time to reconcile herself to that fact.
When they got to the main building of the hospital, the white coats dropped her off with a burly woman dressed like a cop. The woman wobbled like she’d been thrown off balance by the armory of keys on her belt. A couple of the keys looked big enough to fit the kind of doors you’d find at the top of a beanstalk. She didn’t speak. She just pushed Wilma toward a door with a little less iron than your typical bank vault. One of the giant keys opened the door. Wilma had the sense walking through the doorway that she may never walk back out.
A nurse on the inside checked Wilma in. The only words she said were statements of facts, like, “alcoholic” and “two months.” She gave Wilma’s name as Wilma Chesley. This seemed further proof that the old man had pulled strings to set up this commitment. Not that Wilma needed further proof. Not that it took a lot of pull to get a woman committed these days.
The nurse led Wilma down a long hall. Each door had a sign painted on it. “Dental Clinic.” “X-Ray.” “Diet Kitchen.” “Electroshock.” “Secretary.” When they reached the door labeled “Hydro,” the nurse extracted a key from her giant key ring, unlocked the door, and led Wilma inside.
A row of baths stood along the left side of the room. A woman lay in one of the baths. Heavy rubber blankets covered her body. Only her head rose out of the water. The tips of her hair were soaked. A fuzzy patch of dry hair rose from the top of her head. She rolled her eyes slowly in Wilma’s direction. The eyes focused on Wilma for a split second, then slackened into an unfocused stare. Whatever the woman saw at that moment, she saw it without the use of her eyes.
Wilma had seen some sad women in her time, but this woman was the saddest. Her sallow skin and rubber blankets and empty eyes were enough to make Wilma forget that she was wearing a straightjacket. Someone always seems to have it worse.
The nurse had apparently forgotten about the straightjacket, also. She told Wilma to strip.
“I’ll need a little help with that,” Wilma said.
“Are you too drunk to undress yourself?” the nurse asked.
“Honey,” Wilma said, “if I could’ve unbuckled myself from this straightjacket, I would’ve gotten out of that car and found a safe place to hide hours ago.”
“Oh.” The nurse considered Wilma for what looked to be the first time. “Right.” She unbuckled the back of the jacket. Wilma shook herself free. Another woman—a secretary, judging from the formless dress and cracked-leather mules and clipboard in her hand—came into the room. She sat on a bench along the wall opposite the tubs. Wilma stripped to her slip. “Down to the bare skin,” the nurse told her.
Wilma took the rest of it off, remembering, oh Christ, her foray the night before with Tom Fillmore. Surely, they’d be able to tell what she’d been up to. Surely, that was one more humiliation waiting to happen.
The nurse led her to the scale and checked Wilma’s weight. “One twenty-eight,” she called to the secretary. Wilma double-checked the weights. Not bad. Say what you will about these benders, they always brought Wilma’s weight down a few pounds. The nurse checked Wilma’s height next. Wilma stood tall, stretching her spine as much as she could. The nurse called out, “Five-four.”
“And a half,” Wilma added. “Don’t forget the half.”
“Five-four,” the nurse called.
“Are you sure you can see all the way up to the top of the ruler, Shorty?” Wilma asked.
The nurse shot her a look. She called out to the secretary, “Five-three and a half.”
“Oh, now you’re just lying.”
The secretary asked Wilma a litany of questions: birthplace, place of residence, father’s name, mother’s name, mother’s maiden name, occupation, religion. Wilma figured that the State should have all this information anyway, and if they were going to rob her of two months of her life and an inch off her real height, she was going to make up all her answers. So she did. Birthplace: Kalamazoo. Place of residence: The Doheny Mansion, Beverly Hills. Father’s name: Culbert Olson. Mother’s name: Joan Olson. Mother’s maiden name: Crawford. Occupation: hand model. Religion: pagan.
At the end of this charade, the nurse pushed Wilma into a tight shower stall. The nurse took a step back and turned on the water. It felt like it was about two hundred degrees, and it pummeled Wilma from three directions. The nurse tossed a bar of soap and a rough washcloth into the mix. Wilma twisted and contorted, trying to pick up the soap and cloth without getting her hair wet. “What the hell are you doing?” the nurse asked.
“You didn’t give me a shower cap,” Wilma said.
“Get your hair all the way under,” the nurse said. “Soap it all down.”
After dipping her head, the hot water felt all right. She scrubbed her skin until it was rosy pink, clearing all the crust and old makeup off her face, scouring away any traces of her previous night’s transgressions, even opening her mouth to the jets and letting the water wash her teeth and rinse out her mouth. She kept turning and running the cloth over her until the nurse had enough and turned the water off.
The secretary tossed Wilma a towel that wasn’t much bigger than the washcloth. It was soaked through before she was done with her hair, much less drying her skin. The nurse pointed to a metal table near the scale. “Hop up,” she said.
“I’m still dripping,” Wilma said.
“Hop up,” the nurse said.
Wilma climbed onto the table. Her dripping skin made it slick. The metal sucked the last traces of warmth from her. The secretary handed the nurse a magnifying glass. The nurse inspected Wilma. She combed through Wilma’s pubic patch, parting the wild red hair, checking the roots, pushing Wilma’s legs open wider, viewing more of Wilma than Wilma could ever see of herself. The inspection was remarkably and painfully thorough. Had any lice or worms or bacteria found refuge between Wilma’s toes or under her arms or within any other crevice, the nurse would have found it. The whole thing seemed to last for weeks. Wilma wondered if maybe this would be her whole two-month stay at the asylum.
Finally, the nurse told Wilma she could stand. Wilma asked, “Are you sure? You may have missed a freckle somewhere on my ass.”
“Enough, Lady Chesley,” the nurse said. She pointed to a shapeless cotton dress that must have been hospital property when the joint opened in the thirties. “Put that on.” Wilma climbed into the dress. It was big enough to fit the fat lady in a sideshow act.
“Am I supposed to wear this or build a tent with it?”
The nurse hadn’t gone for any of Wilma’s jokes and wasn’t going for this one. She just said, “Wear it.”
“Can’t I wear my dress?”
“It has coffee and vomit on it,” the nurse said. “You’ll get it back after it’s been laundered.”
“Can I at least have something that Dumbo didn’t wear in the movie?”
The nurse didn’t respond. She walked out of the hydro room. Wilma followed, her bare feet slapping against the cool concrete of the hospital floor.
The nurse rushed down one hallway and into another. Again and again. Wilma trotted to keep up with the nurse’s long, purposeful strides. She tried to make note of how many turns she’d taken and which way she’d gone. There was no hope. She was irretrievably lost in the madhouse maze. Some rooms she passed had names of doctors or signs saying things like “Surgery” or “Music Room.” Many were dorm rooms. She passed cavernous spaces with thirty or forty beds. Next to them were rooms the size of closets with bunk beds inside. What little daylight snuck into these rooms seemed a cruel mockery. After what felt like a few miles, the nurse stopped at a small room with four beds. “Welcome home,” she said.
No patients were in the room. Each bed housed the exact same style of bland brown satchel. Peeking out of the top of each