Leaving the Comfort Cafe (28 page)

“I’m Susan Drysdale.” Mom tried her best to make up for my lack of cordiality.

“Arnold Hopkins, director.” He said it like he was applying for a job. “Won’t you please have a seat?”

“Actually, we really don’t have a whole lot of time,” she said. She tried to make him think that she was in a hurry, but I knew it was because she was afraid of contamination and getting broken, too. I think he may have picked up on it as well, for he seemed very careful not to touch or brush against anything in the room.

“Certainly, certainly.” He had black eyes that shone from behind oversized glasses. He was stout, but not chubby. He made me nervous, probably because he didn’t stop wringing his hands together. His nose was too big, and he looked like a cartoon character drawn badly out of proportion. He reached out his hand again to shake mine. I just stared at him and put my hands in my pockets. He had these huge hands: you could fit a whole football field in there—and rubbing them together. Swish, swish, his palms made squeaky noises because they were obviously sweaty.

“I only brought two suitcases, but I’ll bring the rest of her things later on in the week, if that’ll be all right.”

“The room’s all ready, if you’ll follow me.” His body shuffled toward the staircase. “I think you’ll like this room. It has a nice view of the mountains, if you can overlook the junkyard. He gave a laugh that sounded as if it came mostly from his nose.

The room was clean and bare. There was a small desk in the corner of the room, and etched onto one of the drawers were the initials “RS” and “JL.” There was a ceiling fan, although I doubted that it worked. There was a white dresser with a reading lamp, and, much to my surprise, a Gideon Bible.

“I’ll give you some time to get settled in,” he said, opening the closet door in case I hadn’t picked up on where the closet was located. “There’s a bathroom down the hall on your left. There’s a large cabinet in there where you can put your toiletries.”

“Thanks.” My voice sounded hollow and tinny. I wouldn’t have recognized it as mine.

He gave a crooked half-smile and left the room, arms dangling. He pulled the door, leaving it slightly cracked.

“We can go now,” I said. “We can get the deposit back, and everything can go back the way it was.”

“That’s just it, Taylor. Have you forgotten the way things were?”

“But I can control it this time. Just give me a chance.”

How many chances does it take. What is it going to take to prove to you that you can’t handle this? When you end up in an institution? That’s where you’re heading.

I was determined for her not to see me cry. I bit my lip. Institution. She had no idea. Two weeks in the hospital. Big deal. I know people who’ve had worse.

She gave me an awkward kiss on the cheek and then left, closing the door behind her. I could hear the thud of her feet going down the steps. I stared out the window—which did have a lovely view of both the mountains and a junkyard—until I saw her thin, willowy form exit. I placed my suitcase on the bed and unpacked.

“You getting settled, dear?” a voice called from the door. “If you don’t mind, we prefer for the first couple of weeks, you keep the door open. Except when you’re getting dressed.” It was the lady who welcomed us into the house.

“I’d like to have my privacy.”

“Of course, and we want you to have your privacy, but all in good time, dear. All in good time.”

I threw some panties into one of the dresser drawers. The drawer looked worn and musty. I briefly debated whether or not I wanted my underwear to be touching it.

“My name is Maria Lupe Rodriquez Merano,” she said. “But around here, folks call me Big Mama.”

“Hi.” There was no way in hell I was going to call her “mama” anything.

“Have you unpacked your things?”

“Just started.”

“I wish I had gotten up here before you opened your suitcase. It would have saved you some trouble.” She opened the drawers and started going through all my clothes, even my underwear.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for sharps, dear. Have to check everyone. It’s the rules, you know.”

“Sharps?”

“Scissors, nail files…” she pried into my toiletry case and triumphantly held up my razor. “…razors.” There was a hint of pride in her voice.

“So what? I shave my legs.”

“Not without supervision. You might want to consider getting an electric razor.”

“I am not going to have someone sit and watch me shave my legs.”

“It’s just a precaution, dear. Just for the first couple of weeks until we get a better profile of you.”

“I’ll just have hairy legs, then.”

“Suit yourself.”

She moved on to my hair dryer and curling iron.

“These have got to go, too,” she said, wrapping the cords around her wrist.

“Why? They aren’t sharp.”

“Choking.” She stretched out the cord to illustrate her point. “We had a girl nearly commit suicide by rigging up a noose with a hair dryer cord.”

“I’m not going to do anything like that.”

“Of course you’re not, dear. It’s just that we want to be sure that you’re safe.”

“Safe from what?”

“Yourself.”

She picked through my stuff like a shopper at a Kmart blue light special. She checked the pockets of all my blue jeans and even felt down in my socks in case I was stashing a grenade in there.

“Are those the only pair of earrings you brought with you?”

“Yes.”

She tilted her head and took a loser look at them. Then she stretched out her hand.

“You’ll have to give those to me.”

“You’re afraid I’m going to choke on it or something?”

“It’s the backs.” She took the earring and ran the back of it up and down her arm, making a pink streak. “You’d be surprised how people can cut themselves on these.”

“Okay, okay, just do what you have to and get out.” I sat on the corner of the bed.

Big Mama sat beside me.

“I know you didn’t want to come here. But forget about what you’ve heard about this place or what you think that it might be. It sounds hokey, I know, but we really are a family here. And here you’ll have little friends who are struggling with the same things you are.”

I wanted to tell her to kiss off, but I was afraid if I told her, she’d only stick around to argue, and I wanted to get rid of her as son as possible.

She shuffled through the rest of my things as dutifully as a prison matron. She took my compact because she said the mirror inside could be broken to form sharp edges. I noticed the clothes hangers in the closet were permanently attached to the rod, like the kind you see in hotels.

I didn’t hear her leave. I crashed my fists into a pillow on the bed, looking out the window over the junkyard.

Even with the spectacular view of the mountains, it was the junkyard that fascinated me. On the heap was an old blue Pinto, cinder blocks replacing its wheels. I felt sorry for it because I realized that it and I were the same. The forgotten. Tossed into a scrap yard for improvements. Of course, everyone told me this was for my own good, yet I felt that someone fed that same line to the Pinto, and look at it—a pathetic wash of nuts and bolts that couldn’t go anywhere unless God Himself had a hand in it.

I can’t even say I was really upset when the diagnosis came down. Bipolar disorder. Of course, I had heard of manic depression, even studied it in my psychology class, but the faces in the videotape seemed so unreal, surely they couldn’t apply to me.

Then came the spending sprees and the cold nights of crying…

by

Dawn DeAnna Wilson

Part One:

Shakespeare in Chanel

Peter hated his car.

He detested it with a burning usually reserved for the gruesome punishments doled out by the Olympian gods of ancient Greek literature. Peter wished he could simply transform the useless bucket of bolts into something classic, like the tail-finned convertibles that earned the title “vintage” instead of the more dubious moniker of “old.” Every day, his dilapidated steel steed coughed and sputtered its way from Peter’s one-bedroom apartment to the newspaper office at the corner of Third and Main: battered, defeated, and broken. In the car, nothing worked—not the power windows, not the power locks, no power of any kind. Definitely not the power to turn heads.

No, that’s not entirely accurate.

Heads did turn when they heard Peter’s Honda chugging along, but the barf-green vehicle only inspired looks of pity, not passion. A new car? Not this year. Not in this economy. Not on a reporter’s salary.

Peter liked to imagine himself as ruggedly good-looking, the type of journalist Hollywood screenwriters concocted, a reporter who was one part Indiana Jones and one part Ernest Hemingway, able to skillfully weave metaphors into well-crafted paragraphs in a dirty and worn fedora while running with the Pamplona bulls. Peter liked the image because it made him feel more deserving of Emily. Every time he tried to rise above his desperately ragged bank account and dilapidated car, he sabotaged it; he turned in the application late, carelessly forgot to send in a list of references, or got lost on the way to the interview. Secretly, Peter was afraid that he was one of those head cases who feared success, one of those pathetic tales of citizens who could have really “become something” if they weren’t stuck in an endless cycle of mediocrity.

He told himself that he sabotaged his chances of success because success would pull him away from the North Carolina coast, and he didn’t believe Emily would put up with a long distance relationship, nor did he believe she would leave the inlet community where her family name still carried political clout thanks to a grandfather who was a Congressman way back when…and in the South, there was no difference between “way back when” and yesterday.

Peter wondered if coloring his graying beard would magically shave ten years off his age and melt twenty years of bad memories from his psyche. Memory was always his enemy; no one could remember his name, not even the sophisticated attorneys, bankers and CEOs who frequented Emily’s fancy dinner parties. Emily would introduce Peter, and two minutes later, her friends would stammer cluelessly—Paul, Penn, Phil, Perry—like a nervous third grader giving a book report. Maybe that’s why, when filling out surveys, Peter always checked the box for “Pacific Islander,” even though he was white. It made him sound more interesting, anyway, and interesting people were always remembered, right?

Peter resolved that maybe he was just one of those destined to be forgotten. Instead of philosophers and songwriters searching their souls for the finest vocabulary to immortalize the melody of his life, Peter would be stuck with the balladeers who had too much to drink and were improvising while stumbling noisily down the steps.

Peter always felt moth-eaten and bare around Emily. He couldn’t place his finger on why, but he always felt naked and exposed. Maybe it had to do with Emily’s three-by-five, black leather journal, trimmed with a ribbon that was a sickening shade of Barbie pink. Every day, she would pull the small journal out of her Gucci bag, her Mont Blanc pen following. She would scribble random observations—the weather, the strange shade of blue in the waiter’s tie, the answer to the Final Jeopardy question—observations that fed what Peter suspected was a budding case of OCD. When he worked up the nerve to ask if she had visited a therapist, she rolled her eyes.

“Therapists,” she said, “are sooo nineties.” As if she needed a stylish disease to seek treatment.

Peter put up with it because Emily had incredible legs and gorgeous, piercing green eyes that made Peter feel as if he were in third grade and noticing girls—really noticing girls—for the first time. She always wore her raven ringlets pulled back with hair accessories that looked like chopsticks. He loved it when she would playfully remove the chopsticks, letting her mane freely cascade down her equine neck, creating a portrait of energy and elegance….

…but then, the journal would somehow reappear—always—as if it had been nesting in her luscious locks, awaiting the opportune moment to ambush Peter.

Buzz kill.

Emily insisted that she needed the journal because she was fascinated with patterns and people, trying to present herself as some type of non-starving artist, a Shakespeare in Chanel, a Dickens in Dior, preserving the literary history of the mundane and unimportant. The journal was also the source of the recorded history of the many, many, shortcomings of Peter’s car.

One afternoon, en route to dinner, she checked his odometer, pursed her lips, and asked, “When was your last oil change?”

“I got the oil changed a few weeks ago.”

“Hm.”

“Hm what?”

“Nothing,” she said. Which always meant that it was something. “You know when you get over one hundred and fifty miles, you should really get it changed every week.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.” Peter tried to make it sound like a friendly joke, but there was bitterness beneath his baritone that rattled to the surface.

“You know, next time, we could take my car. It has an iPod plug in.”

For Peter, there was something totally emasculating about letting a woman drive during a date. Maybe it wasn’t so much about driving as much as the laundry list of conditions that applied any time he got into the soft leather passenger seats of Emily’s Beamer. Toss that cup of coffee—I don’t want to stain the interior, you’ve got some mud on your shoes, and I don’t want to stain the interior, roll up the window because I don’t want pollen to float in and stain the interior. It was as if the entire world were mounted in a conspiracy against her, and catastrophic events like earthquakes, global warming, or guerilla wars were really just facades the universe used to distract people from its real purpose—ruining the tanned and flawlessly seamed interior of Emily’s Beamer.

“You know, Peter, my Dad would let you have his old Mercedes. Well, he wouldn’t let you have it, but he would sell it to you cheap. He’s getting his Hummer next week.”

“Hm.” Peter said.