I say, What's not to like? They're nothing if not nice.

You're like those people who fall in love with their kidnappers, Pam says. Like what's-her-name. Who held up the bank. The rich b.i.t.c.h.

Betty says, Patty Hearst.

How many suicide attempts does everybody have? Tina blurts out. I have unlucky thirteen.

People go around with their various numbers.

I have only about half of one, I say.

You're bulls.h.i.tting me, Tina says.

A beacon of mental health, the Virgin Mary here, Pam says. One half-a.s.sed attempt. Well, I can beat that weak-a.s.sed s.h.i.t. I have zero. There are some other motherf.u.c.kers I'd seriously like to kill, though.

On the way back to the ward, Pam tugs my elbow, saying, I've got some contraband.

Tell me it's chocolate, I say, for that day's brownies had vanished from the ward kitchen.

Better than that, she says, and she draws from her sweatshirt pocket a small black Bic lighter. Then she whispers, I've also got a lightbulb in my room.

What fun we're meant to wreak with these items, I can't figure out, but I'm feeling well enough to let the opaque opportunity slide.

33.

Waking in the Blue We are all old timers.Each of us holds a locked razor.-Robert Lowell, "Waking in the Blue"

Three weeks after the lamest stab in suicide's history, I sit typing in the sunlit hall of that asylum so famous one Ivy-League poet later suggests I include my time there on a resume. In my blue-striped robe and vomit-green happy slippers, I'm finishing a poem about a particular circle of h.e.l.l in which a sinner is fixed on endless video reruns of her every screwup. An eternity of reruns with eyelids held open by clothespins. Crucifixion by television.

Which is how the end of my drinking felt-the anesthesia of liquor had stopped working, and there was nothing much else to aspire to. It's a c.r.a.ppy poem based on an old idea, but I haven't written in nine months, so I type it with a jeweler's lapidary care, the goal being to get through without having to trek to the nurses' station to borrow white-out, which my shrink has banished.

How's it dangerous? I ask Mary after my next typo.

People find creative ways to hurt themselves, she says.

Do I look like I wanna hurt myself? I breathe frost on the window and inscribe my initials with a little heart.

You're not the only one on the ward, she says. It pleases me that she plays along with my breezy, confident subterfuge, when I was a sobbing wreck two weeks before.

I'd guard it from the other madwomen with my life, I say.

She looks around to be sure the other nurses are still doling out meds, then whispers, Your doctor is lobbying to read your poems, in case they're bad for your mental health.

She can't do that, I say. All kinds of poets wrote here-Anne s.e.xton, Robert Lowell.

She can, I'm afraid, Mary says, her lovely face wearing a look of concern that unsettles me.

I say, Don't you think I'm ready to go home next week? My husband starts school. He's working full-time. I've gotta start teaching.

I don't get to decide, she says.

C'mon, Mary.

Another nurse steps into the room with a piece of mail Warren had that morning dropped off for me. A delinquent bill, I figure. But the return address holds the scarlet shield of Radcliffe College-the Bunting Inst.i.tute for women scholars.

They're probably writing to reiterate my rejection, I tell Mary, since the year before I'd applied-for the ninth time-for one of their fanciest postdoctoral fellowships. They gave you money and an office. Because my academic credentials were so stank, and my one book had proven ignorable. I'd never expected to get it.

But one poet had decided not to come, and I'm runner-up. It's maybe the first gift that I understand fully as such. Rather than feel the b.u.t.ton-busting pride I've been chasing with a decade of arrogantly filled-out grant applications, I feel toadishly unworthy. Mary reads over the letter while I stand stumped in the shine of it.

They make you an officer of the university, she says. What's that mean?

You can charge drinks at the Faculty Club.

Drinks?

Club soda and coffee, I say. O.J. Iced tea.

She's still rubbing her belly with a pinched look on her face. She hands me the letter.

What? I say. What aren't you saying?

That says you have to go to a meeting this Monday, Mary says. Have to go. It's an all-day orientation.

I know, I know. I get keys to my office. I get to meet the other scholars. I can't wait.

She'll never let you go, she says, referring to my in-house shrink: Alice in Wonderland. That's what even the nurses call her behind her back, based on the platinum hair she wears past her knees, despite being on the far side of forty. It flaps behind her like a ship's wake, or she pushes it back using horrid headbands with bows big enough to stick on a birthday convertible. (My doc was on August holiday, or she might've vetoed Alice.) She barely lets you go to the drunks' group in the detox on Tuesday. Escorted.

Won't I be out by then?

Mary shrugs, adding, Maybe not.

Alice in f.u.c.king Wonderland, I say.

A pa.s.sing doctor hushes me and nods toward the mailroom, where the shrink in question-tiny, humorless, and ruthlessly well groomed-is reviewing charts.

It's such a cliche to hate your shrink when you're in the bin. (In truth, all of my other shrinks contributed heartily to saving my life.) Dr. Alice herself would claim I'm projecting a buried hatred of my own seductive, narcissistic mother. But even other doctors seem to stiffen at her presence in group, and her lack of humor is legend in these halls. No one ever sees her pancaked face risk the breach of smiling.

She beckons me now, and I summon the bravado to flounce behind her to an office. She slips behind her desk. She's wearing a peach-colored headband to match her Chanel suit. She's a buyer of name brands, this one, no thrift shops for her.

Sitting primly in the chair across from her, I try to dazzle her with modest confidence. She has a tendency to bring up p.e.n.i.s envy every session, and I swear that this time, when she does, I'll confess to my intense longing for a d.i.c.k of my own, for in most places that pretend to value honesty, I've usually found that sucking up is an underrated virtue given how well it works.

Reviewing my chart, she squirts a dollop of lotion into her hands and rubs them together with the untroubled air of a woman who's never picked up a check and never gone to sleep without flossing.

She says, You're still refusing the sleeping medication?

I'm sleeping so well, I say. I think all our talks are paying off.

What's your objection to the medication?

I'm worried about the side effects.

Your addiction? she says. She gives me a watery smile. She finds my addiction droll.

That and priapism, I say.

Since a raging hard-on is one side effect they'd mentioned from the sleeping pill, I'm throwing her a bone, so to speak, and her face goes all eager.

She says, Do you feel there's something missing from your body?

Funny you say that, I say. I do. Some absence. That's just how I'd describe it.

She waits for me to say more, but I can't think how to elaborate without bursting into lunatic laughter, so I try another tack.

The big problem when I came in was my head, I say. If there had been a transplant list, I'd have signed on.

Does this head of yours urge you to hurt yourself? she asks. (Is it paranoia that causes me to hear enthusiasm?) I tell her no. I feel like an a.s.shole about the whole thing. I want to get better. I want to work on my marriage and be a better mom. I want to stay sober.

Rubbing her hands together again, she asks, Not even any fantasies fantasies about suicide? Are you about suicide? Are you cutting cutting yourself? yourself?

I never did that, I say.

Never? she says, adding, Most people who set out to hurt themselves rely on self-destructive acts for relief. She sounds disappointed.

My relief is that I didn't hurt myself, I say. My thinking was skewed by years of drinking-there's your destructive behavior. You're the one who told me alcohol's a depressant.

Any fantasies about hurting your child? Hurting your husband? she asks, probing like a dentist for a raw nerve.

I've already done that, I say.

You seem upset.

I'm in a mental inst.i.tution.

Less than a month after a suicide attempt.

Suicidal gesture. (You pick up the distinct lingo your chart needs pretty fast in those hallways.) How are you prepared to manage your life any better?

The antidepressants have obviously kicked in- They should've kicked in before you arrived.

Well, then I'm rested for the first time in years. I ask people for help all the time. All I do is ask for help. I make, like, five calls a day to people in recovery to talk about how I feel. I talk to all the nurses.

Yet you think you don't belong here.

I belonged here when I came. Now I'm taking up somebody else's spot.

I wait till the end of the session to show her the Radcliffe letter (though with a shrink I trusted, I'd have gone bounding in like a puppy). She c.o.c.ks a waxed eyebrow, saying that the treatment team will judge whether I'm able to go to the orientation. She's concerned that my regular therapist is still out of the country.

You've been in touch with her. She'll be back by Labor Day, I say, and I'm on the mend.

But you have me, she says.

How lucky is that? I say, and I mold my features into the unwilled smile of a store-bought doll.

As part of my program to look like a model inmate, I organize something I call Health and Beauty Day.

Joan has been called to the West Coast to nurse her father in hospice. But Deb and Liz bring in meditation tapes patients can listen to while lying on the dayroom floor in the morning. I also arrange for staff to take us on a long walk around the campus and to the gym, where we idly thwap around basketb.a.l.l.s. Before dinner, we make facial masks from yogurt and honey and lie supine on mats in the kitchen with cuc.u.mber slices on our eyes and mayo slathered on our hair-homemade spa treatments I clipped from a magazine. Pam jokes that we should have a fashion show involving the papery nightgowns that show our flubbery a.s.ses.

After dinner, Betty invites me to her room so I can borrow some petal-pink polish for my toenails. She nicks into the bathroom to slip into her pajamas. Coming out, she pulls a daffodil-yellow sweatshirt from a drawer, and as it slips over her head, I catch a glimpse of burn marks up one arm above the elbow-a line of festering sores of varying depths. I grab her wrist, and she jerks away.

What did you do? I say.

Nothing, she says. It's none of your business.

How did you even do that? I ask.

Leave it alone. It's been there a long time.

Those were fresh. You've been here three months. How did you find a way to burn yourself?

You think you know about everything, Betty says in a hissed whisper.

Betty- Miss High and Mighty. Miss Harvard Everything.

-you gotta tell your doctor about this.

All you've done since you got here is get fat! You're disgusting. And your son is fat! He's fat because you're mean to him. You're crazy! Your husband should take him to protect him from you. I'm gonna testify for him too if you mess with me. Get out of here. Get out of my room. You came in here to make a pa.s.s at me. You're sick! You're a fat, sick perverted lesbian!

She runs back into the bathroom and slams the door.

What's going on in here? says a nurse, sticking her head in.

Nothing, I say. Betty's worried about her complexion, I think.

In the dayroom the next day, Tina's sketching a design for her wreath as I whisper what I've found out.

She shrugs. You've gotta stay out of that.

Some of those sores look infected, I say.

She tilts her head to the door, and I follow her toward the phone booth. She sits on the wooden stool under the pay phone while I stand in the hall. She glances past me to be sure the coast is clear, then pulls up her ankle-length nightgown. On the very top of her thigh are a series of red slash marks, inflicted with surgical proficiency at varying depths.

How'd you do that? I say.