asylum
kristina marie darling
“All day I've built a lifetime and now the sun seeks to undo it” —Ann Sexton, “The Fury of Sunsets,” The Death Notebooks
On Euclid Avenue there's a beige brick building with tiny windows. The beige is painted on, and the windows are filthy and smudged from the inside. Turning off the main road, a small speed bump spills any girl's Diet Pepsi on the way through. And the stairs are littered with napkins and tossed away love-notes, business cards and check stubs. Try taking it from a rational perspective here. In the stairwells a person can smell the Paxil samples' powdery clean from the doctors' offices upstairs. Not to mention the popcorn that those secretaries cook every afternoon at 12: 30. Once a kid's through the door, the place operates like clockwork. The receptionist is either an Amber or a Tiffany, although there is little difference between blonde and chipper. After the little click sounds and a girl's inside, she's got to hit the button and let the doctor know she's here. Then there's the usual “Did you remember to push the button, sweetie?” from either Blonde or Chipper.
Waiting for the doors to open and swallow someone whole like an oversize mason jar, a person begins to notice things. That the same girl's always waiting in her bunny slippers and Dr. Devereux's button's the one that's pushed for her like Dr. Tulcensky's had been for me. And she never talks, just writes in her small, burgundy spiral notebook in apple-red ink. She's always got band aids in all the wrong places—her wrists, her forearms, her ankles, and even her thumbs. A person can spend all day thinking about how those bandages got there. And that's when anyone can start to think: My life's not so terribly bad.
I'd never noticed how a room can be twenty degrees colder when a person's terribly thin. But it wasn't until later that I'd hate and envy this rattling white skeleton of a former self. Right now I was concerned with the clock twitching like a stun-gunned criminal. I'd been implicated for the lies I told to keep from having a body—the way I said I would eat more later and never did. The doctor stared at the twitching timepiece, carefully rationing my minutes out in the form of embarrassing questions—no, I am not a paraplegic; no, I've never killed a man. And in case you were aching to know, I don't shop lift and am not prone to mood-swings.
After my blood was trickled from its veins, the nurse said that even my arteries were skinny and greenish. My face had taken on cadaver-like shade of blue. And my thirteen-year-old fingernails looked like ice cubes.
Before Dr. Tulcensky handed me some charts to fill out, on which I'd lie and say I'd eating things like chocolate mousse, I asked her what books she read.
“Thomas Mann. Always Thomas Mann. I don't get asked that very much by patients, you know,” and she smiled a big cosmetic dentistry smile. At least I was in the hands of a doctor who read good books.
Walking out, there was a five-year-old girl wearing a pink helmet sitting in the lobby; Dr. Devereaux's button had been pushed for her too. After walking three-fourths of the way down the stairs, my mother, who'd taken me here, said she heard a thumping noise coming from the waiting room. We climbed back up the stairs and listened, hearing a faint thunk, thunk and then an all-out THUMP from where we'd imagined Dr. Devereaux's office to be. It was the girl in the helmet, thrusting the weight of her body against the waiting room walls. My mother and I imagined those pristine Van Gogh prints rocking from side to side on the lobby's beige partitions, their glass cracking and splintering as they hit the speckled carpet.
These are things that happen, only my mother and I weren't used to seeing them so unabashed in the fluorescent light of the building. Welcome to the underworld.
Walking down the stairs my high heels clicked like a well-bred horse trotting on a paved road. I'd beautified myself for what: to hear talk of me gaining back pounds like a British bank owner? I descended with my mother, my long curls bouncing as a child would if perched on my shoulders. I'd shampooed my hair with thirty dollar a bottle curl defining tonic, and painted arched brows above my blue-lidded eyes. Some things can strike a person as hopeless in a place like this, a confederate flag flapping in a warm southern breeze.
Some of the patients were the beautiful girls you'd see on the street and hope they woke up ugly the next morning, covered in blemishes with their bleach white teeth chipped off. Walking from store to store on Delmar I'd see lovely ladies and handsome men, wondering what locust-swarms and Lithium withdrawals pushed up against the charming surface. I tried to picture myself walking down the same street, and knew I'd wonder about this skinny girl too. Funny how a person can become one of “them,” dowsed in pure otherness, so quickly; it's like helmet out of nowhere that a girl just can't unstrap.
They might as well have written my name on Dr. Tulcensky's weigh-in scale. I'd returned to her office five or six times, a prodigal thin person with oversize curls. My body had hit what the white-coated ones called “starvation point,” code for when a girl grows fuzz on her empty flat belly to keep it warm, and the chills set in. I'd gotten cold sitting in the August sun, on cricket-filled, muggy July evenings, and everyplace else a doctor can imagine.
Walking into the office the receptionist knew my green skin and tired brown eyes—it's hard to sleep with knotted belly and hair falling out in piles on your pillow. When I'd asked, the doctors said the body had abandoned my hair like a sinking ship, lacking the nourishment to keep it in my scalp. The little follicles had just given up.
I'd go to the office twice every week to make sure I'd made progress, and other days were spent haggling with my mom for smaller portions of hamburger.
I'd had no girl friends or boyfriends by the time I was seventeen, having spent Saturdays at anorexia support groups and weigh-ins. When I finally had a girl to eat lunch with, I stood too close to her in the hallway, and tried to braid her hair while she emptied out her locker. They-d shown me to the door faster than a doctor would, when nothing's really wrong.
In college it'd been said to me that I looked like a pregnant girl, with an oversize belly and tiny limbs. I'd shorn off my curly brown hair and was left with a wig-like Pollyanna mop. My blazer collection, however, was stunning in its sheer quantity. The longstanding favorite was a vintage blue corduroy piece I'd picked up at Salvation Army. I wore these manly jackets in summer and under coats as well as in cool weather. They smelled like mothballs and hippies, like the second-hand stores where I'd bought them. I-d wanted nothing to do with “slim,” trotting like a well-bred pony in her clickety heels. After awhile I began noticing how girls like this were on T.V., presented as desirable and smart. Try being well-read and sexy with a bald, glistening head.
When I had girl friends, I was unaware of the strict code of decorum that comes with their mall trips and bookstore runs. There were many efforts to get me out of the closet. I wasn't in a closet, or at least not to my knowledge. I was in a committed long-distance relationship with a boy at Cornell, and it was the first boyfriend who had stayed with me longer than a week. My friends still dropped off like flies, all girls who thought I'd fallen in love with their alabaster skin and sparkling eyes.
It wasn't long before I'd made an appointment with Dr. Devereux. I thought there must have been something wrong with me, an ill brought on by growing up under psychoanalysis.
I sat in the same room with the bandaged girl, who was now older and longhaired with band aids in old and new places. I thought to Dr. Devereaux, let the games begin.
Dr. Devereaux was different than I'd imagined her all those years while watching the green wooden double doors swallow up her patients. I always had pictured a soft-spoken woman with light brown hair. Dr. Devereaux was jet black in her long hair, her clothes, and the stones of her gaudy jewelry. She was jet black in everything but her white, white, skin. My doctor was a Goth princess.
I told her what ailed me; how I'd falsely implicated myself as a butch femme. I don't know why this assumption bothered me, when she asked why it did. The best response I could think of was “It's not true.” And I could name other things that rang false with me, sitting in that office: the way she'd dressed like I would have for a childhood costume party, set up by room mothers and run by a bobbed-redheaded housewife.
Dr. Devereaux smiled quickly; she always gave the impression that she was pressed for time. The children who still waited in the lobby had worn their helmets and band aids like an accidental tattoo that it's just better to get used to. They probably got the same smile, the same clothes that showed no signs of being at work, but reminded a person of Saturday nights.
She'd started to notice me staring out the window, and proceeded to clap her hands. “I'll prescribe you some lithium. You should sleep more soundly, and questions about your sexuality won't bother you so much. Get your blood work done too; it's nothing that a good dose won't fix.” She handed me some papers and went back to organizing her desk. I took it that I was dismissed.
Walking out I threw away the blood work orders and the prescription. I walked the same way I had when I was thin and beautiful. I thought of how I'd become one of the waiting room kids, illnesses leaking from their hearts and minds and outward. I emptied my purse of all their business cards right there on the landing. They fluttered like little propellers, carrying me away from the stairwell on their small pulleys of delight.
about the author
Kristina Marie Darling is currently a student at Washington State University in St. Louis. Her poetry has appeared in Offerings, Freefall, The Mid-America Poetry Review, The Neovictorian-Cochlea, Poetry Motel, 3 Cup Morning, Wicked Alice, Telicom, Chantarelle's Notebook, Baby Clam Press, Toes, Parting Gifts, Dream Fantasy International, and Poetry Superhighway. Her essays have appeared in SubTea, Prose Toad, and Quiet Mountain: New Feminist Essays. Her chapbook of poetry, The Traffic in Women, is forthcoming from the Dancing Girl Press Chapbook Series.
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