Read Wax Apple for Free Online Page A

care since she was nineteen, and so far she’d been inside mental hospitals eleven times, for a total of not quite fifteen years out of the last twenty-three. She had attained weights in excess of four hundred pounds, had often literally eaten herself sick, and her mother had reported more than once seeing Molly still trying to eat while in the middle of vomiting. She weighed about two-hundred-sixty now, had been institutionalized for the last sixteen months, and the prognosis of the doctors was poor. No one seriously expected her abused body to survive more than another ten years—the heart would probably give out first—and it was more than likely at least part of that time would be spent once again inside an institution.
    The other two women at the table had not as yet fallen foul of the injurer. One was Ethel Hall, thirty-seven years old and extremely tall and thin, who had also never been married. She’d been a professional librarian since graduation from college, and was thirty-five when she sexually attacked an eleven-year-old girl, who reported the incident to her parents. It turned out not to be the first child thus approached by Miss Hall, though it was the first time any child had told anyone about it. The girl’s father went to Miss Hall, full of angry threats, and after he left she slit her wrists. It was only because the father decided to go to the police that she was found before she could die.
    Why is it that tragic life stories so often seem to have a thread of comedy, almost of farce, running through them? I don’t know. I only know that faces, eyes, even hands are a more than sufficient antidote to the impulses of antic humor. Watching the small careful birdlike movements of Ethel Hall as she picked at her lunch, it was hard to find anything funny in the idea of the lesbian librarian.
    The last woman at the table was Marilyn Nazarro, a young woman now twenty-seven. She had married while still in high school, though apparently not out of the traditional necessity, since it was nearly two full years before her first child was born. A year later she had twins, and shortly after their birth a vague depression began to settle over her. It deepened quickly, and soon the three children were being cared for in the homes of their grandparents, since Marilyn had become incapable of caring for them. She was sleeping and eating poorly, rarely getting up and never getting dressed, she was weeping frequently, and ultimately she took to soiling the bed. At that point the family doctor decided it was time to call in a psychiatrist, and two weeks later Marilyn was committed to a sanitarium, where she stayed two years, then a year of freedom, then another three years in the sanitarium, ending two months ago. The doctors did not believe they had found and eliminated the cause of the depression, and they expected to see Marilyn Nazarro again.
    Looking at her, a chipper vivacious brunette, looking younger than twenty-seven, brightly made-up, the sparkling conversationalist of that table, it was hard to believe she wasn’t cured forever; but I knew that the majority of mental patients who have been hospitalized once will be hospitalized several more times, and the odds are good that the final commitment will be permanent. Marilyn Nazarro with her recurrent depressions, Molly Schweitzler with her recurrent bouts of eating, both were very much of the usual type of mental patient, who could be compared to a kind of wind-up doll. The sanitarium winds them up and sets them loose in society, where they gradually run down again, and have to be returned to be wound up once more, over and over while the spring gets weaker, until the time comes when they can’t be wound up any more at all, and they never again step outside the walls. That made me think of my own wall, and that I wouldn’t be able to work on it until my arm was healed. That gave me a sudden queasy feeling, as though I were on a bobbing boat which had just lost its