The Crazy School (2 page)

“Cha,” I said. “ ‘Good for the disease.’ ”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It’s from this book,” I said. “
Magic Mountain
.”

“Books don’t help,” he said.

“You’d be surprised,” I replied, even though I’d never managed to fi nish reading it myself, back at Sarah Lawrence.

He took my elbow and started us walking. “Can’t kid a kidder.”

Sometimes you can, Wiesner.

I was here because I’d killed a guy. And I owned the hell out of that.

The fact he’d been trying to kill me at the time hadn’t helped me sleep any better since.

Neither had teaching at this place.

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2

The dining hall had the acoustics of a hockey rink, the voices of a hundred-something students and thirty-odd faculty bouncing between thin carpet and low curved ceiling.

I sat with the teachers. Wiesner didn’t.

The last open seat was next to Mindy, who was trying to explain to everyone around the circular table how her TMJ was acting up again. She could barely open her mouth.

A friend of mine had that: temporomandibular-something-something.

“What does TMJ stand for again?” I asked.

Mindy turned and blinked at me, twice. “Tense mouth and jaw,” she said, pronouncing the fi rst word “tints.”

“I’m so sorry you have to deal with that,” I said.

“Aren’t you
sweet
?” she said, blinking again, twice.

When not stricken with TMJ, Mindy chewed gum with her mouth open. She was from Ohio. Every inch of furniture surface throughout her campus apartment was jammed with stuffed animals, all of them pink. She’d brought the canopy bed her 9

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parents gave her as a sweet-sixteen present with her all the way from Dayton.

We couldn’t stand each other, but I hated her more. She was so shallow she couldn’t even dislike people properly.

I despised her receding chin and her stupid fl uffy perm and her stupid fl uffy pink sweaters and her fucking giggle. It made me happy that she was fat, since I’d dropped twenty pounds doing time at Santangelo, having felt too fucked up since arriving to eat much of anything.

I pushed the little piles of lettuce and cottage cheese around my plate, just to annoy her.

“Don’t forget we have Sookie today right after lunch,” she said.

“Thank you, Mindy, but I know we have Sookie today.”

I chose to believe that our mutual loathing wasn’t the reason the two of us got assigned to the same Santangelo therapist, though it wouldn’t have surprised me. Sookie reminded me of a golden retriever—big-pawed, blonde, and brimming with indiscriminate affection. We went twice a week for an hour, along with Tim.

Mindy turtled her head forward, talking across me. “I know
you’ll
remember, Tim. You’re not passive-aggressive, like
some
people.”

Blink. Blink.

Tim was a little guy, mostly harmless, with skin and hair so pale he was practically opaque.

Everyone at the school had to do Santangelo-approved therapy—

not just the kids but the teachers, the administrators, and the parents of every student. We did ours on campus. Santangelo had a traveling crew of shrinks who met with parents around the country. If they missed a session, they weren’t allowed contact 1 0

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with their kid by phone or mail for a month. I couldn’t believe that was legal, but they were desperate enough to suck it up without complaint.

They wanted to help their children get better. They wanted to believe Santangelo had the secret cure, that he’d fi x everything so their kids could resist suicide, or heroin, or schizophrenia, or the urge to inhale fumes from glue and gasoline and hair spray and that stuff you spray on records to get the dust off.

I wanted to believe Santangelo could fi x
me
while he was at it.

Who among us does not want to be shriven, to confess all, in the hope of being made clean and whole and new?

It’s just that I was second-generation at this, one of those kids dragged along for the ride by parents trying to achieve escape velocity at Esalen or Woodstock or, God help us, Jonestown.

Forage through the fi ve-for-a-buck milk crate at any midlife suburban garage sale, and you’ll run across at least one of us in a photograph—captured frolicking, blond, and naked on some scratch-hazed, blunt-cornered old album cover.
Eat a Peach.

McCartney.

We were the ideal, pretty babies poised to inherit their fresh Eden after the war, after Nixon, after all the world’s bitter, stupid old men stopped trying to pave paradise and put up parking lots and shit.

Not like I can blame my parents. Who wouldn’t have wanted to get out from under the black-hole physics of Levittown and Eisenhower, the whole Herb Alpert–Republican death trip?

So there I was, November 1989—Madeline Dare, age twenty-six and at a total loss, sitting on a hill in the Berkshires.

Locals called this Wiffl ehead Mountain: a single peak tucked into the lush hills and canyons just west of Stockbridge, a baby Matterhorn that had drawn to itself all manner of seekers and 1 1

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lost boys, wild girls and pagan sprites—a century-long parade of Adult Children with enough cash to kick and wail against the trammels of age and responsibility, mortality and the scientifi c method.

Santangelo’s “therapeutic boarding school” was just one facet of the primary native industry.

There was the yoga center where you could pay a thousand dollars a week to subsist on watery juice and sleep on a mat no thicker than a dish towel.

There were grand Georgian sanitariums that had dried out the country’s more artistic drunks and junkies, enough of whom stayed on to give the Berkshires a permanent bohemian foundation.

There was the detritus of untold communes and utopias—

from the celibate Shakers, who’d died out through lack of breeding, to the wholly licentious latter-day acidheads who’d left behind nothing but their fl eas and half-fi nished macramé plant hangers and lawnsful of broken major appliances.

Then there was this place, its stone gates surmounted by an ineptly welded arc of steel butterfl ies, mascots fl uttering along the school motto: “Free to Be.”

I pushed away my untasted salad and reached for the jug of fake coffee, suddenly exhausted.

Mindy put her arm across my shoulders. “Are you going to talk to Sookie about your issues around food?” she whispered sweetly.

“Are you going to talk to her about yours? There’s probably some ice cream left,” I whispered back even more sweetly, though even Mindy didn’t deserve that.

She jerked away, leaving fl uffy pink angora lint all over my not-fl uffy-at-all black sweater sleeve.

“Mindy,” I said. “I’m sorry. That was an asshole thing to say.

I slept about three hours last night, and my stomach is just a 1 2

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goddamn nightmare. That’s no excuse, but I hope you can accept my apology.”

“I’ll accept your turn-in at tonight’s faculty meeting. Unless you think it would be more appropriate to fi re yourself,” she said.

“She can’t fi re herself.”

Mindy looked across the table at Lulu. Lulu taught Spanish, a language she’d picked up during a Peace Corps stint down in Peru. She’d come home to the family farm in Pennsylvania, landing here after the only work she could fi nd was checking in guests at the local Econo Lodge.

She was the saving grace of the entire Santangelo experience for me despite her fondness for show tunes.

“And why can’t Madeline fi re herself?” asked Mindy, her jaw clicking with a sharp snap, like a pinball popping up to hit the glass.

“Because she fi red herself yesterday,” said Lulu. “You can’t fi re yourself if you’ve already fi red yourself. It cancels out.”

“Like Double Secret Probation,” said Tim.

Lulu closed her eyes, exhaled through her nose, and rubbed her fi sts back and forth across her spiky dark hair. Not without gusto.

I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking,
No, Tim, that
is NOT AT ALL like Double Secret Probation, as you would know if
you understood ANYTHING, which you DO NOT, despite the fact
that you have watched
Animal House
thirty-seven times, as you told us
all in the faculty group therapy session at which Madeline fi red herself
last night.

She opened her eyes and grinned at me.

And then we were saved by Dr. Ed’s arrival with the stack of Med Plates.

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He walked around the table, handing a disc of thick white dining-hall crockery to each teacher/dorm parent currently on duty.

These were preloaded with semicircles of tiny manila envelopes, a form of stationery I’d last seen stuffed with impotent Mexican dirt-weed on Fourteenth between Second and Third in Manhattan, circa 1983.

I still thought of them as nickel bags, which wasn’t the kind of word-association thing I could’ve shared at that table.

Each envelope was marked with a kid’s last name and fi rst initial, followed by a list of medications contained therein: Haldol or imipramine or lithium or Thorazine.

Lulu, Mindy, Tim, Gerald, and the New Guy were dealt their respective plates by Dr. Ed, New Guy last.

Dr. Ed conferred with him, pointing from each envelope to its intended dosee.

The New Guy took it in with great seriousness. Then he caught me watching and winked. He was a babe—blond hair in loose curls that made me reminisce fondly about those portions of my youth misspent necking with surfers.

The plate bearers rose to make their appointed rounds. Each kid had to dump the meds into his or her mouth, hand the empty envelope back, take a sip of beverage, swallow, and then tilt his or her head back, open his or her mouth, and shift his or her tongue up, left, and right, so the doser could check that all pills had been ingested properly.

No hide-and-seek allowed. No save ’em, collect ’em, trade ’em with your friends.

I never got a Med Plate at meals because I was the only teacher who lived off campus. I was grateful to escape each night, but lately it had been hard to readjust to normal, like getting the bends because I’d come back to the surface too fast and didn’t 1 4

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have a decompression chamber to get the painful “therapeutic”

bubbles out of my bloodstream.

I leaned back in my chair to catch the sun coming down through a skylight, right when this big cloud cut across it.

Perfect. It was just going to keep on being that kind of day.

New Guy was the fi rst member of the Clean Plate Club. He walked back to the table and sat down next to me, in Mindy’s seat.

“Um,” I said, “I think that’s Mindy’s seat.”

“Are they assigned?” he asked. “It didn’t seem as though the two of you were getting along, exactly.”

“Um,” I said, “no.”

“No they’re not assigned, or no, you two aren’t getting along?”

“Both.”

“I don’t want to freak out Mindy,” he said, “you’re just the only one I haven’t introduced myself to yet.”

“I’m Madeline,” I said.

“I’m Pete,” he replied.

“Mindy will be freaked out anyway. She always is.”

“I guessed as much.”

He had one of those really slow smiles, the kind that just kill you.

At that exact moment, the cloud moved on past the sun, and a big fat warm beam of light came down and hit all his blond curls.

I looked across the room and saw Wiesner tapping a butter knife against the edge of his glass, checking the two of us out.

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3

Sookie’s offi ce was a slanted little room under the eaves of the Mansion.

Such a tacky word, “Mansion,” though the building itself was a sadly perfect monument to that forgotten magnate’s fortune, back when it was freshly minted.

His family crest still fl anked the front door in twinned cement relief, so you wouldn’t miss the credential even if you happened to be blind in one eye.

Santangelo claimed the place had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, but I found that hard to believe. The building’s interior sagged under its sheer tonnage of embellish-ment: marble and parquet and stained glass and carved oak, gilt-scroll-encased ceiling murals crammed with ugly petulant cherubs, grand double staircase tortured into a frenzy of varnished pretension.

I pictured the fl ight of the man’s horrifi ed offspring, shamed by this testament to their gentility’s raw vintage.

The place had since housed third-rate spas and schools, each 1 6

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enterprise patching over another layer of furbelow with asbestos or gypsum board or fi re-retardant dropped-ceiling tiles.

The roof leaked. The faucets dripped. The ballroom stank of mildew and mouse piss.

I jogged up three fl ights to Sookie.

Mindy and Tim had claimed the love seat. Last one in got the rotten-egg wobbly chair by the radiator.

“Welcome,” said Sookie. “Tim was just going to start us off.”

Tim raised one hand slowly, placing his palm fl at against the center of his chest.

Sookie nodded with approval. “Tim’s feeling like he needs to nurture himself.”

Mindy stroked his hair. We were supposed to touch each other a lot.

“I talked with my dad again?” Tim said, glancing down at his hand. “He’s so . . .”

“Judgmental?” Sookie’s forehead wrinkled with healing concern. Another nod, coaxing.

Tim teared up, nodding back with relief.

Mindy slid a box of Kleenex onto his lap.

At Santangelo, there was always a box of Kleenex.