Recognition
During the tour of a history of psychiatry museum, we paused before a children’s chair exhibit, what seemed a large, clumsy box. To illuminate, there were photographs taken during its “in-use days” in the lunatic room of a hospital. The photographs were dated recently enough to include my childhood.
The guide, a student, said the chair had sufficient size to enclose the legs of even the largest child. “Notice,” she said, “the door’s double padlock,” and pointed below where the patient in that photograph sat straight-jacketed, face obscured by the stiff mesh spit and bite shield. “The child is there for a reason,” she said. “Disobedience, most likely. Or behavioral outbursts.” It seemed an illustration of “never” or “impossible.”
When I was young, it was not uncommon for those who cared for me to threaten a straight-jacket. An asylum, one day, was identified from our car. My mother, tired of my “acting a fool,” said, “A wing is reserved there for children …”
Some teachers said, “If you can’t sit still or stay quiet …” and we did, not talking back, not moving or cursing or calling out awful names. What were our classroom crimes? What provoked my parents and relatives to threaten with the nut house and the loony bin? Such quiet I kept. Acquiescence.
Once, a boy two years younger moved into my friend’s house. “A foster child,” my mother said. “Go and meet him.” And for half an hour, the three of us played in my friend’s living room. When some small toy became important for both of them to hold, that foster child, without speaking, swung a heavy glass ashtray so hard into my friend’s skull I thought he’d killed him. I heard myself scream from somewhere far away while that boy bit his own arm hard enough to draw blood. I understood he meant that wound to justify self-defense, that my unconscious friend would need to graft his story onto the one I’d tell.
And then he waited. My friend stirred. His mother didn’t ask anything of me except to “leave this minute.” Before the day ended, that boy was, as my mother reported, “back in the system.” Nothing else was said. The spare room in my friend’s house retrieved its sewing machine and ironing board, the space, his mother said, “useful again.”
I am saying “boy” because I forgot his name, though that summer, for my mother’s joy, I recited the names of everyone who lived in the eleven houses on our street, and even now I can recall enough to ace the simple SATs of nostalgia, settling on calling him “that foster child” the way I sometimes say, “Here, boy” to a stranger’s dog, expecting it to be pleased by what passes for recognition.