Betsy 

My name isn’t Betsy anymore. I tell the nurses to stop calling me that but damnit they

won’t. You can call me Janine. Janine, from Boston. Pleased to meetcha.

I have long sandy blonde hair. It’s thin and kinda scraggly at the ends because I don’t like

to cut it. Sometimes I spend hours twisting and twirling it into braids — sometimes one, sometimes a wacky three — or brushing by my bedside. I have this nifty antique brush, just like my favorite doll had before she fell off my dresser and broke a piece of her ceramic face. She’s been in the hospital for quite some now, but she’ll get better because they’re taking real good care of her.

I have freckles that I used to always try to rub off when I was a little girl but now I kinda like them. I paint my nails once every six days, or sooner if they chip at all. Little ladies aren’t supposed to have chipped nails, Mom used to say.

I’m not really from Boston, you know. I’m really from Lowell, Massachusetts, a small college town more than an hour outside of Boston. I moved closer to the city just a few years ago, but I think I have a pretty good accent by now. I drive through Bahston with my cah and after work I go to the bah. I live at 711 Oakland Drive, but our place is set way back through a gate and a swerving driveway with a circle drive you could drive around for your whole life and never find your stop. It’s calls the Oakland Institute, but my mom just calls it Oakland.

There’s this tower here, not so much like the ones with points that you’d see in princess movies. More like a lighthouse. Except not on the water. No one is technically allowed up there,

there’s no working light bulb so the only light up there is imagination. In the distance I can see lights, some of them blinking, that are probably Boston’s tall apartment buildings but I like to think they’re my friends playing light tag among the fireflies. They’re telling me to come play with them but I can’t because I’m too far away.

By the way, I know I’m in a mental hospital. A lot of crazy cooks in here have no idea what’s up or down, let alone where they are. Of course I don’t think belong here because I think I’m perfectly capable of living in the free world most of the time. Sure, I have a few extra voices in my head sometimes, but I never hurt no body with them.

I belong here because I don’t quite fit anywhere else. Plus it’s nice living with friends you can play with from time to time. Yeah, I have a family and all, but they don’t understand me the way Beatrice from across the hall does. Beatrice lost her parents when she was real young and now she suffers from what the nurses call “manic depressive disorder.” I don’t know what that means, to be honest, but she listens good. Plus, we get decent food and don’t have to get out there and work. We don’t have to pay taxes, so rub your nose in that.

One time I went up to the tower with a boy who lives in another wing. His name is Pauly and he looks down with his hands when he talks, sort of rocking back and forth so that his blonde hair falls onto his brow. He has strong hands but always speaks and moves with a softness and grace that makes me think he would have been great in the Nutcracker. It was just one time, but when we went, after a while, our eyes adjusted to the light and we just sat talking about what he thought the lights were. The rest of the time we just looked into each other’s eyes.

We got caught by the guards one night in October just before it got too cold to climb the steps, there were 46 of them, up to the top. They thought we were doing something Mom would furrow her brow at Pauly isn’t allowed to leave the third floor anymore. I think he gets his meals delivered now because I don’t see him in the mess anymore except for on special occasions like Veterans’ Day. Anyway, when I’m up there and feel alone, I rub my hands together and wait for my eyes to adjust to the light.

Betsy was my name before trees stopped looking like wildfires in fall. The falls up here are beautiful still, or that’s what my visitors always tell me.

“Oh, honey, they say,” even though my name is Janine. “We wish we could just spend all autumn up here with you. Look at the leaves!”

But I wasn’t lonely there. I’m not alone here, but I always sort of feel lonely, the way a fish must feel lonely when he can’t talk to the tadpoles because they don’t understand. That’s just though isn’t it: My mom never paid enough attention. I know that’s what your thinking.

My mom never worked a day in her life, but she was never at home either. Taking care of four kids is a full time job, she’d say. She was only doing what’s best for us, she’d say. Mom made me stop talking to my very first imaginary friend. Her name was Felicity. I wasn’t too mad either because I got along with my boy friends better. Still do. You’d could say I’m a bit of a guy’s gal. All of the voices I got up here are boys, except my best friend is a girl. We like to gossip and plan our trip to Europe where we’ll eat French bread and Belgian chocolate. She’s a girly girl, but that’s okay because sometimes even my guy friends don’t help me feel less lonely. They’re always telling me to do mean things like steal other tenants’ Jello. I like Penelope, though. She and I have each other.

Betsy was my name when the friends and family I had would go with me to the beach and watch churn up the sand.

I didn’t name my baby girl.

For eight months all I knew was it was a girl. I didn’t know how or why there was a baby inside of me. I was still a child myself, and when my belly began to swell, Mom looked at me as if she didn’t recognize me. I’d sit on our porch swing and talk to some of my other friends. They whispered in my ear: I should keep the baby and run away with it. They’d help me take care of her. When Mom saw me talking to my friends she’d come slap my wrist away from my belly. Stop talking to yourself.

When she came out of me, Mom hurried the doctor and the screaming thing out of the room before I could get a good look, but she was covered in blood and gunk and I was glad they didn’t give it her to me because I hate blood.

At the time, I didn’t quite understand what “unfit mother” meant. You don’t have a husband, Mom said, you can’t take care of a baby let alone yourself. But she was still my mother and my dad passed away when I was too young. Doctors told me I couldn’t keep my baby too, but I didn’t understand them because I was always busy sniffling.

I think I would have named her Petunia. They’re the kind of flowers that sound pretty, even if you don’t know what they look like or smell like. Everyone wants to be thought of as lovely just by the sound of their name, I think. I think of her like a Petunia — she must be pretty and smell like that powdery baby smell you hope will never go away. Not like Betsy. Betsy was the name of a chubby girl whose cheeks were red and plump, eyes blue, a thumb in her mouth.

“Betsy, it’s time for your medicine.” The guard is tall and beefy, the kind of guy you’d see on the WWE with a shaved head and a tattoo of a beating heart with “Mom” etched into the middle. He’s sort of tan, and has bulging forearms to match the vein in his forehead that always makes me giggle when my giggling makes him angry.

“My name is Janine.” And there it is again.

I was brushing Rosalie’s hair when the nurses came in that day. I don’t usually minds taking it but I don’t like when they come in without knocking. Isn’t that just common courtesy.

Rosalie has thick, wavy hair so it requires a lot of time to brush, especially in the morning because she tosses and turns at night. She’s afraid of the dark, she tells me, but I think that’s a silly fear. She’s three years old, but she’s very smart for her grade. She can’t walk but she can speak two languages. She hears all of my other friends because she’s a real good listener, too. They like her because there aren’t so many children around here, and like I said, it can get kinda lonely.

“Okay, Janine, give me the doll.”

“HER NAME IS ROSALIE.”

I held her close to my chest, tight with two arms crossed so they can’t pry her from me.

They told me they would have to take me to the infirmary if I didn’t let her go. It was time for my medicine, the medicine that makes some of the meaner voices go away, and that I couldn’t take it with Rosalie watching. The other nurse, the skinny one with gages and black hair, pulled out a little needle as the big one held my shoulders tight the way a man does in a movies when he’s trying to tell his lover she’s the apple of his eye.

I remember waking up in the infirmary like the nurse promised. The woman nurse told me I would have to take extra medicine, but that it wouldn’t have anything to do with the voices. There was a lot of vitamin C, she said, and some other drugs to help with the mood swings and

the tummy aches I’d been having for the last few weeks. She gave Rosalie back to me and I slept in the empty room for the rest of the next few nights.

There was one night I didn’t tell you about yet, with Pauly, in August before he wasn’t allowed to come out of his wing. We snuck up to the tower just after sunset, when the sky was still pink and the ducks in the pond below made their way into a nestling group near the bank. One of the voices had been whispering naught things that made me giggle. There was something in the air when a breeze tickled the back of my neck with a pecking chill that made it all feel right. He was gentle in a way that made me feel like I hadn't done it before myself. He kissed with his eyes open just wide enough to make sure I wasn't wincing but shut them tightly at the same time. Before we started, he asked permission and, with a shaky hand, brushed away the wisps of hair that stuck to my forehead in the summer humidity. We laughed awkwardly when the struggled with my bra, smiled when his shaky kissed landed on my lips instead. He kissed me the whole way through so I would never feel alone.

And he didn't know I'd done it before. When it was over, and it was over quickly, he checked for blood. I told him I'd fallen off my bicycle as a little girl even though Mom never let me ride since it was unbecoming of a little lady. Then he let out sigh of relief and kissed me again. We looked out at the lights of the city in the distance. And I heard no noise but the rise and fall of his chest. I was safe.

Mom knew there was something special (and not the good kind of special) about me from the time I was a little girl. She knew my friends weren’t as innocent as make believe. She would smack my hand when I sat mushing food between my fingers as I stared off across the room, trying to listen closely as they whispered about how fat Aunt Jenny had gotten since Thanksgiving. She spanked me when she caught me in my room talking back, playing with trucks instead of dolls because the voices liked to smash through Leggo buildings and hated playing house.

“I could see it when she came out of me,” Mom whispered to Dad one night long ago, before Dad never came back. “We should have given her up then, tried again.”

“Mary Alice, take that back,” he said. “She’s a little girl for Jesus sakes.”

I don’t remember when the voices turned violent, but I’m pretty sure it was after this one time when Dad came into my room late at night. He was always more concerned with me when I wasn’t awake, which was good for him because he worked all night doing “god knows what,” Mom used to say. I was going into the fourth grade when he came in one sticky summer night. He liked to sleep with his arms around me, but this time he put his hands through my hair and down my back until I screamed loud enough to wake Mom. She came in, he left, and I never saw him again.

The friends told me that Mom was evil the way they do now sometimes when the nurses come in unannounced. That’s when I started to throw things; forks, hair brushes, whatever. I’d sit in the tub until it overflowed and put soap on the floor so she’d slip and maybe hit her head. I stopped calling her Mom as soon as I realized it was a term of disrespect to call her Mary. And when she told me the men at the door were from the Institute I ran into the kitchen and pulled out a knife and charged toward the door. The men were strong like they are in here. And they had a needle.

The voices, that’s what I know them to be now, aren’t so mean to Mom anymore. Most of the time when she comes now, they try to distract me, telling me we should go play in the Tower or with the children on the swing set below my room. That’s the pills talking, but I really do love Mom because she visits sometime. It’s more than I can say for Petunia.

I blabbering now, aren’t I. I just get so excited that we can hear each other now. And so loud too! I just can’t decide on a name. There’s something to be said about the science of matching a personality with a name. Some of the nurses in the infirmary have opinions. The others are just happy Mom and my doctors think I’m going to make it through okay. They want to be babysitters in the real sense, not just to these loonies in here. I’m Mom’s excited too. Pauly is nervous, but then again he gets nervous that he won’t wake up in time to greet the lawnmower in the morning. a big fan of even-numbered dates. May 6, 1944 has a nice ring to it. Just something to keep in mind.

Is it warm in there? I know I’m always hot these days, and it’s not even May yet! Anyways, I only got one request: relax on the kicking. It wakes me up at night and it’s bad enough I gotta sleep on my side ‘cause my stomach’s so big I can’t see my feet anymore. I promise to do this one right this time. Marigold. I think that’s just right. Marigold Alice. I can’t wait to see you.