What's for Dinner? by James Schuyler (to read list .txt) 📕

truthfully say I would rather have that and the future (unhappiness) than not to have known you this way. If the Gods gave me a chance to have a clean slate and go back to before, not knowing, I wouldn’t take it! Not on your life.

Well, I am rambling on at a great rate. There must be some one thing I want to say to you and it is this. Won’t you reconsider? Isn’t it possible that we could meet now and then after Lottie is back home? I know it wouldn’t be often but I don’t ask for that. Oh dear, dearest Norris. Perhaps in the future you will find you miss me and want to see me, too? I can’t count on that though. You are so very decisive.

It seems funny—a trait I admire about you is precisely what’s making me so unhappy. You funny man. You make me laugh so much (when we’re together) and then here I am alone and unhappy. Doesn’t make too much sense does it?

Please don’t think I’ll do anything indiscreet—you know me better than that.

The nights are long and the days are dull. I shouldn’t go on like this to you—I’m afraid I’ll only succeed in frightening you away.

What a silly billy I am. Don’t take anything in this letter too seriously. Just picture your Mag late at night, feeling blue, deciding to write you a letter and doing it. They say there has to be a first time for everything, and this is it for me. Or you are.

You know I love you and when you make love to me I feel you love me too. There. I can’t speak plainer than that. Can I? It would fit on a postcard. Perhaps that’s what I should do, copy that sentence on a postcard and send it to you at your office! Don’t frown! I’m only teasing.

See what you make of this letter and then let’s talk about it. Now I’m going back to bed and see if I can’t woo Morpheus. Till next we meet—all my love,

Mag

Mag read this through several times, put it down and went to the kitchen and made herself a light scotch and water. She came back to the study and read the letter again. Then she tore it into little pieces and dropped them in the wastebasket. She sat at the desk a long time, now and then taking a sip of her drink. Then she got up and went back to the kitchen. She opened the oven and looked into it, then took out the racks. She knelt down and put her head tentatively into the oven. She got up and fetched the kitchen chair and lay down across it and the oven door, her head within the oven, reached up and turned on the gas. After a minute she pulled her head out, turned off the gas and went to the sink and began to vomit. Tears ran down her face as she turned on the faucet and washed her sickness away. She started to go upstairs, turned back and replaced the racks in the oven, put the kitchen chair in its usual place and opened the window a crack. She stood in her kitchen and said aloud, “I won’t try that again.” She put out the light and that in the study, went upstairs, took two more sleeping pills and went to bed.

There really seemed no way out.

Chapter X

1

Bertha was back, and the new patient, Mr Carson, was seated also at the crowded table. His wife, a mousey woman much shorter than he, was sitting a little to one side and behind him.

“I wasn’t going anywhere,” Bertha said, “when the nurse found me at the bus stop. For one thing, I didn’t have the fare. And it’s too far to walk out to where we live. And if I had gotten home you’d just have brought me back here anyway,” she added to her parents.

“Of course, dear,” her mother said.

“That’s what you’re here for,” her father said. “To learn how to control these destructive impulses. I don’t mean you did anything especially bad, but it’s a set-back in your treatment, running off like that. It makes you seem irresponsible.

“Maybe she wanted a breath of air,” Mr Carson said in a kindly voice. Under his jacket sleeves it could be seen that both his wrists were bandaged. “Everyone needs that, once in a way.”

“It wasn’t a plan,” Bertha said. “I saw that nurse up by the door wasn’t really looking so I just walked past, down the hall and out the door. It wasn’t so much that I thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’ I just seized the opportunity and got.”

“I can understand that so well,” Lottie said. “That’s the way I used to be about drinking. I didn’t plan to take a drink or even think of it, I just took one. Down the hatch. Sometimes I was quite surprised to find myself standing there with a glass in my hand.”

“That’s all behind you,” Norris said.

“I don’t think we need make such a fuss over Bertha’s little slip up,” Mrs Brice said. “It’s like losing your temper—apologies all round and then best forget it.”

“Try telling him that.” Bertha indicated Dr Kearney, lounging at the head of the table.

“The question has arisen,” Dr Kearney said, “or rather, Bertha’s escapade has caused the question to arise, whether this is the best place for her. This is an open ward, and a patient who has been here as long as Bertha is expected, is trusted to live up to the rules. You might say what we have here is a co-operative venture and patients who don’t co-operate need some other kind of care, of therapy.”

“Oh great,” Bertha said. “You see? They’re going to ship me off to some sort of hoosegow hospital. Locked wards and all that jazz—not that I’ve had all that much freedom here.”

“Oh come, dear,” her mother said.