Problems (17 page)

A small voice says, “You won't ever get high again?”

Another voice says, “No, one day. Like in six months, it will be okay to do a few bags, and your tolerance will be so shitty you will feel incredible.”

And then another voice says, “It's time. Just fucking stop it. You are too old for this to be cute.” I try to hold on to that. I am a former drug addict. Oh god, that sounds terrible.

I'm actually clean. The Suboxone is helping me along.

The place they put me in is like a prison with carpeting. There is a door you have to punch a code into to leave.

I scream at my mother, “How can you fucking leave me here?” She just cries. She says she doesn't know what to do anymore. “So you just fucking lock me up? I have rights.” I didn't know that my shrink and my mother had conspired when I was in the hospital in New York.

Here, kid, this is what you did with the life that was given to you.

I cry a lot. I think about how Peter would have visited if we were still together. My mother annoys me with her questions, and my brother is eager to get back home. He's annoyed I do whatever I want, and he has to take time out of his life to deal with my shit. Like I had asked him to come. “Here, deal with my shit.”

Glad-Ass, the head of the useless nurses, says my roommate will be in soon. I ask if she can leave me alone for a while, but she says I'm
on twenty-four-hour watch. She follows me to the bathroom and looks directly at me when I pull down my pants and go. She takes me to the rec room, which is just one big room with a couch and a big table, the kind they have at preschools, and a
TV
and a Ping-Pong table. The whole place feels like an after-school recreation center.

My roommate's name is Keisha. She's twenty-five years old but looks almost forty. She's fat and wears a scarf over her head and sucks on a lollipop.

Keisha's mom is on crack. I know this because Keisha said, “My mom is on crack.”

I can no longer cry. The drugs must be working.

Keisha says this place is all right, better than a lot of other places. I tell her I like her beaded bracelet around her ankle, and she says she'd make me one.

I lie there in the dark. If sleep ever happens to me again, it will feel like a small miracle. Keisha is snoring. I prop my leg up against the wall and run my hand through the bars of light that fall on the wall. I wonder how long I'll be here, and then my body starts itching inside for a cigarette. I grind my teeth and turn over a couple times, feeling like I want to beat the shit out of somebody. There are places where they let you smoke, but this is not one of those places. I get up and walk over to the nurses' station and say I can't sleep. The woman behind the counter has a fat, friendly face—like a waitress in a diner who you think probably spends all her time in the back eating banana splits—and she gives me two pills, and I swallow them without asking what they are.

I lie in bed and start to cry again. Where the fuck is bottom? Is this finally it? I miss Peter's sleeping body. My head is a dusty room
cluttered with sad, broken things from another time. I remember our first year, when I would make dinner for him like a good wife. When I would rush around making sure the apartment was clean, and he would come home tired and shitty. He would kiss me on the cheek and stuff his face and tell me how great dinner was.

Does Peter know I am in here? Do I even want him to? Would he think,
Of course she's in the loony bin. Of course I'm glad I'm not with her anymore
. He is out there in the world having fun. He is out there in the world, and whatever he does is no longer my business.

I miss being someone's wife. I am divorced, a failure, a reject. Someone had picked me and then thought,
Whoops, this isn't the one I want
. I had been given a million chances, and I was cavalier with all of them.

If you're the woman, you're the one who everyone pities. The one everyone secretly thinks is the failure.

When I wake up, I open the drawers and find all my stuff is gone. I look for my shoes that were right next to the door, and they're gone too, so I walk up to the nurses' station. Glad-Ass won't talk to me till I'm on the other side of a fat white piece of tape. I get behind the tape and tell her all my stuff is gone. And she tells me, in this tone like she's already said it at least a million times, I'll get my stuff back when I earn it. I tell her I don't understand. She says I'll get points for following rules; little by little, I'll get all my stuff back. I nod, thinking,
These people are fucking nuts
.

They treat you like you are five years old. You are being told what to do by people who are obviously stupid.

Doesn't being here confirm what I always knew deep down? What everyone always knew? I am batshit crazy.

There's a point system. You get points for finishing your food. You get points for participating in therapy. You get points for making art in art therapy. When you get a certain amount of points, you get to make a phone call. When you get a certain amount of points, you get to check out certain things from your own stuff to use during free time.

The windows are tinted, and it always looks gray outside.

In the mornings, they fill us with sugar. Three fluffy brown pancakes we drown in syrup and slather with globs of butter, falling apart all hot in our mouths. Then we drink thick whole milk that clings to our bellies like cream. Then there are glazed donuts and Lucky Charms and Frosted Flakes. I eat two of the pancakes, but soon my stomach feels like it's sticking together, with the milk holding it down like lead. Keisha stacks her pancakes and makes sure they are lined up perfectly around the edges. I watch the little hairs, all sticky and shiny, on her pretty lip.

We're not allowed to have razors, or anything with caffeine, or candy, drugs, or gum. If we are caught with any of these things, we will be punished.

All the girls' legs are so hairy. I touch the fur on my own and wonder how thick it's going to get, and how nice it's going to be when I finally get to shave it, watching the long, soft hairs fall away and leading the razor up, making a path through the forest of hair.

This place is for teaching you about structure. Everyone knows structure helps.

You get used to the routine. You yawn ten minutes before lights out. You wake up ten minutes before the nurse comes in to wake you up. Your stomach growls right before the lunch tray comes.

You hardly ever see your shrink, a fresh-faced young guy with black hair and retro eyeglasses. He is supposed to check in with you once a day, but it's more like every two or three days. You wonder what his cock is like. You have been with enough men to know that no matter what someone looks like, they are capable of being a total freak. He is intelligent. You can tell by the eyes. How some people, like the nurses, have eyes that are dull, just dull and glazed over, like nothing is happening behind them. But the shrink's eyes are contemplative. You wonder what it might feel like to get on your knees and unzip his pants, to feel his hand resting on your head as you take him in your mouth. How he would sigh. You miss making people feel good. Time is so slow. It hasn't been that long. It feels like forever. It's been nine days.

You tell him how you were married once and had your shit together. You tell him all you have to do is finish your thesis and then you will have a master's and maybe could teach. You tell him you've been keeping a journal. You tell him the divorce was for the best. You don't know why you keep lying. Sometimes you tell him you're a liar, but he never questions what you say.

When your mother visits, you just end up fighting. You try and fail to explain, without screaming, how awful this place is. She says it's good for you to be here. You tell her she has no idea what the fuck she's talking about. This place is not good for anyone. She's never known what was good for you because she doesn't know you. She has an imaginary daughter she has mistaken you for. How could you be someone you aren't? She cries, and you feel horrible.

That is the only time she visits. Over the phone, she tells you it's difficult finding someone to drive her. You ask her why she brought you to
DC
if she wasn't going to visit. If you were in New York then at least your friends could have visited. You tell her this is all bullshit anyway; you weren't even trying to hurt yourself. “I take
a few extra Xanaxes because I can't sleep, and you lock me in a fucking nut house!”

“I'm doing the best I can!”

“Yeah, and my husband divorces me. Did you ever think of coming and staying with me like a normal mother would have instead of telling me to get over it? You don't understand what it's like. You don't just get over something like that!”

“There were needles in that apartment. You think I'm an idiot! You think I don't know you had that guy staying there?”

You hang up the phone because you don't know what to say.

You wake up feeling shitty and take your meds and take a piss with the door open. Some of the nurses turn their heads, but some of them look right at you. You don't care if they look anymore. Then you go to the morning meeting. The nurse asks to speak to you privately.

“You need to wear a bra.”

“Why? There are only women here.”

“It's part of the rules to dress appropriately.”

“But what difference does it make?”

“You're refusing to comply with the rules,” she says, looking down at a clipboard.

“No. Jesus, I'm just trying to figure out what the point is.”

“Go back to your room and put on a bra, or you're not getting any points for the day.”

You want to say, “Go ahead.” But you've learned it's not worth it. You know when you're beat. And in this place you're always going to be the loser. The nurse gets to go home and drink coffee and read books however she wants to. She has a life that is progressing. She gets to be outside. She gets to eat when she feels like eating, sleep when she feels like sleeping. Your life is on pause.

The meds must be doing their magic because you don't feel emotions that strongly. You don't cry every night. You stop getting so
angry. Thoughts come and register but nothing overwhelms you. There is this weird optimism, and you have no idea what is generating it or where it comes from. It must be the Prozac—a little pill that makes you feel stupidly happy about absolutely nothing.

You spend all of the free time one morning writing a letter to Ogden. You tell him everything. It's kind of nice to write something longhand. You brought a laptop but aren't allowed to touch it because it has a camera. They don't want anyone's privacy to be violated. They don't give you your books because you're supposed to engage with people.

If you ever had any hope that this might not be a total waste of time, you don't anymore.

There is a young woman who attacked her mother with a knife. There is a woman who lost her kid to cancer and never talks. She's obviously in some kind of shock. There is a girl who thinks you're the funniest person in the ward. She's pretty dumb.

Sometimes it feels like you are being punished, and the
real
program is to make you so miserable that you don't try to use or off yourself again because you may fail and have to come back.

That's pretty much the lesson you take away: next time kill yourself properly, or don't try.

You have group therapy sessions every morning. You have to go around the room and say how you feel. You can't say, “Fine.” “Fine” is not a feeling word. They have a chart with feeling words beneath faces expressing the feelings. Scan the chart. Anxious? Optimistic? Enraged? Excited? What is there to be excited about in a place where each day is exactly the same? They probably increase your meds if you say that.

Sometimes you cry and beg the nurses to let you go out and take a walk. Will you please just take me for a walk?

You see people freak the fuck out. One time someone screams at you. Not words. A black girl with hair so short she doesn't look like a girl stands right in front of you and screams her head off, and you stand there staring, wondering what to do. She could kill you. But then the men in white come and take her away. It doesn't seem right to lock a human up for being sick, but you can no longer muster a sense of outrage.

There is an attractive man who comes with a woman wearing unflattering clothes; they tell us to write poetry. You plagiarize a Counting Crows song and everyone is impressed.

There is a lot of therapy: group therapy, art therapy, writing therapy, the dreaded music therapy. Some people get into that shit. Some people paint with a fury, or draw maniacally and with great concentration. For a solid hour this one girl takes a piece of white paper and makes it dark black. She uses black crayons and writes with a little-kid scrawl, over and over, and when she finishes, she looks somewhat satisfied, and then she picks up another piece of white paper.

I earn enough points to check out the collected works of Robert Lowell. “I am a thorazined fixture / in the immovable square-cushioned chairs / we preoccupy for seconds like migrant birds.”

I call Ogden from the pay phone, but he doesn't pick up. He never picks up. I would bet money he was staring at the number and hitting “Ignore.” I would ignore me too. In the message, I try to sound just broken enough for him to care, but also together enough so he isn't scared I will go batshit crazy on him.

On visiting day, everyone has visitors but me. It's not like I wanted to see my mother, but not having visitors is annoying. Just sitting there trying to read while overhearing parents trying to force small talk. Keisha's cousins have bright sneakers and sneak in food: candy and chicken and soda. The nurses never come in during visiting hours.

Ogden calls. He tells me he's glad I'm getting help. He says he knows it must suck. He says he's proud of me. He gives me some perspective. This is only a stop. Life will go on. I ask him if he misses me, and he says, “Sure.” I can tell he wants to get off the phone. It always feels like there is this meter ticking that runs out before I'm done telling him what I want.