Free Manic by Terri Cheney

fact—who does your color?”
    Finally, I thought. A topic I could ace. Like all true redheads, I’m rather vain about my hair. I figure God would not have made me so conspicuous if he wanted me humble. So I grinned back at the blonde, and replied, “Actually, nobody does my color. It’s natural.”
    “Natural. Really?”
    “Really.”
    “Not even highlights?”
    “Never.”
    “How extraordinary,” she said. Not “How lovely,” or “How lucky for you,” or anything else that might have easily translated into a compliment. Then she smiled at me, sweet as a lemon tart, and said, “I think we require proof,” while the rest of the table burst into giggles.
    “Well, there’s only one surefire way for a redhead to prove that she’s…” and I faltered, then blushed to the roots of my suspect hair. If only this table was filled with men, I thought. Then this whole conversation would have been deliciously naughty, and I would have been completely in control. But mania distorts everything when women are around. It sabotages my senses, so all I can see are arched eyebrows and all I can hear are sneers where none, most probably, exist. Then again, maybe they do. I never know for certain, and it’s the not knowing that drives me mad.
    I needed air. I needed space. The heightened sensuality that I had prized so much an hour before, when I was flirting with the men, was no longer titillating; it was torture. I could feel every rung of the hardbacked chair as it pressed up against the small of my back, sharp and unforgiving, while all around me the women’s voices crackled like a summer storm. Nannies was the subject now. Nannies who never showed up on time. Nannies who wanted too much money. Seductive nannies, nannies who tried to steal the silver. The search for the perfect nanny.
    The urge to talk, to interact, was still strong upon me, and I longed to join the conversation. So I thought about nannies, thought hard. I strained my memory for nanny anecdotes. Nothing came to mind. I had nothing to say.
    It wasn’t possible. My manic persona has a great many voices, but none of them is silent. And yet, my tongue lay slack and heavy in my mouth. I didn’t care if the nannies stole all the silver. I didn’t care if the Mercedes handled better than the Porsche, or which dermatologists made house calls at night, or how many pounds of carry-on luggage the Concorde allows. I thought of the mounds of bills piled high on my own kitchen table: doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, insurance, all the shrill, nagging reminders of my mental illness that I faced each morning over cold cereal and coffee. The search for a perfect nanny seemed absurdly easy somehow, in comparison to the search for sanity. Now there was a topic worthy of discussion.
    But the room was whirling too fast for me now, too many names I didn’t recognize and places I’d never been and problems I wasn’t rich enough to afford. I could barely trace the outline of the huge oak tree that grew just outside the kitchen window. Some of its branches, I knew, reached all the way down into my own backyard, but they were hidden from my sight by the darkness and the angle. It would be quiet over there, I thought. Blissfully so, now that the drums had stopped. There would be no twittering voices, no faint, fragrant subtleties to provoke and confuse me. The only other woman was the one that I might, or might not, choose to see in the mirror. Strange, but the option of leaving had not occurred to me before, not while Julian, or the promise of Julian, still lingered in the vicinity. But all at once I knew: it was time to go home.
    I stood up abruptly and told the blonde, “I’m sorry, but I have to leave now—I’m expecting a call.”
    “At least have some dessert before you go,” she said, pushing a plate in my direction. “Here, take some strawberries. They’re awesome.”
    “I know they are. But I think I’ve already had more strawberries than is good for me