The PMS Outlaws: An Elizabeth MacPherson Novel (10 page)

“What about God, Beulah?” asked Warburton, almost
quickly enough to drown out a groan from the men in the group.

She twisted her hands in her lap. “Well, what if God’s values are really different from ours? I mean, I’ve tried to live a good life, and do my duty and not hurt anybody, but how do I know if that’s what God really wanted? What if He wanted something else altogether?”

“Yes!” said Emma O. “Good point! What if God only cares about … say … fashion? What if He spends His time obsessing about how we look? After all, He supposedly created us in His image … B.C.… Before Chocolate. So what if you turn up in heaven on Judgment Day, and God says, ‘About that time on August fourteenth of last year when you took My name in vain … on that occasion you were wearing a lime-green polyester skirt with a fuchsia blouse and a brown plastic belt. What were you thinking?’ ”

Beulah McNeil blinked furiously. Her spiritual train of thought had been derailed, and she was bewildered by the turn it had taken.

“Surely in the ten commandments He specified His priorities,” said Steve, the lawyer. He seemed poised to lecture the group on the contractual obligations of the deity regarding the specifics of sin, but before any celestial preferences could be discussed further, the door opened and a slender young man wafted in. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he said. “Of course, it’s no use expecting me to be on time. I simply cannot force my body to bow to the beat of artificial timekeepers. I know that it’s madly selfish of me to miss everyone’s discussion at the beginning, but there it is. I am inconsiderate. It’s the way I’m made.”

Everyone else in the group nodded and went back to a listening posture, but Elizabeth continued to stare at the newcomer.

Warburton looked stern. “Richard, what have we said about punctuality?”

Richard sighed theatrically. “It is a sign of maturity and a mark of respect for your fellow patients. I know. But it’s no use expecting me to obsess about a few paltry minutes. I was deep in contemplation of Beauty.”

“Oh, is the Disney channel on?” asked Emma with a straight face.

Richard’s stare in her direction was forbidding. “I was referring to the garden. I will sit down now and not continue to monopolize the session, although I’ll probably talk too much anyway, even if I promise not to. My brain is a wellspring of thoughts and ideas, and I feel I simply must share them.” He stopped abruptly as he noticed Elizabeth. “Hello, you’re new here,” he informed her. “My name is Richard Petress, and I expect you think I’m a therapist or something, but actually, I am a fellow patient, not unlike yourself.”

“Richard Petress, M.D.,” said Emma O. “But in his case it stands for manic depressive.”

Richard nodded, as if a compliment had been conferred. “I live in a wider spectrum than most people have in their humdrum lives. Like the butterfly, I dance with the rainbow and then the flame. Society seems to wish to cure me of this heightened perception—”

“Oh, can it, Petress!” said Clifford Allen. “We were discussing something.” He turned to the nurse. “Warburton, I have a question for you. Do patients have any say in the menu
planning here? There was a puddle of butter on my broiled fish at lunch. Butter! I specifically asked for my meat to be cooked without oils of any kind. And I would prefer a salad without dressing instead of cooked vegetables …”

The harangue went on. Elizabeth whispered to Matt Pennington, “Is he phobic about food?”

“Who, Clifford?” Matt shook his head. “You know how some men love to tinker with sports cars? Soup up the engine and so on?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Clifford is his own sports car. His body, I mean. He’s always fussing over it as if it were a brand-new Jaguar. He scrutinizes every forkful of food, and he exercises for hours at a time.”

Elizabeth studied Clifford Allen with interest. He was well muscled, younger than thirty, and sleekly fit without an ounce of fat. He looked in perfect health. Of course, it’s sometimes difficult to judge people’s medical conditions by appearances. He might have a heart condition, she thought. “Is he ill?” she asked Matt.

“No. Well, not physically. In fact, I’d say his body is as good as it’s going to get, but that doesn’t stop him from taking four showers a day, and obsessing about every item on his meal tray.”

“But I thought he was here because he’s a suspected thief.”

“Well, he is. His obsession with his body is his personality, not his problem.” Matt smiled. “In California it’s people who aren’t like that who are considered crazy. So maybe Clifford is just geographically challenged. He’s in the wrong state. But, anyhow, that isn’t his problem.”

A sharp voice ended their private discussion. “Elizabeth, you haven’t said anything to the group yet. Is there anything you’d like to talk about?” Warburton’s expression was a careful neutral, but Elizabeth felt that she had just been punished for whispering in class.

Elizabeth sighed. “I’m sad,” she said. “I was so happy. I guess I expected life to be like a fairy tale. You know: ‘And they lived happily ever after.’ ”

“Life is like a fairy tale,” said Emma O. “Fairy tales are very realistic. They all begin with, ‘Once upon a time there was a beautiful …’ whatever. Princess. Miller’s daughter. Robber girl. Doesn’t matter. The operative word here is
beautiful
. If you’re pretty enough, the prince comes, the frog takes pity on you, and the fairy godmother does a few magic tricks for your convenience. That’s what makes for the happy ending. Ugly people need not apply.”

“Pretty people aren’t guaranteed happiness,” snapped Elizabeth. “Some of them die young.”

“And then they make the cover of
People
magazine, and total strangers weep for them. If that’s not a fairy-tale existence, I don’t know what is.”

“Can any of the staff doctors here check my cholesterol?” asked Clifford Allen.

J
ack Dolan nodded happily on his sunporch. He liked to feel the warmth of the westering light on his face, and as he leaned back against the soft-cushioned back of his wicker armchair, he slipped in and out of awareness, more at peace than he had been in many months.

He wasn’t as young as he used to be. Hell, he’d been old
four presidents ago. It had been a long, eventful life. He’d been born in 1908 on a farm in southside Virginia, which is what they call that part of the state bordering North Carolina. Times were tough in his youth, and making illegal whiskey during the Prohibition years was one good way for a farm family to get a little extra cash. The Treasury cops seemed to think moonshining was some high and terrible crime, damn near treason the way they carried on about it, but as far as Jack Dolan could see, moonshining was just an agrarian form of tax evasion, and he’d never met anybody yet who didn’t do a little of that when times got tough. The really expert bootleggers were the ones up north who dodged the tax man by importing the forbidden whiskey from Canada. Those fellows ended up with fortunes, and fine houses, and sons in the U.S. Senate. Jack had never attained that exalted degree of success, but he had done well for a farm boy who never got past sixth grade.

The children were less of a success, though; he had to admit that. Maybe he’d given them too much money, or maybe they’d got above their raising, with their private schools and flashy cars as soon as they were old enough to drive. Well, things might have been different if John hadn’t been killed in Vietnam. He always was the best one of the bunch, and maybe Jack had doted too much on the oldest boy and the others resented it. Or maybe the time he’d spent in prison when the feds finally caught up with him had soured his children and cost him their respect. Too late to worry about that now, though. He hadn’t seen the young’uns in … must be seven years, he thought. Not since Alice died and they came to pick over the furniture before he sold it all in a tag sale.

Although he still retained his habit of hiding any real emotions,
Jack had been worried lately. He was past ninety, and although he had boasted the constitution of an ox for nine decades now, he knew that health was no longer a thing he could take for granted. Living alone was dangerous at his age. One fall could leave him helpless on the floor, dying by inches out of reach of the telephone. Of even greater concern, though, was the possibility that he would be taken ill and hospitalized. He didn’t like the idea of being given anesthetic. He’d heard that people said things under anesthetic—things that they didn’t want other people to know about. That thought made him uneasy. He hoped he’d never be sick enough to risk it. Another danger of hospitals was the fact that they were full of social-working busybodies who might decide that when he recovered he would not be allowed to return to the mansion.

The young man who had bought the place seemed like a nice fellow, though. He didn’t ask too many personal questions, which was good. He might be useful to have around. At least he wasn’t stingy with the groceries. Maybe the young man or his lady friend would turn out to be decent cooks. Mr. Jack was getting tired of living on fast food. Besides, when he walked to the grocery store he couldn’t carry very much back with him. Five pounds of sugar at a time was about all he could manage these days. He was going to need a lot more than that.

E
lizabeth MacPherson wondered what day it was. Not that it mattered, really. Eat, sleep, and take your pills. The days at Cherry Hill had begun to slip by in an amiable haze, and somewhere in the drift of days she had stopped marking the time until her month was up. She had settled into a routine now—rest, meals, therapy, and group sessions, all punctuated by sedatives designed to take the edge off reality. Elizabeth could see how people could come to prefer this soothing cocoon of a life to the endless struggle of the sane world.

As the days slid past, she found herself getting to know the members of her group, as little by little they disclosed bits of information about their problems. They no longer seemed exotic creatures to her; now they were her comrades, no stranger than anybody else’s friends. She had pegged Richard Petress for problems relating to gender confusion; the vain and caustic Clifford
Allen was probably a sociopath; the waiflike Seraphin wouldn’t eat, and wouldn’t say why. Rose, the newspaper woman, was an alcoholic, Emma O. wanted to die, and old Mrs. Nicholson had left reality through a door marked ALZHEIMER’S. Not exactly the social set Elizabeth would normally have chosen to spend her days with—ah, but normal had nothing to do with it. As it was, there seemed to be a certain satisfaction in joining a group in which you were the least disabled. Elizabeth knew that among her friends and family outside Cherry Hill, she was the afflicted one, while their lives seemed to be progressing smoothly. She’d felt everyone mentally tiptoeing around the minefield of her grief, which had only heightened her sense of loss and isolation. Here, though, everyone had problems to overcome, and she was accorded no special treatment. Others were worse off than she. As a triumph, such a distinction was minuscule, but it offered a flicker of hope for a future recovery. She was not pushing herself to rejoin the world yet, though. Easy enough to suck in one’s sorrow, grasp a prescription for pills, and go back to life as one of the walking wounded, but that would serve no purpose. Go back to what?

As kindly old Dr. Dunkenburger kept reminding her, the important thing was to feel better, not to rush back to the rat race just for the sake of pronouncing oneself cured. Not that she was anywhere near cured. In fact, the members of her group accused her of having a tendency to wallow in her grief, resisting any efforts to bring her out of her depression. In art therapy she drew nothing but charcoal seascapes of a small boat tossed by towering waves.

After studying the tenth rendering of the stormy boat scene, Emma O. had announced, “This is not therapy. This is an
exercise in masochism. Why do you dwell on this scene of your husband’s disappearance? It’s almost as if you had to remind yourself that you’re supposed to be sad.”

Elizabeth made no reply, but for the rest of that class period she painted stick-figure deer at rest under sprawling oak trees. Nobody could find anything objectionable about that. Today, though, she was going to try a more ambitious project.

Art therapy class was apparently designed in the hopes that the patient would draw road maps to his subconscious, thus shedding further light upon his own particular disorder. Rolls of paper and several kinds of drawing materials were made available to small groups of patients in a sunny room with cinder-block walls, a tile floor, and large rectangular windows overlooking the back lawn and the woods beyond. Hardly anyone ever drew the view, though. Apparently their inner vistas were more compelling than the well-tended institutional landscape beyond the glass.

Seraphin did not even face the window as she worked. She stood with her back to the daylight, frowning in concentration at the penciled outline of a portrait on her easel. She always drew the same face: a young woman with short, light-colored hair, and fine-chiseled classic features. Sometimes the woman was a figure in a larger scene; sometimes her face alone looked out from Seraphin’s drawing paper, but the features never altered, except to be rendered more skillfully by the artist, as practice sharpened her proficiency. Except for her slender figure, the woman in the pictures did not resemble Seraphin herself. Elizabeth wondered who the subject was. In today’s drawing the fair-haired woman was kneeling before an altar. In the background of the sketch a lightly penciled suggestion of
Gothic arches and a stained-glass window of a sword-bearing angel implied that the setting was a cathedral somewhere.

Elizabeth could not resist a guess. “It’s a lovely drawing. Is it Joan of Arc?”

Seraphin shook her head and went on sketching without bothering to reply.

The other group members had begun to work on their own projects. Rose Hanelon specialized in caricatures of political figures done with bold strokes of a felt-tip pen. She had the cartoonist’s knack for making her subjects recognizable in a few deft pen strokes. In the last class she had drawn Al Gore as the Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz
. Now she seemed to be working on a religious painting. The rough outlines of a crucifixion scene had begun to take shape on the white poster board. This seemed most unlike Rose’s usual sardonic sketches. Elizabeth wondered if this signaled a breakthrough in therapy.