Fletcher Flora - Desperate Asylum

“I could bring it up in a tray,” she said.

“I do not want any breakfast, Mrs. Lamb.”

“Very well. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Yes, there is. You can go away and leave me alone.” Mrs. Lamb flushed and left, slamming the door, and Lisa began immediately to wish that she hadn’t said what she had, and then she began to wonder if it would be possible to remember even a fraction of the times she had said something and wished afterward that she hadn’t, and she knew that it would not. Oh, Christ, what a bitch you are, she thought. What a bitch you are, and what a day it has begun to be with your very gracious treatment of this woman who wished for nothing but to be kind and to bring you your breakfast on a tray. It is quite apparent already that this is a day which should be eliminated, that it would be a good thing to skip at once to tomorrow, but it is also quite apparent that the only way to eliminate a day is to live it, so there is nothing to be done, and after the day is the night, and what in Christ’s name is to be done with the night?

She was beginning to feel uncomfortable, and so she got out of bed and went into the bathroom and then returned and lay down on the bed again and began to think of those she had known, of Alison and Bella and others, who were no longer threats in themselves but were symbols of the threat that survived them. This was not good, was part of the bad day getting worse, and she tried thinking of Carl, how remarkably kind he was, and of Avery, how even more remarkably kind he was, and she wished to God they would quit crucifying her with their cursed kindness, and this wish made her feel guilty and debased and contributed more to the bad day getting worse than Alison and Bella and the others. Trying to achieve a kind of neutrality in her thinking, she considered the party at the country club, but this was no help because the party was assuming the proportions of a terrifying ordeal. And that, of course, was the clue to the bad day. When the past is a depressant and the future is a threat, the bad day is a trap between them, and there is no escape unless you can find it in a bottle.

Thinking of a drink, she began to want one badly, but it would never do to drink today because of tonight, which had to be gotten through somehow and would be difficult enough at best and could be survived only by drinking just ahead of time and just enough to establish and secure the lift that was her only protection. There had been other times when she had resolved not to drink, either for some specific reason or just because she was convinced that drinking was bad for her and should be stopped, and she had then tried substituting coffee for alcohol on the grounds that it was easier to do without something if you immediately put something else in its place instead of leaving an emptiness where it had been. Every time she had wanted a drink and was in danger of submitting, she had made or bought a cup of coffee and drunk it, but eventually she had given up this technique simply because it was impossible for anyone to go on drinking that much coffee indefinitely. Now, however, though it had never worked before, she decided that she would try it again, just for this one day, and she got off the bed and put on slippers and a robe and went downstairs to the kitchen.

It was very hot in the kitchen, because it was not air-conditioned like some of the rooms in the house. She found the glass pot of coffee that had been left over from Avery’s breakfast and put it on the stove and switched on the electricity and sat down to wait in a straight chair by the table. She could hear Mrs. Lamb vacuuming in the front part of the house. The power mower started up again outside and ran a little while and died, and she decided that the yardman was adjusting the motor or something, and that was why he was running it even though there was no grass to cut. It was really extremely hot. A still, oppressive heat in which you could hear, if you listened intently, a whisper of menacing movement. Perspiration gathered in her armpits and trickled down over her ribs. Strangely, the perspiration felt icy cold. She listened to the menacing whisper in the still heat and was suddenly aware that she was about to scream. She closed her throat abruptly upon the scream, and it died with a whimper in a spasm of pain. Getting up, she went to the cabinet where the china was kept and got a cup and carried it to the stove. She poured coffee into the cup and returned with it to her chair at the table. Sitting with her elbows on the table and her head supported by her hands, she stared down into the black liquid and knew that it wasn’t going to work this time either, the technique of substitution, and that she was certainly going to have a drink in spite of all tricks and resolutions. Once this truth was accepted, it was only reasonable to believe that the drink had as well come now as later. Leaving the coffee untasted in its cup on the table, she went into the hall and down the hall to the library, where there was a liquor cabinet. She got a bottle and a glass from the cabinet and carried them upstairs to her room.

Just one, she thought. Just one small drink will be quite sufficient, and there will be no need for another until tonight, when drinking will be expected and acceptable.

She poured the drink and drank it and lay down again on the bed and began to think about the party at the country club that night. It was going to be only a small party with a few people there to whom Avery thought he was obligated for one thing or another, and she had safely gotten through several more formidable affairs since she had come to Corinth, and there was actually no reason at all why it should be dreaded so excessively. She lay there and told herself this, but it did no good, and no matter how she diagnosed the situation or tried to see it for the small matter that it should have been, she understood that the party was somehow established in a pattern of peril, the consummation of the bad day that had started with waking, and that it should., if possible, be avoided at any cost. This was at first a feeling, but it was soon a conviction, and avoidance of the party was essential to survival. She started scheming how this could best be accomplished, and she came to the conclusion after quite a while that she would simply say that she was too ill to go. This would not be, anyhow, an absolute lie, for she was really not feeling at all well. She had slept poorly in the night, and there was a terrible pressure inside her skull. What she needed, she thought, was to go back to sleep, and if she had another small drink she might possibly be able to do it.

She had it and began to think about Ed Page, who had been there waiting to be thought about all the time but had been resisted up to this point. Now she thought about Ed deliberately in all the ways she had thought about her over and over again, and this was a mistake, as she very well knew, for Ed was the siren of a shining, deadly island, the symbol of a particular ruin. In the torment of thinking, however, there was at least a kind of release from depression, the insubstantial peace of submission. Inviting Eel and Emerson to the party at the club had been a suicidal thing to do, exceeding even her usual proclivity for doing suicidal things, and she had alternated afterward between excitement and dread, and finally had refused to think about it at all. But now it was different. Now there was nothing to be lost in thinking about it, because she was herself not going to the party, and it no longer mattered. She lay and thought, and in the uneasy peace thus established, because she was exhausted, she eventually went back to sleep.

She awoke in the middle of the afternoon with the feeling that she had been on the brink of disaster and had awakened just in time, not to avoid it, but to delay it. Her heart was beating hard and fast, and she lay and listened to its beating, feeling the force of it against her ribs. Danger had slipped with her from the sleeping to the waking world and was hovering with infinite patience in the silent room. She got up abruptly and the room, with the motion, became violently alive, its parts merging and spinning and absorbing in an instant all the light of the world. She sat down on the edge of the bed in darkness until the dizziness passed, and she remembered that she had eaten nothing all day and would certainly have to take something into her stomach soon, even though the thought of it made her feel faintly nauseated. Mrs. Lamb was surely gone, because she worked only a half day on Saturdays, but perhaps she had prepared a cold lunch of some kind before she left. If so, it would be in the refrigerator, and she decided that she would go down and see, but first she would have a shower and get dressed.