She too had been deprived of zhi objects.
When we lined up for meds, I saw that her paper cup was brimming with different colors. She swallowed the pills one at a time, moving the water cup to and from her lips in slow motion, as if sleepwalking. Once she gagged, but it didn’t faze her, she just waited until she knew she was going to keep it down and then continued. A pro.
The brassy theme music of a soap opera blared out from the television set. I could hardly keep my eyes open—what had they given me?—and then I was dreaming that it was dark November and I was a child lying on my bed on Coram Drive, looking out at the dusk beyond the white-curtained windows. It was a dream I’d been having a lot lately.
The sound of clapping jolted me awake. We admits were ushered from the dayroom and down a corridor into a room with lime green wall-to-wall carpeting but no furniture, like a new house. This, we were told, was group therapy. The leader, a bearlike man in beard and ponytail, gestured to us that we should sit down on the floor in a circle.
“We’ll start off by getting to know one another a little bit. Let’s go around the room and hear why each of you are here.”
Nobody was talking. Bear Man knew his stuff. One by one he got us to cough up our stories. He started by pointing at the woman who had given me the Lucky.
She was an alcoholic, she confessed. I envied her that simple label. She’d come home drunk one night, gone in to check on her three-month-old daughter, and accidentally set the crib on fire with her cigarette. Her husband had given her an ultimatum: rehab or divorce.
The next person, a young guy, was a sophomore at BU majoring in medieval history. He’d started having obsessive-compulsive thoughts about killing his girlfriend, who he was sure was cheating on him with the assistant coach of the soccer team.
A woman with short black hair and very red lipstick was a flight attendant who had been suspended from her job because she kept testing positive for uppers.
My roommate, sitting beside me, spoke in a stilted, breathy voice, like a child reciting poetry: “My name is Lillith. I was living in a halfway house in Fairfield.”
“What happened?”
“I had an episode.” This close, I could see freckles. The skin under her eyes was fragile and purplish.
“Mmmhmm.” The leader turned to me.
“My therapist thought I wasn’t doing well enough on antidepressants.”
A bear eyebrow was raised, hovering.
“And I tried to kill myself last week.”
No one seemed impressed. Bear Man nodded and went on to the last person, the man in the yellow shirt.
His sleeves were now rolled halfway up his forearms, I guessed the overheated dayroom had finally gotten to him. In his late thirties, probably, with a black square haircut that made him look like Frankenstein. Propped up against the wall, a big muscular guy sagging like a sack of flour.
Bear Man saw right off that this one wasn’t going to be easy and tried another tack. “What do you do for a living?”
Mumble.
“Where do you work?”
Mumble.
“What is your job?”
The man lifted his head, and his eyes were unfathomably dark. “Security guard,” he exhaled, and then looked down again. That was all he said.
But now his badge of admittance to our group was plain to see—a deep purple vertical scar on the inside of each wrist.
My heart was filled with something like awe.
For dinner, they let us go out to the cafeteria. It was one of the modern buildings, an A-frame, all yellows and whites and chrome, appallingly bright and loud. Not a soul looked up as we entered. By the door was a tableful of teenagers, boys and girls, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, leaning over and shouting at one another. It wasn’t clear who was in charge of them.
The menu, purple Magic Marker script on shiny cardboard with smiley faces drawn on the bottom, was incomprehensible to me. I fell behind in line and listened to other people rattling off what they wanted to the lady behind the counter: veal Parmesan, chicken pot pie, eggplant casserole, several different kinds of vegetables, a soup I didn’t catch.
I slid my tray onto the chrome rack and said the first thing that came into my mind: “Eggplant casserole and rice, please.”
“What? You’ll have to speak up, honey.”
I repeated it for her.
“No rice today. Listen, how about some linguine? With garlic and butter. You look like you could use some meat on those bones.”
“Okay.”
“Good girl,” said a man’s voice behind me.
I turned around. It was the evening shift MH, a man about my age, as handsome as a movie star, with longish dark hair.
Lillith, sitting across from me, didn’t eat. She cut her veal up into splinters, which took a long time, since the knives, although metal, had no serrations, and then began methodically mashing the bits of meat along with the coagulating cheese into the linguine on her plate. It was hard not to watch her doing this. The man in the yellow shirt was sitting hunched over beside her, not eating either, his hands around a mug of coffee so that the scars were hidden. Every so often he swallowed, not the coffee, but his own spit. Bulging out of his white throat, his Adam’s apple looked like a growth.
I took a cautious bite of my eggplant. It eased down and then settled gently into my stomach. The taste was odd, not wrong, but like it was coming from far away. I forced myself to keep eating.
After dinner when Lillith and I were lying on our beds, she surprised me by leaning over and asking casually: “Okay, so how’d ya do it?”
“Are you talking to me?”
Her eyes were hidden behind her veil of greasy hair, so I couldn’t tell her expression. “Who else, Miss Priss?”
I turned a little so my back was to the door, pushed up the left sleeve of my sweater, and showed her my scars. Tiger stripes, I called them. Of course they were nothing compared to the man in the yellow shirt’s.
I’d started in high school. Using the smallest blade of my Swiss Army knife to pick away at a spot until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Only when I was alone. Didn’t anyone recommend you seek counseling? Valeric had asked me, and I said, No, it was just something I did, a kind of tic. Certainly not as dramatic as bulimia, which one of my roommates was into. At least my habit was more discreet. I had it down to an art, savoring the very first sting of it, before my brain had time to distinguish pleasure from pain. Finally it would subside into something dull and predictable, a nasty little wound that I could have gotten by accident. Only a new cut would do the trick, give me that thrill again.
After I got married, for some reason I just stopped, and I never even thought about it until those last few weeks at my job when I’d caught myself at it again. The delicate welling of blood, exactly one inch long—I had such a feel with my X-Acto knife I knew an inch without measuring.
Lillith propped her chin up with a fist to look. “Fuck,” she said appreciatively. “But that’s not the way you did it.”
“No.”
“I bet you took pills. You’re the pill type.”
“What about you?”
“Once I drank Lysol, but they pumped my stomach out. And I tried to hang myself. The only thing I haven’t used is a gun.”
“Too phallic, huh?” I asked.
It was supposed to be a joke but she didn’t laugh, just rolled around so that her back was to me, signaling she didn’t want to talk anymore. So I picked up that stupid Ladies’ Home Journal and stared at it until bedtime meds were announced.
Lillith conked out right away. I lay there in the scratchy, overbleached sheets as the brown darkness filled up with her bitter breath. From beyond the wedge of light at the door came the sound of low conversation and occasional laughter. When I couldn’t stand it anymore I got up and opened the door all the way.