Страница 4 из 96
That doctor. What was his name? Youngish, with fine thin brown hair worn straggling, not quite long, not quite short, he kept yawning and trying to suppress the yawns so that his jaw muscles flexed strangely as he questioned Geraldo and wrote entries on a record form. Geraldo was almost demure. He had a good ma
“Listen to me, Doctor–I didn’t hit her! You take my niece into another room away from him and ask her if I hit her. Hehit her!”
The doctor went on making notations on the form. She was a body checked into the morgue; meat registered for the scales.
She tried to tell the nurse who gave her the injection, the attendants who tied her to the stretcher, that she was i
Fool, poor fool she had got herself locked away again. She had jumped into the fire. Why had she done it? Why?
Yet lying in enforced contemplation, she found that clean anger glowing in her still. She hated Geraldo and it was right for her to hate him. Attacking him was different from turning her anger, her sorrow, her loss of Claud into self‑hatred, into speed and downers, into booze, into wine, into seeing herself in Angelina and abusing that self born again into the dirty world. Yes, this time was different. She had struck out not at herself, not at herself in another, but at Geraldo, the enemy. She had not been wrong to try to defend Dolly, her closest one now, her blood, her almost child. How could she allow Geraldo to carve up Dolly’s body? She had smashed his nose, yes; for all her pain, she smiled as she saw that moment. She had smashed his nose and he would never look quite the same. Last time in she had accepted the doom of sickness; the weight of the heavy judgment they passed out here she had bowed to. This time she was not ashamed. She would get out fast She would be clearly competent, sane, together.
How long did she lie strapped to the bed? Day was the same as night. They had forgotten her and she would die here in her own piss. Sometimes she could not stand it anymore and she yelled as loud as she could and begged the walls to open. Moments were forever. She was mad. The drugs made her mind strange. She was caught, she was stalled. She floated trapped like an embryo in alcohol, that awful thing the Right to Life people had in that van on the street. She was caught in a moment that had fallen out of time and would never be over, never be done. She was mad. Yes, now she was crazy. How could she doubt it, lying wet in her own piss while her body screamed and the drug thickened her to lead.
Sometimes she slipped down into a hot, muggy doze and sometimes the pain from her back or her rib or her mouth tore through her sleep and she woke wild with grief and wept. “Please, please, please come. Please let me out. Someone. Please!” No response came. That was madness. To weep and cry out and curse and scream, and it was as if she had done nothing. She was dozing in that feverish half‑sleep without rest or relief, when the door banged open. Two attendants came in and untied her.
She pitched forward, weak as string. She could see in their faces disgust, boredom. She smelled bad. She stank! They hauled her along the hall like a bag of garbage and they paid no attention to what she tried to say. “Please, I beg of you, listen. I was beaten before they brought me here. My rib hurts so much! Please, listen!”
“So I said to her, it’s all right for you. You don’t have to deal with these animals all day.” The woman was a husky dyed blond who spoke with a slight Middle European accent. “All you do is come in two days and play games with the better ones. It’s easy for you to pass remarks.”
“Those OT’s have it easy.” The other woman was six feet tall, hefty and black. “You better believe it. We just don’t live right, A
“But Byrd gives me a pain. She’s no better than she ought to be. You know, she lives with a man she’s not married to. Lives with him openly in an apartment in Chelsea.”
“Mmmmm.” The black woman wore a bland, noncommittal look. “Here, into the bath with you, snooks,” she said to Co
“I can undress myself.”
“Whew! Me‑oh‑my, is this one a mess? Did she jump out the window or something?”
“I was beaten up. By a pimp. Not mine,”she added quickly. “He was beating my niece. It’s him who brought me here.”
“Now what have you been into?” the black attendant wondered, shoving her into the shower like a dog to be bathed. “Some gorgeous bruises you got yourself!”
“She’ll smell better when she gets out. You wonder how they can live with themselves, never washing. But that’s part of being sick,” the blond said loftily. “Probably she’s been sleeping in the street, in doorways. I see them around.”
She wanted to scream that she washed as often as they did, that they had made her smell, made her dirty herself. But she did not dare. First, they would not listen, and second, they might hurt her. Who would care?
Because her clothes were filthy, they gave her a pair of blue pajamas three sizes too big and a robe of no particular color. Rotten luck to have been shoved into restraint on arrival. If she had simply walked up to the ward, she would have been able to keep her street clothes and more things. Here a scrap of paper, a book, a handkerchief, a nubbin of pencil, a bobby‑pin were precious beyond imagining outside, irreplaceable treasures.
She found herself walking strangely, not only from the bruises: ah, the old Thorazine shuffle. She could no longer move quickly, gracefully, in spite of her plumpness. The black attendant walked her into the day room, a big bleak room between the men’s and the women’s sides of the ward, right by the locked door to the hall and the elevators. She looked around slowly. She caught sight of a clock on the way in and she knew it was eleven in the morning. She was not hungry although she had not eaten for a long time. The drug killed her appetite so that she felt hollow, weak, but not hungry. The rib stabbed her. She felt feverish and might be. Nothing she could do. Her only hope was to catch a doctor as he made his flight through the ward or to persuade one of the attendants that she really needed medical help. Then the attendant would tell the doctor. It would take days to reach that kind of relationship with an attendant, and in the meantime she could die.
How hot the ward was. Steam heat from the old radiators turned on full blast. She fingered the plastic identification bracelet sealed on her wrist. Women in street clothes or the hospital clothes issued to them were sitting vacantly along the walls or staring at the television set placed up on a shelf where no one could reach it to change the station or alter the volume level. It was less crowded than when she had been in last, markedly so. Just opposite her, two old women were chatting animatedly in strong Brooklyn Jewish accents, like two gossips on a park bench instead of two madwomen on a plastic bench in a mental hospital. But they might only be elderly and not mad. At their feet a young girl lay motionless with her hands over her face, like a pet dog snoozing. There were many less old women this time. Was there a new waste‑basket for the old?