Three Faces

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 writes, “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 Newsweek or the Times 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—she may be anorexic—woman with a one-inch-long scar across her right wrist. 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. 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 getting burned by it.

Then Marge said, “Why do you ask?”

“Some people say you attempted suicide.”

“What do you think?” Marge said.

I looked at her hands. “Aren’t you right-handed?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Especially, I cook with my right hand.”

“That’s not what I meant," I said. “Since you’re right-handed, you would have slashed your left wrist with your right hand. The cut is on your right wrist.”

Marge smiled.

She 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 untreated 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 couldn’t read novels. Novels have to have conflict in them, or they’re boring, you know?"

I nodded, and she went on. "The characters have to fight or at least scream at each other once in a while, but I couldn’t take all that emotion. It's scary for me to read about human conflict. 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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