The PMS Outlaws: An Elizabeth MacPherson Novel (18 page)

S
ince the day was fine, the members of the Cherry Hill afternoon group therapy session had decided to meet outside. They were seated on borrowed cafeteria chairs in the dappled shade of a broad-limbed maple tree, enjoying the sunshine, perhaps more than they enjoyed the recitals of their fellow patients. Clifford Allen, seated as far back in shadow as he could get, was anointing every visible part of his body with sunscreen.

After the usual preliminaries had been conducted by the brisk and hearty Warburton, Emma O. indicated that she would like to begin the discussion. “I’ve been making a list of my friends,” she announced. “Or trying to. It’s hard to know if you have any, isn’t it?”

Someone had to break the ensuing awkward silence. Matt Pennington, who prided himself on his charity, spoke the obvious,
expected line, “Well, we’re all your friends, Emma.” He turned to Elizabeth. “I don’t believe I know you, though.”

“Shut up, Matt,” said Elizabeth. “You had ECT this morning. You forgot me again.”

“Oh.” He looked doubtful and peered at her more closely, waiting for a spark of recognition that was evidently not forthcoming.

Emma O.’s impatient scowl suggested that Matt’s well-meaning, if insincere, offer of friendship had failed to impress her. The others in the group remained silent, reflecting on the fact that it isn’t easy to tell comforting lies to someone suffering from depression. As Emma O. was fond of pointing out, depressed people believe the worst, and so often they are right.

“No,” Emma told them. “You people are not my friends. At this point you are all fellow travelers in neurosis, but I’m not sure that the attachment will last after our present circumstances change. It probably won’t. My friends never do seem to carry over from one situation to the next. They drift away.”

“Well, you can always make new friends,” said Beulah. “Church is an excellent place to meet people.”

“It isn’t easy for everybody to make friends,” said Clifford Allen. He looked around defiantly, daring anyone to challenge his statement. Nobody did.

“People come and go,” said Emma, who did not sound overly concerned about it. “I suppose that the people in the books I read are my friends. The characters on
Star Trek
are my friends. Maybe I should list them.”

“But those aren’t real people,” Warburton reminded her.

Emma shrugged. “They’ve been in my life longer than anyone else has stuck around.”

“Friendship is one of those tests you can’t study for,” said Rose Hanelon. She had picked up a maple leaf from the lawn beside her chair and was tearing it into narrow strips, but her abstracted gaze suggested that she was not thinking about the leaf. “When I was in the eighth grade, our health teacher did an exercise on friendship that has haunted me ever since,” she said. “Can I talk about that?”

Warburton remembered to change her shrug into an encouraging smile. “Go on, Rose.”

“Eighth-grade health was an all-girls class. Two days a week it alternated with gym class. We were at the giggly stage of friendship, just before boys and status begin to matter. Anyhow, one day Miss Sharp asked us to list our friends. Who in the class would we want to go on a picnic with? Go to a movie with? Tell a secret to? Sit next to in class? She took up the papers and tabulated the results. The next day in class she drew a diagram on the board—without using any names—showing us the patterns of friendship in the room.

“There were popular girls and unpopular girls. The teacher called them ‘Stars’ and ‘Isolates.’ The Stars were the girls who got the most votes, of course. The circles representing them were surrounded by other little circles of their friends and admirers. They were the pretty, self-assured girls who everyone wanted to be friends with. Some of the Isolates only got one vote. What was interesting about our class, according to Miss Sharp, was that sometimes the Stars picked the Isolates for friends. Often the Isolate’s only vote came from a Star. And the Isolates usually
chose a Star. No Isolate picked another Isolate, which I guess proves that not even misery loves its own company.”

“And you never found out which you were?” asked Elizabeth

“No. Miss Sharp wouldn’t tell any of us. Ever. I’ll bet no one else in the class even remembers doing that exercise, but for thirty years I’ve wondered if I was a Star or an Isolate.”

“Why do you still care?” asked Clifford Allen, to whom relationships were either profitable or cumbersome.

“I don’t know,” said Rose. “Perhaps I think that I could learn some fundamental truth about myself from that exercise. I don’t think the pattern of personality changes much after eighth grade for most people. I think we remained whatever we were—Stars or Isolates—forever.” She shivered.

“You were probably an Isolate,” said Richard Petress, striking a pose. “ ’Cause, honey, let me tell you, the Stars know who they are.”

Warburton considered Petress’s remark contentious enough to require her intervention before a shouting match began. Since Rose apparently had nothing to add to her story, and the others were looking around uneasily as if they were pondering the results of such a quiz among themselves, the group leader decided to provide a distraction. “Emma, I believe you introduced this topic,” she said with a plaster smile. “Perhaps you’d like to tell us why you are making a list of your friends?”

“You’re not writing your will, are you?” asked Clifford.

“No. No real reason. I just wanted to list my friends to see if I had any.”

Before she could develop this theme, with possibly unpleasant results, Elizabeth saw a chance of using the discussion
to her advantage. Turning to Hillman Randolph, she said, “What about you, Mr. Randolph? Did you keep in touch with any of your friends from your days in law enforcement?”

Hillman Randolph’s eyes widened. It was unusual for a patient to solicit another’s opinion on a topic neither of them had commented on, but after a moment of startled silence, the old man shook his head. “After this,” he said, touching a tentative hand to the roughened skin on the side of his face. “After the accident … I had to quit working, you know. It took so many operations to get me put back together to where I could go out without making small children cry.…” He broke off for a moment as he struggled with the memory. “And my hands … Well, some of the fellows came to see me when I was in the hospital—at first—but I was so depressed by what had happened to me that I wasn’t much company. I hardly spoke to them. And I reckon pity is no basis for a friendship. So they stopped coming, and I never looked them up. That life was all behind me. It was time to make a clean start.”

“So you weren’t curious to find out what happened in the cases you had been working on?”

He shook his head. “Maybe they told me. I’ve forgotten. When you’re in a burn unit, young lady, your mind is not apt to be concerned with much of anything beyond the next dose of pain medicine. Pray that you never find that out the hard way.”

Before Elizabeth could pursue the matter, Emma O. took the floor again. “You have more friends than I do, Rose,” she declared. “You have visitors from the newspaper just about every day, bringing you magazines and wanting to tell you all the gossip from work. Everybody is terribly worried about you for being an alcoholic, and about Seraphin because she’s beautiful and
she won’t eat. But when you have Asperger’s, people never much like you in the first place, so you’re on your own, because nobody cares if you get well or not.”

Warburton saw a chance to insert therapy into the discussion. “Emma, we are trying to treat your depression, but you know that Asperger’s syndrome is a developmental disorder. You can’t just take a pill and make it go away, but you might be able to modify your behavior. How do you think you can change yourself to make people like you?”

Emma O. shrugged. “I have no idea what makes people like other people, except for the beauty thing, and in my case I don’t think there’s much chance of that. I can’t do crowds and parties like Rose does. I just don’t see the point of parties, and I can only focus on one person at a time, which means that even when I attend parties I always bore one person to death and antagonize the rest.”

“What’s so hard about parties?” said Rose. “If you’re nervous, just have a few drinks to loosen yourself up.”

“Rose loves parties,” said Emma. “She’s fun, even when she’s dead drunk, but I can’t do it. I can be clever with words, even occasionally funny, but I guess it isn’t the same. Anyhow, when people start to get tired of me, I just go away and I never bother them again.”

“Oh, honey, that goes double for me,” said Richard Petress. “When relationships start to cause me more pain than gain, I just walk right on off, and I do not look back.”

“Is that a good way to be?” asked Warburton.

Hillman Randolph said, “Sometimes you don’t have any choice.”

A
. P. Hill glanced at the directions scribbled on today’s page of her planner. Third house on the left. She was driving along the tree-lined streets of an old neighborhood of Colonial-style houses. She looked out approvingly at the well-kept yards and the neatly tended flower beds. The houses were not identical, but they all blended into a harmonious unit, giving the area character without the cookie-cutter effect. So this is where Sally Gee had ended up.

Even if today’s inquiry turned out to be a dead end, thought Powell, the trip would be worth it just to find out how Sally was doing.

It looked like a comfortable, happy neighborhood, thought Powell Hill, nodding at a couple of boys on bicycles who stopped to let her pass. She was glad. She had wanted Sally Gee to live happily ever after, and from the looks of the neighborhood, she had as good a chance at succeeding as most people could ever hope for. Sally was a good person, though. She would always carry happiness with her, and that counted for a lot. Still, there had been times when the other girls in the dormitory had feared that Sally’s crusading personality might lead to a shallow grave in a war zone or to a tent hospital at some jungle outpost. Sally Gee had such a terrible combination of innocence and social conscience that she could have ended up anywhere.

A. P. Hill had spent the half-hour drive from her hotel to the suburbs of Richmond remembering her student days on campus, when Sally Gee had been dorm president and general guardian angel to the immediate world. She was only two years older than the incoming freshmen, but somehow she seemed to stand midway between them and the remote adult authority
figures who controlled their lives. Sally, self-appointed foster mother of the third floor, dispensed tea and advice at all hours, advised her charges on course selection and relationship problems, and generally kept an eye out for those likely to find trouble in one way or another. For A. P. Hill, who studied too much and laughed too little, Sally would prescribe a movie every couple of weeks. She always asked Powell to go with her as a favor. “Please,” she would say, “Jim has football practice [or a golf game, or a term paper to write], and he can’t go with me. Would you come along? I hate to see movies alone.” The film was always a comedy; the outing was always fun. A. P. Hill was well into her junior year before she realized, thinking back, that she had received the favor, not granted it. Sally Gee cared about everybody. Anyone’s unhappiness diminished her. She was beloved, the girls told one another, but so vulnerable. They worried.

Sally had been enshrined in campus legend as the girl who had received an obscene phone call and didn’t know it. She had been on her own in the residence hall one afternoon when the pay telephone rang. Sally, ever the good citizen, ran to answer it, ready to deliver a message to whichever of her hallmates the caller wanted, but when she said, “Hello. Third floor,” a hoarse male voice had replied, “I’m going to jack off now.”

After a moment of shocked silence, Sally said earnestly, “Oh, no, you mustn’t! Think how upset your parents would be!”

On the other end of the line the heavy breathing ended in a gasp. “What?”

“If you killed yourself. Think how devastated your folks would be. I’m sure they’d blame themselves. Whatever is troubling you, I’m sure it will pass.”

Sally and the caller had continued to have a lovely conversation, with her assuring him of all the joys of living, until at length the young man averred that he did indeed feel … relieved.

“Can I call you again?” he asked after another pause.

“Oh, yes!” said his ministering angel. “Any time you are feeling this way again, just call Third and ask for Sally.”

She had spent the rest of the afternoon in the afterglow of good works, and that evening when Jim, her fiancé, came to pick her up for the evening, she could not resist regaling him with her triumph. They were walking out side by side that evening, tiny sweet-faced Sally Gee and big Jim Klingenschmitt, a linebacker who was built like a thumb. As they neared the front door Sally looked up at Jim and said, “Oh, Jim, I must tell you: the saddest thing happened today. A boy called the third floor and he was so depressed about life that he was going to jack off.”

Several minutes later, after Jim Klingenschmitt had stopped waving his arms and shouting, and after the threat of the fire extinguisher and the campus police had dissuaded him from charging upstairs and ripping the third-floor pay phone off the wall, he sat Sally down on a secluded sofa in the long parlor and carefully explained to her that the phrase “jacking off” was not a euphemism for suicide.

Sally took the news philosophically. Her intentions had been good, after all, and this one unpleasant setback did not deter her from being a mother hen to the rest of the residents. Her one concession to reality after that incident was that for the next month all male callers for Sally Gee were first routed past P. J. Purdue.

Purdue and Sally had been the yin and yang of their residence hall community. They lived at opposite ends of the hall. Purdue dispensed cigarettes in lieu of tea, and her advice tended to be more terrorist than motherly, but they balanced college life well between them. In order to survive college, sometimes you need guerrilla tactics and sometimes you need tea and sympathy. As A. P. Hill pulled into the driveway of the green-shuttered Williamsburg colonial, she found herself wondering for the first time if Sally and Purdue, the saint and the terrorist, had ever sought advice from each other.