A new name had appeared on the blackboard: Alice Calais.
“Let’s guess about her,” said Georgina.
“Some new nut,” said Lisa.
“When is she coming?” I asked Valerie.
Valerie pointed down the hall toward the doors. And there she was, Alice Calais.
She was young, like us, and she didn’t look too crazy. We got up off the floor to say hello properly.
“I’m Alice Calais,” she said, but she said callous.
“Cal-lay?” said Georgina.
Alice Calais-Callous squinted. “Hunh?”
“You say it callous,” I told Georgina. I thought she was rude to imply that Alice didn’t know how to say her own name.
“Cal-lay?” Georgina said again.
Valerie came over at that point to show Alice her room.
“It’s like Vermont,” I said to Georgina. “We don’t say Vayr-mon like the French do.”
“Phonetics,” said Lisa.
Alice Calais-Callous was timid, but she liked us. She often sat near us and listened. Lisa thought she was a bore. Georgina tried to draw her out.
“You know, that’s a French name,” she told Alice. “Calais.”
“Callous,” said Alice. “It is?”
“Yes. It’s a place in France. A famous place.”
“Why?”
“It used to belong to England,” said Georgina. “A lot of France did. Then they lost it in the Hundred Years’ War. Calais was the last place they lost.”
“A hundred years!” Alice widened her eyes.
It was easy to impress Alice. She knew almost nothing about anything. Lisa thought she was a retard.
One morning we were sitting in the kitchen eating toast with honey.
“What’s that?” asked Alice.
“Toast with honey.”
“I’ve never had honey,” Alice said.
This was stunning. Who could imagine a life so circumscribed that it excluded honey?
“Never?” I asked.
Georgina passed her a piece. We watched while she ate.
“It tastes like bees,” she announced.
“What do you mean?” Lisa asked.
“Sort of furry and tingly—like bees.”
I took another bite of my toast. The honey just tasted like honey, something I couldn’t remember tasting for the first time.
Later that day, when Alice was off having a Rorschach, I asked, “How can a person who’s never eaten honey have a family that can afford to send her here?”
“Probably really incredibly crazy and interesting, so they let her in for less,” said Georgina.
And for several weeks Alice Calais-Callous gave no evidence of being either really crazy or interesting. Even Georgina got tired of her.
“She doesn’t know anything,” said Georgina. “It’s as if she spent her life in a closet.”
“She probably did,” said Lisa. “Locked up in a closet eating Cheerios.”
“You mean kept there by her parents?” I asked.
“Why not,” said Lisa. “After all, they named her Alice Callous.”
It was as good an explanation as any for why, after about a month, Alice exploded like a volcano.
“Lot of energy in that girl,” Georgina observed. Down at the end of the hall, muffled booming and yelling and crashing came out of the seclusion room.
The next day as we sat on the floor under the blackboard Alice was marched past us between two nurses on her way to maximum security. Her face was puffy from crying and bashing around. She didn’t look at us. She was occupied by her own complicated thoughts—you could tell from the way she was squinting and moving her mouth.
Her name came off the blackboard rather quickly.
“Guess she’s settled in over there,” said Lisa.
“We ought to go see her,” said Georgina.
The nurses thought it was nice that we wanted to visit Alice. It was even all right for Lisa to go. They must have figured she couldn’t get into trouble on maximum security.
It didn’t look special from the outside. It didn’t even have extra doors. But inside it was different. The windows had screens like our windows, but there were bars in front of the screens. Little bars, thin and several inches apart; still, they were bars. The bathrooms had no doors, and the toilets had no seats.
“Why no seats?” I asked Lisa.
“Could rip off a seat and whack somebody? I don’t know.”
The nursing station wasn’t open, like ours, but encased in chicken-wire glass. Nurses were either in or out. No leaning over the Dutch door to chat on maximum security.
And the rooms were not really rooms. They were cells. They were seclusion rooms, in fact. There wasn’t anything in them except bare mattresses with people on them. Unlike our seclusion room, they had windows, but the windows were tiny, high, chicken-wire-enforced, security-screened, barred windows. Most of the doors to the rooms were open, so as we walked down the hall to see Alice, we could see other people lying on their mattresses. Some were naked. Some were not on their mattresses but standing in a corner or curled up against a wall.
That was it. That was all there was. Little bare rooms with one person per room curled up somewhere.
Alice’s room didn’t smell good. Her walls were smeared with something. So was she. She was sitting on her mattress with her arms wrapped around her knees, and with smears on her arms.
“Hi, Alice,” said Georgina.
“That’s shit,” Lisa whispered to me. “She’s been rubbing her shit around.”
We stood around outside the doorway. We didn’t want to go into the room because of the smell. Alice looked like somebody else, as if she’d gotten a new face. She looked kind of good.
“How’s it going?” asked Georgina.
“It’s okay,” said Alice. Her voice was hoarse. “I’m hoarse,” she said. “I’ve been yelling.”
“Right,” said Georgina.
Nobody said anything for a minute.
“I’m getting better,” said Alice.
“Good,” said Georgina.
Lisa tapped her foot on the linoleum. I was feeling faint from trying to breathe without breathing in the smell.
“So,” said Georgina. “Well. See you soon, okay?”
“Thanks for coming,” said Alice. She unclasped her knees for a few seconds to wave at us.
We went over to the nursing station, where our escort had gone to visit with the staff. We couldn’t see our nurse. Georgina rapped on the glass. The person on duty looked up and shook her head at us.
“I just want to get out of here,” I said.
Georgina rapped on the glass again. “We want to go back to SB Two,” she said loudly.
The person on duty nodded, but our nurse did not appear.
“Maybe they tricked us,” said Lisa. “Gonna leave us here.”
“That’s not funny,” I said.
Georgina gave another rat-a-tat to the glass.
“I’ll fix it,” said Lisa. She pulled her lighter from her pocket and lit up a cigarette.
Immediately two nurses sprang out of the nursing station.
“Give me that lighter,” said one, while the other grabbed the cigarette.
Lisa smiled. “We need our escort over to SB Two.”
The nurses went back into the nursing station.
“No lighters on maximum security. Supervised smoking. I knew that would rouse them.” Lisa pulled out another cigarette, then put it back in the pack.
Our nurse came out. “That was a short visit,” she said. “How was Alice?”
“She said she was getting better,” said Georgina.
“She had shit …” I said, but I couldn’t describe it.
Our nurse nodded. “It’s not that unusual.”
The ugly living room, the bedrooms stuffed with bureaus and chairs and blankets and pillows, an aide leaning out of the nursing station talking to Polly, the white chalk in its dish below the blackboard waiting for us to sign ourselves in: home again.
“Oh,” I said, sighing several times. I couldn’t get enough air in, or get the air in me out.
“What do you think happened to her, anyhow?” said Georgina.
“Something,” said Lisa.
“Shit on the wall,” I said. “Oh, God. Could that happen to us?”
“She said she was getting better,” Georgina said.
“Everything’s relative, I guess,” said Lisa.
“It couldn’t, could it?” I asked.
“Don’t let it,” said Georgina. “Don’t forget it.”