Someone—possibly Tanya, who had been Torri’s roommate before she got her own room—had scrawled Fuk Art! over the yellow smiley. One of the staff would see it eventually and print out a new sign, Torri thought. The psychiatrists here wanted everyone and everything to look positive, so the vandalized sign wouldn’t last for long.
At last they reached the cafeteria and she got in line with the other patients, all wearing the same boring beige scrubs that she was. The cafeteria food was bland and industrial, like everything else in the psych ward. The pancakes were half flabby, half stale—clearly they had come in frozen and been carelessly reheated in one of the big ovens. The bacon was limp and greasy, and the orange juice tasted dusty—as though it had been squeezed from oranges that were a thousand years old. The coffee was halfway decent, but it was almost always decaf. Too much caffeine wasn’t a good mix with some of the patients’ medications.
Torri took her tray and went to sit at a table with Gloria and Emile. There were no last names here among the patients. The orderlies might call her “Ms. Morrison” but in Group Therapy with everyone else she was just “Torri.”
As she put down her tray on the round, sticky table, Emile rose and offered her his hand. He was a thin little man with extremely hairy arms. Tufts of wiry brownish-gray hair stuck out of the V-neck top of his scrubs as well. Torri had heard some of the staff say he was once quite high up in the Department of the Treasury, here in DC, but he had snapped under the pressure. She didn’t know if it was true or not, but it was clear there was definitely something not right about the little man.
“Hi, I’m Emile.” He smiled vacantly at her. Torri knew from experience he would continue to stand there smiling with his hand out unless she took it.
Sighing, she shook the offered hand briefly.
“Hi Emile, I’m Torri,” she said, for what felt like the hundredth time.
Emile’s long, homely face brightened at once as though he was meeting her for the very first time.
“Torri! Nice to meet you!” he exclaimed and then sat back down and began to eat his reheated pancakes and greasy bacon eagerly.
“Nice to meet you, too,” Torri mumbled. She reached for the syrup container in the middle of the table, only to have Gloria snatch it out of her hand.
Gloria was a woman who might be anywhere between forty-five and sixty—it was impossible to say for sure. She had once had bleached blonde, permed hair but she’d been in St. Elizabeth’s so long, the grayish-black roots had grown out down past her ears. The grown-out part was straight and the bleached blonde bottom was still curly, giving her a bedraggled look as though she’d been caught out in the rain.
“What are you doing?” Gloria gave Torri a narrow-eyed, suspicious look. “What are you doing to my syrup? It’s mine you know and you can’t have any.”
Torri sighed inwardly for a second time. Usually Gloria and Emile weren’t bad tablemates. Emile insisted on shaking hands, but after that he would ignore you in favor of his food. Gloria was generally borderline catatonic. She would stare at her plate without saying a word until one of the orderlies came and cut up her food and encouraged her to eat it.
But sometimes—about every third or fourth day—Gloria came to life. On her “bright days” as the orderlies called them, she regarded everyone and everything with a kind of savage suspicion. Basically, she believed that she owned everything and everyone was trying to rob her of her possessions.
It was this quality that had gotten her admitted in the first place, according to hospital gossip. Her son—one of the higher ups in the State Department—had paid a lot of money for a bevy of nurses to watch his mother day and night. But when she started accusing them of stealing her purse, her jewelry—and even her dentures—he had admitted defeat and had her placed in St. Elizabeth’s.
Torri debated fighting about the syrup and decided not to. There was no point in quarreling with Gloria when she was in a mood. She could ask to borrow the syrup from another table, she supposed, but there was a reason she usually sat with Gloria and Emile.
Tanya, her old roommate, was in the next table over. She saw Torri look at her and shot her the middle finger and an evil glare at the same time. Tanya had come from a lovely upper-middle class home where she claimed her parents had held Satanic rituals every night. They wore black robes and tied her to an altar and wrote on her naked body in fresh blood and invited demons to live inside her—at least to hear Tanya tell it. To hear the doctors tell it, she had paranoid-schizophrenic delusions.
Torri didn’t know which she believed, but her old roommate certainly was evil-tempered, whether she had demons inside to blame for it or not. The only good thing about her night terrors, as far as she was concerned, was that they had gotten her out of rooming with Tanya.
Beside Tanya was Rachel—a college-aged girl who had tried to commit suicide because “the voices” told her to do it. She was rocking and mumbling to herself, “No, no—I don’t want to. No, you can’t make me! No, no, no…”
Poor thing, Torri thought. Rachel obviously had demons of her own.
At another table was Rob, a lean young man in his twenties with “wandering hands.” Torri had only tried to sit by him once before realizing her mistake. His other table mates were sitting well out of his reach. But if Rob couldn’t touch other people, he would touch himself. Even now he was eating pancakes with one hand while he had the other hand shoved down the front of his scrubs. From the restless, jerky motions he was making, Torri was fairly certain he was getting off. Stains on the front of his scrub trousers indicated it wasn’t the first time that morning.
Repulsed, she looked away. Could she borrow syrup from anywhere else? Darleen and Jemma were sitting together at the far end of the dining area. Jemma looked quiet this morning, but Darleen had her shirt up and was “breast feeding” the baby doll she brought with her everywhere. Torri winced—she really didn’t need an up-close and personal view of that today.
Shaking her head, she stabbed her plastic spork into the stale and by-now cold pancakes on her plastic plate. Two of the short tines broke off and were left sticking in the skin of the pancake like two little white teeth.
“Forget it,” Torri muttered to herself, putting down the spork. “I’m fat enough as it is.”
She wished she could get something else—something fresh—even a banana or an apple would be nice. But while St. Elizabeth’s was an expensive facility, they clearly didn’t spend the money they charged for care on the food they fed their patients.
Instead of eating, Torri concentrated on the lukewarm cup of coffee she’d picked up along with her morning meal. There was too much cream and sugar in it, but she drank it anyway, wincing at the over-sweetness and wishing it had caffeine.
“Hey!” Gloria glared at her from across the table. “What are you doing with my coffee? Huh? That’s mine you know—you stole it from me!” She pointed at Torri’s coffee cup.
Torri ignored her, wishing for the thousandth time, that she could just sit by herself. There was an empty table across the dining area—she stared at it longingly. But alas, the powers-that-be at St. Elizabeth’s deplored solitude. You weren’t allowed to sit at a table unless there was at least one other patient there to sit with.