But Inside I'm Screaming (9 page)

“W
hat are you thinking about, Isabel?”

She looks up.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Yeah. Nothing.”

“Your mind is blank, then,” Dr. Seidler prods.

“No.” Annoyed, Isabel answers as though she is explaining something to a child. “I’m thinking of
nothing.
I have nothing. There’s nothing in my life, not one living thing. My plant was the only living thing in my life that was still mine and I came back from my last out-of-town trip and there it was, all shriveled up. Dead. The perfect metaphor, really. When you think about it.”

The tears that had been balancing precariously on her lower eyelids finally push past the dam and make tracks down her hot cheeks.

“Are you thinking about suicide, Isabel?” Her doctor looks earnest, concerned.

“Yes. If you must know, yes. There. I’ve said it. I know that means I’ll never get out of this place, but shit, yeah I’m thinking about it. I could walk down to the end of the driveway and step in front of an oncoming car.”

“There are other options, you know.” Dr. Seidler’s tone is urgent. “You have a lot to live for—”

“Before you go on and on about how many people would miss me if I died you can just save it,” Isabel cries. The therapist lets her continue. “It would be a relief.”

“A relief for whom?”

“For me, first of all. I wouldn’t have to figure out each and every single goddamned day how I am going to haul myself up and into this meaningless world. I wouldn’t have to fight the silent scream—you know that painting? Actually, I think it’s called
The Scream—
the one where that person has its hands on either side of its scary face? People look at me and they see this happy face, but inside I’m screaming. It’s just that no one hears me.”

Dr. Seidler waits for her to continue.

When Isabel doesn’t she asks, “You don’t think anyone would be sad if you killed yourself?”

“Who?” she challenges. “Who? My parents? I haven’t been close to them in years.”

“Can she call you back, Katherine?” Alex took a sip of his cappuccino. “She’s taking a nap and I hate to wake her since she’s been so tired lately.”

Sip.

“I know, I know,” he said, trying to make his voice sound as if he were smiling, “she’s terrible about returning calls. But I’ll make sure she calls you back this weekend, okay?”

Sip.

“Good to talk to you, too. I will, I will. Okay, bye!”

“Who was that on the phone?” Isabel rubbed her eyes as she shuffled out of the bedroom. She yawned.

“Oh, no one.” Alex turned toward his sleepy wife. “Telemarketer. How’d you sleep?”

“Like a rock. What time is it?” Isabel turned Alex’s
wrist so she could see the face of his watch. “Why’d you let me sleep so long? Damn! I have so much to do today.”

Alex stroked her hair. “You need your sleep, Isabel.”

She curled up on the couch alongside her husband. “You take such good care of me,” she purred. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“You won’t have to find out,” he said somberly. “You won’t find out.”

“Plus, my parents have two other children to think about. My brothers are healthy and successful and happy. No. They’d be sad for a while but they’d go on.”

“That’s depression talking, Isabel,” the doctor says. “It’s hard for you to see beyond your feelings right now, I know that, but a lot of people would be sad, very sad, if you killed yourself.”

Silence.

“I just want to go.” Isabel is exhausted. “Just let me go.”

“I can’t do that and you know it.”

Why? Why can’t you just let me go?

The next morning it is impossible for Isabel to pull herself out of bed. She lies on top of the covers and stares at the acoustic-tiled ceiling, focusing on the mess of holes punched in each square.

Someone has the mind-numbing job of running a machine that pokes the holes into each of those perfectly measured squares. How can they live with themselves?

A knock on the door breaks the embryonic whoosh of her sound machine. “Yes?”

“Isabel, you’ve got to take your meds.” The nameless nurse pokes her head in the door.

“Okay, okay,” she sighs, not moving from her bed. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Here we are, scurrying around like ants: “You have to take your meds, Isabel”; “Line up, kids”; “It’s time to file your in
come tax returns”; “Would you like this for here or to go?” Each person has their little job and they do it, then they go home, then they eat, then they sleep and then they get up and do it all over again the next day. What’s the point? We’re all just filling up space. Why do people want to reproduce? So they can bring more children into this already overpopulated world so they can fill up space with some meaningless job and then go home and do it all over again the next day? Like those ceiling tiles.

The knock comes again. “Isabel?” It’s the nurse again and this time she looks annoyed when she sees that Isabel hasn’t moved. “You have to come get your meds, Isabel. After that you can get back in bed for a little while if you want, but you have to come take your medicine,” she says emphatically.

I wonder what she thinks of her job. What does she do when she leaves here? Does she talk about all of us to her husband?

Isabel hauls herself out of bed and puts shorts on over her boxers.

“Okay, okay,” she says to no one in particular as she heads down the hall to the medicine distribution window. After swallowing the controlled substances that will beat back nature until the next dispensation—all have foreboding names packed with too many late-alphabet consonants like Serzone, Zyprexa, Trazodone—she shuffles back to her room and crawls back into bed, this time assuming the fetal position.

Doesn’t anybody else see how meaningless this is? How we are all consumed with our chores, which are ultimately useless because with the swipe of a broom we can all be swept away into the abyss. Here I am in a mental institution, trying to get better so that I can go back into the world and rush from job to job, killing time until I die of something other than suicide. I take medicine to help me deal with the nothingness of my life. Millions of us have to take pills to distract us from the sheer
boredom of it all. We hurry from thing to thing like ants when we’re all going to end up suffocating, anyway.

“Isabel.” The voice on the other side of the door sounds like Kristen’s. “We’re getting ready for the morning meeting. You coming?”

Isabel looks at her watch. An hour has passed.

A
nother sign of failure.

Isabel is out of clean clothes. She has been out of clean clothes for two days but has doubled up on dirty underwear instead of admitting to herself that she has been in the hospital for so long she has cycled through her hospital wardrobe twice.

She bends over and starts gathering her clothes together in a bundle and trudges down the hall to the communal laundry room. The door is closed. Balancing her laundry on her hip, Isabel opens the door and is startled to find Sukanya.

Sukanya stands, wedged in between the dryer and the washing machine—which, Isabel notes, is in use—holding an open book and mumbling what sounds like a prayer. In front of her, on top of the dryer, is a single lit candle.

Before backing out the door Isabel watches the sixteen-year-old girl.

Sukanya looks up, sees Isabel and looks back down, without interrupting her prayer.

Isabel closes the door and thinks how nice it is to hear Sukanya say something other than “I’d prefer not to say.”

She dumps her laundry back in her room and grabs her pack of cigarettes.

“Kristen? Patio?” Isabel has started the question on her way around the corner into Kristen’s room but stops short when she finds Kristen immersed in paperwork spread out on her crinkly bed. “Oh. Sorry.”

Kristen looks up for a split second and then races on with her paperwork as if she is in the middle of taking SATs.

“What is this stuff? What’re you doing?”

“Application forms! Can’t you see? I’m trying to fill out application forms. I’ll talk to you later…” She trails off as she flips over the side of one form. On it is an unmistakable logo. A huge
M
formed by two golden arches. McDonald’s. Next to Kristen is a stack of what appear to be a hundred more.

“Seriously, what’s up? Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Kristen answers distractedly, not looking up from her work. “I love to fill out forms. Any forms, really. These are the best, though. McDonald’s. They’re the best because you have to fit each letter in its own square; it takes concentration. Other forms give you a line to fill in. That’s not as challenging. I love these forms.” Kristen is hunched over a fresh application and is carefully squeezing her name, letter by letter, into the appropriate boxes.

“You do this often?”

“Yeah. I have hundreds of the same forms. I take them everywhere with me. Want to do one?” she asks hopefully, as if these are
New York Times
crossword puzzles.

Um, yeah, Kristen, we’re so alike.

“Ah, well…no, thanks,” Isabel says. “I guess I’ll go, then. I’ll be outside if you want to come out.”

But Kristen does not seem to hear her.

Isabel goes out to the smoker’s patio and sits alone in an Adirondack chair flanked by two pots of fatally dehydrated geraniums.

A half hour later Kristen pushes through the door and looks relieved to find Isabel.

“There you are!”

“Hey.” Isabel is tentative in her greeting. She watches Kristen light her cigarette at the wall, noting her shaking hands.

“I’m glad you came and got me,” Kristen says as she pulls a chair up alongside Isabel. “I can get a little obsessive about my forms…”

No kidding.

“…but it calms me down when I start thinking about my mother,” she is saying. “After we talked about Billy the other day I talked more with my shrink and I guess that’s what got me going.”

Isabel feels Kristen looking at her, studying her. She knows Kristen wants to talk but does nothing to encourage it.

That does not dissuade Kristen.

“It sounds corny, but I feel like you get it,” Kristen says. “You understand me.”

“All I did was ask if you wanted to come smoke.”
Don’t do this, Kristen. Don’t drag me into your personal hell.

“It’s more than that.” Kristen is insistent. “No one else understands me. You remind me of this girl I used to know. Laurel. That’s her name.”

Kristen told only one other person when she had had sex with her boyfriend, Billy. From Laurel she sought reassurance and advice. Laurel gave it in the form of a ten-page letter passed to Kristen between classes.

But one night, while Kristen was out with Billy, her mother, Nora, went into her room to straighten up.
When Kristen got home she found her mother in the master bedroom, an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts next to her on the bed.

“What’s going on, Mom?” Kristen was worried. “What happened? Did something happen?” Her mother smoked, but not this much. Kristen could not take her eyes off the ashtray. A couple of half-smoked cigarettes had not been fully extinguished and smoke was spiraling up. She knew, in the pit of her stomach, something was terribly wrong.

And that is when she noticed the letter lying on the bed in front of her cross-legged mother.

Suddenly her mouth was very dry.

“Tell me it’s not true.” Her mother looked intensely at Kristen. “Tell me you have not had sex with Billy. Tell me.”

“What?” Kristen was buying time. “What’re you talking about, Mom?”

“This!”
Nora grabbed the letter in her fist and waved it angrily. “This letter is what I’m talking about! Tell me you were just trying to show off to a friend, this
Laurel
person. Tell me you made the whole thing up just to impress an older girl.
Tell me,
Kristen.”

Kristen knew she could tell her mother what she obviously wanted to hear and tiptoe to safety or she could tell her mother the truth. She took a deep breath and tried to swallow, but her mouth was so communion wafer-dry that her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and she had to take another deep breath.

“It’s true,” Kristen whispered. She couldn’t look her mother in the eye.

Nora let out a guttural moan that seemed to go on forever. She was doubled over as if to get more vocal power. Kristen had never seen her mother like this. She felt alternately sick and scared.

“Mom, I’m sorry—” was all she could think to say.

“How long?” Her mother was talking in a different voice.

“Huh?”

“How
long
have you and
Billy
been having
s-e-x?
” Her mother didn’t actually spell the word
sex,
but said it as if it were poisonous.

“Um. Well.” Once again the truth prevailed. “Three months. Something like that. I’m not sure, exactly. Maybe less. Probably less. Less for sure. Two months. I don’t know.”

By now her mother was rocking back and forth on the bed while trying to light another cigarette. She was so mad, though, that her hands were shaking, making it nearly impossible to unite the tip of the cigarette with the Bic lighter.

Nora reached for the phone.

“Mom? Who’re you calling?” Kristen was panicked. She had no idea what to expect.

“Bob?” Her mother had called Kristen’s father, who had stayed in a company apartment in Manhattan for the night because he had an early breakfast meeting.

“Come home right away” was all Nora said into the phone.

“Mom? What’re you doing? Dad’s going to think someone died or something! Why does he need to come home now? It’s ten at night. He’s going to freak!”

“Too bad.” Her mother was completely still on the bed. She looked Kristen in the eye. When Kristen looked into her mother’s eyes she felt nauseous. Something in her mother’s stare was violently frightening.

Nora swung herself off the bed and stormed out of the room. Kristen followed, not saying anything, just watching in horror as her mother stood in front of the bathroom mirror and screamed. Not a high-pitched scream. A wail of such sad frustration and anger that Kristen moved in to try to hold her mother.

“Get away from me!”
she shrieked, pushing Kristen out of the bathroom. “
You make me sick!
Get away from me!”

“Mom?” she called through the bathroom door. “Mom, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please, Mom. Please come out. Let me explain…”

The door flew open and Nora was in Kristen’s face.

“I told you. Get out of here! I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to hear your voice.
Get out of here!
”

With a vise tightening in the pit in her stomach, Kristen crouched outside the now-closed bathroom door and waited, listening to her mother’s sobs.

After about a half an hour she heard her father’s key in the front door and two seconds later she saw his worried face as he ran up the stairs.

“What on earth is wrong?” He still had on his coat. “Kristen? What’s happened?”

Kristen flew into his arms and, for the first time since this incident began to unfold, cried.

“Dad, I’m so sorry,” she sobbed. “Please remember that. No matter what happens…I’m so sorry.”

Her father was apoplectic. “Where’s your mother?
Nora?
Nora!”

The bathroom door opened and standing in front of her frantic husband stood Nora, with clumps of her thick hair wadded up in her fists.

“Oh, my God,” her husband said. “What happened? Will someone please tell me what in the hell is going on here?”

“I’ll tell you what’s going on here,” her mother said as she pushed past father and daughter and made her way down the stairs into the living room. The two followed her as if sleepwalking.

“Your daughter
fucked
Billy.” Nora was rocking in the middle of the living room floor. Kristen stood at the entrance to the living room and stared at her disheveled mother.

“Is that what this is all about?” Her father was incredulous.

“Dad, I’m so sorry.” Kristen ran over to kneel at her father’s feet. “It’s my fault. I’m so sorry.”

He pulled her up alongside him on the couch and hugged her. And, before he released her, he whispered in her ear. “We’ll get through this,” he murmured.

Kristen looked back at her mother and addressed her, through her tears. “Mom, please forgive me. I’m so sorry.”

“You’re sorry,” her mother mimicked Kristen, putting an emphasis on a different word each time she repeated it. “
You’re
sorry. You’re
sorry. You’re sorry!
”

“Honey.” Kristen’s father spoke gently to her mother, as if trying to soothe a child. Kristen had never seen her father talk to her mother this way. “Sweetheart, let’s go upstairs for a minute and talk. Okay? Let’s go up to our room.”

But before he could reach down to try to pull his wife up from the floor she moaned again, the way she had when Kristen first told her the truth. The moan was the spookiest of the entire display. It was full of such pain and suffering that Kristen vowed she would never again do anything to hurt or disappoint her mother.

And she kept that promise for many years. Kristen began to dance as fast as she possibly could.

Isabel looks away from Kristen, down the rambling driveway.

One step. That’s all it would take. One truck and one step.

Isabel’s eyes are fixed at the space between the two stone pillars.

One step.

“That’s when I first tried it,” Kristen is saying as she lights another cigarette.

“Tried what?” Isabel asks.

“Suicide.”

For a week following her mother’s discovery of Kristen’s sexual secret she was under what amounted to house arrest. The first night of what Kristen would come to think of as the Incident, Nora slept on the floor of her room. She demanded to know every detail of Kristen’s and Billy’s first encounter.

Kristen did her best to answer her mother, even though she was petrified to talk about such a personal, and apparently horrific, thing with her angry mother. She told her mother the truth: that she and Billy had decided together that they were going to make love. That Billy had not forced himself on her in any way. That Billy used a condom. Kristen was humiliated, recounting what she had presumed was a wonderful experience to her disgusted mother. Kristen had no idea what she had done was so terrible, but now, seeing her mother react the way she had, she began to see sex as a shocking, dirty, humiliating act.

When her mother asked her where they were when they lost their virginity, Kristen lied. She knew she was forbidden to be alone at Billy’s house (she had also promised that the two would never be alone in Billy’s room) so she told her mother they had been in Billy’s car.

A few nights later, Kristen snuck into her room when her parents were distracted and called Billy. Whispering into the phone, Kristen sketched out the situation for him and told him that she had lied about where they had lost their virginity (“I just want to get our stories straight so if she asks you…”). Kristen heard a thump outside her door.

The vise that still had a grip on her stomach tightened and Kristen got off the phone within seconds.

She opened her bedroom door and there was her mother, crumpled up on the floor at the threshold of Kristen’s room.

“Mom?” Kristen was sick to her stomach. “Mom?”

Her mother pulled herself up off the floor and headed to the master bedroom with Kristen on her heels. Quietly, her mother faced the mirror in the bathroom and again started to pull clumps of her hair out. Kristen grabbed her wrists.

“Mom! Stop it.”

“Quiet!” her mother spat like a feral cat.

“Okay, okay.” Kristen didn’t know if she had any more strength left for her mother’s volatility.

“Go away!” her mother snarled, shoving Kristen out of the bathroom.

Kristen stared at the wood-grain patterns of the closed door. She turned and went into her own bathroom.

Once the door was shut and locked, Kristen opened the medicine cabinet. She scanned the shelves. There was a bottle of Tylenol, but Kristen knew there were more options in her parents bathroom. Options that could release her from the guilty hell she was living in as a result of her repulsive behavior.