The Long Journey Home (32 page)

She responded in an open, friendly manner. “Yeah, you sound like you’re from Georgia, too. I grew up in Dalton.”

“I grew up in Cairo,” I said.

“I’ve never met anyone from Georgia up here!” she exclaimed.

“Neither have I! Would you like to join us?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said enthusiastically, and came over and sat down next to me. We introduced ourselves. Then she began to talk in a rapid, animated way. She was divorced, had no children, and wrote songs that she sang, accompanying herself on her guitar. We talked about Georgia clay, live oak trees, and Spanish moss. I told her I was a poet. Maybe we’d write a song together. I was having a wonderful time when I felt a heavy darkness descend on Dr. Turcotte.

He turned to Jeanie, my new friend, and announced: “Margaret’s sexually attracted to you.” This was clearly intended to shock and intimidate her, but she dismissed him and his remark as casually as she might have flicked away a fly that had landed on the sandwich she’d brought with her from the bar. Without missing a beat in the cadence of our conversation, she continued: “Margaret, wouldn’t it be fun to write some music together and take it south?”

The doctor was clearly left out of the conversation. He sat glumly eating, while Jeanie and I talked about Georgia and music. At the end of the evening, she gave me her phone number and address, and we agreed to get together the next day.

From here on, the story of my stay in Newport with Dr. Turcotte is filled with memory lapses caused by shock and increasing psychosis.

We went to the room. Dr. Turcotte took his clothes off and stood at the window in his undershirt and underpants. I got ready for bed, got into my bed, and pulled the cover over me. Dr. Turcotte walked across the room, pulled the cover of my bed back down, and climbed in. I sucked my breath in and held it. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He said he was my brother; I’d always felt physically if not emotionally safe with him. Now he was pressing his body against mine. My heart beat rapidly and my breathing was shallow.

“How voluptuous you feel,” he said, kneading my flesh. His fingers dug into me with such force that I imagined him bruising my bones. There was such hatred in his touch. Hatred. I felt frightened
and confused. Nothing in our relationship had prepared me for this. Suddenly he was all over me, his frenzied hands everywhere, digging and digging. What was he trying to do? I tried to push his hands away, but he was determined and strong, pinning my body down with his while I fought to twist myself from under him. Almost thirty years have passed, and still I can sometimes feel the hatred in his hands. I remember him stopping to take a shower while I fell asleep, exhausted. Then I was once again startled awake as he climbed onto me and resumed the struggle.

I lost all sense of time. Many days and nights could have passed. Or only one or two. Once he went away and returned with some antipsychotic drug and I took it without protest. Then another drug. Once he returned with a little tin of candies. I opened the tin and became violently sick from the smell.

He undressed and got into the other bed.

“Come here, Margaret,” he commanded, stretching his arm toward me and sweeping it back toward himself. “Come here.”

He acted like I was an animal that he was determined to train to mute obedience.

In a chair across the room sat a large crocheted clown. I remember trading my heavy, beautifully wrought Celtic cross for it in the gift shop.
What an ugly thing that clown is
, I thought. Yet my eyes fastened onto it steadfastly, as if my life depended on it.

I looked at the crocheted clown and thought of Daddy. How hard he had worked to make us children laugh. I must have wanted the clown because something about it made me think of Daddy’s sense of humor. Thinking about Daddy made me feel secure. I learned what love feels like through Daddy’s touch.

“Come here,” Dr. Turcotte commanded, again stretching his arm toward me and sweeping it back toward himself. This time, I thought of Nazis marching by the thousands, then their salute: “Heil Hitler.” Dr. Turcotte’s gesture became the Nazi salute. I felt nauseated.

And lost.

Then darkness, a deep, thick darkness. And silence that felt like strangulation.

Then I was in another room in the motel. Helen was lying on the bed beside me. Chris was pacing back and forth. Talking quickly in intense metaphors, I was telling him about how he himself was the Future. Jim was there too. I got up and began to sprinkle some sort of bath powder over the room, explaining that I was performing a spiritual ritual, though I have no idea what I might have meant.

Dr. Turcotte came into the room. Seeing him, I threatened to hurl my heavy Frye boots through the picture window. “No,” he said firmly. “Don’t throw those boots.”

I turned to Jim, and he and I went down the hall and into the room that Dr. Turcotte and I had shared earlier. We sat at a table by the window and talked. The draperies were open, and sunlight flooded the room. I said nothing about my struggle with the doctor. I felt ashamed. Had I done something to provoke him? I didn’t ask Jim why Dr. Turcotte had called them all to come down. I thought the doctor was afraid of how upset he’d made me.

After my talk with Jim, I went back to my room and lay down. I lay there in silence a long time.

Days and nights become one long, thick fog.
Maybe everything is my fault
. The thought churned in my mind, which became a confused tangle of self-condemnation and fear. I thought of Suzanne. I thought:
If I focus on her hard enough, will she feel my thoughts and come to get me?
For hours I lay on the bed, eyes closed, my mind focused on Suzanne.

Of course Suzanne didn’t come.

For days I got up from the bed only to go to the bathroom. I neither ate nor bathed. I closed my eyes and thought of Suzanne.
Please come get me
, I pleaded silently.
Please
.

“You have to get up and take a bath.”

Whose voice is that?
I asked myself.
Dr. Turcotte’s voice with the same commanding
tone he’d used when he said, “Come here, Margaret.” I don’t want to think of that. Keep your eyes closed
, I told myself.
Keep your eyes closed
.

“Do you want to take a bath?”

It was not Dr. Turcotte’s voice this time.

I felt a hand on my thigh. The touch was firm but gentle.

Trustworthy.

Jeanie’s touch.

I opened my eyes.

“Hi, Jeanie.”

“Hi, Margaret. Someone found my phone number in your purse and called, asking me to come over. They say you’ve not been out of bed in days.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to take a bath. Would you stay with me in the bathroom?”

“Of course I would, honey.” Her thick Southern drawl felt like a warm hug.

I got my clothes together while she ran the bathwater.

She sat on the toilet, smoked a cigarette, and talked with me while I bathed.

I got out of the bathtub, dried myself, and dressed. It felt good to be clean.

I brushed my teeth.

Again there are blank spaces.

Now we are all in the restaurant. Brightness. I was aware of brightness everywhere. Out the window the sky was cloudless with a scattering of gulls. The ocean stretched its blue to the horizon. Lunch was over. The young people left Newport for Northampton.

The doctor and I remained seated. I was writing something in my notebook about the sky being the blue of one of Grandmother’s china teacups. I was still drugged, but my mind, like the day, was clearer. Dr. Turcotte took Ethel’s credit card from his wallet and handed it to the waitress. Once more he’d become the familiar man I knew. His eyes no longer frightened me like they did when he’d
looked from his bed to mine, commanding that I obey him.
Don’t think about that
, I told myself.
Don’t think about that
. He was calm now, and self-assured. How could he have possibly …

Denial took root in my mind. Even before we left Newport, it sprouted and began to grow wild and rampant like the kudzu vines I saw in Georgia when I was a child. How rapidly it covered everything in its path.

On our way out of Newport, Dr. Turcotte drove me to Jeanie’s apartment. He rested on the living room couch while she and I sat in her kitchen and talked. She kept telling me that she didn’t trust Dr. Turcotte. She told me that she was very psychic and had led the police to a murdered woman’s body just by holding the woman’s scarf.

“Believe me,” she said, exhaling a cloud of smoke and inhaling again. “That man isn’t someone to put your trust in.” I couldn’t make myself tell her what had happened with Dr. Turcotte. My voice was rapidly growing weaker, and to talk at all was a great effort. It was easier to listen to Jeanie.

For dinner, she scrambled eggs, fried bacon, and made toast. I looked around her kitchen at all her knickknacks, but the only thing I remember is a large, pale blue crescent moon. It hung on the wall over—I remember now—a small maple table with its captain’s chairs.

That meal was one of the few that I remember when Dr. Turcotte didn’t monopolize the conversation. Perhaps he sensed Jeanie’s distrust of him. He buttered his toast quietly and ate in silence. We spent the night there. Dr. Turcotte slept on the couch. I slept with Jeanie, who gave me an enormous terry-cloth teddy bear to hold as I went to sleep.

The next morning Dr. Turcotte and I left for home. By that time, I could only speak in a hoarse, labored whisper. He was driving my
car. As he spoke, his tone made me think of a puffed-up rooster in the chicken yard.

“You know, when we got to Newport, I opened the Bible and my finger landed on a verse that said, ‘Do not touch this woman,’ ” he said, pausing as if consciously giving me time to take in what he’d said. I felt the energy drain out of my body and spirit.

He glanced at me. Then he turned to face the road ahead. “But I was curious,” he said flatly.

Curious?
Fragments of memories of his hands on my body, probing, digging in my flesh, flashed across my mind. Curiosity. Cruelty. His touch had been more cruel than John’s touch had ever been. In some way, John had cared. To Dr. Turcotte, I’d been a puzzlement. And somehow a threat.

I lay down on the car seat beside him and closed my eyes. Drugs still sedated me. I felt such relief that the doctor had returned to his normal self. It was like John coming back to his normal self after a night of drunken cruelty. It was like, when I was a very young child, Mother’s voice returning to normal after she’d said in a strange, shrill voice: “Your mother has left this body, and I—the wicked witch—am your mother now.”

The doctor drove. I slept. When I woke, I pretended to be asleep until I could no longer bear the cramped position I lay in. I sat up, relieved to see the Springfield skyline.

I’d soon be home.

I
CAME DOWN WITH AN EXTREME CASE OF THE FLU
. F
OR DAYS
I
LAY IN
bed with a fever, cough, and stuffy nose. My whole body ached. I only got up to go to the bathroom. One afternoon someone left the TV on. I couldn’t make myself get up and walk across the room to turn it off. I lay there, miserable, listening to some soap opera I didn’t want to hear. Finally I reached for pen and paper on the bedside table and wrote a satirical poem about the soap opera. I ended by saying that I wished that I, like the woman on the show, could fall into the arms of the handsome police officer who would make everything all right. After I actually did get involved with the police I realized that in the poem I had known more than I’d recognized consciously.

But that came much later.

I lost track of time. Was it a year or more that I was depressed? Two years? I continued seeing Dr. Turcotte, never talking with him about Newport. I knew he’d deny what had happened just as he’d denied other things. Father Gray was a prominent and respected priest. Who would believe me with Father Gray on the doctor’s side? I did talk to Helen, but she didn’t believe me. She’d begun to work part-time for Dr. Turcotte, and I could see that her commitment to him
was growing stronger as she was moving away from me. Chris, too, wouldn’t listen when I tried to talk to him about Newport. I guess he thought it was just more of my craziness. Or maybe he was afraid that what I claimed was true and he couldn’t face it.

Dr. Turcotte had driven me to the Brattleboro Retreat, my friend Helen and Dr. Turcotte’s daughter June on either side of me. Chris sat in the front seat by the doctor. I no longer remember when or why I was moved from a room in the main ward, but the room I was moved to felt nightmarish to me. It was small, windowless, and cold, and the bare mattress on the cot was hard. There was nothing else in the room. I was barefooted and had only my raincoat to cover my naked body. “There was no such room,” my friend Helen later insisted. “Not in that hospital.” But in my memory, I lay on a cot in a small locked room.

I called out, asking for a blanket.

There was no answer.

I got up and walked to the door, hugging the raincoat to me. I turned the doorknob. The door was locked. My teeth were chattering.

“Help me,” I pleaded. “Please help me!”

No answer.

I called louder, beating on the door with my fist. “Help!” I screamed. “Help!”

No one came.

“Someone, please bring me a blanket! I’m freezing!”

Footsteps approached, paused, and then went on past the room and down the hall.

I called out again.

Waited.

Called out again.

Finally, I gave up and went back to bed, pressing my back against the wall for what warmth it might have held. There was only the hard smoothness of the cold plaster against my backbone. How long could I endure such cold? Even in the state hospital the temperature had been comfortable in the solitary-confinement cell. And I’d had all my clothes on then.
Why was I stripped of clothes here except for this raincoat?
I thought.
Who would permit staff to strip and freeze a patient like this?
Once more I called out.