Part 20 (1/2)

Mrs. Bannister helped me sit up.

”You'll be better now. You'll be better in no time. Would you like some hot milk?”

”Yes.”

And when Mrs. Bannister held the cup to my lips, I fanned the hot milk out on my tongue as it went down, tasting it luxuriously, the way a baby tastes its mother.

”Mrs. Bannister tells me you had a reaction.” Doctor Nolan seated herself in the armchair by the window and took out a tiny box of matches. The box looked exactly like the one I had hidden in the hem of my bathrobe, and for a moment I wondered if a nurse had discovered it there and given it back to Doctor Nolan on the quiet.

Doctor Nolan sc.r.a.ped a match on the side of the box. A hot yellow flame jumped into life, and I watched her suck it up into the cigarette.

”Mrs. B. says you felt better.”

”I did for a while. Now I'm the same again.”

”I've news for you.”

I waited. Every day now, for I didn't know how many days, I had spent the mornings and afternoons and evenings wrapped up in my white blanket on the deck chair in the alcove, pretending to read. I had a dim notion that Doctor Nolan was allowing me a certain number of days and then she would say just what Doctor Gordon had said: ”I'm sorry, you don't seem to have improved, I think you'd better have some shock treatments....”

”Well, don't you want to hear what it is?”

”What?” I said dully, and braced myself.

”You're not to have any more visitors for a while.”

I stared at Doctor Nolan in surprise. ”Why that's wonderful.”

”I thought you'd be pleased.” She smiled.

Then I looked, and Doctor Nolan looked, at the wastebasket beside my bureau. Out of the wastebasket poked the bloodred buds of a dozen long-stemmed roses.

That afternoon my mother had come to visit me.

My mother was only one in a long stream of visitors--my former employer, the lady Christian Scientist, who walked on the lawn with me and talked about the mist going up from the earth in the Bible, and the mist being error, and my whole trouble being that I believed in the mist, and the minute I stopped believing in it, it would disappear and I would see I had always been well, and the English teacher I had in high school who came and tried to teach me how to play Scrabble, because he thought it might revive my old interest in words, and Philomena Guinea herself, who wasn't at all satisfied with what the doctors were doing and kept telling them so.

I hated these visits.

I would be sitting in my alcove or in my room, and a smiling nurse would pop in and announce one or another of the visitors. Once they'd even brought the minister of the Unitarian church, whom I'd never really liked at all. He was terribly nervous the whole time, and I could tell he thought I was crazy as a loon, because I told him I believed in h.e.l.l, and that certain people, like me, had to live in h.e.l.l before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.

I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.

I thought if they left me alone I might have some peace.

My mother was the worst. She never scolded me, but kept begging me, with a sorrowful face, to tell her what she had done wrong. She said she was sure the doctors thought she had done something wrong because they asked her a lot of questions about my toilet training, and I had been perfectly trained at a very early age and given her no trouble whatsoever.

That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.

”Save them for my funeral,” I'd said.

My mother's face puckered, and she looked ready to cry.

”But Esther, don't you remember what day it is today?”

”No.”

I thought it might be Saint Valentine's day.

”It's your birth birthday.”

And that was when I had dumped the roses in the wastebasket.

”That was a silly thing for her to do,” I said to Doctor Nolan.

Doctor Nolan nodded. She seemed to know what I meant.

”I hate her,” I said, and waited for the blow to fall.

But Doctor Nolan only smiled at me as if something had pleased her very, very much, and said, ”I suppose you do.”

17.

”You're a lucky girl today.”

The young nurse cleared my breakfast tray away and left me wrapped in my white blanket like a pa.s.senger taking the sea air on the deck of a s.h.i.+p. The young nurse cleared my breakfast tray away and left me wrapped in my white blanket like a pa.s.senger taking the sea air on the deck of a s.h.i.+p.

”Why am I lucky?”

”Well, I'm not sure if you're supposed to know yet, but today you're moving to Belsize.” The nurse looked at me expectantly.

”Belsize,” I said. ”I can't go there.”

”Why not?”

”I'm not ready. I'm not well enough.”

”Of course, you're well enough. Don't worry, they wouldn't be moving you if you weren't well enough.”

After the nurse left, I tried to puzzle out this new move on Doctor Nolan's part. What was she trying to prove? I hadn't changed. Nothing had changed. And Belsize was the best house of all. From Belsize people went back to work and back to school and back to their homes.

Joan would be at Belsize. Joan with her physics books and her golf clubs and her badminton rackets and her breathy voice. Joan, marking the gulf between me and the nearly well ones. Ever since Joan left Caplan I'd followed her progress through the asylum grapevine.

Joan had walk privileges, Joan had shopping privileges, Joan had town privileges. I gathered all my news of Joan into a little bitter heap, though I received it with surface gladness. Joan was the beaming double of my old best self, specially designed to follow and torment me.

Perhaps Joan would be gone when I got to Belsize.

At least at Belsize I could forget about shock treatments. At Caplan a lot of the women had shock treatments. I could tell which ones they were, because they didn't get their breakfast trays with the rest of us. They had their shock treatments while we breakfasted in our rooms, and then they came into the lounge, quiet and extinguished, led like children by the nurses, and ate their breakfasts there.