“I never said—”

“You don’t have to say. It’s in your expression.”

“That’s not fair.”

“That’s not fair,” he mimicked me. “You know what you remind me of? One of those little dogs people have in their cars, the ones that bob their heads up and down. You’re made of plaster. You’re not real.”

He reached over past Pajama Man and twisted the volume knob on the TV set until someone stuck their head out of nurses’ station and told him to turn it down.

In the bedroom Marty and I shared on Coram Drive, the wallpaper was white apple blossoms on a blue background. I can feel the texture of the paper now—the flower petals were raised and striated. The blue was the oddest shade, not like sky, or anything in nature, but dull and dark, a Prussian blue.

I dream I’m back in that room and there’s my mother sitting on the bed. She’s a monster—her skin has become that wallpaper, completely covered with it, like leprosy. She has no features on her face, just indentations. It revolts me in a way I can’t describe.

I want to kill her.

I wake up, but whether it’s out of sleep or into another dream I’m not sure. Though the room is dark I can make out white lace curtains at the windows. Or are they ghosts? My heart is pounding my ribs apart, cold sweat runs down my sides. I’m lying on my stomach with every inch of my body pressed as close as possible to the sheet. Maybe if I lie very flat like this, staying still as if I were dead, I will be okay.

There is a beating in my head, behind my eyes, and I squeeze them shut, willing the sound to stop. If my blood is so loud, how will I be able to hear anything else? In the darkness I wait a long time, studying the shape in the next bed-a puddle of black hair, the body like a mummy. Is she asleep or dead? Is that the silhouette of a baby rocking chair, tipped or tipping, by the window?

Finally I dare to turn my head and look the other way, toward the door. There is a gold line at the bottom. I can hear people whispering. “There’s an ugly one,” someone says in a loud voice.

The door snicks open and my eyes close in the same instant. I turn away from the light as if in my sleep.

“She was awake, I heard her crying.” I recognize the voice of one of the female MHs on the night shift. A male voice answers: “She just got off suicide watch.”

After they leave I look over at the next bed and see that it’s only my new roommate, Rachel.

Love, Sally

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. I’m sending this to the address you gave me when you left New York, which I hope is still good.

Sa

Love, Sally

What I remembered about Florida: the flat clarity of light over white sand as I walked barefoot, edging my toe into the mild surf of the Gulf. A fragrant wind. The sun on my back.

The sun.

My stomach contracted with desire.

It was just over a week until Easter Sunday.

The art therapist told us to make a self-portrait.

I couldn’t do it. Every terror of the blank canvas I’d ever felt was multiplied a million times as I sat there at the big table with a sheet of newsprint in front of me. For everyone else it was a cinch, just another therapy. They were all working busily, Lillith with her arm coiled to hide what she was doing, Douglas chunking down like he was making polka dots, Mel leaning back with a cigarette in his mouth, and even Rachel—I could see from across the table that she was sketching an enormous face, in choppy lines.

It didn’t do any good to remember the first drawing class I took in college, with life poses for one minute each, where you wouldn’t even look down at the paper as you drew, fast, without corrections, following the curve of a spine by feel. No time to think, before the instructor’s “Next!” and the model would switch poses. Letting the sketches fall to the floor until by the end of the class you had dozens which you could look over later and say to yourself—“Yes, I caught the arc of that muscle” or “The proportions are wrong here, but the feeling of weight is good.”

I picked up my charcoal.

I was stupid now, and couldn’t see, but there had once been a time when I’d had the divine fire.

Senior year at boarding school, after the standard program of charcoal, pastel, and watercolor, we graduated to oils. It was a completely new language, the box of miniature paint tubes marked with colors I’d never heard of—burnt sienna, titanium white, cadmium red, Indian yellow—the fat stiff-bristled brushes that felt clunky in my hands after the slender supple-tipped watercolor ones.

For the first time, it didn’t come easy.

My problem was with the paints themselves, lying like gobs of frosting on the wooden palette. Our teacher ran us through some basic color theory before letting us mix. On the palette my colors looked okay, but transferred to canvas the effect was mud on a dark day. An unforgiving medium on an unforgiving surface. I didn’t understand impasto yet, and any slip in judgment meant I had to scrub with a turpentine rag.

I spent a lot of time torturing myself by leaning over other people’s shoulders and watching them work. In content, they didn’t seem any more inspired than me, but their paintings had already begun to show texture and control. One day I walked into the studio and found an old still life someone had set up, a misshapen brown pot, probably a reject from the ceramics studio across the hall. It was crammed with daisies picked from the senior garden, already dying.

To hell with it, I only knew how to do what I could do. I put away the large landscape canvas I’d been working on and picked up a small new one. With my finest brush I began to work from the outside in, sketching the edges of the spiky petals protruding from the clump, using the white of the canvas as if I were working in watercolor. It looked too spare, so I mixed up some turpentine washes, blue and gray and brown, the tints of decay. The teacher had come in, and he strolled by a few times, looked, and moved on. I don’t know how long I played around the periphery, concentrating only on the flowers that interested me, but eventually my old impatience took over.