The Heroines (10 page)

“Jealous, Jackie?” Kristina said, arching an eyebrow.

“Hey, new girl!”

“She has a name,” Kristina said.

I looked down at my plate and then carefully up again, hoping she wasn’t addressing me. The girl’s face frightened me; the skin on her cheeks was dry and a handful of bloody pimples dotted her forehead. The trace of an old shiner still ringed her eye, green and yellow. Her shaved head made me think she’d had brain surgery.

“Yeah, you.” Now she pointed her plastic fork at me. “Did you know Mr. Dobson’s sixty?”

“He is not!” Kristina said.

“The old boy’s gonna come cruising up in his Winnebago and drive her over the state line. Down south in Kentucky. Yeah. Down there fifteen-year-olds can marry old men. Hell, you can marry your own brother in those states.”

Kristina dropped her pork chop and raised her hand as if to slap Jackie across the face. “Refrain from describing your dear old dad.”

“Don’tcha think Dobson would’ve made bail by now? He’s been out for
weeks,
“Jackie said. “What’s taking him so long? Maybe he forgot about you!”

“Go jump back in the lake you almost croaked in, Jackie!”

Jackie’s swollen face crumpled. “Nurse Eleanor! Kristina’s talking about group information outside of group!”

Eleanor, too engrossed in her eating to get up, yelled from her table. “Don’t start, you two. You want me calling Mr. Gonzo again?”

Kristina opened her mouth and then clamped it shut, sucking in her lips and sticking out her face toward Jackie. She fastened her lips into a sarcastic little button. She leaned in to me. “All the suicides and runaways have to wear their gowns like that.”

“Jackie, be the bigger person,” Eleanor said. “Move over to the other table. Kristina’s helping Penny with her
transition
.”

“Penny the horseback fantasy chick?”

I did a double-take. How did she know about me? But before the implications of that registered, Kristina clapped her hands and looked at me with wide eyes. “That sounds epic, little sister. You must tell me all! But later, back in our room. Where there aren’t so many spies.” She bugged her eyes at Eleanor. Jackie got up and moved to the nurses’ table.

“Good job avoiding conflict.” One of the other women handed Jackie a cloud-shaped cutout. “Here’s an ice-cream scoop! I caught you being good.”

“Don’t I get a scoop for helping Penny?” Kristina asked.

“You can’t ask for a scoop,” the woman said. She filled Jackie’s water cup from a plastic pitcher. “That’s the whole point of the new system.”

“That makes twenty-five scoops!” Jackie sang.

I’d checked out the scoops on my way to the dining room. Jackie and Kristina had the most scoops, whereas Maria (the one who’d been pawing the window), who hardly seemed to do anything wrong, had two. The biggest troublemakers obviously got the most attention, and thus the most scoops. It was a sign of my warped adjustment that I longed for a tower of scoops all my own. I also longed to have Kristina’s command of the room, though not if it meant giving up her protection. She’d somehow chosen to take me under her wing, and I was grateful for the shelter, however capricious it might be.

M
y madness (as defined by the hospital staff) was the most difficult thing for my thirteen-year-old mind to reconcile. I couldn’t keep it straight. For me, if the Heroines were real, then I was sane (a); if the Heroines were fake, as the hospital staff maintained, then I was insane (b); but if I admitted that the Heroines and Conor were fake, then I was sane (to the hospital staff), but insane in my own eyes (i.e., I’d lived a whole life of complete delusion) (c). So I had to, as the armchair therapists say,
compartmentalize
my story. For (a), I could trust only myself and Mother (though my trust in her was rocky); for (b) I couldn’t speak the truth of (a) to anyone in the hospital; so that (c) could take place and I’d be set free from the Unit. The tricky thing was that I sometimes doubted myself, doubted the Heroines, and wondered if Mother and I were insane. The medication added to this self-doubt, made me fuzzy and unable to remember when to apply (a), (b), or (c) to the right people. Plus I was angry and emotional and possessed at times by the urge to play insane by simply telling the truth to the wrong person.

Kristina wasn’t one of those wrong people. She wanted to know everything about Conor. After dinner that night, I’d passed out early, but the next morning when I awoke, she was sitting cross-legged on her bed, staring at me. I didn’t know how long she’d been up, but she was dressed in pedal pushers and a buttoned-up blouse, her hair in a braid so tight, her eyes were slanted. “Tell me about this king.”

I blinked and climbed out of bed. I wanted to get dressed first. It was odd to have people besides my mother and me talking about the Heroines, but my outburst had made me and my story an object of curiosity—for Eleanor, Keller, the orderlies. And Jackie had made sure every other girl on the floor heard about it. Yet, in a strange way, I found a measure of comfort in the walls of the Unit. No other setting had accommodated the bizarre truth of my home life so well. Kristina would be the first friend I could confide in; my first girlfriend, period. She was (literally) a captive audience. I stepped behind the curtain and changed into shorts and a T-shirt. “You’re not going to believe it,” I said.

“I will, I will, I will!” she sang.

“It sounds really stupid.”

“I don’t care. At least it’s interesting! It’s gotta be better than all these super-boring, super-depressed girls.”

Her words appealed to my vanity. I wanted to be singled out from the other girls. I wanted to believe that Kristina and I were the highest-functioning girls in the Unit. I whipped back the curtain and sat down on my bed. “All right. But don’t laugh. These characters from books come to my house.”

“Cool!” The story enthralled her; she believed every word of it. I was so grateful for the attention, and she asked so many questions, that before long I’d given up everything. “You should have seen Ophelia!” I bragged.

“What was she wearing?”

“Just regular clothes.”

“Bummer!” She hated the fact that the Heroines didn’t wear the clothes from their stories. “Have any other characters from plays come to your house?”

“This one Southern lady. Blanche Du—”

“DuBois! Blanche DuBois, I love her!” She jumped off her bed and zigzagged between the La-Z-Boys. “My dumb school wouldn’t let Mr. Dobson do
Streetcar Named Desire
. They’re so uptight!” She laid the back of her hand on her forehead and affected a Southern drawl. “‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers!’ Mr. Dobson gave me the book. Oh, what was she like?”

“Drunk all the time.”

“Where’d she get the booze?”

“From some guys who worked on the lawn.”

“Let’s do the scene where Blanche tries to talk Stella out of staying with Stanley.”

“I don’t know it by heart.”

“I’ll write down your lines.” Kristina ran to her nightstand, her braid swinging down her back, and pulled out a notebook. I’d quickly noticed how her hairstyle and demeanor fluctuated with her moods. As she scribbled, I told her more stories about Blanche, who was always talking about being sweaty, needing a bath, wanting her talcum. Blanche had wandered the Homestead at night with a dripping candle. One afternoon I caught her making out on the power mower with the teenage lawn guy. She must have come to stay with us right before they put her away. At ten, I thought she was nuts. Usually the Heroines arrived in pathetic states of a different order: heartbroken, mourning a death, something. But Blanche’s state was all her own. “I hadn’t recognized her as a Heroine until this summer, when I’d read the play at theater camp,” I said.

“There. I wrote only your lines,” Kristina said. “I know mine by heart. You’re Stella. You start.” She unraveled her braid and undid two buttons on her blouse.

I looked down at the notebook and then faced her, thrusting my arm out like a knight about to duel. “You saw him at his worst last night!”

“On the contrary! I saw him at his best. What such a man has to offer is animal force and he gave a wonderful exhibition of that! But the only way to live with such a man is to go to bed with him. And that’s your job, not mine! I have a plan for us both—to get us both out!” She looked at me expectantly, and I took the cue.

“You take it for granted that I’m in something I want to get out of.”

“I take it for granted that you still have enough memory of Belle Reve to find this place”—she opened her arms and surveyed our cold hospital room—”impossible to live with!”

“You’re taking entirely too much for granted!”

“I can’t believe you’re in earnest.”

“No?” I said.

“I understand how it happened—a little.” Kristina rested her hand on the bedrail and shook her head in disdain. “You saw him in uniform, an officer, not here but—” Kristina collapsed on the bed. “Ugh! I wish I knew the whole thing.”

“That’s so cool that you remember so much.”

“Yeah, even on meds I have a good memory for plays.” She turned on her side and pulled her hair over her face, running her fingers through the tangles. I could tell she was thinking about Mr. Dobson. “Why didn’t your mother tell you who Blanche was?”

“She doesn’t like me to know. She’s afraid I’ll interfere with their”—I rolled my eyes—”destinies.”

“Could you?” Kristina sat up straight.

“How do I know? My mom’s just paranoid and—” I cut myself off. As an only child, I wasn’t used to discussing my mother with anyone. I felt guilty about betraying her, but the intense relief of finally speaking the unspeakable felt too good.

“What if when the Heroines went back to their stories, the plot changed? You could wreak havoc!” She jumped on the bed in a crouch, her knees sticking out like a frog’s. “Do you think you could trade places with them?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know how they get here. And then they just disappear. In the middle of the night, after breakfast, whenever.”

“They vanish into thin air?”

“It’s not like they go poof! It’s just that you go looking for them, and they’re gone.”

“Have you followed them?”

“No.” I hadn’t thought of doing that. “The Heroines were mostly annoying to me. They stole my mother’s attention. And Franny Glass was the only one even close to my age.” I didn’t want to admit how I’d lost Franny.

“You could so fuck things up!” Kristina punched the air, jubilant again. She swung her hair over her shoulder. “I would have totally warned Blanche that they were coming to take her to the nuthouse. Nobody deserves that! Anything beats being locked up. Even turning tricks.”

“When I tried to warn Madame Bovary, my mom slapped me!”

“I’d’ve slapped her back.”

“Slap your mom?”

“If she hit me first. Not that she’s around enough to bother.”

“My mom’s just locking me up to keep me away from Conor.”

“Man, she knows you’re not lying about him, yet she signed you in.” Kristina grabbed a pink plastic hairbrush off her nightstand. Tossing her hair over her shoulder, she brushed it all to one side. “Your mom’s probably jealous ‘cause this hunky king is into you. My mom’s jealous of me. She’d kill for a guy like Mr. Dobson. Even if he only teaches high school and she’s a full professor. She’d take him in a minute. Most men are afraid of her.”

“My mom was afraid Conor raped me. They tested me.”

“I had one of those too.” She scowled. “They’ll use any excuse to shove their hands up your twat.” She trained her eyes on me. “I’m so jealous of you. Your life is so cool with the Heroines coming and going. It’s probably never boring like mine.”

“Don’t be jealous,” I said. Her confession disturbed me; something strong and almost hateful glinted in her eyes. “And you can’t tell anybody about the Heroines. My mom swears that—”

“Knock, knock!” The woman who’d given Jackie the scoop at dinner the previous night poked her head in the room. Her voice had the high, squeaky singsong of a camp counselor. A batik poncho hung to her dimpled elbows. I hadn’t noticed in the dining hall that she was so big.

“Group doesn’t start for another half hour, Pee-iggy.” Kristina called her Piggy, instead of Peggy, but in a garbled way that made it impossible to detect the slight vowel difference. Kristina pointed at the wall clock with the hairbrush. The clear bristles were thick with black strands.

“I realize that, Kristina.” Peggy’s smile involved clenched teeth. “I’d like to meet with Penny before group, to get acquainted.”

She pointed at each of us with the hairbrush. “Penny, this is Pee-iggy. Pee-iggy, Penny. There. You’re acquainted.”

“Thank you for that nice introduction. But I’d like to speak with Penny a teensy bit more than that.”

“Can I come?” Kristina asked sweetly.

“The sign-up sheet for one-on-one time is on my door. I’d love to meet with you individually when my schedule permits.”

Kristina unfolded her legs and stuck her nose in the air. “Maybe. I’ll see if my own schedule permits.”

“How does a little Penny-Peggy time sound, Penny?”

I shrugged. She made it sound as if I had a choice, when I knew I didn’t. I was having so much fun with Kristina, I resented the intrusion. “I still have to brush my teeth.”

“We can stop in the bathroom on the way.”

I got up and grabbed my toiletry kit from the dresser. As we walked out, Kristina yelled, “Don’t tell her anything about Blanche and Ophelia!”

Their names struck me like bullets in my back. I actually checked over my shoulder to see if Mother was around. “Don’t say anything—”

She giggled. “I won’t! Gosh!”

I was suddenly afraid that I’d made a big mistake telling Kristina about the Heroines. It was the Big Family Secret, and while it relieved me to discuss it, my training was so inbred that I checked over my shoulder again to make sure Mother wasn’t within earshot. I didn’t know why I’d felt so free to tell Kristina everything. Hadn’t I been feeling weird earlier about Jackie talking about Conor? But then I’d gone and blathered on about it again. It wasn’t just the meds that were making me feel out of control. It was my own inexperience. I didn’t recognize myself. I didn’t know what I was doing.

After I’d washed up, I followed Peggy down the shiny hall to the group room, a windowless enclave brightened by inspirational posters of sunsets and kittens. One Norman Rockwell poster showed a little girl clutching her doll while a doctor held a stethoscope to its chest. The slogan read, “What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?” A framed diploma proved Peggy had received her bachelor’s in psychology from Loyola two months earlier.

Peggy sat down at her metal desk, gesturing to the chair on the other side. Right behind her head was the coup de grâce: a closeup poster of pale pink ballet slippers, with the slogan, “If you can dream it, you can become it.” I had the same one in my bedroom, and it irritated me to see it here, as mine was a prized birthday gift from my mother. Behind me, a horseshoe ring of folding chairs sat waiting for the others.

“Sooo,” Peggy sang, opening a large manila file. “Dr. Keller says you’re not talking much.”

I shrugged and stared at the objects on her desk: a hollowed-out birch branch loaded with pens, a brown stapler, a monthly blotter covered in scribbles, an owl candle that had never been lit.

“Can you tell me, in your own words, why you think you’re here on the Unit?”

“No.”

Peggy picked up a pencil and pressed the pink eraser into her plump cheek. “Is there any reason why you don’t want to tell me?”

I said nothing.

The eraser disappeared in her cheek. “Okay, let’s move on, then.” Her squeaky voice made her sound younger than Kristina. “You’ve met several of the girls, yes? Kristina, obviously, Alice—”

“Which one is she?”

“How shall I describe Alice?” Peggy looked up at the ceiling, tapping her temple with the pencil. “She likes chess…”

“With her imaginary friend,” I said.

“Yes, imaginary friends…”

I’d bungled and backed myself into a self-revelatory place. Peggy let the silence grow. I avoided her gaze, focused on a poster of a rainbow straddling a sparkling stream: “Peace begins in the heart.”

She squinted and gave me a sparked-with-tears look of pity, complete with frown and furious blinking. A sad clown face! People probably told her she had such a pretty face—straight teeth, blue eyes, pert nose; unfortunately, it was lost in fat. “Anything you want to say on the topic of imaginary friends?” she tried again.