Quiet-Crazy (2 page)

You can't imagine Mama's surprise, or more like shock, I should say, when I came home from Harper's Five-and-Dime one Saturday afternoon with five yards of poppy red chambray cloth and a pattern for a two-piece outfit—a sleeveless dress and matching jacket, a woman-type dress.

“Now how do you think you're gonna do this, Elizabeth, when you haven't ever sewed up a dress in your life, much less a two-piece shindig like this? Now tell me,” she said, her madness rising into a large-sized fit. “Just tell me!”

I knew Mama might be surprised, but I hadn't counted on a fit, least of all a large one, and I didn't hardly know what to say. “Well, Mama, I've made dish towels all along . . . and. . . I reckon I've made a few dresser scarves, haven't I? So . . . well, so, I know I can sew a straight line.”

“Straight line?” she screamed, staring down at the cloth, the spools of red thread, the long neck zipper, and the bias hemming tape I had spread out on the bed. “Straight line? What's a straight line got to do with it!” She picked up the pattern, shaking it right up close to my face. “Patterns!” she hollered. “Patterns! That's what it's all about. Patterns! You never followed a pattern in your whole life, Elizabeth, you know that!”

Somehow it seemed to me Mama was wrong on that. Very
wrong. Somehow it seemed I had done nothing since I came into this world except follow patterns. But for the life of me I couldn't have told her what kind nor how. Instead, I gathered all the dressmaking materials up and stuffed them back into the store bag.

“Mama,” I said, “I can read and I can follow directions. I think I can sew up this dress. It looks, to me, to be plain and simple.”

“Well, I can tell you right now you needn't come asking me when you get all tangled up in it! You're so all-fired smart, you figure it out for yourself!”

I didn't dare tell Mama this to her face, but after she stomped out of my room, I said, “That's what I was going to do anyway, figure it out for myself.”
Just like I finally figured out it wasn't right. What she did to me all those times. It wasn't right. And I'm tired of paying for it. Tired of being a wildflower woman child.

I make my way to the back bedroom, raking my fingers through my frizzy, blond curls, curls that look just like Angela's did, Mama says. I don't like frizzy curls, but Mama does. About a year back I tried letting my hair grow out straight, but it looked worse than ever, maybe because I couldn't get it to lie down right. Or maybe because I've been wearing frizzy curls for so long, if I fix my hair any other way I look like a stranger, even to myself. So about every three months or so, Mama and I go out to Eunice's to get
all frizzed up. “How sweet,” Mama always says, after I've baked under the hair dryer for an hour and Eunice is combing me out. “Now don't that look sweet?”

Mama doesn't look sweet lying there hunched up in bed. She looks anything but sweet. She's not asleep, I know she's not. It's the way her eyes are squinched. Real tight, not loose and natural, and her nostrils are flared, like she's embarrassed. Embarrassed the way she was when she told Daddy about me going off to Nathan. But if she's embarrassed, what about me? Carrying around enough embarrassment for me and her and the whole world besides.

“Mama,” I say, and her mouth draws up into a wrinkled, tan prune. “Mama.” She turns over onto her back and sighs, the breath coming out of her long and heavy, her eyes still closed.

Heavy breath it was. And somehow pleasant and exciting at the same time. But scary pleasant. Scary exciting. Don't even think about it.

The pendulum of the anniversary clock on her dresser turns around first one way then the other, as if it can't make up its mind which way to turn. That's the way I've been feeling for months, actually years, but especially this past month, since I started thinking about
it
even if it is for only ten seconds at a time. First, I start trying to be me, whoever that is, then something happens with Mama, an argument or a fussiness that makes her not even speak to me, and I
start back trying to be like Angela. Being like Angela, mat somehow helps with that debt I owe. Don't ask me how. It just does. Like if I don't go along with Mama and at least play like I'm Angela, then somebody, somewhere, sometime, somehow is going to come and get me and I'll have to pay for it in some way. It's like I'm hiding out. Just waiting. Aunt Lona is glad I'm going to Nathan. I wish Mama were glad.

Something about the way Mama's looking makes me not want to touch her, so I pick up the edge of the yellow chenille bedspread and I shake it. “Mama,” I say. “Look, I'm nearly about ready to go.”

“Look, Elizabeth. Look. See? Here it is.” Don't even think about it.

Mama opens and closes her eyes as if the lids weigh a hundred pounds apiece. “Don't that dress look a sight,” she drawls, clutches her stomach, and moans.

“You need the magnesia, Mama?” I try to say it nice, like Angela would say it, but I can't help the bit of crankiness that creeps into me, crankiness from knowing deep down inside that Mama would be sick today.

“Lord, God, Mama,” I want to say. “I'm sick today, too. Today and every day. And what I'd like to do, Mama, is just puke it all out, every bit of it, right here all over the bed, splatter it all over you, even though you're my mama and I don't have a right to be thinking such as this.”
But, Mama,
I'm your daughter, and you had no right, either. Don't even think about it.

“You need the magnesia, Mama?” I say again, a little crankier.

Mama frowns at my crankiness. “Can't you talk better than that, Elizabeth? That sounds ugly. Can't you talk better to your mama?”

I look at the clock pendulum spinning around, and I want to say, “No, Mama, sometimes I want to talk ugly to you.” But I don't say that because it would hurt Mama bad. And like Mama always says, she's been hurt enough. Still hurting. After all these years, thirty-four years since Angela died, she's still hurting.

“I'm sorry, Mama. I'll get the magnesia.”

There's just a tad left in the blue glass bottle, a bottle the blue of the morning glories flowering up Daddy's garden. She goes through two or three blue bottles a week, drinks them up like someone on hard liquor. Then she goes and sticks them head-down in the ground out beside the walkway where she's made a five-inch high fence of blue magnesia bottles. She's circled the pansy and the petunia beds already with the bottles, and now she's planning to line the walkway up one side and down the other.

Me, I wouldn't be showing off that I'd drunk so much of that stuff. But Mama doesn't seem to mind. In fact, sometimes she acts almost downright proud of it, like it's some
kind of banner she's showing off to the world, showing everyone how much she's suffering. Me, I figure I don't need to show anybody how I feel. All they have to do is look at me. Look. See? It's like I'm a piece of clear glass, with just a hint of rose color for the embarrassment part, and all they have to do is look. Look and see straight through me and see it all. Whether I ever tell anybody or not. They know. They know about
it.

But Mama, it seems, has to show off her suffering. Just like she shows off Angela's clothes, the ones she was wearing when Mama backed over her in the car. There's hardly anything left of them but a few tatters of a green dress made from a dyed flour sack, a piece of a white cotton sock and the brown hightop shoes, stiff with the years. But Mama keeps them packed away in a gift box, like it's her present to the world, and she brings them out every time anybody, it doesn't matter who—neighbors, relatives, or if it's her, herself—brings the subject around to Angela.

And along with the clothes come the pictures. Me sitting in Daddy's lap. Snap. Me prissing around in a new dress. Snap. Me hugging Daddy's neck. Snap. Me sprawled out in the flowers. Me with my arms around my head showing off my long, blond curls.

I used to look at Angela's clothes, and go on with Mama about the pictures, but not anymore, not after Aunt Lona told me I didn't always have to do what Mama said.

“Aunt Lona,” I said, one day when I was over at her house not too long ago taking my weekly piano lesson, “the last time I took them out and was looking at them with Mama, I couldn't figure out if it was Angela's clothes or my clothes I was looking at, and I got the chills up my back something awful. And all those showing off pictures . . . they just make me sick. It's strange, Aunt Lona, strange.”

“Well, Beth,” she said (when we're talking, just me and Aunt Lona, she starts everything off with “Well, Beth,” and just those two words, by the way she says them, makes everything else she says after them sound like the truth for sure). “Well, Beth, you just don't do that, you hear? You need to stop this doing everything your mama says. You've got a mind of your own. A bright, intelligent mind, and you need to start using it to think for yourself. ‘Use it or lose it,' that's what they say.”

Aunt Lona's all the time talking to me that way, because she knows how Mama is, she sees what's going on. Most things, anyway. And deep down I know she's right, that I don't have to cater to Mama's every whim. Still, it's hard not to do it sometimes when Mama says, “Go get Angela's clothes, why don't you, and let's look at them” or “let's look at your pictures, hon.”

All my life I've been going and getting for Mama. And I feel bad, in a way, that I won't be here for a while to go and get, whether it's medicine from the cabinet or a spool
of thread up at the five-and-dime. I reckon Daddy will have to take care of her while I'm gone—if he can stay out of his greenhouse long enough. Although I wonder sometimes if maybe he doesn't stay in his greenhouse just to get away from Mama, if maybe, he'd rather stay around things that are alive and growing.

Between the greenhouse and the flower garden, Daddy grows just about every kind of flower you can imagine. He's grown so many flowers that he looks, himself, kind of rough and ruddy like the earth, like a copper-colored mum, his favorite. But the prettiest of all the mums, I think, are the white ones, those about ten inches across the bloom, every bit of them white except for a few flecks of red splashed across them. They always remind me of Snow White, when she pricks her finger and the three drops of blood spill onto her pure white gown. Snow White flowers. That's what I call them. Anyway, if there's anybody wanting to know anything about growing Snow White flowers, or any kind of flower for that matter, they go to Daddy. Everybody, that is, except Mama.

“Why the little wildflowers beat a greenhouse flower any day,” she always says. And when it's her turn to carry flowers to the church, she sends me out into the woods behind the house or down the road on the road bank to pick her an “arrangement” just like Daddy and his flowers don't even exist.

“Get me some Queen Anne's Lace, Elizabeth,” she'll say,
“and some Black-eyed Susans . . . and throw in a bit of goldenrod, so I can make me an arrangement.”

That's what she calls them, “arrangements,” as if they're some kind of musical pieces fixed for an orchestra. One time she made her arrangement out of dark pink peach blossoms and some pussy willow, and everyone at church thought the peach blossoms and pussy willow looked grand. She does have a way, I'll have to admit, of putting the flowers in the right places to look grand. Still, I feel sad for Daddy, that she never does see fit to use what he's grown, because that's what he studied when he went to that little college right in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, not far from here. That was before he was called off to the war. He studied horticulture, and Shakespeare and sociology and history. He still has his books in there in the den, and I've read them all, but I don't think Mama even admits they're in there, much less looks at them. Sometimes it seems Mama and Daddy don't even look at each other, they just kind of pass through each other's life here and there, nodding every once and a while as if to say, “Howdy-do.”

When I go to tell Daddy that I am ready to go to Nathan and Mama is sick, I find him out in his greenhouse potting red and white petunias. Mrs. Minnie Lou, president of the Garden Club, wanted two dozen flats of red and white petunias to put out in the window boxes at the primary
school. Daddy is already sweating from the sticky moisture, although it's still early in the morning.

“If Mama's taking magnesia now,” I say, “that means she's going to be sick all day.”

“She can't help that, can she?” Daddy says.

I hadn't realized I had said it like I was accusing her of something, but thinking back on my words, I guess it did come out like that. As for if she could help it or not, I hadn't ever really thought about if Mama could help being sick so much.

“Then, how am I going to get to Nathan?” I ask.

Daddy's hands tremble as they lift the black plastic containers of petunias from the shelves to the flats. Daddy's shaky all the time, but the shaking grows worse when he gets excited. That's what the war did for him, blasted his nerves to pieces and relieved him of his left leg so that he had to put on one that's artificial. That's why he can't go to Nathan. He can't ride that far. Besides, cars make him nervous, so Mama's the one who usually does the driving. I wish I had a car for myself. But with what little I make putting in zippers at the pants factory, by the time I help pay my share of the bills and put my share in the savings account, I can't ever seem to scrape up enough for a car payment. But, Lord knows, if I make it back from Nathan in one piece, I'm going to have me a car, one way or another.

Daddy rubs his hands on his khaki pants, pushes his wirerimmed
glasses up on his nose, and says, “I reckon you'll just have to wait. Till tomorrow, maybe. Maybe she'll be better then.”