Sarah's Conundrum

Sarah Lee is fuming. Not only does she share a name with a multinational dessert company whose motto is "Always in Season," but she is having another spat with her boyfriend - these arguments seem to be perennial in nature. "I can’t believe we’re arguing over this again, Foley," Sarah says to a man she has known for close to ten years.   

Sarah Lee has not had an easy life. As children, her parents escaped China with their families after the Communist revolution of 1949. After having an arranged marriage, Danny and Amy Lee struggled to make ends meet in the United States, a country that had accepted them into its prejudiced and opportunity-laden fabric. They commenced their conjugal adventure together in San Francisco’s Chinatown where Danny initially worked as a cook in restaurants. Amy spent twelve-hour days working as a seamstress. Sarah, her brother and two sisters were looked after by their maternal grandparents.  

At the age of six, Sarah was diagnosed with dyslexia. Initially, her teachers thought Sarah’s difficulties with speech, reading and writing were caused by the child’s bilingualism. To remedy the child’s seeming confusion, the teachers suggested that Cantonese stop being spoken at home. 

Sarah’s grandparents lamented the proposed solution to their grandchild’s learning problems and cursed the blue-eyed devils who wanted to deprive Sarah of her cultural heritage by silencing her original language. For the sake of the child’s success in America, Danny and Amy concocted a plausible story that they presented to the social services agency, who promptly took Sarah into their custody and began looking for an adoptive family to care for the child.

She was adopted by a white family. Years of remedial efforts to correct Sarah’s dyslexia were only partially successful, and after a decade of working low-wage jobs, she earned her high-school equivalency certificate and decided to undergo training to become a psychiatric prison guard for the California Recovery Institute, a rehabilitative program for mentally ill persons convicted of crimes ranging from heinous felonies to non-violent misdemeanors.      

*

"How many times do I have to tell you not to leave stuff lying around the house, Foley? You know it annoys me to no end. Your irresponsibility reminds me of the crap I had to deal with at work. Tactless guards and disrespectful patients, both who thought that just because I was Asian and I didn’t have a penis, I shouldn’t have been doing my job."  

Sarah met Foley Gaspers while the latter was an inmate at Chowchilla Psychiatric Correctional Facility. The last thing Sarah ever thought when she took the job at Chowchilla was that she’d end up falling in love with one of the forensic patients, but that’s exactly what happened after her and Foley developed a mutual liking based on a shared appreciation of National Geographic, poetry and tasteful eating.

During the interactions permitted them by the circumstances at Chowchilla and later, when Sarah had surreptitiously provided Foley with a P.O. box address, they wrote to each other about both the historical and Shakespearian Cleopatra, about the dynasty of the Ptolemies in Egypt, who counted amongst them an astronomer of Alexandria who maintained the sun, moon and other known planets revolved around the Earth.

Foley would commence his letters to Sarah with the greeting "Dear Cleo," or "My Dear World," and conclude them with "Your Star, Foley." These epistolary habits indicated that as a result of the peculiarity of their amorous relationship, or perhaps, if one is inclined to believe in such things, as a result of fate, Sarah had become the imperial center of Foley's universe.

Sarah and Foley compared the relative merits of T.S. Elliot’s "Prufrock" and Sylvia Plath’s "Daddy." Both enjoyed the former, but seemed to agree that Plath’s poem was a Freudian insult to proper daughter-father relationships. In long letters they wrote to each other, taking pains to conceal Sarah ‘s identity from Chowchilla mail security, they each salivated when discussing the textures and tastes of Foley’s spicy eggplant parmesan and Sarah’s chocolate chip banana bread.    

The event that sealed the romantic deal between Sarah and Foley was when Foley agreed to stop getting into altercations with other patients. Following one incident in which a hapless Chowchilla detainee had exposed himself to Sarah, Foley waited until after the patient was released from a three-day solitary cell hold and ambushed him in the restroom. "Get him!" shouted Sebastian, one of Foley’s fellow patients and friends who was a keen observer, if not an understanding listener. Sebastian’s outcry and the commotion of the ensuing scuffle attracted the attention of the guards, who promptly put an end to the half-hearted melee.   

After Foley himself had been released from a 72-hour solitary hold for fighting, Sarah made him promise never to risk having another battery charge leveled against him, since doing so would only prolong his stay at Chowchilla and prevent them from ever forming a relationship outside the concrete walls and razor-wired fences of the forensic hospital.

*

Sarah knew Foley was legally regarded as a mentally ill person, but she steadfastly thought neither he nor any of the other forensic patients she was in charge of were inhumane or evil. Although she believed they deserved penal rehabilitative treatment, she was undecided as to whether or not psychiatric incarceration was the answer to their troubles. 

Some had been made detainees of Chowchilla for trifles: repeated counts of delusion-motivated petty theft or hallucination-induced loitering. Others had done horribly stigmatized or savage things: child molestation, matricide. Both low and high-profile offenders at Chowchilla would have had a difficult time surviving within a more conventional carceral environment. “Jay cats,” as many of them were called by general inmate populations in prisons, did not have the discipline or predatory attitude required to make it on a mainline prison yard. 

Although Sarah felt a kind of ambivalent admiration for hard core prisoners, and despite knowing some Chowchilla detainees had committed crimes abhorrent to her own moral code, Sarah couldn’t deny the "jay cats" their humanity. She knew captives of Chowchilla weren’t incapable of being kind or considerate, of offering other detainees who had no internal friends a helping hand when it was needed, or of providing those that lacked external means of support a small fortune's worth of treats from weekly canteen.  

*

Sarah’s relationship to Foley was eventually investigated and she lost her job due to what was termed “unprofessional conduct.” Sarah was given the option of working at another of the California Recovery Institute’s facilities, or of severing all contact with Foley Gaspers.  

Soon after she had been given the ultimatum, Foley sent her a poetry publication that featured a poem he had written entitled “Ptolemy’s Carousel.”

A seeker of poetry in everything

can find comfort amidst difficulties—in a psychiatric prison,

in an overworked girlfriend’s conundrum,

or during a fight in which both contestants are losers.

A schizophrenic is disturbed

by so many everyday occurrences—

hearing ambient conversation in a chow hall,

sensing erogeneity in everyday interaction,

seeing colors and taking them for commands.

My mind has ambulated the slender line

between civilization and madness.

I’ve discovered their twin

destinies are inseparable,

and their dissociation equivocal.

Your allure is rapturous,

a stirring of the soul,

a wistfully spun web.

A Ptolemaic circumnavigation

In which I am Sun and you are Earth.

Dedicated to Sarah, for her patience.

*

Sarah opted to no longer work for the California Recovery Institute. After reading the poem, and being reminded that her lover's world revolved around the glow of tolerance that emanated from her innermost being, she could be sure that Foley Gaspers was her missing half.