“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 all 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.