On a Saturday evening, the first of spring break of her junior year and just a day after her roommate had left for home, Ann, who would spend the break on campus and who had made an elaborate list for herself of “Things To Do,” was sitting on her bed in her underwear. She planned to fill the unstructured hours of the coming week writing a term paper for a course, American Art: 1945 to the Present, in which she had taken an incomplete the previous semester. But as she read through her notes she found she had nothing to say on her proposed topic. And now it was the break, her professor was away, she couldn’t get another subject approved.
Perhaps she just wouldn’t do it, she thought, perhaps she wouldn’t do anything. She was aware of a brief elated feeling, one that went beyond the childish thrill of rebellion; she felt as if she were contemplating a new clean world of possibility, as if, unfettered, she were filled with strength and freedom. She had just performed a urinalysis in the unusual privacy of the abandoned dorm bathroom, whose stall she hadn’t even bothered to lock but sat on one of the six toilets in nothing but a bra, her underpants around her ankles. She dipped the pH strip into the glass of urine she had collected; the imprecise measure revealed her sugar level as quite high. She was supposed to do this at least once a day, but it had been weeks since she’d checked it.
Back in her room, rubbing her thigh in preparation for the insulin she had already drawn into the syringe, Ann placed the needle on her desk. She kept rubbing her leg, feeling the slightly thickened quality of the skin where she habitually injected herself, and then she stood, pulled back the bedspread, and slipped under the covers. It was early evening, an hour before sunset and just the time when she was supposed to take her evening injection. Her doctor asked at each checkup if Ann took her shots the ideal half hour before meals, and she always answered yes, but that was untrue. Sometimes she didn’t bother to eat. Sometimes she didn’t bother with the shot. Sometimes, like that afternoon, she ate candy.
Her dorm was quiet; there wasn’t anyone on her floor. Out of loneliness rather than hunger, she had passed through food service an hour ago and, once in line, requested a take-out meal. The attendant at the register checked that her photo ID was appropriately stickered for the break, entitling Ann to eat on campus between semesters, and handed it back to her. There was no one she knew in the dining hall, just a handful of graduate students eating alone, books open before their trays, and Ann took her paper plate filled with cold cuts and salad back to her room. It was sitting next to the unused syringe of insulin on her desk, round slices of turkey, salami, a dollop of cold slaw still shaped by the scoop that had served it.
Ann got out from under the covers. She placed the syringe in the center of the plate, rolled the limp paper disk up around the food and the needle, and secured the package with a rubber band. Then she walked down the hall, still wearing only her underwear—but no matter, the place was deserted—and threw the little missile down the garbage chute. She heard it clatter distantly against the metal sides of the chute where it took a slight turn before emptying into the Dumpster in the basement. Then she went quickly, almost running, back to her room and put all the diabetic paraphernalia away: the test strips, the cup in which she collected her urine, the syringes she kept hidden in her ski boot. She put the insulin in the compact refrigerator, hid it in a Chinese take-out box that had been there since the beginning of the year and which untidy, scatterbrained Marsha had never opened. Then she got back into bed.
At first she thought she was just skipping dinner since she hadn’t taken her insulin. Uncharacteristically, she fell asleep on her back while looking at the ceiling, her head exactly in the middle of her pillow, her hands at her sides.
The next morning, Ann woke at the summons of her clock radio. She sat up. She felt hungry or sick, one or the other. “Sunday,” she said to herself out loud. She lay back down. The clock read 8:45. The cafeteria opened at seven for breakfast and closed two hours later. She had plenty of time for her shot and breakfast, she noted to herself with distant interest, as if cataloging a stranger’s health. She got up, went to the bathroom. She felt dizzy and frail as she walked down the hall, which seemed immensely long, the cold tiles of the bathroom floor rebuking her. Shivering, she lay back down in her bed and pulled the quilt up to her chin, fell asleep before she had a chance to turn the radio off.
When she woke, she was thirsty and sweating profusely. She knew she was ill, but she didn’t want to take her shot, didn’t want to eat anything. Wanted to be empty, go away, disappear somehow. She struggled out from under the quilt, went to the bathroom, and returned to bed.
Finally, before losing consciousness completely sometime on Sunday afternoon, Ann dreamed of herself as a younger girl peeling her strangely two-dimensional, flat form up off her father’s cold darkroom floor and slipping like a vapor out under the tight crack of the door. She floated off, and the image of herself lingered on the periphery of her consciousness like a kite, blown first here, then there, and finally a speck, disappearing.
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On Monday afternoon, the woman from the campus cleaning service, hearing the radio playing all day but getting no answer to her persistent banging on the locked door, called the security guard, who opened the lock with a skeleton key and then called an ambulance.
“How do you like that,” the guard said to the ambulance attendants, shaking his head. A young woman, nineteen, in her bed, the cover drawn neatly up to her chin. She was breathing shallowly, her skin pale and covered with a film of perspiration. When they lifted her onto the gurney, they found the sheet beneath her soaked with urine. “Isn’t that a shame?” the guard said, still shaking his head. “A pretty girl like that.”
The attendants made a cursory check of the tidy room, looking for evidence of substance abuse, but found nothing. No one reached into the toe of the ski boot, the unused dose of insulin on its way to the dump. The girl wore no diabetic identification.
At the emergency room, Ann’s stomach was routinely pumped, lavaged, its meager contents examined, revealing nothing, telling the doctors as little as the ambulance man’s inspection of her room had done. Her breath, the way her body reeked of sweetness, was the giveaway, confirmed by the lab’s quick response. She remained a mysterious empty vessel only briefly, until the blood work came back from the emergency lab: diabetic coma.
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Dutifully every day, and then after two months on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and then finally after a year only once a week on Wednesdays, Ann showed up for her afternoon counseling session. If she didn’t, she would be expelled. As it was, she had already lost a semester, incarcerated in the university hospital during registration, transferred to a psychiatric facility for a month after that. The days that she was denied her freedom passed slowly, one barely distinguishable from another, and when she returned to school for the summer session she had a new roommate in a new dorm. If anyone knew what had happened, they never let on.
Her new dorm was nine blocks from Dr. Alda’s office and she always felt a brief panic as she entered the sunny room and sat in a chair facing the kind woman. She knew she was supposed to speak, but she couldn’t. How could she explain why, after being revived, she had sobbed with disappointment? Or worse, that she’d later become violent and tried to kick a nurse who came into her room to administer insulin?
After five minutes or so elapsed, and perhaps anticipating that Ann would rather flee than initiate any conversation, Dr. Alda asked a question, always the same one:
“How are you feeling?”
“In general? Or right now?”
“Either. Whichever is easier to answer.”
Ann had learned in the psychiatric ward, muzzled by the artificial calm of Lithium, that freedom lay in figuring out what was expected of her and behaving accordingly. Since she could not bring herself to think or feel in ways deemed acceptable, she kept such insurrection to herself. That was in the beginning, when her defenses were rudimentary. Over the course of therapy, she evolved.
Because Dr. Alda’s questions, to the extent that she thought about them, intensified the urge to respond in ways she had learned were unacceptable, Ann made herself into someone with a sort of two-way mirror in her head. All the things that frightened her—the memory of the pictures she saw at the dealer’s, the Polaroids of her father, and older memories, too, the trial over whether her father was a fit parent, the time the science teacher kidnapped her—they all simply disappeared through the trick mirror. She became so adept at this that even as she uttered words that made sense to Dr. Alda—after all, the woman always nodded and asked another question—Ann couldn’t have said what they were talking about. It all went into the little dark room behind the mirror, and even if Ann were to look for it, all she would find would be a reflection of her own puzzled countenance.
After each session, a tortured fifty minutes of no progress that Ann could discern, she walked immediately from the Student Mental Health building, which was not on campus but, perhaps out of sensitivity to the feelings of those who used its services, on a side street in the small university town, to the public library across the street. She went into the children’s room, where she sat on an undersized chair painted a bright primary color, her knees bent up awkwardly, higher than the top of the matching round table.
She read Nancy Drew mysteries, one each afternoon she saw the counselor. Motherless Nancy Drew had the solace of Hannah Gruen’s faithful, generous bosom; Carson Drew, her handsome attorney father, was well-respected in Riverdale. Nancy had good friends who routinely risked their lives for her. athletic George Fayne and George’s pretty, plump cousin Bess Marvin. Nancy was an amateur sleuth who figured everything out with ease. Kidnapped by thugs, beaten unconscious, bound, gagged, drugged, she was always returned to her father’s side without any real harm done to her. Clues dropped into her lap: the secrets of old clocks and staircases and Larkspur Lanes, the mysteries of old trees and bookcases. The endless hoaxes and pranks and capers all gave themselves up to titian-haired Nancy, who carried a picture of Ned Nickerson, her handsome boyfriend, in her wallet.