By Linda Larson
Waking up next to the Intensive Care Unit’s Christmas tree strung with golden lights and hung with bright green and red ornaments and silvery icicles, Grace felt the seductive magic of her childhood Christmases go to work on her terror and rage.
Grace was lying on her pallet at dawn on Christmas Eve at the Whitfield State Hospital for the mentally ill, located in Pearl, Mississippi. The pallet was made of turquoise plastic and had a hole in it from which leaked urine-soaked straw. The two bathrooms for forty patients were not only chronically missing toilet paper, but were smeared with feces after the toilets filled up at night.
The only chance for cleaning up this Christmas Eve morning was, as the drill had repeated itself since she had arrived four days ago, at six in the morning. Patients were lined up naked in the shower room where staffers put a hose on them, ordered them to soap up and then hit them again with the heavy volume of water.
Grace had never liked to be naked around other people. When she was six she would cry at swim class in the locker room where she was too modest to change into her bathing suit with all the other youngsters. Her mother had to hold a towel up and shield her from anyone who might be looking her way.
Her anxiety about being naked in the shower with forty or so women went through the roof when one small woman ran over to Grace, put her arms around her and gave her a slobbery kiss on the face. Grace’s terror translated into putting her hands around the young patient’s throat until the smaller, weaker woman backed off and tried to surrender. When the staff intervened with the water hose, Grace was relieved. She wasn’t sure what came next after choking someone and she really didn’t want to find out.
One good thing came out of it; no one got in Grace’s face after that.
Yet in the midst of this squalor and fear, at the foot of her soiled turquoise pallet, stood a Christmas tree fit for royals, set up by the staff for the patients, winking its tiny lights off and on. The sleeping area was locked during the day so Grace’s time with her tree was limited. She could steal glances of it through the reinforced pane of glass through the locked door during the day. She couldn’t wait for Christmas Eve evening to come so she could be alone with her tree.
She and her mom had promised each other after Dad died; they would never spend Christmas apart. And even though they were separated by light-years of love and anguish, as well as thirty or so miles, Grace’s mom seemed as near to her as the twinkling lights of the tree itself.
Grace’s eyes only could see up close and very near, so the lights on every Christmas tree she had ever seen without her glasses each had had its own aurora of gold in its nest of deep green.
One sign that always signified Grace was getting sick was that she stopped wearing her glasses, which made the world look farther away, less threatening.
As a rule, she would lose her temper, snatch her glasses off of her face and shatter the frames against floors or walls. This was a recurring signal of imminent mental confusion and rage.
Grace occupied the former game room in her mother’s house and she and her mom talked at least once a day whether or not Grace was locked up.
Yet she hadn’t been called to the phone since her mother had dropped her off into the care of these strangers, on the winter solstice, the twenty-first of December. Her mom had in the past, when Grace was hospitalized, dutifully brought her cartons of Newport (Alive with Pleasure!) cigarettes to smoke on the unit during smoke breaks. After four days there were no cigarettes left and that was something Grace’s mother had never done before…let her run out of cigarettes while on a locked unit. Grace was terrified that her mother was dead or being held hostage.
In fact, Grace hadn’t heard from her mother in any tangible way this Christmas. The only evidence she even had a mother was the Christmas tree. Because she hadn’t seen or spoken to her mom in for days, she was having horrible nightmares about her mom, except that she had them when she was awake…daymares.
She was haunted by a vision of her mom being put into a huge vat of boiling oil by chefs in tall white hats and ruffled shirts. Mom’s hair and make up looked perfect right up until, with a horrible crackling, they let go of her arms and legs and dropped her into a stewpot-sized vat filled with sizzling grease. Except that in Grace’s vision, when Mom was thrown into the vat, it turned into scalding water, and instead of deep-frying her to death instantaneously, Mom sank into a slower, less merciful torment which caused her to mouth Grace’s name in a silent scream.
There was nothing Grace could do.
Bright and early on Christmas Eve day, while the patients were having their coffee and biscuit, one of the kinder nurses, Ned, had brought in a Frank Sinatra tape of carols to play for the forty or so mental patients left in the ICU ward over the holiday.
Grace sang along with the song "I’ll be home for Christmas" which ends "If only in my dreams." Since her mother and she had made that promise to each other to always spend Christmas together, the song made her eyes sting with unshed tears…tears that no one else noticed.
Grace knew the horde of evil chefs whom she half-believed had murdered her mom would come for her next. Many of the windowpanes of the hospital were broken. It would be easy for a host of angry justice-seeking killers to break into the Intensive Care Unit, a medical-sounding name for a hellhole of over forty psychotic women and young girls in a space designed for ten. Once on the ward the killers would flay them alive to ready them for the cooking vats in the courtyard of Grace’s imagination.
Co-existing with her fantasy of cannibals in the courtyard was the certainty that the six-foot Christmas tree glittering beside her pallet, even though she was awash with fear and trembling for her own safety, was from her mom.
‘She must have made arrangements for me to have a tree,’ Grace thought, ‘and a present,’ even though she believed with her sane self that her Mom was snug and safe in her comfortable home in Madison county, Mississippi, thirty miles away, drinking vodka martinis.
She could hear periodically, through the locked door of the ICU, the roaring of the ocean in her ears. She thought it was the sound of many rushing feet coming up the stairs outside the metal door. They were angry-sounding footsteps and she just knew eventually they would come for her. She was the next victim on their list.
‘Look at my sins; look at my crimes,’ she thought to herself. She believed she was evil incarnate and surely a hideous fate awaited her this Christmas.
Part of her understood that she was in a mental hospital in Pearl, Mississippi, which in her experience was one of the ghastliest mental institutions in the whole country. She was locked into a dangerous place filled with angry and violent women and without her mother coming to get her and bring her home, Grace believed she would never see the daylight sky of freedom again.
She realized, even though she could intermittently hear the sounds of a cannibal party being held in the courtyard below, that it was more than likely no one else could hear it. Still these sounds she could hear, that no one else could hear, terrified her…although her facial features remained stoic. In fact, it was one of the symptoms of her mental illness that she showed little or no appropriate emotion, whatever the circumstance.
This was Grace’s first Christmas being so mentally ill that she had to be locked up in the state psychiatric hospital over the holidays. It was her first Christmas in an institution. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that she was psychotic. She was spending Christmas under lock and key for her own safety, and the safety of others.
There was one huge advantage to this particular holiday she was celebrating in the madhouse in Pearl, Mississippi. An unlooked-for; one-for-the-record books event…snow. Some of the small panes in the women’s’ washroom were broken out and Grace could put her nose and eyes right up to the fresh air and breathe in the strange, metallic smell peculiar to snow in the Deep South.
The hardest thing about having schizophrenia for Grace was that she had spent so much time of her life locked up indoors. So, to her, a bit of fresh air was a gift; to have snow seemed nearly a miracle…a personal favor not this time from her mom. This timely snowfall, Grace believed was a gift from God Himself to her and to her alone.
Patients who were not as sick as Grace were taken for walks twice a day. She was not permitted to go because once during a previous hospitalization she had run away on a walk and returned to her mother’s house almost scaring the life out of her mom. It was called an elopement. After you run away once and stay away, you don’t make mental hospital bail so easily.
Finally, when the doctors in their really-truly white coats showed at 9 am on Christmas Eve, Grace heard her name called. After four days without any apparent medical care at all, Doctor Dick Tuesday, a short, sandy-haired man who was doing his residency at Whitfield, called her name and led her through the locked steel doors to a gray examining room bright with stainless steel.
"Let’s get this exam over with," he told her, "so we can get you out of the lock-up unit and onto to a ward with more privileges." That sounded good to Grace.
She was already dressed in only two hospital gowns, one that closed in front and one in back, which was all patients were allowed to wear on the ICU. Dr. Tuesday told her to lie down on the examining table.
"Are you comfortable?" he asked her. "I know that steel table can get awfully cold on the behind."
"Are you a student?" Grace asked him. "You seem so young to be a doctor."
"I’m a doctor all right, " he said as he inserted his finger into her vagina for a pelvic, Grace thought, exam.
"Why did you decide on medicine?" Grace asked.
"Quite honestly, my father was a doctor and I didn’t have much choice about becoming one. There are perks, though. I have a beautiful sailboat wintering on the Gulf Coast and I’m going to set up a practice where sailing comes first. I
Can’t tell you how much I love to be on the water."
"What is the boat’s name," Grace asked.
"I haven’t named it yet. Maybe I’ll name it after you." Then his voice dropped to a whisper and he put his mouth close to her ear, "maybe I’ll call it the Grace."
When he pulled his probing finger out of her vagina, Grace realized that he wasn’t wearing a latex glove on that hand.
She asked him why not and he told her he had just forgotten.
"If you tell anyone about this," he told her, "I will make sure you never get off the locked unit."
Then he walked her back to the acute ward, acting friendly and relaxed, and chatting with the nurses as they buzzed her back in. Grace overheard the doctor tell the nursing staff that, in his opinion, Grace was sex-starved.
When Grace started shouting and hollering, even screaming, about her treatment at the hand of Dr. Tuesday, she found herself laced into a straitjacket.
Grace discovered that there was only one upside to being laced into a straight jacket. One couldn’t scratch an itch on your nose, go to the bathroom without assistance, or even keep your balance. There was no possibility of smoking a cigarette, which was the hardest thing of all. Also if someone attacked you or frightened you, there was no way to defend yourself, you couldn’t use your arms or legs at all.
Still, Grace found out delightedly that she could still sing just fine even with the straitjacket on. Grace was laced into the straight jacket for saying bad things about Dr. Tuesday. After an hour and a half the staff freed her. It seemed they didn’t much like Dr. Tuesday either.
The nursing staff was so kind that holiday; they humored Grace and her fellow inmates. She was the only white patient on the unit; the rest were apparently darker-skinned, but not monochromatically by any means.
There had been another white woman who had been admitted on Wednesday, the same day as Grace. She was a spectacularly beautiful (with movie-star cheekbones to die for) looking woman. Her name was Opal, and she was as misty and luminescent as the stone itself. She had only one flaw. Her husband had knocked out her front teeth and the naked dangle of exposed nerves hung from her mouth as she spoke.
She kept saying the whole time, continually brushing her light brown hair back from her eyes, "This is my fault. I shouldn’t have been drinking. He was right to knock my teeth out. Now maybe I will learn." At first she sort of leaned against Grace until Grace got mad and told her, "I’m not a piece of furniture."
Then Opal started to snivel, which wasn’t very attractive either. Grace felt obligated to try to cheer her up, but Opal’s horror at being locked up at Whitfield State with thirty-eight black women and one other white woman, was far greater than her concern about the nerves dangling from her gums.
Apparently, the doctors believed her when she told them she had it coming. She must have been pronounced sane because in the afternoon on the same day, Opal was discharged, not into a nicer ward, but discharged from the hospital.
As a distraction, when late afternoon approached on Christmas Eve, the staff kept asking Grace to sing first one song, then another and so on to their great amusement. One of the ditties she sang with great confidence was "In the morning when I wake up, she brings me coffee in my favorite cup," a song she imitated from the Ray Charles version called "Hallelujah, I love her so."
And the singing went on, "I shot the Sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy" was such an easy lyric that other patients started to sing with her, swinging back and forth in their seats in the community room leaving standing room only for onlookers.
"Amazing Grace" got them all harmonizing like crazy and for some reason, some of the nurses got out some tissue and dabbed at their eyes…were they crying because they were lost or found?
The nurses stayed locked in their cage at the center of the unit as other patients began to sing with Grace and they all swooped around as if they had wings. Then the women, many of whom were really young adolescents, got hooked on the song…"I’m an outlaw, I’m an oddball." This was fun to sing because the chorus sounded violent and intractable and the harmony had to be right on the money.
The staff really put up with a lot because it was Christmas. The patients who had cigarettes shared them with those who didn’t, which was a huge relief to Grace, having been left there with none. If one patient had a cup of coffee and another patient wanted some, Grace would say, "get a cup" and then pour some coffee in the cup to share with her girl friend. This behavior was not only on Christmas; this was mental hospital etiquette year round.
The staff hung garlands of evergreens. They were draped all over the community room and the nurses even came out of their cage and served peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cookies and eggnog and chicory coffee with all the accoutrements of great coffee, meaning sugar and cream.
The huge pain and heartbreak of the day was that she couldn’t forgive herself for leaving her mother in the lurch on Christmas Eve. Why couldn’t she escape from this mental hospital and spend Christmas with her mother a few miles away?
What was wrong with her?
Suddenly it was five-thirty and the sleeping area was unlocked. Grace raced past the other women to be certain that no one would challenge her possession of the turquoise pallet and her own private tree.
And then, she found herself lying again beside her Whitfield tree, and the tree smell redolent with pinesap was a kind of magic carpet, which allowed her to believe she was once again seven years old, and Christmas.
She was seven and it was Christmas Eve and in her mind’s eye she was lying beside the tree in her parents’ house. The tree had glinting Christmas lights and the ornaments Mother and Grace had shopped for at McRae’s department store…baubles created to be broken by a clumsy six year old, but this year she was seven and hadn’t broken anything. And the colors cast their patterns of light and changed with each movement of her eyes like a kaleidoscope powered by breath…and breathlessness.
Each of the forty women and girls staying on the locked unit on Christmas Eve received a gift wrapped carefully in bright Santa Claus wrapping paper, and left on each woman’s pallet. Grace’s package was tied with ribbons of gold and green, the same kind of ribbed ribbon that Grace’s mother used to make into curls with the edge of a pair of scissors.
Grace was convinced that her package was from her mom.
Actually, it was from the nursing staff that had pitched in for the little presents out of their own pockets. Mostly, the staff was down-home, born-again Christians. Their faith was the only thing that kept the job from being killer-depressing. Some of them, especially Ned the nurse, really seemed to understand the in-and-outs and turns-and -twists of psychosis…at least enough to know how to show kindness and respect to the patients.
She kept making karate moves in the air with her hands and this same Ned the nurse told her she would have to have her hands registered as a lethal weapon. He said this with such perfect deadpan expression that Grace believed him.
Her gift from the staff turned out to be a pair of pink slippers, stretchy…so one size fits all. She loved them. Pink is for girls, she thought. She was certain they were from her mom. Her joy in the day was revived.
She was also convinced in her mind, that the doctors were using her for a human guinea pig. She believed the soap in the showers were made from remains of human beings who had once been patients and had died on the ICU…and that the reason they were feeding the patients was to fatten them up for the kill.
Dr. Tuesday had done nothing to allay her fears.
Logic was not the issue here. The disease of schizophrenia was doing the torturing here and would defy and distort Grace’s mind, senses and emotions at will.
Very seldom would a delusion be as benign as was her perception of the tree being a gift from her mom.
As she rested on her plastic mattress recovering from her excitement from caroling and her perfect, Mom-given present of pink slippers…there beneath the shimmer of the lights on the tree, other Christmases of jewels and lovebirds came back into her mind, relieving Grace’s terrible fears.
Largely because of her illness, Grace was never alone. Sometimes it was horribly frightening and painful to be herself. At other times, such as on this Christmas Eve, it was a mixed blessing.
When Grace was a girl she had Christmas in her eyes. She lived for Christmas. Her favorite expression was ‘slow as Christmas.’ The turquoise plastic mattress she was lying on in the ICU brought her back to reality with its stench.
She squeezed her eyes shut from her painful surroundings and willed herself to be seven again and lying beside the golden lights strung around a Scotch pine or Balsam in the den.
Her mother and father were sitting in the kitchen around a daisy-patterned Formica table where they all three ate breakfast every morning. In the evenings Grace’s Mom and Dad did their wooing there, which sounded like cooing dove sounds emanating from the kitchen to the little den off the living room where the tree was.
On that Christmas when Grace was seven, her Mom and Dad substituted Manhattans for their usual inexpensive jug of Chablis to salute the joy of the night. Their cocktails were complete with orange slices and maraschino cherries. She got to eat the lusciously sweet, red and liquor-flavored cherries right out of their drinks.
Her mom and dad were having a stolen moment in there, the two of them being just two, just two together. The smell of Tabu, bourbon, and hazy, lazy cigarette smoke are still wonderful smells to Grace and always will be.
And there she was again, brought back to reality by the stink of urine…lying on her stomach beneath the tree on her pallet in the madhouse, its needles pointy and prickly green and smelling at once like Christmas and the pine forests of Mississippi.
Her imagination rescued her from the ammonia-like smells of urine and disinfectant, and once again brought her back to that kinder and more loving seventh Christmas.
As she lay there in her parents’ little den, barely big enough for the tree, she played with the nativity scene, also from ‘McRae’s,’ that Mom had bought especially for that seventh Christmas and which was made of plaster and chipped easily. Grace didn’t chip even one. They were the only doll-sized figures Grace ever showed any interest in…she couldn’t resist the story.
Tangibles of the Christmas story were reflected in Grace’s shining eyes as she arranged and rearranged: here a sheep; there a shepherd with a tiny metal staff; lovely Mary in pink with light brown hair; Joseph, standing guard in blue; a scattering of little sheep and a donkey; three humble shepherds surrounded by angels and all of them centered around the little manger with its real straw glued on to its bed and the plaster infant Jesus in his crib.
The angels in a plaster cluster were silently heralding his birth, and there were the three wise men carrying gold, incense and myrrh, one of them leading a camel, one dark-skinned. As she lay beside this enchanting cast of characters, she sang carols to the Christ child. She promised God that night she would never sing for money.
Along with the happy memories of being a child came not-so-happy memories, one of them having directly to do with the irony of Christ Jesus in this awe-filled and awful world.
The only time her mother ever struck her was once when she came home for lunch from school. She was in the third grade. Mom had made her favorite lunch of chicken noodle soup, a peanut butter and brown sugar sandwich and, to top it all off, a glass of chocolate milk. Grace was in heaven. As she started to sit down at the kitchen table, Grace told her Mother that she no longer believed in Jesus Christ. Grace was confused about Santa Claus and Jesus and had mixed them up. Her mom corrected Grace with a resounding slap across the face.
Grace went into shock. Her mother had never touched her in a cruel way until that day. Her mom was horror-stricken at her own behavior and pulled her daughter tightly to her body and crouched over her murmuring "My baby, my best girl, my best love". As her mom held onto her tightly in the kitchen, Grace remembered noticing that Mother had an apron on and that it had a black background with bright sunflowers.
Grace remembered this as she lay on her plastic pallet with the Christmas lights winking at her. There was an undercurrent of panic in Grace’s mind at her mother’s absence and not having cigarettes.
And then as Grace’s mind backtracked, Mom began to cry and told Grace how sorry she was to have struck her and that she had promised herself she would never ever hit her little girl the way she had been hit when she was a child.
Grace’s mom had told her that when she was sixteen years old she sneaked out in the family car with her little sister Mae. Her stepfather found out and was furious. He ripped her shirt off her back and slashed at her with the buckle side of his leather belt. He hit her over and over again on her back as she tried to shield her breasts and stomach. She told her little girl that what was worse than the physical pain and deep cuts to her back, was her shame at having her breasts exposed in front of the whole family. Mom never forgave him, she told Grace, and in the next breath, Mom asked her seven-year old Grace to forgive her for slapping her.
Grace forgave her mother in a flash, right there on the spot, but something had happened to her. She felt as if she was the Mom and her mother was the daughter. And she was angry, angry with Jesus as if somehow it was all his fault.
There was one good thing that came out of it; her mother really didn’t ever strike her again. Besides, as her mom explained to her, without Jesus there wouldn’t be any Christmas.
Grace at the age of seven might not believe in God’s mercy, but she did believe, without reservation, in God’s beauty. Her own mother’s extraordinary, lovely eyes and bright smile proved it. It seemed to Grace, as the little girl of seven was pilfering a bourbon-soaked cherry from her mom’s drink, that her mother’s face was as radiant as any angels’, in Grace’s very-near and blurry eyes.
Mom and Dad said she could open one present that Christmas Eve…and save the rest for morning. It was her Mother’s way, when she gave or was given gifts that whatever was in the package, it was a remembrance. She didn’t use the word present.
Grace chose the smallest box. After she got the wrapping paper off, the little box was made of black velvet. It was a ring box but she didn’t know that then. It was from Aunt Mae. And yes, it was a ruby on a small golden band. It was Grace’s first piece of jewelry. Grace loved it. It was a ruby because her birthday was in July. That ruby ring was the grandest thing she had ever seen and wherever it has got off to, it now and always will belong to Grace. Just as Christmas will always belong to her, regardless of hard knocks and sorrows.
So Grace nodded off to sleep beside her private, personal tree in a wealth of loving Aunts and ruby rings, an unlikely snow and the promise of joy to come. Only that nagging fear for her mother’s life stayed with her.
In the morning on Christmas Day, after the showering and before the special breakfast of ham, grits, biscuits, honey and coffee, Aunt Mae came to visit Grace.
Grace saw her face and was horror-stricken…where was her Mom? Aunt Mae didn’t bring any ruby rings, but she brought warm, strong hugs and three cartons of cigarettes.
Grace was uncomfortable sitting with her beautiful, perfectly made-up and coifed Aunt Mae, while dressed only in her two hospital gowns with her hair a halo of reddish blonde curls. Mae didn’t like to mingle with black people and this was a source of great humiliation to Grace. What did this mean? she wondered, unable to speak. Why is Aunt Mae here and not Mom? And Aunt Mae told her, speaking in her usual low-key, word-sparing way.
"Your mother has had a heart attack. I went by to see her on Thursday after she brought you in on Wednesday. She was all alone at home, just her and that damned dog. I just dropped by on my way home to the farm to make sure she knew we were expecting her for Christmas dinner."
"What happened? Where is Mom now?" Grace, for the first time, knew what it was like to speak with your heart in your throat.
Mae continued, "She was lying in the hallway, a little trail of vomit leading from the bedroom to the bathroom." In Grace’s mind she began to turn from a young woman into a bird and she squawked, "Where is my Mom?"
"It’s all right, Honey Girl. Just listen to me; stay with me now. The ambulance came and they took her to Saint Dominic’s Hospital and she is going to be okay. She will be back home before the New Year."
Grace, who had been getting ready to descend into the well of her hellhound fantasies, came back from the brink of madness and could hear and understand what her Aunt Mae was telling her.
Her mother was alive.
"In the meantime, you must be a good girl, a patient girl, and give her time to regain her strength. She loves you very much."
And then Aunt Mae had kissed her on the cheek, gave the other patients a look that said, "You are lower than dirt," and was gone, quickly and quietly, as was her fashion.
The women in the unit who had shared their cigarettes with Grace now clustered around her as she repaid them with the menthols Aunt Mae smoked, Salem’s, and still had two cartons left.
Grace realized she had been given another remembrance and that it wasn’t the tree or the pink slippers that she had supposed Mom had given for her sake. This was a remembrance that could not be stolen from her, that she could not lose, or sell or give away to a stranger, or hock in a pawnshop, and yet which she understood was only a reprieve.
Not a ruby ring for her finger, but the hot blood of rubies in the snow. Her mother’s blood, that same blood that was spilt in her girlhood, by a man who will surely spend some time in the cooking pots of hell. Grace tried once more to understand the deep anger in her mother’s heart. Anger caught there like a splinter of glass scraping and piercing every dream and hope Grace’s mother had for herself.
And so Mom had surrendered her hopes and dreams. Instead, she had lavished her hope for the future on her only child, who although bright as a whip, had turned out to have a horrid, disabling and chronic illness of the mind.
More than any Christmas promise, Grace had wished for or received, the greatest was the wild reddish blue of life still pumping through her mother’s heart, and knowing she would hear again that sweetest rhythm from infancy, the percussion of her mother’s heart, still beating.
Never did a menthol cigarette taste so much like snow. Grace felt a jubilance that almost made up for being locked inside this rude, ungainly mental hospital during Mississippi’s first snowfall in nine years.
Grace can still be counted on to sing with a grateful heart, but she won’t sing for money.
© Linda Larson 2004
