Elizabeth Flock - But Inside I'm Screaming

“So, you said you’ve been here before?” Isabel starts slow.

Lark senses an interview but can’t withdraw if she wants to inhale any of Kristen’s or Isabel’s smoke. She’s stuck.

“Yeah.” Lark’s addiction takes precedence over privacy. “This is my fourth time.”

“Oh.” Isabel is the one stuck now since she has learned it’s an unspoken rule to let others tell you why they’ve checked in, not to push it out of them. But Isabel is a reporter at heart and knows how to interview. “Is it difficult coming back?”

“Naw.” Lark is looking her straight in the eye. “This time I’m trying to be proactive,” Lark confides. “Father’s Day is tomorrow. That’s my hardest day all year.”

They look at each other for a moment. Kristen gets up to light another cigarette and Lark looks down into her lap.

The eyes of the cat planter gleamed like marbles.

“But why?” Isabel asked, tracing the line of the tail.

“You’re just too young.” Her mother briskly moved Isabel’s hair out of her face. Still, wisps stuck to the tears on her cheek.

“He said I could come. He said.”

The plastic fork was stuck in the soil, the card still in its three prongs. “Sorry, kiddo. I’ll see you soon. Love, Dad.”

“I know that he said you could go, but Dad has lots more meetings than he thought he would. They like the new line of cars Dad is showing them. Isn’t that great? Anyway, he told me on the phone that you can definitely go on the next business trip with him.”

“But I wanted to go on this one,” she sobbed. “Why? Why can’t I just go? I can wait in the hotel room for him till he gets finished with his meetings. I can just wait there.”

“Stop whining, Isabel. Now, I’ve about had it with this conversation. You’re only eight. You’re too young to stay in a hotel room all day alone. And you’d get hungry….”

“I could order room service. Like Eloise. I could order something to eat and wait for him.”

“What did I just finish saying? Next time you can go with him. The next trip he has that doesn’t have too many meetings you can go on.”

“He always has too many meetings,” she said miserably. She stood up to go.

“Don’t forget your new plant. It’s so pretty in this planter.”

Isabel reached for the cat with the shiny eyes.

“Dad, I’m trying to help you up to bed.” Isabel’s legs were buckling under his weight even as she tried to distribute it more evenly by pulling his limp arm tighter around her shoulders.

“I’m so sorry,” he was mumbling repeatedly to his teenage daughter.

“It’s okay, Dad,” she lied. “Just try to walk up these stairs. Six stairs, that’s all you got.”

“One father, that’s all you got,” he muttered.

“Lucky me,” she said, more to herself than out loud. “Come on, Dad. Three more stairs. Here we go. You can do it.”

“Why do you even bother?” he asked, trying to stand up on his own for the first time since his daughter shoveled him off the bar stool in the living room.

“Huh? Come on, Dad, two more stairs.” Isabel looked down the long dark hallway to her parents’ bedroom and then focused again on the remaining stairs.

“Why do you even bother.” This time it wasn’t a question. “You know you have no family.”

A sharp pain radiated down her back. “What did you just say?”

“You have no family,” her father said, his tone mean and cold, his words no longer slurred.

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” she said, hoping she was right and that her drunk father was babbling about nothing again.

“You have no family.”

Isabel stood on the top stair and flinched.

“You have no family.”

Isabel would never know that her father was speaking to himself and not to her.

“Dinner’s in ten minutes,” Lark mumbles. “Want me to sign you out?”

Isabel shakes the memory away like a wet dog coming in from the rain. She looks at Lark.

“Yeah, thanks. We can walk over to the cafeteria together if you want.”

A friendship forged over carcinogens. Lark walks back into the nurses’ station where the dry erase board hangs.

Kristen calls out to Lark: “Lark? Will you sign me out, too?” Then to Isabel she says, “Do you guys mind if I walk with you?”

We’re back in elementary school and we’re forming a clique.

“Sure, whatever,” Isabel replies as she steps on her cigarette.

“Where’re you from, anyway?” Kristen asks as she puts out her unfinished cigarette. “It just occurred to me that I don’t know where you live.”

“Yeah,” Isabel said. “I don’t know anyone’s last name. I grew up in Connecticut but I live in Manhattan now.”

“I grew up in Connecticut, too! Where in Connecticut?” Kristen asks excitedly.

“Greenfield.”

“I grew up in Winsford.” Kristen is beaming. Winsford is only minutes away from Greenfield.

Please let’s not play the name game.

Isabel takes a couple of steps back and looks toward the unit to see if they are to start lining up for their meal march. She hopes her body language will quiet Kristen.

“Where’s the dinner nurse, anyway?” Kristen asks, picking up on Isabel’s signal. “I’m starving. I hate it when they’re late taking us over.”

“Want another cigarette?” Isabel asks her. Kristen nods gratefully.

Isabel smiles as she pulls out her pack of Marlboro Lights. “We are one sick group,” she says, heading over to the wall-mounted lighter. “One sick group.”

Behind her Lark’s mouth turns upward, forming a slight smile.

“You got that right,” Lark says.

“ Okay, guys, grab a magic marker!”

Larry the group leader is sick today and his substitute is a therapist who looks like she is fresh out of graduate school and hasn’t yet had her spirits trampled by life. Her name is Rita.

No one moves. They all stare at Rita.

“Come on, people.” Rita is now batting her eyelashes in what Isabel thinks is a pathetic schoolgirl attempt to get everyone to do what she wants.

She has no experience. She’d never waste the eyelash-bat for a group of nuts if she had half a brain. Besides, this is shaping up to be an artistic venture, and if so, I am outta here.

“What we’re going to do tonight…” Rita is now trying to reason with the group. “What we’re going to try to do is make a mural on this piece of poster board. I want everyone to take a magic marker and go and draw a picture of how you see yourself.”

Still no action from the group.

This is embarrassing. Like watching someone on stage struggle to remember her lines.

“Seriously, you guys.” Rita is plugging away. It’s as if there’s a competition among the mental health care workers to come up with the breakthrough group activity. Rita seems convinced that her activity will beat them all. “Just try it out. If you don’t want to continue that’s fine.”

“That’s fine?” Lark croaks. “If we don’t like it, then what? We get to leave the session for the night?” She challenges Rita. Everyone turns to Lark. Even Sukanya.

“Um, well, no, Lark. But we can try something else if everyone decides they don’t want to do this. But I really think you ought to give it a chance.”

“Yeah, well, what do you know?” Isabel is staring at Lark, who, for some reason is taking Rita to the mat. “You just don’t want to hear about the hard stuff. The shit. The things in our lives that’ve fucked us up. Right? Am I right? You just want us to draw pretty pictures.” Lark’s voice goes high to mimic Rita’s.

Rita is literally cringing. Lark has the entire group transfixed.