Counting Backwards

10

Carrie

September 1924

I named my daughter Vivian Elaine Buck. She came into the world hollering like she already knew about all the misery that was yet in store for our little family. Mrs. Alice and Mr. John tried to send me to the Colony, where my ma was, but the Colony wouldn’t take women who were with child. Instead, I had to stay with a woman they hired from outside of town until the baby came. And then, just three weeks after Vivian was born, they sent me straight to the Colony like they’d wanted from the first.

About six months had passed since the day they came and pulled me away from my tiny baby girl. It took three of those men to get me into the car, what with the way I was carrying on, but they did finally overpower me. Every day since then, I wished for Vivian so hard. I could still remember what my sister, Doris, had been like at six months old, how she’d sat in my lap and smiled at me, pulling on my hair. I wondered if in the six months I’d been at the Colony, Vivian had grown pudgy like Doris had been, if her hair had grown at all, if her chin got slick with drool when she smiled. As I stared hour after hour out the window of the dayroom, the place they brought us out to “socialize”

with the others at the facility, my thoughts stayed always with my daughter.

“Carrie.”

My ma was sitting across from me at the chipped game table.

I turned back to her, waiting to see if maybe she had some new sage words to lift my battered spirits. But we’d already talked the topic to death, so I didn’t expect too much. Plus, Ma had never been a sentimental woman, and the years she’d spent at this awful place, the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, had hardened her all the more. Sometimes she just shut herself off from the world around her, like she didn’t even know anyone else was there. Those times, you could be talking right to her, snap your fingers in front of her face, and she wouldn’t even blink.

But she was having one of her good days, playing games with me that afternoon. We were dressed in the same long gray dresses they gave all the patients, the fabric of hers more worn than mine. I’d only been using the clothing for a few months, but she’d been wearing that same dress for years. I couldn’t hardly guess how often they might replace a thing like that. Maybe not ever.

I watched as she fiddled with the set of dominoes someone had left at the table. Even when she was acting clearheaded, the look in her eyes was duller than when I was a girl.

Ma was still husky, her shoulders broad above her heaving bosom, but she seemed so much weaker than I remembered her from my youth. Maybe it was how her long hair had gone all gray, the coarse braid down her back making her look like an old lady even though she was only thirty-five by then. But all that time in the facility, surrounded by abandoned women and boredom all the livelong day, I suppose that takes its toll on a person.

She didn’t like to watch me mooning over my baby girl, staring out that window with my face drawn and sad all the time.

“It’s almost funny, don’t you think, Ma?”

I asked. “The price of me getting back together with you is being away from my child. Like I can’t have you both at once.”

“She a pretty girl?” Ma asked.

This was something she asked me most days of the week. Whenever I started talking about my feelings, she would turn the conversation. Always asking if my girl was pretty. I knew Ma thought if she herself had been born with a different face, a slender body, blond hair, maybe she could have had a happier life. Instead, she ended up living with a railroad worker who barely made enough to support us before he up and died, leaving us with nothing but debt after.

“Miss Buck.”

One of the nurses approached our table, and Ma and me both looked up at her.

“We still got sixty-seven minutes,”

Ma said, pointing at the clock on the wall behind me.

“Yes, you do,”

Nurse Williams answered, a prim smile on her face beneath the white nurse’s cap pinned to her shiny hair.

I wondered where it was that this rosy-cheeked woman went home to at night, how it felt to come and go from a place like this.

The nurse put a hand to my shoulder, and a wash of alarm took me over. I don’t know how I knew, but something inside my bones told me more bad was coming for me soon.

“It’s time for you to visit with Dr. White,”

the nurse said, mentioning the same man I’d met when they first brought me to the Colony. I still got angry each time I remembered how he asked me all manner of ridiculous questions that day. There I was, still crying about being separated from my baby girl, and he wanted to know if I could tie my shoes, did I know the year, and such. He told me that because I could answer his questions, I’d be allowed to room in the outer part of the Colony, where the women with more skills were kept. Male patients, I’d learned, were kept to the other side of the property. There was also a separate ward designated for the “lunatics and idiots,”

where I didn’t have to go. I’d not seen the doctor since that day. I worried that if I was going back to him now, it meant more bad tidings. But then I had the happy thought that maybe it was just the opposite. Maybe my dread was misplaced and I was about to get out.

“You’re not getting out,” Ma said.

I looked over to her as I stood from my seat.

“They don’t hardly let anybody out. And not a girl like you, with no place to go. Ain’t like anybody’s fighting for you from the outside.”

I thought then of Billy and the letter he’d sent me saying how angry he was about everything that had happened. But he never said anything about getting me out.

“Come,”

Nurse Williams prodded. “It’s just your time for a check with the doctor so he can make sure you don’t need any new treatments or such. You’re not going to give me any problems now, are you, Miss Buck?”

She looked over her shoulder toward a large orderly who stood in the corner of the room, the muscles in the man’s arms bulging beneath the long sleeves of his uniform.

I followed that nurse through the hallways of the Colony, back toward rooms so far from my dormitory that I’d near forgotten about them since I’d arrived. I noticed a smoking room for the staff and then some empty offices, maybe for secretaries and the like. When we reached a door with a plaque that read “Dr. White,”

the nurse stopped walking. I made to go into the room, but the nurse took my wrist and pointed at the closed door just beside it.

She knocked lightly and then pushed open the door. Inside was a large room more like a parlor than a doctor’s office. There was a plush carpet and a large leather sofa, ceramic lamps, and carved side tables. At the center of the room, across from the sofa, stood a shiny wooden desk that looked large enough for three people to use at once, and different groupings of upholstered chairs. The desk had a few papers piled neatly on top and a brass lamp that had been polished to a gleam. I couldn’t think why anyone would want me in such a fancy room. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been in a space so turned out before.

“Go on,”

Nurse Williams said, giving me a little shove into the room. “You can stand yourself over next to the desk. Dr. Preston will be coming in, and you’ll want to show him proper respect.”

“Preston? But what for?”

I asked the nurse. She’d said earlier, I was certain of it, that I was seeing Dr. White. I didn’t think I’d ever met any doctor by the name of Preston.

“Oh, I really couldn’t say,”

she said as footsteps could be heard approaching in the hall. “But here he comes now,”

she added, standing herself a little taller and pushing her shoulders back.

The man who approached us was a stranger to me. He looked to be somewhere over fifty years old, but still, he was comely enough. He had dark brown hair cut to neat square lines around his ears and a crisp linen suit beneath his white coat. He wasn’t a particularly tall man, and I stood more than a few hairs higher than he did.

“Dr. Preston,”

Nurse Williams said, her tone sugary all of a sudden, “this is the daughter, Carrie Buck.”

The doctor’s eyes slid over to me and he smiled real wide, like one does when trying to make friends with a young child.

“I have so been looking forward to meeting you, Miss Buck,”

he said, his eyes near glowing with delight. “Come.”

He took me by the arm and led me to the sofa. “Please, sit.”

Then he motioned with his hand.

It felt a little strange sitting down on that fancy couch while I was in my soiled, shabby uniform, but I did as he said. I thought Nurse Williams would leave us, but she just closed the door and came to stand near where I sat. She held a pencil and a clipboard at the ready.

“We’re just checking on some of our patients,”

Dr. Preston said, his words coming out long and relaxed, like he was adding in extra syllables. “We’re trying to make sure we’re doing as fine a job in this institution as possible. We want to do the best we can for the good people of Virginia, not cause more trouble. You understand?”

I nodded, though I really didn’t understand much at all. Not then.

“We want to help you, Carrie, and I think we may have found a way. Isn’t that nice?”

“Yes, sir,”

I answered. His upbeat attitude had me thinking that my earlier cheery thoughts were on the right track. Maybe I was getting out after all, never mind what Ma had said. I hoped they’d finally realized I didn’t belong in a place like the Colony, that I was sent there only because of the pregnancy. Had Mr. John or Mrs. Alice started to feel sorry about how they’d treated me, then come forward on my behalf? Or maybe the nurses had reported on my good behavior. Any which way, I was excited to think about getting to leave that place and get back together with my baby. I knew Billy would help me find a place to live. Maybe I could find a job where I could bring Vivian along with me to work. I was ready to dart out from my seat and run to the exit, except for one important question. “But what about my mama?”

Dr. Preston’s eyes jumped back to Nurse Williams then. The two of them shared a look, and Dr. Preston’s lips lifted like I’d made a joke. I couldn’t say what was funny, unless they might’ve had good news to share about Ma too.

“No, no, Miss Buck,”

he told me, talking real slow. “We’re just focusing on the younger women so far. Now, if you’re ready, I’d like to ask you a few things.”

He rounded the desk and opened a drawer, pulling out a small notepad before returning to sit on one of the large fabric-covered chairs beside the sofa.

I nodded. I’d have told him my deepest, darkest secrets, whatever he wanted to know, if it meant they’d let me go free.

But then he set to asking me absurd questions that had not one thing or another to do with whether I belonged in the Colony. Most of what he asked, I couldn’t properly answer either. Did I know the square root of 121, could I list three battles from the Revolutionary War? I didn’t think to remind him that I’d not been to school past the sixth grade. Where else was I supposed to have learned those things? As it was, I knew I’d already forgot so much of what I’d been taught years ago. My figuring with numbers had always been weak, and without practice, I needed my fingers to help me out. Then sometimes I didn’t have enough fingers for whatever answer I was seeking, and I would feel mad at Mrs. Alice all over again for pulling me out when she did.

But I pushed my anger away and focused on trying to answer right for the doctor. All the while, he kept on making ticks in his little notebook.

By the time we finished, I felt like I’d been in that office for near half the day. But when I looked at the clock, I saw not even a full hour had passed. Meanwhile, my spirits had dropped so low. I’d likely failed the test I’d been given. I kept my eyes on my dark, scuffed shoes, trying not to let myself cry.

Dr. Preston walked with us toward the door and turned to the nurse.

“This one is perfect,”

he said. “You’ve done well.”

His words surprised me, and I looked up from my feet. He was smiling bright, as if something excellent had just occurred. And I’m embarrassed to admit that I misunderstood all over again. He was so clearly bursting with delight that I began to hope again that they might be considering my release. Well, shame on me. If I thought anything good could come from meeting with that man, maybe I was just as dim-witted as Dr. Preston wanted to believe.