After the chaos of my life, the hospital felt safe. Cold winds blew the bare branches of trees outside. It was winter, the time of death. Walls protected me. Locked doors protected me, and a chain link fence surrounded the grounds. My changing perceptions frightened me. At times, people seemed to be made of cardboard. It seemed as if I, too, were made of something insubstantial. The institution protected me from the world, and from my wild panic.
The daily routine was comforting. At six-thirty we were awakened by an alarm. Meals were at scheduled times in the cafeteria. I found reassuring familiarity in the dull American fare of canned vegetables, mashed potatoes, meatloaf, and desserts of cake and Jello. At scheduled hours we could paint with oils in the sunlit Creative Therapy Room or do handicraft activities. Twice a week I saw a psychiatric resident. He was in his early thirties, slightly hunched, slender, introverted, respectful but clueless. To him, I was a distant and mysterious object. Sometimes we had social evenings with patients from other wards, ending with snacks of juice and cookies. Lights out at ten. An attendant would make her rounds, beaming a flashlight into our rooms to make sure we were all in our beds.
There were hours of free time. At first my mind was so scattered it was all I could handle to do simple things. To manicure my nails, wash underwear, brush hair, keep my few possessions in order—all this seemed to take an inordinate amount of time. As I accomplished these mundane tasks, I was subduing the chaos that kept leaking outwards.
I resisted watching television in the Day Room where most of the women gathered. Some played cards, smoked, watched images on the tiny black and white screen. Others would stare into space or mutter to themselves, hugging their knees. I read classics that I found in the library or requested from you and Dad on visiting days. I danced frenetically in the long, narrow corridors. I wrote. And wrote. Nearly a hundred pages of a narrative in scrawled writing. But my mind raced too fast to create scenes and dialogue. I couldn’t seem to get beneath the brittleness of words to any substance.
I befriended other broken spirits who had bits of magic clinging to them. Priestesses brought low by the world. For the first time in my life I felt at ease with a group of girls. We had all suffered.
Fran had hanged herself with a rope. Her mother, out on errands, had suddenly felt compelled to return home. She entered Fran’s bedroom barely in time to save her. Sky, a heavyset, boyish seventeen-year old, had been committed to the hospital because her parents discovered her making love with another girl. Linda had freaked out after two weeks of marriage.
“Would you like to hear what I just wrote?” asked Linda at lunch one day. She leaned forward over the table, holding a sheaf of papers. Her long dark hair cascaded over her breasts.
“Yes,” said Sky. She and Linda were lovers.
Linda read a poem about masturbating with a pillow.
“It’s a good poem,” said Sky. She squeezed Linda’s hand. An attendant standing nearby gave the two a disapproving look. “They’re threatening to move me to a different ward,” said Sky cheerfully. “That bitch found us kissing in the bathroom.”
“I don’t know why you can’t kiss,” I said.
“Kissing another woman is evil,” said Linda cheerfully. “I imagine we’ll go straight to hell.”
“They are the crazy ones,” I said.
“Rosa’s a poet, too. Did you know that?” asked Fran.
But Linda was lost in her own thoughts. “My IQ soars off the charts sometimes,” she said. “At other times I’ve turned in a subnormal score. Those tests aren’t worth shit. It’s crazy to rely on them.”
“Those tests. … It depends how you feel,” said Laura. She took a tiny nibble of the cottage cheese on her plate. Painfully thin, she always wore black pants and a black sweater that hung loosely on her skeletal frame. She smoked constantly. Drank black coffee. When her cigarette crumbled, she didn’t notice until the tip burned down to her fingers. Blue veins were visible through her pale skin, and she possessed an ethereal beauty. She had gone through several therapists. It was rumored that each became infatuated with her, but they were powerless to help.
While we were young and still hopeful, the elderly patients were pitiful, for most seemed to have given up. But most wretched of all were the patients unlucky in their assigned doctors. There was a brute we called “The Sadist.” Blanche was one of his victims. A plump young girl with very white skin, jet black hair, and a passive demeanor, she’d undergone countless shock treatments. She wandered about in a daze, her mind apparently shattered. We would hear her screams from the treatment room. “No, please. No! No! Don’t hurt me any more!”
During nightly activities, when patients were herded together in the gym, I met Monica. At first I regarded her with little interest. She would sit apart from the others, a bulky figure in navy sweater and skirt, her ears adorned with thin gold hoops.
In June I was transferred from a ward to a cottage where Monica also lived. We grew close. During free time we would wander out on the lawn, sit under a leafy maple tree, talk, and write poems. Her father, a Spanish exile, had been part of Lorca’s literary circle.
“I used to be thin,” Monica said. “I was a perfect child. A role model for my younger sisters,” she said. “Until I was fifteen. That summer I became obsessed with dying. I spent hours cleaning an antique silver ring I’d inherited from my grandmother. One morning I slit my wrists.”
On visiting days, clouds of tension would whirl in the air. Muscles tensed. Spinal nerves contracted almost imperceptibly as we awaited our visitors. Afterwards extra sedatives would be given.
One rainy Saturday afternoon you and Monica’s mother encountered each other during visiting hours. Her mother arrived first, a tall lanky woman. Then I saw you and heard your footsteps—broad sensible heels on the linoleum—when you came closer, the two of you gave cries of recognition and embraced. You knew each other from Nursery School days.
We sat around a table in the Day Room while other patients and their families milled about. Monica’s mother covered any awkwardness she may have felt with her smooth English manner. But your anguish was clearly visible. You and Monica’s mother made polite conversation. While she was speaking, Mother, your lips compressed, and your eyes filled with tears. You wore a white blouse, and your lipstick was slightly smudged. Monica said, “I’m thirsty. Let’s get cokes from the machine.”
“How much do you need?” you asked.
“It’s twenty-five cents a bottle.”
Shakily you pulled coins out of your purse until Monica said, “Oh that’s more than enough!” She went off, returning with four bottles, and gave you back change. But the coins slipped through your trembling fingers onto the table. You didn’t seem to notice.
I wanted to comfort you. I didn’t know how.
I felt so ashamed of how I treated you at times. I couldn’t help it. It was as though a wild animal or an alien force were bursting through me.
Perhaps I was a victim because I wanted to be, like a wolf cub baring her throat. Pity me. See what you’ve done. Soften your heart. Tell me you’re sorry, cried a vengeful part of me. So I kept on letting you and Aaron hurt me, hoping to obtain admission of your wrongs, hoping that you would both change.
But this never happened. I just fucked myself up. Did myself in.
When Monica left the hospital, I wasn’t prepared for the anguish that swept through me. Someone else seemed to be inside my body, screaming and pounding her fists against a mesh steel grating until they were raw. They put a straitjacket on me. They threatened shock treatments. Terrified, I looked down at my bandaged hands and managed to convince them that this wouldn’t happen again. If I could pull myself together under pressure, how crazy was I? How sane was anyone? How many people on the outside were merely acting normal, while harboring madness?
The doctors, unable to understand me, held a special conference.
“Is it true you write every day?” asked one with thick spectacles. I was in a fluorescent-lit conference room, surrounded by thirty or forty shrinks.
“Yes,” I said.
“What do you write?”
“Poetry. Fiction. A diary. A bit of everything.”
“Do you read much?”
“Three or four books a week.”
“Hmm, you’re able to focus?”
“Yes.”
Uncomfortable in the silence while they scribbled notes, I felt compelled to defend Sky and Linda. “I don’t know why you object to girls making love to each other,” I said. “It’s not fair to punish them.”
There was a surge of interest. “Do you make love to girls?” asked a paunchy man with receding hair.
“No,” I said, flushing. “But it’s not a criminal act.”
“Do you want to make love to a girl?”
The doctors consulted in low voices, then told me I could leave the room.
A month later I was released.
The following period was a difficult one. Walking on eggshells. Afraid of falling. Of cracking the shells. Afraid of falling off the cliff. Above all afraid of going back into the hospital. I rented a room at the 92nd Street YMHA in Manhattan, and I clung to a rigid schedule. Every morning I rose at six-thirty and practiced dance. I took classes in ballet, modern, and African dance, as well as a literature class once a week. My bedroom light went out at ten-thirty, just as in the hospital. Three mornings a week I saw a shrink. He had an eminent reputation.
Ironically, having lived all these years with a sense of scarcity, there was now more than enough. Dad’s father in Saint Louis had left money, not only to my parents, but to all his grandchildren. Although we had lived in his house during the last year of the war, I barely knew him. Dad told me that they spent tense, silent evenings together, each unable to voice their thoughts. My grandmother Ruby, dead now for years, had smoothed things over between them.
She had created the warmth in the household. She had mothered me, brushed my hair, dressed me carefully each morning before I went off to First Grade. Sometimes now I felt her spirit was with me.
Endless streams of words. The fifty minutes were too short. When I was in the middle of expressing a thought—or had just begun—the doctor, a white-haired Freudian from Budapest—might glance at his watch and say in a professionally soothing tone, “Thursday we will continue.” I’d leave with a feeling of frustration. If only we could have gone on. I’d just gotten warmed up. By our next session, countless other things would have arisen that were more compelling—other troubling thoughts, a fresh crisis or dilemma.
His office looked out on Park Avenue. Wall- to-wall beige carpet. A faded deep red Persian rug. Couch with cushions. His large desk, littered with papers. He sat in one corner in a plush armchair, while I sat diagonally across.
Endless talking on my part. Minimal response, while what I desperately needed was feedback and guidance. When he did give it, he seemed to be giving advice to someone who wasn’t me.
I would walk in, light a cigarette, and sit down, surmising from his glance that he did not quite approve of me.
“I don’t know what to say, “I began, “There is so much …”
“Hmm.” He looked at me silently, his gray eyes impassive behind the tortoise-shell glasses.
“There’s so much. I could talk forever. So much bottled up inside me.” I faltered, waiting in vain for guidance.
“I feel so unhappy with myself. Like I’m too old. I want to dance. I love dancing. It fills me with a joy that nothing else does.” Did I imagine a look of pity on his face? Pity? Yes, he pitied me.
“Maria Tallchief started when she was eighteen. Most ballerinas start very young. I’m doing well in my classes,” I added with a flash of bravado. “I’ve improved a lot.”
He stroked his chin and gave a quick glance out the window.
“Last night I had a nightmare,” I continued, feeling uncomfortable but not knowing how to confront him. The opportunity to talk to someone—anyone—about bottled up stuff inside—was too precious.
“I dreamed I missed a train. Lately I dream a lot about missing trains and buses. I dream I’ve lost things. … It’s hard to wake up in the morning. I force myself to get out of bed. Every morning I practice dance when there’s no one else yet in the gym. I do plies and stretches …” On and on I talked, wanting him to applaud my discipline.
He remained silent.
Brakes screeched outside. He jumped up from his chair and ran to the window, peering out. “A near miss!” he cried.
Endless were the words. Stream of consciousness could go on forever. It did feel better to express some of the painful tangle, to strip this mass of some of its power by forming it into words; but I failed to impress him.
During that hot summer, while we took salt pills to keep from fainting in dance classes, I wore my hair tightly back. No makeup. Leotard top. Cotton skirt and sandals. Frozen smile and glazed eyes. For a long time I wouldn’t go out on dates. Men were too dangerous, and sex would pull me back into chaos.
When the musician phoned, I refused to see him.
“You’re not crazy,” he said. “You’ve only let them convince you that you are.” His voice throbbed through me, electric.
“No,” I said, I can’t see you. I just can’t.”
I felt so isolated. The tall buildings seemed to press in on me. A sliver of sky was visible through my window. I watched a bird soar out of sight.
While riding on a Lexington Avenue bus, dream images would float up, mingling with sights and sounds, odors, substances. It was all too much to process. But I liked buses. Their rolling motion soothed me.
“Come to a theater party with me,” said the actor when we met one day by chance. How handsome he looked. Tanned. Rugged. His incredible azure eyes. Why hadn’t I moved in with him two summers ago? “Come to East Hampton with me for the weekend. I have friends there.”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
In confusion, I muttered some excuse.
He smiled that slightly wolfish smile of his and took my cold fingers in his warm ones. “Your fly is unzipped,” he said, looking down at my black corduroy pants.
I flushed. God, I still wasn’t in control.
“I’m late,” I said. “Goodbye.” And fled
I read in the library until closing time, skimming through books I didn’t really need to read for my literature class.
Although I longed to roam the brightly lit streets that teemed with life at night, I forced myself to stay inside my room. Often I could not sleep for hours. I dreamed continually of being late. All day long I continued to take dance classes, traipsing from one class to the next, then practicing some more when I got back to my room.
One day when my appointment was later than usual, I caught a glimpse of his wife and daughter as they passed through the waiting room and into their adjoining apartment. His wife was a slim woman in her fifties with short, dyed blonde hair. His daughter, dark-haired and petite, looked about my age. Both were fashionably dressed, their hair coiffed and sprayed, laden with packages from department stores.
That day I was wearing a black skirt and sweater, black dance tights, and black sneakers. No makeup. Hair pulled back into a pony tail. Face reddened with exposure to the cold outside.
They were in a world far removed from mine.
“How is your literature class?” the good doctor asked during the ensuing session.
“It’s okay. Are you at all interested in the dance classes?”
“Why does this matter?”
“It shows what you value.”
“Hmm.”
“Some of my teachers tell me I’m getting really good,” I stammered.
“Do you believe them?”
“Well, I work really hard.”
I would leave these sessions with increasing dissatisfaction. Yet I was afraid to stop seeing him. I was walking a tightrope and could not look to the right or left. Mental health was precarious, and I was scared. Survival was as fragile as an eggshell.
Youth was fleeting. My ballet teacher, a Russian émigré, had old wrinkled legs. Would my legs look like that when I was sixty? The thought horrified me.
“It’s time for you to try your wings,” said my modern dance teachers, thin and ascetic, their faces lined with hardship. “Go to Broadway auditions. You’re ready.”
But my African dance teacher voiced different thoughts. “She’s a terrific dancer. Too bad her arm is crooked,” he whispered during a student performance while I danced in a gown of stretchy red satin. He was an intense black man who pushed us as if he were a sergeant in boot camp.
I went home and wept.
Don’t confront. It’s too painful.
My brain had learned to shut down.
“What future is there in dance?” said the shrink. “It’s better that you’re back full-time at college.”
The shrink, a thoroughly bourgeois European Jew of an older generation, wanted me to fit into his mold. Then he could have affected a “cure.” But this was a Procrustean bed into which I could not fit. Besides, I had no idea how a nice Jewish girl acted in intimate relationships. In what ways she was assertive, in what ways meek?
At times I wanted to die. I felt sad and empty. The physical discipline of dance no longer buoyed me up. Academic studies, engaging only the intellect, left a huge part of me hungry. Writing papers was extremely difficult. I got straight “C”s. My thoughts still were too swift to create cohesive paragraphs, as if I had drunk far too much caffeine. Then there would be long spaces of blankness.
“I feel badly dressed,” I said one day.
“You are,” the psychiatrist said, scrutinizing me. I was in my usual black skirt and tights, but today I had put on a gray sweater with a scooped neck.
“I feel guilty about spending money on clothes. But then I spend so much on you.”
“You sound angry.”
“If I weren’t seeing you, I’d certainly have more to spend on clothes.”
“Perhaps you’re angry at yourself,” he said, deflecting me
“I want to stop seeing you.”
“That would be a big mistake.”
Scared, I believed him for a while longer.
Then things changed. I moved into an apartment of my own on East Fourteenth Street. I began going out with men again.
One night I awakened on the lumpy mattress of a man named Eli, whom I’d met at a party. His good male sweat mixed with cologne and marijuana, which we smoked earlier while we listened to Charlie Parker on the stereo. He lived in a fifth floor walkup a few blocks away. Books overflowed the shelves and lay in heaps on the floor. There was an Olivetti portable on the desk on which he wrote plays. His bedroom was sparsely furnished. There was an Indian print spread on the wall, along with black-and-white photos of nude female parts, with thighs that resembled stretches of sand fringed by hair and breasts that made me think of soft lunar mountain tops.
“Stay, baby, why don’t you stay the night,” he murmured, as I pulled myself away from the warmth of his body.
“I’ve got to get back.” When I looked at my watch under the light of the candle, I saw it was midnight. Suppose Dad were to phone early in the morning? What would he have done? Probably nothing. If he questioned my absence, I could have easily invented an alibi—or simply told him the truth. In reality, he never did phone. But I was afraid. His hold was so strong, although invisible and unarticulated, that I couldn’t spend the entire night in a man’s bed without suffering anxiety.
Driven by an irrational compulsion, I flung off the thin army blanket, gathered my clothes from the floor and began to dress. It was dangerous at this hour on the street.
“No, baby, I’m half asleep.”
“Please!”
“Sleep …,” he mumbled, curling up against the pillow.
Quickly I finished dressing, put on my shoes, closed the door behind me, and walked down the winding flights of stairs.
I ran the four blocks home through nearly deserted streets.
Invisible cords hurled from invisible chakras bind me.
“Hindus believe in chakras. Energy centers,” I said to the shrink.
“Do you?” he asked.
“I don’t know. … Yes, I do.”
“Hindu mythology consists of fairy tales,” he said in his cultivated voice with its tinge of a Hungarian accent.
Dad’s mind was a mystery to me, filled with unsavory, strange objects which I picked up on now and then. I would doubt my perceptions because they were so bizarre. I told him about a girl in my building who sold Oriental rugs and who made a commission one day of seven hundred dollars. “That’s more than a call girl earns in a night,” he said. I was shocked. Why did he associate her earnings immediately with illicit sex? Such isolated comments revealed what I believed to be fragments of his hidden nature.
My reason came up against a wall of fear with regard to him. Dark pits of lions waited, hungry to devour me. His rage, like fire, could transform me into ash. And so I rushed away from Eli’s apartment at midnight, leaving the warmth of his body and his bed, diaphragm inside me, sperm leaking onto my underpants.
Invisible cords hurled through space from invisible chakras.
“Perhaps it is your own desire that you are attributing to your father,” the shrink said, relighting his pipe.
“No,” I replied.” It’s more than that.”
“Chakras! You’re crazy!” Aaron would have sputtered in rage.
When I was fifteen, intrigued by Rosicrucian advertisements, I enrolled in a course by mail. When Dad learned of this, he ordered me to take the heap of pamphlets that I had accumulated and throw them all into the trash. That was the only reading material he ever directly censored. Another hint of his true nature, of the fear he felt about phenomena he did not understand.
But these forces do exist. Invisible cords of desire hurled from invisible chakras. (Why did I obey him?)
The tension created between my own perceptions, which were like dream images, and the beliefs of everyone else around me, was painful. When my perceptions flashed signals of warning, the world told me those signals didn’t exist, that I was crazy. But, Mother, underneath your mocking words, you too have a sense of this reality.