Admissions (2 page)

“Soap’s in there.”

The dark yellow cake lying on the shower floor has jelled. Along the way, it picked up hairs of all shades and textures. I stoop to retrieve the bar and pick at it. But the hair is melted into the cake and won’t budge.

I look down at my hands. I feel them gliding over fake brocade. I imagine snipping them off at the wrists, stacking them on the soap dish, blood streaking down the wall, swirling into the drain. I tip my head back, close my eyes, open my mouth. Turkeys drown this way.

“Hurry up. You have to get situated before second shift.” The nurse’s voice echoes off the tile walls.

The tepid shower smells of iron. The water pressure is waning. My hands drag on my arms—heavy, too heavy. I step out of the shower and blink to clear my vision. A weak attempt to rinse my hair leaves it in a spongy wad plastered on top of my head. I face a stranger—the new nurse wears a white uniform, a blue starched cap, and a name badge:
Miss Lobsinger, LPN, Nurse Attendant
.

“About time. What do you think this is, the Ritz Carlton? Come on. I got better things to do.” She gives me a shapeless denim smock that hangs almost to the floor, my brown desert boots, no socks.

“Where are my clothes?” I need my clothes…to feel human.

“Don’t worry about it. You’ll get them when they’re ready. Come on.”

At the end of the hall, the sign says
Infirmary. No Admission Without Written Orders.
The nurse unlocks the door, steps back. My hands fly to my face, cover my nose and mouth. But it’s too late to keep the sickening smell from coating my throat.

“Keep moving.” The nurse pokes my back, nudges me to an empty bed among a sea of white metal hospital beds. Moans and snores from dozens of sleeping patients, a loud shout, “Let me out of here!” from a bed by the nurses’ station.

“What’s wrong with her?” I ask.

“We have to restrain her, she’s violent.” The nurse takes my elbow, half pushes, half swings me toward the bed. I soften my fall by catching the edge with my hand. The nurse turns up my palm, drops two pills into it, a small round orange one and one that looks like a green bubble.

I try to sit up, so I won’t choke. The pills stick to my tongue until I take the one gulp of water from a tiny fluted paper cup. I crane my neck like a baby bird, swallow several times
…
my eyes water with panic. Finally, the pills squeeze down my throat and break free into my stomach.

Nurse Lobsinger takes a small package from the cabinet and pulls a stand forward. “Everybody gets an enema. That’s the rule. After, if you need to go, there’s the bedpan. You’re not allowed out of bed, period.”

I close my eyes as the nurse fills the bag. The pills explode in my brain, swirling, pulling me down, pushing me into sleep.

Chapter 3

N
o pills this morning, toots…your lucky day…Hall 5…meet your buddies…take a drink.” The voice pulls me from a drugged stupor. The nurse tunnels her arm under my back, holds a small cup of water in front of me. My tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. The skin on my lips cracks, I try to talk.

“Luanne, drink this water.” It feels like my throat is stuck shut all the way down to my chest. She touches my lips with a wet cloth, and they come unglued. I take a small sip. I feel like a newborn, my head rolling to the side, flopping back on the stiff pillow. I hear the nurse’s footsteps grow faint.

“Wake up, Luanne. Let’s get going.” The nurse is back. She tugs at my sheet. “Augh, you stink.” She pulls me upright by my wrists, my bones rub together and it hurts. My legs are like rubber, they slip sideways, dangle over the edge of the bed. My knees buckle as my toes hit the cold linoleum.

The nurse cinches me roughly around the waist. “Walk now. I’m not going to carry you. Walk!”

I try to tighten my body into an upright position as she drags me out the infirmary door and down to the bathroom. Several women sit on toilets. Two aides stand in front of them, talking.

“Betty, help over here,” Nurse Lobsinger shouts.

“I’m busy.”

“Betty, you lazy bitch. I swear to god. Get over here and take her arm.” Grabbing my elbows, they pull me through the doorway into the shower room. Nurse Lobsinger reaches into the stall, turns the handles. The shower nozzle sputters to life, a fat spurt of water becomes an intermittent spray.

“Hold her up. I gotta get this stinken’ nightgown off.” Betty does as she is told, holding me around the waist as Nurse Lobsinger raises the gown over my head.

“I’m not gettin’ wet holdin’ on to her,” Betty says.

“Nope. She’s on her own.” Nurse Lobsinger grabs my shoulders. “Take her arm. Steer her in under the spray.”

They walk me a few steps. As soon as I enter the shower stall, they let go. I stagger, reach for the wall, but my hand slips. I fall back against the hot and cold handles. My heels skid through the soap scum. My arms are too weak to break the fall and my tailbone thumps against the tile floor. Pain runs up my back as the cool water splats onto my head.

“While you’re down there, scrub between your legs,” Betty says.

“Yeah. Try to get the dried shit off your ass,” Nurse Lobsinger laughs.

Their voices sound muffled. My hand moves in slow motion, chasing the gooey soap, trapping it in the corner, lifting it onto my thigh, making circles across my leg. I feel the corners of my lips pull, then crack, as my mouth flies open. It starts with a barely perceptible thin cry, like the distant call of a soaring bird, grows in depth and volume as it fills my chest, rumbles up through my throat until my anguish erupts in heaving sobs.

My hands take over, running the soap up and down my legs and arms, gliding it over my breasts, across my stomach. And I
do
scrub between my legs, all the way back to my throbbing tailbone. The cool water, the pain in my spine, coax me back.

I can hear the two women chatting outside the shower stall. Then Nurse Lobsinger reaches in and shuts off the water, pulls me up and out. Betty brings out a hospital gown. I raise my arms to receive it. They set my brown boots in front of me, hold me upright as I slide my sticky feet into them. As frail as I am, I can wobble along with the nurse holding my elbow.

As the medication wears off, the terror creeps back. Each step I take feels dangerous. Like descending into the cave of a sleeping giant.

The giant could wake.

I feel the blood rush through my heart, feel it quiver in my chest. “Mommy.” I look around—the voice is mine. I clasp my hands in front of me to keep them from flying off.

The nurse unlocks the door to Hall 5. The hallway is wide enough for chairs on both sides. There sit the women, rocking, no distractions, no clutter. As I pass, I notice a small strip of tape stuck between the shoulder blades of each woman, her name written in black ink. “Margaret, sit down,” the attendant says. “Sit quietly now.”

More women pop up, then sit back down on command like targets on a shooting range.

Dim white lamps, like giant mushrooms, hang on long chains from the high ceiling. The creaking and thumping of the steam radiators under the windows, low murmurings of patients create the backbeat for my welcome. I hug myself against the cold. I hug myself to keep from breaking apart, spraying across the walls.

The nurse fingers her keys, picks one, and turns it in the keyhole of Room 12. She pushes me across the threshold of a tall thick door. I lean against it to keep from falling, my hand resting on the deadbolt. I look around the room, my eyes stick on the large window covered by a heavy metal screen.

In the tiny room, two scarred iron beds are stripped down to stained mattresses, the once white stripes of their ticking yellow. No box springs—the two-inch thick mattresses sit directly on iron mesh anchored to the beds with large bolts. Sheets and pillowcase, a gray rubber pad, and a thin black blanket lie folded at the foot of one of the narrow beds. A white metal nightstand is bolted to the floor, a dented granite bedpan sits on its lower shelf. That’s all.

“Lie down and relax.” The nurse hands me a green bubble pill.

“What?”

“Just relax.” She watches me swallow the pill and hustles to the door, crepe soles squeaking against the tile. The heavy door bangs shut, the click of the lock. The clank of the deadbolt echoes, footfalls fade down the hall.

I quickly pull a case over the flat pillow, peel open the stiff sheets and spread them on the bed. I’m not sure how much time I have before the pill kicks in, so I leave my boots on. I lie on my side, bring the thin blanket up around my shoulders. No explosion in my head this time, just the shade coming down. Muffled screams fade to black.

Chapter 4

THE OBSERVER
            
November 25, l968

Page 4

Notice: Patients are strictly forbidden to borrow money, cigarettes, gum, playing cards, games, stamps, magazines, and other personal items from other patients. Fights have broken out because of misunderstandings in this regard. Do not approach fellow patients for favors.

L
adies, ladies.”

I stretch out of a dreamless sleep to start another day.

The Nurse Supervisor on the disturbed ward of Building 50 chants as she sways the hand bell up and down the hall. “Breakfast, ladies.” The bell rings at six a.m. Keys begin to turn in locks.

I strain to clear my head. A dream? Waking from medicated sleep is like emerging from a dark cave, the blackness gives way to a gray haze. Where am I
?
I squint, my eyelids flutter against the harshness of the overhead light, like gazing into the sun. Click! The realization races through my body like an electrical current, shocking me awake. I drum my fingers on my chest. One, two, three, four…this is my seventh day, five days in the infirmary, two days on the hall.

Every day starts the same: The attendant rings patients awake, prods us out into the hallway in our coarse white nightgowns, herds us down to the women’s dining hall. I hear the attendant say
, twenty-three
, feel the tap, as I pass through the double doors of Hall 5.

Cold, I’m always cold.

Patients creep along, their chins jutted out, eyes focused intensely under furrowed brows, on a mission.

“Hi, Lulu.” It’s the patient I met in the dayroom yesterday.

“Hi, Betsy.” Still loopy from the medication, I try to sound cheerful.

“Hurry, ladies. The dining hall will open in three minutes.”

All forty of us from Hall 5 stand waiting in front of the doors. The key turns in the lock at six-thirty a.m. Attendants stand on each side of the doorway to tap and count as we pass into the dining hall. Attendants sit at tables on an elevated platform along the east wall, supposedly a vantage point for them to observe, keep order. I notice them laughing and talking, oblivious to the chaos. I know I have to keep an eye on patients wandering through the dining hall, snatching food, eating it with their hands. Yesterday, I lost my applesauce, today I’m prepared. I hunch over my bowl, my mouth inches away from the steaming glob of oatmeal. I clutch my milk carton.

After breakfast, I skirt the med line in front of the nurses’ station and sneak down the hall to the dayroom. Before long, my night medication wears off and a hollowness settles down on me full length. I back against the wall to avoid a woman twirling across the floor. Others are dancing or marching around the room. The hall smells of smoke, urine, and lye soap. Like the new kid at recess, standing on the outskirts of the playground, I’m alone. Only this is scarier. I begin to shake.

I try to remember how I landed in the hospital—flashes of a castle in a snowstorm, Alexander’s face, a cardboard casket. A vague feeling of time passing while I dream. My legs are weak, my back hurts. I remember the little cubicle, the fat doctor. Jeff fidgeting in the chair in the waiting room, pretending to read a magazine. Where is he? Finally, I take a deep breath, push off the wall toward a woman sitting by herself under the wall television.

I walk up, draw close, look directly into the woman’s face—nothing. “Hello.” If eyes are windows to the soul, these women have moved out, boarded up. I’m not like them. I’m in the wrong place. Somebody has made a terrible mistake. I need a mirror. I need to see if it’s really me. But there are no mirrors. I stare down at my hands. The small diamond chip wedding ring looks familiar, the one Jeff claims he got from a Cracker Jack box. I must be me.

“Hi.” I try a thin patient rocking on a straight chair. The woman jumps to her feet, raises her hands above her head, starts cawing like a crow. I freeze as the caws grow louder and louder.

The attendant jabs my shoulder. “Move on.”

I retreat to the wall and watch. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a crow?

The attendant pushes the crow woman back down on her seat. “Quiet, now. You don’t want to lose your cigarettes, do you?” I reach into the pocket of my state-issue and pull out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. I catch the attendant’s eye.

I drag deeply as the attendant lights my smoke. “Thanks.” I let out a long stream. Maybe I can puff up a smoke screen, become invisible until I feel safe, materialize only when somebody holds the door open, lets me go free, like steam from a teapot.

I made a mistake skipping the med line. I can’t remember anything, now I long for the oblivion of the pills, the blessed journey somewhere else. I can’t do anything about it now, they’d lock me up. From across the room, a toothless crone smiles at me. One more try. I hesitate briefly, then make my way over, lean down next to her chair.

“Hello. I’m Luanne.” I stick out my hand.

The shriveled woman ducks her head as if she’s in a bomb raid. “Luanne, Luanne, Luanne…” She chuckles softly, starts to rock.

Jesus
.
I feel the hair on my arms spring up. I walk away, resume my position against the wall. I take one final drag down to the filter, flick the butt into the metal ashtray, look up.

A large woman strides across the room toward me. I press my back against the wall, chew my nails. Friend or foe, friend or foe? I nod toward the attendant, and bend my head in the direction of the patient heading my way. Is she safe? I size up my options for escape. Adrenaline pumping, I tense my legs, ready to make a run for it.