She had helped him then. She had stroked his hair with her fingers for a long, long time. She had been very careful, very thorough. But that had been a unique situation. Usually, she couldn’t help him.
There was a sound at the door again, a determined knocking. Anne walked to it quickly and opened it. There were several of Harry’s friends there, not just the girl but not all of them either.
“You don’t have to be so rude,” one of them said.
They were angry. They had lost Harry, she thought, and they missed him.
“We loved Harry too, you know,” one of them said. His tie was loose, and his breath was sweet and dry, like sand.
“I want to rest now,” Anne said. “I must get some rest.”
“Rest,” one of them said in a soft, scornful voice. He glanced at the others. They ignored him.
“Tell us another story about Harry,” one of them said. “We didn’t get the first one.”
“Are you frightening me?” Anne said. She smiled. “I mean, are you trying to frighten me?”
“I think Harry saw that thing, but I don’t think he was ever there. Is that what you meant?” one of them said with some effort. He turned and then, as though he were dancing, moved down the steps and knelt on the ground, where he lowered his head and began spitting up quietly.
“Harry will always be us,” one of them said. “You better get used to it. You better get your stories straight.”
“Good night,” Anne said.
“Good night, please,” they said, and Anne shut the door.
She turned off all the lights and sat in the darkness of her house. Before long, as she knew it would, the phone began to ring. It rang and rang, but she didn’t have to answer it. She wouldn’t do it. It would never be that once, again, when she’d learned that Harry died, no matter how much she knew in her heart that the present was but a past in that future to which it belonged, that the past, after all, couldn’t be everything.
THE VISITING PRIVILEGE
DONNA CAME AS a visitor in her long black coat. It was spring but still cool, and she never wore light colors, she was no buttercup. She was visiting her friend Cynthia, who was in Pond House for depression. Donna never had a drink before she visited Cynthia. She shunned her habitual excesses and arrived sober and aware, with an exquisite sinking feeling. She thought that Pond House was an unfortunate name, ponds being stagnant, artificial and small. This wasn’t just her opinion. A pond was indeed an artificially confined body of water, she argued, but Cynthia thought Pond was probably the name of the hospital wing’s benefactor. Cynthia had three roommates, a woman in her sixties and two obese teenagers. Donna liked to pretend that the old woman was her mother. Hi, she’d say, you look great today, what a pretty sweatshirt.
Donna had been visiting Cynthia for about a week now. She could scarcely imagine what she had done with herself before Cynthia had the grace to get herself committed to Pond House. She liked everything about it but she particularly liked sitting in Cynthia’s room, speaking quietly with her while the others listened. They didn’t even pretend not to listen, the others. But sometimes she and Cynthia would stroll down to the lounge and get a snack from the fridge. In the lounge, goofy helium balloons in the shape of objects or food but with human features were tied to the furniture with ribbon. They bobbed there opposite the nurse’s station, and people would bat them as they passed by. Cynthia thought the balloons would be deeply disturbing to anyone who was already disturbed, yet in fact everyone considered them amusing. None of the people at Pond House were supposed to be seriously ill, at least on Floor Three. On Floor Four it was another matter. But here they were supposed to be sort of ruefully aware of their situations, and were encouraged to believe that they could possibly be helped. Cynthia had come here because she had picked up the habit of committing destructive and selfish acts, the most recent being the torching of her boyfriend’s car, a black Corvette. The boyfriend was married but Cynthia strongly suspected he was gay. He drove her crazy. “He’s a taker and not a giver, Donna,” she told Donna earnestly.
She said that she was so discouraged that everything seemed vaguely yellow to her, that she saw everything through a veil of yellow.
“That was in an article I read,” Donna said excitedly. “The yellow part.”
“You know, Donna,” Cynthia said, “you’re part of my problem.”
When Cynthia got like this, Donna would excuse herself and go away for a while. Or she would go back to the room and talk with the old woman. She got a kick out of being extraordinarily friendly to her. Once she brought her gum, another time a jar of night cream. She ignored the obese teenagers, but one afternoon one of them deliberately bumped into her as she walked down the hall. The girl’s flesh was hard and she smelled of coconut. She thrust her face close to Donna’s. Her pores were large and clean and Donna could see the contacts resting on the corneas of her eyes.
“I’m passionate, intense and filled with private reverie, and so is my friend,” the girl said, “so don’t slime us like you do.” Then she punched Donna viciously on the arm. Donna felt like crying but she was only a visitor. She didn’t have to come here so frequently; she was really coming here too much, sometimes two and three times a day.
There were group meetings twice a week and Donna always tried to be present for these, although she was not permitted to attend them. Sometimes, however, if she stood just outside the door, the nurses and psychologists didn’t notice her right away. Cynthia and the fat teenagers and the old lady and a half dozen others would sit around a large table and say anything they wanted to.
“I dreamed that I threw up a fox,” one of the fat girls said. Really, Donna couldn’t tell them apart.
“I shit something that looked like an onion once,” a man said. “It just kept coming out of me. I pulled it out of myself with my own hands. I thought it was the Devil, but it was a worm. A gift from Central America.”
“That is so disgusting,” the other fat girl said, “That is the most—”
“Hey!” the man said. “Get yourself a life, woman.”
The worm thing caused the old lady to request to be excused. Donna walked back to the room with her, and they sat down on her bed.
“Feel my heart,” the old lady said. “It’s pounding. I wasn’t brought up that way.”
The old lady liked to play cards, and she and Donna would often play with an old soiled deck that had pictures of colorful fish on it. Donna pretended she was in the cabin of a boat on a short, safe trip to a lovely island. The old woman was a mysterious opponent, not at all what she seemed. Donna had, in fact, been told by the nurses that she was considerably more impaired than she appeared to be. Beyond the window of the cabin were high waves, pursuing and accompanying them. The waves were an essential part of the world the boat required, but they bore malice toward the boat, that much was obvious.
“What kind of fish are these?” Donna asked.
“These are reef residents,” the old lady said.
They played a variation of Spit in the Ocean. Donna had had no idea that there were so many variations of this humble game.
The two fat girls came in and lay down on their beds. The old lady was really opening up to Donna. She was telling her about her husband and her little house.
“After my husband died, I was afraid someone might come in and …” She passed her finger across her throat. “I bought one of those men. Safe-T-Man II, the New Generation. You know, the ones that look as though they’re six feet tall but can be folded up and put in a little tote bag? I put him in the car or I put him in my husband’s easy chair right in front of the window. He had all kinds of clothes. He had a leather coat. He had a baseball cap.”