A Danger to Herself and Others(21)
Dr. Lightfoot shakes her head. “I want you to stay focused on the work we’re doing. Schoolwork would distract you.”
“I can concentrate on more than one thing at once. How do you think I managed to be a straight-A student in calculus and history and French and English?” Lightfoot doesn’t return my smile.
“I don’t want you to use your schoolwork as a way to distance yourself from what we’re doing here.”
“Well, which is it? A distraction or a distancing technique?”
The doctor doesn’t answer. Good. I caught her in a lie. The truth is, she doesn’t care if I’m distracted or distanced. Schoolwork is simply another thing she gets to hold over me, another privilege I have to earn like lunch or showers or therapy in other rooms.
Tough luck, Dr. Lightfoot. I’m not going to let being trapped in here turn my brain to mush.
Every college I apply to is going to want me.
Maybe I’ll even decide to get a postgraduate degree.
Maybe I’ll become a psychologist so I can prove Dr. Lightfoot’s techniques are absurd.
Maybe I can get her license revoked for keeping a person like me in a place like this.
fifteen
Here’s something they never tell you in books and movies about being imprisoned or institutionalized or trapped (books I’m not allowed to read and movies I can’t watch now that Lightfoot controls all my media access): Being locked up is absurdly boring. The monotony is enough to drive a sane person crazy.
Which is why Lucy and I decide to form a book club.
Okay, I know I just said they don’t let me read, but bear with me. They don’t let me read the books I want to read. Academic books that I could turn into an independent study project for extra credit when I get back to school or great literature like Fathers and Sons that would give me a head start on the Russian literature class I was going to take on Tuesday nights at NYU starting in September.
Then again, maybe it is September by now.
They do let us read terrible books from a library they claim exists somewhere in the building. I’m pretty sure the “library” is nothing more than a closet with cast-off books from the nursing staff. There’s surely no wise librarian curating the list and organizing the books alphabetically or thematically or even by color to make the shelves look nice. I bet there aren’t even shelves. It’s probably just a pile next to the cleaning supplies.
The books are all paperback—no heavy hardcovers with sharp edges here. Not one is longer than three hundred pages. (I guess even a paperback could be considered dangerous if it’s thick enough.) The pages are dog-eared, and the spines are bent, and the covers are creased.
At home, I keep my books in pristine condition. I never crack a single spine, and I underline in pencil only, with .5 millimeter extra-fine lead. My bookshelves are arranged chronologically: Novels I read in school are grouped together by the class I was taking when I read the book and the year I took the class.
Sixth grade: Little Women, The Diary of Anne Frank
Seventh grade: To Kill a Mockingbird, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Clover
Eighth grade: Jane Eyre, Romeo and Juliet
Ninth grade: Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, Beloved
At my school, tenth grade is when they start letting you select elective English classes. There’s a section on my bookshelves for the class I took on short stories in tenth grade (that’s when my school lets you pick elective English classes): The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, The Stories of John Cheever, The Stories of Bernard Malamud;
a section for women’s literature: Pride and Prejudice, The Woman in White, The Yellow Wallpaper, Their Eyes Were Watching God;
a section for Latin American lit: A Hundred Years of Solitude, Kiss of a Spiderwoman, Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions.
And now I’ve gone from all that to reading some bodice ripper that turned on a member of the nursing staff.
But it’s better than nothing. A book is a book, and reading a book is superior to staring at the ceiling for the zillionth time. And talking about a book is better than talking about when the linoleum floors were last washed or how long it’s been since I wore pants with an actual zipper. (Both conversations Lucy and I have had.)
So, like I said, we decide to form a book club. We pass each book back and forth between us—first me, then Lucy—reading one chapter each and then discussing it. We dissect these narratives like they’ve never been dissected before. Lucy folds the page to hold our place while we talk and then hands the book back to me so I can read the next chapter.
“Do you think the writer intended for the wrinkled sheets to be a metaphor for—”
“I don’t think the writer intended anything to be a metaphor for anything.”
When Lucy reads, her mouth twitches, a tick that lets me know she’s concentrating.
An attendant pokes her head in the door, trilling, Room check. We roll our eyes and giggle. (Good. Let them see us laughing together.)
“I wish I had a pencil so I could write down my thoughts.” (They don’t let us have anything to write with.)
“Why? In case we get tested on it later?”
We dissolve into another round of giggles.
Jonah used to say that fresh air was good for your brain. He promised we’d go to Santa Cruz before the summer was over so that we could spend the day at the beach.