This Gossamer House (edit 1)

Life is lived in fragments in this house.

Abie visits Caroline is the hospital every three or four days. He stays for thirty minutes each time.

Where is Lisa? Years later in the next house and again in the house after that, I ask Garth who, in this part of my life, is the string around my finger, where was Lisa? In Europe? Living with Nadavi in Israel? In another of her houses? We once counted out all our houses, each of us listing streets and street numbers (we were bent on listing full addresses only).
"Nineteen," I said.
"Twenty-eight."-Lisa.
"Twenty-eight? Wait." I said, counting again. "Twenty-one. Yup, that's it. How do you get twenty-eight?"

"My memory is shriveling like an old woman's tits," I say to Garth in the next house when I ask him to pencil in those rubbed out times. Garth tells me we fought over Lisa. My voice rises one full octave: "We fought over Lisa! You never cared, you didn't even like--" He says he's not going to lie and tell me he actually liked her; they had a personality clash is all. It was just he thought Caroline wasn't Lisa's responsibility, Lisa had to get on with her life, he said. "But her own sister!" I said, although I understood. Guilt is like lead in my veins.

Julian phones. "Don't visit," I tell him. "Are you sure?" he says. I don't want him to see Caroline this way, not for myself, but for her, out of respect. I don't want visitors paying their respects, watching from the shore as her mind thrashes in treacherous waters.

Although the trees are barren on the Outside, in Nine South, it's spring with
lilac-colored walls, daffodils, tulips, and crocuses sprouting on window sills in the Group Therapy Room and patients' lounge. Gloria, Pat, Dorothy, Kim-these are the nurses. Hair dyed beet red, blond with insistent brown shoots, clipped black hair like a cap. Voices like cream and morning coffee.

Time goes slowly and quickly.

Dr. Flak schedules a round of shock treatments. When I see Abie, I weep on his shoulder. He's going to check his sources, he says. Maybe we won't have to, maybe--Like the evictions, there are no maybes. I know this.

She laughs like a crazy person, whooping like a trapped bird, flapping and hooping with unflagging insistence. "Trogolite!" she shrieks. "Trogolite!"

"Honey," I once said, "there is no such thing as a Trogolite. What does it mean to you? Honey sweetie, tell me, what is it?"
"It's an old word." she said.
"Can we check in the dictionary?"
"It's an old word, from England," she said, her head drooping and then from her throat, a hum like a motor idling.

I sat with her, my hand on her knee. To ground her, keep her in this world from which any visitor would scuttle away. Not a good place. Bad things happen in this place. I breathe in. Five seconds later I breathe in again, this time lightly, my stomach lifting and receding only slightly; I tread lightly.
"Tell me then. What it is. A trogolite."
She grinned then. A lewd sneering smirk.
"It's a hermaphrodite."
"Who, honey? Who's a hermaphrodite?"
"You. You are," she said and flew off with her whooping laugh as wings, her laugh so searing that it scorched my eyes. And I can't save her. I would leave my mind, tear into her untamed planet and scoop her up; I would make deals with the ruffians--mother for daughter, I would plea, mother for daughter.

The first in the round of twelve electroshock treatments is scheduled for tomorrow morning at eleven-twenty.