Promises
Myra Sherman
 I promised my mother when I was in ICU, broken in body and spirit, resistance gone. I was Vicodin dazed and guilt-ridden. There was a funny smell in the room, like acid pineapple, a weird aftereffect of my head injury.
“You have to get treatment,” my mother said. In her best schoolteacher voice, wearing a navy pantsuit and low heels, cocoa blushed skin, coral lipstick, relaxed hair twisted back, pearl studs.
My body was swathed in mummy bandages. A trapeze hung over my bed. I felt more dead than alive, but not dead enough.
I didn’t remember going to Oakland on Labor Day, just standing on the platform of the 12th St. Station with the train coming. I didn’t remember jumping, or anything else. My psychiatrist said the mind protects itself, that I was better off. It wasn’t his Swiss cheese brain.
“You have to promise.”
“Yes Mama.” Whatever you say, whatever you want, whatever.
“If you’re in my house you get therapy,” my mother said. “Your father will take you on his lunch hour.” She was on her way to work, good leather bag over her shoulder, carrying a bouquet of pink and yellow spring tulips for her classroom.
I was two weeks from the hospital, baldheaded and scarred, walking with a cane. I looked horrible and felt worse. The thought of starting treatment, showing myself to strangers, having to talk and interact, made me nauseous.
At noon I went to the front yard to wait for my father. I was camouflaged in baggy sweats and dark glasses but still felt ridiculous and exposed, especially after the old guy next door lifted his blinds. There was pity and disgust on his face, just like the people at church. My first Sunday service in ten years, trying to please my mother, having everyone judge me, feeling humiliated. I didn’t want to, but still cared what people thought.
When I saw my father’s car careening down the street I knew he was angry. My stomach twisted. My throat burned with bile. We weren’t close, never had been. He liked Halle Berry women, pretty women who liked men. He never understood me, never tried. I embarrassed him.
He stopped short, tires screeching as he swung into the drive, honked like I wasn’t there. “Don’t have much time,” he complained in a wheezing, gravelly voice.
“I don’t have to go,” I said.
“Don’t mess with me,” he said.
His company car smelled like cigarettes and new carpet samples. This was his third job in two years. My mother was the successful educated one. She never let him forget it. Never let me forget it.
He sped down Sonoma Blvd, hitting 70 between lights, Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” turned up full blast. My father, the aging player, caught in a marriage he was afraid to leave. Chauffeuring a daughter he wouldn’t look at.
I stared at the dashboard clock, watching the minutes. Twenty, fifteen, ten minutes to change my mind and get out of the car, five minutes, none.
“This is it. You need help?” He’d pulled into a handicapped space, but left the ignition on.
“No.” Not from you, never from you.
The building was nondescript and could’ve been anything—a law office, travel agency, accounting firm, a psychiatry clinic. There was a Safeway supermarket at the far end of the lot. A Round Table Pizza to the right. Gripping the cane in my right hand, I shuffled slowly to the entrance.
Carquinez Mental Health had a discreet brass-plated sign, overflowing stainless steel cigarette receptacle, a domed trash can with an open container of half-eaten fried rice teetering on top. I stared at the rice waiting for it to fall. Pictured yellow egg, pink pork and brown rice, scattering like bits of mangled flesh.
“Are you okay?” A tall groomed man, carrying a computer bag, “Let me,” he said, holding the door open. He followed me inside then went to a door marked Medical Staff Office. I followed red arrows to Patient Registration and took my place in line.
One at a time, next please, hurry up and wait. The woman before me was talking on her cell, laughing, like registering as a psychiatric patient was nothing special. When I got to the window a young brother with a phone earpiece smiled knowingly. “You’re in AOP. They’ll come for you.”
I opened my mouth to ask what he meant but he was already looking around me, signaling the next person. What she doing, all agape, like a monkey ape...
No way to ask questions, no way to escape. I sat in a hard upholstered chair under harsh fluorescent light. The air was stuffy and warm, lemon disinfectant, vanilla perfume, popcorn, chocolate, a movie theatre without the show.
The waiting room filled with women and a few men. There were always more women. When I worked at Haight Hospital in San Francisco my clients were depressed substance-abusing ladies, bottomed out and ready for change. They loved going to treatment, thought it was the best thing ever. Thought I was the best thing ever. Lisha, what happened, you said never give up hope, you said life is precious, you said...
When a white guy with staff ID positioned himself in front of the room, I was ready to bolt. He seemed so burnt-out, sad and tired, but maybe I was projecting. “Acute Outpatient Program, AOP,” he announced.
“You’re Dr. Peters?” someone asked.
I didn’t know him, just the type. Heading to middle age, HMO job, private practice on the side, not enough money for his years of education... “AOP,” he said again.
Most of the room stood up. I waited to be last. Two women in skirts and heels, just coming in, looked sidewise. See the freak show, all the freaks, especially that black bitch at the end.
We followed Dr. Peters like the Pied Piper, across the lobby, down a long hallway; a tiny cloud-haired senior, a Filipina with buzzed hair and overdone makeup, young wigged sister dressed for church, big red-faced blonde guy looking paranoid, Mariah Carey look-a-like...
He waited outside a closed door then herded us into a windowless room with amateur artwork on the walls. Fourteen patients and five staff, chairs in a circle. I was heading for a panic attack. Rancid sweat seeped through my clothes.
“Welcome everyone. I’m Dr. Peters and this is AOP. This is our check-in group. We’re going around the room. Your name, how you’ve been since last time, or if anyone’s new, what brings you here. Okay then. Betty, let’s start with you.”
“I don’t know where to start, if I just had some hope,” the older lady moaned.
“You’re getting out, new activities?”
“I keep trying. But it’s...
“Dr. Peters, you forgot staff introductions.” Mariah Carey’s double tossed her hair and smiled. She had very white teeth and deep dimples.
“Right, Perla.”
I listened as they introduced themselves, a male nurse and three female social workers—Ralph, Joyce, Thelma, Marsha. “And I’m Dr. Peters, the psychologist and AOP Director.”
I didn’t care who they were, or what they did. I slid in my chair, adjusted my hat and closed my eyes. I was back at work, where I did the talking. “I’m Lisha, one of the counselors and this is our newcomers’ group. If you’re ready to turn your life around we’re here to help you.”
“Lisha, you with us?”
I licked my lips and swallowed air.
“Just a few words, whatever you’re comfortable with.”
I sat up and tried to breathe. Couldn’t they see I was choking?
“It’s okay. We’re here to support you.”
“First time’s hardest.”
“It helped so much when I talked.”
I was hyperventilating, desperate, suffocating.
“It’s okay,” Dr. Peters said.
“No,” I gasped. “I tried to kill myself. I should be dead.”
“Girl, you are in the right place,” Mariah/Perla sighed.
“I jumped in front of a BART train.”
Shocked silence, a few coughs, a nervous laugh. There was the right kind of suicide attempt, like overdosing or cutting your wrists, then the not so right, like hanging or shooting yourself and finally the not at all right, like jumping in front of BART.
I felt them staring as I staggered away but no one stopped me. Not even when I went back for my cane. They didn’t want me. I didn’t want them. It was perfect.
“You promised,” my mother kept saying, wiping her eyes with a lace-trimmed hanky. “If not for yourself do it for me.”
I couldn’t take the guilt. After five days I went back to the program.
“We’re so glad you’re trying again,” Marsha said.
Her office was small and cluttered. She took off her glasses and cleaned them with a tissue. Started to touch the sty on her lower left eyelid but stopped herself.
“I don’t need a case manager,” I told her.
“Everyone has one.” She blinked and put her glasses back. “The way you left, I’m sorry...”
“I should be dead.” After my head injury I was short on inhibitory ability. Not always but too much of the time. “I didn’t mean that,” I said.
Marsha’s face flushed, her nose pinched, she nodded slightly. “Lisha, are you having thoughts of hurting yourself?” Her voice was tinny and tense.
I understood her concern. My client Earlene said she wouldn’t kill herself. I made the mistake of believing her. “I trust you,” I said. “I’ll help you,” I said.
“I’m not suicidal,” I told Marsha. No lying involved. I wanted to die, but had no immediate plans. “I promise not to do anything.”
My mother picked me up three hours later. My father brought me to the program, she brought me back. I wasn’t allowed to drive.
“Say something,” my mother snapped. We were halfway home. Her back seat was filled with school stuff—books, papers to grade, lesson plans.
“It was okay. Met with my case manager, went to group.” I stared out the passenger window. Three middle school girls, like my mother taught were in front of the Dollar Store, giggling, wearing matching pink puff jackets and sequined backpacks. The future... “There was this elderly lady, been depressed her whole life. She cried most of the meeting, talking about her mother’s suicide. Sixty years and she’s not over it.”
“It’s the ones left behind...”
“You think I don’t know?”
Despite how it sounded, we weren’t agreeing. It was a suffering contest, with no way to win.
When I got home I went straight to my bedroom, still decorated with posters of Queen Latifah and MC Lyte, filled with unhappy childhood memories.
I was twelve the first time I saw a therapist. It was 1990, after Sonny’s accident. My brother was taking me shopping at Hilltop Mall. We were on Hwy 80, right before Richmond, Eric B. & Rakim playing, “In the arsenal I got artillery lyrics of ammo, Rounds of rhythm.”
“You got a fella?” Sonny was teasing. He was second year at UCLA, home for Christmas.
“Ain’t got time for no stupid boys,” I giggled.
It was so quick, like a video on fast play. The police told my parents it was a six car pile-up, Sonny with no seatbelt... I came to, saw his head all smashed and bleeding, glass like peppermint candy, the clear hard kind, stuck to his hair. “Now throw you hands in the air and yo, go. Rakim will do the rest of this slow.”
“She’s lucky, just a concussion,” they said at the hospital. “Your daughter will be fine.”
Sonny’s funeral was the day after Christmas. I’d never seen anyone buried before. I felt everybody was staring at me, thinking the wrong one died. How could she be alive and Sonny dead, the only son, track scholarship, smart, his father’s pride, his mother’s joy. She’ll never measure up, be good enough, make up for what happened.
Dr. Hawkins was pink and fat and bald with disgusting nose hairs. “Your brother’s death wasn’t your fault,” he told me. “She didn’t want to kill herself. A cry for help,” he told my parents, “a cry for help.”
He didn’t know shit. I wanted to die. I still have the bracelet scar on my wrist, a reminder of Sonny, just like old school songs and videos.
All those years, in and out of treatment, drunk and sober, dirty and clean, doing my Steps or doing myself in. I thought I’d never got better.
“No. I don’t want dinner,” I told my mother through the closed door. I’d been in treatment two weeks. I was too lethargic to move. My head felt like lead. The last thing I heard before falling asleep was my mother’s cuckoo clock, six cuckoos, six o’clock. I woke the next morning with a spiking headache.
That was the day I saw the AOP psychiatrist. He had almost no chin, like Andy Gump, and looked like a weasel. He had a family portrait on his desk. One blond wife, two sons, one daughter.
“I just do medication. Anything else, talk to your case manager,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
“Meds working okay?”
“I feel drugged. Slept eighteen hours yesterday.”
“You’re a counselor?”
“I was.”
“No psychotic symptoms, mania?”
He took me off the Depakote and Zyprexa, left the Geodon and Ativan, added Cymbalta. He treated me like a professional and considered my opinion. I felt validated, almost like the person I used to be.
I was called to Human Resources on August 11th, a week after Earlene died. “Not about the suicide,” the personnel analyst said. “But we did check your file.”
I was just ten units short. I was going to finish and get my credential. Six years clean and sober, the Twelfth Step...
“Lying on your application is cause for instant dismissal. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not the end of the world,” my girlfriend Shelly kept saying.
“It’s my punishment for Earlene. If I knew what I was doing, she’d be alive.”
I’d been crying for hours, my head hurt, I had chest pains. “I lied, Earlene died, my fault, everything’s my fault. I wish I was dead,” I screamed.
Shelly never said where she went that night. She came back in the morning and tried to console me. “Baby, I’m so sorry,” she whispered, rubbing my back.
“Making you go through this,” I groaned, turning to face her. My pretty girlfriend, with her freckled skin and blue eyes, her soft body.
Shelly was my first clean and sober relationship. We were serious, together three years, saving for a house, thinking about kids.
Two weeks later she told me she was leaving. We were at our favorite Japanese restaurant, sharing a sushi boat. “I can’t stand being with you,” she said. “Your moods, crying, the way you distort everything. Baby, you’re scaring me. You need to get yourself straight, get in treatment.”
I looked at the sushi and felt like puking. All I could think of was dead fish, dead everything.
I was already relapsed, drinking and smoking weed, but with her gone there was no stopping me.
Shelly called when I was in ICU and couldn’t have visitors. Then she disappeared.
After four weeks I knew everyone. I was an AOP success story. The staff raved about my progress. I covered my head with a scarf from Kenya, how flattering, how ethnic. Wore red lipstick, large hoop earrings—she’s better, cares about her appearance, isn’t hiding.
Of course they were wrong, I was hiding everything. If the staff knew I’d stopped my medications no one said a word. I was decompensating but didn’t know it.
I didn’t mean to bring up Shelly. It was my damn inhibitory problem. I remember Betty was crying about her fiancée who died in World War II. She told the same story at least once a week.
“I never married,” Betty said. “I didn’t want to.”
“You just keep thinking positive.”
“It’s never too late.”
Dr. Peters stifled a yawn. “Okay, who’s next?”
I raised my hand. “My girlfriend, Shelly...”
“How nice for you, having a girlfriend,” Betty said.
“She left me.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Perla said. “After...”
“Right before.”
If anyone was concerned I was queer, they didn’t show it. Not like my mother, whose disapproval was blatant and irrational. “I don’t care about other people, but not my daughter.”
I was sixteen when I came out to my parents, but my mother kept hoping. Just last July, she invited this widower for dinner and put me next to him. Even if I was into guys, a forty-five year old accountant with two sons, a good church-going man? I’d die first.
“Lisha, we missed you,” Dr. Peters said.
“I had appointments,” I said, enunciating clearly. Three weeks without meds, I knew to be careful.
“How are you?”
“I am totally fine.”
“You’re sure?”
“You can move on,” I told him.
“He’s trying to be tactful,” Perla told me. “You are so far from fine. Girl, that wig, and your lipstick looks like you did it on a rollercoaster, plus....”
“Perla, that’s enough,” Dr. Peters said. “Marsha, can you take Lisha to your office.”
I was ten years old, going to the vice-principal. You’ve been a bad, bad girl. “No, I won’t resume medication,” I told Marsha. Through the closed office door I heard people walking down the hall, taking a break between check-in and small group. “I don’t like feeling drugged and stupid. I need to lose weight.”
“You’re not thinking clearly, I’m afraid for your safety, your ability to take care of yourself.”
“I don’t need this.”
“Lisha, I want to help you.”
She can’t know. Don’t tell her, she’ll never understand. Don’t...
“It’s bad. I never heard voices before. I had problems. But more depression, drinking, drugs. Nothing like what’s going on. Last night I really believed the TV was talking to me. How’s that for classic. And the voices, right out of the book, command hallucinations saying to kill myself. I’m afraid. It’s organic damage, right?’
“You can’t do this outpatient.”
“No 5150. No hold. Promise.”
“A voluntary hospitalization.”
Marsha had the security guard get me a coke while she called the hospital. She waited with me until the ambulance came.
“No, Lisha doesn’t need restraints,” she said.
The hospital was a few blocks from the clinic, on the corner of Broadway. By ambulance, a five minute ride. I was on the open unit. There were fifteen double rooms, with showers down the hall. Meals were in the dining room, next to the day area.
I knew right away I’d made a mistake. I was barely settled when a psychiatry resident walked in with four students. They gathered around my roommate’s bed, staring at her.
“Board and care operator says she was banging her head bloody. Heavily sedated now, regressed,” the resident said. He talked about her like she wasn’t there, or was deaf.
“Can she talk?” a student asked.
“Is she hebephrenic?”
“What’s that rash?”
She was chubby and young, with greasy blond hair. The resident touched her neck with gloved fingers. When he pulled up her sweatshirt to look at her stomach, she opened her eyes and smiled. “Eczema,” he said.
When they turned toward me, I shook my head. “No students,” I insisted.
“No problem. Your doc’s in tomorrow,” the resident said. “Never know what’ll set ‘em off,” he explained as they left.
I hated being in the hospital. I was on a medication holiday, waiting for a neurology consult. Even then, I knew... If I wasn’t so desperate and paranoid, afraid of electric shock therapy, long involuntary hospital stays or worse, I would’ve told the doctors. Instead I let the days go by, sinking into a morass of delusion and despair.
At first I knew they weren’t real. I don’t know when I slipped over the edge. I heard familiar voices...I can’t stand being with you, no one could, no one ever will. Being dead ain’t half-bad, join me little sis. I don’t want you for a daughter, never did, your mother neither. I can’t have a drunkard lesbian failure for a daughter, what would my students think?
I heard unfamiliar voices saying dangerous things...You’d be better off dead. Monstrous brain-damaged freak, you’ll never be normal. End it now, end your lie and die. Do it now and do it right. There’s no hope.
I lost track of time. I kept my secrets. The nights were the worst. When it happened I could’ve been in the hospital three days or thirty. I didn’t know and couldn’t care.
What do I remember now? Not as much as I should. The room was dark. My roommate was moaning in her sleep. I heard loud footsteps, like a large man in combat boots. A shadowy, hulking male figure carrying a saber silhouetted in the open door, coming toward me, no, toward my roommate.
He bends over her, removes her covers, smacks his lips then coughs. He lifts up her nightshirt. Her body is round and white. He crouches over her, unzips his pants, takes out his penis, he’s too big, he’ll break her in two, I have to help. I’m shaking, breathing hard, sweating, afraid...
When I get to her bed she screams, “Help. Help. Help me.” It’s the first words she’s spoken. The nurses come running.
“She touched me,” my roommate cries, pointing at me. She’s half-naked, shivering. The man is gone.
“We’ll deal with you in the morning,” the head nurse told me.
My roommate was escorted away. “You’re going to be fine, dear...”
Accused, accused, molesting, abusing, innocent girl, so psychotic, where was the man, who was the man, they’ll never believe you, they’ll kill you for this, or at least torture you.
I hid under the covers. I wanted to disappear, go back in time, confess my sins. I curled into a fetal position, waiting. I wanted my mother, I wanted Shelly. I’m so sorry, so sorry, so very sorry.
A dead smell, salty, sour, decaying, rotten. A dark shadow, looming over the bed, visible through the blanket, coming closer, a heavy hand, cold metal...
“No, no, no,” I scream. Time stops, the world fades.
Footsteps going, footsteps coming, musk perfume...
“What’s going on?” the nurse asked. Her teddy bear scrubs had a brown stain in front. She looked me up and down then cracked her gum.
“He was here,” I said, sitting up in bed.
“Sure he was.”
In the morning a woman in a brown pantsuit came to see me. She was holding a paper coffee cup rimmed with pink lipstick and looked tired. “I’m the nurse manager,” she told me. “About last night...”
“He seemed so real.”
“Some of the staff thinks you...”
“I was trying to help.”
“There’s no record of your seeing things, hallucinating.”
“I heard things but was afraid to say.”
No one will ever believe, they know who you are, what you’re capable of, what you can’t do, what you can. Hopeless, desperate, worthless, lesbian liar, liar, killer, killer...
I might have known the voices weren’t real, but it didn’t matter. I believed every word. The disposable razor was pink. The extracted blade was sharp. My blood was red. I was lucky not to die.
The emergency room smelled like a butcher shop. The doctor had bloodshot eyes and squeezed lips. He stared at his computer screen. “You made another attempt last Labor Day. BART train,” he said. “Where did you get the razor?”
“Someone left it in the shower.”
“Not good.” He twisted his mouth and scratched his nose, then walked away. I overheard him talking to someone in the hall. “Chronically suicidal,” he said.
The involuntary unit had single rooms. Mine was small, shaped like a wedge of pie. The bed had rails and faced the window. There was no television, no radio. I was alone with my voices, my despair and my death wish.
I had a new psychiatrist, Dr. Stevens. He had a big head with a fringe of reddish hair. His nails were bitten to the quick, like mine. He put me on mood stabilizers. “Lamictal and Neurontin,” he said, nodding.
I was on a fourteen day hold. Not wanting to be restrained and forced, I grudgingly complied.
After a week the voices stopped, but I still felt guilty—for Earlene’s death, pushing Shelly away, making myself sick.
I spent a lot of time staring out the window. There was a Japanese restaurant, Murasaki, across the street. I watched people come and go, having lunch and dinner. They looked sated and content. On nice days, the waiters put out sidewalk tables.
I was on my second hold when I saw the elderly woman eating Sake sashimi. I watched her lift the raw salmon to her mouth, glistening pink-orange. She smiled and smacked her lips after every bite. Her green cotton dress looked cool and comfortable. Her straw hat gave her a rakish air. She looked healthy and happy, like I wanted to be.
Things turned around after that. I was tired of my illness and symptoms, of wanting to die. I remembered the patients I’d helped, tried to follow my own advice.
Never give up. Remember life is precious.
I promised myself.
I had lunch at Murasaki a month later. It was right after my discharge. I went alone. I sat where I could see the hospital. I tried to figure out which room I was in, but couldn’t. It didn’t matter. I ordered too much sushi and ate it all.
Where there’s life there’s hope.
I promised myself.
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