JELL-O Girls Page 9

  “I don’t know,” Mary said. “Well, Jell-O.” She started there.

  “No fucking way,” Bea said, lifting her eyebrows, as if it meant everything. “Jell-O?” The product was fast-tracked to become the epitome of uncool, a symbol of the suburban establishment. She put her cup between her thighs and fiddled with her turban. “You square,” she said. Mary looked at her cup, ashamed. But Bea shook her head and said Wow, honey when she heard about Midge’s death, about Cousin John, about the Dex coursing, even now, through Mary’s veins. Bea wasn’t impressed by the drugs; she approved of them. Most of all, she approved of Mary. When Mary said she wanted to quit them, too, Bea shook her head. “Don’t,” she said. “Everybody needs somewhere they can escape to.”

  In the end, they talked all night. They went over Mary’s family, Bea’s. They talked about Riggs and its rules—or lack thereof. They ran over the list of its oddball patients, which included, ironically, Norman Rockwell. He lived in Stockbridge.

  “I see him sometimes,” Bea said, “moping around town.”

  “Not as cheerful as his paintings,” she said when Mary looked shocked. “But then,” she added, “who is?”

  The girls met in the hallway the next morning, hungover and tired. “Take a nap later,” Bea commanded. “Tonight we go to Simm’s.”

  Mary had known Bea less than twenty-four hours, but she could already see that Simm’s was an obsession of hers. Simm’s this, Simm’s that. “Everybody goes to Simm’s,” Bea said through the cigarette stuck in between her lips, coiling the fringed shawl around her neck as she led Mary through the autumn night. “That’s where the boys hang out.”

  The boys were Hollis and Tim, opposite but for the matching biker jackets they wore, their bodies soft like slugs beneath their leather shells. Hollis was aloof, apathetic. He turned up the collar of his jacket, rolled the sleeves over twice. Tim was shy, insecure. “He’s the sensitive type,” Bea said, kissing his cheek. “I think you two will get along.” They did, two nights later, a gentle fuck, hesitant, then desperate. After that Tim tucked Mary beneath his leather wing like she was something to be careful with.

  She was fragile. But her admission to Riggs had been on a trial basis. All patients began this way, tentatively. Mary knew she was sick. But how sick? Sick enough to stay at Riggs, she hoped, where she finally felt safe.

  It wasn’t just safety Riggs offered. It was a sense of being believed. Her disorder, the disorder of her, made some kind of order there. The men she’d dated in New York. Cousin John. Tom. Even her father. None of them saw she was struggling. None of them seemed to care. “Take a trip to Europe,” Bob had advised the night before she left for Riggs. “You need perspective, not the loony bin.” But Mary had insisted, looking at her knees and shaking her head. She knew perspective would come from structure and also from someone to talk to.

  She waited out the diagnostic period nervously, holding the hem of her beloved baby-doll dress, fraying its edges. She pulled her hair obsessively, starting at the root and working down the strands like she was trying to coax everything straight. “Stop worrying about it,” Bea kept telling her as the trial time ran out. “You’re sick enough, okay?” Mary stared at her with an expression both confused and meek, and Bea smoothed her hair like a mother. “There, there,” she’d say. “I don’t waste my time on the healthy ones.”

  The day of Mary’s admission conference, they sat together outside Dr. Marcus’s office. Bea had her arm hooked around Mary’s elbow, steadying her as she rocked in her seat, chanting nursery rhymes and looking at the ceiling. Bea pinched her arm.

  “Come off it, Fussell,” she said. “You’re crazy, but not completely nuts.…Here.” She placed a cigarette gently in between Mary’s lips and struck a match.

  On the other side of the wall, Mary could almost hear the men talking about her, saying her name. “They order lunch,” Bea snorted, “and make a real day of it.” Mary imagined the doctors in there, chewing. She pictured Dr. Marcus wiping his mouth with a corner of his napkin before placing it back in his lap.

  “You know, a few months ago some guy sent a cake to his conference,” Bea said. “On it he’d written in pink icing, Please Be Kind.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Hell no. They sent that crazy to McLean.”

  “Maybe I should have tried an offering of Jell-O,” Mary quipped. “A big pink mold of my brain for them to eat.” They laughed just as the door opened.

  “Mary?” Dr. Marcus said. “You can come in now.”

  ADMISSION CONFERENCE: OCTOBER 5, 1964

  Mary is a tall, slim, attractive young lady who comes to appointments dressed in ragged denim Bermuda shorts and an oversized rumpled cardigan. She sits rigidly huddled in her chair with her legs tightly crossed and arms folded over her chest, as if holding herself in check at the same time she shuts out the world. She is capable of abrupt, dramatic changes in appearance and affect, which appear unrelated to any external stimulus. Usually, she looks sad, puzzled and apathetic. Intermittently, she ceases all movement and, virtually frozen, stares as if terrified; then her whole body jerks violently and she resumes her previous posture.

  DEVELOPMENTAL HISTORY:

  As a little girl Mary was bold, active, and aggressive. She was more adventurous and quick to learn than her brother, who was privileged to receive more care and attention than she. Neither parent spent much time with the children. Her father was on three- to four-day flying assignments. During periods of free time he and his wife went to wild parties, usually leaving home in the late afternoon, returning about four in the morning and sleeping until noon. There was nobody to make sense of the world. A house came to represent Mary’s only stable, reliable object.

  Mary often played alone but preferred to play with her brother and his pals, who treated her like a scapegoat until age ten, when they developed a sexual interest in her. Often these boys would come into her bedroom, wake her up, and fondle and experiment with her. During this time Mary’s most frequent and pleasant daydream was of building a large house.

  On April 9, 1959 (age fourteen), Mary’s mother died. After her mother’s death Mary reports to have cried just once.

  PSYCHOLOGICAL TEST REPORT:

  This is an unusually angry young woman. She assumes a disdainful, cynical stance, giving vent to her inner sense of bitterness and pessimism. Coupled with this is her sense of futility about anything being worthwhile. Feelings of helplessness, despair, and isolation are prominent. At the same time she defensively maintains a hard, shell-like exterior, refusing to allow herself to be caught up in sentimentality.

  Overall, the patient has a negative view of herself as an ugly, unappealing person, and, consistent with this, there are strong needs to reject femininity in herself, for her concept of feminine sexuality is surrounded by sadomasochistic notions. She sees women as damaged and injured, malevolent and ungiving, and men as unresponsive and devilishly evil.

  DIAGNOSIS:

  Borderline schizophrenia with marked depressive and hysterical features in a schizoid, narcissistic character.

  * * *

  From her spot on the sofa, Mary could see out the window and across the lawn. The clock ticked, counting out the hour. Smoke from her cigarette entwined with Dr. Marcus’s. “Mary,” he said. She was on her back in the grass, sinking corpselike into the earth, where she’d be mothered and held. She was sinking, sinking. She could hear his voice, but dimly, Mary, Mary, calling her back to the room, to her body, which froze and seized at times like this, a process she felt but couldn’t stop. The seizures were as unpredictable and erratic as her mood, which wavered from day to day, not in little ticks but in grand swings, an atmospheric pressure needle seesawing uncontrollably on a plummeting airplane.

  The drinking didn’t help. It started every day at four, with Bea’s arrival at her room. Before dinner they’d sit by Mary’s mirror and examine their faces. They didn’t wear makeup. It wasn’t their thing, hippies that they were. But Bea played wi
th Mary’s hair, arranging it in a loose pile atop her head before letting it fall around her face. She pinched her cheeks and lips to pull the red out. Mary was Bea’s porcelain doll, holding out her glass palms for the pills Bea tipped into them, parting her lips for the color Bea painted.

  Once primped, the girls walked to Simm’s arm in arm, sister witches singing Jefferson Airplane up at the stars, the dark sky strobing crystalline points down on their zigzag path. Their voices cut the cold with puffs of hot breath. Mary wore her baby-doll dress and a long ratty sweater, even in the dead of winter. Bea wore the white feather boa she liked wrapped tight around her neck. It always wound up slipping, wagging like a tail behind her.

  Together, Mary and Bea were witches. But their magic was vague, as was their desire. All Mary knew was that she wanted to be wanted. The rest she could take or leave. Bea seemed less interested in being chosen. “We’re not possessive here,” she often said, swaying in her chair. But Mary wanted to be possessed. She wanted containment and safety. Sex was just a numbness she rode out from a detached perch somewhere on the ceiling, somewhere outside her body. Even with Tim, who was gentle and concerned, she felt disassociated. It was the affection, the afterglow, she craved.

  Mary pined for stability. She wanted to go back and do her childhood over again, get it right this time. If only she’d known not to pester Tom so. If only she’d fended off his friends. If only she’d been the perfect daughter, compliant and quiet and brave. Maybe then Midge would still be alive. Or Elfrida. Maybe then Cousin Joan wouldn’t have disappeared. Maybe then there’d be someone to nurture her. But all she had was Bea, who was a fickle mother, jealous and harsh at times, absent others. Of course there was love, too. There were the times Bea tucked Mary into bed, then sat on the edge, promising to stay through the night. “I’ll never leave you, Fussell,” she swore, whispering I’m right here, I’m right here, as she smoothed Mary’s hair, a mantra cast out into anxious waters, that Mary clung to like a buoy. On nights like these, Bea saved her. But it never lasted long. Bea always let her down eventually, disappearing into Hollis’s room and the heroin he kept there, leaving Mary alone for long hours with only her bourbon and Dex to cleave herself from her mother’s ghost.

  Fridays after community meetings, Bea and Mary, Hollis and Tim, met in the parking lot to make a weekend plan. Where to go, what to do? Get high and walk around the botanical gardens? Drive to Boston, Northampton, or New York? The cities often won out, and the group would pile into Hollis’s Corvair, dropping Dex before they hit the highway, then watching out the windows as the world flew by, a blur of feathery green.

  One autumn night, they got high at the entrance of the Taconic and then made for New York. Mary sat in the backseat, talking frantically, caressing strips of her hair. Bea put her hand on Mary’s forehead, pulled her torso into the scoop of her armpit and breast, and she quieted like a child, watching out the window as the landscape peeled past them and around them. Hollis pushed the Corvair past sixty, moving them through space with the effortlessness of drugs hitting blood, of skylines opening, a shock of skyscrapers, cold and gray after so much green.

  “So,” Bea said as they merged into city traffic, snaking along the west side, small and white in the shadows of gray. “You guys ready for some real action?”

  Nobody replied. The car was silent, each passenger a singular, brewing storm. Mary felt prudish and small. She didn’t want to say it, but she was scared.

  They parked around the corner from the Bitter End. Hollis pulled something small from under the seat. “Let’s go,” he said. Bea and Mary linked arms automatically and followed the boys along Bleecker and up MacDougal, where Hollis stopped at a dingy walk-up. “Be cool,” he said, looking at Tim, who then looked at the girls. Bea unlaced her arm from Mary’s and walked confidently around Tim to follow Hollis. Mary paused at the foot of the stairs, which were too narrow to climb in twos. She thought about turning around and walking out the door. She could be in the city by herself, after all. Since admitting herself to Riggs, since attaching to Bea, she’d almost forgotten her own self-sufficiency. She often felt like she needed Bea’s input for even the simplest things: when to eat dinner, when to go to bed, and what to do when she awoke. She feared displeasing her almost as much as she feared the memory of her mother’s abandonment, her sudden disappearance into death.

  “Fussell!” Bea yelled from the top of the stairs, shattering Mary’s indecision. “Stop fucking around.” Her tone was cutting, as if she were berating a lazy child. Bea, easygoing on the outside, was controlling and high strung within. Mary saw now how everything about Bea confirmed Mary’s sense of smallness and silence, how their friendship had silenced her. She’d come to Riggs wanting order and rules, and she’d found them, but not in the right place. Bea wasn’t a therapist. She was an addict, and her future was exactly what Mary was trying to escape. Mary climbed the stairs, ears ringing with the truth of her realization, vision blurred and stinging in the dim tobacco light.

  On the third floor, Hollis stood outside an orange door. When Mary joined the group assembled on the landing, he knocked three times. The dented metal door swung open, pulled by an invisible hand.

  Inside, the walls were stark and white, with yellow stains along the baseboard. There was a twin mattress on the floor. Three girls were flopped, half-naked on its bare white and blue. A sheet was balled up and tossed into a corner. A tray of needles balanced precariously on the armrest of a stained sofa.

  The room seemed to tick with the pulse of so many fluid-filled veins, each heartbeat a second count, measuring the silence. Hollis counted bills, and the flip-flip of the crisp paper made the place smell fresh and green. On the mattress by Mary’s feet, a girl hummed Jefferson Airplane through her blue corpse lips. The light filtered through the colored scarves tacked up over the windows. The heat pipes clanged deep inside the walls. The needles were offered, served up like hors d’oeuvres.

  When Bea poked the needle into Mary’s arm, the skin resisted, as if in protest, before giving way to droplets of red, a blue bruise blooming almost instantly from the site of insertion. Bea began to lightly push the trigger. “Breathe, Fussell,” she said without kindness. Mary looked away, at the sprawled-out girls, dead-eyed and painless. She felt a chill enter her bloodstream, washing into her body. She thought of it, this poison she was allowing inside her. Everything she’d done with Bea since arriving at Riggs had been this way, venom sweetened by belonging. Poison poison poison pulsed in her head. She felt her chest begin to shrink, her arm begin to freeze into the witch’s hand, gnarled and rotten. No! she thought, her body suddenly twitching, bucking involuntarily, an unissued scream. Her arm swung forward, knocking into Bea’s shoulder and breast and throwing the needle across the room. “Fucking Christ,” Bea yelled as the boys scampered to retrieve the syringe.

  The group’s ejection from the apartment was swift after that. Outbursts from new girls weren’t allowed; the deal was off. Nobody wanted yells traced back to the den, nobody wanted to call attention to its moist-aired cocoon. Mary begged for forgiveness, but the damage was done. Bea was withdrawing—she could feel that female solidarity shrinking—and Mary sensed something immutable had passed between them. The price of Bea’s friendship had always been adherence to her rules, rules Mary had now violated.

  Monday after the drug run. Mary climbed the stairs to Dr. Marcus, pulling back on the banister with each step, as if she might fall if she simply let go. “You’re awfully quiet today, Mary,” Dr. Marcus said after half the session passed in silence. “May I ask how your weekend was?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She kept her eyes on the rug at her feet, green and gold and so clean-edged where it met the dark wood floor it covered. She considered saying something about the heaviness she’d woken up with, a sense of numbed-out loss. Everything would be different now. Even if Mary wanted to return to Bea’s good graces, she couldn’t. She knew now she needed safety and structure. The rules at Riggs were a
spell she’d have to follow in order to discover what the curse really was and, in the process, to break it. But Bea wouldn’t understand; she had settled here, a permanent guest. Mary still wanted a life in the outside world. She was willing to do whatever she had to in order to get it.

  She thought all this but couldn’t say it. Instead she receded into her body, frozen and unfeeling. She could hear Dr. Marcus saying Mary Mary Mary, but her voice was locked inside her. In the circles and pockmarks of the wooden door, she saw her mother’s face, the shape of her dying body dissolving in downward lines like the corpses of Palermo, shelved into stone walls like books. Only one thing filtered in, only one thing got through: death and its inevitability, the indelible badness she’d imprinted upon herself the day Midge left for the hospital, left for her death; the day Mary had been too cowardly to help her hide from it. So how could she tell Dr. Marcus what had happened in New York? How could she betray her friend, turning her in to the authorities at Riggs the way she turned her mother in to the paramedics? Be absolutely silent, Midge’s image told her now. If you talk, someone dies.

  Someone dies, gets sick, and jumps. In a white nightgown, her body a dove, open winged and free. “Your cousin Joan,” Dr. Marcus was saying, “your father thought you should know.” He touched her arm. “Mary, nod if you understand me.” She tried to look at him and signal that she understood. But she couldn’t. Her body was immobile, her mind building the scene: Joan in her bedclothes, just discharged from a mental hospital with only a private nurse to watch over her. The nurse on a cigarette break, or in the bathroom. The open window, the flight.

  “Mary,” Marcus said again, but she was picturing the tip of Joan’s cigarette, the angel-heart ember, the way it had ebbed and flowed like a beacon with the warmth of Joan’s breath. She was making a list in her mind, cataloging the other people who’d died, tallying names like they’d add up to an answer. Aunt Edith and Elfrida, Midge and Joan. The sum of their absence was the sum of everything she feared. Each loss, each death, showed her own death, its inescapability, its predatory nature, how it was coming for her, cutting through everyone she loved on its way with its mean, exacting disorder. “Mary,” Dr. Marcus said over and over again, calling her back. Her name was an incantation. But now she was shaking, arms frozen by her side, gaze fixed like she was looking beyond the room at something immaterial, death itself, perhaps, or time, the ticking seconds designed to measure out a life she knew was already lost.