Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

“We could use condoms if you don’t mind, or I could get fitted for a diaphragm,” she said.

“A diaphragm? I thought you wanted a baby.”

“Yes, but…”

“What?”

“Forget it.”

“Forget it? How can I forget it?”

She rolled away from me. “Let’s just sleep,” she said. “Sleep.”

But now it was impossible, not just that night but each successive one. Anxiety builds on anxiety. Each workless day that I carried the secrets of Animal Testing inside me, I felt like a drunk who is compelled to go out and do something horrible, if only to take his mind off the horrible thing he’d done the night before. Betty noticed. Seeing me sulk and finding me quick to anger (“Yes, Betty — fish again!”), she thought I must still be hurting from the memories stirred up by my fall at the gas station.

One Sunday morning she suggested we try church. She’d been raised Episcopalian, and though she was by no means a fervent believer, she was more than happy to return to the fold if it’d get me smiling and small-talking with strangers again. “You haven’t left the house in days,” she said. This may have been true, but it was also the wrong Sunday to try and convince me of theism. When she made her suggestion, Betty was in the kitchen, brewing a cup of coffee, while I was at the breakfast table, reading the front section of the Sunday paper. My Norwegian had died, my stolid, fish-eating Norwegian had passed in the night three days previous, and now the Times was ready to reveal the identity of the nation’s newest oldest man (if you’ll forgive the apparent oxymoron). He was a gentleman of more rarefied tastes, those he had cultivated as a missionary, first in the Kingdom of Kongo (1889–1893) and then Siam (1896–1904).

I stood, tightening the belt of my bathrobe, and asked Betty if she loved me.

She came over to the table, smiling tentatively as she set down our mugs of steaming coffee. “Of course,” she said, and gave me a peck on the cheek.

“Then I need you to do something for me. I need you to find some plantain leaves and as many cassavas as you can carry.”

“Cassavas?”

“No less than a dozen. You do know what a cassava is, don’t you? Not a sweet potato, not a yam — a cassava. Here, let me draw you a picture. Okay? Yes? Now once you’ve picked up those — and get two dozen, if you can — find some coconut milk. It’s absolutely imperative that you find some coconut milk. Should I write that down?”

Betty looked at the shopping list I handed her as if it began with King Arthur’s sword and ended with the Ark of the Covenant.

“But, David, I don’t think they carry any of this at the Acme.”

This was true. She would have been lucky to find taco shells and a bottle of La Choy sweet and sour sauce. That’s why I told her she should take the train into New York City.

“There’s sure to be an appropriate ethnic market in Brooklyn or the Bronx.”

“You want me to go to the Bronx? Alone?”

“You know I’d go with you, Betty, but that city”—I returned from the kitchen with the scissors and started cutting out the profile of my latest super-centenarian—“and how my nerves are on edge as it is, I just can’t do it. You’ll be fine, though. It’s a perfectly sunny day.”

I don’t know what happened in the city that day, but when Betty returned home that night after sundown, she set a bulging shopping bag down on the kitchen table, went into the bathroom to shower, and then promptly went to bed. When Christmas arrived later that week, we celebrated alone over a dinner of cassava porridge and a dessert of sweetened rice wrapped in plantain leaves.

New Year’s Eve was far less exotic, for Betty had insisted she wouldn’t be going into New York City again. That evening, before the ball could drop on 1974, we dined on Hamburger Helper and drank too much champagne, and my wife asked if maybe it wasn’t time I got professional help.

I knew where she was going with this — or, rather, where she’d have me go. A couple of weeks back, when we’d gone together to the local Episcopal church’s annual Christmas bazaar and rummage sale, I had bought a historical society’s monograph on Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, or the State Lunatic Asylum at Morristown, as the institution had been known when the book was published. The hospital stood at the end of a long tree-lined street high in the leafy mountains of northern New Jersey, and the many black and white photos in my book made it look more like a resort than anything else. The guests, as they were known, were housed two to a neatly furnished room and given the same privileged treatment regardless of their economic standing in the outside world. Ornate rugs ran down the corridors; stuffed divans, bright curtains, and fresh flowers filled the day rooms; and if the on-site bowling alley didn’t interest you, surely one of the regularly tuned pianos would. Everyone looked so content. Men in suits and ties were shown walking the trails through the surrounding woods, while women in ankle-length dresses lay on chaises and read edifying books. Most memorable to me were the shots of the community garden, in which a handful of stout souls worked with their sleeves rolled up and their hands sunk deep down into the earth’s warm and regenerative soil.

“It wouldn’t be forever,” Betty said.

“Of course not.”

“Just long enough to get you back on your feet.”

I was nodding. “Like a little vacation.”

“That’s right. A little vacation. And there’s no shame in it.”

“No, no. Like National Health, isn’t it? There to give you a little boost when you need it.”

And need it we did: our insurance had been taken away, and the end of our savings account was already in sight.

She finished her champagne, adding almost as an afterthought, “But all the same, it probably would be best if we kept this to ourselves. Do you think we could do that?”

I smiled. It was the easiest question to answer all night. “You can tell your mother I went to a dude ranch out west.”

* Minus the masturbation, that is.

THE DAY BETTY DROPPED ME OFF at the hospital, I was interviewed by a jowly man with salt-and-pepper hair and hound dog eyes. A doctor here for more than thirty years, he loosened his tie and held up the flat of one hand after I’d spoken to him for no more than a few minutes.

“Let me stop you right there,” he said. “There’s no garden anymore.”

“Pardon?”

He dropped his forearms onto his desk. “Ruling came down a couple of years ago. Courts said we must be exploiting our patients. You know, forcing you to grow your own food and not paying you a nickel to do so.” He threw his index finger out toward me. “Goldwater would’ve put a stop to this nonsense. We wouldn’t have half the problems we’ve got today if only we’d put a good man like him in the White House.”

Sitting there with my suitcase on my lap, I tried a hopeful chuckle. “Well, at least the lawyers can’t take away the libraries.”

In fact they could and they had, if not the lawyers, then the accountants, because while the thinking of Moral Treatment had held for a time, allowing the sick to look out the windows and see fountains and rolling green lawns, soon overcrowding had forced the state to consider other demands. By the mid-fifties (“when we even had that Communist Woody Guthrie in here”), some seventy-five hundred men and women were being housed at the asylum — more than ten times the number the facility had been designed for.

“And so you’ll excuse us,” the doctor said, “if your bed’s in a former reading room. But if you’d like, I could ask the nurse to scrounge up a couple of Reader’s Digest s for you. I’m sure we’ve got a few copies lying around here somewhere.”