I did not have to puzzle over what this meant. Those people whose names were on my stationery? It seems to me that I am every one of them.

Writing to you, I am myself. And what that self is I will tell you: a graveyard. I can be a graveyard. But that is a thing you would have to find out for yourself. A person cannot tell you a thing and have you just believe them. A person has to prove it. You would find out, if you cared to, that I have told no one about you. As if anyone would believe me if I had! As I think you would be the first to agree, it is hard to know what to believe anymore.

Although this is the kind of place that can call your bluff. It’s like—let’s say you are at a mixer in high school, and a boy you don’t like keeps asking you to dance. Let’s say he keeps coming over, and each time he asks, you say, “Let’s wait for a good one.” Then “Great Balls of Fire” comes on, and what are you going to say—“I’m waiting for ‘Color My World’?”

This place was once a school for girls. For one hundred years a tony school for girls in the Georgian style with a circular drive, then mounting fiscal problems and a merger with the corresponding school for boys, only the name retained in the hyphenated name of the new institution.

After many years vacant, what was once a parlor hung with portraits of the founder, the place the girls received their guests, is now a lounge we call the Hostility Suite. The paint is fresh, the armchairs inviting, the wood polished; it stops short of fussy. It is easy to imagine mattresses being pulled off the beds upstairs, and teenaged girls in baby-doll pajamas surfing them down the stairs.

And how about this for the way life works—one of the patients used to be a student. When Chatty was away at school, this was the school she went to until she was kicked out, that is, for drinking. She plays the drinking down, says she monitored herself using the Jimi Hendrix test: Am I choking on my own vomit? No? Then I can have another drink.

Chatty has lost nearly all of her short-term memory, and she loves it. Wasn’t that the point, she asks, of drinking? But she says her recollections of school are untouched. She said a platinum screen goddess had attended in the thirties, and had sneaked out through the chapel to elope. Chatty said that every girl in the school for years after claimed that the screen star’s room was her own.

Chatty remembers jumping out of her window and running to the beach where, under a full moon, you could make shadows on the sand. She said she sabotaged convocations, substituting vegetable seeds for the flowers in the Centennial Garden, so that where should have bloomed hollyhocks—corn stalks. And in place of delphiniums, butternut squash.