Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(60)

Dr. R, accustomed at long last to my kidding, took this in the spirit it was intended. “For the most part, no,” he said. “Unless we’re talking about something like syphilitic psychosis. And you can assure your friends that they’re in no danger of catching that here. Silver Hill is a progressive institution, but only up to a point.”

“Thank you, doctor. You’ve helped me win a bet with myself.”

“A thing I have noticed,” he continued, unable to avoid self-seriousness for more than thirty seconds or so, “is that encounters with people who are confronting their psychiatric issues often produce anxiety in people who are not confronting their psychiatric issues, precisely because they are not doing so. You might keep that in mind while you’re reading your correspondence.”

I shook my head in mock wonderment. “What a peculiar career you have chosen for yourself,” I said. “Didn’t your mother want you to become some regular sort of doctor? Like a podiatrist?”

“Don’t get me started on my mother,” said Dr. R.

My own parents were both dead by that time, to my great relief. My mother died in 1950; my father lost his will to live in her absence and followed not more than six months later to wherever it is that people who’ve died go.

Nowhere, I think, is what you’d call the place.

My older brother never came to visit me. He did write me letters, though: distant and condescending ones, because those were the shallow pools in which his small mind swam. When he sent me a clipping called “Mastering Your Impulses,” about how alcoholics bring their problems upon themselves and need merely to “buck up” and “grow a spine,” I never wanted to hear from him again, at least not while I was still inside. I sent him an envelope full of worthless plastic prizes that I’d collected from boxes of Cracker Jack—Dr. R was a psychiatrist, not a dentist—and I wrote my response on the backs of what the box called a Zoo Card Animal Game: You are acting no more sensitive than a stupid animal when you send things like that. I feel caged enough as it is. If that is all you can find it in your brain to send me, then I wish you’d refrain. I’ll just see you when I get out.

He did not write me anymore at Silver Hill, and that was fine with me.

*

Saintly Helen McGoldrick was the first guest I was permitted. She came in March, on a morning blue and bright with the muddy smell of spring. It happened to be Saint Patrick’s Day—a Thursday, so she could avoid the weekend traffic—and she brought a bouquet of green carnations suited to the occasion. They reminded me of the potted four-leaf clover Max had gotten me two decades ago when we were first in love, their botanical luck long since run out.

I met Helen in the common area, where residents were allowed to have visitors. We could order coffee or tea and sit and drink it and pretend we were free: normal people joining friends at a café.

Anyone else would have lied, said I looked great, told me I was beginning to appear healthy again. Not Helen. “Lily,” she said. “Your eyes!”

I welcomed her lack of pretense, though it was hard to look at her still-lovely face as it saw my ravaged one. “I know,” I said, raising a hand to my cheek. “You’re the only person I’m seeing until my eyes have recovered. The creases and circles are from the Thorazine. It affects some people that way. Others break out.”

“Thorazine?” said Helen, leading me by the arm to a table. “Let’s sit down.”

“I meant to write you and explain,” I said. “But I didn’t have it in me. I figured I could just tell you in person, if you even want to hear about it.”

“I do, of course,” she said. “If you even want to talk about it.”

“They only give shock treatments to patients with severe depression,” I said. “And they sure had one in me.”

A wispy, deferential presence—I was never sure what to call them; they were less than orderlies but more than waiters, and I’ll bet if a patient suddenly pitched a fit their wispiness would firm up in a hurry—took our orders and brought us our cups, smooth and silent as a marionette angel.

“Ah yes, the forced charm of these hospital saucers reminds me,” I said, and handed Helen a small wrapped package. “Open it.”

“A leather coaster,” said Helen, setting it on the tabletop, then setting her coffee cup atop it. “With my initials. Thank you. They’re training you to become a craftswoman?”

“A slave,” I said. “This whole setup is a racket. They’re abducting middle-aged women as forced labor to finally break the back of the leatherworkers’ union. I was going to stamp a desperate request for help into it, but the clever bastards took away all the vowels. You’d have never made any sense of it.”

Amusement and alarm spun across Helen’s face like a dog chasing its tail. I laughed, for the first time in a long time.

“I’m joking, honeybunch,” I said. “But don’t I make a damn good lunatic? The coaster is the happy byproduct of my occupational therapy. I’m made to stay pretty quiet here, aside from walking in the gardens and working on handicrafts. That’s because of the Thorazine. They gave it to me in large quantities to keep me from getting too high after those shock treatments. They’re weaning me off it now.”

“I hear electroshock is a waking nightmare,” said Helen. “I can understand if you don’t want to relive that.”