night dreaming of a beveled camel hair paintbrush; its fine-grained softness made me want to squeal with wonder.
All these dreams were pleasant ones. The most pleasant ones were of the pink blossoms of mimosa trees—the whole blossom, not just its pinkness—how they swayed in Memphis beside the Mississippi like the skirts of ballet dancers.
The color cherry red repeatedly filled my mind. Only occasionally did it take the shape and shininess of actual cherries hanging over Adam’s ears.
“Six days have passed,” Adam said one morning. “On the seventh day, today, it would be good if you began to walk about. You need to regain your strength.”
I agreed.
He held out his hand to me; I stood up and wobbled out into the open sun. The effort made me dizzy; I would have fallen if he had not held my hand. I realized the seriousness of my weakness; I had tarried too long in my sickbed convalescence. I knew better than to indulge in the horizontal. I knew from my grandmother’s illnesses that patients should be up and on their feet as soon as possible. I knew from the treatment charts of even those with mental ailments how crucial exercise was to the achievement of any kind of health. And yet I had banished such knowledge from my mind. I had not wanted things to change. I had made a demigod of Adam, in whose care I wished to be perpetually cradled.
Our first quarrel occurred when I asked him to bring fresh ferns for my bed. I had never asked him to do anything particular for me before; he had always just anticipated my needs.
He looked startled, but he replied, “Of course,” and left immediately.
I felt annoyed. I hadn’t meant he should do it right that minute. I had thought we would sit down and chat. If we were not to sit together and chat in the shade of the tree, I thought petulantly, then I would sit by myself and think.
What was I to do about my situation? Our situation. Unbidden, the image of his genitalia presented itself to my mind, the pleasant curve of the end of his penis. Immediately I was furious with myself. He was mentally ill. He was practically my patient. Hands off! I was the sane one; I needed to take charge. Nationally, 50 percent of the patients in mental hospitals suffered from religious delusions. Many of them believed themselves to be Jesus—thoroughly divine, not human. Well, it was the same here in the Garden: 50 percent of the population suffered from religious delusions.
Immediately I thought of his gentleness, his sense of my needs, how he had courteously constructed his own bed under a different tree. I thought of the sincerity and simplicity with which he spoke, when he spoke of God. There was nothing proselytizing about it, nothing that pressured me to believe, no coercion. I felt nothing of fear and little of curiosity. Cared for and content, I found it difficult to think of next.
He made me feel helpless. The situation made me angry.
Then I looked out into the sunshine, the simple way it lay on the grass. It was as though the grass had been mown; it was like a large, civilized park, left to go partly natural. Idly, I thought of Kew Gardens—“It isn’t far from London,” Alfred Noyes had written. “Come down to Kew in lilac time, in lilac time, in lilac time….” In the distance, I saw Adam moving toward me. His arms were heaped so high with fern fronds that it looked as though a pile of greenery, with legs, was making its way across the plain.
I got up from my rock-chair and cleared the shriveled fern from my bed place under the makeshift roof. I didn’t want Adam to have to build a new roof of banana leaves, though a few splits had developed, turning the edges of the leaves into a coarse brown fringe. Probably the roof would need to be refreshed soon enough, but perhaps piece by piece.
As soon as Adam finished spreading out the ferns, fashioning a thicker mound at one end to suggest a pillowed place, I startled myself by asking him in a rather presumptuous manner, “Do lilacs grow here?”
Adam straightened up and put his hands on his hips. He looked at me in a level and direct way. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll get you some.” And he turned and walked away.
I was glad to have him go. I hadn’t finished thinking about our