Victory Over Japan by Ellen Gilchrist

Author:Ellen Gilchrist [Gilchrist, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Victory Over Japan
ISBN: 9781940941141
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 1984-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

***

Duncan and I went off to the real Caribbean in July. While I was gone Fanny finished the room and moved out into the hall and bathroom.

“Oh, did you ever see the bathroom?” she said to me later. “Oh, I could never make it again. I painted on the bathtub, on the toilet, on the washstand, on the floor. ‘Oh, dear, we have to lock Mother up again,’ I heard Gloria saying.

“You should have seen the tub. They could not deny it now. Now they knew what they were doing. I had dumped the whole thing in their laps. They bought off Clark. They bought off Treadway. But I showed them. They had no way of not knowing anymore. ‘Oh, dear, we have to lock poor old Mother up again,’ Gloria said. ‘Oh, dear, oh dear.’”

The day before they came to get her she wrote MURDER over the bed in three-foot letters.

“Gibberish,” Doctor Treadway said when he saw it.

“Generalities,” Gabe added. And as soon as Fanny was safely back in Mandeville he called the painters. They painted the room light blue with white trim. How could I have stopped them? I was sailing from Petit Saint Vincent to Mustique, locked up on a fifty-foot sailboat watching Duncan drink beer and brood over the unions and the government coming to take his money away.

“Oh, I could never make the room again,” she said the other day, safe at home once more, safe in the arms of her wonderful keepers, Stelazine and lithium and Elavil. The little bottles standing guard beside her bed, the little maids. The room is so clean and cheerful, there is a blue silk quilt on the bed, a clean rug on the floor. The paintings are hanging on the wall, the dresser drawers are shut, the books are on the shelves.

“I would have photographed it. If I had been here I would have stopped him. I can’t believe he let them paint it all away.”

“Here,” she said, taking a sketch pad from a drawer beside the bed. “This is what I’m doing now. I’m going to play their game. I’m going to put them on paper and have them framed and nail nails into the wall and hang them up. That’s what they told me at the Loony Bin. You have to play their game. That’s the new idea. So I played their game. And now I’m home. Here, look at what I’m doing.” She opened the pad. It was a scale drawing of her house, everything very precise like an architect’s sketch. In front of the house were seven garbage cans, all in a row with the tops down nice and tight. “I’m going to do a series of these drawings,” she said. “Won’t they love it when they see it? Won’t Gabe be surprised?”

“Oh, God, you’re so subtle,” I said. I gave her a kiss. “I have to get home now. I have to go cook dinner. I’ll see you soon. I’ll talk to you later.

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