Plans of the Heart

[Fiction]

When I was eighteen years old, I met Derek in the recreation room on the seventh floor of St. Vincent’s hospital.

“Baila? Your name is Baila?” he asked, sliding down the orange plastic coach until he was beside me. He was a thin boy with vivid blue eyes and sunken cheeks. His restless hands drifted from the seat cushion, to his jeans, to the back of his neck.

“My name is Derek,” he told me. “Are you frum, religious, you know?”

I nodded, scanning his blue-black hair. He didn’t wear a yarmulke.

He laughed loudly, for no reason, and the other patients swung around from their positions in front of the television. Derek stared them down, and they slowly turned back to the box’s magnetic pull.

“Are you frum?” I asked. He nodded.

“I don’t wear my yarmulke here. It’s too confusing. And Derek—it’s the name I use when I’m out in the world.”

“Why are you here?” I asked.

He hesitated, probing his bottom lip with his thumb.

“My parents- ” his eyes flashed downwards. “They- they caught me with a guy. So they had me admitted. They told the nurses it was depression. They think this will cure me.” He sighed, slouching against the seat back.

“But how old are you?” I asked. He seemed too old to be committed involuntarily.

“Twenty one.”

“Why do you let them put you here? You’re over eighteen. How can they hold you?”

Derek looked away and then back at me, his eyes wide and hopeless.

“I want to be here,” he said. “Maybe it will make it better. Why are you here?”

“I had a miscarriage. My ex-boyfriend’s baby- I got upset. I attacked a doctor.” I said the words stiffly like lines in a play about someone else’s life. I didn’t want to remember everything that had happened. The sex. The pregnancy. The blood.

Derek nodded.

“I know,” he said, his eyes soft, “it can be so hard. I haven’t attacked anyone yet, only myself.”

“What do you mean?”

“I tried to kill myself last year. With my tfillin.”

He had tied the leather straps of his tfillin around his neck and his closet rod.

“I was knocked unconscious but then the rod broke and I fell to the floor.”

“Why did you use your tfillin?” I asked him.

He turned away and his hand went up to cover his eyes that filled with tears.

“I don’t know. I – I love Hashem. I want to be frum.” He turned back to me and caught my eyes with his with a fierce anger. “I don’t want to be gay. Fuck, I don’t want to be gay.”

“Why?” I asked, envious of how clear-cut his diagnosis was. “You’re lucky enough to know who you are. Maybe you should just accept it.”

“It’s not who I am!” he cried, as if in violent prayer. He leaned in closer to me.

“In third grade my Chumash teacher kept me in class during recess, just to tutor me,” he said. “He told these jokes about chickens, everyone liked him, he was funny. He gave me a silver pencil one time, for being the quietest student or the best-behaved. I forget. I loved that pencil. Sometimes I sat on his lap. He put his hands. He- he rubbed. His hand. He rubbed himself. He touched me.” Derek looked down at the floor.

The forced laughter on the television seemed suddenly loud. I kept my body still, my eyes on Derek, afraid if I moved an inch he wouldn’t continue to give me his secrets.

“Did you tell anyone?” I finally asked.

Derek shook his head and ran his hand through this hair. “No. Nobody. I didn’t understand. I didn’t have any words. What could I say? Then I went to fourth grade. It was over. Then I had a neighbor. We were playing around, wrestling, in his attic. We started-” he drew his legs up into his chest and finished in a whisper, “touching.”

He leaned his head back on the couch, his adams apple poking out of his pale neck. He continued speaking, faster now, reciting facts that he had obviously polished away to smooth sentences by going over and over them in his mind. “In camp, in eighth grade, I had a group of friends. We’d go off into the woods at night. Do things. Made each other feel good. We never talked about, it was like this silent play that we all agreed to participate in. And agreed to pretend wasn’t happening.” His eyes welled with tears. “What I do with men now, it’s only because of everything that happened,” he said. “I’m not gay. I love god and I want to get married. Have children. Be frum. I’m not gay.”

I nodded. I believed him.

The bell rang on the ward for lunch, three long clangs. The other patients moved in drug-slowed shuffles to the cafeteria. Derek and I stood and walked down the hall side by side. Both of us got kosher trays from the counter. I unwrapped mine, but I didn’t eat. The smell of tuna drifting up from the tray made me nauseous. I watched in silence as Derek ate his sandwich.

We didn’t say much to each other after that first conversation. The lethargy of the ward settled on us and Derek didn’t want to talk. But we sat together all day and watched the others, sometimes turning to each other and exchanging snide commentary on our fellow patients.

Derek shared his room with José, a fat boy who moved like a penguin and stuttered lines from cartoons and movies.

”D-d-dump the drugs the cops are coming! D-dump the drugs the cops are coming!” was his favorite. José didn’t seem crazy like the rest of the people on the ward. He seemed retarded. But they treated him like anyone of us. When he threw a fit, crying and screaming, three of the guards surrounded him. Derek and I cowered in our couch in the corner of the rec room and watched as Jose kicked his fat legs powerfully and screamed:

”AAAAAAAAH AAAAAAAAAAAAAH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!”

The guards closed in with their hypodermic guns. I covered my ears and closed my eyes but I still heard them grunt as they stabbed him. They dragged his body down the hall and threw him in the locked room that stunk of shit and urine. They slammed the door and José’s cries faded.

“Is this hell?” Derek asked me, his nervous hands drawing down his face.

“For some of them,” I said, shrugging. “Not for me. Besides for that, José. I mean, I have you here. And I like being here. It’s so calm. It’s nice to be around people. I’m sick of living on my own.”

“You don’t live with your parents?”

“No. They live in Ohio. And we don’t talk much. Because I’m not really religious anymore.” I picked at the plastic piping on the cushion, saddened to realize that was the truth.

“You don’t keep Shabbos—wait, but you get kosher trays?”

“I keep Shabbos, pretty much, and kosher, I even keep the laws of modesty most of the time. I don’t even own a pair of pants. But it’s boys. You know.” I drew my legs up to my chest, and rested my face on my knees, my eyes on him.

“Are you happy?” he asked.

I shook my head no, stopped and shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “I never planned this. It all just fell apart. I always loved Hashem and the beauty of Yiddishkiet. And I miss my family and everything. I hate them for what they’ve done to me, but I miss it also.”

He nodded and I knew he understood. We fell silent again.

Later that night two guards dragged José out of the locked room and threw him into his bed. The next morning he paced the hallway, his voice burbling with extra drugs, crying:

”R-r-run man run they’re coming. R-run!”

His words it seemed more real, more appropriate then the other call on the floor:

“Medications! Abel, Arnold, Cooper, Chang, Diaz, Froman, Goodman, Kalper, Levy, Lopez, Miles, Maldez, Newman, Peterson, Perez, Rothman, Ravine, Sabaretta, Salomon, Scott, Smither, Stein, Volio, Wajoski! Medications!”

I didn’t take medications. They wanted me to. They made me line up with everyone else, by the nurses’ window.

“I don’t want it,” I told them every time.

“Don’t take the meds,” I whispered to Derek, who stood at the back of the line. “They only hurt you. They only make pharmaceutical companies wealthy by numbing people to their problems.” My parents had explained all of this to me as a child.

“I’ll hide them, I won’t swallow them,” Derek promised with a grin. I watched as he took the pills from the nurse and placed them carefully in his mouth. We ran giggling out the room together to my bedroom, making sure no one was watching as he slipped inside. Boys weren’t allowed in girl’s rooms.

I grabbed the small trashcan and he spat the pills out onto the clumps of hair and crumpled tissues. We fell back laughing on my bed and we laughed and laughed until I cried. Derek patted my back, saying “shhhh, shhhhhh” until the tears left me. My body dried and emptied. We went back to the recreation room, back to our endless sitting.

I was released after ten days. I exchanged numbers with Derek and we held each other tight as we said goodbye.

My stay on the psychiatric ward and my traumatic miscarriage had sparked a determination to finally do something constructive with the liberties of secular life. I enrolled in college. Derek and I spoke occasionally, as I waited for the semester to begin. He was trying, again, harder, to be frum, to be good.

He called me when I got home from my first exhilarating evening class at Brooklyn College. It was late, and I was already lying in bed with the light off, my mind racing.

“How are you?” I asked. “I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

“I’m all right,” he said. “What about you?” Loud music in the background muffled his voice.

“Where are you? I can’t really hear you!”

“Hold on, hold on,” he shouted into the phone, and a minute later the noise receded.

“Is that better?” Derek asked. I still heard a thumping bass, but his voice was clearer.

“Yeah, where are you?”

“I’m out. Out on the town. Out with Sean. Having a great time. And I just needed to talk to you.” There was something manic in the way he was talking, something too happy to be normal.

“Are you ok? And who is Sean?” I asked him, “You sound—”

“I’m fine, I’m fine, baruch Hashem,” he said, sarcasm cutting into his words. “But tell me about you, how are you doing?”

“I had my first day of college today!”

“Neat. How was it?”

I paused because I couldn’t think how to put the feeling into words.

“It was crazy,” I said. “Unbelievable. The professor was really smart and its just amazing how there are so many worlds out there, you know? We’re raised to think everything is only in the Torah, in Yiddishkiet, but there are so many brilliant ideas and people beyond that we never learned about. The class was so incredible.” I heard how happy I sounded and I stopped speaking, because despite his over-animated voice, I guessed he might not be doing so well, and might not appreciate my excitement if he was having a rough time.

“What going on with you?” I asked. “Are you still living at your parents?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They think if they stay in denial everything will go away.”

“How is the ‘everything’?”

Derek didn’t respond for a moment. Then he said, “Bad.”

My stomach filled with icy dread. I curled up under the covers and held my pillow to my chest. “What’s going on?”

“I’m out with Sean. He’s this French dude I met on Craigslist – you know, this website where people meet up. We’re at this club. I come here all the time. I’m still in yeshiva every day, but at night, I can’t stay away from him, from this place. I wish it wasn’t – there’s something – magnetic about him.”

“Are you guys in a relationship?”

“If doing Ecstasy and getting fucked in the ass is a relationship, yes.” His voice broke off and he sobbed.

“Derek, Derek, poor Derek,” I murmured, my heart crumbling for him. “Do you want me to come get you, or do you want to come over?”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice shaky. “I’ll come take a cab. What’s your address?”

Derek arrived half an hour later. I had tidied up my apartment and brushed my teeth. I was still in the boxers and ripped t-shirt I had worn to bed.

He looked awful.

His bloodshot eyes were cupped by blue bags of exhaustion, his pupils large and unfocused. His breath, when he leaned in to hug me at the doorway, stank of alcohol and cigarettes. Our cheeks met, his skin rough with stubble. He looked like a very tired and drunk goy, in his gelled up hair, undershirt fitted against his ribs and tight jeans.

He staggered into the room after me.

“Can I lie with you?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said and pulled back the cover. He yanked off his shoes, tripping over his feet and catching himself on the bed. After he unbuttoned his jeans and pulled them off, he lay in the bed, in his boxers and undershirt. I came in after him. He cuddled his thin body up to me and I held him against my chest and rocked him gently like a baby.

The shma prayer came to me, the one that I used to say every night and that my mother used to say to me as a child. I used to sing the words of the prayer to my little brother when I rocked him to sleep. I sang them softly to Derek, my love for him pushing past the ordinance that forbade me, as a woman, to sing in his presence:

“Shma yisroel hashem elokainu, hashem echad. shma yisroel hashem elokainu, hashem echad.”

My t-shirt became wet with Derek’s tears and I was crying too. He lay flat on his back. I leaned over and kissed his wet cheeks.

“Baila. Baila. Save me,” Derek whimpered, pulling me down to him, clutching at my hair with his fingers. He kissed my cheeks and my eyes and then my mouth. I opened my lips to him. Our tongues met. The taste of him was raw and ugly, like vomit and sewage and too much drink. He kissed me eagerly but I pulled back and lay back down beside him. He rolled over and hugged me, running his hands over my body.

“Baila. My sister Baila,” Derek said. “The sister of my soul.” His warm hands reached under my shirt and over my breasts.

“Derek! Derek! What—”

“Please Baila, please, save me.” He took my lip between his lips, pushing his tongue into my mouth. He put one hand around my waist, sliding between my back and the bed, pulling my boxers down with his other hand.

“Derek. This isn’t- please Derek.” I wanted to push him away, but I also wanted to hold him close, to pull out his pain, to take it into me. He fell over my shoulder as he took his hard penis out of his boxers. My thighs split apart under his strong legs. Against my will, my insides welcomed him.

“Derek,” I cried, my tears sinking into his shoulder. “Please don’t do this. It’s not a good idea. I don’t want us to have sex.”

“I’m not gay,” Derek hissed into my ear. “I’m not gay. I’m not gay,” he repeated as he moved into my still body, becoming angrier and harder in his voice and movements “I’m not gay. I’m not gay. I’m not gay.” He cried the words one final time, ramming into me, coming, shuddering, inside of me.

He pulled out and lay back on the sheet. His hand drifted over my wet face. In a moment he was snoring in deep relaxed breaths.

I couldn’t lie beside him. I went to the bathroom and closed the door and turned on the shower, crying. I washed his residue out of me and punched the wall with my fist, over and over and over again.