I ventured out of my room only when I heard the door between the master bedroom and bathroom open as Ma went to bed and I could smell the soap from her bath in the hall.

Night was when I felt most comfortable. The house looked different then, the stark furnishings and Tudor arches friendlier in chiaroscuro. I wandered down to the kitchen and found food laid out on the counter: Chinese plum candies in blue and red wax papers, sesame crackers shaped like chickens, swollen-bellied pears in browns, greens, and yellows, tucked into the Rembrandt shadows of an earthenware bowl. Ma's own still life, to tempt me. The refrigerator was stocked with cottage cheese and plain yogurt, things that my mother herself never ate, but she must have remembered my vegetarian phase in boarding school. I sat down at the kitchen table and like an animal devoured what I had picked out, not knowing or remembering what I was cramming into my mouth, staring out at the black beyond the tiny window over the sink. Sometimes I'd take the food into the living room and consume it sitting on the floor with the TV on, sound off, even though I had no idea what was going on, watching simply in order to concentrate on something besides the static in my own head.

When even silent TV became unbearable, I went down into the basement and sat there in a dream until the sun came up.

My one-month visit had spilled into two. Ma made me an appointment with her doctor, who ordered a bunch of tests. The tests turned up nothing. I was underweight, but not seriously so. The doctor suggested that I see a psychotherapist.

My mother thought this was nonsense. "All you need is career. That takes your mind off personal problems. You seen my sewing scissors?"

"No," I said.

One afternoon Ma came to my room and announced that she had invited Lally Escobar to tea. "She especially wants to see you."

"I don't want to see her." I was lying in bed as usual, still in my pajamas.

"But she knows you're home. What am I suppose to say when she ask for you?"

"Tell her I'm asleep."

My mother said firmly, "You come down," and shut the door.

The only place I could think of to hide was the basement. I made it down to the first floor without Ma hearing. The teakettle began to whistle at the exact moment I opened the basement door and shut it behind me in a single motion. At the bottom of the stairs I held my breath. The kitchen floorboards creaked as my mother moved about above me. Then I heard the chimes of the doorbell and short quick creaks as she went to answer it.

I didn't dare turn on the light. When my eyes got used to the dark I edged my way deeper in through the maze of boxes and old furniture, the oil furnace growling in the middle, and finally reached the corner where I'd made a kind of nest for myself out of an old stadium blanket on top of several rolled-up rugs. I drew my bare feet up and tucked the bottom of the blanket around them.

Lally and my mother were talking. There was a package of Pepperidge Farm lemon nut cookies on the table between them. Because they were having Western tea, Ma was using her tulip tea set that had cups with handles. There was a bizarre rasping noise that I recognized as Lally's laugh. I pictured her in her gardening outfita"a pink-and-green-striped turtleneck and overallsa"although she probably wouldn't be wearing that today.

I waited, growing colder. The dark pressed against my ears, so that I could hear my blood pounding. I covered the sides of my head and tried to slow down my breathing. The furnace rumbled. Lally wasn't laughing anymore. In fact, it was perfectly silent above. I imagined slowing down my breathing more, suppressing my heartbeat, like the yogis in India. Only I'd will it past suspended animation. I'd make myself die.

I reached down between the rolled-up rugs and felt for Ma's sewing shears. It wasn't the easiest thing to do in the dark, but I knew where there was virgin skin, up near the crook of my elbow. The feeling came, not as sharp as it would have been if it hadn't been so cold, and it didn't last nearly long enough.

There was one window high up in a corner that let in a bit of daylight, and I made myself concentrate on that. My cut began to throb. I pressed a corner of the blanket against it.

PIECE OF MEAT.

The window had gone completely dark by the time I finally decided it was safe. I unfolded myself from the rugs, stamped around a bit to get the circulation back in my legs, and then went up the basement stairs, slowly and deliberately this time. When I opened the door there was my mother sitting alone at the kitchen table, looking directly at me. The tea things had been cleared away, and the dishwasher was humming. I blinked hard, getting used to the light, and saw that my arm looked much worse than I'd imagined. I hadn't been so neat this time.

For a moment I thought she wasn't going to say anything at all. I turned to go on upstairs to my room.

"Lally gave me the name of someone. A woman doctor." I must have looked blank, for she added: "A doctor for your brain."

"A psychiatrist?"

"She has a medical degree from Yale. Good reputation."

So this was it. If my mother admitted it, I really was crazy.

I knew in my bones that no matter how brilliant this person was, she'd never be able to cure me.

3.

We each got assigned to a unit. Lillith and I stayed togethera"same unit, same treatment group. The alcoholic and the flight attendant went to Rehab in its own separate building behind the cafeteria, and the quiet guy who slashed his wrists ended up being transferred to State. Lillith told me about State, how the ratio of staff to patients was so bad they kept everyone drugged up to the eyeballs. According to her, Willowridge was a country club.

The point, it seemed, was to deinstitutionalize our surroundings so we could pretend we were normal citizens instead of prisoners. The dayroom in our unit resembled an upscale suburban living room, with its gold wall-to-wall carpeting, Ethan Allen furniture, and the baby grand Steinway donated by a former patient. Where the dining room in a regular house would have been was the glassed-in nurses' station, and across from it a kitchenette where people hung around and drank coffee. But unlike in a regular house there was an air of emergency, too many comings and goings, the phone in the nurses' station constantly ringing.

I was on Status One, house arrest. Along with me was a man who had to dress in pajamas because he was liable to run away. "Elope," they called it. We got our meals on trays and had single rooms on the first floor near the nurses' station, where the staff could keep an eye on us. Our day began at 6 A.M. when we were woken up and taken for showers. In my entire twenty-four hours, the shower door was the only one I could shut behind me. I turned the water on full force and made it as hot as I could stand and then hotter, so that it steamed up the glass, obliterating the silhouette of the MH leaning up against the sink. We got exactly seven minutes in therea"they actually set a kitchen timer. It was Lillith who explained to me the dangers of the bathroom. At State, she said, some guy had once managed to drown himself in the toilet.

In our first week at the unit, Lillith had advanced to Status Two and gotten her sharps back. She'd decided not to hold my unimpressive suicide attempt against me and became my buddy, bringing me honey packets from dinner, a necklace of tiny wooden spools she'd made in OT. It was Lillith I went to when I found I'd gotten my period. I'd lost track, I'd become so irregular, and during my shower I thought I had a stomachache and then looked down and saw it in the hollow of my thigh like a bloody oyster.

I found her in the dayroom and asked if she had a Tampax.

"Can't help you there," she said. "I had a hysterectomy." There was something about the way she said it that discouraged me from inquiring why.

I had to ask at the nurses' station. When I went back into the dayroom my treatment group was waiting there to go to breakfast. Lillith was reading a magazine. A couple of the younger guys, Douglas and Mel, were fooling around with a tennis ball, taking turns bouncing it off their heads.

When Douglas saw me he started chanting: "Wally Sang, Wally Sang, Wally Sang."

Douglas scared the shit out of me. Over six feet tall and built like a linebacker, he wore the same stained forest green polo shirt and crummy jeans day after day. He was in here because he had tried to murder his mother who was black and from Barbados. His father was white. Douglas would actually have been an attractive guy if it weren't for his personality. His thing was to hit on all the womena"MHs, nurses, patients, even poor Rachel, who walked around with a teddy bear clutched to her bosom.

Lillith looked up from her magazine and patted the sofa next to her. "C'mere," she said. "I'll do your hair."

No one had done my hair for me since Ma at the breakfast table before school. She'd make my two long plaits with paintbrush ends, and bows to match what I was wearing. "Beauty routine," Daddy would mutter. My sister's face framed by its Dutch-boy cut rose smug across the table.

Lillith's touch as she combed was a lot gentler than my mother's. It made me feel dreamy and in danger at the same time.

"I think braids," she said. "I'm good at braids."

"Okay."

"How many?"

"Just one."

"Oh," she sighed, "I'd kill to have hair like yours." Douglas passed into our line of vision, making a pig face, lips bloomed up touching the tip of his nose.

Lillith ignored him. She said to me: "You know, you should talk more in group."

"I can't."

"Oh, come on. You're so smart, you can think of something." She herself had related harrowing tales of growing up in a mansion in Guilford with her pervert uncle and his string of boyfriends. Her stories were full of rubber gloves, hoses, and toilets. "When I get out I'm going to the beach every single day. Lie around and drink pina coladas and get a tan."

"Me too," I said.

"Seriously, if you want to get out you should talk. Why do you give a shit about what these people think? You're never going to see any of them again."

"That's true."

"Plus, you think they haven't heard it all before?"

"I guess."

"Okay, you're done," she said, snapping the elastic. I could see my reflection in the glass wall of the nurses' station. She'd been so neat it looked like I had short hair.

"Thanks."

"Tell me your opinion of this." She opened her copy of Glamour to a photograph of a do-it-yourself crocheted string bikini.

"Wowza," said Mel, looking over her shoulder. I liked Mel. At nineteen, he was the youngest in our group, transferred from Adolescents because he'd kept on getting into fights there. He wore macho clothes-frayed flannel shirts, work boots, a gold stud in one eara"but underneath I could see that there was something delicate, almost dandyish, about him.

Lillith said: "I'm going to send away for some shocking pink yarn." I looked at the browned, busty, gleaming model, and then I looked at Lillith, all frail bones with a caved-in chest and skin the color of skim milk.

"That would look great on you."

"You think?" When she smiled her teeth were stumpy, grayish at the roots. "Oops, gotta go," she said. The MH had just come in. Breakfast had already arrived in plastic wrap for Pajama Man and me.

"Have fun," I said.

I didn't really mind being stuck in the house while everyone else was out at meals or therapies. Pajama Man and I mostly watched stupid TV, and when I got sick of that I'd go curl up in my favorite spot, the bay window seat, where I could sit for hours, doing nothing. Staff didn't like that, they'd come over and try to get me to tell them my feelings.

I ate my breakfast at the window. The view was the flagstone path that led up to the front door, where another group was trooping back from breakfast. About fifty yards beyond shimmered the cold gray plane of the lake. On the near side were a couple of wrought-iron benches, where occasionally I saw someone huddled up, tossing bread to the ducks. On the far side stretched a line of weeping willows beginning to bud white. At least Willowridge really had willows. I imagined that if I could still paint I'd use a Chinese brush and inka"the kind you mix up in a stonea"on the finest rice paper. Stark short strokes for the boughs, washed over with a broad sweep to indicate wind.

It was an audacious fantasy I was having, because I knew full well the absolute confidence it took to work in ink. You had to do it from your soul, and it had to be as natural as breathing.

Lillith's uncle sent her raspberry licorice strings. We all watched while she opened the package and made a disgusted sound. "He knows I hate this crap."

She put the tin on the sign-out desk in the foyer. After dinner Douglas took it into the dayroom and consumed every single piece while watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Then he went into the bathroom on the first floor and puked. Puking was a common occurrence at Willowridge. They'd note it down in the daybook: "Refused meds, reticent during group, vomiting 8 P.M."

On my way into the kitchen for a cup of tea I heard him retching and then the toilet flush.

The bathroom door opened and Douglas emerged, looking amazingly healthy.

"Hey, geisha girl," he said.

I pretended to be fascinated by a conversation in the nurses' station.

"You do have beautiful hair," he said. "Satin. Is it like that on the rest of you?" He came up slyly beside me and pressed his nose into the crown of my head. "Mmm. Smells good too."

"Get away from me."

"Don't be so skittish." He yanked at my braid and tears popped into my eyes. "Come on, I want to show you something." Still holding my hair, he dragged me along the hall a few feet into the recess where the phone was. We called it a booth, though it didn't have a door. He let go of my braid and turned me around so that I was facing him, and then he kissed me. I could feel the soft squishiness of his belly, surprisingly comforting, and also between his thighs where I was afraid to lean into. His lips were chapped. He twisted my head around to insert his tongue and despite his having been sick, his saliva was still as sweet as a child's from the candy, although I could taste the other too at the back of my throat.

He said into my ear: "I've always wondered about what they say about Oriental women. Is it true, Sally? Tell me, is it true? Are their cunts, you know, slanted?"

"Fuck you."

"Leave her alone."

It was Mel, coming down the back stairs.

"Ah, don't worry, she's not my type anyway. Too skinny." He released me.

Mel said: "Touch her again and I'll kill you."

"Christ, she let me do it."

I ducked into the bathroom without asking the MH on duty like I was supposed to. The faint stench of Douglas's half-digested dinner still clouded the air. I could report him, get him into a heap of trouble, but I knew I wasn't going to. I took a piece of toilet paper and scrubbed at the corners of my mouth, which were stained a carnival red from the licorice juice, like the little-girl lipsticks Aunty Mabel used to give Marty and me for Christmas.

In group Mel told us that when he was little his older cousins had locked him in the garage and pulled down his pants and tortured him by sticking pins into his buttocks. It was a kind of game, he said.

"How old were you?" the MH asked.

"I'd just learned to walk," Mel said tersely, not looking at anyone.

"Two?"

"Something like that."

"How often did this happen?"

"Every single Saturday."

"Did you tell your parents?"

What a stupid question, I thought.

"No," said Mel. "I couldn't talk very well."

"But they must have wondered about the scars."

Mel shook his head. "I don't remember."

"Hi, Ma. I got your messages."

"How are you? How is your health?"

"I'm okay. They're taking care of me."

"Enough to eat?"

"Yeah, there's plenty to eat. Ma, my group thinks it's better if you don't call me anymore."

"Ah? What's this? Who says this?"

"They think it's better if we have less contact."