Alice in Bed by Judith Hooper Read Free Book Online Page B

Sara. But if I were ill, surely the funds would be found to send me to a hydropathic establishment in France or Switzerland, and Sara could accompany me. Perhaps she could be ill as well. But it did not take long to grasp that we would never be allowed to sail to Europe unmatronized. If I went abroad, Aunt Kate would come along and that would change everything.
    As the weeks and months slid by, my happiness and peace of mind increasingly depended on Sara. But you could not set your clock by Sara, she was prone to such extreme fluctuations. Some days she didn’t eat and other days she consumed five or six meals. She developed a sudden irrational interest in the French dancing master and speculated wildly about him. She went to Bar Harbor and acquired a passion for mussels, and then to New York City and returned speaking differently, while denying that she did. She surrounded herself with several people whom she’d previously dismissed as boring. She became acutely critical of George Sand, whom we’d previously idolized together. (“It’s rather bad taste to threaten suicide so often; it should be held in reserve, don’t you think?”)
    My state of longing now rendered me so jagged and raw that, in my lucid moments, I was compelled to admit to myself that I no longer enjoyed my friend’s company as before. I was losing any objective sense of who Sara was since she had become everything to me. Was that what love did? I decided frequently to break things off, but her gaze always dissolved my resistance, her arms would reach for me, and my resolve melted. I now understood the lovesick heroines in novels whom I’d previously dismissed as stupid, silly, and weak.
    By mid-autumn, it did not escape my notice—or my family’s—that I was breaking out in symptoms of nerves. I “went off” while lacing mystays, when Father rehearsed his lecture on “Is Marriage Holy?” when the dressmaker pinned the sleeve of my frock. Occasionally I found myself lying on the floor with no memory of getting there. Within the family my going off became “one of Alice’s things,” just as dressing like a dandy was one of William’s things and being minutely well-informed about the theater was Harry’s thing. Jaunts to the country were proposed. Suspicions were voiced about certain types of weather, heavy meals, newspaper accounts of railway crashes, French novels, staying up too late, and excitement in general.
    When I failed to improve, Aunt Kate mentioned the name of a great doctor in New York City and volunteered to accompany me there.

TWO TWO
    I T WAS IN SOME WAYS AN OLD STORY. I HAD CELEBRATED MY thirteenth birthday by “going off” and coming to with a vision of my family standing in a ring around me like trees around a clearing. I recalled my mother’s face looking frightened, my father’s concerned but mildly curious. My “fit” was traced to mysterious vapors associated with my first menstrual period, which had just struck without warning.
    Since then my mind and body had been at war, like the armies of France and Prussia, enjoying fragile cease-fires but no lasting peace. Anything could send the caissons rolling toward the front again, blowing up bridges and shelling towns. When I tried to see back to how it all started, there was only a dense jungle behind my eyes.
    Now, as our train chugged along the coast of Connecticut, I was suffering from a thick head-fog through which I could dimly make out the shapes of thoughts. I was unable to bring myself to eat anything or read or talk and merely watched fields of brown stubble, purple marshes, and glassy bits of the Long Island Sound glide past while Aunt Kate knitted and read Elizabeth Gaskell in the seat next to me.
    By the time we pulled into New York City in a cloud of soot-flecked steam, my nerves felt like hot wires. Not wishing to set the seat ablaze, I stood up and fixed a dumb-ox stare