Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

  “Ah yes, the forced charm of these hospital saucers reminds me,” I said, and handed Helen a small wrapped package. “Open it.”

  “A leather coaster,” said Helen, setting it on the tabletop, then setting her coffee cup atop it. “With my initials. Thank you. They’re training you to become a craftswoman?”

  “A slave,” I said. “This whole setup is a racket. They’re abducting middle-aged women as forced labor to finally break the back of the leatherworkers’ union. I was going to stamp a desperate request for help into it, but the clever bastards took away all the vowels. You’d have never made any sense of it.”

  Amusement and alarm spun across Helen’s face like a dog chasing its tail. I laughed, for the first time in a long time.

  “I’m joking, honeybunch,” I said. “But don’t I make a damn good lunatic? The coaster is the happy byproduct of my occupational therapy. I’m made to stay pretty quiet here, aside from walking in the gardens and working on handicrafts. That’s because of the Thorazine. They gave it to me in large quantities to keep me from getting too high after those shock treatments. They’re weaning me off it now.”

  “I hear electroshock is a waking nightmare,” said Helen. “I can understand if you don’t want to relive that.”

  “Oh, I do want to talk about those, Helen. If I may?”

  “Of course, Lily,” she said. “That’s why I came. It’s been so long. I’ve missed your voice.”

  She took my hand across the table—probably mistaking the joy in my soppy eyes for anguish—and I let her.

  “Here’s the strangest thing,” I said. “Whoever thought up those shock treatments ought to be canonized. For so long I’d been looking at the sky, and trees, and roast beef, and friends, and even though I knew they were beautiful, I could take no pleasure from any of them. And I’m not just talking about these past few terrible months, Helen. This was years. Now even a field mouse looks divine. The days are crowded with the good old reliable joys: orange juice and sunshine and Coca-Colas and crows and sparrows and blue jays and petunias. And I can feel that joy in my chest again, immediately. I don’t have to work it out like a crossword puzzle.”

  Helen gave me a cautious smile. “Is that what the Thorazine is for?” she asked. “To keep the mouse mousey?”

  “They can give me all the Thorazine in Smith, Kline and French’s coffers,” I said. “The mouse and I will remain in cahoots.”

  “Lily, that’s wonderful. Blackened as they are, your eyes do have the look of your old self back in them. Will it last?”

  “It’s supposed to,” I said. “I think it will. Dr. R tells me that I may well get dejected over crises in the future—the parakeet croaking or what have you—but I won’t get depressed.”

  “What a world of difference between those two words.”

  “It’s almost been worth it to go through this horror,” I said, “because I don’t believe I can ever again look at the lowliest angleworm without rejoicing in its suppleness and complexity and sheer life.”

  “Speaking of worms,” said Helen, “would you care to give me a tour of the grounds? Will they let you?”

  “I’m not permitted to be alone,” I said. “Not yet, anyway. But with you as my escort, they’ll allow us to stroll around the Gardens of Insanity. Your timing’s perfect, too. These drugs make it hard as hell to sit still.”

  She helped me to my feet, we returned our cups, and Helen signed me out with the front-desk nurse. We set out among the trees and walking paths and birdbaths; the air was clear and tinged with the loamy defrosting smell that follows a long winter. Thanks to the Thorazine I moved slowly, with stiff shuffling steps, but I didn’t mind; it just meant more time to look.

  On one secluded loop in the trail I halted Helen so we could watch a pair of eastern phoebes—elfin and gray, big-headed and fearless, pumping their tails like prizefighters—as they snatched black ants from a redbud’s trunk.

  “I wouldn’t wish my troubles on my deadliest enemy,” I said after they’d flown away. “Sometimes I think it would be better never to have known how beautiful the world is. Just to be able to pass calmly by rather than pay the admission fee for a ringside seat. But here I am, ringside again.”

  “If you had a deadliest enemy,” Helen said, “which seems unlikely, then I can’t imagine that person could manage to see any beauty in anything at all.”

  Unbidden, Olive Dodd popped into my head; I hadn’t thought of her in ages. I recalled the harsh whistle she sounded through my halcyon days, and my wincing contempt for her, but I found that I could no longer feel it. In its place was a sad sympathy, a suspicion that she never managed any happiness.

  I was about to ask Helen if she knew what ever became of Olive, when she spoke.

  “You can tell me, if you want, that it’s none of my beeswax,” said Helen, taking my elbow to help me around a puddle in the path, “but has Max been to see you yet?”

  “Yet?” I said, and laughed. “That’s a good one.”

  “I’m sorry, Lily,” she said. “I oughtn’t to have brought it up.”

  “No, it’s all right,” I said. “It’s one more thing I’m gearing up to face after I emerge from my cocoon. Max and I are getting a divorce.”

  “I’d thought you might be,” Helen said. I could feel her eyes on the side of my face, but I couldn’t look at her directly while we talked about that. “I’m sorry that’s happening, Lily.”

  “We’ve been heading down that road for a while, as I think everyone who knows us knows,” I said. And then, because it was clear that Helen was saying both that she was sorry that it was happening and asking more about what was happening, I added, “Even before Julia, Max and I had gotten stuck in a tiresome spiral. I got sadder and Max couldn’t handle it and flung himself into the younger arms of his workplace subordinate. I found out and we tried to fix it, but I got worse—more drunk, more distant. He kept seeing her until finally I just broke and the rest is pretty well on the record. They’re out and official now, at least, and I can look at my situation honestly, as well as at theirs.”

  “Dwight and I thought you might patch things up.”

  “No,” I said. “No. The new-girlfriend rift is sadly unpatchable. But do you know what’s funny? Looking back, I can’t understand how or why I suffered such intense melancholy when I found out about Julia.”

  “Well,” she said. “It was frankly a snaky thing for Max to do. Taking up with her the way he did, with you in such a state.”

  “My reaction was out of proportion, though,” I said. “That’s my point. I can see that now. As much as I loved Max, as much as I still do, it’s still not comprehensible that such an estrangement of affection could cause a person to literally shut down. To make them unable to pack a suitcase, or to get on a plane or train alone. Barely able to do it even with the aid of as faithful a friend as you.”

  “I should never have let you board that ship,” said Helen, stopping in the middle of the path. “I could tell. I knew you weren’t well. And look what happened.”

  “That incident, dear Helen, is something I cannot talk about,” I said. “But it’s not your fault. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s nobody’s but mine. Even Max, blameworthy though he may be in other respects, isn’t indictable on this count. Not really. Please don’t forget that.”

  She was silent.

  “Want to hear one more fun fact about Max’s new lease on life?” I asked.

  “Probably not,” she said. “But all right.”

  “He called me up last week,” I said. “The day I got back from Greenwich Hospital. And asked if I could fly to Reno.”

  “Reno?” said Helen. “To expedite the breakup?”

  “Why else? I’m sure he thought I was just stalling when I said I couldn’t go. He had the grand idea that I could take my ‘rest cure’ simultaneously with the divorce.”

  “Oh, good lord,” said Helen. “Now that is a package holiday! He should put that in a letter to the state tourism commissi
on. What a heel.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “And we are getting a divorce, I assured him. Uncontested. I accede to my abandonment. But I really just don’t have the mind or strength or spirit to go to Nevada at this particular moment. Much less to cope with lawyers. I only have it in me to grapple with one overeducated professional at a time, and right now that’s Dr. R. So Max has agreed to do it the slow, old-fashioned way, right here in New York State, once I’m up to it.”

  “What a sweetheart,” said Helen.

  “Always a romantic,” I said.

  Helen’s arm was now bearing an unfair share of my Thorazine-inflated weight; my legs had grown leaden, my mind fogged, given to repetition and forgetfulness. It’s fun to be around someone who appreciates wit, but only to the extent one is able to be witty, and I was fading fast.

  “How’s Johnny taking it?” Helen asked.

  “The Great Schism, you mean?”

  Helen’s voice snagged in her throat for an instant. “All of it,” she said.

  I slowed to a stop, bracing myself against a bench to still a twitch in my legs. “I try to console myself,” I said, “with the notion that this will all be character-building for him. Johnny, fortunately, is thirteen years old. His intense self-regard will get him through anything. Helen, would you forgive me if I told you I need to rest? This delightful excursion has just about finished me off.”

  She signed me back in at the desk, then insisted on waiting—reading a book in the common area with a quiet cavalcade of nuts, drunks, and dope fiends drifting around her, a lone bloom amid rock-slide debris—while I took my nap.

  Afterwards we had a late lunch together, and then she had to leave to catch her train back to Manhattan. “I’ll be back,” she said. “As often as you’ll have me. And I’ll bring Johnny as soon as Dr. R says you’re ready.”

  We hugged good-bye. As I watched her go, she in her smart traveling coat, I admired how impressive she had become. As a dewy youth she’d been lovely, as a successful illustrator she’d been elegant, but now her application of patience and poise had somehow made her formidable: the sort of figure one stares at on the street, trying to recall what she’s famous for.

  I realized, without surprise, that I had neglected to inquire after all the good news her recent letters had contained. Her young Merritt was out of the Army at last, in one piece, in fine spirits, sporting a chestful of medals from Korea. One stepdaughter was sending her twins to high school, while the other—summa cum laude at Barnard, J.D. from Fordham, not, as they say, interested in boys—had hired on as legislative counsel for Senator Lehman and was helping to give that tub-thumper McCarthy his long-due comeuppance, much to her father’s delight. Dwight himself was a dynamo at seventy-one, still bounding down the front steps every morning to his battle station at The New Republic, where he’d been the art editor now for a decade. And Helen had just gotten a letter “out of the blue” from her alma mater: They were planning a retrospective exhibition of her illustrations, maybe even a catalogue. So your important work won’t be forgotten, they’d said. “Of course they’ll have to feature your verses, too,” Helen had written. “All my best doodles took root in your rhymes. We’re a package deal!”

  She was a damn good egg, that Helen McGoldrick. Even though Silver Hill gave me analysis aplenty, her ear was superior to ten thousand psychiatrists, and I was grateful beyond words for her loan of it that Saint Patrick’s Day.

  If you can fool even your closest friends into thinking you’re sane, then maybe you’re not so crazy after all.

  * * *

  Dr. R was handsome, but devoid of threat. Blandsome. A generic doctor-ish set of good looks.

  He was not much of a reader, it turned out, though his office was book lined. They were for show. I looked at them, their spines on the shelves, whenever I needed to break eye contact, so as not to appear too intense. It was early May, and I was angling for a change in my inmate status.

  “With all due respect, Doc,” I said, “I don’t like therapy—talk therapy. I have a lot of friends, and I’m up to contacting them now. So I don’t feel like I need to keep paying someone to listen to me.”

  “One of the key features of therapy, Lillian,” he said, “is that the therapist is an outsider. Coolheaded and objective. Not your friend, but a trusted professional.”

  This I ignored.

  “And occupational therapy,” I said. “I liked it for a while, but now I can keep myself occupied.”

  This was accurate. After the shock treatments, I’d been able to start writing poems again. Tacking them to the wall above the maple desk in my room, like an inmate hash marking down the days. Granted, they were a bit fixated on gloomy topics, but they were poems nevertheless. The one I’d written that morning began:

  Please, God, arrange to let me be

  A ghost, if You will be so kind,

  Just long enough to ease my mind.

  A horrid little ghost—and there

  I’ll sit upon his bed and stare

  Until his tortured eyelids prickle.…

  * * *

  My great subject during that period was my unsatisfiable longing to draw sad, salt tears from the eyes of my erstwhile darling. Max would never cry over me, though, not ever again. I felt as though these poems represented progress—away from self-nullifying melancholy, toward a concrete and productive anger—but I wasn’t confident that others would interpret them the same way, and I didn’t show them to Dr. R.

  “Lillian,” said Dr. R, “I’m happy your old habits and routines are finding their way back into your life. But, again, occupational therapy serves a different purpose than your poetry, so we’re going to keep that up, too.”

  “All right,” I said. “I understand. And I am grateful for the chance to build up my handmade pot holder collection. But my industriousness has been such that I’ve even written a poetical message for you. Want to hear it?”

  “Sure,” he said, smiling.

  I read aloud:

  Dear Dr. Rosemont, W.G.,

  This is the day you don’t see me

  Trying to do anything you don’t want to see.

  Congratulations! Now I’m painin’

  To buy a few things in New Canaan,

  So I’d consider it a boon

  If I could go this afternoon.

  * * *

  I knew that they were worried about a relapse of my drinking, and about the collapse of my marriage making me feel vulnerable—and honestly so was I—but I wanted out. Just out for a while: the tiny responsibility of going by myself into the town and then coming back.

  Dr. R laughed appreciatively, but the effort got me nowhere.

  “Lillian, I’m afraid we’ll have to keep you close by as much as possible, and under constant supervision for a little while longer,” said Dr. R, steepling his fingers as they must have taught him to do in Serious Doctor School. “Because of the grave nature of the incident that brought you here. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Oh, Dr. R,” I said, trying to force my lips from rictus to actual smile. “Don’t let’s live in the past. I’ve moved on.”

  “We have to keep you moving in the right direction, though, Lillian.”

  “Taking some small unescorted trips seems to me to be one of the steps that will take us in that direction, doctor.”

  “It is,” he said. “In due time. But we’re not ready for that yet. Who’s the expert here, Lillian?”

  That was how it had been going for weeks. I didn’t want to leave Silver Hill permanently, not yet. I was actually enjoying it: the rest, the quiet, my recovered mental self. But I did want some freedom and a bit more privacy. Yet as much as I tried to persuade Dr. R to let me have more of each of these, he refused.

  “Of course it’s you, Dr. R,” I said, trying to laugh with him.

  “How about this, though: Your son’s coming to visit you this Saturday, yes?”

  “He is,” I said.

  Thirteen years old, he’d be ta
king the train all the way up on his own. It would be his first visit. Dr. R had suggested three weeks ago that it might be time for Johnny to be reunited with his mother, but I’d demurred; I had not wanted him to see me until I looked less shattered, until I could be sure I had the stamina to sustain a lifted spirit for a full weekend. I did not mention this to Johnny, although I had been writing him a letter a day since the middle of March—and sometimes two letters on eventful days: when a craft project had gone spectacularly well, when a crazy person had done something crazy, et cetera.

  “We’ll have a nurse take you two into town,” said Dr. R with exaggerated benevolence. “For shopping, for ice cream, for a movie. Whatever you like.”

  I had always thought that the capacity to persuade was based on one’s wit, cleverness, and skill. But when one is trying to convince one’s doctor to let one out of a mental institution, it becomes apparent that persuasion actually has a great deal to do with the position of power that one occupies to begin with. No amount of wit, it seems, will get one out of an involuntary psychiatric commitment.

  Choice is an illusion promoted by the powerful.

  “All right,” was all I said out loud. “That sounds like a fair compromise.”

  “There’s a reasonable girl,” said Dr. R, standing up and walking around his desk to show me out, back to my pot holders and my shuffles through the garden.

  I was not a girl. I was fifty-five. At that point in my life, an old fifty-five. But I stood and thanked him and went to go pick at my institutional lunch.

  * * *

  By the end of my stay, though, I had to admit: It was a good shop they ran, and I was a different person again, more like I’d been twenty years before.

  I wouldn’t miss having doctors and nurses hovering around to remind me of all my pills and exercise appointments, but they truly had helped me.

  The week before my discharge I felt ready to face even the least appealing tasks ahead of me. I’d been sending business correspondence, tying up loose ends.