Mixed: My Life in Black and White (17 page)

With the last question finished, I was shown to my room. While unpacking the few things the police had let me gather, I planned out how I would talk to no one during the seventy-two hours I was stuck behind the locked doors.

Wednesday, 8 A.M.: 58 hours to go.

Getting out of bed felt like trying to dig myself out of my own grave.

My body seemed to be made out of cinder blocks. As I lay in the bed unable to move, I daydreamed about situations that could force me to get up.
Would you get up if there was a fire?
No.
If a burglar
was climbing through your window?
Nope.
If God was in your kitchen?
No, but I’d yell at him from the bed. “Hey, God, what is the point of depression? I mean, maybe it was cool to take a break like this when you first made man and we were living in gardens and eating fruit, but we’re a society of productivity now. If I can’t even get up to punch the clock, I might as well be dead.”

I tried negative self-talk, sometimes yelling out loud like an abusive high school football coach. “Is that the best you can do? You’ll never succeed in life if you let a bed beat you!”

Lying in the bed on the psych unit, unable to use God, fire, or my full bladder as a catalyst to stand upright, the only other reason I saw to get up was food.

When food is free, I feel a primal competitiveness for it, even if I’m not hungry, I can’t allow someone else to get it. I knew that was partly why I weighed almost two hundred pounds. Food is more than food to me. It’s what I put in my mouth when I don’t want to curse anyone out, it’s my nonjudgmental friend when I find out my boyfriend is cheating and using my car to do it, but dammit I’m going to stick with him because what else kind of boyfriend is a two-hundred-pound girl going to get?

You’re locked up in the psychiatric ward, honey. There are more important issues at hand than free food,
the sane part of my brain said. Alas, free food was the only possible reason I saw to get up.

After I lay in bed and stared up to the ceiling for over an hour, a nurse’s aide came by to make sure I hadn’t killed myself. I told her I hadn’t. “You better get out there before someone snatches your breakfast,” she said.

The horror! I pleaded with her to let me eat in my room. She said no, I had to eat with everyone else; if I didn’t, I’d have a hard time convincing my doctor that I was well enough to be released.

She left to make sure my next-door neighbor hadn’t committed suicide and I pulled the covers over my head. I kept thinking how someone was going to take my food and how that was more important than God to me right then. Food is real; I’m not sure God is. I rolled around on the mattress like my hands and feet were bound with duct tape. I ran out of energy and hoped that the blankets would just rise up like an angel of death and smother me.

Free food. Free food. Someone might be eating mine.

I rolled one more time and managed to separate myself from the bed. When my feet hit the floor I felt like screaming, “Woohoo! I just got out of bed! What’s my name?” But only people who have been this depressed would understand the joy of performing a simple task like getting out of bed.

Left foot, right foot. Walk toward the free hospital food.
Oh, my God, look at my life; I’m on a mental ward convincing myself to walk because there is free food at the end of the journey.
Don’t think
about that, just keep walking. You’re almost to the cafeteria.

I grabbed my tray and chose a seat in the corner with my back against the wall. It’s a seating tactic I learned in Nation of Islam Lite—you can see everyone and no one can sneak up on you. It’s supposed to be used during race riots, but I figured I could co-opt it for the mental ward cafeteria.

I watched the geriatric patients being pushed up to the tables by nurses’ assistants. Anna, one of the women from last night, looked at her tray and moaned loudly. “This is horrible, just horrible!”

“Oh, shush already and eat your food,” a fellow senior citizen responded from across the room. Ally entered the cafeteria and waved to me but sat with a group of college-age patients. That group included Arielle the Anorexic, who cried while she ate. A nurse stood over her shoulder throughout the whole meal, encouraging her to take “just one more bite.” As soon as the nurse decided she’d eaten enough, Arielle jumped up and started power walking the length of the hall to burn the calories off.

As I poked a fork through the paper covering of my single-serving cereal bowl, a woman with stringy hair and too much nervous energy entered the cafeteria. Her eyes darted around the room and locked on mine before I could look away. She made a beeline to the seat across from me, setting her tray down like it had the weight of the world on it. She seated herself in the same manner. I gave her a quick acknowledgment smile. She took that as her cue to launch into full manic conversation.

“I told my family that I didn’t want any more rabbits for presents,” she said, holding direct eye contact with me.

“I was featured in the local newspaper, the county one—me, Audrey—for my rabbit collection,” she said, as if that would have made me understand her first sentence.

“Every goddamn present I opened was a rabbit,” she said, peeling the cover off her Rice Krispies bowl and placing a shaky hand around her juice carton. She raised the carton to her lips but, unable to steady her hand, let most of the juice dribble onto her thin hospital robe.

“It’s the medication side effects,” she offered, noticing me looking at her hand. “I sent out a mass e-mail to everyone, months ahead of my birthday. Do not buy me any more rabbits, I said. That period of my life is over. I’m a lawyer, for God’s sake, I shouldn’t collect rabbits. But every box I unwrapped had a rabbit. I got rabbit bookends, rabbit slippers, a book on taking care of rabbits even though I don’t own a real rabbit, a musical figurine of a rabbit on a rocking horse that plays ‘Rockabye Rabbit Baby’—”

I listened as she rattled off several dozen more rabbit items and then told me the movie-length version of her life and how she came to be here. “Once you’ve been in here, anytime you raise your voice, people want to call the cops. I have a right to be mad about all those rabbits, so I screamed at everyone I was going outside and then the cops came.”

The rest of her story sounded like a weird sci-fi Easter tale, but I listened more intently than I had ever listened to a professor. I was fascinated. This was the most real (if one-sided) conversation I’d had in a long time. In the “sane” world, people hold back their psychotic parts. “Sane” people give you little happy bits of themselves, then months down the line when they know you’re invested in their well-being/in love/committed to being their best friend, they dump their huge, crazy psychotic backstories on you, leaving you no choice but to help carry them. Sometimes, when their load gets really heavy, you think in the back of your mind, “I wish I’d known this shit earlier,” but you keep trudging along with them because that’s what a good friend/wife/worker does. I prefer the crazy version of friendship.

“Is it so hard to understand that I have grown out of rabbits?” Audrey continued.

Wouldn’t life be easier if we all had to lay our bunnies on the table in the first conversation and say,
Take me or leave me?
We can’t because we’re all competing: for a job, for a man, for the Most Black Person Award. I got tired keeping all those secrets inside. I guess that’s why I am here, I thought. I showed people who had no connection to me how crazy I’d been feeling on the inside. I’ve got to get better at holding it in, like normal people do.

Suddenly, Audrey stopped talking and dropped her head. Big tears started plopping into her cereal. She didn’t try to sniffle them up; they poured out. Her Rice Krispies started crackling from the wetness. My eyes welled up, too. I wanted to say,
I understand, I understand.
I wanted to hug her. Instead, I looked around, embarrassed, wondering if anyone was judging me as weak for crying. I dabbed at my eyes with my napkin and attempted a fake sneeze that came out a little too loud to be real.

I’m crying with a white girl who collects rabbits,
I thought, and that made me want to cry even more.

10 A.M.: 56 hours to go.

There was a knock on my door. A tiny woman entered with a tape recorder and a small cardboard box tucked under her arm, squinting as though the fluorescent lights in my room were too bright. She walked over to me and extended her palm. Her hand was cold and pale, but her grip was firm, like she was letting me know she was in charge. She introduced herself as Anne and told me she was a Penn PhD student. “Your doctor asked me to administer the Thematic Apperception and Rorschach tests to you,” she said, setting her tape recorder down on the dresser. Unlike the manic woman from the cafeteria, Anne barely looked me straight in the eye; she seemed unsettled. I wondered if she was unsure of herself or afraid of me. I wondered if she knew I went to Penn also and she was picturing herself lying where I was.

As Anne was arranging her cards and fiddling with her tape recorder, she dropped both the box of cards and the tape recorder on the floor. I noticed a battery rolling near my foot, so I started to lean over to stop it. Anne, who was also chasing the battery, jumped back when she saw me lean forward.
Oh, God, they’ve sent
me a racist test administrator.

I hate covert racism. I have always hated guessing whether someone is being mean/rude/nervous because they hate my race or because they are having a bad day. As I got older, I noticed that covert racism is just like depression: You know it when you feel it, but it’s hard to explain to someone who has never experienced it. It’s like a sixth sense that God has given people of color that white people don’t believe in.
We just know.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t just come straight out and ask Anne if she was afraid of blacks because (1) people don’t tend to talk about racism and (2) I could have gotten accused of playing the race card. I was wishing it were the 1950s. If it were, she could have just said, “I don’t want to test a nigger.”

Time to play Put the White Woman at Ease, I thought. Put the White Woman at Ease (a.k.a. PuWWE or PU, for short) is what my friends and I had taken to calling this phenomenon. PU is the ultimate passive response to racism. It’s more passive than turning the other cheek; it’s
work your ass off to prove you’re smart/not a thief/
polite/not as crazy as the intake sheet says
so you can change this white woman’s mind about all black people. It’s my Boonie neighbors and their “Don’t let white people see you acting like that” threats. It’s me buying the most expensive item on a store shelf just to spite the saleswoman, who acts like I am poor black trash who obviously can’t afford anything in the boutique. I might not have enough money to get home after that, but
dammit I showed her.
And people wonder why there are black folks on the bus with a car’s worth of diamonds in their ears. Those diamonds were probably a result of PU—showing some saleswoman they weren’t a thief.

I sat back up and let Anne get her own damn battery.

“Would you feel safer if I were strapped in a wheelchair?” I asked.

She paused like she was seriously considering my question. “No, you’re fine on the bed,” she said.

Anne sat down and started explaining the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) to me. “Basically, the TAT is a storytelling game. I’m going to hold up a drawing and you tell me a story about it.”

Yay. Fun.

Anne held up the first card, a pencil drawing of a boy sitting near a violin. Why would a boy sit near a violin and not play it? I wondered.

“The pencil-drawn boy is mad because he really wants to play the drums. He doesn’t see anyone on MTV playing the violin. He’s a virgin, and he knows carrying a violin case to school will not help him get laid,” I said, purposefully trying to keep my sentences simple but entertaining.

“Mmmmhmmm,” Anne murmured intermittently, while jotting down notes. Does any mental health professional realize how hard it is to give honest responses when someone is taking notes? All I could focus on was that she was going to write down whatever I said and it would be in some file forever. I was extremely conscious of every word.

Anne revealed the next card. It was a pencil drawing chockful of white people. As were the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth cards. All the images on the cards seemed inherently sad. I couldn’t pinpoint if it was because not one drawing so far had featured a smiling person on the cards or that, to me, black-and-white pencil drawings were inherently sad.

I looked up at the seventh card, which had white people lounging on a back porch with what looked like cotton fields stretched out before them.

“What year was this test developed?” I asked, thinking that only a die-hard racist would subject mentally ill black people to a test full of scowling white people on a plantation.

“The TAT was developed in the nineteen-thirties,” Anne replied.

“Are there any black people on these cards?”

“No.”

Was this really the best modern medicine could do, multiple-choice questions and quizzes made during the Great Depression? They had that at the fucking DMV.

Of course, I didn’t say that out loud. If my reaching for her battery made Anne jump, I’m sure a curse word would have sent her punching at the panic button on my wall. I reworded what I was thinking and said it in a PU way, a way that proved I was smart.

“So, if I had come in with two bad kidneys, doctors could pull one out of my brother and send me home. I come in with my brain supposedly broken, the part of my body that controls all the other parts, and the best I get are picture tests?”

“These tests are very accurate in diagnosing. . . .”

Stop regurgitating what your professor told you and think!
I wanted to scream.
If you were depressed and I showed you cards full of black people,
you’d probably scare yourself out of your depression.