Fifteen storms Inside, by Rebekah Phillips

I.

“Sunday drive,” Roselyn’s father says, smiling gently at her. Roselyn looks up from her desk, surprised. He has barely managed to look her in the eye after he discovered pages and pages of handwritten poems in the dramatic, lyrical style of Augusta Webster. Roselyn discovered Augusta Webster by accident, and since had been slowly adopting parts of Webster’s style to influence her own first-person poems.

Poems she had never meant for her father to see.

“Come along, darling,” her father says. “Put on your coat.”

 Roselyn obeys. This sudden kindness is unexpected, and puts her on edge, but she shakes this feeling away. Her father is her father.

They drive for hours, reminiscing, looking at the scenery. The length of the drive bothers Roselyn, who worries about the horses, but her father laughs at her fears.

 It is only when the great iron gate appears in the distance that Roselyn’s father changes his jovial tune. “It’s for your own good,” he tells her sternly, restraining her with his arms.

“This is an insane asylum,” Roselyn cries. Her heart has flown to her throat and she fears it may never leave. “Father! I am not insane!”

He regards her gravely. “Your…poems…say otherwise, Roselyn. I have no doubt that you are suffering from one of those multiple identity crises, so common these days in unmarried young women. I have no doubt you will find this a wonderful place to convalesce. Dr. Schmidt assures me that it has lovely grounds for you to walk in, with trees, and flowers, and chirping birds…”

The great iron gate closes behind them with a shrill wail.

II.

Maybe it was because her favorite Augusta Webster poem was Circe: lurid, sexual, demanding; turning the Greek patriarchy on its head.

Maybe it was because she had turned down Mr. Illingsworth last year. He had been old, bald, red-nosed, and took to ranting about the current state of the world after he had had too much to drink, which seemed every meal. “Young people these days know nothing,” he would roar, slamming his glass onto the table to emphasize his point. That he sincerely believed so, Roselyn did not doubt; but he could not possibly be expected to make a good husband to a young wife with that opinion in mind.

 Maybe it was because she would rather write poems in the first person than flirt, or tell the cook what to make her father for dinner. (The cook had been running the kitchens just fine for as long as Roselyn could remember; the cook had learnt the system from Roselyn’s mama by heart. Just because Roselyn’s mama had died did not mean the cook would unlearn all that Roselyn’s mama had taught her.)

The nurses smiled at Roselyn calmly every moment her father was there with her. I am not mad, Roselyn said to them with her eyes, but they only promised to take very good care of her and reminded her father of Dr. Schmidt’s high success rate with unstable patients. They took her weight and eyed her carefully, each exclaiming that, madness aside, Roselyn was the very picture of physical health.

Now Roselyn’s papa was gone.

She had seen the doctor before her father left her alone in the madhouse. He too had been all smiles and jubilant expression; asking thousands upon thousands of questions with no end in sight. Have you had many boyfriends? How much do you eat? How regular are your menstrual cycles? Do you want many children? How many?

And then, one last question, with an apologetic look at her father: Does madness run in the family? Was, perhaps, the mother…

III.

The Asylum is structured in a way the real world never could be. The faces, the food, the activities are all the same.

Dr. Schmidt calls it a structured environment.

He has the faintest trace of a German accent. Roselyn learned some German, long ago, and secretly she refers to him as Herr Doktor.

“You were unhappy in your old life? Hm? Wanted to be a writer—like a man?”

 Roselyn never considered it. She just wrote things down; she never thought further than that.

“I want to go home,” Roselyn says. “I won’t write anymore. I won’t.”

 It seems an easy promise: sanity, familiarity, for her poems.

"The root of your illness is not the writing of the poems,” Dr. Schmidt tells her. “It is simply a symptom.”

Roselyn stares at the ceiling, and then a vague memory returns to her. “My great-uncle wrote a novel,” she says.

“I’m sorry?”

“You asked me earlier if madness ran in the family. My great-uncle wrote a novel.”

He looks at her gently. “There. You see. You have become confused. Men may write as much as they like. But for women…it is distressing. You have become confused.”

His logic is flawed, but Roselyn sews her lips together and says nothing. Arguing will get her nowhere in this strange new world.     

IV.

Roselyn is so different from the other women. She knows a little German, some Greek mythology—but not Greek itself—and she speaks French fluently. It was her father’s thought that a European lord might take an American girl if she was well-educated, but Roselyn has never met a European lord. She’s seen a few poor Irishmen sometimes, and once she saw a (married) British writer on tour of the Americas, but that was all.

These women know nothing, nothing at all.

No: That is a lie. They know how to survive in the asylum. That is more than what Roselyn knows.

Her roommate’s name is Evelyn, and she sleeps almost all the time. It is how she copes. But there are others, slowly becoming distinct from the mass of mad crazies.

Victoria, for instance, is not mad at all.

But talking to her is impossible. The nurses, who have to know that neither of them are mad, shout if they stand too close to each other.

In fact, they shout if anyone gets too close to each other. It seems there were some problems, last year, with two of the female patients being caught in a compromising, half-dressed position.

Roselyn had had the rules of the world figured out. But she realizes there are different rules here—and that perhaps the game is different from what is played outside of the iron gates, after all.

V.

Roselyn has barely had time to sit in her seat when she is ordered out of the dining room and practically run to the gathering center. There is no one in the gathering center but one or two slow-moving lunatics, their arms waving gently in the air, as if they are imagining gentlemen are dancing with them. They could dance with each other, Roselyn thinks, but each patient seems unaware of the other; for all they know, they are dancing in completely different ballrooms in completely different worlds.

Evelyn sits along the wall and then lies down, relaxing her features into sleep. How can she be tired after last night? Roselyn wonders. She herself feels drugged and heavy from fourteen hours of forced sleep.

One of the patients, her brown hair a rat’s nest, uncombed for days, slowly creeps towards Roselyn. Her back is hunched over, and she looks about wildly, as if she is being hunted. Her hands are bunched into claws, but she has no fingernails to scratch and claw with. “They’re watching you,” she whispers to Roselyn. “They’re watching all of us.”

Roselyn stares at her as the madwoman pushes a worn red loveseat from the wall and slowly crawls behind it. “It doesn’t matter,” Evelyn murmurs quietly. Her eyes are still closed. “They’ll find you if they’re wanting to. There’s no place to hide.”

The woman with the wild hair just starts to hum under her breath about shadows, sentient and vengeful.

“Sleep awhile,” Evelyn whispers, her voice heavy and warm with sleep. “You must be tired.”

But Roselyn does not know if she is talking to the patient behind the loveseat or herself.

She is starting to wonder if there is a difference between the two at all.

VI.

The nurse looks pityingly at Roselyn. “Writing is bad for women,” she says kindly, but firmly. “If I gave you paper and a pen, it would erase all of the progress we’ve made over the last few months.”

Progress? Roselyn thinks. What progress?

Over the past few months, Roselyn has learned that she has no autonomy. Her body, which she always assumed belonged to her, belongs to her father, and he has given it to Herr Doktor. She has learnt there is a list and, if her name appears on it, her essence, what Christians call the soul, will be taken from her.

She has learnt that zombies are not just scary stories told by black people, and that women can love women the way her father loved (?) her mother, and that her words are meaningless and go unheeded. She has learnt to beg for sanitary napkins and to shovel food down her throat and to sleep for fourteen hours.

These are not things she ever wanted to learn.

“I just want to write to my friends, and tell them I am…” Roselyn struggles to find a word. Alive? Sane? Trapped?

Anger spasms across the warden’s face. “Sane women want nothing with letters,” she snaps.

“Then why do I see you writing?” Roselyn cries, for it’s true. The warden is always writing: to Herr Doktor, to her own family and friends.

The warden slaps Roselyn. Not expecting it, Roselyn crashes to the ground, holding her cheek. Tears start to splash from her eyes, and Roselyn rubs at them quickly, humiliated by the weakness of her body.

“Oh, Roselyn,” the nurse whispers, bending beside her. “When will you admit that you are in need of mental help?”

 VII.

 “I hear voices,” Roselyn confesses one day. She doesn’t, not really, although lately she has taken to having imaginary conversations with her father. Often she repeats the same lines over and over, like an actor who has forgotten the next line.

“What do they tell you, these voices?” the current warden asks.

Roselyn closes her eyes and keeps herself from smirking. “What matter? Let it come and bring me change, breaking the sickly sweet monotony. I am too weary of this long bright calm; always the same blue sky, always the sea, the same blue perfect likeness of the sky, tomorrow’s dawn the twin of yesterday’s…” 

They are lines from Circe.  Circe, from The Odyssey, the witch who lured men to her island and turned them all into pigs. Augusta Webster turned the myth on its head, though, making her Circe give the men who come to her island a drink that reveals their true nature. Only Circe drinks from the cup and remains unchanged, and she longs for the day a man will drink from the same cup and remain a man.

Roselyn has selected these lines from her memory because she repeats them, over and over, every day in an out. Tomorrow’s dawn the twin of yesterday’s, she thinks upon waking, upon shuffling around the bare walls of the asylum, upon being run to and from the cafeteria, upon being forced to bed. These are the words that urged her to write in the first place, the words that landed her here. These are the words they have been waiting for her to say all along.

Let the storm come, Circe begged. Let the storm come and bring me men; but do not let the storm bring more pigs. Let them bring men, real men, to share my bed with me.

Roselyn is not so demanding. She says only, Let the storm come.

VIII.

That morning the wardens take special care with Roselyn’s attire. For once they fight to brush her hair, forcing tangles out by tearing the offending hairs from her scalp. They scrub at a food stain with a wet cloth. Roselyn cannot remember what it means to be clean anymore, but she submits to it.

The reason for this sudden neatness is that Herr Doktor wants to see her. Dr. Schmidt. The smiling nurses escort her to his office on the first floor, away from the madness of the wards and their occupants. He rises when she enters the room, as if she really is the woman of standing that she once was, and he stands until she has taken a seat in a plush red chair.

He tells her that her madness is still inside of her, but he promises, smiling genially, to eradicate it by any means necessary.

He writes a prescription and then scribbles away in a notebook, refusing to look at her, until Roselyn rises and leaves the room.

IX.

            One

            minute

            passes 

            .

            .

            .

            .

            .

            heart

            beat

            .

            .

            .

            .

            one

            .

            .

            .

            .

            .

            mil

            .

            .

            .

            .

            .

            sec

            .

            .

            .

            ond

            goes

            by

            andthentheworldisalightwithcolorandsound

            PURPLE-SKYeverythingisBEAUTIFUL

            Five-years-pass-with-one-blink

            Allofthenurses

            Friendly, kind

            Dinnertimetoolon

            .

            .

            .

            breathe

            .

            .

            .

            refuse

            the

            drugs

            .

            .

            .

            fight the nurse

            .

            .

            .

            can’t think

X.

Depression is a gray cloud without a silver lining. It is thick and choking, the smoke of a house fire filling her nose and lungs, blinding her until the only colors she can see are white, gray, and black.

Depression is a little dog that follows her around. The dog always looks as if it has been dragged out of a lake. It leaves wet paw prints wherever it goes, and little drops of water find their way into Roselyn’s clothes and bed.

Depression is a heaviness, a thickness that coats Roselyn’s body, until she cannot stand and her breaths are labored.

Depression is a brown maw in the ground and the sound of shovels picking, picking, picking away at the earth.

Depression is sticking needles into your skin.

Depression is when Victoria slips her stocking down her throat.

Depression is Roselyn hunting through the courtyard for a marker, and the heaviness of knowing this is the best she can do.

Depression is knowing the best she can do is nowhere good enough.

Depression is a large rock badly marked with a cross.

Depression is knowing Victoria was never mad in the first place.

XI.

Everything Roselyn does is because she is mad.

She herself is a symptom. Her femininity, her sex, her gender—all of these are symptoms of a larger problem. She knows enough Greek to know that hysteria comes from the word for her female organs.

Women are all insane.

Roselyn can never be fixed, because she can never not be a woman. To try to be like a man is to be mad in the eyes of the world; to try to be like a woman is to become mad in her own eyes.

She was supposed to be married, and give her body to a man much like she was given dolls as a child, to do what she liked with. She was always careful with her dolls. Men, she is learning, are not careful with their toys.

Roselyn blames her mother for creating her. She would be better off dead than in the madhouse, thinking these mad thoughts.

She misses going outside. She misses picking dresses to wear in the morning, and deciding what she will or will not eat for dinner. She wants to run wild, and not simply weed the asylum’s gardens on sunny summer days as a part of her “rehabilitation.”

“You are simply sad that Victoria chose to sin against God,” Dr. Schmidt tells her.

Roselyn is not sad. She is glad Victoria is dead.

She is angry that she is not dead, too.

She is angry that insane men are controlling sane women.

XII.

 Since Victoria’s suicide the wardens wake the prisoners up once, twice, sometimes four times a night. They fall out of bed and stand shivering in their thin nightgowns and stare at the snow falling outside of the window.

It seems like they stand for hours, waiting for nothing and no one.

Yolande whispers Bible verses under her breath. She is convinced that it is the end of the world, and that she is a prophet of the lord. No one ever told her that women cannot be prophets of the lord.

 (“Name one female prophet,” Herr Doktor is rumored to have asked her, and when Yolande said, “Why, Joan, of course,” she was put on the List. Two more sunrises and she will be carted out of the asylum and shaved, and the part of her brain that hears the words of the lord will be carved out of her. Then she will return grinning and empty like a Jack O’Lantern.)

It used to bother her, the sleepless nights. But Roselyn is nothing now. Asleep, awake, there’s no difference. They’re all dead women walking.

XIII.

There is a new doctor. Young. Unmarried.

Roselyn fears him.

He visits the wards every day, smiling at the nurses, and asking the patients questions. He despairs of wild-haired wild-eyed Helena, who still skulks through the hallways, and sleeping, doe-eyed Evelyn. He praises Yolande’s sewing, which is unimaginative and simple, and she looks at him, trying to remember what words are, and why they are spoken.

Oh, he is handsome enough; his blue eyes are quick and lively, his lips, though a little thin, always breaking into a handsome smile. His brown hair is a little long and wavy, and Roselyn hears the wardens sigh about how beautiful he is.

Whenever he enters the room Roselyn is suddenly aware of the ticking of the clock.

Lately he has taken to staring at her. “What does she suffer from?” she heard him ask the head warden. He spoke quietly, but Roselyn’s hearing has become better and better after her years in the madhouse. “The girl with the green eyes, and the flower in her hair?”

Roselyn tries to be clean. She runs out into the rain and dances in it, and she picks flowers to wind them into her long hair. But now she smudges dirt onto her face. Once the nurses wouldn’t have cared. But the new doctor has noticed her, and she is given baths and special treatment.

He is careful about her therapy. Once a week nurses bring her to his office, filled with books and sunlight, and he talks to her almost as if she were a human. She refuses to meet his eyes. Often, she refuses to say anything at all. Roselyn wishes she had never said a cruel word about Dr. Schmidt in her mind.

One morning, the same as usual, Roselyn is brought to his office.

“Roselyn,” he says, and cupping her chin with his hand, forces her to meet his eyes.

Roselyn hears the clock strike the hour, and knows her time has come.

XIV.

Roselyn is quite sure she is mad.

(Wasn’t there a riddle someone told her once—that mad people never think they are mad; that only the sane would wonder if they were sane or not?)

She stares dreamily at the empty air. She imagines a funeral, with her father dabbing at his dry eyes, and her old friends there for propriety’s sake—perhaps married now, perhaps with children—watching the black plumed horses sedately carry the hearse to the church. She imagines herself in the casket, dressed in finer clothes than she has seen in years, her soft hands wrapped around white roses.

No. Not white.

Roselyn hates white roses.

There is no air in the coffin, but Roselyn does not need to breathe. She catches her breath and holds it, pretending she is dead.

The sound of dirt being shoveled on top of her is a symphony.

It has been four months since she asked for sanitary napkins. The blood comes all at once.

Little Roselyn will have to do.

Roselyn buries the dead infant next to the rosebushes, digging a small hole with her hands. The wardens pretend not to notice.

It is the kindest thing they have ever done for her.

XV.

Lately strangers have taken to coming to the asylum. Their days are Mondays and Wednesdays from 1-4. The faces are usually different, although some people return and return. Occasionally Dr. Schmidt graces these tourists with his presence.

Roselyn does not remember if she has any friends. If she does, either they do not come, or she does not recognize them.

Her father, too, does not come. She has lost track of time, and does not know how long it has been since he left her in the madhouse, how long it has been since she has seen his face.

She does not know if she would recognize him, either.

Sometimes Roselyn agrees to perform for these visitors. She crouches, or pretends to be rocking a baby to sleep in her arms. Sometimes she asks the visitors if they, too, see him, and if they ask questions she only shudders and turns away to the next visitor, asking, “Have you seen him? Have you seen him?”

Sometimes she refuses to meet their eyes.

There are a few days, though, when Roselyn remembers who she was before. On those days she meets the guest’s eyes and holds them, daring them to recognize their shared humanity. Roselyn has no illusions about her sanity any longer. She understands, though, that there is no gulf between herself and the strangers, but a very thin line on which any male may write his signature, committing the women whose eyes she meets to Roselyn’s place in hell.

On these days she recites Augusta Webster. Must life be only sweet?

One lady, who also wears a rose in her hair—although her rose is white, and Roselyn’s is red—bends down to meet Roselyn’s eye. It is a sunny day, and Roselyn is in deep mourning for no reason she can put a name to. It does not matter. In the asylum, her moods do not need reason. They pass without comment, and are merely written down to be discussed in therapy with the electroshock machine.

The electroshock machine is new. Some part of Roselyn’s dulled brain is amazed by how much has changed since she was locked away. Visitors come putting up to the door in black machines now. There are fewer and fewer horses these days.

“You will be well soon,” the woman promises.

There is an innocence about her that Roselyn barely remembers. The woman means well, she does, but what does she know about life? About living? About death? “Oh me, I am a woman, not a god; yea, those who tend me even are more than I,” she murmurs, and confusion only crosses the woman’s fair face before the gentleman escorting her urges her to move away.

Augusta Webster has lapsed into anonymity, and Roselyn has lapsed into a worse fate—nonexistence. But the asylum soldiers on.

XVI.

 Roselyn is not mad.

The head warden, who came to them some time ago—her predecessor having become with child, and escaped to the country—is insane. So is Dr. Schmidt, who begins to turn to his homeland for different theories. Dorothea Dix has failed in everything she had hoped to achieve, and the electroshock machine and the lobotomies have too. 

Yolande went home, for a brief while. Her parents sent her back, claiming that their daughter had become an idiot. It is true that Yolande drools now, and she smiles inanely at everybody, no matter what they say to her. She even smiles at Karen, the cruel nurse, who digs her nails into the patient’s skin.

There are stories now of the wife of a famous writer. She is also crazy. “It comes from writing,” one of the nurses, who has been there as long as Roselyn can remember, says, looking at Roselyn.

Roselyn understands what is being said. There is a woman like you who dared to dream. She is going to die in a place just like this. There will be a fire, just as in Jane Eyre, and the madwoman in the attic will succumb to death.

Roselyn knows much, much more than anyone has ever given her credit for. But the information is patchy; it never comes when she wants it to, and she has difficulty speaking now. One of the nurses hit her when she couldn’t obey fast enough, and knocked a tooth out. Roselyn’s face aches most of the time.

Yes, the lunatics are in charge of the asylum. Roselyn and the others are a part of a friendly conspiracy to let them believe that they are sane. It is kinder, more humane. Roselyn and the others know, though, that they are only there to humor the doctors and the nurses, and keep them pretending that they are people of influence. They are all trapped here.

The news came to Roselyn a little while ago. Perhaps it was yesterday, or perhaps it was last year. Dr. Schmidt received a letter, and for the first time in a very long while he called Roselyn to his office and told her that her father had died. She had cried, and Dr. Schmidt commended her on her filial feelings. Roselyn had not bothered to correct him. It mattered very little anyway. Her father might be happily buried, but she was still living in the shadows, neither alive nor dead.

Roselyn has a new dream now, one that will never come true. Still, sometimes she stops dreaming of being buried and finds herself roaming through her childhood home once more. With her father gone there is sunshine and light everywhere, and the air smells of earth and roses. In her desk she sees the poems she had once begun, and in the library the books that were her friends. There is the piano that she had once loved to play—Roselyn has forgotten how to play, and even if she could remember, her hands shake so badly it hardly matters—and from the kitchen the friendly laughter of the cook and the smell of sweet things baking.

She wishes so badly it were true that sometimes she convinces herself it is.