Read Online Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen - Free Book Online

had boarding-school names like East House and South Belknap, and Dr. Wick would have been a good boarding-school matron. She came from Rhodesia and she looked like the ghost of a horse. When she talked, she sounded somewhat like a horse as well. She had a low, burbly voice, and her colonial English accent gave her sentences a neighing cadence.
    Dr. Wick seemed utterly innocent about American culture, which made her an odd choice to head an adolescent girls’ ward. And she was easily shocked about sexual matters. The word fuck made her pale horse face flush; it flushed a lot when she was around us.
    A representative conversation with Dr. Wick:
    “Good morning. It has been decided that you were compulsively promiscuous. Would you like to tell me about that?”
    “No.” This is the best of several bad responses, I’ve decided.
    “For instance, the attachment to your high school English teacher.” Dr. Wick always uses words like attachment .
    “Uh?”
    “Would you like to tell me about that?”
    “Um. Well. He drove me to New York.” That was when I realized he was interested. He brought along a wonderful vegetarian lunch for me. “But that wasn’t when it was.”
    “What? When what was?”
    “When we fucked.”
    (Flush.) “Go on.”
    “We went to the Frick. I’d never been there. There was this Vermeer, see, this amazing painting of a girl having a music lesson—I just couldn’t believe how amazing it was—”
    “So when did you—ah—when was it?”
    Doesn’t she want to hear about the Vermeer? That’s what I remember. “What?”
    “The—ah—attachment. How did it start?”
    “Oh, later, back home.” Suddenly I know what she wants. “I was at his house. We had poetry meetings at his house. And everybody had left, so we were just sitting there on the sofa alone. And he said, ‘Do you want to fuck?’ ”
    (Flush.) “He used that word?”
    “Yup.” He didn’t. He kissed me. And he’d kissed me in New York too. But why should I disappoint her?
    This was called therapy.
    Luckily, Dr. Wick had a lot of girls to take care of, so therapy with her was brief, maybe five minutes a day. But in her wake came the resident.
    There was a two- or three-minute breather between Dr. Wick’s departure and the resident’s arrival. During this time we could think of new things to say or formulate complaints. Residents were in charge of privileges, medication, phone calls—the day-to-day matters that were not important enough for Dr. Wick to bother with.
    Residents changed every six months. We’d just begin to figure out how to manage one resident when he’d be snatched out from under us and replaced with a new, incomprehensible resident. They started out tough and ended up exhausted and ready to leave. A few started out with compassion; they ended up bitter, because we took advantage of them.
    A representative conversation with a resident:
    “Good morning. How are your bowel movements?”
    “I want to get off group. I want destination privileges.”
    “Do you have any headaches?”
    “I’ve been on group for six months!”
    “The head nurse said you were acting out after lunch yesterday.”
    “She’s making that up.”
    “Hmmmm. Hostility.” He scribbles in a notebook.
    “Can I have orders for Tylenol instead of aspirin?”
    “There’s no difference.”
    “Aspirin gives me a stomach ache.”
    “Are you having headaches?”
    “This is in case I do.”
    “Hmmmm. Hypochondria.” He scribbles again.
    But these two doctors were hors d’oeuvres. The entrée was the therapist.
    Most of us saw our therapists every day. Cynthia didn’t; she had therapy twice a week and shock therapy once a week. And Lisa didn’t go to therapy. She had a therapist, but he used her hour to take a nap. If she was extremely bored, she’d demand to be taken to his office, where she’d find him snoozing in his chair. “Gotcha!” she’d say. Then she’d come back to the ward. The rest of us traipsed off day after