And now here she was, in her lab coat, tending to Barbara’s hummingbirds. And here, too, was Lil—who had become a scholar of poetry because she couldn’t find the wherewithal to write her own verse, only to let go of even those safer, secondary aspirations—in a faded green gown and a borrowed sweater, stoking the ashes of Tuck’s ambitions. It was unkind, Emily thought, to compare herself to Lil right at this moment, when poor Lil was so clearly at a disadvantage. But the events of the morning had put her in a strange humor, jumbled together, as they were, with some distasteful memories of Lil lecturing her, through the years, on how to find a man.
It was later, hours later, when she realized she’d walked right by the nurses’ station without asking about magazines for Lil—or making a case, as Lil had bid her, for her friend’s sanity.
As soon as Lil heard the door click shut, she flopped over onto her back and stretched her body to its full length, reaching her toes down to the footboard and her arms overhead. Her body ached and throbbed, as though she’d been beaten by a thousand tiny bats, and there was a peculiar tightness in her abdomen—the residue of the previous night’s pain. Then again, maybe the pain was still there, lurking, muted by the drugs they’d given her. In a way, she hoped this was so, as it better justified her stay in this creepy room with its faux homey touches (a putrid border of flowers, a Chagall print), staffed by plump, worn-faced nurses in ugly crepe-soled shoes. It was midafternoon already—she’d been in this place for a good twelve hours—and she’d barely yet caught sight of a doctor. Just the tall, bald one who’d come in this morning, fired a few questions at her as though he were reading them off a questionnaire, and abruptly left, saying Dr. So-and-So would be in later. She couldn’t tell if he was referring to himself in the third person or if he was speaking about an actual third person, the doctor who would oversee her case. Regardless, no doctor had so much as peeped in the small window set into the door of her room. Just an endless parade of nurses, bustling around and bringing this or that, refilling her water jug, giving her more forms to sign, asking to see her insurance card again and again, and on and on until she wanted to scream or, at the very least, lock the door so she might sit undisturbed for a few minutes and try to sort through the various competing threads in her mind.
Earlier, she had, in fact, tried to do exactly this, only to find that the door, of course, wouldn’t lock from the inside (nor, she later discovered, would the bathroom door). And her fiddling had summoned the attention of yet another sour nurse. “Is something wrong?” she’d asked.
“Everything’s fine, thanks,” Lil told her impatiently.
But the woman lingered, maddeningly. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Lil said. “I’m fine. I don’t need anything.” And slammed the door right in the nurse’s face. Later, when this same nurse—a short, plain-faced woman of indeterminate ethnicity, with a greasy gray braid—brought her lunch, she’d refused it just to spite her. “I don’t want it,” she’d complained, in a whiny voice that now embarrassed her (why had she made such a fuss, particularly since she was actually hungry?).
“Well, I’ll just leave it right here, okay?” the nurse said calmly, as if she were talking to a child. “In case you get hungry.”
“I don’t want it,” Lil insisted. “The smell is making me sick. I’m not going to eat it. Please just take it away.”
“I need to leave it, hon,” the nurse said calmly. “We can’t have people saying we starve them, can we?”
Now the tray sat beside her bed, gravy congealed into a gelatinous mass, reminding her of her rashness and stupidity. What she really wanted was to stand up and stretch. To move her legs a bit and hang straight over from the waist, as she did in yoga class. But she was afraid that the nurses might barge in and find her in this position, her body revealed by the flapping gown. And so she stayed in bed and picked at the skin that had formed on the pudding. It was good, she found, in a terrible way—the appealing metallic of artificial vanilla—and sweetly reminded her of her childhood, which had been punctuated with lime Jell-O and pudding from a box and other such toxic, processed foods, which people simply didn’t feed their kids anymore. Normal people, that is.
Earlier, Lil had thought she might call her mother—which showed how desperate she was feeling—but there was no phone in her room and the nurses had confiscated her cell phone when she was admitted, along with a host of other things from her purse: pens, cuticle scissors, lip gloss, keys. She’d asked one of the nurses if she might have the cell phone back, just for a minute, to call her mother. But the woman had told her no, that her husband would take care of all that, and she shouldn’t worry. Lil had argued, but now she saw that she wouldn’t have made the call anyway. She couldn’t tell her mother that she was in a mental hospital. It had been hard enough to tell her, for the third time, that she was miscarrying. “We’re all so fertile in my family,” her mother had said with typical callousness. “I can’t imagine what the problem is!” The implication, of course, was that there was something defective about Lil or perhaps Tuck or the two of them together, and that if Lil had married a nice doctor, someone like her father, and bought a ranch in the Palisades—rather than staying in the dirty, expensive, outmoded East and forcing her parents to send her checks every month or two so that she and her bohemian husband wouldn’t starve—none of this would be happening. Well. Perhaps it wouldn’t. But she could never have gone back—could never go back—to L.A., to that stultifying sort of life. The blondes in their huge, beastly cars. The kids who’d made fun of her. They were all still there, working in film or television as midlevel producers or agents or entertainment lawyers; taking meetings with their frat brothers from UCLA; stocking their glass houses with kids; meeting their parents for brunch on Sunday. Their lives unfolded before her all too vividly. “Yech,” she said aloud, and polished off the pudding, just as Josh walked in the door.
“Not bad, right?” he said.
“No,” she agreed, “it’s pretty good.”
“You should try the rest,” he told her. “It’s really much better than it looks. And I can guarantee you’ll feel better after you eat something. They taught me that in medical school.” Lil laughed. This was just the sort of joke her father often made. Perhaps that’s what they were taught in medical school—a barrage of self-deprecating witticisms. “I’d bring you something from outside, but it’s strictly against the rules. We could be putting a file in the cake. You know.” Lil smiled at him. She felt, instinctively, that he was on her side—that he believed, perhaps also instinctively, in the force of her sanity and the extent of Tuck’s villainy even more so than did Emily, who knew her better, like a sister, and was slightly prone to disbelieving Lil. Men had always liked Lil better than did women. “I don’t need a file,” she told Josh now, with a smile. The pudding had made her feel better and she shot an inquiring glance down at the mashed potatoes. “There are no bars on the windows.”
“True,” he said. “So no file for you. But listen, how are you doing?”
She wasn’t sure how to answer this question. “Emily told you…” she began tentatively.
He nodded. “Emily gave me the gist of it. And I got the rest from Dr. Goldstein—the doctor who spoke with you this morning—and Dr. Mukherjee, who spoke with you last night.”