I scribbled some notes so I'd remember details for the patients' charts, then
hurried to my supervisory group. 
    "How'd the cooking class go, Lynn?" The Boss asked. 
    "Borderline, I guess. I had to do most of the cooking, but they wolfed down the
food. I think they'll all come back. But several guys are quite a challenge." 
    "Tell." The Boss never used a syllable more than was absolutely necessary. 
    "One guy appointed himself my lieutenant, which helped. Otherwise, there's a mute
guy who doesn't understand English. He stared at me the whole time. Another guy
made lewd remarks, which set off a paranoid I had to calm down. And a rebellious
one tried to get personal but I fended him off pretty well." 
    "What about the lewd?" 
    "My second-in-command shut him down, but not before he'd yelled at me pretty good." 
    "How'd that feel?" 
    "I felt like a kid. But I got yelled at a lot in my family, so I didn't get too rattled." 
    "Protected too?" 
    "Overprotected." 
    "Yes. Either of them like your father?" 
    "Both." 
    "Good answer. Remember it while you're with them next time." 

    The following Tuesday I left the hospital at midmorning to pick up supplies.
Although I'd have chosen whole wheat bread for the sandwiches, I decided to buy
white because I figured that's what they'd choose for themselves. For nutrition's
sake, I picked up salad fixings although it wasn't in the plan. If they didn't eat it,
I would. 
    I made it back to the classroom ten minutes early, but Nurse Hutchinson and the
crew had beat me to it. I wondered if the men were that eager to eat decent food,
or she just wanted to get them off the ward. 
    Eugene's expression had the same vapid emptiness. As they filed in, I lingered
outside to talk with Hutchinson.
    "Are you sure Eugene is ready for this? He can't understand the directions." 
    "We have state requirements to fill," she scolded. "It's our duty to provide
therapeutic services to our patients." As usual, she left without waiting for my
response. 
    I went in, passed out the day's recipe and read it aloud, breaking each part of the
process into the smallest possible pieces so that success was likely. Then I asked
for volunteers. WilliamMcDougall beat together eggs and milk. Levi sliced cheese,
no easy task with a blunt knife, the only kind allowed in that kitchen. Roderick
Thistlethwaite set the table. I assigned the guys who couldn't drag much attention
away from their hallucinations to melt butter in two large frying pans. The other
washed and cut veggies for the salad. 
    Nasty Jack watched us but refused to join in. Eugene followed me closely, his long
hairy arms twitching at his sides. I tried to hide how crowded I felt by his
presence, wondering if he pictured me as his mother or his dream girl. 
    I was determined that this time the guys would make the meal themselves instead
of observing me as they had last week. When they'd completed the preparations, I
told each one to assemble and cook his own sandwich. I kept one eye on the stove
and the other on how much ham and cheese they used so no one was shorted by
someone else's greed. When Jack approached the stove with a sandwich two inches
thick, I marshaled up some smooth talking about it not cooking right that convinced
him to cut back without threatening me again. That felt like a victory even though
he communicated his displeasure by slopping the sandwich into the egg mixture so
hard it forced a runny mess over the sides of the bowl. 
    When Eugene's turn came, he gaped helplessly back and forth between the
ingredients and me. 
    "A slice of bread, two slices of cheese, and three of ham." I pointed at the foods as
I said their name, and mimed stacking them. "Then another piece of bread on top." 
    His idiot grin told me he wasn't getting the message. It seemed unlikely that
Eugene would even eat lunch that day, let alone leave the hospital. So I made his
sandwich, dunked it in the egg mixture and dropped it in a frying pan. 
Eugene edged closer. I thought he wanted to see how his meal was coming along,
until I noticed he was more interested in my breasts than ham and cheese. I
stepped back and offered him the spatula. "You flip it," I said, gesturing with the
utensil what I meant. 
    He eyed it like it was an alien artifact. The egg-soaked bread smelled like it was
starting to scorch, but moving in to turn it myself would mean getting closer to
Eugene than I was willing to do. 
    "Okay," I said, waving him away, "back off, and I'll finish it." 
    Again no reaction. No change in expression. I noticed WilliamMcDougall sniffing
the air. It seemed like a bad precedent to let Eugene's bizarre behavior make me
burn his food, so I ordered him more forcefully out of my way. Still, he stood there
grinning. 
    WilliamMcDougall leapt out of his chair, grabbed Eugene by the arm and dragged
him to the table. "Listen to Ms. Wiest," he warned, "or they'll bust you out of this
class and all you'll have to eat is cafeteria shit." 
    William's tone must have been plain enough because Eugene sat dejectedly in the
last empty chair. William flipped Eugene's sandwich, then slid it onto a plate and
handed to him before sitting down to finish his own. 
    Relieved, I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. Eugene was giving me the
creeps. Unsure that I could have handled him myself, I focused on not looking as
shook up as I felt. 
    The food disappeared in minutes, even the salad. Then WilliamMcDougall bullied
Levi into wiping down the stove, and even got nasty Jack to bag up the leftovers.
The others collected trash, cleaned the table and washed dishesó except Eugene,
of course. 
    I complimented everyone on a job well done, and praised William's leadership. 
    He blushed. "Shouldn't we be voting on what the next meal's gonna be?" 
    "Spare ribs," Jack thundered. 
    "Or pot roast like Mama used to make?" Roderick pleaded. 
    "I'm sorry, but both of those take too much time for this class," I said. 
    WilliamMcDougall nominated chili. "With salsa and corn chips," Levi added. 
    Realizing that chili would draw on the first session's experience with ground beef,
I allowed it to stand for a vote. We could use canned beans to save time. 
    It was unanimous again. We'd just finished when Nurse Hutchinson came back for
them. 
    Exhausted, I sat alone in the empty kitchen trying to gather my wits. What could I
do about Eugene? Why did I let Jack fluster me? How should I treat the
hallucinators? Would I ever be a good therapist? But even in this awful proving
ground I'd witnessed a whiff of independence in a few of them, so I was able to cut
myself some slack. 
    Still, I wondered about Eugene. Was he brain-damaged? Autistic? In the half-hour
before my meeting with The Boss and my fellow lab rats, I trekked to the nurses'
station on Eugene's ward to check out his file. 
    The first entry was dated nineteen-sixty-one. A crabbed handwriting told of the
police finding a disoriented teenager wandering the streets in center city, speaking
gibberish. Thinking he was psychotic, they'd sent him to this very hospital where
he'd been ever since. Notes after that were sparse, marking only occasional periods
of agitation or illness, and medications given. Then in the early eighties, an
attendant named Galina Dementieva wrote about her own recent arrival from the
Soviet Union as the happy circumstance which revealed that Eugene was speaking
Russian. 
    I was stunned. Eugene had been hospitalized because the cops thought Russian was
gibberish? So why was he still here? 
    Dementieva's notes continued, translating what he'd said as they spoke together
twice a week. He'd gotten to the US by walking from his home north of Moscow to
Turkey, then caught a freighter through the Mediterranean to New York, and
walked to Philadelphia where he had relatives. He'd been in the country only two
weeks when the police collared him. He'd been sightseeing and got lost, but he
wasn't crazy. 
    Maybe he was by now, I thought, after forty years in Bedlam. At the least, he was
hopelessly institutionalized. 
    Dementieva had tried to teach him some English, but he never got the hang of it.
Her notes ended a year later, and no one had picked up where she left off. Entries
in his chart were again rare and vague. For the last twenty years he hadn't been
able to communicate with anyone. 
    As I dashed off a few lines describing my two sessions with him, I found myself
wiping away tears for this poor man no one bothered about, whose life had been
stolen from him for no good reason. 

    The chili session went better than the others, so I stuck to The Boss's schedule to
make Week Four a field trip to the supermarket. 
    The eight patients and I were chaperoned by Nurse Hutchinson and a big, strong
psych tech named Clarence Mills, who acted as chauffeur, bodyguard and enforcer.
During the drive the guys were so excited (or terrified, I couldn't quite tell) to be
out in the world, they bounced around the van like caged hummingbirds. 
    Before entering the Acme Market, Nurse Hutchinson, Clarence and I reviewed the
agenda with the patients. We'd break up into two's and three's, each with its own
staff person and list of supplies. While we worked out who went with whom, Levi
kept breaking in to talk jive and be cool with Clarence. Hutchinson and I thought it
a valid attempt to connect, so we put Levi in Clarence's group. I wanted to send
Eugene with the nurse, but he ducked behind me, shaking his head violently so we let
him have his way rather than cause a commotion in public. 
    Finally each group set off with its list. My flock's task was to pick up cans of tuna
and mushroom soup for next week's tuna-noodle casserole. It was slow going. The
guys kept throwing things in the cart that weren't on the list and I kept stopping
to put them back. Eugene trailed close behind me, grinning maniacally. 
    When we rendezvoused with the others in the produce department, I started the
talk I'd planned about how to choose the best fruits and vegetables. It was hard to
keep from laughing as the men argued the advantages of ripe bananas versus green
ones, yellow onions or red. I was about to tackle how to tell if a melon is ripe when
Jack burst out screaming at a passerby who was observing our odd assembly. 
Clarence moved quickly, wrapping his huge arms completely around Jack. Nurse
Hutchinson tried talking Jack down, but Jack didn't even notice. With a jerk of her
head, she gave Clarence the order to whisk him out to the van. She dithered about
us all having to return to the hospital immediately, but I argued that if Clarence
could handle Jack, the others shouldn't be penalized by his outburst. 
    "I'll check with Clarence before I decide," she said. "Will you be okay by yourself?"
    I said I would. As she headed toward the parking lot, I hoped I was right. 
    Lieutenant McDougall moved in to offer assistance. I let him herd everyone over to
the melons, then hefted a cantaloupe. 
    "You can tell when they're ripe by slapping them. If it sounds hollow, buy it." I
demonstrated. "You hear it? This one thuds. It should have a sharper sound." I
returned it to the stack. 
    Levi cracked, "You slap them before you even know if they're fresh?" Guffawing
about his double entendre, he instigated the others into a laugh riot. Except
Eugene, who didn't get the joke. 
    Feeling compassion for the old Russian's endless isolation, I tried to engage him.
    "Listen," I said, bringing another melon near his ear and smacking it. 
    He looked at me blankly. I took his hand, intending to have him slap the cantaloupe
himself to see what it felt like. His free hand touched my breast. 
    I yelped, dropping the fruit on the floor as I pushed him away. "That is not okay!" I
shrilled. "NOT OKAY, you understand? NO!" 
    The others broke off their giggling, eyes wide in surprise. Eugene shuffled his feet,
riveted his sad gaze on the floor. 
    "What's wrong, Wiestey?" Levi asked. 
    "Nothing," I snapped. "Never mind." Knowing how empty Eugene's life was, I didn't
want to get him banned from future outings. "I think it's time we left." 
    Hutchinson returned as I was leading the motley band to the checkout line. While I
paid, she bossed the guys into carrying the bags to the van. We dropped them off at
the ward, and then Clarence helped me store the food in the classroom. When he
left, I shut the door, took a seat in the shadows at the farthest corner of the
room, and let myself cryó for losing control, for being scared, and for poor Eugene,
who'd never had a chance. 
    When I was all cried out, I went to Eugene's ward to make a terse note in his
chart about not coping well in public. I rationalized my fence-straddling by telling
myself that his human contact had been so limited, one had to make allowances. 

    In that afternoon's supervision, I told The Boss what had happened. He bounded to
his feet and prowled the circle's outer perimeter like a tiger. 
    "Unacceptable," he growled. "I'm responsible for you people. I can't have you
working with patients who molest you." 
    "But, Boss, I'm fine. He didn't hurt me." 
    He stopped, glared. "Not the point. We're doing this place a favor. How dare they
give us a guy who grabs tit? Think about what that says about how they see us?" 
    "It was my tit, Boss. Do you want to hear how I see it?" 
    A sharp intake of breath rippled through the group. Even I couldn't believe I'd said
it. First with Eugene, and now The Boss, I was discovering courage I hadn't known
I had. And wasn't that one of the things The Boss was training us to develop? 
    He entered the circle, planted himself in front of me with his feet spread wide,
arms crossed over his chest. "Speak." 
    "Eugene was committed here forty years ago because he was lost and spoke only
Russian. He was a teenager, and not very smartó my guess, his IQ's about
eighty-five. After his experience in Russia, when they threw people in jail or even
killed them for no reason, he was probably just glad to be alive, so he accepted
being locked up here. But he was trapped by being unable to communicate." 
    I told them about Dementieva and the brief break in his solitude. "Then twenty
years later I came along, and I'm sympathetic. Because of his loneliness,
inexperience and the language barrier, he misinterpreted my sympathy as an
invitation and acted on it." 
    I felt tears welling again and steeled myself against them. "But I set him straight.
Unmistakable and immediate. You should have seen the change in him. I'm sure he'll
never do it again. But the most amazing part is that I handled it! I didn't fall
apart or flip out or waffle. I knew my boundaries and enforced them. That means a
lot to me, and I have Eugene to thank for it." 
    The Boss didn't comment, which was encouraged me to keep going. "And you, too, and
this program. You've taught me I'm entitled to define my own limits." 
    "Tell me more," he said. 
    Uncomfortable memories roiled within me. I looked at the floor. "In my family, I
had no say in anything, even things that affected only me. My father wasn't around
much, so whatever my mother said, went. I didn't even know what my preferences
were. If I happened to spontaneously voice one, it was immediately shot down.
Almost like for sport. So I learned to keep myself to myself." 
    "How'd that work?" The Boss asked. Everyone else was silent. 
    I didn't have the guts to meet anyone's eyes, but I felt their attention caress me
like warm honey. "Not good," I said. 
    "Give an example." Now The Boss was in his element. Having seen him work his
magic with my peers, I opened myself to a fuzzy image floating at the edge of my
consciousness. 
    "I see my father's uncle. His family was from Russia too." 
    "Aha. Go on." 
    "He's been dead for years, but in this picture, I'm very young, and it's just the
two of us. I guess he was babysitting." 
    The Boss's voice softened. "What's happening?" 
    "He's changing my diaper, cleaning me. At first it feels good, but he keeps cleaning
and cleaning and I don't like it any more... Oh, God. Shit! I'm not sure that he ever
really molested me, but I wouldn't be surprised. I never liked him. His energy was
very dark." 
    "What's next?" 
    "I complain. Not with words, I'm too young, but with sounds. I kick, and scream.
I'm clean already, I'm dry, I want to say, put my diaper back on." 
    "Let's hear it." 
    I let my arms and legs flail like I imagined I did when I was an infant. 
    "Leave me alone! Get away from me!" I yelled, then roared, again and again, at the
top of my lungs. It felt so good to fight back that I suddenly burst out laughing. 
    Empathetic chuckles erupted around me, giving me the courage to make eye contact.
My comrades winked, gave me thumbs-up. 
    "Is that what you told the old Russian this time?" The Boss asked. 
    "Not the exact words, but yeah, the feeling was the same." 
    "What we're seeing here is the first step to healing," he said. "The transformative
power of making the unconscious conscious." He rotated slowly to meet each
person's gaze. "Everyday events can provide the stimulus to revisit an early upset
and release the pain. An incident that could have compounded Lynn's trauma became
instead the leverage for her evolution. It's may seem like a miracle, but it's a
routine blessing available to anyone. Even the most regressed, non-verbal nutcase
can be your teacher." 
    "You are too much," I said. 

    The next Tuesday, I went back to my cooking class, and so did Eugene. After all,
how could The Boss banish my great guru? 
    I felt more confident, and Eugene seemed changed too, as if my transformation had
rippled out and touched him as well. He kept his distance, perhaps regretting what
he'd done. I wished I could tell him that it had all turned out fine, but that was, of
course, impossible. 
    Still, the idea of communicating with him haunted me. I thought of Dementieva, and
wondered if there was someone who could do that now. It might revolutionize the
guy's whole life. 
    In our next supervisory meeting, I told The Boss my idea and asked if I could
suggest it to the hospital's volunteer coordinator. He not only approved, he
applauded. I was so embarrassed and flattered, I cried all over again. 

    The next week, Eugene arrived with a stout little woman in a drab woolen dress and
a colorful, flowered shawl around her shoulders. They were talking. Eugene! Talking!
Jabbering, actually. He looked so happy. 
    "Please, doctor," his escort said. "I am Masha Baranskaya. I am volunteer. I talk to
Yevgeny, maybe teach a little English." She offered her hand, and I shook it warmly.
    "Is okay I stay to translate for him?" 
    "My pleasure," I replied. 
    Then Eugene said something. I turned to Masha. 
    "He says, 'Thank you for bringing me this friend.'" 
    Eugene spoke again, and she translated. "He says you are good friend too." 
    I held out my hand for Eugene to shake. He hesitated, looked to Masha. 
    "Da," she said. 
    He took my hand, met my gaze, and nodded. 
    For the first time in my life, I felt like I really did something.