It was an aspirin box of dope that Glenda had got from her boyfriend on the men’s side. Glenda was married and so was her boyfriend, but nobody counted that against them. Outside, it would end; they would be stuck back in the frame they had fallen from, with a new glue of fear to hold them there. Romances between patients reminded Connie of grade school affairs, a matter of catching a glimpse at a high window, sending a note on a cart, holding hands briefly in the common day room, touching for an instant at group therapy, dancing together at a Christmas party. Sometimes patients with grounds privileges were rumored to fuck in a storage room or behind a hedge, but that was mostly fantasy. For staff, it was different.
Mrs. Richard and Nurse Wright reminded her of grade school teachers anyhow. Her first school hadn’t been that bad. She had gone with Luis hand in hand. All the children had been Mexican and the school within walking distance. No, the grade school she remembered with a shudder was her Chicago grade school.
“Say sit down.”
“Seet down.”
“Sit down. Now say it correctly, Consoola.”
“Seet down.”
Luis had mastered that Anglo sound and taught it to the rest of them, hitting them with his fists until they said it as he did. Luis punching her in the arm was better than the white teacher looking at her with that bored knowledge that she would fail and fail again to say the sound that seemed to have been invented to shame her. Luis did not teach them to say “sit.” Luis’s word of choice for his finally successful lesson was “shit.”
“Can I go to the bathroom? Teacher, I got to go.” Here she approached the nursing station and begged for a scrap of paper, a pencil, a cigarette, a light, a chance for one word with the doctor, permission to make a phone call. Everything but being tied down drugged blind or wheeled off to electroshock was a privilege. A job off the ward, a chance to take a walk, a candy bar.
One of the privileges was a trip to the beauty shop, where they made up women her age to look exactly like women her age made up. She wouldn’t come out of there looking like Mrs. Polcari. Last time she had been released, the beauty shop had done a job on her like Dolly’s mother, Carmel, did on the Puerto Rican women who came to her to be stuffed and cooked for weddings, important parties. She had looked ten years out of style, covered with funny wry curls and with a quarter inch of mask emphasizing every line, with green eyelids and a bright orange mouth and thickened lashes caked with mascara on the front of her like new awnings on a pawnshop window.
When she had arrived at the welfare hotel where they had her for the first months–junkies in the halls and ten kids to a room with a stopped‑up sink–she was greeted by that garish face of an elderly doll lurid with the grime of traveling. Stretched out on the bed, she imagined Claud’s ghost touching her skin with his knowing fingers, those fingers faster than the rest of him and ending in sensitive bulbs. How he would have complained about what was smeared over her cheeks.
“You feel like satin pillows. Like the satin sheets the king of the pimps sleep on. Gonna spend this whole Sunday just lollin around, just rootin around grabbin myself handfuls of that good stuff.”
Claud made love as if he had all the time in the world. He might not feel like it for a week, he might disappear, he might feel too low and mean. But when he came to it, he took his sweet time. He loved up every bit of her. He would stroke the silky skin on the underside of her arms until her breasts would begin to burn, he would play with her breasts with light teasing and then he would take great handfuls and nuzzle and suck, until her belly ached with wanting. He would rub his thing against her languidly, slowly, slowly he would slip in and then ease out, slip in and ease out until she was thrusting him in herself with her hand. After he came, he would pause a little but he would stay hard. Then he would go on and go on. He would be so patient and so deliberate with her, so slow and easy, that she could give herself up to loving him back, to enjoying his coming, to the feeling of their skins touching, knowing that she would have her pleasure opening out full and slow in her.
She had gone into a bar on Second Avenue–one of the few bars with a mixed black and Puerto Rican clientele–looking for Eddie, who’d stopped paying child support. She was sitting at a table alone, low in mind, feeling she must look as if she wanted to be picked up. She had noticed Claud at the back having a drink with some friends, just as she warily noticed every man who came and went. She held a newspaper propped in front of her and nursed a warm beer, hoping that Eddie or one of his compadres would walk through the door.
After some banter with the bartender, Claud started to play his saxophone: blues, spirituals, some popular songs. She was glad. He played all right, but she was glad because she had something to be doing sitting there: she could watch the big black man with the opaque glasses playing saxophone and she could be beating time to music, and only from the corner of her eye keep a watch on the door. Not till Claud finished and passed the hat did she realize he was blind. That took her off guard, so that when he came back to her table, returned the quarter she had dropped in the hat and asked if he could sit down and buy her a beer, she had agreed–not to be rude, because his blindness took her off guard.
This rotten place, it gave her nothing to do and too much time to do it in. Here she was brooding on Claud again. She couldn’t take it. Remembering him just cut her to bleeding hunks. Dead.
Ten‑thirty. She had been up for four hours and the big event had been waiting in line for breakfast for half an hour. On the ward it was a bad day. Mrs. Richard found the sixteen‑year‑old black girl, Sylvia, leaning against the radiator with the side of her face burned. She was dragged off to seclusion, numb with drugs, and whatever they did to her would not include treating the burn.
Then old Mrs. Stein came out of the toilet with shit rubbed in her hair, and while one of the attendants was dragging her back in, Sharma suddenly began to punch Glenda. “You goddamn whore! I know you’re carrying on with my husband. You both think I’m stupid! Whore of Babylon! You’re doing it with all the doctors. Everybody’s talking about you, whore! You do it with all of them!”
By eleven‑thirty half the seclusion rooms on the ward were full and the patients lined up for an extra‑heavy dose of tranks, given in liquid form that burned the throat raw and made her hoarse. She could feel minds stirring like poplars in a storm all through the ward, and occasionally a brittle branch would break off and crash to the floor. They were angry about being kept in, with none of the minute breaks in routine to look forward to that made a life on G‑2. She sat on the floor in a place where she could catch a glimpse of a whole window full of nothing but leaves if she held her head just right. If she sat at the right angle, she couldn’t see the other buildings and the green could fill her eyes.
The medication was dragging her down, filling her mind with cotton fluff and odd hot pieces of hallucination and memory. Her head felt swollen: the heads of those embryos floating in the brooder, those oversized knowing heads floating upside down behind glass. She wanted to sleep, but patients were not allowed to lie down during the daytime.
Finally an event: time to line up for lunch. They shuffled into line, they wandered about as the attendants made them stand straight. They waited and waited for the door to unlock. All the wards in G building went to lunch downstairs, but on a staggered schedule. Glenda, with a face swollen from Sharma’s attack, came and stood next to her. Waited to see if she would speak.