The prescription bottle emerges from the drawer with the label facing me. I see my name, my birth date, the address of my mother’s house, and the name of the drug, lithium. I see the dosage and the notation that I am to take one 300 mg tablet twice a day. Back when things were bad, I was taking pills three times a day and they were at a higher milligram count. We’re on maintenance now.
Tightening a hold on the white top, I push down and turn at the same time. Inside the bottle, there are a reassuring number of the chalky white pills, perfect circles with a stamp on one side and a line on the other. I lean down and take a sniff. The chemical bouquet is faint and unpleasant, but as I’ve never smelled inside the bottle before, I don’t know whether it’s normal or not. I pour a few pills into my hand. They seem fine. In any event, I have no choice but to take them.
I look around my room. Hiding them in my top drawer seems stupid now. Everyone hides things in with their underwear, don’t they? I decide to put them somewhere else. I choose the bottom left-hand side of my desk, under my extra folders and my backup notebooks. Much better. If someone comes looking for my medication, they will have to hunt and peck now, and maybe this will give me time to get back from wherever I am.
As I close the drawer on the newer, hopefully better, hiding place, I push my hair out of my face with fingers that tremble. I don’t like being on lithium and I sure as hell don’t like taking it here at school. I’m always afraid someone, even Strots, will burst through the door halfway through the swallow. I typically retreat into my closet and close myself in, popping the top off in the darkness and pulling them down dry, the pills getting stuck to the back of my throat so that I have to repeatedly swallow to usher them along.
Even if somebody isn’t poorly opined of me, such as Strots, the news that a girl in this dorm is on a psychotropic drug is too tantalizing not to share, and share, and share.
The sound of someone talking in the hall brings my head up and I’m momentarily surprised by the fact that I’ve taken out the pills again and am reexamining the bottle with my door open to anyone who might pass. The lithium that helps me stay on the planet may look like aspirin, but given the orange bottle it comes in, you don’t need to be a genius to know it’s a substance that requires dispensing by a physician’s order, and therefore treats something far, far more serious than a common cold, a common ache.
Jesus, I hope whoever was talking didn’t see me.
A moment later, I hear the back door to the dorm open and close. I go over to the window and look down. Hot RA is walking to his sports car, his hair gleaming in the hot and heavy sunlight, his blue jeans once again worn and washed to the point of paling out, his shirt long-sleeved but white and diaphanous, like a veil for his torso. He looks fresh and sexy, and as my senses dance, I realize that even though he’s married, I live for the moments I catch a glimpse of him.
And I ache at the thought that I am not the only one who does this. The impact of his presence is so great on me that its intensity seems to demand a special carve-out for me. I feel as though I should be the only one who is allowed to notice him. But that is not realistic, and as I consider how many others covet our residential advisor, I have a theory that part of the allure is the impossibility of it all. Nick Hollis is totally unobtainable to any of us because of his age and employment, and then there is his marriage. Plus I’ve heard his wife is part of a federal task force on AIDS and that she lectures around the nation to cities and hospitals. I’ve already decided she’s a Miss America beauty queen in addition to being an intellectual giant and a resplendent humanitarian.
Even if she might get into her cups from time to time and argue with her husband over long distance.
I watch call-me-Nick unlock the driver’s side door of his two-seater and insert his rangy body into the seat behind the wheel. His car is even older than my mother’s, but it’s no Mercury Marquis. His is some kind of vintage Porsche and it’s in gleaming mint condition. It’s a pale blue, with eyelike headlights offset on the flat hood, its back end curved in tight like a dog with its tail tucked under. When he starts the engine, it has a ticky, high note, and as he drives it forward with confidence—because he always parks rear fender in—I have a feeling it was probably his father’s and has been passed down. From what I’ve overheard in the bathroom, Hot RA graduated from Yale with a master’s in English, and he is only here for a year before he, and that traveling wife of his, go back to New Haven so he can get his PhD. He is going to be a professor at an Ivy League school. He is going to write important books about important books.
The fact that he is smart and wealthy as well as too beautiful to look at seems like too much good fortune for one person to possess. He reminds me of Greta.
Returning the pills to their new spot, I decide to motivate. I have some laundry that I’ve started down in the basement, and I should put it in the dryer before everything smells like gym clothes even though I don’t take gym. I swap my geometry textbook and notebook out of my backpack, and put my French things in there. Then I one-strap the avoirdupois and leave.
The dorm’s laundry room is in the basement, and as I descend into the lowest level of our building, I’m hit with a pervasive cool that feels good for the moment, but that will soon make me want to put a sweater on. Along with the washer and dryer facility, there’s a rec room nobody uses and some storage areas that have doors that are not just deadbolted but chained with padlocks. There’s also the boiler room, which wafts an auto repair shop smell of dirty oil.
As I enter the laundry, the air smells too sweet, a meadow’s worth of lab-created floral scents making my eyes water because there is no ventilation. It’s also toasty because somebody is using one of the six dryers. I think of that Peanuts comic strip: Happiness is a warm blanket.
Was it Schroeder who said that about his blanket? I wonder as I go over to the six washers.
There’s a shelf that runs above the workhorse Maytags, and on it are various detergents, most of them liquid, all of them labeled with student names. An overflow for supplies is off to the side, the well-used, Formica-topped table sporting a secondary fleet of bottles. There’s also a vending machine that dispenses boxes of powder for twenty-five cents. The washers and dryers are free.
Naturally, there is a lucky machine for me. The one I must use is all the way down the row on the left, a random choice that is another absolute—
As I open the lid, I stop where I am, my aimless wander of thoughts ceasing in concert with my body.
A smell rises up from the belly of my machine, sharp, pungent, pool-like.
Leaning down, I pull out something, anything. What arrives at the lip of the maw is the exhausted twist of one of my long-sleeved shirts. The black of the fabric is speckled with pale brown spots and splashes, and as I flatten it out on the closed lid of the next machine in line, I do not understand what is happening. What has happened. What I am looking at.
I bring more of my clothes out, and the autopsy reveals a possible explanation. It appears that undiluted bleach was poured in after the end of the spin cycle, and the Clorox has been sitting in there long enough to stain, but not long enough to eat holes in what it came into contact with.