The hospital was on a hill outside of town, the way hospitals are in movies about the insane. Our hospital was famous and had housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers, or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?
Ray Charles was the most famous ex-patient. We all hoped he’d return and serenade us from the window of the drug-rehabilitation ward. He never did.
We had the Taylor family, though. James graduated to a different hospital before I arrived, but Kate and Livingston were there. In Ray Charles’s absence, their North Carolina–twanged blues made us sad enough. When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
Robert Lowell also didn’t come while I was there. Sylvia Plath had come and gone.
What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
The grounds were large and beautifully planted. They were pristine as well, since we were almost never allowed to walk around. But now and then, for a special treat, we were taken through them on the way to get ice cream.
The group had an atomic structure: a nucleus of nuts sunounded by darting, nervous nurse-electrons charged with our protection. Or with protecting the residents of Belmont from us.
The residents were well heeled. Most worked as engineers or technocrats along the Technology Highway, Route 128. The important other type of Belmont resident was the John Bircher. The John Birch Society lay as far to the east of Belmont as the hospital lay to the west. We saw the two institutions as variations on each other; doubtless the Birchers did not see it this way. But between us we had Belmont surrounded. The engineers knew this, and they took care not to stare when we came into the ice cream parlor.
Saying that we traveled with a group of nurses does not fully explain the situation. A complex system of “privileges” determined how many nurses accompanied each patient, and whether a patient could leave the grounds in the first place.
The privileges started at no privileges: restricted to the ward. This was often Lisa’s condition. Sometimes she was bumped up to the next rung, two-to-ones. That meant she could leave the ward if she had two nurses with her, though only to go to the cafeteria or occupational therapy. Even with our high staff-to-patient ratio, two-to-ones often meant restricted to the ward. Two nurses could rarely be spared to take Lisa by the elbows and hustle her over to dinner. Then there were one-to-ones: a nurse and patient bound together like Siamese twins. Some patients were on one-to-ones even on the ward, which was like having a page or valet. Or like having a bad conscience. It depended on the nurse. A lousy nurse on one-to-ones could be a problem; it was usually a long-term assignment, so the nurse could get to understand her patient.
The gradations were Byzantine. One-to-twos (one nurse, two patients) led to group (three or four patients and one nurse). If you behaved in group, you got something called destination privileges: This meant telephoning the head nurse the moment you arrived at wherever you were going to let her know you were there. You had to call before coming back, too, so she could calculate time and distance in case you ran away instead. Then there was mutual escort, which was two relatively not-crazy patients going places together. And the top, grounds, which meant you could go all over the hospital alone.
Once these stations of the cross were achieved within the hospital, the whole circuit began again in the outside world. Someone who had mutual escort or grounds would probably still be on group outside.
So when we went to Bailey’s in Waverley Square with our retinue of nurses, the arrangement of atoms in our molecule was more complex than it appeared to the engineers’ wives sipping coffee at the counter and graciously pretending not to look at us.
Lisa wouldn’t have been with us. Lisa never made it past one-to-ones after her third escape. Polly was on one-to-ones, but that was to make her feel safe, not hemmed in, and she always came along. Georgina and I were on group, but since nobody else was on group, we were effectively on one-to-twos. Cynthia and the Martian’s girlfriend were on one-to-twos; this made it seem that Georgina and I were as crazy as Cynthia and the Martian’s girlfriend. We weren’t, and there was a bit of resentment on our part. Daisy was at the top of the chart: full towns and grounds. Nobody could understand why.
Six patients, three nurses.
It was a ten- or fifteen-minute walk down the hill, past the rosebushes and stately trees of our beautiful hospital. The farther we got from our ward, the jumpier the nurses became. By the time we hit the street they were silent and closed in on us, and they had assumed the Nonchalant Look, an expression that said, I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.
But they were, and we were their six lunatics, so we behaved like lunatics.
None of us did anything unusual. We just kept up doing whatever we did back on the ward. Muttering, snarling, crying. Daisy poked people. Georgina complained about not being as crazy as those other two.
“Stop acting out,” a nurse would say.
They were not above pinching us or giving a Daisy-like poke to try shutting us up: nurse nips. We didn’t blame them for trying, and they didn’t blame us for being ourselves. It was all we had—the truth—and the nurses knew it.