Paula Bomer - Inside Madeleine

“You must come over for dinner sometime. To our house in Newton. Yes, yes. You must.” Then he paused. “I pay five dollars an hour to someone like you.”

“Someone like me?”

“Yes, a student. Later, I may give you a raise. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Then he began talking about himself. How he came from Morocco, how his wife was a psychologist, how they came to own and operate these homes. How in the past decade, the institutions were emptying out due to the great strides in medication and treatment and now half-way houses were the way to take care of these people. How they were so much more “civilized” than the large mental institutions.

When Mary got home it wasn’t quite yet noon. She went straight to her room and fell asleep for three hours.

She started work the following Monday. She arrived early, but not so early that she had to walk around for half an hour. Brigid was there. Brigid would work with her for the first few days. This comforted her.

This time, she stopped and said hello to the same group of smokers that were there on the day of her interview, and introduced herself.

“Are you going to work here?” a man with a mustache asked. He sounded angry.

“Yes.”

“I’m Carol,” the woman said, her voice breathy and raspy from smoke. “Nice to meet you.” Carol’s face was pockmarked. Her hair was greasy and she was very overweight.

“Nice to meet all of you,” Mary said and entered the house.

Brigid was in the office with the door open, dispensing meds. A few clients waited patiently as she scooped out a number of pills and put them in their hands.

“You’re early.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Brigid said, as the last person waiting took their meds. “You like to apologize, don’t you?”

“I don’t know.” Mary reddened.

“You know what they say about people who are early?”

“What?”

“They’re anxious. Early people are anxious, on-time people are obsessive compulsive, and late people are hostile, or passive-aggressively hostile.”

“I never read that in any of my psych books.”

“I bet you haven’t.”

The shift was eight hours, from nine until five. She also would have a night shift once a week, which was six hours long, from five until eleven. At that point, the house was locked up until the morning. Brigid introduced her to all of the clients that were lingering around, showed her the rooms they slept in, the bathrooms, the two common rooms. One of the common rooms, on the ground floor, had a television set turned on at all times. This was where the majority of the clients hung out. Toward the end of the shift, Brigid took her in to the office and closed the door.

“So, what do you think?”

“Well, it all seems fine.” Mary didn’t know what to say.

“I’ll write in the log book, but I thought you might want to know how that goes, or talk to me about anything you may have observed.”

“Okay.”

Brigid held the log book in her lap and swiveled the chair around to where Mary sat on the couch. “Well, I think Carol seems depressed. She’s manic depressive and I think she may be cycling into a depression.”

“What should we do?”

“Make note of it, for one. And then bring it up during meeting time.”

This didn’t seem like doing a whole lot. “Can we do anything for her?”

Brigid smiled. “Like what?”

“Well, treat her in some way?”

“We could maybe up her anti-depressants. Listen, I was going to assign you two clients to spend extra time with. Everyone here has two clients who they take out for coffee or something like that, about once a week. Of course, you can only take them out if there is another person here. But I’m often here, as you’ll find out. If you are here alone, you can spend some time with them in their room. It’s an hour a week, approximately. Would you like Carol to be one of them?”

“Okay.” Mary didn’t actually want Carol. Carol disgusted her. But that was what she was here for, she told herself. To help these people.

“And how about Bob?”

“The skinny man with the glasses?”

“Yes. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic and he’s also mildly retarded. We call that dual-diagnosed. He’s a sweetie. He loves to go to the pizza place for coffee. Although, we’re trying to cut back his coffee intake. Try and get him to get decaf. The caffeine makes him more paranoid, you see.”

“I see.”

By Friday, Mary felt ready for something and she wasn’t sure what it was, but it turned out she was ready to get drunk for the first time in her life. Or at least, that’s what happened.

Darrell and Clay were having a party. They, too, lived in Allston, a short walk down Harvard Avenue and then a few blocks into a tree-lined side street. Larissa’s face was expertly powdered a dull white and her lips were painted red. She carried a vintage silver purse that shone in the summer night. She smoked a joint as they walked.

Besides smoking cigarettes, Larissa had begun smoking pot at night, which Mary found alarming, but fascinating as well.

“Want some?” Larissa held the joint out to her.

“No, thanks.”

“You know, I’m thinking of switching to a film major next year.”

“Really? Why? Why would you do that?”

“Because I want to make movies. I want to make art .”

“Oh.” Mary hunched her shoulders down, feeling terribly disappointed. “What about understanding the world? Understanding human nature? Or helping people?”

“I never wanted to help people,” Larissa said, as they turned toward Darrell and Clay’s. “That’s your thing. And I think I can better understand the world through art, through movies.”

The party was big and loud. Music blared — The Cure, The Cult, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Smiths, Meat Beat Manifesto. Outside of Pittsburgh, where Mary grew up, people listened to Foreigner or Van Halen. To rock music. Just being in the room with these people, the music playing, made her feel sophisticated. The room was filled with smoke and Mary kept going back to the keg.

“My father loves me so much, he offered to buy me a car to come home. I said, no way. I’m staying in Boston,” she said to three or four people at different times.

“Why does my mother hate me? Why? I never did anything to her, I didn’t,” she said to Darrell, at around two in the morning. They were sitting on the couch and she was leaning into his shoulder, feeling very emotional. It felt good, to be so full of feeling. Such tragic feeling! The party was over. Only she and Larissa remained. And Larissa had disappeared into a bedroom with Clay.

Darrell looked down at her. He was taller than her. This fact alone made her heart surge with a sort of love for him. He tried to say something, but he was too drunk and his mouth just hung open for a while.

“I think my father would sleep with me if he could. I think he loves me that much,” the words came out, dirty and awful. The next morning, waking on the very same couch at Darrell and Clay’s house, she would remember saying those words, and her head throbbed viciously with shame.

Monday at work, Brigid said, “Why don’t you take Bill out for some coffee? Try to make it decaf, okay? But be back in time for the staff group meeting at one.” She handed Mary three dollars.

Bill was standing in the TV room, watching the television with the sound off. He stood back in the corner, wringing his hands. He was an exceptionally thin man, tall with gray hair. His head lolled to the side and he wore very thick glasses. He was the sort of person that by looking at him, you could see that something was wrong with him. Not all the clients were like that, but many were, if not most. Some looked normal and even acted semi-normal. Bill looked wrong.