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reinforced with chicken wire between double panes, her back very straight, her hands clasped. She said it was important to practice good posture, and she moved her head, slowly, deliberately, when she looked to the right or left. Her skin was pale and clear like white porcelain. Before I left, we repeated some rituals evolved earlier in half-serious fun: children’s songs with hand motions (“here is the church and here is the steeple” … “I’m a little teapot, short and stout” … “along came the rain and washed the spider out”), the Repulse Tiger movement from T’ai Chi, a series of Chinese bows in slow motion. She said the hospital was like a big clock and she was in the floor of the clock; every day she went to Group, and played dominoes in the Common Room. She ate her lunch in a chair by the nurses’ desk; she liked their white clothes and the sighing of the elevators.
    By the time she was released, the TM instructor living at Price Street had moved to Cleveland. Rayme moved in with me, with the Harvard carpenter, with the Lebanese photographer. She wasn’t paying rent but we had the extra room anyway and sometimes she cooked meals.
    Once she cooked soup. For an hour, she stood by the stove, stirring the soup in a large dented kettle. I looked into the pot and saw a jagged object floating among the vegetables. I pulled it out, holding the hot, thin edge; it was a large fragment of blackened linoleum from the buckling kitchen floor.
    I asked Rayme how a piece of the floor got into the soup.
    “I put it there,” Rayme said.
    I didn’t answer.
    “It’s clean,” Rayme said, “I washed it first,” and then, angrily, “If you’re not going to eat my food, don’t look at it.”
    That was her worst summer. She told me she didn’t want to take the Thorazine because it made her into someone else. Men were the sky and women were the earth; she likedbooks about Indians. She said cats were good and dogs were bad; she hated the lower half of her body. She didn’t have lovers but quietly adored men from her past—relatives, boyfriends, men she saw in magazines or on the street. Her high school boyfriend was Krishna, a later one Jesus, her father “Buddha with a black heart.” She built an altar in her room out of planks and cement blocks, burned candles and incense, arranged pine needles and pebbles in patterns. She changed costumes often and moved the furniture in her room several times a day, usually shifting it just a few inches. She taped pictures on her wall: blue Krishna riding his white pony, Shiva dancing with all her gold arms adorned, Lyndon Johnson in glossy color from
Newsweek
, cutouts of kittens from a toilet-paper advertisement. Her brother, three years younger than she and just graduated from high school, came to see her several times a week. He brought her a blue bottle full of crushed mint, and played his guitar. He seemed quiet, witty, focused; he looked like Rayme, the same dark hair and slender frame and chiseled bones. She said he was the angel who flew from the window with sleep-dust on his shoes; he used to tell his sisters, when they were all children, that he was the one who’d sealed their eyes shut in the night, that they would never catch him because boys could be ghosts in the dark.
    On an afternoon when we’d taken mescaline, Rayme sat weeping on the couch at Price Street. The couch was brown and nubby, and people had to sit toward its edge or the cushions would fall through to the floor. The cushions had fallen through, and Rayme sat in the hole of the frame comfortably, her legs splayed up over the board front. She sat looking at the ceiling, her head thrown back, like a woman trying to keep her mascara from running. She remained still, as though enthroned, waiting, her face wet, attentive. I watched her from across the room. “Yes,” she said after a long while, as though apprehending some truth, “tears wash the eyes and lubricate the skin of the