I had knocked on DeeDee’s door that morning, wanting to borrow some two-part sheet music. Mr Willard was her little boy, and his voice was high and clear, like a little boy’s. I had a picture of Mrs Willard, with her heather-mixture tweeds and her sensible shoes and her wise, maternal maxims. Mrs Willard’s a wonderful, wonderful woman. I’m going to ask him to bring his mother….” But then it seemed to me it would be a step, placing him, renouncing him, in spite of the fact that I had nobody-telling him there was no simultaneous interpreter, nobody, but that he was the wrong one, that I had stopped hanging on. “Are you,” Joan hesitated, “going to let him come?”Īt first I had thought it would be awful having Buddy come and visit me at the asylum-he would probably only come to gloat and hob-nob with the other doctors. It would have looked … I don’t know, funny.” “I’m sorry.” Then I added, “Why didn’t you go on seeing them, if you liked them so much?” I went over to see them all the time ” she paused, “until you came.” They were so nice, so happy, nothing like my parents. “Yes,” Joan’s voice slid down my spine like a draft. I went over to my bureau, picked up a pale blue envelope and waved it at Joan like a parting handkerchief. Joan slipped out a pale blue envelope from her skirt pocket and waved it teasingly. “All right.” I stuck my finger in my place and shut the book. I wanted to tell her to get the hell out, she gave me the creeps, only I couldn’t do it. Joan edged into the room and sat down on my bed. They had taken away her physics books and the piles of dusty spiral pads full of lecture notes that had ringed her room, and she was confined to grounds again. Ever since the shock treatments had ended, after a brief series of five, and I had town privileges, Joan hung about me like a large and breathless fruitfly-as if the sweetness of recovery were something she could suck up by mere nearness. “Good for you.” I kept my eyes on my book. “I’ve got a let-ter,” Joan chanted, poking her tousled head inside my door. And DeeDee’s husband was obviously living with some mistress or other and turning her sour as an old fusty cat. Why, she couldn’t even keep a boy like Buddy Willard. I thought how sad it was Joan looked so horsey, with such big teeth and eyes like two grey, goggly pebbles. Joan and DeeDee were sitting side by side on the piano bench, and DeeDee was teaching Joan to play the bottom half of Chopsticks while she played the top. I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the centre of empty air. Then I put down the knife and looked at it. I took up the silver knife and cracked off the cap of my egg. “That depends,” Doctor Nolan said, “on you and me.” “You will be having shock treatments three times a week-Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.” “Well it will always be like that,” she said firmly. “It was like I told you it would be, wasn’t it?” said Doctor Nolan, as we walked back to Belsize together through the crunch of brown leaves. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. But before I could take in any more, Doctor Nolan led me through a door into fresh, blue-skied air.Īll the heat and fear had purged itself. I woke out of a deep, drenched sleep, and the first thing I saw was Doctor Nolan’s face swimming in front of me and saying, “Esther, Esther.”īehind Doctor Nolan I could see the body of a woman wearing a rumpled black-and-white checked robe and flung out on a cot as if dropped from a great height.
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