Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [66]
“How do you know Lizzie’s a schizophrenic?” Nell said. She wanted to sit down – she felt sick to her stomach – but the telephone was on the wall and the cord was too short.
Dr. Hobbs laughed in a condescending way. I’m the professional, his tone said. “It’s the word salad,” he said.
“What is word salad?” said Nell.
“She doesn’t make any sense when she talks,” said the doctor. Nell had never noticed this.
“Are you sure?” she said.
“Sure about what?” said Dr. Hobbs.
“That she’s – what you say she is.”
The doctor laughed again. “If she wasn’t a schizophrenic, these drugs she’s on would kill her,” he said. He then said that Nell should not say anything to Lizzie about the diagnosis. That was a delicate matter, and needed to be handled with care.
Nell called him back the next week. She had trouble getting through – she left several messages – but she persisted, because Lizzie’s state was becoming more and more alarming. “What about the way she’s walking?” she asked. Lizzie’s hands were beginning to shake, she’d noticed. Dr. Hobbs said that the stiffness and the drooling and shaking were symptoms of Lizzie’s disease – all schizophrenics had those symptoms. Lizzie was just the age at which this disease manifested itself. A person could seem perfectly normal, and then in their late teens or early twenties, out came the schizophrenia, like some malignant blossom.
“How long is this going to go on?” said Nell.
“The rest of her life,” said Dr. Hobbs.
Nell felt cold all over. Though Lizzie’d had some bad times in the past, Nell had never suspected anything like this.
She discussed the situation with Tig after Lizzie had gone to bed. How would he feel, being saddled with a mad relative?
“We’ll cope,” he said. “Maybe she’ll snap out of it.” Nell felt so grateful to him she almost wept.
There were a lot of other things Nell needed to know over the next few months. How could Lizzie be trusted with driving a car – Tig’s old Chevy – back and forth to the city, with her body so stiff and her hands shaking like that? But Dr. Hobbs – whose tone was becoming more and more hostile, as if he felt Nell was pestering him – said that was fine, Lizzie was perfectly capable of driving.
He also said he hadn’t told Lizzie the truth about her condition yet because she wasn’t ready for that news. She was hallucinating about some man called Claude, he said; she was convinced Claude was dead. Also she’d been suicidal when she’d come to him. But he could guarantee that she wouldn’t commit suicide any time soon.
“Why not?” said Nell. She’d thought that I’m going to kill myself was a figure of speech for Lizzie, as it was for her. Now it appeared she’d been wrong; nevertheless she felt preternaturally calm. She was getting used to these fragments of nightmare that kept coming at her out of the mouth of Dr. Hobbs.
But Dr. Hobbs appeared to be confused about who she was: he seemed to think that she and Tig were Lizzie’s parents. Nell carefully explained the actual relationship, but every time she spoke with him she had to remind him about it.
Meanwhile, Lizzie’s real parents – Nell’s parents – had gone into shock. But they were talking to Nell again, or at least her mother was. “I don’t know what to do,” she would say. It was a plea – Don’t send her back here! It was as if Lizzie had committed some shameful, unmentionable act – something in between a social gaffe and a crime.
Then Nell’s mother would ask plaintively, “When is she going to get better?” As if Nell had any special insights.
“I’m sure the doctor knows what’s right,” Nell would say. She still believed that anyone with a medical degree must know what he was talking about. She needed to believe that: she put some effort into it. “You should come up to the farm and see my horse,” she added. “You like horses. Her name is Gladys. You could go for a ride.” But her mother was too distressed by Lizzie’s plight.
Nell herself hadn’t been riding Gladys much, because she was pregnant. She didn’t want to be thrown