The point, it seemed, was to deinstitutionalize our surroundings so we could pretend we were normal citizens instead of prisoners. The dayroom in our unit resembled an upscale suburban living room, with its gold wall-to-wall carpeting, Ethan Allen furniture, and the baby grand Steinway donated by a former patient. Where the dining room in a regular house would have been was the glassed-in nurses’ station, and across from it a kitchenette where people hung around and drank coffee. But unlike in a regular house there was an air of emergency, too many comings and goings, the phone in the nurses’ station constantly ringing.
I was on Status One, house arrest. Along with me was a man who had to dress in pajamas because he was liable to run away. “Elope,” they called it. We got our meals on trays and had single rooms on the first floor near the nurses’ station, where the staff could keep an eye on us. Our day began at 6 A.M. when we were woken up and taken for showers. In my entire twenty-four hours, the shower door was the only one I could shut behind me. I turned the water on full force and made it as hot as I could stand and then hotter, so that it steamed up the glass, obliterating the silhouette of the MH leaning up against the sink. We got exactly seven minutes in there—they actually set a kitchen timer. It was Lillith who explained to me the dangers of the bathroom. At State, she said, some guy had once managed to drown himself in the toilet.
In our first week at the unit, Lillith had advanced to Status Two and gotten her sharps back. She’d decided not to hold my unimpressive suicide attempt against me and became my buddy, bringing me honey packets from dinner, a necklace of tiny wooden spools she’d made in OT. It was Lillith I went to when I found I’d gotten my period. I’d lost track, I’d become so irregular, and during my shower I thought I had a stomachache and then looked down and saw it in the hollow of my thigh like a bloody oyster.
I found her in the dayroom and asked if she had a Tampax.
“Can’t help you there,” she said. “I had a hysterectomy.” There was something about the way she said it that discouraged me from inquiring why.
I had to ask at the nurses’ station. When I went back into the dayroom my treatment group was waiting there to go to breakfast. Lillith was reading a magazine. A couple of the younger guys, Douglas and Mel, were fooling around with a tennis ball, taking turns bouncing it off their heads.
When Douglas saw me he started chanting: “Wally Sang, Wally Sang, Wally Sang.”
Douglas scared the shit out of me. Over six feet tall and built like a linebacker, he wore the same stained forest green polo shirt and crummy jeans day after day. He was in here because he had tried to murder his mother who was black and from Barbados. His father was white. Douglas would actually have been an attractive guy if it weren’t for his personality. His thing was to hit on all the women—MHs, nurses, patients, even poor Rachel, who walked around with a teddy bear clutched to her bosom.
Lillith looked up from her magazine and patted the sofa next to her. “C’mere,” she said. “I’ll do your hair.”
No one had done my hair for me since Ma at the breakfast table before school. She’d make my two long plaits with paintbrush ends, and bows to match what I was wearing. “Beauty routine,” Daddy would mutter. My sister’s face framed by its Dutch-boy cut rose smug across the table.
Lillith’s touch as she combed was a lot gentler than my mother’s. It made me feel dreamy and in danger at the same time.
“I think braids,” she said. “I’m good at braids.”
“Okay.”
“How many?”
“Just one.”
“Oh,” she sighed, “I’d kill to have hair like yours.” Douglas passed into our line of vision, making a pig face, lips bloomed up touching the tip of his nose.
Lillith ignored him. She said to me: “You know, you should talk more in group.”
“I can’t.”
“Oh, come on. You’re so smart, you can think of something.” She herself had related harrowing tales of growing up in a mansion in Guilford with her pervert uncle and his string of boyfriends. Her stories were full of rubber gloves, hoses, and toilets. “When I get out I’m going to the beach every single day. Lie around and drink pina coladas and get a tan.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Seriously, if you want to get out you should talk. Why do you give a shit about what these people think? You’re never going to see any of them again.”
“That’s true.”
“Plus, you think they haven’t heard it all before?”
“I guess.”
“Okay, you’re done,” she said, snapping the elastic. I could see my reflection in the glass wall of the nurses’ station. She’d been so neat it looked like I had short hair.
“Thanks.”
“Tell me your opinion of this.” She opened her copy of Glamour to a photograph of a do-it-yourself crocheted string bikini.
“Wowza,” said Mel, looking over her shoulder. I liked Mel. At nineteen, he was the youngest in our group, transferred from Adolescents because he’d kept on getting into fights there. He wore macho clothes-frayed flannel shirts, work boots, a gold stud in one ear—but underneath I could see that there was something delicate, almost dandyish, about him.
Lillith said: “I’m going to send away for some shocking pink yarn.” I looked at the browned, busty, gleaming model, and then I looked at Lillith, all frail bones with a caved-in chest and skin the color of skim milk.
“That would look great on you.”
“You think?” When she smiled her teeth were stumpy, grayish at the roots. “Oops, gotta go,” she said. The MH had just come in. Breakfast had already arrived in plastic wrap for Pajama Man and me.
“Have fun,” I said.
I didn’t really mind being stuck in the house while everyone else was out at meals or therapies. Pajama Man and I mostly watched stupid TV, and when I got sick of that I’d go curl up in my favorite spot, the bay window seat, where I could sit for hours, doing nothing. Staff didn’t like that, they’d come over and try to get me to tell them my feelings.
I ate my breakfast at the window. The view was the flagstone path that led up to the front door, where another group was trooping back from breakfast. About fifty yards beyond shimmered the cold gray plane of the lake. On the near side were a couple of wrought-iron benches, where occasionally I saw someone huddled up, tossing bread to the ducks. On the far side stretched a line of weeping willows beginning to bud white. At least Willowridge really had willows. I imagined that if I could still paint I’d use a Chinese brush and ink—the kind you mix up in a stone—on the finest rice paper. Stark short strokes for the boughs, washed over with a broad sweep to indicate wind.
It was an audacious fantasy I was having, because I knew full well the absolute confidence it took to work in ink. You had to do it from your soul, and it had to be as natural as breathing.
Lillith’s uncle sent her raspberry licorice strings. We all watched while she opened the package and made a disgusted sound. “He knows I hate this crap.”
She put the tin on the sign-out desk in the foyer. After dinner Douglas took it into the dayroom and consumed every single piece while watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Then he went into the bathroom on the first floor and puked. Puking was a common occurrence at Willowridge. They’d note it down in the daybook: “Refused meds, reticent during group, vomiting 8 P.M.”
On my way into the kitchen for a cup of tea I heard him retching and then the toilet flush.
The bathroom door opened and Douglas emerged, looking amazingly healthy.