She's Come Undone (36 page)

They thought I might cooperate better with Dr. Pragnesh, an Indian
doctor, a woman. She had perpetual garlic breath and called Jack “Mr. Speight,” as if he was someone we were required to respect.

“What do you think attracted you to Mr. Speight in the first place?” she'd ask in her squashed little accent.

“I have no idea. Why is your hair so greasy all the time?”

“What is all this belligerence for—protection?”

“What's that dot on your forehead for? Target practice?”

It was Geneva Sweet who paid all my bills at the private hospital she'd flown east to select personally for me. Grandma had at first objected to the financial arrangement—this fairy-godmother approach to making me sane—but Geneva had sat down in Grandma's parlor and pointed out that she and Irv were “comfortable,” that God had never given her a daughter of her own to provide for, that making me well was something she wanted to do for Bernice, God rest her soul.

It was Geneva, too, who had led that Cape Cod shore patrolman to the Wellfleet beach for my belated rescue. After I'd phoned her from the motel and sung “The worms go in, the worms go out,” she'd fretted and paced, then telephoned Grandma, who, in turn, picked up the receiver and dialed Hooten Hall and the Rhode Island State Police.

“When you said over the phone that you were staying at a town where whales were dying, it was a clue, a long-distance cry for help,” Geneva told me the first time we sat face-to-face. “At least that's what
my
therapist told
me.
” She had rich-lady looks: blond-tinted hair pulled back in a knot, icy-pink lipstick and matching nails, moisturized skin. I let her believe she'd rescued me—kept it a secret that I'd tried death before that patrolman ever arrived, that I'd swum down and met that whale eye to eye.

Gracewood put on the dog for rich visitors. When Geneva flew in at Christmastime, I was driven up to the mansion to see her. We sat on tan leather sofas in the festive solarium, Geneva balancing a cup of eggnog on her lap and calling attention to the lovely falling snow, the charming antique ornaments on the tree, and all I should be thankful for.

Grandma visited me back in the ward, every Tuesday afternoon
from two to three-thirty. Gracewood was an eleven-dollar cab ride from Easterly. She came by cab, she said, because she didn't want to trouble Mrs. Mumphy's daughter during the week. The real reason was that she had kept my craziness a secret. Poor Grandma: first a daughter in the state hospital, then me at Gracewood. She kept her coat on during visits and held on to her purse strap, her eyes jumping nervously from Mrs. Ropiek's drool to Old Lady DePolito's peculiar attire: flannel pajamas, fur-trimmed nightgown, high-cut sneakers. But Gracewood spared even Grandma the worst of it: the weekend aide who elbowed you hard if you didn't obey him fast enough; Manny the Masturbator; Lillian, who picked her nose and wiped it on the wall, who shit her pants for spite.

“But you're basically happy here?” Geneva asked me when she visited again the following summer, phrasing it both as a question and the answer she wanted me to give. This time we were seated in Gracewood's spacious front yard on iron-lattice lawn chairs while gardeners primped at the color-coordinated petunia beds and the Atlantic rumbled behind us. My hand was still bandaged from the week before, when I'd bitten it. “Basically you're happy? You feel you're making progress?” My reply was, as always, a snort of contempt, a drag on my cigarette. Geneva hugged me at the end of each visit, a mannequin's embrace that let you know she was nobody's mother.

Dr. Shaw and I began our work together in the winter of 1971. I'll admit it: when I recall Dr. Shaw, it's with an impish memory that may or may not be playing tricks. I remember him as both my fool and my magician: the gullible idiot from whom I withheld information, the powerful wizard who evoked secrets I'd kept even from myself. More often than not, Dr. Shaw's voice is the voice of the corpse.

“How is Dolores Price this beautiful morning?” he asked me at the beginning of our first session.

“She's fine. How's Dr. Quack-Quack?” I answered, blowing a throatful of smoke in the direction of his “Thank you for not smoking” sign.

“Dr. Quack-Quack? Why am I Dr. Quack-Quack?”

“You're all Dr. Quack-Quacks here. You're all the same.”

“Several of my colleagues might debate you on
that
statement,” he said, smiling.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, let's just say . . . that I'm a bit of a maverick.”

“Which one—Bart or Brett?”

“Excuse me?”

You could tell he was one of those wholesome types that never watched TV. “Nothing,” I said. “Just forget it.”

He nodded, closed his eyes, and smiled at the beautiful version of me he claimed he saw. In our earliest sessions, all that shut-eyed smiling of Dr. Shaw's gave me the creeps. But he was so hopped-up on visualization—saw a better me so emphatically—that he made me curious about the Dolores who existed behind his eyelids.

Visualization was how I lost the weight—not all of it, but enough so that people passing me just ignored another fat girl rather than gaping at a freak. “You've dropped another seven pounds, I see,” Dr. Shaw would say, smiling at my weekly report. “You know why you're slimming down, don't you?”

“No, why?” It was better to let
him
tell you what you were thinking, rather than wasting time having him correct you.

“Because you're beginning to conceptualize the beautiful person you really are—you're becoming the young woman you deserve to be.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”

After six months with Dr. Shaw, I could shove both hands down between my stomach and the waist of my jeans and flap my wrists in the space I'd made; I'm not going to say
that
didn't feel good. But I wasn't visualizing some beauty-contest version of myself. I was seeing mold.

That
was how I did it. The cafeteria servers would cut me a square of shepherd's pie, a block of macaroni and cheese, a wedge of cream pie: enough food so that I'd have to heft, not just carry, my tray. Everyone at Gracewood was pale and flabby—exhausted from all
that starch and tranq. I'd plunk my meal down at one of the long tables and close my eyes like Dr. Shaw. When I opened them again, I'd picture the top surfaces going bad. I could make mold take hold of anything in front of me: canned fruit cocktail, the surface of soup. It was a skill I got good at. I'd make it sprout in a corner of whatever was on my plate, then network it out, thicken it into a furry blue rug over whatever I was supposed to chew and swallow. “She's gaggin' again,” Mrs. DePolito would always complain. “How are we supposed to eat our dinner with her gaggin' all the time?” As if it was attractive to watch
her
eat scrambled eggs without her top teeth. As if
that
was appetizing. I never told Dr. Shaw about the mold. I let him believe he was helping me visualize some beautiful Dolores. After I got to know him, I didn't want to disillusion him. He walked a pretty thin line.

As I began to drop weight, I began, as well, to drop my cattle prod of hostility whenever Dr. Shaw closed his office door. Our first major project was my night at Dottie's apartment. I took him through the particulars, then asked him outright. “It means I'm gay, right?”

Dr. Shaw made his face a question. “Tell me again what you were thinking about during the encounter.”

“Do you mean the part about me looking at the fish or the part about Larry and Ruth?”

“I mean, what was going through your mind as she was bringing you to climax? It was starting to feel very good to you and you were thinking about . . .”

“Larry and Ruth. I was thinking about that night when I woke up and they were doing it on the floor at Grandma's. I might have been moaning a little, like Ruth did. I was kind of . . . imagining I was Ruth and that Larry was . . . What are you saying? I'm
not
gay?”

He gave me a speech about how homosexuality was an orientation, not a life-style choice, and that I should “perhaps consider” whether or not my being angry at Dottie or Mr. Pucci for who they were was an appropriate response. Dr. Shaw was a big “perhaps” man; it was one of his favorite words. “No, Dolores, your patterns as I see
them show a clear attraction to men. Perhaps all that food bingeing you and Dottie did temporarily depressed your anger, made you numb. And in that passive state, you . . . ?”

He was always doing that, too: turning his statements into little fill-in-the-blank quizzes for me.

“I just let her go ahead and do it?”

“That's right. You merely gave yourself permission to dally.”

“Yeah, but I . . .”

“You what?”

“I had . . . I felt . . . you know.”

“Say it. Say the word. You experienced—”

“I don't want to say it.”

“Why not, Dolores?”

“Because I don't
feel
like saying it, okay? Aren't you always telling me to be honest about what I feel?”

“Well, I'm just curious. I hear you using the word ‘fuck' all the time. Which is an angry word when you think about it, isn't it? You usually say that word in anger. I guess I'm just wondering why ‘fuck' slips out so easily but you can't seem to say the word ‘orgasm.'”

“I can say it. ‘Orgasm.' There. You happy now?”

“I am, yes. Thank you.”

“You're welcome. Sheesh.”

“Anyway, to get back to your question, I'd say no, your orgasm that night doesn't make you a lesbian. Stimulation feels good, even to the clinically depressed. A finger, a tongue. Friction isn't specifically male or female. It's—well, it's just friction.”

He smiled and hitched a strand of his golden hair behind his ear. “But of course your sexual climax is what energized you, jolted you out of your passivity. And then you felt . . . ?”

“Fucked over!” I said. In the silence, I listened to the way I'd just said it as Dr. Shaw watched the discovery on my face.

“Fucked over,” he repeated. “By whom?”

“By her, I guess. But mostly by him.”

“Who do you mean?”

“Eric! Who else would I mean? What right did that shithead have to make a joke out of me? I kept telling him to stop, but he . . .”

“What? What is it you're thinking?”

“Is that why I killed the fish? To get back at Eric?”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, of course it is.”

I stood up and walked to the window. Watched the distant whitecaps, the slanted, icy drizzle pelt against Building B. Let my tears fall.

I turned back and faced him again. “Could you stop saying ‘of course' after everything, please? All this is new to me. All those ‘of courses' make me feel kind of stupid.”

“Certainly,” he said. “Of course. Who else fucked you over, Dolores? Over the years, I mean. Make us a list.”

Blood banged inside my head. “You know who.”

“Tell me.”

“Jack Speight!”

He nodded solemnly. “Anyone else?”

“You name it. Kids at school, my father, my . . .”

“Who were you going to say just then?”

“Nobody.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

*   *   *

I'll admit this, too: part of the reason I cooperated with Dr. Shaw at first was because I had a crush on him. On the ward after lights out, I used to visualize myself unlacing those Earth shoes, unbuttoning and unzipping him. Lying in my bed trying not to hear DePolito's gurgly snoring one room down, I'd conjure up his bare chest and let my fingers do the walking. They kept our rooms so hot—not humid heat, the sexy kind, but oven heat—the kind that collapses your sinuses and
makes your head ache. It used to rise up at me from the register between my bed and the wall while I lay there quietly, my fingers turning into Dr. Shaw. “Friction is friction,” I used to reason. “What the fuck?”

*   *   *

Sometimes I could figure out what Dr. Shaw was up to and deny him. That felt good: when had men with power over me ever made
my
life better?

“Can you name one thing during that whole Cape Cod business that put you at ease?” he asked me at the end of one unproductive session. We'd spent our whole hour on my suicide trip.

“Those lemon doughnuts I bought on the way,” I said. “They were pretty excellent.”

He sighed and looked up at his ceiling. “This is work I thought we'd already accomplished. Where did your impulse to overeat come from? What was the pattern there?”

I sighed impatiently, reciting what he wanted like a bratty child. “I ate because I was angry.”

“So did eating the doughnuts really make you feel good?”

I rolled my eyes. “No.”

“Then would you please answer my question seriously?”

I knew what he was after: he wanted me to lift up my rotting whale to see if Ma was under it. He was always looking for Ma. “What was the question again?” I said. “I forgot what you even asked me.”

“I asked you to identify a moment up there on Cape Cod when you felt at ease. Felt good. Felt freed.”

“Freed?” The word interested me, in spite of myself.

He nodded. “Freed.”

“In the water, I guess . . . out in the ocean.”

“Ah,” he said. “Go on.”

“Go on what? I just liked the way it felt out there.”

“What did you like about it?” He leaned closer. I could smell his Listerine.

“Swimming,” I said. “Feeling weightless. And going underwater. We're over our time, you know. In case you're interested.”

He reached over to his desk and turned the clock to the wall, an act that panicked me. “Why did you like it underwater, Dolores? What was good about it?”