Chapter 24
THE PATIENT I FEARED MOST WAS HEINER, AND I THOUGHT HE must have been close to seven feet tall. His face was so swollen it looked like he had a stocking pulled over it, and he stared at me a lot, breathing heavily.
One day he touched my hair and grunted as I played poker near the coffee machine. When he lumbered away, I asked Fred what was wrong with Heiner.
“Was he born that way?” I wanted to know.
“Naw.” Fred stacked his poker chips. “He’s got some kind of brain disease, I think.”
Sometimes at night when moonlight seeped through the curtains as I tried to sleep, I’d see formless shadows that reminded me of Heiner’s face.
I was terrified he might leave his room and lumber into mine, and I’d pull the covers over my head.
I don’t think I slept much the entire time I was at Appalachian Hall.
One day in group therapy Don asked if I was a “good actress.” He wanted me to participate in psychodrama and act like Fred was my father.
“Just pretend Daddy is sitting across from you,” Don said as if I were a toddler. “Here is your golden chance to tell him what you think, what you feel, what you have suffered.”
“Dad,” I said, looking at Fred, “tell me why you’ve never loved me.”
“Now, Patsy, you have misunderstood things.” Fred sat on the edge of his chair, leaning closer. “I’ve always loved you, but my business takes all my time.” At this he whispered to me, “What did you say your father does?”
“He’s a lawyer, an appellate specialist.” I watched Fred scratch around the angry red scar over his eye from the alleged pistol whipping.
“Yes,” he replied. “My law practice is very demanding. And I’ve had to work so you could go to college and… ah… have nice things.”
“You’re a terrible actor, Fred,” I replied, because my father had made it clear he wouldn’t pay for college. “And you’re not a good lawyer either.”
“Patsy,” Don interrupted with a frown. “Remember this is all pretend. Now go along with it. Just remember it’s therapeutic.”
“Okay.” I took a deep breath, returning my attention to Fred. “Dad, you won’t give me an education, and you don’t give me nice things either. There’s no excuse.”
“What can I say?” Fred shrugged at Don. “I think she wins the case!”
After the first month of my hospital stay, Don told me I needed to write my father.
It was time to tell him where I was and that I hadn’t stayed in Rome.
Don also mentioned my eventual hospital bill, and that was his real agenda.
There was concern about how it would be paid.
The staff knew my mom couldn’t possibly afford an expense like that.
The next morning, I woke up to my alarm at six o’clock, propped pillows behind me, and wrote the letter. I told Dad the truth.
“I’m in a psychiatric hospital. I didn’t want you to find out because I know you hate weakness.”
On my way to breakfast, I dropped the letter in the lobby’s mail slot. During my next session with Dr. Bill, I decided to tell him the truth too. I confessed I wasn’t taking the Navane. I hid it under my tongue every morning and flushed it down the toilet the minute the nurse left my room.
“And if she now starts forcing me to swallow it,” I threatened, “I’ll just go into the bathroom and throw it up.”
“Patsy, you always have to have control, don’t you?” Dr. Bill shook his head very much like my dad did after I gave away my fake gold doubloons. “How can we help you if you won’t let us?”
“But nothing is helping, Doctor Bill.”
“Give it time. It takes a while for our emotions to catch up with our intellect.”
I agreed to try the medicine again. I sat all day long, my head nodding, my eyes refusing to stay open.
I took no walks. I didn’t laugh or smile.
I didn’t feel anything except heaviness and depression as if I were being sucked inside a black hole.
From that point on, I threw up the pill and this time didn’t tell Dr. Bill or anyone.
February turned into March, and the snow melted.
The days began to feel like spring, the temperature nudging close to sixty, the flowers sprouting and trees budding.
One of the social workers was a tennis fanatic.
I’m not sure of his name and will call him Seth.
In his late twenties, he had brown eyes and a nice smile.
He was tall and must have weighed more than twice what I did. He’d read about me in the newspaper and knew I was a small-town tennis celebrity. The hospital had an ancient asphalt court that was in poor repair, the net half rotted, the painted lines partly peeled away, no windscreens or fence.
I didn’t have the impression the court was ever used. That didn’t deter Seth from challenging me to an exhibition match in front of all the patients except those on Back Hall.
“No,” I said.
“Come on, it will be good for you.”
“I don’t want to.”
“This is how you return to your life, Patsy.”
“I weigh ninety pounds, can barely climb the stairs, and don’t have a racquet here.”
“I’ve got one you can borrow.”
“I can’t…”
“Sure you can. It’s happening.”
I had no choice about it and didn’t trust his motive.
He wanted to play me in front of everyone, no doubt certain he would win.
He would brag about it. On the appointed day, the weather was clear and cool, and I didn’t have so much as a warm-up suit or proper shoes. I wandered outside, my anger sparking.
Dozens of patients were instructed to gather around the tennis court to watch this parody of the Battle of the Sexes.
Front and center sat my Camel-smoking friend Sheena.
She winked at me, giving me a thumbs-up when I appeared in jeans, a sweater, and Hush Puppies.
She hooted, “Beat him like a drum,” as I walked onto the court like Billie Jean facing off with Bobby Riggs.
Seth handed me a racquet I’d never used before, and by now I was quietly furious.
Practically murderous. How dare he put me on the spot like this, especially when I was so disadvantaged.
The stress and upset of it all sent a cascade of adrenaline rushing through me and I did what Sheena said. I beat him like a drum.
Maybe worse than that, and it was the most satisfactory victory of my life.
Looking back, it still is. Nothing could have been better than watching him slink off the court after scarcely getting a point.
I slammed sharply angled shots anywhere he wasn’t, and if he dared rush the net, I’d try to hit him with the ball where it would hurt.
Patients stared, a few clapping, Sheena cheering wildly and heckling.
Soon after, I announced to Don Boone that I’d been in the hospital almost two months and was no better. I needed to leave.
“That’s a very bad idea,” he replied somberly. “You’re not well.”
“Actually, I’m worse,” I said. “And if I don’t get out of here, I will be crazy.”
“I don’t want you to leave.” He held my hand again.
“I signed myself in and can sign myself out,” I retorted. “I’m leaving and you can’t stop me.”
I returned to my house on Kanawha Drive around mid-March. I don’t know the exact date, but I’d been home only a day or two before the tennis-playing social worker Seth called.
“How are you doing?” he asked when I answered the phone on the kitchen counter.
“Okay.” I wasn’t.
He said there was a Glen Campbell concert that night at the Asheville Civic Center and would I like to go with him.
Mom was in the kitchen, the copper teakettle whistling on the stove.
I told her who was calling and what he wanted.
She assumed Seth taking me to a concert was follow-up therapy. She was happy for me to go.
That late afternoon, he picked me up. I thought it unusual that he didn’t probe for details about whether I was eating and keeping anything down. I was surprised and unsettled when he started holding my hand. It wasn’t like Don Boone’s meaty paw making sure I knew he was dominant.
Seth laced his fingers in mine the way my high school boyfriends did.
I had no interest in Seth, especially after he forced me to play that tennis match.
I’d disengage my hand from his at every opportunity.
Reaching for a tissue. Scratching my nose.
Sneezing. Digging out a ChapStick. Finally, he got the message.
What I remember most about the concert is how amazed I was to see Glen Campbell in front of me onstage even if from a distance. I thought of all the times I’d skated around the basement playing his 45 vinyl records on my boxy red phonograph. “Little Green Apples.” “Wichita Lineman.” “Galveston.”
After our therapeutic date, Seth walked me to my front door, and I rushed inside before he could kiss me.
I never heard from him again. To give him credit, he wasn’t pushy, unkind, or rude.
While it wasn’t a good idea to date a recently discharged nineteen-year-old patient, that was par for the course at Appalachian Hall and maybe other places in those days.
Nothing much that had gone on was appropriate or necessarily helpful.
But it was a different era and the only staff member I held accountable and frankly hated was Don Boone.
One of my regrets is that I never tracked him down before he died and told him what I thought.
He was a sexist blowhard, a fraud, and completely disgusting.
All those years in church and I’d been taught that to hate is sinful. I was a sinner then. Thinking about him, the patrolman, Lenore Saunders, Larry King this many years later causes my mood to harden like steel. I won’t forgive what they did.
I’d been home from Appalachian Hall two weeks when Mom insisted that I go to church with her. I said I couldn’t possibly. I was humiliated that people believed I was mentally ill.