Elizabeth Crane - The History of Great Things

When you get there, you’re barely inside the automatic doors when they take your suitcase away. Later, it gets returned minus your meds, your dental floss, your hot rollers, your crochet hook, your yarn, your stork-handle mini-scissors, your tweezers, your Rive Gauche and your Paris, and the notepaper you took from the Broadmoor in 1975. Christ , you tell Victor when he calls, what do they think I’m going to do with any of that stuff? I’m going to look like the Wicked Witch of the West in a few days if they don’t give me my hot rollers back. I can’t burn myself to death with a hot roller. He laughs and says you couldn’t look like a witch if you had a pointy hat and six moles on your nose.

The next morning, a nurse comes by to return your notepaper. You ask why they took it in the first place; the nurse says something snarky along the lines of The staff knows what they’re doing and maybe you’re here because you don’t.

You have never been one to take kindly to sass, but you’re still dopey from whatever it was they made you take before lights-out last night. I have rights is all you can get out of your mouth, which feels like it’s full of flour, which is too bad, because you’re sure that if you could add “Missy” to the end of the sentence she’d know who she was dealing with. You point to your head, to indicate that you’ve got a wicked headache; you’ve got just the right thing in your bag of meds for that but you’re done with words right now. You scribble on the paper she just handed you, capital letters, HEADACHE , show it to her. She shakes her head and walks out.

After breakfast, your head is still pounding, but at least you can get a few words out. The people at your table include one quiet old lady (hard to imagine what she could have done wrong besides get old), a young girl with bandages on her wrists, and a woman, a bit younger than you, attractive, early twenties, so of course you can’t begin to guess why she’s there.

You’re so pretty. What are you doing here?

Young woman laughs at this, says she wishes that were her ticket to anything good. You don’t understand. She says she’d been having hallucinations and got violent with her boyfriend because she thought he was a feral pig. She laughs saying it; you do too.

That’s a very specific hallucination , you tell her.

Well, he is cuter than some of the other pigs , she says. My name’s Annie .

Lois .

You’re now best friends.

After breakfast you meet with your assigned psychiatrist. You can’t quite get a bead on her; she’s expressionless, asks some of the routine questions you’ve been asked before. You’ve been to all kinds of shrinks by this point, had various diagnoses — chronic depression, atypical depression, generalized anxiety disorder, borderline disorder (what a load of bullshit that was, you’ve known borderlines, that is not your problem) — but none of the shrinks or their bullshit diagnoses made any difference. Why should it be any different this time? A significant part of the problem is that you don’t tell them everything. You don’t mention that, like Annie, you’ve seen some weird things, too; you tell yourself that you just shouldn’t have had that glass of wine with the pill you took that time, or that you were just tired. You don’t tell them thing one about the rages, although they all get glimpses of your anger, but you don’t tell them what it’s like inside your body, like hot lava, like an actual substance in you that has got to come out when it gets in there or it will melt you from the inside out. You don’t tell them this, because what causes them always seems justified, the rages, the unfairnesses of life perpetrated entirely upon you, you are sure, by evil guiding forces; starving children in Africa have nothing on you. If these things were different you’d be just fine.

Group therapy is a joke. You know enough about psychology, having been to therapy before and read any number of books by Carl Jung, Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, that you can tell putting this bunch of loonies together will not help a one of them. You can’t randomly toss together a pile of barely functioning people and expect anything productive to come out of it. In your group alone, there’s a young mother with severe postpartum depression; a full-blown narcissist (no help to anyone); a lady who spits every five minutes (you don’t know what her problem is, but you have asked repeatedly to have her removed or fucking muzzled, because that is disgusting and unsanitary); a woman who claims to have the voice of Art Fleming in her head; a couple of alcoholics; and a junkie. The narcissist accuses you of being a narcissist, which is hilarious; the junkie and one of the alcoholics think you’re an addict, though you’ve noticed that they say that about everyone. You have a bit of compassion for the postpartum mom, but she alternates between crying and staring blankly into the middle distance, and not once in all the weeks you spend here does anyone besides Annie say anything insightful. You walk out together and sit down for coffee with her in the atrium by the lunch room. What bugs me is just how inexact it all seems , Annie says. Like, with all of the advancements they’ve made in modern medicine, they still have to try sixteen things in case maybe one will work. Plus, their other genius idea is to throw a bunch of whack-jobs in a room together? Ha! Well said. You’re how old? Twenty-four. Annie tells you she’s been arrested three times on domestic violence charges. I only ever punched him, but still. I don’t know how not to, when I get to that place. He probably deserved it , you say. Your own rage is nonviolent, but it’s not unimaginable to you. He really didn’t , she says. Something about her reminds you of your daughter, though it’s not anything she’s saying, and not the way she’s saying it. She doesn’t even look like Betsy — in fact, she’s tiny, and her voice makes her sound like a sexy Muppet — but you feel something deep for Annie, though you’re not sure what it is. Holy crap, you feel something.

The staff continues to go through your drawers every day, no matter how many times you tell them you’re all out of crochet hooks to murder anyone with. (This is not amusing to them, and it only prolongs your supervised probationary period with the one crochet hook they’ll allow.) They give you meds that make you slightly too drowsy to argue with anyone, but otherwise do nothing to turn you into a regular person, whatever that is. Someone who thinks only nice things, maybe.

A million years later, on the return of your petit point (during supervised free time only) you suppress a joke about how they must have figured out how many times you’d have to stab someone with a petit point needle before any real damage was done.

In one of your last appointments with the shrink, you learn the one thing from your entire stay that is of any little use: that sometimes there’s a cross-diagnosis — that a patient has a little bit of this, a little bit of that — and that when that’s the case, it’s difficult to treat with success. Well then what the fuck am I supposed to do? you ask, and she screws up her mouth in an I’m sorry for what I’m about to say kind of fashion, and says You take the meds we give you and you stay vigilant and you come back here whenever you need to. But you’re not coming back here if you can help it. Which you can. You can always help it.

You join a Unitarian church in the neighborhood. Your belief in a higher power (if not your faith) has been restored by all of your recent research (that is, your growing library of spiritual and self-help books), and though you’ve always placed a percentage of the blame for your problems on having been forced to go to church as a child, you hear about this church and its more open-minded beliefs, and in no short time you make friends and become actively involved, serving soup on Sundays, passing the basket, even singing in the choir. (Although everyone else is almost insufferably off key, you singing at full voice doesn’t help, but church choir isn’t the place for that, though once in a while you can’t help yourself.) But you could always do more to help. When you’re helping, you feel just a little more purposeful in the world; your mind is redirected away from you and toward others, and even though you still come home with all kinds of judgments about those others you’ve been helping — over dinner you tell Victor you don’t know why the poor people can’t all just go work at McDonald’s (a part of you truly does not see that there might be a larger picture, though you vaguely want to) and he for sure doesn’t either, though he is sure that their race, whatever race it might be that isn’t his own, has something to do with it, that all their race wants is handouts, and you wonder how you married your father, when you were so sure that the sexy, cosmopolitan, jovial big-city man you took vows with was his natural opposite. Victor has clients of all races, religions, genders, and sexual orientations, your home is open to all races, as you had vowed it would be when you grew up (though you never did find out what became of Ginny), and Victor always welcomes everyone to his home happily, with genuine warmth. So it’s just confusing. You don’t openly disagree with him; you aren’t even really sure if what he’s saying makes sense. It still feels like you should do more to make up for the conflict about it in your brain, and in talking to Audrey she asks if you might be interested in social work, and suggests the program at NYU, and the fall you turn fifty you’re enrolled.