Heart Berries: A Memoir(7)

We fought for hours, and I didn’t say that my mother had spent her life waiting for service. I waited with her in cafés for an order of french fries or something small we could afford. White women didn’t greet her or consider our time. We walked into places and sometimes men heckled me. I said I was twelve, and they often didn’t believe me. My mother and I found solace, driving hours out of our neighborhood, where being Indian was not much of a crime. If I told you that, I would also need to stop and note the significance of so many other things.

My mind is overwhelmed with breakfast alone. I don’t eat for days so you can run your hands over my ribcage. You told me that you always want to eat ribs afterward. I don’t eat for days because I can’t afford it. The meal I order after being fucked, by you, or anyone, is something earned. Men objectify me, to such a degree that they forget I eat. You feed your dog more kindly than you feed me. That’s men.

That was also my problem: an inability to distinguish you from other men when I am angry. I’m sorry. If only you could see how little I need in this hospital.

I have been vulnerable, but I have never felt this threatened before. I thought I knew what the worst outcomes could be, until I ended up here. I didn’t know not being enough, or being so wrong about someone, would feel this way.

You got the message I asked my friend to relay. You left me a message, and the nurses said you sounded concerned. I called you from the community phone, but you were not available. I don’t even know what to say, so I ask you to visit me. I hope that when you get my message you are alone. Nobody would advise you seeing me. You are capable of a finality I can’t exact.

I sat in the reading room for five hours watching women color. The women in here take coloring seriously. They’re territorial over the colors.

“That’s an earthy green,” Patricia said to me. “You should use something brighter.”

Patricia looked bothered by my work. She was an apple-faced older woman, with white hair and a soft voice. She was taken here against her will, so she had no clothes of her own. Her breasts hung low in her gown.

“I don’t know, Patricia,” Laurie said. “It’s kind of like a rich, lustery green. That’s how green stems are.”

Patricia smiled and passed me the right color.

Laurie told me that I should color and speak to the other women and never watch the TV because they write that stuff down. She doesn’t want to be released because she is homeless. She tried to kill herself with pills, and by some magic, she was discovered on the floor in her own vomit. She was living in transitional housing, and the suicide attempt wasn’t an issue, but when the emergency responders searched her room, they found pills, which had been prescribed, along with two beer cans. They had a strict rule about alcohol. She was notified with a little sticky note from the nurses that she could no longer live in her home, and that someone else would inhabit her studio by the time she got out.

“Tallboys?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “It was two small cans.”

Patricia hovered over her own flower to disengage from our talk.

“I didn’t try anything,” I said. “I usually do try something when I get this bad. I usually take pills and vomit or something.”

Laurie’s hair made me nostalgic for my childhood. It was auburn and permed and gelled into a crunchy lion’s mane.

What I color is inside the lines and cute. A teacher’s assistant in grade one asked me to draw a spoon. I took my time and drew an elaborate rainbow in its silhouette. I gave it a mouth and legs. She told me that passing relied on my ability to just draw a spoon, then she handed me another paper. I used to forgetfully bring things home from school to show my father, years after he left.

I have some memories of him painting. He held me tight in the cold of the basement. I used to sit on his lap for hours while he worked.

“Look,” he said, pointing to one of his birds. “What do you see?”

“Eagle,” I said.

“Mother,” he said.

He looked a lot like Jim from Taxi. He had long, coarse hair, and he always wore light blue denim with an old baseball tee. He was lean, and my mother had a thing for tall, lean men.

I feel like I don’t belong here, Casey. I feel like nothing here has helped. The psychiatrist advised against me leaving and threatened to get the courts involved. So I tried to engage myself with every material and exercise. They give each woman a large pink book that asks numerous questions to help parse out all the things that led up to their unraveling. The latter half of the book tries to wind the reader back together, asking them to find better ways to cope: Stop and think before you do something you regret. I don’t like neat narratives or formulas.

I go to group therapy. It is quite intense, because holy shit there are a lot of women in the group who can articulate why they are here.

“It’s been forty years of silence for me,” said Laurie. “My father raped me from age six to ten.”

The group counselor said that one must forgive for one’s self and not for the perpetrator. This made little-to-no sense in my mind. We’re all on meds here, most of us are half zombie and half antsy: a weird mix. In white culture, forgiveness is synonymous with letting go. In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. I don’t even know that white people see transcendence the way we do. I’m not sure that their dichotomies apply to me.