“And occupational therapy,” I said. “I liked it for a while, but now I can keep myself occupied.”
This was accurate. After the shock treatments, I’d been able to start writing poems again. Tacking them to the wall above the maple desk in my room, like an inmate hash marking down the days. Granted, they were a bit fixated on gloomy topics, but they were poems nevertheless. The one I’d written that morning began:
Please, God, arrange to let me be
A ghost, if You will be so kind,
Just long enough to ease my mind.
A horrid little ghost—and there
I’ll sit upon his bed and stare
Until his tortured eyelids prickle.…
*
My great subject during that period was my unsatisfiable longing to draw sad, salt tears from the eyes of my erstwhile darling. Max would never cry over me, though, not ever again. I felt as though these poems represented progress—away from self-nullifying melancholy, toward a concrete and productive anger—but I wasn’t confident that others would interpret them the same way, and I didn’t show them to Dr. R.
“Lillian,” said Dr. R, “I’m happy your old habits and routines are finding their way back into your life. But, again, occupational therapy serves a different purpose than your poetry, so we’re going to keep that up, too.”
“All right,” I said. “I understand. And I am grateful for the chance to build up my handmade pot holder collection. But my industriousness has been such that I’ve even written a poetical message for you. Want to hear it?”
“Sure,” he said, smiling.
I read aloud:
Dear Dr. Rosemont, W.G.,
This is the day you don’t see me
Trying to do anything you don’t want to see.
Congratulations! Now I’m painin’
To buy a few things in New Canaan,
So I’d consider it a boon
If I could go this afternoon.
*
I knew that they were worried about a relapse of my drinking, and about the collapse of my marriage making me feel vulnerable—and honestly so was I—but I wanted out. Just out for a while: the tiny responsibility of going by myself into the town and then coming back.
Dr. R laughed appreciatively, but the effort got me nowhere.
“Lillian, I’m afraid we’ll have to keep you close by as much as possible, and under constant supervision for a little while longer,” said Dr. R, steepling his fingers as they must have taught him to do in Serious Doctor School. “Because of the grave nature of the incident that brought you here. I’m sure you understand.”
“Oh, Dr. R,” I said, trying to force my lips from rictus to actual smile. “Don’t let’s live in the past. I’ve moved on.”
“We have to keep you moving in the right direction, though, Lillian.”
“Taking some small unescorted trips seems to me to be one of the steps that will take us in that direction, doctor.”
“It is,” he said. “In due time. But we’re not ready for that yet. Who’s the expert here, Lillian?”
That was how it had been going for weeks. I didn’t want to leave Silver Hill permanently, not yet. I was actually enjoying it: the rest, the quiet, my recovered mental self. But I did want some freedom and a bit more privacy. Yet as much as I tried to persuade Dr. R to let me have more of each of these, he refused.
“Of course it’s you, Dr. R,” I said, trying to laugh with him.
“How about this, though: Your son’s coming to visit you this Saturday, yes?”
“He is,” I said.
Thirteen years old, he’d be taking the train all the way up on his own. It would be his first visit. Dr. R had suggested three weeks ago that it might be time for Johnny to be reunited with his mother, but I’d demurred; I had not wanted him to see me until I looked less shattered, until I could be sure I had the stamina to sustain a lifted spirit for a full weekend. I did not mention this to Johnny, although I had been writing him a letter a day since the middle of March—and sometimes two letters on eventful days: when a craft project had gone spectacularly well, when a crazy person had done something crazy, et cetera.
“We’ll have a nurse take you two into town,” said Dr. R with exaggerated benevolence. “For shopping, for ice cream, for a movie. Whatever you like.”
I had always thought that the capacity to persuade was based on one’s wit, cleverness, and skill. But when one is trying to convince one’s doctor to let one out of a mental institution, it becomes apparent that persuasion actually has a great deal to do with the position of power that one occupies to begin with. No amount of wit, it seems, will get one out of an involuntary psychiatric commitment.
Choice is an illusion promoted by the powerful.
“All right,” was all I said out loud. “That sounds like a fair compromise.”
“There’s a reasonable girl,” said Dr. R, standing up and walking around his desk to show me out, back to my pot holders and my shuffles through the garden.
I was not a girl. I was fifty-five. At that point in my life, an old fifty-five. But I stood and thanked him and went to go pick at my institutional lunch.