Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(59)
Silver Hill was meant to be a hospital that didn’t feel like a hospital but rather like a comfortable retreat in the New England countryside: quaint and comforting as a house in a snow globe. But only if one had really lost one’s mind—only if it were gone completely, never to return—could one forget what it really was and why one was there.
February is the shortest month, and thank whomever for small blessings, because I’ve never been lower in my life. The Silver Hill staff tried their damnedest to fix me, with talk therapy, occupational therapy, and drugs—Miltown, Luminal, Thorazine—but I was so far down the well that they could not even reach me, let alone pull me up.
So they farmed me out. On the first of March they sent me to Greenwich Hospital—twenty miles southwest, almost to the state line—where I stayed for ten days. The location felt like an improvement: Even bedridden in my drab gown, brain scrubbed of every good and bad thought, I could feel myself closer to the city. Closer to the ocean, too; at night the open window sighed the cool breath of Long Island Sound.
The drawback was that they’d sent me there for electric shock treatments.
They didn’t administer such therapy at Silver Hill.
Electroshock treatments are horrible—even though, indeed because, I can’t remember having them. To their credit, the staff at Greenwich Hospital was advanced in its methods: scrupulous about strapping me down and fixing my mouth with a rubber bit to keep the seizures from breaking my bones or making me bite my tongue, considerate enough to give me a muscle relaxant—and a more sophisticated formulation, at that, than the blowgun poison some doctors still favored—along with a general anesthetic to spare me the suffocating horror of the muscle relaxant. Such, I’m told, are the measures they took for my comfort; I’m sure it’s all true. But the treatments purged themselves from my mind even as they did their work—the way that cranes create and then erase themselves from the skyline, one might say—leaving me with only the faint nightmare recollection of lying in bed afterward, every muscle sore, with no notion of who I was, who I’d ever been, why I was in a hospital, how I’d gotten there, or what I’d be returning to when I left. If I ever left. If I’d ever been anywhere else.
But the treatments helped me when nothing else did. In time—and not much time, really—almost everything came back: my address and my phone number, the fact that I was married and had a child, Max’s and Johnny’s faces and names, my books, my fame, all my years at R.H. Macy’s.
What did not come back were the days that had led me to Silver Hill—or, more to the point, the miserable person who I’d been in those days. In an almost-literal flash, the treatments had transfigured me. My healing brain’s sentimental attempts to feel conflicted about this loss met with no success. No easy medical metaphor—they had amputated a wounded limb; no, they had cut out a tumor—seemed the right fit. The doctors’ electric pulse was more like the clearing of an old attic, or the burning of a barren field: Rather than destroying a part of me, it had restored me to who I really was. Or who I imagined myself to be.
The counterfeit Boxfish—that crazy woman, that sorry drunk—was a mistake, a wrong turn, a missed stitch. Now she was gone, unraveled, with no stone to mark her grave, mourned by no one. Me least of all. She shadowed me for years, feeding off her inarticulate anger at the world, and when she saw that I was weak, she attacked. She sabotaged every effort I made to adjust my dime-bright expectations to my middle-aged maternal circumstances, and when the resultant shambles didn’t satisfy her, she tried to kill me and nearly succeeded. So good riddance to her—the best of all possible riddances.
My only hesitation—the only thread of doubt in my vast tapestry of gratitude—has been the fear that, thanks to the treatments’ extreme effectiveness at expunging my enemy from my memory, I might not recognize her if she ever came back. Almost all electroshock patients have follow-up treatments every few months or years to keep their symptoms in check; I never felt I needed them, and so I never did. Over nearly thirty years, of course, this fear has faded as the stakes have shrunk. If she comes back now to claim me—this tall, proud, husk of a woman, ending her days alone in Manhattan—then I can’t see how the prize would be worth the fight.
Once the treatments were over I wanted to go home. I could have walked back to Murray Hill, I swore—an easy thirty miles along the Lower Post Road, a thoroughfare older than the Constitution, rambling through Port Chester and Rye, through Mamaroneck and New Rochelle, across the Bronx, over the Third Avenue Bridge into Harlem, past the homes and the businesses of every kind of New Yorker you can think of, straight down Lexington to East Thirty-Sixth—but of course they did not let me.
Rather I got shipped—alone this time, no Max, and certainly no Johnny—back to Silver Hill for indefinite “observation” and further rehabilitation.
For three months I hovered like an astronaut over my old life, my real life. I wanted so badly to return to it—but in my own way, on my own terms. The thought of friends seeing me in my current circumstances was abhorrent. Fortunately, few of them wanted to. I received a number of kind and thoughtful letters, but blessedly next to no requests to visit.
“If I may appeal to your expertise,” I asked anodyne Dr. R as he made his rounds, “perhaps you can settle a question for me: Is crazy contagious? Some of my acquaintances behave as though it might be.”