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day to exhume the past.
    Therapists had nothing to do with our everyday lives.
    “Don’t talk about the hospital,” my therapist said if I complained about Daisy or a stupid nurse. “We’re not here to talk about the hospital.”
    They couldn’t grant or rescind privileges, help us get rid of smelly roommates, stop aides from pestering us. The only power they had was the power to dope us up. Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium: the therapists’ friends. The resident could put us on that stuff too, in an “acute” situation. Once we were on it, it was hard to get off. A bit like heroin, except it was the staff who got addicted to our taking it.
    “You’re doing so well,” the resident would say.
    That was because those things knocked the heart out of us.
    Half a dozen nurses, including Valerie, and an aide or two were on duty during the day. The night staff consisted of three comfy big-bosomed Irish women who called us “dearie.” Occasionally there was a comfy big-bosomed black woman who called us “honey.” The night staff would hug us if we needed a hug. The day staff adhered to the No Physical Contact rule.
    Between day and night was a dark universe called evening, which began at three-fifteen, when the day staff retired to the living room to gossip about us with the evening staff. At three-thirty everyone emerged. Power had been transferred. From then until eleven, when the comfy women took over, we were in Mrs. McWeeney’s hands.
    Perhaps it was Mrs. McWeeney who made dusk such a dangerous time. No matter the season, dusk began at three-fifteen with her arrival.
    Mrs. McWeeney was dry, tight, small, and pig-eyed. If Dr. Wick was a disguised boarding-school matron, Mrs. McWeeney was an undisguised prison matron. She had hard gray hair pressed into waves that grasped her scalp like a migraine. The day nurses, following Valerie’s lead, wore unbuttoned nurse coats over street clothes. No such informality for Mrs. McWeeney. She wore a creaky white uniform and spongy ripple-soled nurse shoes that she painted white every week; we could watch the paint cracking and peeling off between Monday and Friday.
    Mrs. McWeeney and Valerie did not get along. This was fascinating, like overhearing your parents having a fight. Mrs. McWeeney cast on Valerie’s clothes and hair the same disapproving eye she gave us and clicked her teeth with impatience as Valerie gathered her coat and pocketbook and left the nursing station at three-thirty. Valerie ignored her. Valerie was able to ignore people in an obvious way.
    As long as Valerie was on the ward, we felt safe hating Mrs. McWeeney. But as soon as her long tapered back had receded down the hall and out the double-locked double doors, we were overcome by gloom shot through with anxiety: Now Mrs. McWeeney was in power.
    Her power wasn’t absolute, but it was close. She shared it with a mysterious Doctor on Call. She never called him. “I can handle this,” she said.
    She had more confidence in her ability to handle things than we did. Many evenings were spent arguing about whether the Doctor on Call should make an appearance.
    “We’ll just have to agree to disagree,” Mrs. McWeeney said about ten times per evening. She had an endless store of clichés.
    When Mrs. McWeeney said, “We’ll just have to agree to disagree” or “Little pitchers have big ears” or “Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone,” a faint but delighted grin came onto her face.
    Clearly, she was nuts. We were locked up for eight hours a day with a crazy woman who hated us.
    Mrs. McWeeney was unpredictable. She’d gnarl her face up for no reason while giving out bedtime meds and slam back into the nursing station without a word. We’d have to wait for her to calm down before getting our nightly Mickey Finns; sometimes we waited as long as half an hour.
    Every morning we complained to Valerie about Mrs. McWeeney, though we never said anything about waiting for