Since You Ask Page 11
‘Can we go to your house?’
‘Now?’
‘Just for a little while.’
‘Okay.’
It was dark and quiet in the hallway. I poured him a Coke in the kitchen, with cubes of ice.
‘Can we go upstairs?’ Beck asked.
‘To my room?’
‘I’ve never seen it. I’ve never seen your fucking room.’
‘My mother’s coming home.’
‘Come on.’
He took off his shoes at the foot of the stairs. He carried his hat in his hands.
‘So here it is.’
The blinds were still down from morning. I crossed the carpet to raise them. ‘Don’t,’ Beck said, coming from behind me, putting his arms around me. ‘I’ve dreamt about this room.’
The collar of his wool uniform pricked my skin.
Something was gone between us, like the warm part of day. He had hardened himself up. Maybe he’d done it so he could stand me, so he could still be with me.
Afterwards, I opened the slats of the blind with my hand. I listened to the sounds of the house, making sure no one had come in. ‘Why do you hate the Marines?’
His arm across mine was heavy and damp. He smelled of sweat and something slightly burnt.
‘It’s just killing and more killing. That’s all anyone talks about.’
‘You’re unhappy?’
‘Fuck yeah.’
‘Can you get out?’
‘No.’
He lay on his back. ‘You know how often I imagined this room?’
‘A lot?’
‘Yes. Are you going to college?’
‘Probably.’
I touched his stomach and he tightened his muscles, so they were hard as rope.
I thought of Frank’s apartment, of his cream and crimson sheets and waking up early in the morning to pale gray cloud all around the building. ‘Do you still see Frank?’ I asked.
‘Frank?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s around.’ He ran his fingers across his abdomen. ‘He goes out with some Asian girl. A banker type.’
My jeans were at the end of the bed. I stood up and pulled them on. I went to the bureau for a fresh T-shirt. ‘What about Tommy?’
Beck dropped his head into the pillow. Then he turned his cheek. ‘He’s the same.’
‘And Seth?’
‘In jail.’
‘Really?’
‘Something with Frank.’
I sat on my desk chair, pulling on my socks. ‘But Frank’s not in jail?’
‘No.’
‘You should get up,’ I said, looking at the door. ‘My mother’s coming home.’
‘I like it here.’
I smiled. ‘Do you?’
‘Come over here. Please.’
I moved beside him, on the edge of the bed. He touched my breasts under my T-shirt.
‘Beck.’
‘What?’
‘My mother’s coming home.’
He undid the button on my pants. ‘Get up,’ I said.
‘Not yet.’
‘Please.’
When the front door opened, he pulled my body onto him. ‘Let go,’ I said. He started to pull down my pants but then stopped.
‘I’ll always come back, Betsy. You do know that?’
When we came downstairs, my mother was still in the kitchen, a glass of wine on the table. ‘Beck.’ She opened her eyes wide. ‘I was wondering who was here.’
‘I just showed him the house.’
‘I saw his shoes.’
‘He didn’t want to get anything dirty.’
‘So you’re a Marine now.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Well, I suppose if you’re a Marine I can offer you a beer.’
All the times I would have liked to have Beck over, to have my parents give him a drink, suddenly were gone. Beck drank his beer from the bottle, his beautiful full mouth and freckles on his cheekbones. My mother leaned back against the kitchen counter. She was wearing a cream silk dress, a shirt dress open at the neck, and high heels. I liked that she was beautiful. I liked being proud of her when she came to school. She got enough attention, though. She didn’t need to slip off her shoe the way she did, to slide her slim ivory-stockinged foot in and out of it, cocking her hip, holding up her wineglass beside her pale blue eyes.
‘We have to go,’ I said.
Henry was accepted to Princeton. His father had gone there and his grandfather and his great-grandfather so there wasn’t much he could do not to get in, he said. At the reservoir, an Indian man was selling shaved ice with flavoring.
‘Why go where your father went?’ I asked.
‘If I don’t go there it’ll be just as much his influence.’
‘Except that it will be your own school.’
‘Except that,’ Henry laughed, his raspberry ice dripping on his hand. ‘I wouldn’t get in anywhere as good—‘
‘Sure you would.’
‘My grades are mediocre. My SAT scores are passable. It’s Princeton or bust.’ He laughed again. Our fathers were the same kind, Henry said. ‘They know everything. They have to prove that they know everything and they won’t relax until you think they know everything.’
‘You like your dad.’
‘I do. I just wish he’d let me have a different opinion than he does.’
‘On what?’
‘Anything. No matter what I do, he looks at it as having to do specifically with him. If I go to Princeton, it’s because he went to Princeton. If I go to New Orleans and become, say a fisherman, it’s because I’m running away from him to become a fisherman.’
‘Then you have to not care.’
‘But I do care.’ Henry ran his fingers through his hair, helping it to stick up. ‘That’s what’s so annoying.’
He went to Princeton and Sylvia to Bennington and I went to Sarah Lawrence. It was thirty minutes from the city in Bronxville, quiet and green with acres of woods. Sometimes I had a notion that Frank would drive up and wait outside for me. Probably he didn’t even know where I was. Beck went to Lebanon and got dysentery and was hot and bored and sick of everybody. My dorm room at Sarah Lawrence was small and narrow and we slept together there once, snow on the trees. There was this great space that kept growing between us and part of that was Frank and the other part was just who we were.
I went to visit Henry at Princeton. It was winter, snow deep on the lawns and libraries and bare trees. Henry and I dressed in his down jackets and wool hats and his L.L. Bean boots. We went to a party and drank rum and Coke. On the way home we lay in the snow outside his dorm, and I liked Henry more than I had ever liked anyone. Up in his room, he kissed me on his bed and I felt a great affection for him and I also felt like crying, because I didn’t desire him, at all.
We slept together all that winter, in his dorm room in New Jersey and mine in Bronxville. Before he left for class, he made me cups of tea. He put on music and cracked the window for the icy air to wind in like ribbon. I could smell buttered toast and one day I thought, I would break through my coldness—and it would work out.
He was the first person I ever told about Raymond. I thought it might make him feel better about me being in love with Frank and not with him. Maybe it did, too, for a while. He said, ‘Jesus, Betsy that’s the key.’ In the end, though, it was the same. His fingertips on my breast irritated me. When he kissed my mouth, I turned my head. Later, he said he couldn’t do it anymore, he felt useless and it was no good for either of us. I sat on his futon and cried—not just over him, but over his dorm room and his batik bedspread and the way he put on music for me, left a cup of tea for me whenever he went out. Those were things real boyfriends did; with a real boyfriend, you slept in his dorm and made eggs in the morning or went out with other people your age for french toast at three a.m. Henry and I did these things.
‘But you love me and everything,’ I said. ‘You told me.’
‘I know.’
‘Oh, come on, Betsy,’ he said, sitting on the floor beside me, his arms on his knees. ‘Don’t make things worse.’
I wanted to. I didn’t love him the way I wanted to, but he still could have tried harder. I would have tried.
PART IV
I have "Treatment" at the end of June. Kenneth drops me off at the conference center and it is not unlike the Last Supper with all the staff in a row: Keats in the center, Nurse Caroline on his right, and Lindsey from Morning Group on his left. Then there is Robert, my drug counselor, Thomas the nutritionist, and Ellie from Eating Disorders. There is Vicki, the meds nurse, and a few others I do not know.
I sit in a wooden chair, a few feet back. The windows are level with the tops of the trees. Sunlight lies on the wood floor. Adam is a nurse’s aide and sets out clear plastic cups. He is twenty-three and handsome and going to medical school in the fall. I am wearing a red skirt my friend Robbie bought me at the gift shop and an oversized white sweater. The sweater was a mistake, first because all the Eating Disorder girls wear oversized shirts, and second because it is hot.
Keats takes off his blue blazer, beads of dust floating in the amber light. ‘Elizabeth Scott, known to us as Betsy,’ he says, opening a folder thick with lab tests and nurses’ notes, ‘came to Fairley on April 25, having that morning been picked up by the police in Central Park. She spent her first twenty-eight days in Substance Abuse and is now in Adult Psychiatric.’
I like it when he says Adult Psychiatric. I have finally arrived, I think, at a place where I should be. Outside, Adam is now crossing the lawn, on his way back to Main House. His hair is curly and dark. He has a girlfriend his own age, I imagine, someone who plays tennis or lacrosse.
My progress has been excellent, Keats says. I have completed the Substance Abuse program. I have remained sober and reached target weight. Robert leans back in his chair, his skin red and blotchy as if he still drinks. ‘That’s all great,’ he says, opening his hands. ‘It really is, and I think Betsy’s doing great also. But she does seem to be on a lot of medication.’
He says this as if he has said it before, about other people.
‘She has left Group twice this week,’ Lindsey says.
The first time I left Group, rising from my pink upholstered and chrome metal chair, pushing through the swinging glass doors past the indoor swimming pool and the gift shop with its jewelry and leisure clothes, I thought someone would catch up with me—that some nurse or guard or our counselor Lindsey would take me by the shoulders and turn me around, take me back to my seat. Instead, I made it through the front doors of Rec. and Kenneth was there, standing by the Lincoln Continental in his thin black tie.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked, his hair white and lightly waxed.
‘Yes.’
He shook out his cigarettes for me. Across from Rec., in front of Dobson House, the breeze played with the dandelions. A white birch shone like rope. Kenneth held up his silver lighter, ‘K Lundon’ engraved on the side.
In the car, Kenneth drove with his window down. The trees were still fresh with dew, the sun distant from the earth. Up at Main House, Vicki called Dr. Keats and then gave me Klonopan, a small, chalky orange pill the color of a Creamsicle. I took a cup of ice and a carton of orange juice and lay out on the grass. I liked Klonopan. Klonopan laid me out—as on a beach, on a hot towel receiving sun.
Since then, I have left Group six times. This is almost twice a week, Keats says, and too much. He would like to lower my medication, but first I need to sit through Group, to be less ‘labile.’ It is then decided that I am generally well liked, have made several friends amongst the patients and staff, and am particularly active in occupational and recreational therapies. I am regularly seen, Sammy says, at the swimming pool.
Keats smiles at me, in his soft, quiet, deliberate way. ‘How do you feel about your treatment here?’
‘How do I feel?’
Sammy’s eyes flick to the windows and back. She is twenty-five and has a degree in Stress Management. She has red hair and a pretty face, smooth and placid as on a Greek vase.
‘I feel,’ I say slipping my hands beneath my thighs, palms against the slats of the wooden chair, ‘that everyone always thinks I’m doing well.’
‘And you don’t think so?’ Keats asks.
A Philippine maid is carrying sheets into Bishop House, her hair in a dark bun shining like corn syrup.
Nurse Caroline leans in toward me. ‘People judge you on your outsides, don’t they?’ she asks me. ‘Rather than your insides.’
I hate that kind of language. Anyway she has it mixed up. ‘Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides,’ that’s what it’s supposed to be.
‘Maybe.’
‘No one is suggesting that you’re ready to leave,’ Dr. Keats says. ‘Is that what you’re afraid of?’ His eyes are not stunning. His eyes are not the brilliant green of water in Antigua, not blue as the sky or azure—yet they are startling to me, open yet serious.
‘I guess it is.’
Afterwards, Kenneth walks me to the car. I light a cigarette. Smoke fills my lungs like water.
‘How did it go?’
‘Okay.’
‘They helping you any?’ ‘Maybe.’
We stop beside the car. Dr. Keats comes out with Sammy. Wind blows her red hair into her mouth and the tops of the oak trees sway.
‘You’ve got to want it,’ Kenneth says, stamping out his stub.
‘To want what?’
‘To be well.’
The truth is, nobody but Dr. Keats and Wayne would ever admit I wasn’t well. Maybe Raymond had caused my parents enough grief; maybe he was all the grief my parents could stand. The day the police picked me up, at 5:22 a.m. in Central Park, in the West 70s by the lake’s edge, my parents were asleep in their yellow cotton sheets, pale sun rising on the second floor, on their large quiet room beneath Raymond’s room, on the bluish garden. It was my father who rose and dressed, who took a cab in his gray suit to the police station where I sat with my coffee cup, with a lieutenant in a white shirt with thick crimson stripes, yellow stain like an iron burn beside the middle button; he pushed up my shirtsleeve when my father came, showing him my track marks like bruises, blue and yellow deep inside the skin.
Outside, it was too bright. My lungs hurt. In the cab, my father leaned against the far door, his handsome face all tight as if in a hard wind. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said in this voice so quiet and grave I almost stopped breathing. He was like Wayne, though. He had too much going on in himself. ‘Not now,’ he warned and held up his hand, looking out at Central Park as the cab moved through
Inside the house, it smelled of fresh coffee and freesia and furniture polish. My mother was in her dressing gown and sat beside me on the bed, her skin in the dim yellow light of spring soft, like that of her mother, who I never knew but was English and didn’t go in the sun. ‘What is going on?’ she asked.
My father sat by the window, in their blue armchair. Slim trees eased their way up from the garden. ‘Show her your arms.’
‘Dad—’
My mother pushed up my sleeve. I saw a flicker like a tic in the soft skin under her eye. ‘Charming.’ That wasn’t the reaction I expected. ‘Where is your brother?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t you care?’
I did and I didn’t.
My parents have always had nice bathrooms. In Antigua, they had had their bathroom tiles shipped from England. In New York, their tub was pink granite, the light dim, rose-colored from the walls. My mother hung a dress on the back of the door: one of my old dresses, a shirt dress with long sleeves and a belt. She folded a pair of underwear on the counter, peach colored with a lace band at the top.
‘I don’t understand it,’ she said.
I sat up in the tub, so water splattered on the floor. I had a bath sponge in my hands, in the shape of a heart. She leaned against the doorway
her bare ankle cocked in her high-heeled slipper.
‘You have everything. What could you possibly want in your life?’
‘It’s not about that.’
‘What is it about?’
She knew what it was about. ‘Just because—’ she said.
‘Just because what?’
The sponge was heavy in my hands.
‘It’s Ray or it’s Beck or it’s Wayne. When are you responsible?’
Certain times—times at Fairley times after Beck or Frank, at the very end of things—the world grows so quiet I lie on my bed with my palms up. I look out the window at the spreading trees, and the gold light on the bark is gold like a wedding band, only cold.
My father drives from the city and is late for Session. He is closeshaven, his face and body lean with ambition. He walks fast through Reception so people look at him. ‘Hello, Betsy,’ he says in his cool, deliberate, cautious way. He is so angry and I can’t understand it. He will do anything for Raymond: bail him out of jail, get him into schools, hire lawyer after lawyer. But when it comes to me, he is tired already.
‘It’s as if he hates me,’ I tell Keats.
‘Hate is a strong word.’
‘That’s how it feels.’
‘He does seem uncomfortable with you.’
‘Uncomfortable?’
‘He has trouble dealing with you.’
‘He deals with Raymond.’
‘He helps Raymond. That’s not the same as dealing with him.’
Keats holds his hands in his lap—smooth, square, unblemished hands. ‘You’re emotional. It threatens some people.’
In high school, Keats was probably a really nice person. He wouldn’t have been a school star, but he wouldn’t have been an underdog either. I probably wouldn’t have talked to him at all.
‘Sometimes,’ I tell Keats, ‘I think Dad treats Raymond differently because he’s the oldest son.’
‘You think your father favors him?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘Just the way he makes excuses for him—as if he can do no wrong, as if he is an extension of my father.’
‘But you’re not?’