The
Three Faces of Margaret Mary Sweet
You want me to describe
Margaret Mary Sweet? Easy. She’s a skinny little bitch with a scar on her
right wrist — she must have attempted suicide — who cheated and manipulated
her way to a Ph.D.
She’s so full of self-pity it
makes me sick. I visited her house once, and she whined the whole time.
“Oh, poor me,” she thinks, “I have bipolar disorder and I’ve had
such a rough life.” Well, I suffer from bipolar disorder too, and you don’t
hear me whining about it.
By the way, while I was at her
place, I blew my nose, and she got a wastebasket and made me throw the tissue
away right then. So she’s bossy too.
She’s the most self-righteous
person I’ve ever met. Miss Goody Two Shoes won’t even look at men. She
thinks she’s too good for them. What a prude! She goes around with her nose in
the air, so stuck up. She thinks she’s smarter than everybody else, but how
could she be? She never even reads. She told me so. Any intelligent person at
least reads the Times or Newsweek once in a while. She’s ignorant, and she’s
selfish too. Too selfish even to say hello to people she knows as they pass by.
You don’t want to get to know Margaret Mary Sweet.
I’ve been asked to describe
Margaret Mary Sweet. Let’s see, where should I start? She’s a short, slender
woman with a one-inch-long scar across her right wrist. She may be anorexic, and
she has bipolar disorder. I don’t have a psychiatric condition myself, so I
can’t tell you much about that. She has a Ph.D., so she must be pretty smart.
Once, she invited me to her place and told me a little about her life. What a
story! I was amazed at all the grief she’s taken. She keeps her home perfectly
neat. Everything has to be in its proper place, so she may be an
obsessive-compulsive.
I think she’s afraid of sex
or men or something. She keeps men at arm’s length. She told me she intends to
still be a virgin on her wedding night. But she’s no spring chicken; I don’t
think I’ve ever met a virgin as old as she is. So she must have some kind of
sexual hang-up, not that it’s any of my business.
What else can I tell you? Oh,
yes. Even though she’s really smart, she doesn’t read for fun. She used to
try to read novels, but she just couldn’t seem to concentrate on them. Her
mind would wander off, and she’d forget the plot and have to start back at the
beginning. Unless the book was about mean people fighting with each other. Then
she’d get really upset after reading it, and she wouldn’t be able to sleep
that night. I guess the bipolar disorder makes her hyper-sensitive, poor woman.
A funny thing happened the
other day. I passed her in the hallway of
State
Hospital
, where I work and she’s an outpatient, and she walked right by without saying
a word. I don’t think she even saw me. I caught up with her and said, “Hey,
Marge! What’s the matter?” She apologized and said that sometimes she just
spaces out. She thinks that it’s part of her bipolar disorder. I try to give
her all the help I can.
Margaret Mary Sweet? She’s
one of my best friends. She’s a short, slender woman with a scar on her right
wrist. I asked her about it, and she said that she burned her wrist taking
something out of the oven. She said she was clumsy, but I saw her oven, and
it’s built so that you can hardly keep from burning yourself on it.
Marge has bipolar disorder,
like me. She invited me to come over once, and we discovered that we have other
things in common too: difficulty finding a job, problems with our families, and
a very stressful life in general.
I complimented her on how neat
her house was. She said, “Thank you.” Then she thought for a minute and
said, “I’ve never had much control over my life. I still haven’t found a
man who wants to marry me, or a good job. I can’t control the people around me
at all, and they’ve hurt me a lot. But this” — she looked around her
apartment — “I can control.”
She’s really smart about men.
She won’t let them use her. She’s holding off on sex until a really good man
who wants to marry her comes along. If I’d done that myself, I would have had
a lot fewer problems to deal with.
I admire her. She keeps her
weight low even though she has to take lithium, which makes you hungry all the
time, and she got a Ph.D. before she
started taking the lithium. The bipolar disorder made it really hard for her to sit
down and study, much less concentrate on what she was studying. And she went
through this for seven whole years! Grad school must have been hell for her.
I told her that there’s a
rumor going around that she never reads for fun and asked if she knew who
started it.
“I did,” she said,
“because it’s true. I used to feel guilty about it. I just couldn’t read
novels. Novels have to have conflict in them, or they’re boring. The
characters have to scream and fight with each other at least once in a while,
but I couldn’t take all that emotion. It was scary for me just to read about
screaming and fighting.
“But, now that I’m on
lithium, I don’t have that problem any more. Now I just have the old
concentration problem; I can’t keep track of the plot. I’ve solved it by
doing my cross-stitching while I listen to novels on cassette tapes. The
cross-stitching helps me stay focused.”
“Marge,” I said,
“you’re a great person, but sometimes you walk right by me without even
seeing me. Why?”
She said, “Sorry. I get
preoccupied with my own thoughts sometimes.”
I think that’s because
she’s so creative. She’s always getting ideas and, by the way, they’re
usually really good ones. So I don’t mind when she doesn’t notice me. It
means that, pretty soon, she’ll come up to me with a sparkle in her eyes and
tell me a great new story or joke or plan to do something fun.
Margaret Mary Sweet is a cool
person.
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