“Please can I make a phone call?” Sylvia asked.

“Who do you want to call?”

The black woman shifted her feet. “My boyfriend.”

“What’s his name?”

“Duster.”

The nurse was still waiting.

Reluctantly Sylvia added, “Duster MacPhee. He’s in Yonkers.”

“You have the money?”

“Right here, I sure do.”

“Okay. The men’s attendant is on duty in the hall.” The nurse acted out permitting a great favor.

“I need a couple of aspirin. I have a terrible headache tonight.” A new patient, Mrs. Souza, held out her hand impatiently.

“Your medication is listed on your chart, and it doesn’t include aspirin,” the night nurse said.

“But I have a headache. I don’t need any … medication. Drugs. Just plain, ordinary aspirin.”

“You’re a doctor now, to prescribe for yourself, Mrs. Souza? Is that what you’re doing in the hospital–thinking you’re a doctor?”

“I’m not asking for morphine, Nurse. Just aspirin! Like we sell in the drugstore I own with my husband, by sizes up to one thousand! Aspirin!”

“Sweetie, you may or you may not own a drugstore, but you’re contused now. You aren’t the one who prescribes for the patients in here. Now go sit down! Now! Or I’ll have you sedated.”

Mrs. Souza could not believe it. She turned to Connie, next in line. “I was only asking for plain aspirin, for my headache! I’ll tell the doctor about this.”

“Better sit down,” she said softly. She could not risk saying more. She stepped past Mrs. Souza and in her best beggar’s manner pleaded, “Please, I would really appreciate it if I could call my niece Dolly Campos in New York City?”

“You have the money?”

She showed her the precious dollar, cashed into quarters and dimes from Mrs. Stein. “See? Enough to call her. Please. I would appreciate it, Nurse, ever so much.”

“I sure would like to know where you got that, Mrs. Ramos,”

“It’s mine. See? Please.” Again she held out her hand with the precious coins hot in her palm. “I would really like to talk with my niece, Dolly Campos, in Manhattan. You have her on the list of family, if you want to check it.”

“Go ahead. Though I’d like to know what you did for that money. Did you bum it in dimes?”

A man was talking on the pay phone already and four others were ahead of her, including Sylvia. They could all hear, although the man tried to hold his mouth close to the receiver and cup his other hand around it. Still, when his wife could hear him, they could hear him too.

“So how come you haven’t brought it? I’m not angry … . I can’t talk louder, baby … . So sell the goddamned house before they foreclose! Never mind what your brother said … . Now listen … . I’m not yelling! … Listen, so call a real estate man–that’s what they’re for … . Never mind what he says, the commission comes out of the price. If they don’t sell it, they don’t get anything, Margaret. Listen to me!”

“Hurry up, you,” the kid next in line said. “I got to call by eight o’clock. You been on ten minutes!”

The whole line wriggled with excitement, anxiety, the dreadful force of focusing all longing on that black object waiting to eat their precious coins. The attendant leaned smoking against the far wall, idly flirting with a woman patient giggling in short nervous bursts, her eyes fixed on his shoes. Dolly might not be home. She might be with a john. Geraldo might be with her, and he would hang up. To get Geraldo would be worse than not to get anyone, because that would alert him to Connie’s trying to reach her niece. If she could only call in the morning!

The kid was talking to his mother and father at once, presumably on different extensions. He was about fifteen, with acne run wild in the hospital, a tubby build, hands that shook on the phone. It depressed her to see a kid with hands that shook. She stared at the greasy texture of the wall opposite, like the skin of a dirty old lizard. Geraldo’s sharp lizard boots. He would be there, of course, he would answer the phone. She could try to disguise her voice. If he answered and she hung up immediately, maybe her coins would come back. No, that didn’t work; once he answered, the money was lost and the chance blown.

The kid left the phone dangling and shuffled off. “Bitch, bitch, bitch,” he mumbled and slammed headfirst into the opposite wall. The attendant seized him by the scruff.

Sylvia grabbed the phone for her call. Behind them five others were waiting. Sylvia dialed her number. It was busy. Her face would not accept that. She dialed again. It was busy again. Without a word she went to the end of the line to wait another turn. Her face was wondering who her boyfriend was talking to. Her face was naming women, her face was inventing women he was about to run over to see, hop into bed with, love in total forgetfulness of her.

Connie fumbled at the coins, dropped a dime, stomped it and scooped it up in blurred haste before she could lose her place in line. She dialed deliberately, not too slow, not too fast. The number rang. Third ring. Picked up. Her heart rose like an express elevator.

“Hello, this is Dolly Campos’ residence. I am busy right now but I will call you back as soon as I am free. Please state your name and number, and I will get back to you just as soon as I can. That’s a promise! Love from Dolly. You have sixty seconds after the tone.”

She could not comprehend for a moment and then she realized it was a recording machine. She said quickly, for she had already lost seconds, “Dolly, my baby, it’s me, Connie, in the hospital. Please, come to see me! This weekend or next. Please! Bring me a little money and clothes! Write me. Please, Dolly! Don’t forget me!” It beeped again before she could get in “Don’t forget me,” and she spoke to dead air. She hung up the phone and drifted away. A machine. Across the hall the attendant was muttering in the ear of the woman patient, who fidgeted and shook her head limply.

What was Dolly doing with a machine? She must still be in the life. That way could she pick and choose? Fat chance. A machine! She had worked Skip for a dollar to speak to a rotten machine.

Friday she got a letter that had been opened and read, pawed through, inspected, and passed upon by staff, but still it was hers. From Dolly, in English. The staff took an extra week on Spanish; maybe Dolly remembered, or more likely she could not write Spanish.

Saturday her excitement strummed like a wire. She noticed every visitor. So that was Sharma’s husband, the one she was always accusing other women of sleeping with–that awkward sleepy‑faced middle‑aged boy who kept gaping around him but never looked into any of their faces. Introduced to him as she passed–Sharma was proud of having her husband visit–she tried to meet his gaze but he stared unwaveringly into her torso, breast high. She mistrusted him instantly. Yes, she felt he had another woman already, who cooked his breakfast and laundered his shirts and lay in his bed. She could feel that coming off him. Sharma knew too. Connie fled.

Weekends were bad unless a patient had visitors. The locked door of the ward hardly budged, not for the unpaid labor called industrial therapy, not for OT, not for group therapy, not for the doctor on his galloping visit.

The evening medication did not work on her. Her adrenaline hummed in the dark ward like a generator and it burned off the Thorazine and the Seconal like fuel. She was dreadfully alert and bored. How many, many hours must wear away before dawn could stain the high windows? How many more hours of the day must flow, a river of lard, over her before Dolly would appear? Dolly must be persuaded to start trying to get her out of here, before Luis signed whatever release the doctors were after. But don’t push Dolly; to reestablish contact was everything. Everybody outside had freedom and power by contrast. The poorest most strung out fucked up worked over brought down junkie in Harlem had more freedom, more place, richer choices, sweeter dignity than the most privileged patient in the whole bughouse.