But Inside I'm Screaming

“Watch your tone, Isabel,” her mother warns. “I’m your mother and I’m just trying to make conversation.”

“Do we have to have a conversation right now?”

“Your father and I don’t know why you didn’t call us last night. We could have talked to you, cheered you up. You’re always giving up so easily.”

“So even in this I didn’t do the right thing? The thing you and Dad would have wanted? Sorry to disappoint you once again, Mother.”

“Well, I don’t understand why you always give up. Like ballet, for instance. Whatever happened with that? I’ll tell you what happened with that—you weren’t any good so you dropped it. Instead of sticking it out you dropped it.”

“Thanks, Mom. This is making me feel so much better.”

“And then there was volleyball…you couldn’t get that ball over the net no matter what you tried…so what’d you do?”

“Mom.”

“You dropped it. I’m sorry, Isabel, but someone has to help you see the truth here. Maybe it’s tough love….”

Isabel closed her eyes, her mother’s familiar lecture a sad lullaby for the rest of the ride up the interstate.

* * *

There is no sign for Three Breezes, just a discreet number expensively etched into the low stone pillars flanking the wooded driveway. Katherine slows as she makes the turn, anticipating the speed bump just inside the entrance. While they ease over it, Isabel catches sight of a groundskeeper raking a few errant leaves underneath a magnolia tree. As their car passes, he glances up and ever so slightly tips his head to Isabel. She looks away.

Everything is in slow motion.

Within forty-five minutes her belongings are spread out on the floor of the nurses’ station. Everything she has brought with her to Three Breezes is out of her suitcase and on display for all to see. Her underwear, her raincoat, her nail clippers, needlepoint, tweezers. Everything.

What the hell is going on?

“You don’t have to stay here while we do this, Isabel.” The nurse is sitting cross-legged on the floor among Isabel’s things, Isabel’s own hairdryer in the nurse’s lap. “We explained to you when you checked in that everyone’s suitcase has to be inspected. It’s nothing personal. Some people find it easier to let us do this and then we bring them the things they’re allowed.”

“What do you mean allowed?”

“It’s for your own protection,” the nurse answers. “We just go through here and take anything that might be dangerous and we set it aside. After the inspection, we take all the things we set aside and we put them into a bin marked with your very own name on it….”

Why the hell is she talking down to me as if I’m in kindergarten? Can’t she see I’m nothing like the people here?

“…that bin then goes into the sharps closet,” the nurse continues, “and any time you need to use something from your bin you just need to come find one of us and we’ll help you out. You might find it easier, though, to let us do this by ourselves.”

The hell I’m leaving when she’s going through my stuff. Why is my hairdryer going into that pile with my pack of Lady Bic razors? I understand the razors—I’m not a complete idiot—but what’m I going to do…blow-dry myself to death? My needlepoint, too?

“Why are you taking my needlepoint?” Isabel asks through gritted teeth. “I’m making a pillow for my niece.” She doesn’t care what the needlepoint is for…why did I say that?

“It has a needle?” the nurse answers in up-speak. “You can work on it only if you’re supervised.”

Even the Oil of Olay moisturizer is confiscated. “It’s in a glass jar?” Up-speak again. Before Katherine can regain her own composure, Isabel catches her mother’s mouth gaping open—mirroring the horror Isabel feels closing in on her, suffocating her.

Her Hammacher Schlemmer sound machine is set in the “no” pile.

“Okay, that’s it. This is ridiculous.” Isabel feels the fury beginning to unleash. “Give me back my sound machine. It’s not sharp. It’s not dangerous.”

“Um, well, we need to run a test on it.”

“My ass you’re going to run a test on it.” Isabel’s voice is an octave higher than usual. Katherine puts a hand on her shoulder.

“Get your hand off my shoulder, Mom.” Isabel whips around to face her mother. “I know what that’s code for. That’s code for Shut up, Isabel. Mind your manners, Isabel.”

Katherine withdraws her hand quickly and takes a step back.

Astonished, Isabel asks, “What, Mom? You think I’m going to hurt you?”

Katherine, with eyebrows stretched across her forehead in mock fear, addresses her reply more to the nurse than to her daughter. “I just don’t know you anymore, Isabel. How do I know what you’re going to do next?”

Oh, this is rich. This is just perfect. Now she’s making them think I’m dangerous.

“What I’m trying to say, Isabel—” the nurse goes from friendly to firm “—is that we simply run a quick electrical test on it and we’ll return it to you by tonight. Tomorrow at the latest.”

I can’t take this. I can’t take this…

Isabel steadies herself in the doorway.

“We’ll get it right back to you.”

It’s not just the sound machine, you idiot. It’s everything. It’s this whole place. It’s this whole snake pit.

Isabel slides down the door frame, collapsing into a heap at the base of the doorway.

“All right, that’s enough, young lady.” Katherine is standing over her crumpled daughter. “Let’s go outside for a minute.”

“Ma’am?” It’s the inspection nurse again. “Um, she can’t go outside the unit anymore? She doesn’t have her privileges? She has to stay inside at all times.”

Isabel is stunned. The tears that had just begun to flow stop immediately.

“What?” She stares directly at the nurse, the fog that had enveloped her briefly dissipating.

“Um, you have checked in so you cannot go outside. Your caseworker will be here any minute to explain all this to you,” the nurse says as she returns to her inspection.

“Mom?” Isabel’s breathing becomes shallow as she reaches for her mother and tries to stand up at the same time.

“Yes?”

“Let’s go,” Isabel says simply. “Let’s get out of here. Do you have the car keys?” Katherine looks from her daughter to the nurse, unsure of what to do.

Another nurse, who until then had been sorting through files, turns to Isabel.

“All right, hon.” Her voice is craggy but gentle. Her tone betrays a hint of resignation, as if she has seen a thousand Isabels come and go. “Let’s go sit down for a second.” She tries to lead Isabel into the single room she has been assigned. Isabel pulls her arm away and focuses on her mother.

“Mom? The car keys?” Her stare is intense. Her lips are pursed and her throat is trying to choke back vomit. She sees, for the first time, that she is here to stay. Her mother is not even reaching into her cavernous bag to hunt for the keys.

Oh, my God. Why isn’t Mom doing anything? Why is she looking at me like that?

“Mom? Mom? Please, Mom. Please take me home.” Isabel is crying again as the nurse helps Katherine lead Isabel to her stark room with an ominous stain on the industrial wall-to-wall carpeting. “No. No, Mom. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to come here, Mom. Seriously, I’ve changed my mind. Mom, do you hear me? Mom?”

When she sees that yelling is not advancing her case, Isabel begins to beg.

“Mom! Please, Mom…”

Isabel sees the same mix of dread, shock and disgust on her mother’s face she had seen two nights before in Manhattan. On that night Isabel had announced to her parents that she had decided to follow her doctor’s advice and was checking into a psychiatric facility in upstate New York, “before they check me in involuntarily.”

“Just give it twenty-four hours, Isabel,” the nurse is saying as she guides Isabel to the bed by the elbow. “Just twenty-four hours.”

* * *

As she tries to unscrew the cap of her water bottle, she frantically scans the room and sees she is surrounded by the dregs of society. Losers, both literally and figuratively. Literally because they lost the battle to end their lives. Figuratively because, collectively, they look like the rejects from a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest casting call.

Isabel’s hands are shaking so badly she gives up the thought of hydration. Her pupils are so dilated by fear her green eyes appear black.

Across the room a woman with short, thick jet-black hair is staring at her. Slowly, still staring at Isabel, the woman brings her own bottle of water to her lips and sucks, like an infant, through the sport spout.

Jesus. Where am I? What is this place?

Isabel shrinks into herself when, moments later, a large man stumbles into the room. The only free seat is next to her. He lumbers toward it and loudly exhales as he squeezes into one of the mismatched Naugahyde armchairs. His fat pasty-white thighs begin to melt uncomfortably into the chair. The hot weather has intensified his body odor and the only thing separating Isabel from the man’s stinky armpits is a useless polyester mesh jersey that adds a gamey scent to the sweaty giant.

“I know exactly what I’m gonna talk about today,” he gleefully declares to his miserable neighbor. He resembles a puppy with huge paws and baby fat that he hasn’t yet grown into. He appears to have the mentality of a six-year-old.

Isabel continues to stare straight ahead, knowing that looking at him will only encourage his conversation. She is willing the day to be over, willing the clock to tick faster.

This is a nightmare.

“Barbecued chicken wings!” shouts the smelly man-child. She thinks he meant to whisper to her, but he is too excited to regale the group with this topic that he forgets to adjust the volume and instead loudly blurts it out. It doesn’t seem to bother him that Isabel is pointedly ignoring him.

These people are freaks and this is a nightmare.

“Shhh,” everyone in the bedraggled group hisses. Everyone but the black-haired sport-spout girl, who is laughing disproportionately hard at the outburst. And another, younger woman with long, stringy hair, who is staring off into space. Two people over on Isabel’s left sits an older woman in restraints because, the smelly man loudly whispers to Isabel, “Yesterday she tried to hit the group leader when he asked her what she was thinking.”

Isabel takes it all in, frozen in her sleek black gabardine slacks and Barney’s New York black T-shirt, her arms tightly wrapped across her chest in an invisible strait-jacket, her legs tensely crossed, her thick blond hair dried out and brittle.

How the hell did I end up here?

* * *

Hours later, Isabel has not changed out of her clothes and is lying on her back, wide awake, her purse still on her shoulder so that if tipped upright, she could walk straight out. Through the cinder-block walls, Isabel hears something slamming into the wall and strains to identify the sound.

Slam!

After five more minutes trying to block it out, Isabel sits up. With her heart beating rapidly, she inches off the bed, which is several inches higher than a normal one, so, upon sliding off, she is startled when it takes her feet longer to find the floor. After waiting a few seconds she swallows hard and takes a few steps to the doorway, following the crack of light beaming from its edges. The hallway is deserted. She waits while her eyes adjust to the bright overhead lights. The sharp sounds next door echo her panic and amplify her fear.

She moves silently toward the sound, her body pressed up against the painted concrete wall like a cat burglar. Again she swallows hard. Her heartbeat is now pulsing in her ears. She jumps when she hears something crash to the floor several feet away from her around the corner.

Maybe I should go back to my room. This is stupid. I’m going back to my room.

After several seconds of silence, Isabel peeks around the corner and in through the doorway of the adjacent room.

Inside, the dark-haired sport-spout woman is a blur of activity ripping apart her room. Drawers are pulled out, sheets untucked, closet emptied. Every twenty seconds or so the woman kicks the wall.

Just as Isabel is about to turn and creep back to her room the woman whips around and sees her.

“Are you spying on me?” she asks, her eyes darting from side to side. “What do you want?”

“Huh?” Caught off guard, Isabel panics. “Um, want help or something?”

Goddammit, why did I just offer to help? I don’t want to help her…she’s crazy.

The woman has already turned away and is dumping the contents of her purse onto the floor in the middle of her bright room. “My name’s Melanie,” she says breathlessly.

Isabel backs up and looks up and down the hallway.

Shouldn’t an orderly be in here calming her down? Doesn’t anyone else hear all this noise she’s making? Hel-lo? Nurse Ratched? Anyone?

“Hey?” Melanie shouts. “You helping me or what?”

“Uh, okay.” Isabel cautiously kneels down just inside the doorway and, not knowing where else to begin, delicately picks up Melanie’s lipstick.

Get me out of here….

“What’re you looking for, anyway?”

Melanie breaks into a sob. Her hair is angrily pulled away from her face with a simple barrette. Her pajamas are splashed with primary colors, exaggerating the sense of chaos. Melanie must have been told she’s arty and eccentric and then capitalized on the compliment.

“My beaded bracelet,” Melanie answers in an annoyed tone that suggests Isabel should have known the object of the search. “I made it in art the other day and now I can’t find it.” More sobbing.

Isabel looks up to see someone else joining in the hunt.

“Hi. I’m Kristen.” The woman cheerfully introduces herself to Isabel as though she’s in a sorority meeting. “What’s up, Mel? Want help?”

Isabel is still holding the lipstick. “Okay, well…I’m going to go now,” she says to no one in particular.

The night nurse comes barreling through the door with her flashlight even though the lights in the room are on. Her nameplate reads “Connie.”

She is the nurse who just hours before talked Isabel into staying at Three Breezes for at least one day. Isabel takes a closer look at her. Connie’s face is wizened from years of sunbathing. Her voice is raspy from years of smoking.

Finally! Somebody cart this woman off to solitary confinement.

Instead, Connie casually plops down on the floor and helps look for the bracelet. Melanie starts shaking. Her whole head vibrates and she starts hyperventilating. No one can calm her down. She’s talking so fast even she is tripping over the words and thoughts pouring out of her mouth.

“She’s only two months old. Elwin is never gonna deal with me,” Melanie chokes in between breaths, “he’s put up with so much. I have the baby. I get the postpartum thing and stop taking my meds and now he’s taking care of her all by himself. Of course he’s got his parents. They love this. They love the fact that they were right about me. I’m not good enough for their son. I hope he remembered to get the lamb-and-rice dog food. Coco hates the beef flavor. When I was little I used to love running through sprinklers. Wasn’t that fun?”

This is unreal. If I saw this in a movie I’d think it was heavy-handed.

Connie pulls Melanie up and takes her over to the nurses’ station to give her a sedative. Kristen and Isabel remain on the floor, Kristen still searching for Melanie’s bracelet, Isabel listening to Melanie’s disturbing chatter echo from down the hall.

Isabel steals a glance at Kristen’s right arm, bandaged because, as Isabel will later find out, her obsessive-compulsive disorder leaves her clawing at her skin until it starts to bleed. Perhaps sensing Isabel’s stare her hand flutters to this spot and quickly withdraws. There is an awkward silence between them.

Isabel looks back down at the floor.

How do I extricate myself from this one?

Melanie returns just as Kristen spots a cigar box and opens it. Voila! Among some pictures and letters is the bracelet. Melanie grabs it and shrieks with happiness.

“Good night, everyone,” she says as she crawls into bed, the shot Connie gave her a few minutes ago taking hold of her tiny, troubled frame. “Thanks for helping.”

When no one moves she adds, “That’s all I have to say.”

Kristen and Isabel file out and head back to their respective rooms. The bed crinkles as Isabel climbs up into it: instead of soft mattress covers there are thick sheets of plastic under the paper-thin sheets in the unlikely event someone becomes incontinent on top of everything else.

Every fifteen minutes the door opens and a flashlight shines in Isabel’s face. Directly into her face. So even if she manages to fall into a light sleep the beam wakes her up just enough to toss and turn all night. Isabel is on suicide watch. The flashlight checks are a status symbol. Everybody seems to know who’s got checks every fifteen minutes and who has the more desirable thirty-minute variety. Isabel wouldn’t have known this except that Kristen asked her point-blank about her checks while they were on Melanie’s bizarre scavenger hunt. When Isabel told Kristen that the nurse checked on her every fifteen minutes Kristen looked relieved. Kristen had been at Three Breezes for some time now, but she was still, apparently, a “fifteener.”

Four

The ant is neatly marching along the mortar line on the cement block wall alongside her bed. To Isabel, it appears he is as frantic as she is to leave the hospital. She tugs once more at the lower lip of the window but it will not budge. Windows are nailed shut at Three Breezes. So instead of freeing the insect, Isabel, with miserable resignation, watches it make its way down the wall.

* * *

Isabel avoided anthills. In the spring- and summertime, when nature was busy reinventing itself, those telltale signs of ant industry—miniscule pyramids of dirt—multiplied in cracks of buckled pavement, between bricks and along fence posts, and Isabel always stepped around them. She had ever since she was a small girl growing up in Connecticut.

Her brothers, on the other hand, went out of their way to step directly on them.

“Don’t!” she yelled at Owen, who was twisting his foot on top of the fourth of twelve anthills along their short front walk. Isabel ran over and pushed her seven-year-old brother away. Too late. Isabel imagined hundreds of suffocating ants under the cement gasping for air.

“I’m telling Mom if you do it again.” She was on her hands and knees frantically trying to clear a passageway so that the ants could find their way out of the rubble. Her nine-year-old mind realized this was futile so she grabbed a tiny stick to drill a hole into the ground so the ants could get some oxygen.

“I’m telling Mom if you do it again,” mimicked her brother. “You’re such a tattletale.”

He was right.

But Isabel didn’t think of it as telling on her brothers, she just couldn’t stand to see anything or anyone hurt. Even ants.

“What’s going on out here?” Isabel’s mother called through the top screen of the porch door.

“Nothing,” her brothers called out, disappearing into their fort in the backyard.

“Isabel? What’re you doing?” Katherine asked as she approached her hunched-over daughter.

Isabel was furiously drilling, pausing only to wipe her tears out of her eyes so that she could continue her rescue mission.

“Is it the anthills again?”

“I don’t understand why they do this,” Isabel cried as she squatted over the fifth flattened mound. “There’re families under here. Whole families. And they’re dying!”

“Oh, for God’s sake. This is ridiculous. Look at me for a second.”

Isabel obeyed as she wiped her nose on her sleeve.

“They’re going to be okay, the ants. We’ve been over this. They like to burrow out. They’ll be okay.”

Isabel looked back down. No ants were crawling out of her manmade holes. She looked back up at her mother.

“You’ve got to let it go. You think this is sad? Wait’ll life kicks you in the rear a few times. No one’s out there drilling holes for all of us, you know. Now, come on inside. Help me sort the Girl Scout cookie orders.”

As she stood up to go, Isabel looked back at her doomed friends. But she swallowed her tears and forged ahead.

* * *

As her childhood advanced, Isabel’s empathy for creatures of all shapes and sizes morphed into a sadness that was difficult to shake. Sadness gave way to isolation. Isabel constantly felt as if she were on the outside looking in. As if she wasn’t quite a participant in everyday life, but a sleepwalker. While she maintained the polished front of an oldest, overachieving child, her true personality had yet to emerge, and that only added to the disconnected feeling she wore like a bulky shroud.

As Isabel floated numbly through elementary school, her physical appearance was taking a very definite shape. She began to hear over and over again that she was pretty, and soon, perhaps because she felt so empty, the compliments at least temporarily filled her up. Isabel began to crave the attention that was paid to her looks. No one wanted to hear about her sorrow, no one wanted to see her sad.

She was becoming an expert at reading people. She soon learned that humor got more results than anger or tears, that attention was paid to the attractive, and that people were inherently egotistical. Everybody likes to talk about themselves. So she honed her listening skills. Isabel was learning to survive by playing roles: the curvaceous beauty, the class clown, the intense listener. She was excellent at being whatever someone else wanted her to be.

* * *

“Isabel. What can I do for you?”

Isabel cleared her throat.

“Um. Mr. Clulow? Um, I was wondering if I could have another chance.”

The high school drama teacher slightly cocked his head to the side. “Another chance.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Yeah. I mean, yes. I know I froze up there last week. I totally froze. I blew it. I just wasn’t prepared. For improv. But I’m ready now. I can do it. I’ll act out anything you want me to act out. If you’d just give me one more chance.”

Mr. Clulow looked down at the papers on his desk. Then he looked back up at Isabel.

“Why do you want to join the drama club, Isabel? What is it that’s drawing you to drama?”

“Drawing me?”

“Yes. You see, some people feel it’s the perfect way to tap into their creative side. Others find it’s the perfect form of self-expression. I’m just wondering what’s driving you.”

Isabel looked down. Without looking back up she answered.

“I guess it’s that…well, I suppose I just like the idea of being someone else,” she mumbled.

Mr. Clulow raised his eyebrows as if he’d caught her in a trap.

“So you don’t like to be yourself?”

“No!” she said, too loudly. “I mean, I do. What I really mean is that…” She stammered, aware that he was prepared to pick apart her next sentence. “It’s…um…”

“Miss Murphy,” the teacher scolded, “I have a class to teach in five minutes. I suggest you get to the bottom of what it is you would like to say.”

“Please. Just give me another chance to try out. Please?”

He tapped his pencil impatiently and looked out the window.

“Hmm.”

“Please?”

“All right. One more chance. But this is hardly fair. I don’t do this for other students who buckle under pressure. If you get embarrassed in an audition, how on earth will you be able to act on stage in front of hundreds of people? Don’t…answer. It’s a rhetorical question, Miss Murphy. Tomorrow after school meet me in the gym and we will try it one more time.”

“Thank you! Oh, thank you so much, Mr. Clulow,” she said, backing out of his tiny office.

* * *

It was eight o’clock on a school night and Isabel’s mother was furious.

“I thought rehearsals were never more than two hours after school.”

“Mom, we’ve got a play coming up and no one knows their lines yet. We had to stay late. Mr. Clulow said—”