field,” Mary said.

  The next day, bright and early, Mary put on her only nice skirt and a collared white blouse. She brushed her hair too much, ripping the brush through it over and over so it ended up staticky and wild, swirling upward and tickling her ears. She tried to barrette it down with some success. Then she took the T out to Cleveland Circle. It took about twenty minutes and was above ground the whole way. The sun shone brilliantly, trees swayed their green leaves in the light wind. It was June in New England, she was interviewing for a job in her field. Her body vibrated with the beauty of it, the possibility of it all.

  She got off after the T had climbed a long, sloping hill that seemed to be the end of Boston and the beginning of the suburbs. The house was right there. Right in front of her. She was forty minutes early for her interview and beginning to sweat. It had suddenly gotten muggy. She hadn’t noticed it in the cool air-conditioning of the T. The house was a large, old Victorian, with an enormous porch and two huge elm trees in the sloping front yard. While she stood there staring at the house, a man came out and sat in a chair on the porch and lit a cigarette. She ducked her head and began walking and continued to walk around until she was only fifteen minutes early for her interview, at which time she walked up the wooden steps onto the porch. At this point, she was damp with sweat and there were three men and one woman out on the porch, smoking. One man stood nervously. He said something to her, but she couldn’t understand him.

  “Hi, I’m here for an interview,” she said. No one said anything. Perhaps she shouldn’t have said anything. The woman got up and went to the door just as Mary was going to.

  “Brigid!” she screamed loudly. “Brigid!”

  “Oh, excuse me,” Mary said, trying to get past the screaming woman. “I’ll just go in and find her.”

  Brigid came through a hall and it was suddenly clear that here was the woman she would meet and talk to, here was someone who worked here—indeed, here was the woman she spoke with on the phone when scheduling the interview and Mary had stupidly forgotten her name, had not written it down either—and that all the other people on the porch were “clients,” as they were called.

  “Hi, I’m Brigid. You must be Mary. You’re early.”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m sorry I’m a bit early.” They shook hands.

  “That’s okay. Come in here, to the office.”

  They entered a small room directly inside the house. “Sit down,” Brigid said, gesturing to a couch. She sat at a desk and swiveled around toward Mary.

  “I’ll just explain a bit about the place. Soon, Ahmed should be here and he’ll want to talk with you further. He owns this house and a few others. He’s a psychiatrist. I’m basically the manager. I’ve been working here for four years,” she said. “We have a weekly group meeting which either he or his wife attends. Usually his wife. The meetings, or sessions, are a part of the work week. In other words, you get paid for attending them. It’s an important part of the job, actually. We all need to talk about how things are going, how it’s a
ll affecting us. The clients can be very tricky, behaving one way for one of us, another way for another one of us. Particularly the borderlines. They’re the most tricky.” Brigid smiled at this.

  “I see,” said Mary, but in truth, she was blinded with fear and could barely see Brigid sitting right in front of her. What the hell was she doing here? Borderlines? She had read about them. Read about them in her Abnormal Psychology class, in her DSM 3 manual.

  Brigid took out a blue ice tray from a cupboard. “This is how we dispense the meds. See? Each one is labeled. You fill them up according to what they get. Changes are always noted in the med book, which is in this cupboard as well. We give out meds two times a day, morning and evening. And some can request an extra Xanax or something like that, depending. It’s all in the med book. In the beginning, you’ll always be doing your shift with someone who’s been working here for a while, and usually that will be me. You won’t be expected to do all this at once.” She smiled at Mary. She had big, horsey teeth. She wasn’t a pretty woman, but she wasn’t ugly either.

  Ahmed came in, smelling of cologne, his bald head the color of toffee. He took Mary to another office which seemed to be just his. Inside, the wooden floor gleamed and there was an expensive Afghan rug on the floor. It felt like a real psychiatrist’s office. And it smelled nice. Walking through the house with him to get to his office, Mary had noticed an odor of urine and warm garbage.

  “So! You want to work with the mentally ill! That is very brave of you. You will not regret it. Of course, I must ask you some questions about yourself,” he said. His voice was deep and slightly accented, and he rubbed his hands together and smiled.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Outside of Pittsburgh.”

  “And you are a student at BU?”

  “Yes. I’m studying psychology. I want to work in my field. I’m very serious about my … my career.”

  Ahmed smiled even more broadly. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  Mary hesitated. “No.”

  “Oh, you are so young!” Ahmed said, his thick hands thumping the desk in front of him. “Your whole life is ahead of you!”

  “I guess.”

  “You must come over for dinner sometime. To our house in Newton. Yes, yes. You must.” Then he paused. “I pay five dollars an hour to someone like you.”

  “Someone like me?”

  “Yes, a student. Later, I may give you a raise. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Then he began talking about himself. How he came from Morocco, how his wife was a psychologist, how they came to own and operate these homes. How in the past decade, the institutions were emptying out due to the great strides in medication and treatment and now half-way houses were the way to take care of these people. How they were so much more “civilized” than the large mental institutions.

  When Mary got home it wasn’t quite yet noon. She went straight to her room and fell asleep for three hours.

  She started work the following Monday. She arrived early, but not so early that she had to walk around for half an hour. Brigid was there. Brigid would work with her for the first few days. This comforted her.

  This time, she stopped and said hello to the same group of smokers that were there on the day of her interview, and introduced herself.

  “Are you going to work here?” a man with a mustache asked. He sounded angry.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Carol,” the woman said, her voice breathy and raspy from smoke. “Nice to meet you.” Carol’s face was pockmarked. Her hair was greasy and she was very overweight.

  “Nice to meet all of you,” Mary said and entered the house.

  Brigid was in the office with the door open, dispensing meds. A few clients waited patiently as she scooped out a number of pills and put them in their hands.

  “You’re early.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize,” Brigid said, as the last person waiting took their meds. “You like to apologize, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know.” Mary reddened.

  “You know what they say about people who are early?”

  “What?”

  “They’re anxious. Early people are anxious, on-time people are obsessive compulsive, and late people are hostile, or passive-aggressively hostile.”

  “I never read that in any of my psych books.”

  “I bet you haven’t.”

  The shift was eight hours, from nine until five. She also would have a night shift once a week, which was six hours long, from five until eleven. At that point, the house was locked up until the morning. Brigid introduced her to all of the clients that were lingering around, showed her the rooms they slept in, the bathrooms, the two common rooms. One of the common rooms, on the ground floor, had a television set turned on at all times. This was where the majority of the clients hung out. Toward the end of the shift, Brigid took her in to the office and closed the door.

  “So, what do you think?”

  “Well, it all seems fine.” Mary didn’t know what to say.

  “I’ll write in the log book, but I thought you might want to know how that goes, or talk to me about anything you may have observed.”

  “Okay.”

  Brigid held the log book in her lap and swiveled the chair around to where Mary sat on the couch. “Well, I think Carol seems depressed. She’s manic depressive and I think she may be cycling into a depression.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Make note of it, for one. And then bring it up during meeting time.”

  This didn’t seem like doing a whole lot. “Can we do anything for her?”

  Brigid smiled. “Like what?”

  “Well, treat her in some way?”

  “We could maybe up her anti-depressants. Listen, I was going to assign you two clients to spend extra time with. Everyone here has two clients who they take out for coffee or something like that, about once a week. Of course, you can only take them out if there is another person here. But I’m often here, as you’ll find out. If you are here alone, you can spend some time with them in their room. It’s an hour a week, approximately. Would you like Carol to be one of them?”

  “Okay.” Mary didn’t actually want Carol. Carol disgusted her. But that was what she was here for, she told herself. To help these people.

  “And how about Bob?”

  “The skinny man with the glasses?”

  “Yes. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic and he’s also mildly retarded. We call that dual-diagnosed. He’s a sweetie. He loves to go to the pizza place for coffee. Although, we’re trying to cut back his coffee intake. Try and get him to get decaf. The caffeine makes him more paranoid, you see.”

  “I see.”

  By Friday, Mary felt ready for something and she wasn’t sure what it was, but it turned out she was ready to get drunk for the first time in her life. Or at least, that’s what happened.

  Darrell and Clay were having a party. They, too, lived in Allston, a short walk down Harvard Avenue and then a few blocks into a tree-lined side street. Larissa’s face was expertly powdered a dull white and her lips were painted red. She carried a vintage silver purse that shone in the summer night. She smoked a joint as they walked.

  Besides smoking cigarettes, Larissa had begun smoking pot at night, which Mary found alarming, but fascinating as well.

  “Want some?” Larissa held the joint out to her.

  “No, thanks.”

  “You know, I’m thinking of switching to a film major next year.”

  “Really? Why? Why would you do that?”

  “Because I want to make movies. I want to make art.”

  “Oh.” Mary hunched her shoulders down, feeling terribly disappointed. “What about understanding the world? Understanding human nature? Or helping people?”

  “I never wanted to help people,” Larissa said, as they turned toward Darrell and Clay’s. “That’s your thing. And I think I can better understand the world through art, th
rough movies.”

  The party was big and loud. Music blared—The Cure, The Cult, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Smiths, Meat Beat Manifesto. Outside of Pittsburgh, where Mary grew up, people listened to Foreigner or Van Halen. To rock music. Just being in the room with these people, the music playing, made her feel sophisticated. The room was filled with smoke and Mary kept going back to the keg.

  “My father loves me so much, he offered to buy me a car to come home. I said, no way. I’m staying in Boston,” she said to three or four people at different times.

  “Why does my mother hate me? Why? I never did anything to her, I didn’t,” she said to Darrell, at around two in the morning. They were sitting on the couch and she was leaning into his shoulder, feeling very emotional. It felt good, to be so full of feeling. Such tragic feeling! The party was over. Only she and Larissa remained. And Larissa had disappeared into a bedroom with Clay.

  Darrell looked down at her. He was taller than her. This fact alone made her heart surge with a sort of love for him. He tried to say something, but he was too drunk and his mouth just hung open for a while.

  “I think my father would sleep with me if he could. I think he loves me that much,” the words came out, dirty and awful. The next morning, waking on the very same couch at Darrell and Clay’s house, she would remember saying those words, and her head throbbed viciously with shame.

  Monday at work, Brigid said, “Why don’t you take Bill out for some coffee? Try to make it decaf, okay? But be back in time for the staff group meeting at one.” She handed Mary three dollars.

  Bill was standing in the TV room, watching the television with the sound off. He stood back in the corner, wringing his hands. He was an exceptionally thin man, tall with gray hair. His head lolled to the side and he wore very thick glasses. He was the sort of person that by looking at him, you could see that something was wrong with him. Not all the clients were like that, but many were, if not most. Some looked normal and even acted semi-normal. Bill looked wrong.