The Protocol

We have been here two weeks. I have not felt like writing until today.

I am sitting by the north window, up in this atrocious old nursery, and there is nothing at all to stop me writing as much as I please except the lack of strength to hold the pen. Hollis is away all day, and some nights, when the cases are serious.

I am glad that my case is not serious.

These nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing, though. He does not know how much I actually suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that is the end of it as far as he is concerned. It is only nerves. It weighs on me so, not to do my duty in any way, not to be any use.

I meant to be such a help to him. Such a rest and a comfort. And here I am, a burden, and it is only the middle of June, and I am already this.

Nobody would believe what an effort the little things are. To dress. To decide about dinner.

It is fortunate that Nita is so good with the baby. Nita is ours the way the car is ours and the house is ours: Hollis hired her in the spring from an agency in the city, and she came up with the crib in the second car. August is such a dear boy, and so good, and I cannot be with him for more than a few minutes; it makes me so nervous that I have to put him down and walk out of the room, and Nita watches me do it with a face like a closed door.

I suppose Hollis has never been nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wallpaper.

At the beginning he meant to have the room repapered. Then he decided that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing is worse for a nervous patient than to give way to a fantasy. He said that if we changed the paper, next it would be the bed, and then the bars on the windows, and then the gate he would put at the top of the stairs, and then the lane, and on until there was nothing in the world I could stand to be near.

"You know this place is doing you good," he said, and he does know it; he says it with the same face he uses to tell a family that the scan was clean. "And really, dear, I am not going to renovate another man's house on a summer lease."

"Then let us go downstairs," I said. "There are such pretty rooms down there."

He put his arms around me and called me his good little goose, and said he would sleep in the cellar if I wanted, and have it painted white while we were at it. Which is his way of loving me, and I do know that, and it is not nothing.

But he is right enough about the bed and the windows. It is as airy and comfortable a room as anybody could want, and I am not going to be silly enough to make him uncomfortable over a whim.

I am getting quite fond of the big room, everything but the paper.

Out of one window I see the garden, the deep-shaded arbors, the old flowers gone riot, the gnarled trees. Out of another I get the bay, and the estate's own little dock with the boathouse the family keeps locked. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down to the water. I am always catching movement on it. I always think I see people walking in those paths and standing under those arbors, and Hollis has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imagination and my habit of making pictures, a nervous condition like mine will be only too glad of the excuse.

I think sometimes that if I were well enough to work a little, it would let the pressure off my head and rest me. I find I get very tired when I try. There is an unfinished repeat on my laptop, a hotel commission, sixty centimeters of a pattern that would have taken me two days when I was well, and I open the file most mornings and close it again before Nita brings the baby down.

It is discouraging not to have anyone to talk to about the work. When I am well, Hollis says, we will have my cousin Dov and Ines up for a long visit. But for now he says he would as soon put fireworks in my pillowcase as have those two in the house with me in this state.

I wish I could get well faster.

But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it knows exactly what a vicious influence it has.

There is a spot that recurs in the pattern where a curve lies over like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. There is one place where two strips did not match, so the eyes go all up and down the seam, one a little higher than the other, all the way to the ceiling. I get positively angry at the impertinence of it, and at how it never, ever stops. I have never seen so much expression in an inanimate thing, and we all know how much expression they have. I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and more terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than other children got out of a toy store.

The furniture in this room is only inharmonious, nothing worse; the family brought it all up from downstairs to make the room usable for us. The floor is scratched and gouged, and the great heavy bed we found standing in the middle of the room like something scheduled to be destroyed looks as if it had been through a war.

But I do not mind it a bit. Only the paper.

I have started keeping this notebook in the gap in the plaster itself, where the paper is torn away near the head of the bed, where the lath and the outside wall leave a space the book fits into exactly. Hollis would never look at the wall that closely. He looks at the wall the way he looks at a rash: briefly, and for evidence, and then never again.

There is one more thing in the room, and I do not know how to write this without sounding like a woman who needs the Marbury clinic — the rest cure the doctors keep promising me, out in the desert — so I will write it plainly and let the paper be the judge. Hollis put a sleep ring on my finger the week we arrived. It logs my heart rate and my temperature and how much of the night I spend awake, and it sends all of it to his phone, and he looks at it at the nurses' station in Boston between patients, the way you would check on a dog left in a car.

I have not taken it off. But I have thought about it the way I used to think about the exit row, on planes, in the years when flying still frightened me: which seat, how many rows, how fast.