Enduring (22 page)

“Like sex?” Mary Jane giggled.

“That never got to be a habit with me,” Latha said.

“It wasn’t exactly a habit with me either, but I sure miss it,” Mary Jane said, and got a wistful expression on her face that soon turned into a look of great sorrow. And that was the end of the conversation.

Chapter eighteen

S
ince Mary Jane was more mute than Latha whenever she got into one of her down moods, Latha decided she should have more than one friend. There was an exercise period after breakfast, when everyone stood in rows and tried to imitate Nurse Shedd while she bent down to touch her toes. The problem was that lowering your head like that right after a meal made you nauseated, and Latha wasn’t the only one who disgorged her toast and jelly. An attendant with a mop, broom and bucket was busy cleaning up. For the first time, Latha was aware that she, like all the other girls, was barefoot. She had spent so much of her life going barefoot that she hadn’t even thought about it. The woman next to Latha put her hand on the back of Latha’s neck, and that made her feel better. “What you need is some ginger tea,” the woman said. “But ’course we aint got ary.” They introduced themselves, and it turned out the woman was from Madison County, just one county over from Newton County. Her name was Flora Bohannon. “What are you in for?” she asked. It was a common question among inmates, which made the place seem even more like a penitentiary. Flora, like Mary Jane, was so friendly that Latha knew she might be able to speak to her.

“I haven’t been diagnosed yet,” Latha said. “When they get around to it, they’ll find there’s nothing wrong with me.”

“That’s what everbody says,” Flora said. Nurse Shedd had wandered off, and the exercise period was over. “Are you doing Occtherp?”

It sounded like a mental condition, but Latha hadn’t heard of it before. “What’s that?” she asked.

“Occupational therapy,” Flora said. “They put us in this room for the rest of the morning and give us things to play with. Come on.”

Flora escorted her to the occupational therapy room. Flora explained that she would much prefer to do knitting, but knitting needles were not allowed, so she had to try to knit with her fingernails, and it was a slow, tedious job, but she showed Latha the small square that she had managed to knit, full of dropped stitches but a piece of fabric nevertheless. It was also more or less durable, unlike the other items in the room, which were strictly temporary: stacking blocks of wood into a castle, or working a jigsaw puzzle.

Latha accepted Flora’s offer to teach her how to knit with her fingernails. An attendant gave Latha a ball of violet yarn. Latha had never learned how to knit back home, although her Grandma Bourne had tried to show her how, so she was at a disadvantage to Flora, who claimed to have knitted all manner of sweaters, socks, mittens, and comforters “on the outside.” Latha asked her what she was in for, and she declared that she had dipsomania. “I just never learnt when to stop,” she said. “And it got me in a lot of trouble.” Her brother, Ralph, was also an inmate of the asylum, over in one of the men’s wards, and he had the same affliction, only worse. She could tell Latha many stories about some of the outrageous things that she and Ralph had done whenever their daddy brewed up a fresh batch of moonshine. Flora visited Ralph in the visitation room, under strict supervision, not more than once a month, and Ralph told her about all the crazies in the men’s ward and about the horrible conditions over there. “If you think we got it bad, sister,” Flora said, “just be glad you aint a man.” The men were mostly treated like animals or slaves or both or worse.

Latha and Flora became good friends, although Flora cautioned Latha that occasionally she should be prepared to see Flora subjected to either hypo or hydro. Whenever Flora’s craving for something to drink got out of hand, and she started raving, a nurse would inject her with a sedative or take her to the hydrotherapy room, where she would be packed up in cold, wet sheets until she quit raving. Flora never knew, when she began to rave, whether she would get the hypo or the hydro. Naturally she preferred the former, because it brought on a state that was almost like that of a booze binge, whereas the hydro made her thirstier than ever because she couldn’t drink any of the water that she was surrounded with. “It’s enough to drive a body nuts,” Flora said.

After dinner, which nearly everybody called “lunch” except Latha and Flora, and which consisted of some inferior parts of chicken, boiled—wings or neck or feet—served with a boiled potato and boiled turnips, everyone was “free” for the rest of the day. There was nothing to do. B Ward patients who had been on good behavior might be allowed to join the A Ward patients in strolling the grounds of the courtyard, an area enclosed by the conjoined buildings of the asylum, so there was no access to “on the outside.” C Ward patients did not have that privilege, and most of them simply remained in or on their cots throughout the afternoon. Flora and Latha spent a while trying to find out if they knew any Ozark folks in common, but although Flora knew Caleb McWhorter, who had been Latha’s teacher in the primary, they discovered that Madison County and Newton County, while being side by side and nearly identical in size and topography and in the fact that the settlers of both had come from the same parts of Tennessee and Kentucky and North Carolina, were worlds apart, and thus Flora and Latha, who sounded alike, had no other common ground.

In the middle of the afternoon, Flora revealed that if Latha petitioned Nurse Shedd, she could get library privileges. The only book Flora was interested in was the Bible. “They took my Bible away from me when they locked me up in here,” Flora said, “and damned if I aim to go to the library just to see another’un.”

So Latha went up to the library by herself. It wasn’t very big, consisting of a few hundred books that had been donated to the asylum by people on the outside who didn’t have any further use for them. Latha found an interesting looking volume by David Grayson, called
Adventures in Contentment
. If there was anything Latha needed, it was contentment. The book was illustrated with nice pen and ink drawings of country scenes. But when Latha asked the attendant to check it out, the attendant looked at her as if she were a lunatic, and said books could only be read in the library. So Latha sat at a table and read the first three or four chapters. It was a story about a nice man named David Grayson who leaves the city and buys a farm in search of a simple life, and he has all kinds of friendly encounters with neighbors and strangers in which he learns as much from them as they learn from him, in terms of a philosophy of life that leaves one satisfied if not contented. The people and their ideas and way of talking reminded Latha very much of Stay More and Stay Morons, and she was excruciatingly homesick, and had to stop reading.

She returned to the dormitory and tried to take a nap, which most of the occupants were doing, but it was too noisy, because several of the occupants were talking loudly, not necessarily to each other but to themselves or to the walls. One of them was saying to Nurse Shedd, over and over, “It’s time for me to go home.” Nurse Shedd tried to get her to believe that if she didn’t shut up, she would be transferred to D Ward. Nurse Shedd’s constant repetition of the threat was more monotonous than the woman’s constant talk of going home. Latha’s friend Mary Jane Hines rose up from her cot and stood upon it and shouted, “NOBODY IS EVER GOING HOME, SO BUTTON YOUR TRAP!” Then Mary Jane lay back down to brood deeply on the import of her words, and covered her head with the blanket. Her words had stopped all of the talking from every corner but had also awakened all the nappers, who started talking steadily with more noise than those who had stopped. Latha reflected upon the possible truth of Mary Jane’s words. Was it not possible ever to get out of here?

At supper, which consisted of a bowl of gruel of some sort, she asked her new friend Flora if it was true that no one ever left. “Why, never the week goes by,” Flora replied, “that somebody or other don’t figger out a way to escape. I just wish they’d tell me how
before
they leave, because it’s no good afterwards.” Flora counted off on her ten fingers the various inmates of her acquaintance who were no longer here. “’Course they never tell you when it happens, or where they went. For all I know, some of them died and was taken off to the cemetery. Or maybe they got transferred to A Ward for being real good or transferred to D Ward for being real bad.” One reason that B and C Wards were combined together was that it saved the problem, and the paperwork, of transferring an inmate from one to the other. Latha wanted to know which of the two wards Flora was in, and Flora said she had started out in B Ward but was now officially in C Ward. What was the difference? Flora said that each morning the doctor—the patients called him Doc Meddlesome—would ask her what she had dreamed about the night before. If she just dreamed about ordinary things—baking a cake or shopping for groceries—she was B Ward. But if she dreamed something shocking or terrible, like sleeping with her father, then she would be C Ward. “I never even had to dream it,” Flora said, laughing, “because I really did sleep with my Paw. But that’s why I’m in C instead of B.” Flora claimed it was possible to tell just by looking at somebody whether they were B or C. “Now you,” she said, “are pure-dee A, ’ceptin for the fack you can’t talk to meanies like the docs or the nurses, which is why you wound up in B. Maybe if you was to try real hard to talk to the docs, they’d promote you to A.” To demonstrate her claim, Flora proceeded to classify all the inmates within their field of vision, particularly at their table. “That lady on your left, Clara McGrew is her name, is obviously C, a clear-cut psycho, and a arsonist besides. She burnt down the whole town she lived in. This here ole gal on my left is a B. Ask her what she dreams about, and she’ll recite ‘The Child’s Garden of Verses.’ Over yonder at the end of that table is Betty Betty Chapman. I aint stammering; her middle name is also Betty. I reckon her folks just didn’t have any imagination. Which ward would you put her in?” Latha studied the woman, who, like many of the others, seemed perfectly normal, and she guessed perhaps B Ward. “Wrong!” said Flora. “That witch is a schizomaniac, which means that you caint never tell when she might up and start screaming the awfullest words you ever heard. She’s the opposite of you. You caint tell Doc Meddlesome the time of day. She tells Doc Meddlesome what a sorry stinking prick he is, and what a whore his mother was, and what awful things he does to his wife at night. But the joke’s on her, cause Doc Meddlesome aint got no wife!”

The B Ward, Latha managed to determine, was filled with the anxious, the disheartened, the confused, the nostalgic, and the disgruntled, whereas the C Ward, according to Flora’s categories, was made up of schizomaniacs, moonstruck-cholics, dipsomaniacs (like Flora), heebeejeebics (an advanced form of dipsomania that includes DTs) borderline loonies, and monomaniacs. Flora pointed out examples of each surrounding them. None of them were really crazy. The curable crazies were in D Ward. The incurable crazies were in E Ward. Those not even worth attempting to cure were in F Ward.

Latha brooded upon the presence of so many different girls and women with so many different mental or emotional maladies, and she felt both ashamed of her own malady, slight as it was, and proud that her malady was as slight as it was. She wondered if she might be able to produce the power of speech in the presence of the doctor and nurses, and thus get herself promoted to A Ward, the first step toward discharge. She decided that the next time she saw Dr. Meddler she would make a concentrated effort to speak. She spent most of the insomniac night rehearsing what she would say to him, until she had it down perfect.

Promptly at five
A.M
., he appeared with Nurse Shedd. “Ah, I see you’re already awake,” he observed. To Nurse Shedd, he dictated, “Marked progress toward acclimatization.”

“Thank you,” Latha tried to say, but realized that no sound had left her mouth. She grunted and bore down and tried harder, but couldn’t get the words out.

“What did you dream about last night?” he asked.

“A vegetable garden,” she tried to say, which wasn’t true, because she hadn’t had any dreams, having not slept. But she wasn’t able to say that.

The doctor was prepared, with a tablet of blank paper, and handed it to her with his pen. “I keep forgetting that you are aphasic,” he said. “You may simply write down your answers.”

Again she tried to speak, but realized it was hopeless. She wrote that she had had no dreams because she hadn’t slept. The doctor read it and said to the nurse, “Tell Nurse Turner to put her on laudanum.” Then he asked Latha, “Do you feel any pain?” She shook her head. “Did you finish your supper?” she nodded her head. “Did you evacuate?” It was one of those big words, but unlike masturbate, she hadn’t heard it before. She gave him a quizzical look, shrugging her shoulders and spreading her hands, and he said, “Did you have a bowel movement? Have you been to the potty?”

She took the pad and wrote on it, “Have you seen our potty?”

He shook his head. “No, in fact, I haven’t.”

“Go look at it,” she wrote.

“Oh, I couldn’t do that. It’s a ladies’ room.”

“It’s nobody’s room,” she wrote. “I wouldn’t turn pigs loose in that place.”

The doctor showed what Latha had written to Nurse Shedd, and the nurse nodded her head and said, “Yeah, it’s not fit for man nor beast. Nor women neither.”

The doctor changed the subject. “Weren’t you supposed to make an appointment to see me in my office today?” Latha gave him a blank look. He turned to his nurse. “Nurse Shedd, see to it that she has an appointment pee dee cue.”

Nurse Shedd said to Latha, “Right after lunch, I’ll come and get you.”

“Lunch” as they called it consisted of a sandwich made of a thin slice of bologna between two thin slices of light bread, and a glass of water. Latha listened to Flora and Betty Betty Chapman arguing about religion; Flora was a “foot-warshing Babtist” while Betty Betty was a “hardshell Baptist.” They each believed the other was going to hell, and they gave each other lengthy descriptions of the hell that was waiting for them. Betty Betty got so agitated in her description of hell that she lapsed into dirty words. Latha had heard Betty Betty say most of these words before, or she had heard them in school, but some of Betty Betty’s words, as she became more worked up, were new to Latha; she had not heard these before: clit, wong, berries, twat, poontang, member, hand job, head job, beaver, toss off, wad, and sixty-nine. These were so loud that Nurse Shedd came running with a hypo to shut her up. “Shame on you,” she said to Flora, as if it had been Flora’s fault. Latha tried to shut sexual matters out of her mind, because they were hopeless, but Betty Betty’s recital left her aroused and frustrated. Nurse Shedd said to her, “Okay, let’s not keep the doctor waiting.” She took Latha’s arm and led her out of the dining hall up some stairs to a hallway of offices. “You’re lucky,” Nurse Shedd said to her. “Most patients don’t ever get personal handling from the doctor.”