Chapter 18 “If Only I Could Get a Scholarship to McLean.”
“If Only I Could Get a Scholarship to McLean.”
I failed, but not because I couldn’t even kill myself right.
I failed because I got lucky.
Ethan hadn’t felt good about leaving me in what he viewed as a houseful of sententious vipers.
In Vietnam, his role had been, essentially, to be sure that no man was left behind, details of which he would share with me little by little when he would visit me in the coming days and months.
And so he had returned to Capen from the bus stop.
When I wasn’t in the bedroom I shared with Tina, she’d told him that she’d seen me in the hallway going to take a bath, and that I was looking as stoned as ever and maybe a little depressed.
(Although I was buzzed, in her opinion, it was impossible to decipher what was dope and what was despair, and she’d simply assumed I was just more baked than usual.) Ethan knocked on the bathroom door, got no response, and jiggled the handle.
It was locked, leading him to one of those heroic moments that are supposed to happen only in movies but happen in real life all the time.
He kicked in the door—which was actually pretty easy, since the lock was an antique hook-and-eye clasp, the screws in wood that was starting to rot.
But the young women around him who had gathered to watch thought he was cooler than Richard Roundtree in Shaft.
I’d spent just enough time lolling in the tub before taking the X-Acto to my wrists that I was still alive when he found me. And the Cooley Dickinson Hospital was at the edge of the Smith College campus, and so an ambulance was there within minutes.
Later, a doctor explained to me before my psych evaluation that the young man had saved my life because he’d known how to apply intense pressure on my wounds while he waited for the EMTs.
(Ethan was young only to this middle-aged physician.
As we know, a part of Ethan’s charm for me was the idea he was an older man of twenty-nine.) I was embarrassed that he’d had to hoist me out of the tub and lay my naked body on the bathroom floor like a slippery sea otter, and I’d gotten blood all over his shirt and pants.
But I did have one consoling thought I shared with the doctor, because I knew it would make him less concerned.
“I’m glad I’d shaved my legs and underarms yesterday,” I confessed, aware this would reassure him in some small way that I wanted to live.
Which it did.
But I had mentioned this not so much because I actually did want to live, as if having smooth skin and womanly pits for the guy I’d gone on a date with suggested I pined for life, after all, and regretted what I had done.
I’d get there, but I wasn’t there yet. I was thinking of the new Blondie song, “Die Young, Stay Pretty,” which had been playing on the little dorm’s living room record player the night before.
I was young enough and vain enough that, even as I was bleeding out on a bathroom floor, I wanted to look good.
I dozed, and when I woke next, my mother was sitting in a chair with orange Naugahyde cushions and metal armrests beside my hospital bed reading Life magazine. I gazed at her and then at the bandages on my arms, and when I looked back toward the chair, our eyes met.
“How are you feeling?” she asked. Her voice was eerily calm. My God, I had put her through a lot.
I shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Dad here?”
“Yes. He’s in the cafeteria doing some work.”
“And Spencer?”
She shook her head. “But he’s on his way. He’ll be here in a few hours and said to tell you he loves you and don’t ever do that again.”
“He doesn’t have to.” I saw a clock on the wall. It was nearly eleven in the morning. “When was the doctor here?”
“A few hours ago. Do you need him? A nurse? Are you in pain?” She was on her feet now, pouring water from a pitcher the pink of a plastic Easter egg into a Styrofoam cup.
She plopped a straw into it and brought it to my lips.
I let her. Then she dabbed my mouth with a paper towel like I was a toddler.
“No, I’m fine,” I told her. “I don’t need anyone.”
She looked out the window and observed, “It’s a beautiful day out. Just gorgeous.”
“Good.”
“Mira?”
I waited. I knew what was coming.
“Why?” she asked. “What is it? The drugs? Tell me it was just the drugs.”
“It was just the drugs,” I agreed.
“You’re just saying that.”
“I am, yeah.”
“Then why? Why did you try to…? What’s going on?”
“I think I want to go back to sleep,” I said. “Can the nurses get me a sleeping pill?”
“Mira, people kill themselves with sleeping pills.”
“Just one. Not enough to kill myself. Just enough so I can go back to sleep.”
With great reluctance, she went to the nursing station and returned with a nurse with flurazepam.
The nurse watched me take it, making sure that I swallowed.
Only later would someone explain to me that she did that because she wanted to make sure I didn’t build a cache of flurazepam I could use to try again, this time with pills, to take my own life.
My brother looked ashen, his usual bonhomie gone, but he tried to put a good face on the fact that his kid sister was in the hospital after slashing her wrists.
“Couldn’t you have just taken a golf club to the window of one of those snarky bitches’ cars?” he asked. “I mean, that’s kind of more your style.”
My parents’ shock had begun to recede, but they’d been around me longer. His was still fresh.
“I didn’t have my clubs,” I said. “But yeah, I guess that would have been better.”
Usually, my father didn’t appreciate gallows humor. “I think we have enough going on,” he said. “But your brother might be on to something. Mira, the next time you’re this upset, please consider vandalism instead, okay?”
He didn’t mean it, of course, but I was pleased at how the Pinnacle—even this badly shaken—had given my parents a little comfort.
There were discussions of whether I should be admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and the fact I volunteered that Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton had both spent time at McLean in Belmont, Massachusetts, had to have increased the belief in some people’s minds that I was a serious risk to myself.
After all, clearly I’d done my homework on suicidal women.
But, I added in one conversation, McLean hadn’t saved either of them.
The truth is, I didn’t want to go there.
I didn’t want to go anywhere. If I wanted anything, I wanted to stay in that hospital bed at Cooley Dickinson and eat popsicles and lime-green Jell-O.
The psychiatrist who saw me there was a bearded fellow in his fifties who, I’d learn later, had written a book on human sexuality that hadn’t sold well.
(I’ve never read it, but I suppose it’s terrible.
After all, it’s about sex, and still no one bought it.) He was kind enough and a little officious, but he didn’t seem uncomfortable around a girl with bandages on both wrists who had a history that was (viewed in even the best possible light) very, very sketchy.
The results of his psychiatric evaluation of me suggested that my suicide attempt had been impulsive and, perhaps, triggered in part by the amount of marijuana I smoked and cocaine I snorted.
This was viewed as the best possible news, in my parents’ eyes, because while the risk of a second attempt could not be disregarded, it was not likely.
(I hadn’t shared in the evaluation the amount of time I had spent thinking and writing about suicide.
Moreover, while I do not profess to be a diabolical genius who was capable of gaming the stay-out-of-the-psych-ward system, it was pretty intuitive to downplay the idea that I was clinically depressed.
The fact is, back then it was difficult to get admitted to McLean.
Sexton had to struggle for years to cross the threshold that dead poets revered, once opining, “If only I could get a scholarship to McLean.”) And while my parents would never have admitted they were relieved they’d been spared the indignity of a daughter so mad that she’d been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, I’m sure they were.
It was bad enough I had so many other black marks on my ledger that reflected badly on them.
In any case, the final decision that my parents and the doctors made was this: I would withdraw from Smith…for the moment. Perhaps I would return in January, starting over in a different house.
“Could I have a different name, too?” I asked.
They all agreed that I would spend the next few months in Tallmadge.
“Why don’t I spend more time with Aunt Julie and Uncle Terence in Manhattan?” I suggested, hoping to avoid the stares and titters behind my back in Tallmadge, or the possibility of running into Mrs. Catton, her children, or anyone at all in Kenny Foster’s family.
But this was a nonstarter, too. Everyone agreed that I should live at home, where my parents—which meant my mother—could keep an eye on me.
She was given a long list of behaviors that might suggest either I was falling into depression or “using” again.
I pushed back against the word. “Using makes it sound like I’m a drug addict.
A little weed and a little cocaine does not make me a drug addict,” I insisted.
“It wasn’t a little of either,” my father reminded me.
It’s arguable that both he and my mother were functional alcoholics, so a better debater might have countered that his definition of little was suspect. But I saw there was no winning this argument.
And, while I was home in Tallmadge, I would see a psychiatrist recommended by this Northampton shrink at least once a week.
“Really,” said my mother. “This is all so good. You could have wound up very badly hurt.”
Or dead, I thought, but I didn’t say that.
“And,” my father added, “if nobody blinks and nobody settles, the criminal trial could start as soon as this winter. So, that’s another reason why it makes sense to have you home with us in Westchester.”