LITMIR.BIZ

       FOUR

      After the Back Bay call, I definitely needed my fitness club. I went and worked out, sweating and pushing myself past my usual limit, then stood under the shower and scrubbed my body nearly raw. And then I sat for nearly an hour in the whirlpool, getting up every ten minutes to reset the timer. If they hadn’t had a closing time, I would have stayed in there all night.

      The fact that this was what I had anticipated before I started working, that I had actually imagined feeling soiled and used and unclean, didn’t help much. The fact was that I had gotten spoiled. “It’s a crap shoot,” Peach once said.

      Yeah. And sometimes, it seemed, you didn’t exactly roll a winner.

      But the feeling passed. There were enough neutral or good experiences to balance out my time with Barry; there was no obligation for me to ever see him again. And eventually, as one does, I pushed him into the back recesses of my consciousness and concentrated on what was essential. The money.

      The money was essential because by that time – by the time I’d been working for Peach for merely a few weeks – I was beginning to see my way out of my financial problems. Oh, I wasn’t there, not yet, not by a long shot; but I could see that it was going to happen.

      I was able to pay my rent on time, for one thing. No small accomplishment. I almost wanted to e-mail the rat bastard in California to tell him how well I was surviving.

      Well, on second thought, perhaps not.

      On the Sunday night after my first week of working for Peach, I sat in my apartment with Scuzzy contentedly purring nearby, and I wrote checks to help pay off debts that had been hanging over my head seemingly forever. I’d already spent some of my money on what I was already thinking of as professional expenses, smart little suits at Next and the Express, lingerie from Cacique. Even with those extravagances, I made bill payments. I was going to be able to start answering the telephone again, instead of ignoring it so I could avoid potential creditors. I was going to stop feeling that tight fist of panic in my stomach when I opened my mailbox, wondering who was threatening to shut me off today.

      To say that I was feeling good would have been the understatement of the century.

      It showed, too. There was a new confidence about me. It may have been due to my new employment; or it may have just been the fact that I finally wasn’t slinking around avoiding bill collectors anymore. Whatever was happening, people were noticing.

      The head of the sociology department, for whom I was teaching On Death and Dying, was the first to comment. “So – new boyfriend?”

      I nearly spilled my coffee. “No, Hannah, why?”

      She looked amused. “You’re looking so good these days. You look happy. I heard you humming in the ladies’ room, to tell you the truth. I thought that there might be somebody.”

      No, Hannah, there are a whole lot of somebodies. There is a different somebody every night, if you really want to know. I repressed the thought and replaced the impish grin it engendered with a proper professorial attitude. “I’ve been working out more; maybe that’s it.”

      The other sociology elective that I was teaching that semester was Life in the Asylum, a course that examined the shifting ways in which the well-intentioned but fundamentally cruel institutions of medicine and psychiatry dealt, historically and currently, with the mentally ill. I spent some time focusing on the so-called “paupers’ palaces,” the immense, grandiose state mental hospitals built in the nineteenth century to try and do the right thing – whatever that was perceived to be at the time.

      The day after my shopping and mini-spa, I went into the “asylum” class (as its own inmates liked to call it) with a mixture of feelings that I was hard-pressed to sort out. We were in the middle of what I always found to be a difficult couple of weeks in the subject area: society’s use of mental hospitals as dumping-grounds for unwanted women.

      I could never treat these classes with any kind of proper academic distance or dispassion, because they never failed to anger me. The superfluous spinster, the outspoken wife, the aging mother, all could be incarcerated if the man who wished to be rid of them found a doctor willing to sign a form attesting to her insanity. Once committed in such a manner, the victim could be released, not by the signature of the committing physician (or by any evidence of mental health), but only by permission of the male relative who had instigated the process.

      I found it outrageous. Every time that I think or talk about it, I can feel my blood pressure rising.

      The students had that week been reading Geller and Harris’ Women of the Asylum. They were presumably prepared to comment on the first-hand accounts recorded in the book, the voices of real women who had lived for years and even decades in lunatic asylums, the women who were no more crazy than the men who had sent them there.

      Not more crazy, just more powerless.

      I had begun to read, in my own newly-acquired independent study (or independent obsession, take your pick) about how prostitution was sometimes used as proof of insanity, and was feeling rather more passionate anger than usual. Perhaps not a strictly academic point of view.

      Some of the women in the class were feeling even more vehement about what they had read than I was. That was usually the case, I have found, which is one of the highs, the joys, of teaching: give people information that they did not have before, and their passions come alive. Tell the truth, and watch it change lives.

      Maybe even some day it might change the world.

      There was a somewhat heated discussion involving most of the class – well, I’d anticipated that. It is, after all, really difficult to read words that express so much pain in such an eloquent way without having some emotional response to it. I let them go at it, walking around the classroom, making a comment here, asking a question there. Inevitably, we were drawn away from the topic, and I let that happen, too, to see where it might go, before reeling them back in again.

      “Well, it doesn’t really matter, does it, it’s just history, that kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore.”

      “Are you kidding? It looks different now. Maybe it’s less blatant, but nothing has really changed.”

      “What exactly hasn’t changed?” That was me, the question asked quietly, innocently.

      “What hasn’t changed? What has changed, that’s the real question! People still think that there’s something unnatural, something abnormal, about women who choose not to do exactly what they’re supposed to do.”

      “That’s bullshit! Women are presidents of companies now!”

      “What is it that women are ‘supposed’ to do?” I asked.

      The response was vehement. “Everything! They’re supposed to do everything, be everything, and still be nurturing and non-threatening to everybody around them! They have to be sexy. They have to be a fantasy woman and at the same time be as good a cook as their husband’s mother! They’re supposed to want to have children, and if they don’t want children, if they want a career instead, they’re seen as selfish, self-centered, and not normal. I’d probably be put in an asylum if I lived a century ago!”

      Another female

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