Truman was looking at me with concern. “Yes,” he said, but he didn’t sound like he meant it.
I attempted a smile and a light laugh. “I guess we do like to tease.”
“Well, there you go,” Celine said. “No more talk of ghosts, now. It’s creepy.”
Wilson shrugged like he didn’t mind overly much that theconversation was going to be moving in a different direction. But he reached for his wineglass and looked at me over the rim.
Perhaps you don’t see ghosts, his look was saying to me.But you see something. And when you were six and I was ten and we were friends, you told me what it was.
9
APRIL 1939
For the next six weeks, every time I attend my therapy sessions, Dr. Townsend extracts some type of noisemaker from within the boxes in the room, produces a sound, then asks questions about what I see. He has brought out a metronome, a cuckoo clock, a train whistle, a duck call, a bell. He has dropped a porcelain dish, clapped his hands, bounced a ball, dragged his chair across the floor. He has played recordings of farm animals and chugging locomotives and opera singers and gunshots and falling rain and a crying child. He writes down what sounds produce vibrant colors and which ones nearly hueless shapes. He has placed colored numbers in front of me to find out which are the right colors according to me and which ones are wrong. He has had me list the colors for January, February, March, and so on; the color for his name, my name, the names of my family—my dead family in heaven. And even though he said the electrodes would be used only if I refused to tell him what he wanted, he nonetheless straps them to my head and has me listen to the sounds all over again while he watches a skinny stretch of paper become splattered with ink from a moving needle.
Sometimes Stuart Townsend comes into the room during our sessions. Dr. Townsend asked me if I minded the first time he came, and since I thought it would be to my benefit to say that I did not, I told him I was fine with it. Stuart is polite but curious, and I often catch him looking at the mound that is my tummy. But I have made a point to be nice to Stuart on the off chance that doing so will help me gain favor with his father. And I do in fact like Stuart. I have been able to tell as the days have progressed that Dr. Townsend expects much from him and is insistent that Stuart pay attention to everything he shows him regarding the running of the institution. I now have the impression that Stuart’s future has been decided for him, and I am wondering if he would have set his sights on being a doctor like his father if the choice had been left to him.
Also during these six weeks, another woman from my room, the childlike woman across from me named Ruth, is taken to the surgery on the second floor and comes back to the room the next day with the same little incisions on her abdomen that Charlotte had. Lenore cried for her friend when she left and cries when she comes back. Again when I ask Nurse Andrews if my roommate is all right, I’m told Ruth will be fine; she had a procedure and just needs rest. This time, though, when I ask, I am at the nurses’ station. This time I can see Ruth’s medical chart. It is facing the glass and I can see what the procedure is called. A salpingectomy. There is no mention of the appendix at all. Ruth—and presumably Charlotte—had a salpingectomy. I have no idea what that is.
Finally something nearly good happens, though. Charlotte’s bed is given to a new resident. Her name is Belle and she is nineteen, auburn-haired, green-eyed, and beautiful. Unlike the others in my sleeping room, Belle accepts my friendship from the get-go. She has relied on me to tell her what she needs to know, sits with me at mealtimes, plays checkers with me in the dayroom, tells me jokes that make me laugh. Belle seems so normal. She isn’t givento fits, doesn’t walk with a limp, isn’t slow of speech, doesn’t fade into a fog of melancholy or slide into bouts of anger.
After she has been at the institution a week, I decide to ask her why she is here.
“My mother dumped me here because I am an embarrassment to her,” Belle says. We are lying in our beds after lights-out, talking in low tones. “I spent a little too much time with the gardener and the next-door neighbor and her best friend’s husband, if you know what I mean.”
“Too much time with them?”
“Having sex with them. With them and with others. I’m good at seducing men. I can get them to do whatever I want. Anything. My mother thinks there’s something wrong with me because all I want is sex. She’s wrong, though. I don’t want the sex, really, I just want the power.”
Power? I have no idea what she is talking about.
“Is that why you’re here?” she asks. “Because you like sex?”
A little laugh escapes me. It is almost like the start of a sob. “No.”
“My mother, when she found out what I was doing, called me a whore. She kept yelling, ‘What is wrong with you?’ So I told her. I told her it all began when her cousin—the rich family relative—raped me. She stormed off with her hands over her ears when I said it. Didn’t want to hear it. Told me I was a liar.”
“A liar? She... she didn’t believe you?”
“Nope. She called this place up and told them I was a sex-crazed, lying lunatic and a danger to society and myself.”
It is dark in the room, and I can’t see Belle’s face, only the outline of her body curled up into her blanket. “But your cousinrapedyou,” I say, appalled.
“Her cousin. And yes. He held me down, put his hand over my mouth, had his way, and then told me if I told anyone, he’d deny it. Didn’t matter, because when I finally did tell my mother, shedidn’t believe me anyway. The cousin has loads of money. He’s wealthy. So of course he wouldn’t do such a thing.”
“That’s... terrible.” I wish for a better word for what Belle has just told me.
“I hated that he was able to use his body against me that way. And I hated that I could control nothing,” Belle goes on. “I vowed I would be the one in charge of my body from then on, and I have been. Every man since has begged for it. Begged.”
I can scarcely imagine what Belle endured. I can’t imagine at all how she’s chosen to recover from it, nor can I understand how openly she talks about it. She sounds almost proud.
“How old were you when he did this to you?” I ask her.
“Thirteen.”
“Oh, Belle! How awful! What does your father say about all this?”
“Nothing. I haven’t seen him since he left my mother for another woman ages ago. It’s why Mother won’t rock the boat with the cousin. She needs what that side of the family gives her.”
