“That bag’s falling apart, but I don’t like throw away. Are you sure you want? I have better.”
“No, this is fine.”
In fact, it was appropriate, because I too was traveling to a strange land from which I might never return.
After a while Ma cleared her throat and said: “You don’t worry about expenses. However long it takes, okay.”
Her eyes were glassy. It made me uncomfortable and I looked away, pretending I hadn’t seen.
The straps and buttons gave Swivel Chair Lady a little trouble but I didn’t offer to help. She stuck her claw right in, rummaging, feeling everywhere-between my folded clothes, into all the corners, her nails scraping leather.
In Mandarin, my Uncle Richard once told me, there is a special category of nouns for long, skinny things like pencils, chopsticks, hair. All numbers modifying these nouns must end in zhi.
Swivel Chair Lady confiscated all my zhi objects: cigarettes, shoelaces, belts, hair elastics, the drawstring to my parka.
Also, contact lens solution, nail clippers, aspirin. She asked for the pearl studs in my ears and the gold watch Ma gave me when I got married. Then she picked up her telephone receiver and dialed four numbers. “The new admit is ready.” She said to me: “An MH will escort you to the ward.”
“MH?”
“Mental health worker. You are aware, aren’t you”—she paused and gave me what I interpreted as a triumphant look—“that you’re going to be watched twenty-four hours a day?”
The dayroom in Admissions resembled a primary school classroom, furnished in orange, yellow, and white plastic, with a linoleum floor and plaid curtains at the windows, which lined one wall. There were no bars, but the panes were reinforced with chicken wire and looked like the kind you couldn’t open. At the far end of the room was a glassed-in booth, where a nurse in a pantsuit was sitting in a folding chair. Right outside the booth a man in a pale yellow button-down shirt was slumped in an orange chair, an ashtray smoking on the table beside him.
The MH, a woman about my age, led me over to one of the doorways opposite the bank of windows. Through the brown darkness, I could see that one of the beds was already occupied. Someone whose face was to the wall, long stringy hair—I couldn’t tell what color—one hand dangling over the edge. The hand was so small and pale that it itself looked ill.
“Lillith,” said the MH.
No answer.
“She just got in this morning too.”
I set my bag down near the foot of the unoccupied bed, not knowing what to do next. I didn’t feel like staying in this stuffy room with that creepy sleeper.
The MH was standing in the doorway, watching me. She had a certain kind of Zen quality I’ve always admired, with her wire-framed glasses and bun and the Earth shoes that pulled down her heels as she walked, although on her the effect was oddly graceful.
I asked to use the bathroom. It turned out I couldn’t even do that by myself—the MH posted herself right outside, the door slightly ajar. Sitting there, waiting, I looked around, wondering what possibly could be dangerous. It didn’t occur to me that I could shatter the mirror glass, or even the frosted shower door, with my fist, and use the pieces to slash my wrists, or swallow them.
Christ, I was never going to be able to pee. I told myself this was just a job for her, she wasn’t listening or anything. The disinfectant smell made me shiver, and I had to concentrate hard on the speckled white ceiling tiles until they blurred, before I could let go.
When I came out the MH said: “You’re free to watch TV, you know. Or read, if you want.”
Reading was another ability I’d lost—it was the reason I’d quit my job as an art director in New York City. I’d managed to hide it for a while, marking time at my drafting board, leafing through font books. The letters themselves still interested me, as abstract entities. I could still discuss what typeface would be appropriate for what kind of ad, and I could discern the shapes and textures of things, when a paragraph seemed too long or too dense, for instance, but if I read a sentence I couldn’t remember a word of it ten seconds later. Then it got so I couldn’t understand text at all unless I read it slowly out loud, and even that didn’t always work. The letters started getting smaller and smaller, although the pica rule said otherwise.
A similar thing happened when I went back to Connecticut and tried to drive. I faked it for a while, but you can’t fake a sense of timing. Ma put her foot down after the front fender of the Honda got swiped as I was trying to make a left-hand turn into oncoming traffic.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Why are you sorry?” the MH asked.
“I’m sorry I can’t carry on a conversation.”
“This isn’t a cocktail party. You don’t have to be entertaining.”
Where did you go to college? I wanted to ask her. Do you have a boyfriend? What makes you so normal?
The phone shrilled and the nurse poked her head out and announced there was another admit. I snuck a glance at the man in the yellow shirt. He hadn’t said a word or even raised his head since we’d come in. While the MH was gone I picked up a Ladies’ Home Journal from one of the tables and flipped through it aimlessly. I was dying for a cigarette but didn’t have the nerve to ask. The man seemed like he maybe couldn’t speak at all. I settled for secondhand smoke.
Since I’d been sick, a minute could feel as long as a day, or I’d blink my eyes and suddenly see that three hours had passed. The dayroom had one of those large school clocks where the seconds jerk along. It reminded me that my mother would be starting her own class at Yale about now, standing before the blackboard in her plaid skirt and white blouse. Ma had no compassion for the slow or the lazy or the simply unfocused. She could pick out those students in the back, the ones who hadn’t done their homework, and she’d call on them. When my sister and I were small we’d do the dinner dishes while Ma corrected exams at the kitchen table. “This one gets a C!” she’d announce triumphantly. Or worse: “This one doesn’t belong in my class, he’s too stupid.” She’d draw the F much bigger than any of the other grades.
My mother is nothing if not efficient. When she’d found me passed out on my bed and the mess on the floor beside it, she called 911 and then she called Valeric. I don’t remember a thing about the ambulance ride, although they told me later the siren was screaming the whole way. In the emergency room they made me sit up in a chair and gave me this evil-looking black potion in a glass so I’d throw up again. It was Valeric who jerked me to my feet and hustled me down the pale green corridor to the bathroom, Valeric who knelt on the floor with me, grabbing back my hair and holding on to my nape with the other hand, as if she’d done it a thousand times before for other desperate women. It came up as easily as a trick, just colorless mucus by then, and I thought: It’s all gone, I have failed. When I was done, she wet one of those coarse brown paper towels all public bathrooms have and pressed it against my forehead. We walked back that way to where Ma was sitting ready with a handful of Kleenex.
After her class was over, Ma would drive home for lunch, to the empty house. She’d change into her Communist China outfit and call Lally Escobar, who lived next door. Lally was a little older, divorced, with a son in Australia. Come over for leftovers.
“Bonnie, you’re so lucky to have daughters!” Lally would tell my mother. “Sally is the willowy, sensitive one,” she’d announce, even if one of us was in earshot, and then: “But of course that Marty is the beauty.” We might have been species of iris in her garden.
By noon there were six new admits, including me and my roommate and the man in the yellow shirt. Lunch was brought in on trays. I asked one of the other patients if I could bum a cigarette. She looked surprised but shoved the pack across the table at me. It was a Lucky Strike and it made me dizzy, which I liked.