Girl, Interrupted (2 page)

“Take her to McLean,” he said, “and don’t let her out till you get there.”

I let my head fall back against the seat and shut my eyes. I was glad to be riding in a taxi instead of having to wait for the train.

Etiology

This person is (pick one):

1. on a perilous journey from which we can learn much when he or she returns;

2. possessed by (pick one):

a) the gods,

b) God (that is, a prophet),

c) some bad spirits, demons, or devils,

d) the Devil;

3. a witch;

4. bewitched (variant of 2);

5. bad, and must be isolated and punished;

6. ill, and must be isolated and treated by (pick one):

a) purging and leeches,

b) removing the uterus if the person has one,

c) electric shock to the brain,

d) cold sheets wrapped tight around the body,

e) Thorazine or Stelazine;

7. ill, and must spend the next seven years talking about it;

8. a victim of society’s low tolerance for deviant behavior;

9. sane in an insane world;

10. on a perilous journey from which he or she may never return.

Fire

One girl among us had set herself on fire. She used gasoline. She was too young to drive at the time. I wondered how she’d gotten hold of it. Had she walked to her neighborhood garage and told them her father’s car had run out of gas? I couldn’t look at her without thinking about it.

I think the gasoline had settled in her collarbones, forming pools there beside her shoulders, because her neck and cheeks were scarred the most. The scars were thick ridges, alternating bright pink and white, in stripes up from her neck. They were so tough and wide that she couldn’t turn her head, but had to swivel her entire upper torso if she wanted to see a person standing next to her.

Scar tissue has no character. It’s not like skin. It doesn’t show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It’s like a slipcover. It shields and disguises what’s beneath. That’s why we grow it; we have something to hide.

Her name was Polly. This name must have seemed ridiculous to her in the days—or months—when she was planning to set herself on fire, but it suited her well in her slipcovered, survivor life. She was never unhappy. She was kind and comforting to those who were unhappy. She never complained. She always had time to listen to other people’s complaints. She was faultless, in her impermeable tight pink-and-white casing. Whatever had driven her, whispered “Die!” in her once-perfect, now-scarred ear, she had immolated it.

Why did she do it? Nobody knew. Nobody dared to ask. Because—what courage! Who had the courage to burn herself? Twenty aspirin, a little slit alongside the veins of the arm, maybe even a bad half hour standing on a roof: We’ve all had those. And somewhat more dangerous things, like putting a gun in your mouth. But you put it there, you taste it, it’s cold and greasy, your finger is on the trigger, and you find that a whole world lies between this moment and the moment you’ve been planning, when you’ll pull the trigger. That world defeats you. You put the gun back in the drawer. You’ll have to find another way.

What was that moment like for her? The moment she lit the match. Had she already tried roofs and guns and aspirin? Or was it just an inspiration?

I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that today I had to swallow fifty aspirin. It was my task: my job for the day. I lined them up on my desk and took them one by one, counting. But it’s not the same as what she did. I could have stopped, at ten, or at thirty. And I could have done what I did do, which was go onto the street and faint. Fifty aspirin is a lot of aspirin, but going onto the street and fainting is like putting the gun back in the drawer.

She lit the match.

Where? In the garage at home, where she wouldn’t set anything else on fire? Out in a field? In the high school gym? In an empty swimming pool?

Somebody found her, but not for a while.

Who would kiss a person like that, a person with no skin?

She was eighteen before this thought occurred to her She’d spent a year with us. Other people stormed and screamed and cringed and cried; Polly watched and smiled. She sat by people who were frightened, and her presence calmed them. Her smile wasn’t mean, it was understanding. Life was hellish, she knew that. But, her smile hinted, she’d burned all that out of her. Her smile was a little bit superior: We wouldn’t have the courage to burn it out of ourselves—but she understood that too. Everyone was different. People just did what they could.

One morning somebody was crying, but mornings were often noisy: fights about getting up on time and complaints about nightmares. Polly was so quiet, so unobtrusive a presence, that we didn’t notice she wasn’t at breakfast. After breakfast, we could still hear crying.

“Who’s crying?”

Nobody knew.

And at lunch, there was still crying.

“It’s Polly,” said Lisa, who knew everything.

“Why?”

But even Lisa didn’t know why.

At dusk the crying changed to screaming. Dusk is a dangerous time. At first she screamed, “Aaaaaah!” and “Eeeeeh!” Then she started to scream words.

“My face! My face!
My face!
”

We could hear other voices shushing her, murmuring comfort, but she continued to scream her two words long into the night.

Lisa said, “Well, I’ve been expecting this for a while.”

And then I think we all realized what fools we’d been.

We might get out sometime, but she was locked up forever in that body.

Freedom

Lisa had run away again. We were sad, because she kept our spirits up. She was funny. Lisa! I can’t think of her without smiling, even now.

The worst was that she was always caught and dragged back, dirty, with wild eyes that had seen freedom. She would curse her captors, and even the tough old-timers had to laugh at the names she made up.

“Cheese-pussy!” And another favorite, “You schizophrenic bat!”

Usually, they found her within a day. She couldn’t get far on foot, with no money. But this time she seemed to have lucked out. On the third day I heard someone in the nursing station saying “APB” into the phone: all points bulletin.

Lisa wouldn’t be hard to identify. She rarely ate and she never slept, so she was thin and yellow, the way people get when they don’t eat, and she had huge bags under her eyes. She had long dark dull hair that she fastened with a silver clip. She had the longest fingers I’ve ever seen.

This time, when they brought her back, they were almost as angry as she was. Two big men had her arms, and a third guy had her by the hair, pulling so that Lisa’s eyes bugged out. Everybody was quiet, including Lisa. They took her down to the end of the hall, to seclusion, while we watched.

We watched a lot of things.

We watched Cynthia come back crying from electroshock once a week. We watched Polly shiver after being wrapped in ice-cold sheets. One of the worst things we watched, though, was Lisa coming out of seclusion two days later.

To begin with, they’d cut her nails down to the quick. She’d had beautiful nails, which she worked on, polishing, shaping, buffing. They said her nails were “sharps.”

And they’d taken away her belt. Lisa always wore a cheap beaded belt—the kind made by Indians on reservations. It was green, with red triangles on it, and it had belonged to her brother Jonas, the only one in her family still in touch with her. Her mother and father wouldn’t visit her because she was a sociopath, or so said Lisa. They took away the belt so she couldn’t hang herself.

They didn’t understand that Lisa would never hang herself.

They let her out of seclusion, they gave her back her belt, and her nails started to grow in again, but Lisa didn’t come back. She just sat and watched TV with the worst of us.

Lisa had never watched TV. She’d had nothing but scorn for those who did. “It’s shit!” she’d yell, sticking her head into the TV room. “You’re already like robots. It’s making you worse.” Sometimes she turned off the TV and stood in front of it, daring somebody to turn it on. But the TV audience was mostly catatonics and depressives, who were disinclined to move. After five minutes, which was about as long as she could stand still, Lisa would be off on another project, and when the person on checks came around, she would turn the TV on again.

Since Lisa hadn’t slept for the two years she’d been with us, the nurses had given up telling her to go to bed Instead, she had a chair of her own in the hallway, just like the night staff, where she’d sit and work on her nails. She made wonderful cocoa, and at three o’clock in the morning she made cocoa for the night staff and anybody else who was up. She was calmer at night.

Once I asked her, “Lisa, how come you don’t rush around and yell at night?”

“I need rest too,” she said. “Just because I don’t sleep doesn’t mean I don’t rest.”

Lisa always knew what she needed. She’d say, “I need a vacation from this place,” and then she’d run away. When she got back, we’d ask her how it was out there.

“It’s a mean world,” she’d say. She was usually glad enough to be back. “There’s nobody to take care of you out there.”

Now she said nothing. She spent all her time in the TV room. She watched prayers and test patterns and hours of late-night talk shows and early-morning news. Her chair in the hall was unoccupied, and nobody got cocoa.

“Are you giving Lisa something?” I asked the person on checks.

“You know we can’t discuss medication with patients.”

I asked the head nurse. I’d known her awhile, since before she was the head nurse.

But she acted as though she’d always been the head nurse. “We can’t discuss medication—you know that.”

“Why bother asking,” said Georgina. “She’s completely blotto. Of course they’re giving her something.”

Cynthia didn’t think so. “She still walks okay,” she said.

“I don’t,” said Polly. She didn’t. She walked with her arms stuck out in front of her, her red-and-white hands drooping from her wrists and her feet shuffling along the floor. The cold packs hadn’t worked; she still screamed all night until they put her on something.

“It took a while,” I said. “You walked okay when they started it.”

“Now I don’t,” said Polly. She looked at her hands.

I asked Lisa if they were giving her something, but she wouldn’t look at me.

And this way we all passed through a month or two, Lisa and the catatonics in the TV room, Polly walking like a motorized corpse, Cynthia crying after electroshock (“I’m not sad,” she explained to me, “but I can’t help crying”), and me and Georgina in our double suite. We were considered the healthiest.

When spring came Lisa began spending a little more time outside the TV room. She spent it in the bathroom, to be exact, but at least it was a change.

I asked the person on checks, “What’s she doing in the bathroom?”

This was a new person. “Am I supposed to open bathroom doors too?”

I did what we often did to new people. “Somebody could hang herself in there in a minute! Where do you think you are, anyhow? A boarding school?” Then I put my face close to hers. They didn’t like that, touching us.

I noticed Lisa went to a different bathroom every time. There were four, and she made the circuit daily. She didn’t look good. Her belt was hanging off her and she looked yellower than usual.

“Maybe she’s got dysentery,” I said to Georgina. But Georgina thought she was just blotto.

One morning in May we were eating breakfast when we heard a door slam. Then Lisa appeared in the kitchen.

“Later for that TV,” she said. She poured herself a big cup of coffee, just as she used to do in the mornings, and sat down at the table. She smiled at us, and we smiled back. “Wait,” she said.

We heard feet running and voices saying things like “What in the world …” and “How in the world …” Then the head nurse came into the kitchen.

“You did this,” she said to Lisa.

We went to see what it was.

She had wrapped all the furniture, some of it holding catatonics, and the TV and the sprinkler system on the ceiling in toilet paper. Yards and yards of it floated and dangled, bunched and draped on everything, everywhere. It was magnificent.

“She wasn’t blotto,” I said to Georgina. “She was plotting.”

We had a good summer, and Lisa told us lots of stories about what she’d done those three days she was free.

The Secret of Life

One day I had a visitor. I was in the TV room watching Lisa watch TV, when a nurse came in to tell me.

“You’ve got a visitor,” she said. “A man.”

It wasn’t my troublesome boyfriend. First of all, he wasn’t my boyfriend anymore. How could a person who was locked up have a boyfriend? Anyhow, he couldn’t bear coming here. His mother had been in a loony bin too, it turned out, and he couldn’t bear being reminded of it.