Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [167]
This was the only mental hospital she’d ever been in where doctors actually saw patients. She had no idea what went on. The first time she’d been committed, when she belived herself truly sick, she had expected treatment. A kindly gray doctor, a sort of Marcus Welby of the mind, would sit behind a desk asking her questions in a learned but soothing voice, explaining to her exactly how she had gone wrong. She would weep and understand. Confessional. Priests that healed. But all the doctor asked in the five minutes granted her had been the name of the President, the date, why she thought she was there. Then he had told her to count backward from one hundred by sevens.
That counting backward gave her trouble. Somehow, in changing schools from Texas to Chicago, she had missed some arithmetic. Never could she figure a tip or catch the cashier at the superette cheating her, even though she would count over her change, squinting at her palm to con the cashier into thinking she knew what was going on. Let’s see—one hundred, ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine, seventy-two … A pang of fear tweaked her. Shouldn’t it have been seventy? She’d done it wrong again. Seven tens were seventy; she knew that. She had gone wrong again … .
If she could get through the locked ward door, she was convinced she could escape the hospital. A guard stood on duty in the lobby, but he hardly ever stopped people. Many outpatients came and went, and furloughs for inpatients were common. She knew she could make it, once past that ward door. But because she had run away, they watched her even more closely than the others. Whenever she loitered near the door, the attendants or the nurse would ask what she thought she was doing. She ran out of excuses. Sometimes she would hang around the nursing station making conversation with staff in order to keep an eye on the door, trying to shape a plan for getting through it, but if she looked at the door too much they got suspicious. Then she would try to redeem herself by offering to make coffee for them. The doctors had their own fancy automatic coffee machine in an alcove outside the conference room. Redding drank ten to fourteen cups a day, and the secretary Patty or one of the aides or attendants made it fresh every couple of hours. The lower staff sometimes drank the doctors’ coffee, but mostly used an electric percolator in the little kitchen. Sometimes patients were allowed to used the percolator or to drink an occasional cup of coffee in the afternoon. For Connie that made a big difference, keeping her awake enough to plot and think.
“I’m sorry you didn’t make it out,” she said to Tina as they got ready for bed.
Tina did not answer for a while. Then she said in a soft, remote voice, “My man, the only man I ever loved all the way through and through. Down to the pit of my stomach. They sent him up for thirty years. It might as well be life. Twice a year I get up to see him. Fifteen minutes through a grille. He’s getting old fast there. His hair’s coming out and his teeth … It might as well be for life!”
At bedtime, as Connie was sloshing in the murk of drugged sleep, Skip walked lightly through the rooms of the ward and paused at the foot of her bed. In death his hair had grown out and he had regained his loose-limbed grace. “Come along,” he called to her over the sleeping Tina. “Aren’t you coming? Shuffle off with me, my dearie-o! Don’t let them steal the best of you.”
What was it, her Catholic upbringing that kept her from thinking about suicide? Just as contraception had always felt more of a sin than falling into bed.