Excerpt



I've heard voices, well that's okay,

But the tapping on my shoulder

Is the boulder

That weighs heavier than

A thousand cloudy days.



"Ma, it's me, Ted. It's the end of the month. I just gave notice. I can't take it anymore. I've been living in this place over a year. I don't belong here. There's nothing the matter with me. Can I come home until I find a place for me?"

Oh, hell, she thinks. Here we go again.

"Ma, do you hear me?"

She was about to cover her typewriter and pick up a sandwich and container of coffee at the cafeteria to eat at her desk. She had hoped to get caught up on her work over her lunch hour and, for a change, go home at a decent hour. She glances at the stack of paperwork held down by an apple and her heart sinks.

Now this.

She imagines Ted standing at the pay phone on the corner near his board and care home. Thirty years old and most of his possessions fit in a paper bag. Anything of value he has ever owned was long ago stolen, left on a bus, given to startled strangers. She pictures his dirty bare feet. Is he even wearing his shoes?

"Isn't the doctor coming there tomorrow?" she asks, awkwardly folding letters that have to get into the noon pickup. A phone rings in the next office, but she won't be able to answer it. She hopes whoever is calling doesn't later tell the whole world that no one was around at quarter to twelve to answer a telephone that rang at least eight times. She's supposed to be covering the floor for the other secretaries who went out together to celebrate a birthday. Too bad about the phone. She's got to keep talking until she finds out what new plan Ted has cooked up.

"Come on, Ma. I've been seeing shrinks for more than ten years. You know that. They don't know what they're doing. They make everybody worse." A pause. "You know something, Ma? I think most of them become psychiatrists so they can figure out what's wrong with themselves. They're not like real doctors with stethoscopes and bottles of vaccines. They ask a lot of questions that don't make sense."

"Ted, please. I'm at work. I can't talk right now."

He goes right on talking, or more like whispering. "Besides, this new guy's a creep. He's got these landscape pictures hanging in his office with faces of dead people staring at you from the branches of the trees. They follow you with their eyes. Nobody who's sitting around his waiting room even looks at his walls because of the spell cast on you by those eyes. The patients pretend to be reading the magazines."

He pauses to take a pull on one of the forty or so cigarettes he smokes in a day. Any brand will do, plus any he can borrow or fish out of an ash tray or one of those sand-filled drums outside a building, plus loose tobacco rolled in newspaper. The mentally ill are the tobacco industry's best customers. They have neither the will power to quit nor the will to live. Hadn't she read somewhere that there could be something in the nicotine that alters the chemistry of their brains or of the medication they take?

She often imagines his lungs as long, black sacs, thin as silk stockings, stuck together with accumulated sticky tar, trying feebly to inflate in only a few remaining functioning passages. She's sure he'll end up needing one of those aerosol puffs or oxygen tubes up his nostrils. She sighs and glances out the window for the mail truck. At the moment, cigarettes seem the least of the problems.

"Oh, Ma. Let me come home," he begs. "I want to find an apartment. I know I can handle it. I'll wait in the train station until you're off work. I don't care how long it takes. It's only waiting. Please?"

Ted and I go through life extemporaneously, she thinks, both at the whim of his ghastly disorder.

She gives the thumbs-up sign and a too-bright smile to her boss who has just appeared in her doorway with a tuna sandwich and bag of tortilla chips he plans to eat while getting caught up on dictation. The size of the folder under his arm makes her heart turn over. I'm so far behind, she thinks, I don't want them to have to hire a temporary girl. Sometimes they slow things down worse because you have to take the time to explain simple things to them. They don't know how the different machines work, where the ladies room is, or anybody's name.

On the other hand, sometimes they're so sharp they're offered a full time job at the end of the day.

They're not paying me to worry about personal problems, she tells herself. You're supposed to leave them at home. Every time she catches a glimpse of herself in a mirror she sees a face pinched with worry. Smile, she reminds herself. The song says you're supposed to start off each day with one. Take a deep breath, drop your shoulders, and smile. In today's business climate you could easily be replaced by one of those terrific-looking young things you've noticed filling out employment applications in the Personnel Department. They jog, work out in gyms, go to tanning parlors, have their teeth whitened, their curly hair straightened and streaked blond.

She lowers her voice. "All right, Ted. I can't talk now. We'll talk about it when I pick you up at the train station," then adds, "don't forget your medication."

There's a pause. Oh, damn.

"Come on, Ma! I've taken pills for all these years and I'm in a board and care home.