LOCKED WARD
“Dear Ella,
“I’ve had your letter on my mind for many days now, and though I’ve meant to write you back, I haven’t been able to get past the first few lines. This week has been so eventful, however, I now have something to write about besides my usual melancholy complaints.
“Last Monday afternoon I drove to Berkeley to pay my friend Linda a surprise visit, only to wind up on the receiving end of a surprise myself. Anne, Linda’s roommate, told me that Linda had been missing since midnight the night before, and she’d just gotten a call from someone who’d seen her at the Unitarian seminary near campus and said she’d been behaving irrationally.
“I drove up to Seminary Hill to look for her, retrieved her purse—somebody had found it on a sidewalk—and tried to talk a policeman out of towing her VW bug, which she’d left parked in the middle of an intersection. ‘Couldn’t we just push it to the curb?’ I wheedled. I also talked to various people she’d crossed paths with that day. She didn’t seem to know where she lived, they said. When asked where her home was, she said she didn’t have a home, and she was so suspicious she wouldn’t part with her car keys long enough for anyone to repark her car.
“I walked and drove around the neighborhood until dark but couldn’t find her anywhere. Anne had promised to keep me posted and called me the next evening to say that Linda was at Highland Hospital—in the psychiatric ward—because she’d set off a fire alarm in an apartment building and been picked up by the police.
“At the hospital the next morning, I rapped on the door of the locked ward, but no one came to let me in. Through a small window in the door, I could see people milling around, but they’d just stare at me vacantly, then wander off. I wouldn’t have figured out the protocol at all if another visitor hadn’t arrived just then and pressed a button over a grill—a buzzer over an intercom, of course.
“When I was admitted, I saw Linda shuffling into the TV room, eating ice cream. She gave me a hug and convinced me that she was OK, explaining that she was on a three-day hold and expected to be released Friday; still, I couldn’t help noticing how badly her hands were shaking. That would have been that—I phoned her the next day and she seemed to be herself—but Friday, when I tried to reach her at home, I got Anne again. Though Linda seemed fine during the day, she told me, she got wild at night, shrieking, shoving furniture around, and tearing off her clothes. One night they’d even had to put her in restraints. Her psychiatrist’s diagnosis (and my mother’s): manic-depressive illness.
“Then yesterday, when I went for a second visit, she was so drugged, her arms stuck stiffly out from her body and she mumbled mostly incoherent things about her therapist coming on to her and the CIA being out to get her. At one point she actually dragged me into her room, then shut the door, which couldn’t be opened from the inside, so we were trapped together. Again I found myself rapping on a door to no avail…and I have to say, it felt like a long time before someone finally heard and let us out. Later it occurred to me that maybe Linda had wanted me to understand what it was like to be locked up that way.”
…
When Earl and I were at Black Hawk recently, and I was stretched out under a tree to ease my back pain, he told me that sometimes Linda used to stay at his place during her psychotic episodes, and that he would hold her while she screamed.