“I don’t know,” she repeated.
They began the treatment the moment they received the signed permission from Priscilla. They gave Penny three electric shocks a week for a period of five weeks, and then began speeding up the frequency of treatment. For the next three weeks, Penny’s brain was invaded by electricity once every day. They would strap her legs and her arms to the long flat table while she kicked and gouged, trying to escape the machine behind her, hating it from the very first, hating it even before the first shock struck her, even before the blinding orange flash suddenly streaked behind her eyeballs, even before the sound shrieked into her head, hating the look of the machine itself, the sentient silence of the machine, the ominous machine, the hateful wired machine! Now she knew when they were taking her to the machine that ate her brain with fire. She could smell them as they came down the hall for her, dirty bastards come to take her to the eating machine, she would shout at them and roll her eyes in her head to frighten them away, but they would carry her down the hall, down the sliding sloping hall to the wire machine, strap her down, tie her to the slab, she would twist her head and bite and then sense the hum, that awful hum, know it before it came, feel the orange explosion and the crackling spitting sound inside her head, her hands clenching rigidly, her back arching, blackness.
Limp, unconscious, sweating profusely, she would be carried back to the ward and they would wait for her to regain consciousness, wait for a sign that something was happening, something was penetrating the shell. But she did not respond. So they wrote to Priscilla again and asked this time for permission to begin insulin-shock treatment. “It may help her,” they said, and Priscilla signed another form.
If Penny had hated the ECT, she hated the insulin shocks and the induced comas even more. She knew about the needle. They had done the needle before. They had done the needle to her when she first came here, had stabbed her day and night with the needle, and now there was a needle again, but this time it was an exploding needle, it rocketed into her skull and exploded there in dirty black filth, her eyes would bulge out of her head, she would scream in the blackness, they were trying to make her black, they were trying to explode her brain, they were trying to hit her with a hammer, they were trying to knock her head off with a hammer, five days a week they came with the needle, six days a week, hammer, hammer at her brain, blackness, forty times, forty-five, fifty, and then they stopped. The bastards stopped.
I am claws, I am claws, I am claws!
The doctors were already beginning to think of her as a Back Ward Patient.
The period of mourning was almost over.
The libertine days of World War II, the V-girls and the riveters, the tight sweaters and the low-cut blouses, the short skirts and the exposed knees, the what-the-hell attitude of a generation raised for the preparation and the waging of war, the one-night stands, the shoddy false stateside heroics and the unglorified real heroism overseas, the whole frantic pulse of a nation that had followed the war news as it would the results of a baseball game or a horse race, the entire wacky and unpredictable everyday living that was the United States of America during the war years, all this free and easy living, all this dropping of moral standards in the face of something bigger than both of us, baby, a goddamn war, all this sudden kissing and spontaneous mating had reached its culmination on V-J Day and then had immediately produced a feeling of guilt in a country as basically Puritan as Cotton Mather.
The first thing they did was lower the hem line. They pretended this was the latest news from the Paris couturiers, a hem line that suddenly dropped from a cozy spot an inch above a dimpled knee to someplace low on the shinbone. The women all took out their tape measures, and measured up twelve inches from the floor, and then made the startling discovery that even letting out the hems of their favorite frocks would never make them long enough for the new fashion. The longer dresses and skirts appeared sporadically — this was, after all, a nation in mourning, and mourners don’t go on spending sprees even though all the magazines were shouting about a war-free Christmas the moment the Japanese surrendered. The girls who first sported the longer lengths were mocked by their sisters, but mourning is contagious and someone had to bear the guilt of that wartime spree. So it started with the women, and the first thing they did was cover up those legs, cover up legs that were famous the world over because they were good strong straight legs, rickets-free, fed on good American sunshine and canned Vitamin C. They covered them up in what they called the New Look, a look that was as old as the Crusades, but a look that ushered in a new sense of morality, a stiffening of the sagging upper lip. The sneer that had first accompanied the new fashion turned into a fixed expression of approval. It was popular to mourn, and if the men of America missed seeing shapely calves and well-turned knees, they told themselves the new style was more provocative, a style that hid more than it showed, a style that encouraged speculation.
The new cars came out, the first since 1942, and color was the thing. It was odd that a nation in mourning should suddenly burst onto the automotive scene with the rainbow hues that issued forth from Detroit, but Puritanism is a crazy thing at best, and even in 1692 there was a certain exotic quality to the witches they hanged, a certain theatricality to the serious long-panned men who ranted about God and the devil, and who listened to the Salem maidens as they raved in Freudian free-association about the things the black enticer had asked them to do. Black should have been the color for this guilty people, this nation suddenly blushing, as was every nation in the world, for its wartime extravagances of emotion and rage. But even guilt must have its compensations, and so the automobiles blossomed in radiant splendor, tentatively at first, design still several years behind color boldness. People began buying the product, telling themselves they were entitled to a new car after all those years of deprivation. The war was over, after all, and if they bought a beautifully colored symbol of their own masculinity, it could help them to forget those foolish years. Oddly, everyone in America had already forgotten the very real and noble part they’d played in crushing a monster.
The skirts were longer, and the cars were flashier, and people came back to work as if they were returning from a long weekend that just happened to be World War II. The weekend had been a lot of fun, but now there was work to be done. There had been drinking and fooling around, and a little honest killing here and there, but now there was work to be done, now there was a desk to get in order, and the guilt was heavy. The Hollywood machine began grinding out a few sticky-sweet films on readjustment, the best of which was The Best Years of Our Lives, and a little Broadway revue named Call Me Mister was a smash hit, combining as it did memories of the military with the bewilderment of return to prewar values. The trouble was, however, nobody could remember what the prewar values were. The young people who’d gone off to fight the war couldn’t remember the thirties except as a time of NRA stickers and poverty, and all this had radically changed the moment the Japanese dropped their cargo of bombs and torpedoes on the sleeping fleet in Pearl Harbor. There was more than a simple diffusion of memory involved in readjustment. There was, in fact, no memory at all. The people who came back, and the people who were there to welcome them, suddenly discovered they were starting with a blank sheet. They had been children before the war, innocent and naïve, thrilling to the high whining voice of Henry Aldrich yelling for his mother, but now they were adults, beset with all the problems of adults, all the fears, all the guilts, all the obsessions. It was no wonder that the club was formed, and that it gained such immediate acceptance.