Quiet-Crazy Read online

  Blue-ribbon girl. That was my trademark growing up, I won so many blue ribbons for Mama, mostly on dresses at the county fair, dresses she made from scratch drawing up her own patterns. And if modeling at the fair was not enough, I had to practice prissing around in front of Daddy, too.

  “Turn around, Lizabeth, and let your daddy see you in the back,” she’d say. And that was okay up until I was about ten, but when I got to be twelve or thirteen and was still turning around in front of Daddy, I couldn’t help it, my shoulders curled around, my bottom squeezed together, my legs turned stiff.

  I think even Daddy got to feeling uncomfortable too, taking on over me, or the dress, or Mama, whatever it was he’s supposed to be taking on over. So he got to where he didn’t say much of anything, just kind of nodded his head and mumbled, “Um-huh, pretty.”

  “Well! Who needs your approval to get a blue ribbon, anyway?” Mama would sass, never once coming anywhere near thinking that maybe Daddy was as embarrassed as much as I was. All Mama was concerned with was adding another ribbon to the wall in the den. At least, I think that was all. Even though sometimes I had this queer feeling that somehow she took some sort of pleasure in showing me off, like maybe, heck, I don’t know, like maybe it was like she was showing her own self off, and it did her some kind of good that I couldn’t never figure out. Anyway, she liked to get blue ribbons on other things, too, not just me. The wall, it’s covered up not only with her ribbons, but mine, too. You see, I had to get blue ribbons on my own projects, too, whether they were canned peaches, crocheted doilies, or lap quilts. I had to because Mama said.

  Winning blue ribbons is okay, I guess, but where do you stop once you get started? In school, you have to make all A’s, in piano you have to practice so much that you’re the one picked to go to district competition, and in church you have to act so God-fearing that you’re the young person chosen most Christlike for the year. There’s just no end to the competition once you start. It hangs on, following you everywhere, even to Ward Eight, where I’m wondering who on this floor will turn out better than any other person in this division. If we all stood up on the display shelves at the county fair to be judged, who would receive the blue ribbon for being the least crazy? It’s a good thing Mama’s not here. She might not fare too well in this contest.

  Poor Alice isn’t doing too well in this contest, either. Alice, who was just fine during lunch turns into something else altogether along about the middle of the afternoon.

  After lunch everybody heads down the hallway toward a room at the end of the hall to something called the “wreck room.” At least I thought it was called that, because, maybe, shoot, I don’t know, maybe because it’s where wrecks of people go. But then I find out it is really the recreation room, and people are just calling it “rec” room for short. At least it’s good to know I’m not a total wreck.

  But here we all are, most of us, anyway, some playing Ping-Pong, some huddled around the TV, some looking at magazines, and some playing cards. When that Jewel Mavis comes strolling in on the scene with her guitar, she is walking just like everybody should stop in their tracks and listen to her strum on that thing, so that’s what we all do. When she starts up, everybody’s eyes and ears are glued to the Jewel.

  “Play ‘Amazing Grace,’” Miss Cannon hollers out, even before Mavis gets started good.

  Mavis bends her head slightly toward her guitar and begins to strum, and although it’s not “Amazing Grace,” it’s amazing, all right. She plucks those strings so soft and light it sounds more like a harp than a guitar, and she looks just like something celestial sitting there among all of us lesser people.

  “Play ‘Bringing in the Georgia Mail,’” hollers James Freedman, who’s playing a game of checkers with Miss Cannon.

  But the Jewel never lets on like she hears a word. She just sits there and keeps playing on and on, her song going on forever, up and down and all around, like one note chasing another and never quite catching up with it. If she were playing that on the piano, it would sound most definitely like Bach. But do guitar players play Bach, too? I don’t know. I’ll have to be sure and ask Aunt Lona.

  “Play something we know,” says Alice, and then it happens. She starts screaming and crying something awful.

  “Oh, Lord, God, no!” she wails. “Not again, Jesus Christ, so soon? No, no, please, dear Lord, not again, don’t do it to me again!”

  And she keeps on wailing and screaming so, that, before long, Orange Nurse and two other nurses besides come running into the rec room.

  “Oh, Lord, God, please give me back my eyes, sweet Jesus, don’t take ’em away again, don’t you know I can’t see this way?” Alice wails, flinging and flailing her arms every which way.

  Alice, poor Alice, is sitting right across from me on a green couch exactly like the one I’m sitting on, and I look at her eyes to see if they’re still there, and of course, you know, they are. But it pains me something awful when I see this glazed look come over her brown eyes, like a skim of milky wax, and she is looking everywhere, but seeing nothing.

  “Look, Elizabeth. Look here. See? Here.”

  Harold, who’s sitting next to me, acts like there is nothing going on, nothing whatsoever in this world, and looking around, myself, I see that everybody else is acting about the same way. Mavis does stop her guitar playing for the time being, like she’s stopping out of respect, like the way traffic stops when a funeral procession comes poking along down the road.

  I move over a little closer to Harold, within talking distance, and I say, “Harold, whatever is wrong with Alice? What’s going on here?”

  After he gets through sneering at having to talk to me, Harold says, “Aw, she just goes blind every now and then. That’s all.”

  “Alice, Alice!” Orange Nurse says. “You don’t want to go back into the lock-up ward, do you now?”

  But Alice isn’t even hearing her, nor hearing the other nurses either, pleading with her to stop the wailing and crying and to settle herself down.

  “Remember you said last time you weren’t going to get all upset if it happened again, remember?” says Orange Nurse.

  But Alice has gone beyond their calling, and no amount of talking and pleading can call her back. Poor Alice is definitely “out of control.” I know that when one of the nurses says, “Okay, girls, back in she goes.”

  Lesson number one. Don’t ever scream and wail and cry while you’re here at Nathan. No matter what. No matter if all of a sudden without warning you go blind. What you do in that case, I suppose, is calmly feel your way to the nurses’ station and say in the most controlled way possible, “I thought you all might like to know I just went blind.”

  Mavis starts up her guitar note-chasing again, and that helps to get my mind off Alice. Mavis does have a calming way of playing, I’ll have to admit, even if she does act like she’s better than everybody else here. She must have the “soft touch.” That’s what everybody at church says I have on the piano—“the softest touch of all.” I never knew, though, exactly what they meant until I heard Mavis playing with the soft touch, although I knew they were trying to pay me a compliment. But for some reason, I never do like hearing them tell me about soft touches, especially telling me that I have one, even though they are trying to be nice. I decide, then, to pass along the compliment to Mavis.

  “Mavis,” I call out, when she has stopped her song, “you have the softest touch of all.”

  Mavis stands up with her guitar, stares at me with those brown eyes clinging to me and piercing into me, as if I’d said something dirty as mud, then strolls out of the rec room, just as casually as she strolled in, not once ever looking back. Maybe she’s like Lot’s wife. Maybe she’s afraid she’d be turned into a pillar of salt, if she looked back, I don’t know. But if anybody asked me, and they probably won’t, I think she is pretty salty already, the way she acts and all.

  I decide that since it’s turned out to be such an outrageous afternoon, what with Alice and all,
that I’ll go to my room and take a nap. It’s way past time, considering that napping is all I know lately. So I head on down to Room 807 to crawl in the bed and cover myself up.

  No sooner do I have myself tucked under my cover than here comes in Orange Nurse.

  “Sorry, dear, we can’t be lying around in bed in the daytime.”

  “But I’m just going to take a short nap,” I say.

  “House rules,” says Orange Nurse. “We don’t take naps on Ward Eight. Doctors’ orders.”

  “But I’ve a headache,” I lie, thinking a head that’s in pain would surely entitle one to a short nap.

  “You want something for your head?” says Orange Nurse. “I’ll ask your doctor if you may have something.”

  “No, no,” I say, “it’ll be okay after a while. I just need to be by myself for a while.”

  “Get out and socialize,” says Orange Nurse. “Interact with people. That’s what you’re here for.”

  “It is?” I say, a little bit surprised that I’ve come all the way to Nathan just to socialize with folks. Shoot, I could do that back home in Littleton, if I wanted to. Although I never seem to want to.

  “Have you been to the other rec room?” she asks, as if there’s something I might be missing.

  “What other rec room?”

  “The one down at the end of the men’s rooms on the other hallway. It has a piano in it. You play the piano, by chance?”

  “No, I play by note.”

  “Well, go on down there and play some. Let us hear you, dear. I bet you play good, don’t you?”

  Now, if I go down there and play the piano, the Jewel will think I’m just trying to show her up. No. I will not play the piano. Not today anyway. Maybe some other day.

  I do go down to the other rec room, though, and on the way I pass the nurses’ station that has a white-robed doctor sitting inside. The little black bar on his robe says DR. ADAMS. I hadn’t realized I was staring at Dr. Adams, but after a while, he looks up from the chart he’s writing in, smiles at me, and gives a little wave of his hand.

  I feel the red warming up my face and insides. Although it is a deep embarrassment, for why I don’t know, it is also a feeling of instant like. As much as I instantly disliked Orange Nurse, I instantly like Dr. Adams. And nothing is even said. All he does is just see me. And I saw him see me. And it doesn’t bother me, him seeing me. Haven’t I known him forever? Hasn’t he known me?

  5

  . . . . . .

  Because it seemed I had known Dr. Adams forever, I don’t even mind it when he puts his finger up me in the examination room. Maybe that’s because his way of doing is one hundred eighty degrees different from what old Dr. Hardy did back home. Dr. Hardy probably didn’t know it, but he was the first full-grown man to ever get his hands on me, and I swore he’d be the last, but there must be something about being crazy that makes nurses and doctors have to look at you all over and feel you out everywhere.

  Anyway, I finally went to Dr. Hardy because Aunt Lona made an appointment herself for me to go, whether Mama wanted to go or not. As it turned out, Mama was the one to take me. She wasn’t about to let Aunt Lona take me and, I guess, have me and Aunt Lona know something that she didn’t. Although what she thought we might find out from old Dr. Hardy, I don’t know, because he always seemed to be right in the same category as Mama, just as backwards as they come.

  What made me so infernally mad with Mama, though, was when we were on the way to Dr. Hardy’s office she said, “Lizabeth, have you done gone and got yourself in trouble?” Well, not knowing Mama, you wouldn’t know what she meant. But, in Mama language that meant was I pregnant.

  “No, Mama. No!” I said, furious that she would even think such a thing. What I really wanted to say was just because she had conceived Angela out of wedlock, that was no sign I had gone and done something like that. But I didn’t have the nerve to say it. Besides, Mama was then wanting to know why I was “acting like it.”

  “Acting like what?” I said.

  “Acting like you’re in trouble.”

  What could I say to this woman? First of all, I didn’t know how pregnant people acted. I didn’t know they laid around in bed all day, fed up with living and just as ready to go on to a new life in the next world, a life with a little more light in it.

  Second of all, since I never in my life went out with any man at any time, how in the name of pickle did Mama think I would have gotten pregnant? By divine conception? But “in trouble.” The words landed so heavy in my stomach they might as well have been a child messing up my insides as nauseated as they made me feel.

  And of course Mama wasn’t satisfied with me just telling her I wasn’t pregnant. No. “You and Lona, you know something I don’t,” Mama said. “And you know I think she’s right. You do need to go to Dr. Hardy and get yourself straightened out.”

  Right at that moment I was terribly glad that Mama had her eyes on the road and not on me. I couldn’t have stood it. Her looking at me. But, you know, it’s entirely pathetic how people can have exactly the same ideas for entirely opposite reasons. Aunt Lona was wanting me to go to Dr. Hardy just to find out if there might be something physically wrong with me that was making me so down and out, and, I suppose, Mama, in a sense, was too. But all Aunt Lona was wanting to do was help, while Mama was all fired up to prove I had done gone out and sinned.

  And I think old Mrs. Hardy was on Mama’s side of thinking, the way she kept side-glancing her eyes at me, just like I was something to avoid. “Take off all your clothes and get under this sheet here,” she said.

  So, I took off everything except my panties and brassiere, and I was embarrassed to death to be even down to that, plus I saw that these panties had “Sunday” on them, and here it was Tuesday, so I felt kind of ridiculous that I couldn’t even put on the right day’s panties. Of course, it’s ridiculous to even have panties with days of the week on them anyway, but that’s what Mama orders from Sears Roebuck, and just to keep the peace, that’s what I wear. That, or nothing. And I like wearing nothing sometimes. Just for the thrill, you know. Since there’s nobody around Littleton who gives me much in the way of thrills, sometimes I have to make up my own. Not wearing panties is just right sometimes, since nobody knows but me, and isn’t it what you think and how you in your own mind picture yourself when it comes to the thrills of your body that counts after all?

  When old Dr. Hardy came in, he got right put out with me—or old Mrs. Hardy one—that I wasn’t stripped down to the bare bones. “When she gets ready, I’ll come back in,” he said, looking from me to her, like he was wondering what was wrong with both of us. He probably didn’t know this, but Lord, I wouldn’t never be ready for him.

  Old Dr. Hardy’s name for pregnant was a little different from Mama’s. “Are you with child?” he asked at the same time he stuck his finger up me. Since I couldn’t speak with an old man’s finger ramming all around down there, I didn’t say anything.

  “I said, are you with child?” he repeated, once he’d pulled out of me, and turned to take off his gloves. I shook my head, since my throat was too tight to talk, and old Mrs. Hardy relayed the message.

  After he was finished with me, I decided old Dr. Hardy was really a rapist going around in the form of a doctor. He had entered me without my permission, and that was definition enough in my book, because what does it matter what somebody enters you with? Breaking and entering is breaking and entering.

  Anyway, after he was finished with his raping, we met in his office, me, Mama, and him, where he said I might do good to go off to Nathan, where they could take a look at me and maybe find out what was wrong with me. “They got a special ward there,” he said, “for people like her.”

  “You mean Lizabeth’s done gone crazy?” Mama said, raising up on the edge of her chair.

  “Not crazy,” Dr. Hardy said, “just what I’d call ‘depressed.’ If she’s stopped working and lays around in bed all the time, and there’s nothing physically
wrong with her, that I can find, then I’d say she’s maybe got a bad case of depression.”

  “Or a tumor beginning to form on my brain, like Annie Lou Parsons,” I said, although nobody seemed to hear. They just looked at me. Both of them. Like I was something to just look at, to see and not hear. Like Mama was always saying, “Children should be seen, not heard.” And she always follows it with some reference to some verse in the Bible that I don’t even care about, even though I looked it up one time just to see if it really did say anything like that at all, and since it didn’t even appear to resemble anything like what Mama was always saying, I just passed it off as another one of Mama’s own self-made commandments. But I do believe that there should be another commandment to go along with it. Something like, “Children should be heard and not seen.” And that would take care of things from the children’s side. But who cares what I think anyway?

  “But Nathan’s for crazy folks,” Mama said, disbelieving her ears. Disbelieving her eyes, too, it looked like. And I know this sounds weird, but when she looked at me in Dr. Hardy’s office, even though she was thinking I was crazy, it was still like she was somehow in some way seeing an Elizabeth she had never seen before. It’s just the way she looked at me, like, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before in my whole life. Who are you?”

  But that’s not what she said. She just said, very quietly, “Nathan? Are you sure? Nathan?”

  “Like I said, they’ve got a special ward there for people who are not exactly crazy, they just need some help.”

  “Nathan,” Mama said, almost breathless, staring off into nowhere, and not even pretending to hear.

  What bothered me nearly as much as the idea of going off to Nathan was hearing Dr. Hardy and Mama talk about me like I was nowhere around. And that made me wonder more than ever, was I, Elizabeth Miller, really here and alive in this world, or was I just this shadow of Angela floating along that people could see and talk about, but when I talked back it was like I didn’t even count.