Quiet-Crazy Read online

  From the first time I ever talked with Dr. Adams, I got the feeling he wouldn’t ever do that: talk about me in my very own presence as if I’m not there. Dr. Adams, I learn from the beginning, comes straight out and talks with me like I am a person in my own right mind and body, although he does make me a little nervous. And I know this sounds strange, but I do believe that I get nervous because he is so calm. It doesn’t make sense, does it? But he’s just so calm, my Lord, if a big, black bull came charging into his office and balked right between us, Dr. Adams wouldn’t even budge. He’d just likely say something such as, “And, what, Elizabeth, do you think of this big, black bull here?” I can tell you for sure, if anyone ever wanted to take a picture of calm certainty and absolute correctness, just strike Dr. Adams and they’d have them one.

  But I figure the nervousness is my problem, not his. Not used to being around truly real and peaceful people, I plain don’t know how to act. It’s awfully easy acting around people in Littleton, since everybody there is putting on a show, and you just get in there and put on a show too—“Hey, how are you? Fine, and you? Oh, I’m fine, too, and how about Hank? Well, he’s fine, too, suffering a little with his arthritis, you know, but he’s fine.” Everybody is just so fine I can’t stand it.

  Dr. Adams doesn’t stand for shows. He reminds me of Aunt Lona in that way. He stands for what you’re really and truly feeling, no matter if it makes you sound good or bad, and I’m not used to letting myself sound bad, not even with Aunt Lona, at least not all the way bad.

  And now that the examination is over here he is asking me the very same question he asked me at the beginning of our visit. That’s what he called it, a visit.

  “May I visit with you for a while, Elizabeth?” he says, his shimmery, blue eyes just inviting me on into him, not forcing me, not making me look at him, but leaving me alone for myself to decide that Lord, he could visit with me any old time he wanted.

  But the question. “Why are you here, Elizabeth?” And I figure I didn’t give him the right answer the first time when I told him I was here “because something’s wrong with me,” because if I had answered him right, he wouldn’t be asking again so soon, would he? So I look around at the bare, green walls, and when I get tired of that, I rub my fingers around the gold base of the table lamp right beside me that puts out a morbid dim light, just stalling, you know. Then I try again.

  “I’m here because I’m crazy,” I say.

  “Elizabeth,” he says, “people who are really crazy don’t talk about it.” He says it like it is the gospel truth, firm and final, and I’ll have to admit it’s something I’ve never thought about before. The best part of all, though, is that it makes sense, and I feel a world better.

  When we get one question settled, though, he asks another one too hard to answer. It grows to be a little bit fun and a little bit scary at the same time, trying to figure out what he would have me say.

  “Who are you?” he says, kind of sudden.

  And I really think by now he should know my name, everybody else around here surely does, but my name, it turns out, is not who I am.

  “Elizabeth Miller,” I tell him. And when that doesn’t seem answer enough, I add Sarah to it. “Sarah Elizabeth Miller.”

  “So who is Sarah Elizabeth Miller?”

  For a while I just sit, trying to smooth the apple green jumper-dress that Mama won first prize on last year, wondering for the first time if she is okay and how she’s made it so far without me around to look after her. The room gets so quiet for so long that I feel I have to say something, so I say, “I’m Dock and Vera Miller’s girl.”

  “You’re Dock and Vera Miller’s girl,” he says, and the words sound so ridiculous coming from him. And that’s another thing about Dr. Adams. He can repeat exactly the same thing I say, and it sounds like something else entirely, so different sometimes that it’s like some other person said it, not me. That’s one of his favorite things, I find out real quick, is repeating stuff. It’s like he takes my words and stretches them out in a banner in front of me holding them up for me to see. Most of the time I don’t like what I see on that banner because it makes me look foolish. At the same time, it feels kind of good to look foolish and have it be all right with Dr. Adams. Anyway I want to be, or anything I want to say is all right with him. He’ll take me just the way I am.

  Of course, God’s supposed to take me just the way I am, too, that’s what I’ve always heard. But I always got the feeling, and I may be wrong, but I always felt that God would take me just the way I am, as long as it’s His way. But here I get the feeling that Dr. Adams will take me just the way I am, as long as I’m MY way, no matter the way that happens to be.

  But how am I? Who am I? “Maybe I’m really Angela,” I tell Dr. Adams on our next visit. “Maybe I’m really Angela come back from the dead.”

  Then, of course, I have to get into telling all about Angela, and for some reason it’s easier telling about Angela than it is telling about myself. Maybe I don’t know me, but I sure do know Angela frontwards and backwards, and for some reason I feel there’s some saving grace in that.

  “Okay then, pretend you are Angela,” he says. “Then who are you?”

  “I am Angela, a little girl about four years old, an angel now, but I got run over thirty-two years ago when I ran out behind the car when Mama was backing it out of the garage. I am the prettiest and the best little girl in the world. I made my parents very happy when I was alive, but now I make them very sad, and it makes me feel sad, too. I try very hard to make them happy, but it doesn’t work because they’re still sad most of the time, and it makes me sad, too.”

  “Why does it make you sad?” Dr. Adams says, writing in the silver-backed notebook, which he won’t let me see, although I’ve asked him nearly every time I’ve visited him, I’ve asked him to let me see it. Why I want to see in that notebook so bad I don’t know. But it’s like he’s writing things down about me that I don’t know about myself, and if I knew it, maybe I could figure out who I am. If I could just peek into that notebook, then maybe I would find Elizabeth Miller in there somewhere all written up in a nice, neat summary so I could read it and say, “Oh, so this is who I am.”

  “Why does it make you sad?” I say. You see, I’ve found that trying to answer the questions is easier if I repeat what Dr. Adams repeats. So I repeat him repeating me. It’s real catchy, this repeating stuff. “Because,” I say, “because Mama just keeps on thinking it’s all her fault about me getting behind the car when she was backing out of the garage, but it’s not, it’s the Lord’s will. At least that’s what everybody says.”

  “It’s the Lord’s will,” he says, looking at me as if he’s looking deep into me, puzzling over me. And I’m feeling ridiculous again.

  “Oh, you know,” I say, “like everything that happens is supposed to be the Lord’s doing, that kind of Lord’s will.”

  He’s writing in the silver chart again, and then he says, “Is your coming here, Elizabeth, is that the Lord’s will?”

  Another stumper. But after I think about it for a minute, I decide sure, if the Lord’s the cause of everything, then sure, that’s why I’m here. And for the first time ever I feel myself getting really put out with this Lord who’s supposed to notice every sparrow’s fall. As I leave Dr. Adams, the more I think, the more I decide that’s all this Lord did, He just watched this sparrow’s fall, just watched it, and didn’t do one solitary thing about it. He just looks, like Mama always looks. Looks and you don’t know what she’s thinking. But then remembering back on that little verse in the Bible, it didn’t really say, did it, that He would do something about the sparrows falling. No, I think it just says that He watches them fall. But that makes me even madder. What’s the purpose in having a Lord, if He’s just going to stand by and watch the sparrows fall and not even make a move to do anything about it?

  When I get back to my room and hear Miss Cannon singing, “’Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus, just to take Him a
t His word,” I feel myself start in to trembling with anger, and I wonder if this is what it means to go crazy, standing here listening to some old woman singing about trusting in a Lord who just stands back and watches everything and everybody and doesn’t ever do nothing about nobody none of the time. Mama, nor me, nor nobody!

  “Well, where’s the sweetness in it, I’d like to know!” I holler at her, but she doesn’t even let on to hear me, she just looks at me and keeps on in that whiny-pitched voice, “Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him, how I’ve proved Him o’er and o’er.”

  So I get up real close to her this time, so she’ll be sure to hear me, and I holler at her again. “You just keep on trusting Him, sister, ’cause you see where it got you, right smack-dab in the middle of Nathan!” And I find out I may as well be talking to a tree stump for all the reaction I get.

  But more and more I’m seeing that it just doesn’t matter what you say or how you behave here at Nathan. It’s not going to matter much to anybody one way or the other. The patients here, they don’t care, and the nurses and doctors, they act like they’ve seen everything and heard even more, so nothing ever surprises them at all.

  And it’s such a new freeing feeling, this acting in whatever way that comes out of me, it’s getting to be kind of fun waiting and watching and waiting and looking at my own self, just to see, you know, what does happen to come out from way down deep inside me, to see feelings and thoughts and ideas I didn’t even know were in me.

  6

  . . . . . .

  Like when I go to the recreation room now, I go on over to the piano with no hesitation, sit down and play all the Elvis songs I know. Mama would just about die, I know she would, to hear me playing such as that. The only time I play Elvis songs at home is when she’s gone out to the grocery store or over to Eunice’s on Saturdays to get her hair fixed. Now I play Elvis and rock ’n’ roll all I want, and one time I even played “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” rock ’n’ roll style. That was after I got mad at Him for willing that I end up in the crazy house.

  Playing the piano is when I fall in love with Dr. Adams. He plays the piano too, something wonderful, and every time I sit down at the piano, I say to this Lord: “Lord, at least if You’re going to put me in a place like this, at least let Dr. Adams come around today and play the piano again with me.”

  Dr. Adams has what he calls this “little medley” of songs that he plays, and they’re all about love. He sits on one end of the piano bench and I sit on the other. He’s showed me how to play the soprano part, and he takes the bass, so we sit there together playing songs like “The Way You Look Tonight” and “Heart and Soul” and “My Heart Stood Still,” and I just keep on falling deeper and deeper, and I wonder if he’s feeling anywhere near the same as I am. But I know he’s not, because he’s got a wife and med school besides, so he doesn’t have time to go around falling in love with his patients, no matter how beautiful he is.

  So, all I can do is just pretend. Pretend that Dr. Adams is in love with me, even though I do have frizzy hair and wear homemade dresses and am nothing at all to look at. Brand X, that’s what I was in school, while the other girls—the kind like Mavis—came out sparkling, looking like they’d been washed in Tide. But when you’re washed only in the Blood of the Lamb that doesn’t have all those whiteners and brighteners in it, you can’t hardly help it, you come out a little on the dingy side.

  I feel anything but dingy, though, on Saturday nights when Mr. Fleet waltzes in from the Arthur Murray Dance Studio. Mr. Martin, the rec director, gets everybody up and out on the patio in the daytime where we play volleyball and shuffle-board and badminton. But on Saturday nights we dance. Everybody, that is, except Miss Cannon. Miss Cannon just peeks at us through her window, shaking her head and talking about what sinners we are to be carrying on so, and how we’re going straight to hell, every last one of us.

  Maybe it is awful to be learning how to do the fox-trot, the rhumba, and the two-step instead of stuck away under some dim lamplight studying your Sunday school lesson, but I decided from the beginning I’ll just have to be awful, because Saturday nights are the closest thing to sparkling I’ve ever been. It beats polishing your Sunday shoes anytime.

  Mr. Fleet, tall and thin, is some more whiz at dancing, even if he is a little on the prissy side. He’s tall and skinny and very white, you know the kind of white on a man that looks as if he’s never spent a day working outside in his whole life? But whiteness doesn’t matter when you’re dancing, especially on him. He floats along so easy as if it didn’t take a bit of effort for his body to glide around, as if he has an invisible scooter under his feet sliding him around everywhere.

  And there are all of us lesser people, with bodies heavy as lead trying to do the cha-cha to the Four Ladds singing “There’s Only One of You.” I figure Mr. Fleet picked that one out just for us.

  Take Tommy, for instance, over there shuffling around with Mrs. Krieger. He’s all the time jerking his head and mumbling something or other, which sounds an awful lot like bad words, and it’s not like he’s doing it on purpose, it’s more like he can’t help it. Saying the bad words, I mean. But every few minutes his head starts in to jerking, usually in a one-two-three, a pattern that I’ve watched carefully, and I’ve learned the jerking flows right along in time to Mr. Fleet’s waltz music, and all this mumbo-jumbo comes rolling out from his mouth, and he covers up his mouth like he’s embarrassed to death because there’s nothing he can do about it.

  Maybe it’s mean of me, but I don’t dance with Tommy. And I hate to say this, but I don’t like Tommy. It took a while for me to admit it to myself, because I couldn’t bring myself to say I don’t like someone with such an affliction, because you should be kinder and sympathize with them, but I can’t help it, I plain don’t like Tommy. And, I promise, it’s not because of his affliction. It’s because he’s all the time following me around wanting to talk to me, and I discovered if I talk with him long enough he starts wanting to put his arms around me, and once he does that, then he wants to just look at me square in the face and then he wants to feel me all over, just like the doctors, so I just plain don’t like him. (Besides, he doesn’t use any kind of deodorant.) So if I’m going to find out who I am, then I can’t keep on doing things I don’t want to do, and dancing with Tommy is one of them.

  He mostly dances with Alice anyway. Alice will dance with Tommy when she’s not blind. But half the time, you know, she can’t see. Even though I’ve seen her blind spells come on more than once, it’s still hard to believe she can see sometimes and sometimes she can’t. Hemp is the one who told me about Alice’s blind spells. According to Hemp, Alice was once a beauty queen, and she had a wreck one night that cut up her face so bad and that now it’s all scarred up, and now she can’t stand to look at herself in the mirror anymore, but being a person who’s always looked at herself a lot, she can’t all of a sudden stop looking, and when she does look, then soon she just goes blind so she won’t be able to see herself.

  It took me a while to figure this out, but I’ve learned you can’t always believe what Hemp is saying. And, too, he might act one way, but really be feeling an entirely opposite way. Like his acting cheerful all the time. Nobody can really feel cheerful all the time, I don’t care who it is, but that’s the way Hemp acts, that and joking around a lot.

  Take the first day when I came to Nathan. Hemp was down in the rec room, and just as soon as I walked in the door he started in to saying, “Here, Fido, here boy, come on, Fido,” and whistling at this dog that was nowhere around. Well, he walked his “dog” on over to the game closet, opened the door and put him in there. And there I was wondering what in the world was wrong with him. Or was there something wrong with me, was there really a dog there and I couldn’t see it? Had I really entered into the spirit world with Angela and this invisible dog was positive proof?

  When Hemp saw I was good and puzzled, he came over, plopped down on the green plastic sofa beside me, and started lau
ghing. “I do that for all the new ones,” he said. “Make ’em think they’ve come to the right place.”

  From then on he acted just as normal as the next person on the street, and I can’t figure out why Hemp is there because he seems so happy and good-natured. But you know yourself you can’t go around asking people if they’re crazy and if so how and why. Some people you can figure out their problem if you stay around long enough, like Alice. The blind spells come on her almost every day and they go away sometimes just about as quick as they come. So there you know her problem, but you don’t know the why. And the why, that’s the magical question around here.

  Like why has Delores been so hoarse for so long? For months, Hemp says. If anyone’s the jewel around here, personally, I think it’s Delores, not Mavis. Mavis acts too haughty. But Delores, she’s probably the nicest one around, and it makes you sick to think that such a nice person can’t talk above a whisper.

  “It was this guy she was engaged to,” says Hemp. “He’s what done it to her. He didn’t even show up for the wedding, and it just about left her speechless.” You see, when Hemp says something like that, like when he told about Alice, and then Delores, he looks at you like he’s checking you out in some way to see if you believe it or not. He knows why everybody’s here, he says, even Bonnie who’s stuck away in the lock-up ward all by herself all the time.

  “She killed her babies,” Hemp tells me one day when we’ve just finished a game of Ping-Pong. I’m getting pretty good at Ping-Pong, though I don’t know what good it will do me because I don’t reckon you can win a blue ribbon at Ping-Pong. Anyway, Hemp says, “I know all about Bonnie. She had twins. Two little girls, and she roasted them.”

  “Yeah, roasted them,” I say, “just about like you taking your dog to the game closet.”