Everyone but the attendants and the nurse bustled after him, as the patients looked at each other and the shut door. One at a time they were called in. The morning passed. No provision had been made for them to get lunch, which was brought in on trays for the staff, so they remained parked in the hall, grumbling, those screened and those not yet processed.

“It’s no different from a regular psychiatric interview,” said a woman in her forties, who also informed them she was a schoolteacher. “I teach auditorium,” she said. That sounded peculiar to Connie, like teaching garage or living room. “The doctors simply ask you the same old questions. They have your records right there, so they know the answers, or they think they do … . Perhaps I’m being reclassified, finally. They’re going to look into our cases.”

At about one, Connie was called in as Skip came out. Clearing her throat with nervousness, she sat in a chair facing them lined up behind a table. Doctors and judges, caseworkers and social workers, probation officers, police, psychiatrists. Her heart bumped, her palms dampened, her throat kept closing over. She could not guess which way to cue her answers. What were they looking for? Would it be better to fall into their net or through it? If only she knew. If only she knew what the net consisted of. She was taking a test in a subject, and she didn’t even know what course it was.

The young doctor who had picked her out of the ward did most of the questioning at first, with the type in the denim pseudo work clothes horning in from time to time. The same old stuff about Dolly and Geraldo, her daughter, her time with Claud, her drinking, her drug use, her difficulty in getting a job. It was like saying the responses at Mass. When what she said didn’t fit their fixed ideas, they went on as if it did. Resistance, they called that, when you didn’t agree, but this bunch didn’t seem that interested in whether she had a good therapeutic attitude. What were they listening for, inasmuch as they listened at all? How that Dr. Redding stared at her, not like she’d look at a person, but the way she might look at a tree, a painting, a tiger in the zoo.

They were on her brother Joe now. The holy ghost of poor Joe, who had died of a perforated ulcer just after he got out of the pen for a drugstore holdup. Now they were questioning her about the beatings her father had given her as a child. She kept her face frozen, her voice level. Inappropriate affect, they called that–as if to have strangers pawing through the rags of her life like people going through cast‑off clothes at a rummage sale was not painful enough to call forth every measure of control she could manage. Her mother, her father, her brother, her lover, her husband, her daughter, all fingered, sized up, dissected, labeled. Still, their white faces looked bored. The denim type, Acker, and Miss Moynihan in the lab coat were exchanging flirtatious glances. They could eat her for dessert and go on to six others and never belch. They were white through and through like Wonder Bread, white and full of holes.

Suddenly Dr. Redding came to life and took over. “Have you ever suffered headaches? pain anywhere in the head region?”

“Headaches?” Now what was this? “The medication does that sometimes,” she said cautiously.

“The medication?”

“The tranquilizers.”

“Other times. Outside the hospital. Haven’t you had headaches outside the hospital, Connie?”

One of those first‑name doctors who reduced you to five years old. “Not often.”

“How often?”

She shrugged. What was he getting at? Were they wanting to try out drugs on them? “My back aches. My feet sometimes. I’ve had female complaints. My eyes, my head never has troubled me much in my life. Knock on wood.”

“How about in connection with some of those incidents we’ve gone over? I notice in the incident where you used violence against your daughter there’s a mention in the record of your feeling unwell.”

“Doctor, I was hung over. Strung out. I was very bad. I’d been drinking for three months.”

“Connie, you’re diagnosing, aren’t you?” He seemed to suspect she was concealing headaches. “Dizziness? Blackouts?”

“Like fainting? No, I never fainted in my whole life.”

“Yet you say you were unconscious the night you were admitted to Bellevue.”

“Geraldo and Slick hit me in the head. Slick knocked me out.”

“Do you remember any blows to the head previously? Before the last accident when you were readmitted to Bellevue?”

“Sure, occasionally.”

“Why don’t you describe those occasions?”

“I don’t remember them all … .” She paused when she saw Dr. Redding making a satisfied note of that. “Eddie, Eddie Ramos, my husband, used to hit me in the head sometimes.”

“That’s the second husband, the one she’s still married to,” Acker, the denim type, said.

“He didn’t sign the commitment. Where is he?” Dr. Redding demanded of Acker.

“Whereabouts unknown, Doctor.”

“I suppose no one has tried too hard to find our pugilist,” Dr. Redding said with a slight smile. “Connie, do you remember your head being x‑rayed after any of these incidents with your second husband?”

“No. I never got beat up that bad, to go into the hospital and get x‑rays.” They had to be kidding. When she had been with Eddie she had not been on welfare and who would have paid for x‑rays and doctors? The only time she had gone in was when she had been bleeding after the abortion, and that had been terrible in its consequences.

“Not that badly,Connie? … Did he knock you down?”

“Sure.” She had noticed before that white men got off on descriptions of brown and black women being beaten. “Hay que tratarlas mal,” Eddie would always say.

“Get a set of x‑rays on her before we begin the EEG monitoring,” Dr. Redding said to Dr. Morgan. “We’ll go with this one in the initial stages. How many live ones does that give us today?”

“Seven, Doctor,” the secretary chirped.

“That’s all? Let’s get cracking. Okay, Connie. Take her out.” Dr. Redding was already rummaging through the next set of records as she was whisked out and dumped in her chair again.

At two the staff emerged, Dr. Redding looking irritated. “This won’t do. We need more. You’ve got to scan more records. We might even locate some subjects on the chronic wards.”

The first consequences of that interview came within the week, when Connie was told to get herself together for a move. “You got lucky, girl. I put in a good word on you. But I know we be seeing you up here again!” Fargo packed her off Ward L‑6 to a more open ward, G‑2.

Sybil gave her a sad hopeless look that reminded her of childhood partings from best friends. Connie said, “Try to get off here. Be cagey for a while.”

“I’ll be docile as a plastic cow,” Sybil said without conviction. “After all, I’ll never get out of this place if I don’t start trying, unless I learn to fly. And I have a lot to do this year.”

Ward G‑2 was in G building, just as old and sad but in marginally better repair. It was a red brick barracks that stood nearer the medical building, where the doctors had interviewed her. Connie sat on her new cot and looked over the ward, trying to gauge its potentials and threats. The long room with the beds had several windows whose sills were claimed as roosting territory by cliques of women, black women on one window and whites on another. G‑2 was a locked ward but a more active one. That big door by the nursing station clattered open to admit occupational therapists, an occasional volunteer, and to let out patients who worked off the ward. Group therapy sessions were held on the ward twice a week. Little cabinets stood beside each of the fifty beds, and at one end of the ward card tables were set up. Along one side ran a long screened‑in porch where patients could walk. They shared a day room with a men’s ward, a dim room with chairs in rows facing a locked TV. It was strange to see men around again.