*
Saintly Helen McGoldrick was the first guest I was permitted. She came in March, on a morning blue and bright with the muddy smell of spring. It happened to be Saint Patrick’s Day—a Thursday, so she could avoid the weekend traffic—and she brought a bouquet of green carnations suited to the occasion. They reminded me of the potted four-leaf clover Max had gotten me two decades ago when we were first in love, their botanical luck long since run out.
I met Helen in the common area, where residents were allowed to have visitors. We could order coffee or tea and sit and drink it and pretend we were free: normal people joining friends at a café.
Anyone else would have lied, said I looked great, told me I was beginning to appear healthy again. Not Helen. “Lily,” she said. “Your eyes!”
I welcomed her lack of pretense, though it was hard to look at her still-lovely face as it saw my ravaged one. “I know,” I said, raising a hand to my cheek. “You’re the only person I’m seeing until my eyes have recovered. The creases and circles are from the Thorazine. It affects some people that way. Others break out.”
“Thorazine?” said Helen, leading me by the arm to a table. “Let’s sit down.”
“I meant to write you and explain,” I said. “But I didn’t have it in me. I figured I could just tell you in person, if you even want to hear about it.”
“I do, of course,” she said. “If you even want to talk about it.”
“They only give shock treatments to patients with severe depression,” I said. “And they sure had one in me.”
A wispy, deferential presence—I was never sure what to call them; they were less than orderlies but more than waiters, and I’ll bet if a patient suddenly pitched a fit their wispiness would firm up in a hurry—took our orders and brought us our cups, smooth and silent as a marionette angel.
“Ah yes, the forced charm of these hospital saucers reminds me,” I said, and handed Helen a small wrapped package. “Open it.”
“A leather coaster,” said Helen, setting it on the tabletop, then setting her coffee cup atop it. “With my initials. Thank you. They’re training you to become a craftswoman?”
“A slave,” I said. “This whole setup is a racket. They’re abducting middle-aged women as forced labor to finally break the back of the leatherworkers’ union. I was going to stamp a desperate request for help into it, but the clever bastards took away all the vowels. You’d have never made any sense of it.”
Amusement and alarm spun across Helen’s face like a dog chasing its tail. I laughed, for the first time in a long time.
“I’m joking, honeybunch,” I said. “But don’t I make a damn good lunatic? The coaster is the happy byproduct of my occupational therapy. I’m made to stay pretty quiet here, aside from walking in the gardens and working on handicrafts. That’s because of the Thorazine. They gave it to me in large quantities to keep me from getting too high after those shock treatments. They’re weaning me off it now.”
“I hear electroshock is a waking nightmare,” said Helen. “I can understand if you don’t want to relive that.”
“Oh, I do want to talk about those, Helen. If I may?”
“Of course, Lily,” she said. “That’s why I came. It’s been so long. I’ve missed your voice.”
She took my hand across the table—probably mistaking the joy in my soppy eyes for anguish—and I let her.
“Here’s the strangest thing,” I said. “Whoever thought up those shock treatments ought to be canonized. For so long I’d been looking at the sky, and trees, and roast beef, and friends, and even though I knew they were beautiful, I could take no pleasure from any of them. And I’m not just talking about these past few terrible months, Helen. This was years. Now even a field mouse looks divine. The days are crowded with the good old reliable joys: orange juice and sunshine and Coca-Colas and crows and sparrows and blue jays and petunias. And I can feel that joy in my chest again, immediately. I don’t have to work it out like a crossword puzzle.”
Helen gave me a cautious smile. “Is that what the Thorazine is for?” she asked. “To keep the mouse mousey?”
“They can give me all the Thorazine in Smith, Kline and French’s coffers,” I said. “The mouse and I will remain in cahoots.”
“Lily, that’s wonderful. Blackened as they are, your eyes do have the look of your old self back in them. Will it last?”
“It’s supposed to,” I said. “I think it will. Dr. R tells me that I may well get dejected over crises in the future—the parakeet croaking or what have you—but I won’t get depressed.”
“What a world of difference between those two words.”