I was sitting in the alcove next to the kitchen before breakfast sketching the profile of an MH through the glass window of the nurses’ station. Lillith came trailing down the hall, fresh from her six A.M. shower. At least now they’d make sure she took a shower every day. The twin wet hanks of hair stained the shoulders of her blouse, which was about four sizes too large for her. For the first time in days her eyes looked almost lucid.
“Can I talk to you?”
“Sure.”
She lowered herself down beside me on the love seat, so light I could barely feel the springs give, and pulled her legs up so that they were in the same position as mine, tucked under. Instead of talking she just watched me. I could feel her breath fluttering the edges of my hair.
“It’s hard to concentrate with someone staring at you like that.”
“Sorry.”
“That’s all right.”
“It’s just that you look so normal. You even looked normal in Admissions. You’re the most normal person here, you know. I want it to osmose to me.”
That was the kind of talk we weren’t supposed to encourage. But I knew what she meant. Also, that it worked sometimes. Moral strength, lightheartedness, ease with your body—all these things were contagious.
“You really ought to eat,” I said.
She gave me a sharp look.
“What do you care? You’re going to Florida to visit your relatives. I’m going to hell.”
“That’s a stupid way to think.”
“At least I call a spade a spade. I don’t cover things up.”
She was right, Douglas was right, my sister was right. I was a fake. I did things from my head, not from my heart. For all my sincerity I was the least honest person I knew.
On the way to breakfast I walked by myself, noticing that beyond the lake the willow strands hung light green and delicate shivering with wind. Mel came up beside me and linked his arm through mine. We continued on, not speaking, not missing a beat, and I noticed, among other things, that he was exactly my height.
That week Valerie wanted to talk about sex.
“Sally, what’s your experience when you make love with a man? What do you feel?”
Incest survivors will tell you they focus on something outside themselves during sex in order to escape. In my case, it was ceilings. At college, Carey’s off-campus apartment had a yellow ceiling with tiny bumps like chicken skin. There was a hairline fault running down one edge, which sometimes would seem to have gotten wider, although in reality I’m sure it stayed the same. The window shades in his bedroom were translucent, and at night the watery red reflections of taillights would glide above us like the planaria I’d watched slipping to the edge of a microscope slide in high school biology.
Once, I can’t remember why now, we spent a night in a fancy hotel in Boston. The ceiling gleamed metallic, matching the rest of the room, which was high-tech and spacious, with a thrilling view of the Charles River. The lights from the outside were reflected in the ceiling in a muddled way, like movies at camp.
On our honeymoon in Japan, the inn ceiling was low, ominously so, a pale Zen green. I had the feeling as we lay there innocently in our sleeping rolls that it might slowly lower until we were crushed to death, like the room in the Edgar Allan Poe story.
The ceiling of our first apartment in New York was made up of little decorated squares-tin painted over white. Carey liked the light on while we made love, and I could sometimes see the tips of our shadows slipping up along the molding where the ceiling and wall met. This would make me so uneasy I would have to close my eyes.
“What about his body? Could you feel him? His penis?”
I shook my head.
“Sally, concentrate. Could you feel Carey?”
Mel leaning over me in rec therapy. His breath so sweet it was almost narcotic.
“Sally. Could you feel him?”
My sister in the room on Coram Drive. Her face in the morning, eyes wide open, hair flying up with static over the collar of her nightgown, coming over to my bed to wake me up, although I’m already awake.
Sa-sa.Sa-sa.
Another ceiling. Moonlight defining twin parallelograms. It is Indian summer, the windows are open, and the white lace curtains have been drawn back, out of the way, to let all of any breeze into the room. There is the noise of the shades flapping up, making the pattern on the ceiling shift in an unpredictable way, with no rhythm.
I am no longer on the bed. I have shrunk to the size of a mosquito and float up to the ceiling, where the life-preserver shape of a shade pull dangles. I grab on to the O of it and swing, as if it were the tire in the school playground. Hold my breath. The play of light inside my closed eyes is dazzling.
My wrists pinned to the sheet. Carey lets go, his chest collapsing on mine.
“Sal.”
“What?”
“You still don’t like it, do you?”
“Of course I do. I told you I did.”
“You don’t stay with me. At first I can feel you, you know, that you’re getting hot, and then you kind of disappear.”
“It’s getting better, Care, I swear.”
“If we got married, would you feel more comfortable? Is that it?”
I think of my sister, fucking man after man.
For pleasure.
Tou-fa, tou-fa, tou-fa.
Over and over again, in a whisper, like a spell.
I know this means hair. But we didn’t learn it in Chinese school.
“Sally, you have a visitor.”
Since I’d been at Willowridge I hadn’t had any visitors at all except for my mother that one time for family therapy. I dragged myself up from the bed and glanced in the bureau mirror. “In the dayroom,” the MH said as I followed her downstairs.
But she wasn’t. She was standing in the foyer, head down, reading the sign-out book, maybe looking for my name. Her hair had been cut very short, like a boy’s, and I could see the shape of her shoulder blades through the suede jacket, which was the color of butterscotch, one I had never seen before. At the sound of our steps, she turned and looked up.
“Sa.” She was wearing lipstick—in her tanned face her mouth looked like a little flame.
I couldn’t say a word, there was so much heart inside me. I tried very hard simply to continue breathing while I walked the last several steps that would bring me to my sister.
7
“You look better than I thought you would,” she said. We were sitting on the window seat in the dayroom.
“You cut your hair,” I said. She took my breath away, I couldn’t stop staring. I’d forgotten how small she was.
“Yeah, my agent’s going to kill me.” She pulled out a pack of Gauloises from her purse and shook two out. The backs of her hands were as tanned as her face, and she was wearing a pink cameo ring that looked vaguely familiar. There was a faint, rangy aroma about her. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d worn perfume.
She lit our cigarettes and took a deep drag. I coughed on mine.
“Camel shit, honey, but it does the trick.”
“When did you get back?”
“Last Thursday.” She’d been back for an entire week and hadn’t bothered to get in touch. “So when are they cutting you loose from here?”
“My shrink says soon. A couple of weeks at the most.”
“You coming home?”
“No,” I said. “I’m going down to visit Aunty Mabel and Uncle Richard.” I had already called a travel agency asking them to find me the cheapest ticket to St. Pete.
My sister teased a bare brown foot out of its shoe and frowned at her fuchsia toenails. “How come they won’t let you talk to Ma?”
“It’s only temporary.”
“It seems weird to me. Ma is very, very upset, you know.”