Hystera Read online

  The loud shuffling of the nurse frightened her. There were harsh sounds, more drawers opening and shutting. Lilly didn’t understand why the room was darkening until she opened her eyes again and saw Beverly had pulled down the metal shutters of the window. The moonlight and city lights had vanished behind them.

  It seemed like seconds passed before Beverly spun around again, to her. “Well, are we ready now?” Beverly glanced at the puddle of Lilly’s clothes on the floor. “Okay, I guess we are, then,” she said. “Does anything hurt?” Beverly was asking Lilly now. Beverly’s gloved hand pushed down on Lilly’s abdomen. “We’re exploring externally first,” she explained.

  From Lilly’s thigh to her navel, the nurse’s right hand repeated its mechanical actions, pressed and released with its heel. “Does this hurt?” Beverly kept asking each time her hand bounced off a spot. “How about here? Do you feel pain anywhere in the back area?”

  The room’s light now came from an overhead swing lamp that Lilly hadn’t seen Beverly flick on, its beam lancing Lilly’s groin.

  The room was lit, but strange and dark and coffinlike, as in a movie theater.

  “When you were admitted there were notes about your discomfort,” Beverly was saying. “Dr. Burkert just wanted to be sure. Of course, if your pain is hysterical you must use the hospital to explore the reasons why.”

  The motion of Beverly’s hands stopped, and for a long minute she stared straight into Lilly’s eyes.

  Suddenly, Lilly couldn’t bear this cold woman in her perfection. Beverly’s voice came to her now in half-sounds. The mysterious bulb inside Lilly rose, swelling—the same apparition she had seen that day in the bathroom in her Little Italy apartment, suffocating her in its waves of distress and unwanted heat. Lilly felt herself on the verge of fire.

  “Do you know why Dr. Burkert wanted this exam?” Beverly was saying, still talking at her. Lilly couldn’t answer, and Beverly shuffled to the cabinets and counter once again. She started checking the different probing utensils: black electric instruments connected to one long holder fastened to the white wall, the plugs of their coiling black cords pressed into one central outlet. Each of the three instruments resembled a telephone receiver; switched on, Lilly felt them as flashlights.

  “I’m going to ask you to slide down more.” Beverly gestured with her right forefinger, signaling Lilly to position herself as she came back to the table, flexing her fingers in the gloves.

  When Lilly slid her back against the table, she heard the paper tear and she struggled to sit up, but the nurse abruptly grabbed a hold of Lilly’s feet, clasped her ankles, and tugged at her. Pulling out the stirrups, she forced Lilly’s feet into them, leaving a wide spread between Lilly’s thighs and her naked genitals.

  Lilly weakly fought to sit up again, but her feet were imprisoned in the stirrups. “I’m not going to argue with you,” Beverly said. “I don’t argue with patients. I’m staff, you know.” Beverly’s hand was doing what it did before, pressing first on Lilly’s lower abdomen. Beverly had flicked one of the black instruments on, and a red light beeped from its nozzle. “I’m not trying to hurt you, Lillian,” she said.

  The fingers were somewhere, and Lilly helplessly lay her hands, palms up, along her sides. She stiffened, tightening against an unbearable onrushing, a heated current inside her.

  There was another silence before Beverly, taking no notice of the reflexive reactions erupting now in the body she was probing, said, “I have to finish this. Please stop squirming, for heaven’s sake.”

  When the darkness came, cloaking and then wrapping Lilly into mute stillness, the tips of Beverly’s rubber-gloved fingers were cold, like buds of ice. But Lilly’s mind was already crashing behind her. If she could not die she could become a person who had fallen into a certain kind of death, she thought.

  She started driving there with her jerks and swallows. Her physical body was hurling torn shreds and pieces of the examination table paper in a tantrum, and she was screaming. But then—she was past her body, as if a space had blown out, taking everything with it into a great expansive nothing, an in-rushing of gas and matter and darkness.

  She felt the gloved fingers of the nurse. They were warm now, and brought her into a feeling that some better power was over her, unfolding Lilly into a safe night of protectors and caretakers. Fracture and genesis were happening both at once inside her. First, falling in pieces, she was now coming back into the reality of the room, of her mental breakdown. And then, within seconds, she could feel her body again, as if after a long disemboweling.

  Lilly looked up into the eyes of the nurse. Beverly was no longer Lilly’s tormentor. The nurse would help her, Lilly thought, and Lilly would not have to go back, into the outside world. Not for a long while.

  Two hours later, Lilly awoke from a cloudy sleep inside a seclusion room, conscious of her surroundings again. When Lilly had stopped screaming, Beverly had helped her stand. Two aides had rushed in the examination room, held Lilly by each elbow, and escorted her down the hall— dressed only with a sheet around her shoulders, into this barren white room down the hall. They had helped her dress into a thick gown, told her she was in the “quiet room.” Then they forced her to drink down a watery liquid with crushed pieces of sedating pills in it.

  Now Lilly was listening to herself breathing too hard. Underneath her back was the cold plastic of the bare mattress. Around her and above—a pure whiteness with no shadows. The room’s severe and thickly padded walls were painted with a heavy, chalky coat like milk of magnesia, their stuffing worming a way out through holes.

  She had come through the examination, but she was mad. It could be something beautiful, she thought, her madness. She would make it have sense, like the strange symbols she once saw in the basement of her parents’ house, where her mother’s ancient Hebraic texts lay.

  Lilly fell back to the thoughts of the alchemy she had researched in the Sarah Lawrence library. In the quiet now, she tried to remember the alchemy pictures she saw in the books. There was a place for what was happening to her within those images, she thought. All this wouldn’t feel so strange if she could remember what she read in the books at the Sarah Lawrence library.

  “She appears calm,” Lilly suddenly heard now.

  Two people walked into the room.

  Lilly struggled to sit up on the mattress.

  “You gave us a pretty hard time, Lillian.” It was Beverly talking down to her. “The way you were screaming—”

  “Wait, Beverly—,” the man said to the nurse. He was lean, not tall. “I’m Dr. Burkert,” he said. “I admitted you after the emergency room. Do you remember? We thought it better to protect you in here while you were having such a difficult time.”

  Lilly fell back into a sound of plastic, but she felt relief, hearing his voice.

  “We’re going to talk in here,” she heard him say to the nurse. And when Lilly again looked up there was only Dr. Burkert in the room: slender-boned and young, he was almost sympathetic-looking in his chino trousers, his moss desert boots. His long hair was caramel-colored, and it curtained his ears. “I’m concerned,” he said to Lilly, “about what happened to you a few hours ago. Can you tell me what happened?”

  “I was committed,” she said.

  “You weren’t committed. You signed a voluntary admission form in the emergency room. Perhaps it’s hard for you to remember everything that has happened. We’ll take our time, all right?” Lilly recognized his clipped-sounding accent now. It was South African. He talked like the man on that Safari to Africa TV series on Channel 13. She hadn’t noticed he really wasn’t British when he interviewed her before. She had been sure he was British. “Do you understand why you were admitted to the hospital?” he asked her again now.

  “Someone brought me here.”

  “A woman named Jane brought you to the emergency room tonight. Your roommate at college, I believe.”

  Lilly felt a slight throb in her bare right foot, like warm blood wa
s suddenly flowing down her instep. Someone had forgotten to put her socks and Frye boots back on.

  She heard his breathing in what she believed was his exasperation at her. “You mentioned a feeling of discomfort inside your body. I ordered a pelvic examination,” he said.

  Lilly clasped her hands around both her arms, keeping her body lying flat and stretched on her back.

  The fresh cotton of her underwear felt suddenly too warm against the inside of her nervous thighs, against her buttocks. The dark gulf inside her was a basin of tears, anger, and helplessness.

  Lilly firmed her eyes shut. It could be that the doctor knew nothing about her at all. And it was best to keep it that way.

  “You were very frightened in the examination room,” he said. “And then you were out of control. We gave you some Valium to take some of the panic away.”

  She lay as stiffly as she could and looked up at the ceiling to keep herself still. Her eyes searched the white ceiling, the lightbulbs behind the translucent square plastic tiles. She wondered if any flies were caught between the plastic and the masked light fixtures the way they were in her parents’ house in Bedford on summer nights. Moths died, scorched into dust by flying into the lights.

  “All right, then,” he said. “We’ll give you more time to calm down.”

  Lilly waited but she didn’t hear Dr. Burkert’s voice again, and she didn’t move or speak in the new silence.

  She felt more than heard Dr. Burkert stepping back. His soft-soled shoes made a squeak on the floor, and he said, as if even a sound might have frightened her, “I think you’ll find the hospital to be a safe place.”

  The door closed, and the door lock caught behind him as he left.

  Lilly sat up on the mattress again, after Dr. Burkert left the quiet room. Would he come back? She wondered, and then she was thinking of Mitchell in Little Italy, of lying on the synthetic gold brocade spread waiting for Mitchell to come into her bedroom the way it was, before her feelings changed.

  Mitchell liked to find Lilly with only her wild baby-blue high heels on, naked as these walls, she remembered. She would listen as Mitchell pulled a beer out of the refrigerator in the kitchen. “Now you look like a woman,” Mitchell would say, walking into the bedroom to lie with her.

  Now Lilly forced herself off the mattress. She was like a child, tortured by her own violent motions. She scraped toward the locked door. Her hand stroked its flaky white surface. It wasn’t wood, she was sure, but a strange cement or plaster.

  She could break out. Soon the doctor would be gone for the night, and if she waited a clearing would be apparent to her outside in the hall. She pushed her right forefinger inside the keyhole, filled, too, with dusty white crust. The whole room was overpainted with that terrible white, so thickly layered the space was unnatural and frightening.

  No, she did not want to break out, she thought. She took her finger out of the keyhole, and then she put it into her mouth, as if to taste her own incarceration, make love to it. She wanted to stay. In the hospital, she would be safe. The doctor was right.

  Through the door’s synthetic plastic window, the people milling around the ward were blurred and murky. A middle-aged woman trying to pull her hospital dress down because it kept sliding up her doughy legs. Two adolescent girls passing a bag of Frito-Lay corn chips back and forth from one another’s hands as they sat cross-legged on the hall carpet. Someone complaining to a chubby nurse. Then a teenage girl started yelling and screaming. The girl broke from two aides trying to calm her and ran away, down the corridor.

  Lilly stepped back from the door. She raised her right, throbbing bare foot. She thought she felt a flow of blood dripping from its heel. But when she bent to touch the liquid, there was no blood, and her foot felt cold. It was as if all the heat in her had been spent. The small bloodless footprints she made stepping back from the door could have been a ghost’s.

  A soft haze sailed over Lilly’s thoughts.

  Chapter Two

  Lilly was seventeen years old the summer of her father’s accident. She was still living in the house with her parents.

  Two strokes. One caused David, her father, to tumble down the stairs. David’s second stroke made him fall on the kitchen floor. But Lilly was upstairs, with her bathroom door shut by then. Her mother, Helen, was out for the afternoon at that time, at a friend’s house down the road.

  “Take this bag of your father’s things, Lilly,” Helen had said in David’s hospital room, pushing at Lilly, later that night, after the ambulance came and took them to the hospital. David’s slight body was tucked tightly inside the white bedsheets of the bed in the intensive care unit at Northern Westchester Hospital. “The men in the ambulance took his watch,” her mother had said to her, and Lilly remembered how David lay unconscious on the kitchen floor after his second stroke—her mother frantically dialing the emergency number on the refrigerator door.

  The sight of David immersed inside the coma, lying cocooned and breathing through his nose like a wound, made Lilly paralyzed. Her father had turned to ether, she had thought. She could feel him turned inside-out and vaporous and faraway.

  Her mother was wagging the plastic bag at her. “Maybe these ambulance people were stealing. I have his wallet. But there was not his watch to be found anywhere. I don’t want this bag, Lillian, I don’t want it anymore.” Helen had held up a plastic bag, and Lilly saw her father’s box of peppermint Chiclets in it, his gold pinkie ring with its tiny blue stone, which she never knew the name of, and other things—all floating inside the sterilized plastic bag like tiny fish: loose change, his click dispenser of “sen-sen” breath fresheners… “The nurses gave me this bag,” Helen was saying. “What am I supposed to do with the bag? Everything this man ruins.” Helen’s foreign accent had entered the hollow of David’s hospital room. Her mother’s eyes were vacant and swollen, and Lilly heard the way Helen speaks when Helen needed her own language again, the Hebrew inflections returned to Helen’s speech. “What am I expected to do now? What do you want from me? You are so selfish you do not hear when your father falls.” She had stopped, but only to collect more thrust. “Shame on you,” she said. “Shame on you and your father.”

  Her mother was a force too disintegrating to be near. Helen was more an atmosphere in the room than a person. She talked right through Lilly.

  Under them, in his bed, her father’s face had twitched in his coma; his lips were making a hissing noise through his teeth.

  “I want to go back home and get some sleep, “ Helen had finally said. “Your father isn’t the only one who must have rest. What did he do, Lilly? What is all this?”

  Helen had brushed her hand through Lilly’s hair and taken a Kleenex out of her purse to wipe Lilly’s face. “What is the matter with you now, darling?” she asked Lilly. “Look at you, you’re a mess.”

  Helen spit into a Kleenex, running the tissue over Lilly’s cheeks with its moistened end, and Lilly had felt a relief for an instant. Helen’s hand was in her hair, and she was against her mother’s chest and Helen was holding her. Helen drew Lilly to the linen of her summer shift and the feel of her mother’s body underneath it that was soft.

  How many times had Lilly gone over every detail of that night? This is how it had happened, Lilly told herself in the seclusion room again now. Helen was leaving in two days, an early morning flight for Tel Aviv. Her parents were separating. Her mother was going to return to Israel to spend some time. The memory of that night—David’s accident, his room in intensive care lingered now in the whiteness of the seclusion room. The fragments of what had happened in the house would not reassemble inside Lilly’s head with any clarity, darkening and drifting away from her as they had for three years since it happened— mental clouds harboring an accumulation of storm.

  She remembered the draft in the bathroom from the open window that night, the smell of pussy willows and birch trees when she had undressed to take her evening bath. The bathroom was so old, the pipes had grated a
nd squeaked like metal grinders when the hot water ran. For a summer night, the weather had been cool. Lilly had turned off the faucet for her bath, and the water was so clear and clean. Disrobing, Lilly had gotten into the water when she heard the dull thud below her, as if a piece of furniture had fallen down. It was an old, nineteenth-century colonial house, and the floorboards were fragile and did not muffle sounds. But then something within Lilly took over, the bathwater was already riding up into her in caressing waves, circulating sexual pleasures. The sound of the impact had vanished from her awareness, and Lilly slipped into the warm seduction of the water as if she were in the middle of a dream. She pushed herself down into the warmth, and the bathwater had felt like a blanketing body holding her close to her mother, not letting her go. She had stayed in the water longer than she usually did, enveloped by it. Then she heard her mother’s car in the driveway, and seconds later—Helen’s loud footsteps, the front door downstairs opening. Her mother was home again.

  “What happened?” Helen was screaming to Lilly from the stairway. “What happened here, you tell me!” and then Lilly was in a half-blind whirlwind of regrets. Lilly leaped out of the bath and put on her robe as Helen’s shrieks split the silence.

  Later, Lilly thought she had no memories of the night her father fell into his coma on the kitchen floor, except those planted and fixed into her body from her mother’s furious sobs. She could only partly remember those moments she had heard the thud sound of her father’s second fall. It was if a liquid amnesia flowed down and through her every time she tried to recall her hesitation that night, submerging her again in oblivion.

  Down in the basement of her parents’ house in Bedford, next to her mother’s book-binding craft tools which lay on a workbench, Lilly once furtively found an old photograph of her parents’ wedding in New York that Helen accidentally forgot to put back into her private, locked chest one afternoon. The newspaper clipping from a White Plains Reporter Dispatch of 1946 read, “DRINK A TANGERINE! A BRIGHT NEW TASTE THAT’S REALLY DIFFERENT!” and “AUNT PRISCILLA WAS SO PRISSY SHE WORE HERSELF OUT STARCHING CLOTHES—” and in the middle was the announcement of the marriage between her exotic, foreign mother, Helen, to her American father, David, at the Hotel Astor in New York City.