(no subject)
Gina Elia
8 Polk Road
Hingham, Ma 02043
e-mail address: gegenschein432@hotmail.com
Home phone: 1-781-749-3866
THE LADY IN BLACK
By Gina Elia
Approximate length: 5,000 words
Gina Elia About 5,000 words
8 Polk Road
Hingham, Ma 02043
e-mail address: gegenschein432@hotmail.com
Home phone: 1-781-749-3866
THE LADY IN BLACK
It’s so cold, always so cold here. The wind blows through the cracks in the window and the holes in the floor, while I’m in my sweater under the covers complaining about the biting, incessant cold.
They always tell me of course it isn’t, of course I can take off my sweater if I like, but it won’t keep the cold away, I tell them.
The kid in the next bed admires my sweater. “I never had one like that,” he exclaims fondly one day. “You always wear it.”
“That’s because it’s so damn cold,” I grumble, turning on my side in the bed. The kid never gets any visitors.
The medical types here smile at me and feed me Rorschach tests and hypnosis and Freudian junk like that. I used to tell them they could stick Freud up their asses, ‘cause it was so cold I didn’t give a damn about anything save turning on some heat. They told me, though, “Be a good boy and don’t swear, Simon. Use the word buttocks to describe your behind.” I grumble a whole lot about it, but if I don’t listen they’ll hold me down, so I really have no choice.
There isn’t any cold, Mother tells me when she comes, this is a five-star hospital with five-star heating and all that other crap mothers usually feed you. I wonder why the kid next to me grins so broadly at her. She finds his smile charming.
His name’s Earl, or Jonathan, or something like that. A week goes by where it gets a little sunnier outside, so I offer him my sweater. It’s useless anyway.
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He finally gets a visitor, this overweight blonde woman in bright white sneakers and a black jogging suit. She grins toothily at Earl-Jonathan, who pulls my sweater more tightly around his skinny little frame. His elbows are real pointy, like those Indian arrowheads on display in museums.
Tomorrow he is due to leave, or so I’m told. Blonde Woman is sending him somewhere else where I hear it’s warmer, in Florida or something.
I told him he could keep the sweater, but I’m starting to regret it.
*
After Earl-Jonathan leaves, they send me to see the floor’s new psychologist-I guess the old one with the wispy red hairs quit after I stuck my feces into the wine he used to sneak in the linen closet. I pad through the starch-white hallway with my gray blanket wrapped around my shoulders and over my head because it’s colder than the damn north pole and also because I hate the way the guests who visit patients here smile at me when they pass, like I’m entertaining or something.
I sit across from the shrink in the same old questioning room, except that where once bright artificial lights had seeped into my eyes and created dark corners, now the natural sunlight pierces the drab walls and carpeted rug, infusing me with warmth.
Gazing over the her horn-rimmed glasses as she clasps her ivory hands together on the desk, the shrink purses her lips together and lets her watery black eyes seep right through me. I want to say something sarcastic to make her angry, but you have to be careful what you say to psychologists because they can give you Hell if you say the wrong thing.
The aide laughs, “He looks like a little Chief Powatan.”
The shrink’s hair is night-black, dyed, probably, and it hangs down to her chin in chunks clinging close to her head. She stares straight ahead at me and does not move to acknowledge the aide’s stupid comment. First the aide’s annoying chuckles trail off, until finally she turns and exits the office,
door slamming abruptly behind her. I glance at the swinging door and back to the shrink in front of me. I think maybe I like her, at least a little more than the others.
She moves a bit now that it’s only us, adjusts her glasses and picks up a pen. “Do you miss your roommate?” she asks in a throaty voice. Her nails are black, and I can’t help staring at them because I’ve never seen anybody wearing black nail polish, and plus Mother told me that people who wore it were going straight to Hell. I stare so hard, and my mother’s face takes up every space and corner in my mind so that I can’t think about anything else--I forget to carefully consider my answer and reply, “He stole my sweater!”
“You gave him your sweater,” she answers calmly as her pen scratches against the paper. I sit shocked because she didn’t say it like it was a question at all, but like she was assured that her observation was correct.
I challenge, “How do you know?”, trying to fill up space because I never like blunt silence in a shrink’s office. She looks up from her papers. “Never mind. Do you miss your roommate?”
I cross my arms and bite my lip, refusing to answer. If you’re a patient in this hospital and you don’t make a complete buttocks of yourself, then in my opinion you’re completely unlikable.
She doesn’t sigh or give me an exasperated look, like I was hoping for, but moves on to her next question. “What about your mother? Tell me about her. About your home, as you remember it.”
Internally I curse like I have Turette’s syndrome, because this is one subject I can’t stay silent about. I really like talking about myself. I look at her face to make sure she’s listening, but I should have guessed she would be, since shrinks always listen too hard. I tell her all about the big house my father bought for my mother, about my three younger siblings and the four cats we have. I describe to her the two that looked so similar we always called them identical twins, both with gray fur and a white patch over their right eye. We named them Tristan and Isolde. The third one was a calico that always reminded me a lot of caramel and cream, but it was my younger sister’s and she named it Curly, which was a
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stupid name because it didn’t have any curly fur at all. The fourth one was mine, and she was silky black with green eyes sunken deep into her skull. Everyone wanted me to name her Midnight, but black cats with that name are crawling all over the place, so I named her Osiris instead, because I’ve always liked that name. I don’t tell the shrink that if I ever meet a girl someday, I want her cheeks shaped and her eyes colored like Osiris’s.
“Do you know Osiris is a male name?” the shrink cuts in.
I grumble some annoyance about being interrupted and reply, “Of course I do.”
She continues, leaning back in her chair and peering over her glasses at me with amusement, “And I suppose you know that Osiris was the Egyptian god of death.” I nod. “And you know, too, that cats were revered in ancient Egypt.”
“Can I continue with my story now?” She leans forward, picks up her pen, and nods at me to go ahead.
I tell her about the days my siblings and I used to play badminton out on the lawn as Mother sipped her iced tea and watched, wearing her broad-rimmed pink sun-hat and large sunglasses. I hate sunglasses because you can never see a person’s eyes, so you have no idea what they’re thinking.
I don’t tell the shrink about how Father was always away on business trips to make lots of money for us, and how Mother caught him in bed with this other woman in red panties once. She told me afterwards that any woman who wore red panties was Satan’s child. It occurs to me as I think this that since she wears black nail polish, maybe the shrink in front of me sports red panties as well. But anyway, I don’t mention when Mother and Father pulled an all-nighter arguing in the living room as my siblings and I crowded around the door to hear. They said a lot of stuff about me and whose problem I was, which I
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didn’t particularly feel like relating to the shrink.
The shrink nods through all of it and then peers slyly at me, in a way I don’t think I really care for. “Was it warm there, Simon?”
I nod emphatically. “Yeah, ten times warmer than it is here. You need to fix your heating or something. It’s colder than the damn north pole.”
The shrink looks at her notes, and I try to read them upside-down, which I’m pretty good at, but I can’t because her handwriting’s too flowery. Without looking back up at me, she asks, “What about the South Pole, Simon? Is it colder here than at the South Pole?”
That’s a really queer question for a shrink to ask. I shake my head no. “Of course not. What are you, dumb? The South Pole is ten times colder than any place on earth. Even snakes can’t live there, because it’s so cold, and they live everywhere.”
She abruptly glances at me with a little expression of surprise, her lips formed into a big “o” shape. “Do you like reading, Simon? Did you have a lot of books at home?”
My father always liked to stay up late in the oak library reading, and the next morning when we passed it on our way to school, we could smell the faint smoky fragrance left over from his pipe. I tell the shrink that I had a lot of books at home and that yeah, I read when there was nothing else to do. She nods her head slowly up and down over and over again after I say this, and then rises to her full height, which is pretty tall. I realize for the first time that she’s wearing a long flowing black cloak and dress that must be her grandmother’s or something, it’s so old. A brooch of the same color adorns her neck. I wonder why she wears it-I bet it reminds her of some dead person she really liked, maybe even loved. I don’t really comprehend love, though. I don’t know anything about it. It’s something Mother had for Father, but
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they’re both depressed and they stuck me here in this hospital, so I figure that whatever love is, it can’t be too good.
“You’re not treated like a human, but like an artifact,” the shrink declares, walking out from behind her desk. “I plan on changing that. Do you have any suggestions?”
I glance over at her wall, where she’s hung her achievements, just like every other snotty educated person. It looks like she’s a Yale graduate, and like she did some studying abroad. She’s won a lot of awards, too, which pretty much say things like what a great psychologist she is. I look back at her and say, “Are you sure you’re a shrink? You don’t look like one, even though you talk the same.”
For a second, I’m afraid I’ve said something terribly wrong, for she keeps staring at me without moving like she did with the aide. But then, to my shock, she laughs. “The wolf in sheep skin!” she proclaims. “Now I’ll call the aide and she’ll take you back to your room , if you’re satisfied with our interview.” So saying, she picks up the black phone and dials the main desk.
I can’t sleep later on, because I’m burning up inside, for a change, and I’m not used to it. I’ve never made a shrink laugh before. I turn on my side and try to remember what color her eyes were. Green, I think, but I can’t be sure.
*
Dr. Moriarity comes to see me the next day. He’s an old medical doctor and he comes around to my room sometimes. I think he used to be a chemistry teacher at some college. Ever since I read Frankenstein in the eighth grade I’ve kind of had an interest in chemistry, so when I heard that about him it redeemed him a bit in my eyes. He’s pretty accomplished. I hate the guy, but I have to admit that much, since it’s true.
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He smiles down at me smugly while shaking the thermometer he just practically forced down my throat. “You have a fever,” he explains, “probably just influenza. You should be over it in a matter of days.” He sits down next to me on the bed and I slide as far away to the other side as I can get. He leans his head in his hands and sighs. “Strange, though,” he murmurs. “You’re never sick.”
“Do you know the shrink in black?”
“The shrink in-oh, yes, you mean Ms. Demeure. And call her a psychologist, Simon, like a good boy.”
“Shrink. She never told me her name. Ms. Demeure.” I say it slowly, feeling the way it rolls off my tongue, and decide I like it.
The doctor looks me in the eye. His eyes are this light translucent blue that reminds me of some stagnant pond deep in a cave, ready to ripple with the plunk of a stone into its depth at any moment. He asks, “What do you think of Ms. Demeure, boy?”
I peer at his peppered gray and white hair suspiciously (since of course I can’t look into his eyes), because he never cares what I think. I feel like talking about her nonetheless, though, so I just shrug it off. “Her hair’s…” I want to say nice, but the way his eyes are cooling my fever right down tells me I shouldn’t. “…short.”
He nods as if accepting this analysis, and adds, “Greasy, too, I daresay.”
I never noticed that about her hair. “Her voice is nice,” I continue, unable to restrain myself. “Shapely, like a real woman’s, not all high-pitched and whiny.”
Dr. Moriarity nods. “You could say that. Find it a bit manly, myself.”
Now I’m angry. “What are you--?”
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“Calm down, Simon, no need to get frenzied,” chides Dr. Moriarity, standing up. “She is one of the best psychologists in the country, after all, and that counts for something. Or so I’m told.” He presses the button to make my bed go up so I’m sitting, even though I don’t want it that way and I tell him so. He continues, “I have to leave now, and finish rounds. I’m bringing someone with me tomorrow, a professor from the college. He wants to see you. I want you to behave yourself, Simon.” He always takes on this tone like he’s my father, which he’s not. “I hope you don’t disappoint me.”
“Is this professor guy old, like you?” I blurt, but the question doesn’t seem to bother Dr. Moriarity, who says goodbye and, humming, leaves me burning up in this stupid lonely ward.
*
The next day Dr. Moriarity comes back dragging along a clean-shaven young man with a clipboard.
“This guy’s a professor?” I ask incredulously. “He looks like he’s barely got his high school diploma!”
“Simon, please,” says Dr. Moriarity in his warning tone. Then he transforms completely like Mr. Hyde into Dr. Jekyll and introduces us. “Simon, this is Professor Clark. Professor Clark, Simon.”
I don’t like him at all. He reminds me of a puppy dog with large soulful eyes obediently following its master’s example. The guy touches my shoulder, and I push him away angrily. “What the Hell?”
Dr. Moriarity regards me from under his bushy gray eyebrows. “Simon’s a little sensitive about people touching him, Professor Clark, but he knows very well what will happen if he doesn’t behave.”
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Damn, he’s gonna call in all the male doctors and have them hold me down. I hate it when they do that since then I can’t move and I have twenty or so of those medical types blinking down at me as they probe me all over the place “for research purposes” or something like that. I sigh and sink to the bed in defeat, since even this Professor Clark guy’s better than being held down.
I ask if Professor Clark is a chemistry teacher, since chemists get to do fun things like discover elements. I used to want to be a chemist, except that I realized when I met Dr. Moriarity that Chemists can’t love girls or anything, only chemistry, and I always have anticipated some sort of girl in my future.
But Professor Clark shakes his head no. He’s a professor of psychology. Great. Another one.
Silent as the snow the way it falls outside my soundproof window, Professor Clark scribbles furiously on his clipboard and hardly even looks up at me. “Some observation,” I can’t help but mutter.
“When will I meet Ms. Demeure?” the professor asks timidly, and I feel like telling him there’s no need to fear Dr. Moriarity, he’s an idiot anyway.
Dr. Moriarity responds, “You will not be meeting her today. She is holding an informative meeting on her methods tomorrow. You will see her then.”
Later on after Professor Clark leaves, I hear a deep female voice shouting at Dr. Moriarity outside in the hall, and I can tell from the voice and the bit of dark skirt visible in the crack beneath the door that it’s Ms. Demeure. I pat my hair to make sure it isn’t ruffled or anything.
Their voices are loud but muffled, and I can only hear that she’s upset about Professor Clark. Afterwards she bursts through the door and runs to my bed, cloak flapping wildly, while I hear the fading click-clack of Dr. Moriarity’s shoes on the pavement as he storms away.
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“Are you all right, Simon?” she cries enthusiastically, feeling my forehead.
I try to shrug indifferently. “Fine, except that it’s cold as usual.”
She takes a step back and breathes deeply. “Well, there’s nothing I can do about the cold,” she says, but I can assure you there will be no more visitors from the college.” She spits these words like they taste like dirt coming out of her mouth.
I suddenly feel some need to defend my fellow man against the meeker sex. “Aww, Professor Clark isn’t bad. Ten times better than Dr. Moriarity, anyway, ‘cause he doesn’t talk much.”
Ms. Demeure ignores me, looking at the empty other bed made all neatly, freed from the scent of Earl-Jonathon so that nobody except me knows he was ever here. “Those men think they come here to learn but they’re only here to ogle the sick and thank their lucky stars it isn’t them in the bed.”
The way she says this all of a sudden makes me embarrassed to be lying with ruffled hair in a johnny in an unkempt bed right in front of her, to even be in this hospital in the first place. I make some weak attempts to straighten out my sheets. She abruptly swings her gaze my way, intently, watching, and I look back at her ‘cause I have nothing else to do. She smiles, “I’ll be back, Simon. Don’t worry about Dr. Moriarity.” Then she pivots on her heel and exits with her cloak flowing out behind her, shutting the door softly so I can’t hear the clickety-clack of all the footsteps in the hallway.
*
It’s been awhile and I’ve decided to marry Ms. Demeure. I figure she’ll probably say no, but if I don’t try I’ll kick myself in the buttocks really hard many years from now when I’m wrinkly and alone.
I get out of my bed without anybody’s consent, which I’m never supposed to do, and I clickety-clack through the hallways in my brown leather shoes looking for her. I’m all dressed up in my brown slacks and beige sweater, and hair neatly combed to one side, even, so nobody suspects that I’m a patient walking around without permission, only a casual visitor. At one point Dr. Moriarity strides by, and he
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knows me very well, so I have to turn and pretend to read a poster on Alzheimer’s. My grandpa had that. He never knew who I was when Mother made me call him on the telephone.
I happen to amble past the cafeteria, empty at this hour, and hear Ms. Demeure’s voice through the door. I smile and pat the daisies in my hand that I picked during recess yesterday. They’re beginning to wilt, but I figure once she puts them in water they’ll come back to life like nobody’s business. Besides, I can’t afford a ring, in this damn place.
Mother saw me yesterday and asked how things were going, and I told her she was going to get a new daughter-in-law. She laughed and asked if it was the new girl who moved in next to me, Ophelia, but I told her no, Ophelia talked too much.
I walk through the cafeteria’s swinging doors prepared to propose immediately, but my words fall silently to the ground and shatter as I stand there in the yellow light, completely unnoticed.
Ms. Demeure stands before the snack machine, but she isn’t the same Ms. Demeure. Oh, she looks pretty similar, but she’s wearing a slim black dress, backless, kind of modern. Then she’s wearing these sheer black tights and little black pumps. Not only that, but her hair’s smooth and shiny, reminding me of the motherly embrace of the ocean waves I remember from when I last went to the beach. She looks amazing like that, with her legs showing and all, but it still annoys me because now she’s dressed just like every other woman I meet these days. Her brooch is still pinned to the fabric before her neck. Her cheeks redder than I remember, she is laughing with Professor Clark, whom I have only seen a few times in the hallways since that first meeting with Dr. Moriarity. The two of them are standing there chatting it up as if it’s the end of the world tomorrow, which confuses me because I thought she said Professor Clark was bad to come in and ogle at me like I was an artifact or something. What really amazes me is when the professor takes his arm and wraps it around her waist as if he knows her, and then
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he squeezes her buttocks gently and I expect her to push him away angrily but she smiles and buries her head in his shoulder. I feel like a steamy black cauldron all boiling inside, because it’s me she’s supposed to like.
I’m going to tell him off. I’m going to point out all of the faults in his personality, like how he’s bad because he treats me like an artifact, and how he listens to everything Dr. Moriarity says and doesn’t know the meaning of individuality. My speech will be so convincing that Ms. Demeure will pull away from his grimy hands and run to me crying out about how she was sorry, being so mistaken like that. I open my mouth, but all that comes out is screaming.
Ms. Demeure transforms instantly into the woman of serious demeanor I know her as, glancing my way, hurrying over. “Oh, Simon, it will be okay, it will be okay,” she says in a soothing tone, so I scream louder. She’s just like every other shrink, wouldn’t you know it, treating me like a pile of turds, and I wish she’d get her slimy hands off of me. Professor Clark runs over too, kneeling by my side and repeating everything Ms. Demeure says because he has no personality of his own. “Don’t you look nice, Simon! Don’t you look nice!” Ms. Demeure croons, and meanwhile neither one of them even notices the flowers in my hand, which I clutch more tightly than ever in my sweaty palms because they’re the only remnant here of life as I knew it before I stepped into the cafeteria.
“You’re not even married!” I shout. “Slut! Slut!”
I don’t expect Ms. Demeure to get angry, and she doesn’t, but stands up to talk to some new arrival standing behind me. Before I even have a chance to turn around, I’m grabbed by the collar and dragged away, and I can tell by the glimpses of white coat that it’s Dr. Moriarity pulling on me.
Now I’ afraid of being punished, and I scream, “Don’t hold me down! Don’t hold me down!” while Ms. Demeure’s voice from behind me shouts advice to the doctor that he’s not listening to.
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As everybody turns and stares I am dragged kicking and screaming all the way back to my room, my pants all disheveled and my stupid tears streaking my sweater like clear blood. As my bed suddenly looms before my bleary eyes, the doctor plops me onto it and looks me in the face, a hand firmly gripping each of my shoulders. Ophelia glances at me as I scream, but it doesn’t seem to bother her and she returns to watching the television turned on mute in the corner. “Stay,” commands Dr. Moriarity, like I’m a dog.
“You can’t treat me like this!” I scream, my throat growing terribly sore. “You can’t order me around! Ms. Demeure says you treat me like I’m not even human! Like an artifact!”
“Ms. Demeure doesn’t know what she’s talking about!” Dr. Moriarity hisses, spit in my eye, face right in front of me blocking out everything else. But then he looks surprised with himself, with eyes widening and furry eyebrows raising. He’s not supposed to talk to patients like that, I bet.
I calm down a little and nod vehemently, showing I agree with him. Dr. Moriarity is my friend, he knows me loads better than Ms. Demeure ever will, and I feel like hugging him but don’t because I should be more manly. Besides, I’m still clutching the daisies in my hand, my frozen hand-I can’t unclench it.
Dr. Moriarity tentatively lets go of me, and I blurt, “I want to study Chemistry! I hate women and I want to be a chemist instead!” My father had a degree in chemistry, even though he never did anything with it, and I always figured if he had been a chemist instead of a businessman things would have turned out differently and I wouldn’t be here today.
The doctor glares at me as if trying to decipher what I said, like it’s hard to understand or something, and then he shakes his head. “Stay here, Simon, and don’t bother Ms. Demeure or Professor
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Clark ever again.” He glances down and sees the daisies. He wrenches my fist apart, ignoring my howl of pain. Grabbing the daisies, he storms out, throwing them into the trashcan as he leaves.
Ophelia folds her hands neatly in her lap and gazes at me. Her hair’s stringy and she’s sitting staring at me with her sunken eyes. I don’t usually mind things like that but I finally turn to her and shout, “What the Hell is it?”
“Are you okay?” she promptly asks, as if she had been waiting for the right moment. “Because it’s okay if you’re not. I don’t mind.”
I have no idea how to answer her, but the image of her sitting primly before me like that is filling my mind entirely, and I’m beginning to forget about Ms. Demeure and Professor Clark and even my friend the chemist Moriarity. I bite my lip until it bleeds trying to think of a way to answer her, and when I can’t think of anything I turn on my side away from her and pull the sheets up around my chin, muttering about the damn cold and wishing Mother would hurry up and visit again so I can make her buy me a new sweater.