Edith’s Journal, September 29, 1971
I don’t feel so alone anymore. Things have been better since the night I woke up calling Cal’s name. I told Libby all about him. How even though he was just a waiter up at the lake he was saving up to go to college and he and I were going to elope and both get jobs as teachers in Richmond. I told her how we’d meet at the boathouse and lie out on the pier on a bed made of life vests, looking up at the stars and talking about . . . well, everything. Our favorite children’s books and the names of our first pets and what we’d name our children. I felt so much better spilling it all out to Libby, even the bad parts when Mama and Papa found out and forbade me ever to see him again because he was poor and “not the right religion,” so they sent me up North so we couldn’t meet in the fall.
“So you didn’t come here for the art history after all,” Libby said when I was done.
“No,” I admitted. I was afraid she was going to make fun of me again but when she laughed I could tell it wasn’t at me. It was this low, smoky laugh, like we were sharing a secret. And then she told me all about her fella and how her father didn’t approve of him so he sent her away, first to a French boarding school and then, when she came home last summer and took up with him again, away to college.
“Why doesn’t your father like him?” I asked, because I couldn’t imagine Libby going with any poor waiter or her folks caring what religion her boyfriend was.
“Because he’s an artist,” she said, blowing smoke out when she said artist, “and no one understands artists. That’s why you understand. I’ve seen those sketches you do in class.”
I only did the sketches to help me remember the art slides, but it made me feel so good that Libby thought I was a real artist that I told her I was thinking of changing my major to studio art.
“You should,” she said. “Why should you study what a bunch of old, dead white men made when you could make your own art?”
She told me she was going to be a writer and live in Paris with Clive. That’s her artist’s name. It’s so much more romantic than Cal’s plan for us to buy a house in Richmond, but still, I feel like everything has gotten bigger. Like I was looking at a beautiful painting and suddenly it became real and I stepped inside it. And that I was one of the beautiful, fascinating people you see in those paintings. Libby makes me believe I could become someone special, someone completely new!
Chapter Twenty-Two
Edith knows a back door out of the building and a path that will take us to the back gate. She tells me this way we’ll avoid the searchlights and white angels. Apparently that’s what they called the dorm matrons at Vassar. I assume for our purposes she means the guards.
The path we take goes through a garden that she calls Shakespeare’s Garden and past a Tudor-looking building she refers to as the infirmary.
“That’s where Nurse Landry works, but the lights are out so she must not be there yet.”
I remember looking down from the tower that first night and thinking that the hospital looked like a college campus; for Edith, the hospital is the campus of her memories.
She takes me to a spot where the electrified fence traverses a steep ravine. We scramble down, clutching saplings to keep from sliding headlong into the fence. Improbably, I begin to feel like a college sophomore out on a lark, ducking curfew to drink a few beers or smoke a joint in the woods. The longer I spend with Edith, I realize, the more I enter into her delusion.
At the bottom of the ravine Edith clears armfuls of dead leaves, revealing a gully where the ground has fallen away beneath the fence. There’s a gap about two feet wide and two feet deep. Edith flattens herself against the ground and squirms under it like an otter. When she pops out on the other side her face is smeared with dirt and leaves stick up from her hair like a wreath. She looks like a slightly demented Puck. “Come on,” she urges me. “It’s easy.”
Maybe if you’ve been eating hospital food for more than forty years. Not only is Edith thinner than me, she also has the bones of a bird.
She’s a sixty-year-old woman, Laurel says in my head. Are you really going to let her outdo you in the gymnastics department? Why did I bother taking you to all those Pilates classes?
Shamed by Laurel’s rebuke, I lie down on the ground, my head facing the gap, and crawl. It feels like I’m burrowing into my own grave. The soil is damp and cold and smells like worms—
Don’t think about worms.
But of course now I am. Worms and snakes and spiders. Something slithers down my neck and it takes every ounce of my willpower not to thrash out and impale myself on the electric fence.
That would be ironic, Laurel coolly observes, electrocuting yourself while running away from electroshock.
I feel a laugh bubbling up inside me and then I’m crying, tears turning to mud in the dirt. It’s not my grave I’m digging, I realize, it’s Laurel’s. Snarky, carping, bitchy Laurel. The taste of dirt in my mouth is her death, the first time I’ve grieved for
